Decades-Old Disputes Over LGBTQ Clergy: What Next For US ‘mainline’ Presbyterians?
(ANALYSIS) The Presbyterian Church (USA) is nearing the latest turning point in its half-century struggle over same-sex clergy and marriage that could give liberals powerful new leverage against traditionalists — if they choose to exercise it. The coming clash would pit the liberals’ anti-discrimination principles against the evangelical minority's freedom of conscience claims.
Last year’s General Assembly handily passed two significant sexuality changes to the constitution’s Book of Order that also need endorsement by 84 of the 167 regional bodies known as “presbyteries.” Amendment 24-A adds “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the categories of members guaranteed “full participation and representation” in church “governance,” alongside race, sex, age, disability, geography and “theological conviction.”
This law has already been ratified due to support from 91% of the presbyteries that have voted, according to the tabulation by the Covenant Network, which supports “diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.”
Ratification of the more controversial Amendment 24-C also looks inevitable. It carried 63% of the presbyteries that acted as of early April and needs only 15 more among the 57 yet to vote. The amendment would govern both ordinations of new clergy and installations of pastors in local congregations. It requires presbyteries and congregations to examine the “suitability” of all candidates by determining their “ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements” that include the new 24-A rules. Opponents fear that would be applied to bar traditionalist clergy.
Thus, during the past year’s campaign the Covenant Network sought to reassure voting delegates that “nothing in these amendments restricts anyone’s freedom of conscience” or excludes pastors “who hold traditional views of marriage.” Yes, presbyteries and congregations must quiz candidates on their commitment to “inclusive values” on sexuality. Suggested examination questions: How would you befriend clergy colleagues “who are LGBTQIA+” or “what has the experience of transgender Christians taught you”? But the Network insists 24-C does not “compel any particular answer” or “bind” anyone’s conscience.
That explanation does not convince the Fellowship Community, an organization of Presbyterian evangelicals who believe Christians should be “faithful within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman as established by God at the creation” or else embrace “a celibate life as established by Jesus in the new covenant.” After many victories, this wing of the denomination lost in presbytery balloting that officially approved same-sex clergy and lay office-holders in 2011, and gay and lesbian marriages in 2015.
A February posting by Fellowship pastor Jerry Deck of Zionsville, Indiana, asserted, “I feel I am being lied to by the church” through “a truly disingenuous attempt to allow us to pass something that will later be used as a weapon and not as a welcome.” Whether that accusation proves true depends on how liberals in the presbyteries and local congregations exercise the new control over clergy, as well as constitutional interpretations by the Permanent Judicial Commission (PJC), the church’s supreme court.
When the amendments were first proposed last year, the Fellowship Community’s board warned that they would be so “devastating” for tradition-minded Presbyterians that “perhaps a thousand churches and thousands of PC (USA) pastors and [lay] elders” would be “driven out of the denomination.” In the next couple years, Presbyterians will learn whether that dire scenario is overblown.
Mainline Presbyterians have suffered three prior walkouts. Dissenting conservatives broke away to establish the Presbyterian Church in America (1973), Evangelical Presbyterian Church (1981) and ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (2012). Those three denominations (which are unlikely to unite) report a collective 645,000 members. The Presbyterian Church (USA) counts 1,095,000 members, compared with 4,045,000 as of 1970 in two predecessor bodies that later merged. Apart from the formal schisms, other dissatisfied congregations, pastors, and parishioners have drifted away one by one.
The Presbyterians’ plight plays into the big Protestant picture. Mainline denominations are weakened by losses of their conservatives, but this also tends to narrow the outlook of the broader evangelical movement. Meanwhile, U.S. Protestantism is being reconfigured as venerable denominations and their once-powerful agencies, whether liberal or conservative in theology, fade while evangelicals’ independent local churches gain in influence. The most recent Religion Census ranks such non-denominational congregations as America’s largest Protestant grouping and second only to Catholics, with 21,095,641 members in 44,319 congregations.
Political implications of what’s been happening are analyzed this month by President Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which has long rallied the now-shrunken evangelical sector within mainline churches. Tooley observes that increasingly “post-denominational” Protestants are being shaped by online sources, “often not Christian, and more attuned to contemporary political trends, for better or for worse.”
“Much of today’s hyper-polarization results from the decline of major Protestant institutions, which provided trans-generational wisdom that strove to transcend passing political moments,” Tooley contends. “Without their influence, many American Christians are prone to conflate their online-developed political preferences, often tied to hyperbolic perspectives, with Christianity. American Protestantism, absent strong institutions, is increasingly unmoored and intemperate.”
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.