Musings on the Moral Failure of the Church and Democracy in America

 Musings on the Moral Failure of the Church and Democracy in America

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., July 12, 2025

The standards of legitimacy in America are based on the Constitution as the foundation of our democracy and its laws, with our moral standards and values shaped by our culture.  America is a Constitutional democracy with its people the source of their changing laws, moral standards and values; but unfortunately, American democracy has lost its moral compass.

Thomas Jefferson was a Deist and Founding Father who considered the altruistic teachings of Jesus “the most sublime moral code ever designed by man.”  It’s too easy to blame Donald Trump for America’s moral failure.  The people enabled Trump to dismantle America’s Constitutional democracy, and they elected Trump twice to do just that.

Morality has traditionally been the province of a church that has lost its moral authority and is now in decline.  It has failed to be a moral steward of democracy, and failed to reform its exclusivist doctrine that limits salvation to Christians.  As a retired pastor of the United Methodist Church (UMC), I consider the church a failure as a moral steward of democracy.

The issues dividing the UMC have cultural roots that have split Americans along racial, demographic, moral and theological lines, but those divisions are not being discussed in the church.  My old home church in Columbia, S.C. has declined, but nearby there is a thriving Unitarian Universalist Congregation that does not promote Christianity as the one true faith.

At the end of the 19th century the Methodist Church was America’s largest Protestant congregation.  The UMC was formed in 1968, but United is a misnomer.  Most UMC congregations remain racially segregated, with most Black UMC members voting Democratic and most white UMC members voting Republican in a nation with racially polarized politics.

Donald Trump’s morality is the antithesis of that taught by Jesus; but most white Christians voted for him in 2016 and again in 2024--even after he tried to overturn the 2020 election and praised those who participated in the January 2021 insurrection.  It reminds us how the church has ignored the moral imperative of the greatest commandment to love God and our neighbors, including those of other races and religions, as we love ourselves.

The UMC has now split over sexual preferences, allowing its congregations to choose whether to remain in the UMC or to join other denominations more compatible with their moral preferences.  But in the disaffiliation process the UMC never considered doctrinal changes to promote the altruistic teachings of Jesus that could have ameliorated UMC disaffections.

   

For America’s pluralistic democracy and the UMC to survive they must be reconciled as stewards of democracy that promote the common good.  Jefferson understood that; but the church has continued to ignore the universal moral imperatives taught by Jesus.  The choice is ours.  Can the church save itself and democracy from human depravity in religion and politics?            

Notes:

A breakup of UMC churches over L.G.B.T.Q. issues has caused more than a quarter of UMC churches to defect, and the defections continue.  “At issue for Methodists is the question of sexual preference for ordaining and marrying L.G.B.T.Q. people, a topic that has splintered many Protestant denominations and which Methodists have been debating for years. In 2019, Methodist leaders opened a window for any congregations to leave over “reasons of conscience,” in most cases allowing them to take their property and assets with them in a clean break if they received approval to depart by Dec. 31, 2023. Many conservative congregations have done just that. “It’s the biggest denominational schism ever,” said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University. There were eight million Methodists in the United States in 2020, according to the U.S. Religion Census. Between large-scale departures and the broader trend of decline, Dr. Burge said that number could drop by half in a decade. The exodus marks a calamitous decline for the broader tradition of mainline Protestantism, which once dominated the American religious, social and cultural landscape. …Remaining congregations and leaders are taking stock of their losses, and looking ahead to a future in which the denomination’s footprint in the United States may continue to shrink (even as it grows overseas, especially in Africa). In Texas, a historic stronghold for United Methodists, more than 40 percent of churches have left.  “It’s significant, and it’s been at a high cost,” said Thomas Bickerton, who is president of the denomination’s Council of Bishops. More than 7,500 congregations have left since 2019, a number that he said was slightly higher than leaders expected when they extended the offer. Next year, Methodists plan to vote on what will likely be their lowest quarterly budget in 40 years. Officially, the United Methodist Church still forbids same-sex marriage and does not allow “self-avowed, practicing” gay people to serve as ministers. But in recent years, some leaders began defying official restrictions on the practices, and the church now has a number of openly gay clergy and two gay bishops. Many anticipate that church law could change — and spur more departures.” See  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/us/the-united-methodist-church-schism.html.

On the relevance of Thomas Jefferson’s Jesus in the 21st century, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2019/05/musings-on-relevance-of-jeffersons.html.

Alex Detocqueville was a French aristocrat and intellectual who visited America in 1831 and observed a mutual relationship between democracy and Christianity on morality that was critical to both.  Detocqueville observed that America’s many Christian sects shared a “Christian morality” that produced common standards of political legitimacy that defined what is right, and imbued American politics with its moral authority.  On the views of both Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville on the moral values of religion in American politics, see Religion, Moral Authority and Conflicting Concepts of Legitimacy at http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2017/07/religion-moral-authority-and.html. See also Musings of a Maverick Methodist on a Universal and Altruistic Jesus, August 19, 2023, at http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2023/08/musings-of-maverick-methodist-on.html.