The Politics of Piety

The Poltics of Piety In American Protestantism, as in American political parties, the bitterest factional fights are often within denominations rather than between them. A vigorous, angry, conservative rebellion is challenging the liberals who have dominated mainstream Protestant churches almost steadily since the 1920s. The central issues vary from church to church, but they center on three areas of disagreement: strict v. liberal interpretation of the Bible, evangelism v. social action, and a distrust of ecumenism v. an eagerness for church merger. U.S. Episcopalians felt the crunch of disagreement last fall (TIME, Nov. 2), Presbyterians and Methodists more recently. Nowhere is the clash currently more bitter than in the 3,000,000-member Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod, whose biennial convention in Milwaukee last week boiled over into a savage debate over the future direction of the denomination.

The fight was unusual for the L.C.M.S., which is known for its familial German-American solidarity and its loyalty to traditional Lutheran doctrine. Indeed, in the Protestant spectrum, contestants on both sides of the L.C.M.S. battle are relatively conservative. The moderates simply prefer a degree of theological variety and a gradual opening up to other Lutheran denominations--the middle-of-the-road American Lutheran Church (2,600,000 members) and the more liberal Lutheran Church in America (3,100,000 members). The hard-line conservatives want to keep the L.C.M.S. theo logically exclusive and pure. But, as with earlier Christians, seemingly small differences can mean a lot. Moreover, the issues have been intensified by some hard-nosed power politics within the church.

The jockeying began two years ago, when a grass-roots revolt before the 1969 convention brought conservative Classicist J.A.O. ("Jack") Preus into the presidency of the denomination. But moderates remained in command of the Missouri Synod's respected Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, the largest Lutheran seminary in the U.S. Preus has since consolidated power with aggressive efficiency--moderates say with ruthlessness. Though a number of opponents stayed in untouchable jobs around him, he carefully nurtured grassroots support. The moderates' main complaint against their president stems from an investigation he launched last year at Concordia in response to charges that some seminary theologians were not hewing strictly to the doctrine of the Bible's "inerrancy."

Gang Rape. The inerrancy doctrine is at the heart of the present strife. Preus and many other conservatives take the fundamentalist view, which holds that such biblical passages as the Adam and Eve account and even Jonah's journey inside the whale are historically true. For most moderates, however, inerrancy means rather that major doctrines, such as original sin, are divinely inspired truth, while specific stories like that of Adam and Eve or Jonah could be just illustrations of a larger truth.

The fight is an old one in American Protestantism, but it has grown up anew in the Missouri Synod with Concordia's efforts to build a topflight Scripture faculty. When Preus' investigation team arrived on the Concordia campus, it was stacked with fundamentalists who see the more liberal position as heretical; a number of theologians feared a purge.

At the convention, Preus saw to it that key committees were in the hands of allies. Then he opened the week by laying it on the line to the nearly 1,000 delegates in a dramatic, unflinching call for theological law and order. He asked that the convention require L.C.M.S. members to accept not only traditional Lutheran Confessions of Faith but also all statements on biblical doctrines passed by Synod conventions. The "absolutism" of the presidential wing, wrote the angriest of the opposition newspapers circulating on the convention floor, resembled nothing so much as "gang rape."

Lingering Bigotry. As it turned out, the conservative drive was stopped by a narrow margin. Moderates retained control of Concordia's board, which should avoid any threat of purge in the seminary for at least two years. As for the resolution on doctrinal formulations, the delegates voted 485-425 for a curiously schizophrenic compromise. It retained the conservative preamble and "whereas" sections of the right-wing resolution, but substituted a moderate version of the resolution proper, simply asking--not requiring--church theologians to "honor and uphold" doctrinal statements of church conventions.

Like the Missouri Synod, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern Presbyterian) is split almost evenly down the middle. At issue among the Southern Presbyterians' 960,000 members is the future of reunion plans with the 3,200,000 members of the United Presbyterian Church, which has grown apart from the Southern church ever since the Civil War. The North-South split among the Presbyterians is exacerbated by differences in theology and de facto racial practices. Blacks in the Northern church recently barred consideration of reunion until at least 1973 because of what they see as lingering bigotry in some Southern congregations. Southern conservatives resent such things as the 1967 changes in Northern ordination vows, which eliminated a reference to Scripture as "the only infallible rule of faith and practice."

Good News. Conservatives in the Southern church based their hopes of blocking the merger on a clause in their constitution that demands approval of three-fourths of the church's 73 presbyteries. But at the denomination's convention last month, a bare majority of Southern liberals pushed through a plan to "restructure" the church map that could gerrymander the conservative threat out of existence. A conservative magazine, the Presbyterian Journal, charged angrily that "everything important went the way of the world, the flesh and the devil." But last week the denomination's chief executive officer, Stated Clerk James Millard Jr., reminded Southern Presbyterians that their convention had voted to support programs of reconciliation. One resolution, he said, decried "public insinuations and accusations against the faith, orthodoxy and character of fellow members."

Forces are less evenly divided in the more solidly liberal denominations, in which minuscule bands of right-wingers are less important than growing minorities of a more moderate conservative opposition. In the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), an articulate new moderate group called "Disciples Concerned" is earning notice. In the mighty 10,700,000-member United Methodist Church, the most successful opposition comes from a movement known as the "Good News" Methodists, named after a quarterly magazine published by the Rev. Charles Keysor of Grace Methodist Church in Elgin, III. Keysor emphasizes the importance of preaching the Gospel to modern man and champions a return to enlightened evangelism coupled with effective social action. Liberals, claim Keysor and his associates, wrongly replace evangelism with social action, while traditional conservatives neglect social action.

The moderates say that Methodist membership losses (300,000 in the past three years) stem from disillusionment with the liberal program. Some who might have left are now moving in the Good News direction; about 1,800 of them gathered at a meeting in Cincinnati earlier this month. The magazine itself now commands a readership of 5,000 among the nation's 35,000 Methodist clergymen.

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