EVEN A SECULAR MAGAZINE, POLITICO, WARNS THE NATION THAT THEY SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT AND WATCHING THE SPLIT IN THE SO-CALLED EVANGELICAL CHURCH OVER THE ABOMINATION AND SIN OF HOMOSEXUALITY AND HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE. THROUGHOUT AMERICAN HISTORY, THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS INFLUENCED POLITICS FOR GOOD OR BAD. FOR GOOD WHEN THE INDIVIDUALS IN THE CHURCH ARE TRULY BORN-AGAIN AND SAVED SIMPLY BECAUSE JESUS CHRIST IN THEIR LIVES INFLUENCES THEM FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS; FOR BAD WHEN INDIVIDUALS IN THE CHURCH ARE NOT TRULY BORN-AGAIN AND SAVED, AND THEREFORE, DO NOT HAVE JESUS CHRIST IN THEIR LIVES. THEY ARE, THEREFORE, THE TARES OR WHAT ONE PREACHER CALLS “TARE-ISTS” AND WHO BY THEIR VERY NATURE GO CONTRARY TO THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE BIBLE, AND THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND LEADS THE CHURCH AND THE NATION INTO THE DITCH WHERE WE ARE TODAY

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Last weekend, over 400 Methodist churches in Texas voted to leave their parent denomination, the United Methodist Church (UMC). Their decision followed the mass exodus of Methodist congregations in other Southern states, including North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas and Florida.

The departing congregations joined the more conservative Global Methodist Church over concerns that the UMC has grown too liberal on key cultural issues — most importantly, LGBTQ rights. They are part of a larger schism within other mainline Protestant denominations (namely, Episcopalians and Baptists), ostensibly over the propriety of same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy, though in reality, over a broader array of cultural touchpoints involving sexuality, gender and religious pluralism.

At first blush, this might seem like an issue that’s peripheral to American politics — a purely religious matter. But it’s actually an indicator of just how fractured our politics have become. And if history is any indication, it’s about to get even worse.

The last major split in the church occurred in the 1840s, when the question of slavery opened a rift in America’s major evangelical denominations. For years, the churches had successfully contained debates over the propriety of slavery. Denominational leaders, clergymen and parishioners largely agreed to disagree. When the schism did finally come, many observers worried that the inability of the churches to maintain unity portended something far more serious. And they were right.

Amid handwringing over the current state of political polarization, it’s worth revisiting the religious crackup of the 1840s. The United States is not likely staring down the barrel at a second civil war, but in the past, when churches split over politics, it was a sign that the country was fast coming apart at the seams.

In the early 19th century, most of the major evangelical denominations — Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians — formally opposed the “buying and selling of men, women, and children,” in the words of the Methodist Book of Discipline, which from the church’s very inception in the 1790s took an unequivocal stance against slavery. The Presbyterian General Assembly echoed this sentiment in 1818 when it held “the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another, as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature, as utterly inconsistent with the law of God.” Baptists, the largest denomination in the antebellum period, were a decentralized movement, but many local bodies similarly condemned slaveholding.

None of these positions aligned the churches with the immediate abolitionism that William Lloyd Garrison, the preeminent abolitionist newspaper editor, and his allies championed, but they placed the nation’s largest evangelical bodies squarely in the moderate antislavery camp — on paper, at least.

Conviction soon ran up against the practical need to placate slaveholders in the South and border states, as well as Southern transplants to the Midwest. Competing fiercely for new adherents, the major evangelical churches were loath to alienate current or prospective members. It was one matter to oppose slavery in official church documents. It was another to sanction slave owners or exclude them from Christian fellowship — a step that many churchgoers considered both counterintuitive to the project of saving souls and more likely to alienate than persuade slaveholders. Thus in 1836 the Presbyterian General Assembly rejected a resolution to censure slaveholders, reasoning that such a measure “would tend to distract and divide” Christians of good faith. The same year, the Methodist General Conference similarly voted down a proposal to sanction slaveholding church members and even took the additional step of formally denouncing two abolitionist ministers for agitating against slavery at the conference.

In these years, religious abolitionists, who represented a small minority of evangelical Christians, sometimes applied a “no fellowship with slaveholders” standard. If the churches would not expel slave owners, they would simply establish their own churches. A variety of “come-outer” sects broke away from the established evangelical churches in the 1830s and 1840s, believing, in the words of a convention that convened in 1851 in Putnam County, Illinois, that “the complete divorce of the church and of missions from national sins will form a new and glorious era in her history — the precursor of Millennial blessedness.” Prominent abolitionists including James Birney, who ran for president in 1840 and 1844 as the nominee of the Liberty Party — a small, single-issue party dedicated to abolition — William Lloyd Garrison and William Goodell, the author of Come-Outerism: The Duty of Secession from a Corrupt Church, openly encouraged Christians to leave their churches and make fellowship with like-minded opponents of slavery. Come-outers nevertheless represented a minuscule fraction of organized Christianity. In the end, breaking fellowship with their coreligionists was a step too far for all but a small number of deeply committed activists. Some churches were closer to the antislavery cause than others.

The first lightning bolt struck in 1837, when the Presbyterian church formally split between its New School and Old School factions. Technically the divide was over theological questions, with New School churches and synods adopting an “alleviated” form of Calvinism that rejected the harder tenets of predestination, while Old School Presbyterians retained a traditional Calvinist interpretation. Most of the nation’s New School Presbyterians, numbering roughly 100,000 communicants across 1,200 churches, lived in Northern states. The Old School, with roughly 127,000 members and 1,763 churches, was not strictly a Southern religious movement; it enjoyed pockets of strength in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Contemporaries nevertheless believed that the controversy over slavery was firmly behind the rupture. A year before the formal divorce, delegates to the General Assembly held separate caucuses — one in the North, one in the South. A Southern delegate observed that “it is the prevalent opinion among southerners that we are to be unchurched by a considerable majority. If so, we can retire south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line and … dwell in peace and harmony.” The Cincinnati Journal and Luminary, a religious publication that closely followed the Presbyterian schism, concluded that the “question is not between the new and the old school — is not in relation to doctrinal errors; but it is slavery and anti-slavery. It is not the [Westminster] standards which were to be protected, but the system of slavery.”

Source: Politico, Joshua Zeitz