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Juicy Ecumenism – The Institute on Religion & Democracy's Blog

Juicy Ecumenism – The Institute on Religion & Democracy's Blog

Tag Archives: Methodist

Touring Mosby’s Confederacy & Dark Human Nature

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by marktooley in News

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Catholic, Civil War, John Mosby, Methodist, Truro Anglican Church

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On Sunday after church I had the pleasure of touring “Mosby’s Confederacy” in bucolic northern Virginia outside suburbia, visiting some of Confederate partisan Colonel John Mosby’s safe houses. The rolling hills and quaint villages are now better known for wineries, country taverns, and posh estates. What irony that what’s now so charming and chic was filled with killing, ambush and horror several generations ago.

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Mosby the “Grey Ghost” who operated stealthily behind federal lines, always evading death and permanent capture, is an almost mystical figure who has become a sort of regional icon. There was a television series about Mosby in the 1950s, and a Disney movie in the 1960s, which portrayed his most famous triumph, the nighttime capture of a surprised Federal general in his bedroom. The house of that scene now is part of Truro Anglican Church in Fairfax.

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As a native Northern Virginian, I can’t think of a time when I did not know about Mosby, imagining his exploits when my own neighborhood during the Civil War had been still a rural enclave outside the federal capital. I did my first tour of Mosby sites about 20 years ago. An elderly Virgil Carrington, who had helped on the tv series, was there as one of Mosby’s first biographers who had actually interviewed Mosby’s last surviving ranger.

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A school friend of mine was a descendant of Mosby’s best friend and fellow partisan, Fountain Beattie. I once met my friend’s great aunt, who could recall her grandfather the Civil War cavalryman. She was also acquainted with Mosby’s grandson, a retired admiral, who remembered her grandfather’s visits with his grandfather, when they typically talked politics.

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Mosby was famously Republican after the war, one of the few ex-Confederates who were, partly due to the friendship he began when his former adversary Ulysses Grant became president. His politics earned him political appointments from Republican presidents but also enmity from many fellow ex Confederates. He quit living in his native Virginia after an apparent assassination attempt at the Warrenton train station, which is now a nice restaurant.

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Reputedly Mosby was raised or at least baptized Methodist, which he omits in his memoir, never becoming a devout churchman. He married a pious Catholic woman, and his children were raised Catholic. Several of his closest associates, like Beattie, were Catholic, which was a little unusual among Confederates. After his wife’s death, Mosby occasionally attended Catholic churches and expressed hope about seeing his beloved wife again.

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Mosby in public was typically steely if not cold. He didn’t romanticize the war, scoffed at claims by some southerners that it wasn’t fought in defense of slavery, credited Lincoln for freeing the slaves, and wanted to look forward. He was a modern man who drove a car, watched movies (a movie about him appeared in his lifetime), lived to see World War I, and commented on rising radio towers outside Washington, where he lived and died. Grant’s son appeared at the hospital during Mosby’s final illness to offer good wishes.

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One house on Sunday’s tour is where Beattie met his future bride and where Mosby, while visiting his wife, was nearly captured by converging Federal troops, from whom he escaped by clambering out a window onto a tree limb. That limb is gone but the majestic tree still remains. A re-enactor there portrays Beattie, explaining that Beattie quit the area after the war, not wanting to live amid so many dark memories.

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The verdant beauty of the Virginia horse country is hauntingly seductive. Reaching the final safe-house on the tour entailed a long drive down an ancient dirt road mostly unchanged since Mosby’s day. There are wild flowers, red barns, cattle filling the hills, a log cabin, and views of the Blue Ridge.

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Picturing so much intrigue and blood letting amid the natural splendor is hard, no doubt harder still was it for Mosby and others on both sides who unrelentingly lived it. Mosby was severely wounded three times, including shots to his groin and abdomen. But Sunday’s tour was a reminder of humanity’s tragically fallen nature, which scenic wineries and country fine dining cannot disguise. God’s natural creation shines forth even as we who carry His image persist in rebellion against Him, until all creation is fully redeemed.

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Methodism and Ulysses Grant’s Final Victory

08 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by marktooley in News

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John Philip Newman, Julia Dent Grant, Methodist, Ulysses Grant

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It was President Ulysses Grant who once declared America had three political parties: Republicans, Democrats and Methodists. The great general who won the Civil War was himself a lifelong Methodist, raised in the church and marrying a pious Methodist woman, Julia Dent. Grant himself was not considered very devout, although often church going and respectful. In his final months, as he famously and heroically struggled to complete his memoir to ensure his family’s financial security, he was surrounded by a then renowned Methodist minister who later became bishop. Grant was baptized in his final days, even as his friend Mark Twain, a religious skeptic, mocked the Methodist pastor’s claims that Grant had spiritually awakened.

Grant’s Final Victory by Charles Flood tells the story. After his presidency, ensconced in a New York investment firm, Grant believed himself wealthy. The firm was actually a giant fraud, and his suave younger partner, to whom Grant had entrusted all, squandered the firm’s entire portfolio. Grant was left virtually penniless, and was forced to write articles for income, which he enjoyed, and which transitioned into a full memoir of his life through the war, published by Twain, who realized its global potential.

Early in his writing, Grant was diagnosed with untreatable throat cancer, forced to abandon his beloved cigars, and compelled to complete his autobiography in a race against death, a race just barely but triumphantly won. Grant’s potently spare prose made his two volume work a best selling masterpiece that enriched his widow, as Grant had hoped.

During his final year, after his financial collapse, a tearfully appreciative Grant found redemption of sorts at Methodism’s Ocean Grove Campground in New Jersey. About 10,000 Civil War chaplains and other religious workers rapturously received him there amid prayer and hymns. The introducing Methodist chaplain veteran vigorously defended Grant’s integrity against allegations about the causes of Grant’s financial insolvency. “No combination of Wall Street sharpers shall tarnish the fame of my old commander for me,” he told cheering thousands. Grant briefly responded with an emotion choked recollection of Christian “good works” by his audience during the war.

Rev. John Philip Newman was the Grants’ pastor first during the presidency at Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC and later, in New York, at the Central Methodist Episcopal Church, where Grant was a trustee until his bankruptcy obliged his resignation when he was unable to pay the pew rental. Grant had also dispatched him on a diplomatic assignment in Asia. Newman was an accomplished organizer of churches and charities, a global traveller and author. He also enjoyed publicity, telling reporters outside Grant’s house that prayers were keeping the old general alive.

Supposedly unsure whether her ailing husband was ever baptized, but probably just seeking reassurance, Julia Grant asked Newman to baptize Grant when he seemed close to death, only to be revived by a syringe injection of brandy. (Grant likely was baptized as a baby, since his mother was devout and reputedly a regular reader of Methodism’s Christian Advocate.) Methodist Sunday school children in New York serenaded Grant outside his home. Newman joined the Grants for family devotions and a dinner that included General William Sherman. Later Newman followed the Grants to the mountain cottage where Grant would die. Grant declined Newman’s request that he publicly take the Eucharist in outdoor worship at the nearby hotel, professing himself unworthy. Newman was present when Grant died and afterwards led a private funeral at the cottage, pronouncing of Grant in a 90 minute adulatory sermon, “We’ll done, good and faithful servant.” He recalled leading Grant in private prayer, which Twain later claimed was “rot,” while admitting Grant was “taciturn” about his faith. The Methodist bishop of New York was also there, as he and Newman both later were at the massively attended interment of Grant’s body in New York in what would become a landmark tomb.

In his public speeches, Grant upheld traditional American civil religion and acknowledged Providence. He commended the separation of church and state, reputedly having resented the Episcopal Church’s spiritual domination of West Point while attending. Likely his parents’ Methodism influenced his anti-slavery views and his strong nationalism. Emotionally reticent, he rarely if ever described his personal faith in recorded comments. Although Twain, a bitter agnostic who later talked his own wife away from her faith, was dismissive of Reverend Newman, it is not impossible that the dying Grant, who shared with the pastor about his physical “suffering,” expressed the devout sentiments that the Methodist minister claimed.

Grant lived and died dutifully. In response to a visiting Catholic priest representing Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, he thanked the “Christian people of the land” for their prayers during his well publicized demise. He also thanked Jewish Americans for their solicitations. During the Civil War’s Vicksburg campaign he had controversially tried to expel Jewish merchants from the theater, an order that President Lincoln overrode. Grant later worked hard to compensate for his error, becoming the first U.S. president to dedicate a synagogue.

The Methodist churches that Grant attended in Washington and New York no longer stand. But his pre-Civil War church in Galena, Illinois, including his pew, remains much as it was.

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FDR’s June 6 D-Day Prayer, War, Churches, & Drones

06 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by marktooley in News

≈ 4 Comments

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D-Day Prayer, drone, Episcopal, FDR, Methodist, pacifist, World War II

Episcopalians for Traditional Faith has a wonderful email today about the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer’s influence on President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous June 6, 1944 D-Day prayer, which he delivered on national radio today 69 years ago.

Roosevelt began:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

And he prayed:

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.  And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas — whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them–help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

FDR concluded:

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.

Here’s the full prayer.

The Episcopal email notes that FDR the weekend before D-Day was in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where, according to William Manchester’s Churchill biography, FDR read his Book of Common Prayer “to find the proper words for a blessing to be read on the night of the invasion.”

Roosevelt was a lifelong, church-going Episcopalian and often drew solace from its faith and rituals.  His final Easter on earth a few days before death he worshipped at the Episcopal service at the rehabilitation center he founded in Warm Springs, Georgia, frail, but singing the hymns, at times fumbling with the hymnal.

About 2500 Americans were killed on D-Day and many more wounded.  A terrible toll, but only a tiny fraction of the approximately 50 million who perished in World War II.  Over 425,000 Allied and German personnel were killed or wounded during the Battle of Normandy over the weeks following D-Day.  Over 9000 Americans are buried in Normandy.

World War II is often recalled as the “good war,” but there was little good about it.  It was the most morally necessary of all wars, given the alternative of Nazi and Japanese militarist domination, entailing not only the murder of all European Jewry but the eventual extermination of other targeted people groups, including the Slavs, amid the enslavement of many whom Nazis and Japanese militarists saw as sub-human.  As Churchill recalled in his memoir, it was tragically also the most avoidable of wars.  A modest exertion of force by the West against Nazi Germany earlier in the 1930’s likely could have deterred a larger conflict and possibly toppled Hitler.  But the West preferred “peace.”

The U.S. Methodist Commission on World Peace quietly encouraged avoidance of military service and opposed World War II throughout.  Officially the Methodist Church in the U.S. was pacifist until the 1944 General Conference narrowly endorsed participation in the war, in which 1 million U.S. Methodists served.

Among other horrors, 15,000 to 20,000 French civilians were killed in the Battle of Normandy, mostly by Allied bombers attempting to liberate France from German occupation.  There were no carefully targeted cruise missiles or drones.  There was mostly just carpet bombing, where friends almost died as often as foes.

Today many church thinkers and activists are pacifists or neo-pacifists whose strained interpretation of Just War teaching is too strict to allow force in almost any situation. Some now criticize the sometimes imprecision of U.S. drone strikes on terrorists, demanding an impossible human and technical perfection, and not considering the alternatives.  Thank God that drones do offer a precision so much greater than the haphazard bombing of World War II.

Here’s an excerpt from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer that likely inspired FDR before D-Day:

ALMIGHTY God, our heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead; We give thee thanks for all those thy servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Grant to them thy mercy and the light of thy presence, that the good work which thou hast begun in them may be perfected; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.  Amen.

– page 42, The 1928 Book of Common Prayer

Evangelical Methodists vs. Jim Crow

03 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by John Lomperis in News

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Asbury Seminary, Born of Conviction, civil rights, Confessing Movement within the United Methodist Church, Institute on Religion and Democracy, John Lomperis, Maxie Dunnam, Medgar Evers, Methodist, Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church, Myrlie Evers, racism, United Methodist

In contrast to safe, retroactive endorsements of the civil rights movement, Mississippi residents who challenged segregation in 1963 faced real risks. (Photo credit: BlackPast.org)

In contrast to safe, retroactive endorsements of the civil rights movement, Mississippi residents who challenged segregation in 1963 faced real risks. (Photo credit: BlackPast.org)

On January 2, 1963, a group of white, largely evangelical ministers in what is now the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church released a famous public repudiation of racism in the midst of a very volatile environment. As others prepare a  ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the statement, we are honored to publish this guest post by one of the main organizers of this effort, the Rev. Dr. Maxie Dunnam. Dunnam is a longtime, prominent leader of evangelical renewal efforts in United Methodism who we have been privileged to know as a brother and a friend.  Later parts of his career included serving as president of Asbury Theological Seminary, world editor of “The Upper Room” devotionals, president of the World Methodist Council, and one of the most widely recognized leaders in the Confessing Movement within the United Methodist Church.

MISSISSIPPI METHODISTS REMEMBER

I was the organizing pastor of a Methodist church in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1963. James Meredith had been admitted as the first black student to the University of Mississippi. There were student protests and riots, and racial tension had risen to new heights.

Three minister friends joined me in writing a statement which we called BORN OF CONVICTION. We introduced it with these words:

“confronted with the grave crisis precipitated by racial discord within our state in recent months, and the genuine dilemma facing persons of Christian conscience, we are compelled to voice publicly our convictions. Indeed, as Christian ministers, and as native Mississippians, sharing the anguish of our people, we have a particular obligation to speak.”

We then spoke of the responsibility of the church to steward freedom of the pulpit and the call to pastoral/prophetic responsibility on the part of clergy.

We expressed our concern and opposition to racial segregation, stating clearly the Biblical and Church’s conviction that there must be no discrimination based on “race, color or creed.”

Our third concern was the undermining of public schools by the proliferation of private Christian schools to preserve segregaion.

In those days, the issues of race and communism were confused and folks committed to racial justice were accused of being communist. We closed our statement by expressing our opposition and the official position of the United Methodist Church in relation to communism.

Unfortunately, the annual conference was crippled by internal ecclesiastical politics, making it impossible for the conference to speak with one voice on any issue. To keep our statement out of that political arena, we four writers of the statement decided we would invite only younger clergy to join us in issuing the statement to the conference and the public. We wanted the issues to be kept clear. 24 others joined us in signing.

Reading the statement today, you might think there was nothing radical about it. But in Mississippi parlance, “all hell broke loose.” Most of the signers were compelled to leave Mississippi and serve in other areas.

That was fifty years ago. The Commission on Religion and Race of the Mississippi Conference has chosen to honor the 28 ministers who signed the Born of Conviction statement with an award established in honor of Emma Elzy who spent her life advocating reconciliation and better race relations.

The award will be presented by Myrlie Evers, wife of civil rights activist, Medgar Evers, who was assasinated June 13, 1963.

I’m going to be in Jackson, at the conference, on June 9. I’m looking forward to seeing the persons who signed the statement, some for the first time since 1963. I have no notion about whether we deserve to be honored, but it is good to know that memory sometimes serves us well.

I’m convinced racism is not as pronounced as it was in 1963, but it is still present all over our nation. I’m as concerned about that today as I was 50 years ago, but my passionate concern is this: I BELIEVE PUBLIC EDUCATION IS THE CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE OF THE 21st CENTURY.

Religious Upset Over Drones

03 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by Institute on Religion and Democracy in News

≈ 2 Comments

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Catholic, Committee on International Justice and Peace, Drones, Mark Tooley, Methodist, President Obama

Predator drone

(Photo credit: Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson/ U.S. Air Force)

By Mark Tooley (@MarkDTooley)

The pacifist Religious Left is again denouncing drone strikes against terrorists without offering plausible alternatives. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the U.S. Catholic bishops offers a more rigorously thoughtful critique while also failing to address the serious threat from transnational terrorists beyond the reach of law enforcement by lawful regimes.

The April 16 letter to President Obama from United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Quaker, Brethren, and Christian Reformed officials expressed “great concern” about drone “targeted killings” of “alleged” al Qaeda militants.

“The use of these lethal weapons within the borders of other sovereign nations, at times without their permission, shrouded in secrecy and without clear legal authority, raises serious moral and ethical questions about the principles and the implications of this practice for U.S. foreign relations and the prospects for a more peaceful world,” the clerics and activists insist.

Predictably, the Religious Left plea wants to repeal the post 9-11 “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” and instead pursue “police actions” that “extend protections consistent with principles of human and civil rights pertaining to the pursuit and apprehension of a criminal suspect, including fair trial in a court of law.” They complain that drones “destroy trust and lead increasing numbers of people to turn to fear-based responses, which may include acts we often describe as ‘terrorism.’”

Note the quotes around “terrorism.”

Naturally, these religious activists are interested in the “root causes of conflicts,” which they surmise can be addressed by “restorative justice practices, and effective economic development programs.” Their suggestion has merit if Islamist terrorists have legitimate grievances that can be redressed by rational recompense. But what if their mollification entails accommodation to Islamist rule and practice, including the suppression of civil liberties, which the activists profess to champion, and the suppression of non-Islamists, which would includes groups like these liberal Protestants?

These activists also bemoan the supposed ease of “remote, technical warfare,” without admitting they, as literal or functional pacifists, oppose all warfare and force. Their appeal offers no reason for serious consideration. But it illustrates how some church officials, ignoring their own religious teachings about fallen humanity, want desperately to pretend that the world is intrinsically benign and just.

Offering more moral seriousness is the recent letter to the White House by the Catholic bishops’ chairman of their Committee on International Justice and Peace, which, unlike the liberal Protestants, affirms a “right to use force in self-defense” while urging restraint. It also tags al Qaeda as “uniquely dangerous.” And it recognizes the Administration’s “primary obligation to protect the lives and welfare of our citizens,” while stipulating “we do not underestimate the threat posed by terrorist organizations,” and granting the “necessity for operational secrecy in counter-terrorism.”

The Catholic letter asserts that counter-terrorism is “primarily a law enforcement activity,” that drone attacks occur outside war zones, and even in war, may violate just war principles on “discrimination, imminence of the threat, proportionality and probability of success.”

It suggests that a “proper understanding of proportionality in counter- terrorism would elevate the bar against the use of deadly force above its setting in war, and would call for a much wider range of economic, political and diplomatic responses in order to get at the root causes and injustices that terrorists exploit.”

The Catholic letter also wonders whether “targeted killing may contribute to terrorism by reinforcing a community’s sense of being subject to domination and injustice,” while exacerbating “anti-American sentiment, [encouraging] recruitment by extremists, and [undermining] the international collaboration necessary to combat terrorism.”

Drone strikes may indeed provoke enemies. But so too would conventional bombing, military abductions, or even apprehension by domestic law enforcement, if even possible, at the behest of the U.S. Is there any way to neutralize terrorists without inflaming their “community”? And doesn’t the absence of decisive action against them only further enhance their prestige within their “community” while communicating that Americans may be targeted with impunity?

As to whether drone strikes occur within war zones, it’s hard to see how places like remote Pakistan, Yemen, or Mali can be regarded otherwise. And what if host governments, although unable to say so publicly, effectively authorize U.S. drone strikes because they lack the military, police, or political capacity to eliminate terror targets? How would law enforcement substituting for warfare possibly function in such situations?

On just war teaching, the relative precision of drones seems better to approximate the standards regarding “discrimination, imminence of the threat, proportionality and probability of success” than all of the available, plausible alternatives.

The Catholic letter is more modest than the liberal Protestant plea, perhaps recognizing the limits of their expertise and vocation, unlike the liberal Protestants, who claim to speak ex cathedra on nearly every political issue while typically ambivalent theologically. But both letters seem to expect a level of perfection and power that not even the U.S. at its very best can possibly attain.

Technology and modern scruples have made war and law enforcement more precise than ever before. But churches attuned to the limits of human capacity must understand that states, when defending the innocent from the murderous, must act boldly, stealthily, dangerously, and without guarantee of absolute success. Winston Churchill reputedly said: “The maxim ‘Nothing but perfection’ may be spelled ‘Paralysis.’” High-minded theorists may demand moral precision, but no government this side of heaven can guarantee it.

This blog post originally appeared as an article on the American Spectator website. 

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