United Methodist Lobby Proposes Divesting From Israel, Investing In North Korea, Legalizing Prostitution
At this spring meeting, the GBCS directors went further in its campaign to de-legitimize Israel by approving grants for "Peace with Justice Sunday" (with funds to be collected from United Methodist offering plates on May 31) to help fund, among other beneficiaries, the Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope and United Methodist Kairos Response (UMKR). The former is devoted to promoting ideologically pro-Palestinian narratives about the "Nakba" (the Arabic word for "catastrophe" which some Palestinians use to refer to the establishment of Israel). The latter is an unofficial caucus of United Methodists for the Palestinian cause, who forbid United Methodists who disagree with their agenda from attending their meetings, but which is now being funded by the GBCS, an agency of the whole church that once again has chosen to act more like a caucus only serving a particular political faction of United Methodists.
The longtime general tendency has been for GBCS to be very pointed and specific in calling out alleged wrongdoing of the Israeli government, without adopting a morally consistent standard of scrutiny for Islamic or Communist regimes.
All in all, directors adopted over 100 General Conference petitions (including many to delete and consolidate older parts of the United Methodist Book of Resolutions), rushing through to get them completely a day earlier than scheduled. At least one director bravely spoke out against the extensive length of these political resolutions the GBCS adopted.
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If the super-majority of other directors had taken time to do their work carefully, they may have noticed some more controversial things in the petitions they adopted:
- Blanketly demanding the legalization of "public drunkenness, drug use, [and] prostitution," as non-criminal "personal conditions or behaviors." Some of us had hoped that fighting human trafficking could be a common-ground cause for liberal and conservative United Methodists. But now the GBCS has committed itself to a political agenda that effectively empowers ruthless pimps and human traffickers.
- Completely opposing any "discrimination against people with criminal records" without any exception for day-care centers or Sunday-school classrooms doing background checks to screen out individuals with histories of abusing children.
- Ironically, the GBCS also went on record to both broadly call for NO tolerance of ANY "discrimination people with criminal records" and explicitly support a clear form of discrimination against people with criminal records: restricting the gun-purchasing abilities of individuals with violent criminal records. Thoughtful arguments could be made for either of these mutually exclusive positions. But the GBCS evidently was not paying close enough attention to its own work to notice the contradiction, even though the two resolutions came through the same committee of directors.
- Promoting expanded access to elective abortion under the banner of the misleading euphemism, "reproductive health care services."
- Endorsing the controversial U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, even though probably no more than one or two of the dozens of directors voting in favor of the resolution (if that) have actually read that treaty.
- Endorsing President Obama's controversial, unilateral 2014 executive order to simply stop enforcing parts of U.S. immigration law.
- Deleting a current official UMC resolution that acknowledges documented abuses by U.N. personnel, such as the "Sex for Food" scandal, and calls for such reforms as "zero-tolerance" policies against such abuses.
- Demanding significant withdrawal of the post-World-War-II U.S. military presence in Japan.
- Insisting, "[c]hildren must never have access to or opportunity to use guns." While this sounds like a generally good principle, does the GBCS really believe that men must "never" be allowed to take their teenage sons (who are technically still children) hunting in rural areas where that is part of the culture?
- Broadly and helpfully decrying religious persecution, but without any indication that United Methodists should be especially concerned about the persecutions of Christians. Rather, this resolution even-handedly asserts that there is a dangerous rise of extremism "from all of the established and nontraditional religions."
Another group of resolutions commendably encouraged abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs, and called on UMC institutions of higher education to reduce college drinking. But this concern is expressed almost entirely within a secular public-health framework, while ignoring biblical and spiritual concerns about the sinfulness of intoxication.
That points to a fundamental problem: at the end of the day, how is the GBCS much different from any other secular, partisan political lobby group, other than getting its funding from churches?
The well-documented fact of the matter is GBCS openly ignores and opposes biblical, historic Christian values on issues like sexual morality (supporting both homosexual practice and extra-marital sex more broadly) and abortion that conflict with its secular, partisan political loyalties. In framing its concerns, the GBCS seems too embarrassed to stray too far beyond the language of secular 21st-century, upper-middle-class, American, secular liberal culture into the language of the church. And its attempts to sound more spiritual involve embarrassingly out-of-context biblical proof-texting and non-Christian "Mother Earth" prayers.
Is this really the best we can expect for the social and political witness of our church?
