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Pro-lifers speak out during national rally
By Melissa Lauber

On the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, thousands of anti-abortion advocates marched in Washington D.C. “to witness to a culture and a gospel of life,” said the director of Lifewatch, an unofficial United Methodist pro-life caucus.

At a January 22 worship service held in The United Methodist Building in the nation’s capital, the Rev. Paul T. Stallsworth, director of the pro-life caucus, said the group is working to reverse the Supreme Court decision by providing theological leadership within the church.

Bishop William H. Willimon, Birmingham episcopal area, praised Lifewatch’s efforts in a sermon at the worship service. This marks the 20th year Lifewatch has held a worship service before the annual March for Life.

Using the text of Isaiah 7:14, the bishop said when Israel was facing an overwhelming enemy, King Ahaz called upon his wisest council for help. Isaiah told the king, “The Lord himself will give you sign. A young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”

Just like King Ahaz, Christians today “chafe against the non-utility of the peculiar truth of the name Immanuel,” said Willimon. Christians need to look beyond what is helpful, or logical, even reasonable, and instead look into the gospel at the heart of non-utility—the cross.

“We are to live as God is,” said the bishop.

When Willimon was a chaplain at Duke University, a graduate student interviewed women who had had abortions. Their number 1 reason for doing so, they said, was that they felt they “had no other options.”

“Ironically, we call this freedom to choose,” the student remarked.

But for Bishop Willimon it pointed out a lack of imagination within the church.

“The role of the church is to stoke, fund, and fuel alternatives we could not have come up with if we looked only at the alternatives the world gives us,” he said, cautioning United Methodists against a “lack of imagination that leads to accommodation.”

An executive with the denomination’s Board of Church and Society agrees that the church needs to work on policies that will prevent unplanned pregnancies, “thereby, preventing abortion from the outset.”

“What the church doesn’t need are episcopal leaders who add shame and guilt to the millions of women caught in circumstances leading to abortion by categorizing abortion as sin,” said Linda Bales, an executive with the denomination’s social action agency housed in The United Methodist Building.

“If we, as people of faith, are really serious about reducing the number of abortions in this country and around the globe, then we need to be serious about addressing the issues holding women hostage to circumstances resulting in abortion,” she said.

Those issues include comprehensive sex education for young people, health services including contraception and education, and leadership opportunities for girls and women to thrive “and not be at the mercy of patriarchal societies,” Bales said.

“We have to equip men to treat women non-violently and with respect and dignity, and break the cycle of the marginalization of women.”

According to a recent national study, the numbers choosing non-surgical abortion options, such as the morning-after pill or RU-486, are growing while abortion rates and the total number of surgical abortions steadily decline.

Stallsworth characterized the United Methodist view on abortion as a procedure that “can be seen as tragically necessary.”

The United Methodist Social Principles (in Para. 161J) say: “Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother, for whom devastating damage may result from an unacceptable pregnancy.”

The Social Principles conclude that the church recognizes “tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion, and in such cases we support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures.”

United Methodist General Conference—the only official body to speak for the denomination—has been very outspoken, however, about its opposition to popular abortion procedures that it rejects. “We cannot affirm abortion as an acceptable means of birth control, and we unconditionally reject it as a means of gender selection,” says the Book of Discipline. In 2000, delegates to the General Conference overwhelmingly voted to oppose “partial-birth abortion.”

“We oppose the use of later-term abortion known as dilation and extraction (partial-birth abortion) and call for the end of this practice except when the physical life of the mother is in danger and no other medical procedure is available, or in the case of severe fetal anomalies incompatible with life,” stated the 2000 resolution.

Lifewatch hopes to reverse Roe v. Wade by first providing theological leadership within the church, which will set an example that political, legal and cultural forces will follow.

“We want to make waves of reform and renewal throughout the church and shake up the world as well,” Stallsworth said.

Adapted from United Methodist News Service. Melissa Lauber, editor of the UMConnection, the newspaper of the Baltimore-Washington Conference, contributed to this report.

 

Book profiles America's most famous Methodist
by Mark Tooley

Few United Methodists recognize his name today. But for over 20 years, he was America’s most famous Methodist.

Clarence True Wilson, temperance advocate and builder of the Methodist Building in Washington, D.C., blazed across the nation’s political fabric. Prohibition was his chief passion, and his activism helped generate America’s failed “noble experiment” between 1920-1933. But Wilson also embodied early 20th century Methodism’s zealous confidence that America and the world could be captured for Christ.

“Clarence Darrow’s Unlikely Friend: Clarence True Wilson” by the Rev. Robert Dean McNeil (Spirit Press, 2007) is probably the first biography about the illustrious crusader, who served the Methodist Temperance Board from 1910 until 1936. His agency morphed into the modern United Methodist Board of Church and Society. A conservative Republican who opposed big government, supported America’s wars, defended capital punishment, and denounced theological liberalism, Wilson would not recognize his successors in today’s Methodist Building on Capitol Hill.

The son of an equally crusading Methodist preacher, Wilson admired his father’s exertions against liquor, racial injustice, and spiritual laxity on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the late 19th century. Literally transforming saloons into churches, the older Wilson cut a wide swath through Maryland and Delaware Methodism. After his appointment as a district superintendent, the town fathers of Princess Anne, Maryland, literally procured all available real estate to prevent the firebrand minister from renting a home in their community. A black restaurateur graciously gave Papa Wilson his space, from which the crusader successfully warred against sin and vice.

The younger Wilson began preaching at age 15. His first sermon began: “There is a traffic in our midst which bears upon its face the blood of men and the curse of God.” His father gently pointed out that he had preached this very same line 10 years earlier. The five year old Wilson had unconsciously absorbed his father’s stirring rhetoric. Bad health forced Wilson’s relocation to the West Coast, sparing him from the “eastern liberal” theological education that he would later denounce. He was a successful and charismatic pastor, ultimately returning to the East to pastor a New Jersey congregation. In Newark, he discovered a department store openly selling liquor to underage girls.  He quickly rallied the city to shut down the operation.

Wilson’s next pastoral appointment was in Portland, Oregon, where a newspaper reported that he had “an opinion on everything, which he is willing to state at any time with perfect frankness.” A colleague said Wilson was the “fearless champion of all that ought to be, and is justly regarded…as a moderate sized advance edition of the Day of Judgment.” Another colleague would complain that the local clergy preach only about “Sunday newspapers, Prohibition, and the slot machines.”  A layman in Wilson’s church told him, after hearing that Wilson would host a revival, that he was “downright glad that you’re going to do something religious at last!”

In 1910 Wilson was hired as field secretary by the under-funded Methodist Board of Temperance. Operating out of a closet-sized office in Chicago, Wilson published anti-liquor leaflets, which his wife helped to ship out, by the thousands. He explained that he was not interested in preaching to the converted, but aimed to make temperance a “missionary job,” sowing the land “knee deep in Prohibition literature” and speech making everywhere. In 1912, the General Conference appropriated $50,000 for the Temperance Board. Wilson began to crisscross the nation in an automobile called the “Prohibition Water Wagon” so as to reach remote towns without railroad access.

Initial Prohibition victories in states like his own Oregon excited Wilson, who became a nationally recognized temperance advocate, and who would point to reduced rates of prison populations, welfare cases, and fires where Prohibition was tried. Zealous as he was, Wilson was not deluded about the law’s limitations. “Prohibition is not to make men moral but to stop a traffic that injures people,” he explained in his stump speech. “Temptation is the devil’s job, not ours.”  In 1916, the Board of Temperance moved to Washington, D.C., but Wilson largely stayed on the road, where his speeches were compared to a “torpedo boat destroyer.” The Temperance Board’s monthly newsletter, The Voice, described him on the platform: “There is roll and sway and salt flavor to his words, there is menacing logic in every paragraph, there is rhetoric foaming before his advance, but standing out above all…are the staccato facts which precede with crackling snap the thud of the target.”

Wilson achieved the height of his glory in 1920, when national Prohibition was finally enacted, and he enthusiastically addressed the General Conference meeting in Des Moines with a speech called “Methodism and Temperance Reform.” Wilson also announced the construction of the Methodist Building in the nation’s capital, which he dedicated in 1924, having raised most of the required $1 million. “This beautiful building makes Protestantism visible in the most influential capital in the world,” Wilson boasted. Besides the Temperance Board, the building housed a restaurant, a chapel, and residential apartments, many of which were rented to members of the U.S. Congress. Mrs. Wilson capably helped manage the building and kept its vacancy rate low. In the lobby was a sculpture called “Pay Day,” which portrayed a forlorn mother and child looking upon a fallen man clutching a broken bottle.

“Rejoice that Prohibition has come to America,” Wilson exhorted in a 1921 speech. “America is pointing the way for other nations. Prohibition is here to stay.” An unapologetic enthusiast for his country, Wilson also spoke widely on the biblical origins of America’s founding. And he lamented how it was a “national shame that the Book from which the forefathers took their inspiration of a true republic—the Government that is now America—should be crowded out of the schools.”

Inevitably, the collapsing national consensus behind Prohibition devastated Wilson. He faulted the lack of enforcement. “Prohibition has been tried and found wanting,” he noted in 1927. “But the truth is, Prohibition was found difficult and therefore not tried. To live Christian ideals in a world like this is not the pastime of an hour but a manly, self-sacrificing, cross-bearing work of a lifetime.” He warned: “If we fail, it would set back one of the greatest moral triumphs of Christianity for a century.” And he insisted: “We are not going to fail.”

As Wilson’s national influence peaked, so too did critics of his agency. “The Methodist lobby is the envy of all other lobbies,” the Chicago Tribune observed about The Temperance Board, noting that six members of Congress sat on its advisory council.  “Dr. Wilson is one of the most active of the gang which controls Congress by bribery in the form of honoraria and by intimidation…[he] and the other political clerics...are the agents of this retrogression of democracy.” Time magazine wondered if the Methodist Temperance Board were not a “lobby” and Wilson an “arch-lobbyist.” Christian Century magazine wrote: “The wedge which Methodism has unwittingly started to drive into American democracy should be withdrawn by the removal of the headquarters of its Board of Temperance…from the capital city.” Famed attorney Clarence Darrow declared: “The Methodist Vatican in Washington is between the depot and the Capitol so they can smell Congressmen’s breath on the way to the Capitol.”

Darrow and Wilson became regular debating partners during the early 1930’s. Ironically, Wilson had also been friendly with William Jennings Bryan, whose exertions against Darrow in the infamous Scopes Monkey trial over the teaching of evolution in a Tennessee school had precipitated his early death. A religious agnostic, Darrow denounced the Methodist Temperance Board as “the most brutal, bigoted, ignorant bunch since the Spanish Inquisition.” But Darrow and his wife routinely traveled with and socialized with Wilson and his wife, despite their disagreement over nearly everything political and religious. “So this is the Vatican,” Darrow said upon visiting the Methodist Building. “I am glad to meet you at your home. It appears to be quite a stronghold.” Wilson responded: “I am glad you think the Vatican is dry enough to compare it with this.”

Sympathetically, Darrow wrote Wilson a sincere letter of condolence when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Their friendship persisted, but Wilson was understandably embittered when his lifetime achievement died. “So the public is going to open the flood gates of booze in the Machine Age,” he remarked in 1934. “And the fool farmer who is too busy to vote against Repeal will have his milk orders cut fifty percent, for the beer bottle always crowds out the milk bottle.” He equivocated about whether Prohibition could ever return. “It is over and done with,” he admitted in 1935. “We must move forward by educating the people along temperance lines.” Later, he opined: “I expect to live to see our country completely and permanently dry.”

Exhausted by over 25 years of struggle, Wilson retired from the Temperance Board in 1936. The General Conference of that year thanked him for his service, and the presiding bishop pronounced: “The angel who makes record of the annals of the temperance reform will be compelled to write in large and shining letters the name of Clarence True Wilson.”

Wilson had also written on other topics besides temperance. In a 1931 tract, he warned against growing liberalism in the Methodist Church. “Our enemies have undercut the authority of the Bible,” he warned. “My leanings are towards the conservative interpretation of the Bible and the constructive believers in the Savior. If we live with more faith and preach with more power…everybody who is seeking the best faith will want ours.” In an earlier work, Wilson condemned “German rationalism” and declared that their “rationalized Christ is not our Savior” and their “crazy-quilt Bible is not our Holy Scripture.”

After 1936 and until his death in 1939 at nearly age 67, Wilson mostly enjoyed his farm in Oregon. His rest was well earned. During one 10 year period, he had given an average of 1000 speeches annually. With Clarence Darrow alone he had debated 46 times. Wilson’s travels had taken him to every region of America, no matter how remote.

Seventy years later, Wilson’s cause of Prohibition seems archaic. But alcohol in pre-World War I America had indeed been a scourge to millions, especially the working poor. For all its failures, Prohibition did reduce national alcohol consumption. The experiment was noble in intent if not practical. Wilson, for all his political zeal, never repeated the mistake of Social Gospel enthusiasts by confusing God’s Kingdom with earthly legislation. But his determination to drive the church towards intense political crusades undoubtedly cleared the way for his more utopian successors to exploit the Methodist Building and other Temperance Board assets for causes that would appall Wilson.

In his tireless, whirlwind of a life, Wilson heroically represented Methodism’s notions about civic righteousness when Methodism was at its cultural height in America. Robert Dean McNeil’s biography of him nicely captures the frenetic, admirable and sometimes misdirected energy of those bracing years.

 

By Mark D. Tooley, director of the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.



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