Archive: In Pursuit of Truth

By Richard John Neugaus

Every four years the people called Methodist gather at General Conference to discern where God may be leading the movement launched by John and Charles Wesley in 1729.

Retrospectives from the 1992 conference held in Louisville suggest that the Methodists are sharply divided but not hopelessly split. For the most part, the lines of division track the conservative/liberal divide within the general culture. On the votes deemed to be the most telling, the one thousand elected delegates decided disputes by minuscule majorities sometimes going one way, sometimes another. On key votes regarding homosexuality and the national bureaucracy, some conservatives claimed victory, while liberals more or less graciously interpreted the same votes as representing little more than a delay of the inevitable. The dynamics of change, they confidently believe, are on their side.

Diversity Within Limits

Tex Sample, professor of ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, explained the Methodist situation: “This is a centrist church. The delegates want diversity, as much inclusion of people as they can possibly get, as long as they don’t have to buy into a position they think is divisive.” That rather neatly summarizes the circumstance in which other mainline/old-line churches find themselves. And of course the description applies beyond the boundaries of oldline Protestantism. The goal is to be as inclusive and diverse as possible, but that is not the highest goal. Institutional stability, which requires the avoidance of “divisiveness,” is trump. Methodism, like other oldline groups, has been in an institutional free fall for many years now. Those on all sides of disputed questions are concerned, if not alarmed, by that reality, and are therefore reluctant to push their causes to the point where they might further debilitate the institution they wish to win over to their side.

Sample’s formula of “diversity just short of divisiveness” works in favor of the liberal faction that also dominates the national bureaucracies. Whether the issue is homosexuality, feminism, or multiculturalism, the assumption is that the “progressive” causes are on the offensive. The church may not be “ready” to embrace them now, but through a sustained process of “education” popular resistance can be overcome. The rubric of inclusiveness mean that all viewpoints must be represented, and those minority viewpoints that have been least heard in the past must be more than equally represented.

The loser in this process, of course, is the question of truth. When inclusiveness reigns, those who appeal to the Bible or to the classical Christian tradition or to the Wesleyan heritage are representing simply one viewpoint among others. To the traditionalists this is intolerable, since it means that truth and falsehood are equally represented in the church’s decision making. But their unhappiness with this situation, indeed their insistence that there is a distinction between truth and falsehood, registers in the process as no more than one more opinion to be included in an outcome that aims at accommodating maximum diversity short of institutional divisiveness. The entire process becomes one of accommodating opinions and passions rather than of weighing arguments. Thus, the procedural triumph over the deliberative in an approach that is always pressing the envelope to be more inclusive. Thus does the “middle” get moved inexorably toward that which had previously been inadmissible.

There are some understandable, and in many ways attractive, human dimensions that accelerate this process. For instance, William D. Lux, an Iowa farmer who sat on the homosexuality committee, described his feelings when a colleague on the panel told him she was a lesbian “in a committed couple relationship.” Mr. Lux told the delegates that he continued to believe that the Bible prohibited homosexual activity, “But, at the same time, within this committee we have built a level of trust and understanding where we can speak to each other under the umbrella of Jesus Christ.” The image of Jesus Christ as an umbrella is reminiscent of the late Lee Atwater’s description of the Republican Party as a “big tent” that can accommodate pro-choice and pro-life viewpoints. It is an image that well serves the mandate to be inclusive. Whatever the Bible and the Wesleyan tradition may say about sexual ethics, Mr. Lux and many like him have decided to be understanding, compassionate, and just plain nice people who are not about to pass severe judgement on the practices or views of others whom they have come to like. The Christian imperative, after all, is to be “accepting.” Isn’t that what the New Testament means by love? (It isn’t, of course, but the equation of love and niceness is far advanced in our culture and in our churches.)

Ensuring Apostasy

Some of the dynamics at work here were well understood by Alexander Pope more than two centuries ago.

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As to be hated needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace,”

Three steps: to endure, to pity, to embrace. To endure is not to judge and certainly not to exclude. To pity is to be understanding and compassionate. To embrace is to officially approve, perhaps at the 1996 General Conference after the constituency has been sufficiently “educated.”

“Diversity just short of divisiveness” is a formula tailor-made to ensure apostasy. At its heart is the ascendancy of sociological and institutional principles of representation over theological principles of deliberation. At its heart is the relativizing and eviscerating of the question of the truth. Again, the problem is in no way limited to Methodism. There is hardly a religious community in America that has not succumbed to the imperative of inclusiveness, sometimes employing elaborate quota systems to ensure that the enemies of the tradition have at least equal representation with its defenders. But all such communities were originally constituted by a claim to truth, and cannot long survive the abandonment of the claim.

The defenders of the constituting truth claims are regularly, and successfully, portrayed as reactionaries resisting the inevitable course of progress. In the struggle between liberals and conservatives, each accuses the other of cultural accommodationism. Conservatives, it is said, are uncritically captive to the church culture of the past, while they accuse liberals of joining the Gadarene rush to accommodate the church to the secular culture of the present. But this again is a sociological rather than a theological dispute. It is doubtful that most of our churches are still capable of theological argument. Such an argument assumes that there is indeed a word from God, that there is normative truth by which the life of the Christian community is to be ordered if it is to be a Christian community. That very assumption is deemed to represent a conservative bias. Under the rubric of inclusiveness, it will be admitted to the debate, but it will be counted as one viewpoint among others. When the appeal to normative truth is registered as a viewpoint to be taken into account, the appeal to normative truth is denied.

Conservatives and moderates came away from Louisville feeling that they had gained some ground. If, however, “diversity just short of divisiveness” is the controlling dynamic, they have only slowed the loss of ground. Their resistance demonstrated to their opponents, who do not want to destroy the institution, that the institution of United Methodism is more fragile than the party of progress had hoped. The progressives will have to go more slowly in educating the constituency to embrace their agenda of change. In Methodism and in all the churches, those who are loyal to constituting traditions will have to do much better than what apparently happened in Louisville. They will have to demonstrate how traditions that brought communities into being can faithfully develop in response to new challenges. They will have to make a persuasive case that truth is not the enemy but the indispensable support of other great goods, such as compassion and understanding. Absent the capacity to deliberate about theological truth, religious communities are defenseless before the ravages of sociological transformation disguised as progress. It is not easy to make the case for truth in a culture whose intellectual elites (very active also in churches) have come to believe that Pilate’s question to Jesus—What is truth?—represents philosophical sophistication.

Richard John Neuhaus is editor in chief of First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 400, New York, NY 10010), and the author of several books including The Naked Public Square and Freedom for Ministry. Reprinted with permission from the October 1992 First Things.