By Mark Tooley, Institute of Religion and Democracy
June 1995 – The national social agency for the nation’s second largest protestant denomination has joined hands with Democrats to push a far left social political agenda.
The General (national) Board of Church and Society (GBCS) of the United Methodist Church made promotion of the far left social agenda their top item at a recent meeting. Those present listened to harsh attacks on the Republican Contract With America, heard praise of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and overwhelmingly reaffirmed the agency’s opposition to the church’s stance on homosexuality at its Spring directors’ meeting. Agency chief Thomas White Wolf Fassett offered to enter dialogue about “social justice” issues with Good News, a frequent critic of Fassett and his GBCS.
Fassett advocated “discussions, not debates” with Good News, a conservative group of UM’s, so as to move “beyond polarization.” But the GBCS position on homosexuality likely will not foster good will among its traditional critics. The vote reiterated the board’s decision last fall to urge deletion of paragraph 71F in the Discipline, UM’s book of denominational law, which states “we do not condone the practice of homosexuality.” The 1996 UM General Conference will consider the board’s motion. Only 13 directors out of 80 voted to retain the church’s current opposition to same gender sex.
Tex Sample, a clergyman and professor at St. Paul’s School of Theology in Kansas City, successfully introduced the measure to delete paragraph 71F at the board’s meeting last October. Sample is a prominent liberal spokesman within United Methodism and has called homosexuality a “gift of God.”
Further controversy was ignited when the Contract with America was denounced at length during the board’s opening plenary. Each of the Contract’s ten points was condemned by a board staffer for its “lethal” impact. Staffer Hillary Shelton alleged the Contract sought to close 30 years of affirmative action after “500 years of white supremacy. “Assistant General Secretary Jaydee Hanson compared the Contract to Pharoah’s suppression of the Hebrews. “Where is our Moses?” he wondered.
Hanson called the Contract “the biggest attack on the environment since James Watt.” Other staffers derided its “welfare for big corporations,” its reduction in foreign aid, its tax relief for the “rich” on the “backs of children,” and its lessening of federal regulations. Staffer Bob McClean said the Contract effectively “cancels” the Beatitudes and is “illegal” because it reduces U. S. funding for the United Nations.
Staffer Jane Hull Harvey told the directors that she brought “greetings” from First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, herself a UM. Harvey then denounced proposed Republican cuts in public television’s “quality programming.” Other staffers celebrated the defeat of the Balanced Budget Amendment in the Senate earlier that day. One staffer admitted, “We get lots of calls from United Methodists concerned about the positions we take and why we are opposed to budget cuts.”
“No matter the personal cost, we will persist,” said Fassett about the board’s political agenda. He denounced the new atmosphere in America that permits “race-based thinking” and “taking food from hungry children.”
Some directors thought Fassett and the staffers’ presentation sounded like Chicken Little’s claim that the sky is falling.
A handful of directors who visited Cuba in February as part of an 11-member United Methodist team lauded one of communism’s last outposts. “Everyone had free education, free health care,” said Ellen Carter about the Cuban dictatorship. “There were no rich, no mansions. No poor and no homeless on the streets. There was a sense of non-competitiveness and of community. There was richer life for many.”
Fassett, who joined in the Cuban visit, complained that despite the Cuban National Assembly President’s having “graciously” visited the Methodist Building in Washington last fall, leaders from other church offices were disinterested. “Our task is not easy,” said Fassett, who hopes to meet with President Clinton to urge better U.S. relations with Cuba. The board is forming a task force to advocate an end to the U.S. embargo.
A retired admiral condemned the “highly militarized” foreign policy of the U.S before the board. Eugene Carroll of the left-leaning Center for Defense Information lambasted the Contract with America as a “chauvinistic document” which demands that the U.S. be “number one” in military strength. Carroll was “aghast” at the Clinton Administration’s attempts “to impose our values around the world at the point of a gun.” He urged a cut of $250 billion in U.S. defense spending over the next five years and advocated U.S. military withdrawal from Europe and Asia. “China poses no threat whatsoever,” Carroll concluded, as the audience applauded warmly.
Politics invaded nearly every session of the board. Tex Sample alleged that proposals to reduce the church’s bureaucracy were attempts to disempower women and minorities. “Our denomination is becoming increasingly upper middle class,” he said. “This is the most conservative group in our society.” Sample linked demands for church restructuring to the “ascendancy” of “laissez-faire economics,” whose fate would follow “supply side economics,” which “went down in flames with the collapse of the stock market in the late 1980s.”
In pushing the far left agenda, GBCS followed a path taken by similar agencies in other old-line denominations. Most have experienced huge membership losses in the past three decades as they have pushed the far left agenda.
Observers feel that despite growing opposition from the grassroots, social agencies of the old-line denominations will continue their support of the far left agenda as long as local churches continue financial support for their national social agencies. 
