"Methodist": Another Way To Spell "Pest"

I'll never forget the reaction of an earnest Methodist when I began what was to be but a brief sojourn among the Methodists some years ago: "You mean you like us?"

In the end I didn't, but not because of the history of Methodism's political advocacy per se, with which I was already intimately familiar. What I found wanting was the theological basis for it: grace so predominating as a doctrinal force that it excludes almost all talk of sin and judgment, a monstrous form of Christianity similar to others in America which end up emphasizing just one feature of themselves in an exaggerated fashion. The latest version of this phenomenon abandons the concept of hell. As we used to say in Greek class, orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is another man's doxy.

If theocracies are wrong because in the end they conclude that human beings are essentially evil and need to be ruled, liberal democracies are wrong because they believe that people are essentially good and can be trusted to their own devices. The basis for American style limited government, by contrast, is a moral conclusion derived from long experience on English soil which believes that men are first and foremost always at war in themselves.

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues."

-- William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, 4.3.84

From William Murchison, here:

From the Methodist standpoint, as it evolved in the late 20th century, the Lord was calling his people to adopt pretty much the social and political programs of the Democratic Party. ...

A poll at the church’s 1996 General Conference found that 60 percent of clergy delegates took the liberal side on social and political questions. The laity lagged only slightly behind, with 51 percent making the same affirmation. ...

Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians - that is how it goes in the old mainline denominations. Leaders tug leftward; the path to the right leads often enough straight out the church door - to bodies with conservative commitments, or just to religious inertia. ...

Americans saw readily enough, as the dark night of Prohibition descended, that the Methodists and their allies had quit preaching and gone to meddling. Something deeper was wanted - an engagement with the high and serious purposes of God, first in creating man and woman, then in saving them.