In Search of a Wesleyan Political Theology
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After decades of American court rulings interpreting "separation of church and state" to mean a thoroughly secularized public discourse, the intersection of politics and theology is once again a cutting-edge issue. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, invoked Catholic social teaching on the market in a 2019 speech at Catholic University and in an essay for First Things magazine. Citing Pope Leo XIII, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis, Rubio laid out a vision he described as “Common-Good Capitalism.”
A few Catholic thinkers and academics, such as Harvard law professor Adrian Veremeule, go several steps further. They espouse a concept called integralism, in which Catholic religious and moral teachings are legally privileged and in effect protected by the government.
American Methodism has long been outspoken on political and cultural controversies. Methodists were on both sides of the slavery debate. They were leaders in the Temperance Movement, as well as efforts to suppress gambling and immoral entertainment. More recently, General Conferences of the United Methodist Church have called for bans on handguns and partial-birth abortion. The denomination endorsed a boycott of Taco Bell on the grounds the fast food chain was mistreating its tomato suppliers.
Methodism’s political witness in the United States has often reflected the theological and cultural divisions within the tradition and its largest denominations. For the past century, Methodism has been dominated by the liberalism of mainline Protestantism, which often entails a social gospel approach to matters of public concern. But Methodism also has a strong evangelical subculture which stresses holiness, a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and in political issues has more in common with Baptists, nondenominational evangelicals, and the various constituent parts of the Religious Right.
Both of these tendencies often spoke with one voice in the early 20th century on vices that were seen as harmful to and exploitative of workers and their families. This included the ready availability of alcohol and gambling. But that did not last long. The Cold War, sexual liberation, and to a much lesser extent the civil rights movement fragmented Methodism politically to the point of ideological schizophrenia.
By the 1970s, liberal Methodists began espousing radical liberation theology and Marxist revolution while much of the evangelical subculture remained fervently anti-communist and opposed to the Soviets’ militant, state-enforced atheism. In contemporary political debates, one can find Methodists arguing for and against legal abortion, same-sex marriage, certain conceptions of religious liberty, and homosexual rights more broadly.
That is not to say that institutional United Methodism does not have a more or less coherent political vision. The agencies and institutions of the church have aligned themselves fairly consistently with the political Left, sometimes in strident and extremist fashion. But this does not reflect the culture of most local churches, and the church’s governing structure as an episcopalian democracy means that General Conferences frequently come down on a different side of divisive topics than Methodism’s bishops and bureaucrats. The laity is more conservative, and it has a voice.
The end result is that instead of representing a consistent Wesleyan political theology, Methodism has for the most part reflected the divisions that already exist in American society. A movement that played such a constructive role in the revivals of the 18th century and building civil society in the United States during the 19th century is now too often a series of squabbling political factions at prayer, with the elites leaning left and Southern and Midwestern elements on the right.
While Methodism has strayed from its roots, political ambiguities were present from the very beginning. Unlike other Christian thinkers of comparable significance, John Wesley never laid out a comprehensive or systematic approach to applying the faith to the public sphere. He commented on matters of political import and championed some social causes, such as his opposition to slavery. But Wesley was more of a preacher and minister than a public theologian.
Moreover, some of the political stances Wesley did take are not especially applicable to the American experience. He was a strong supporter of the British constitutional monarchy and his country’s state church. He was skeptical of revolution, while the United States was born out of a revolutionary war. Toryism is ascendant even on the American Right today, but there is a limit to how much Wesley’s writings on these subjects can speak to a typical U.S. audience.
Still, obvious political implications arise from Wesley’s teachings. He believed in public as well as private virtue and social accountability. He emphasized the importance of community rather than atomistic individuals. He held that political and social authority ultimately derive from God. He was a proponent of natural law.
While Methodism has been prone to moments of utopianism in its political witness, Wesley’s own writings and preaching on the subject were characterized by humility. “It is always difficult and frequently impossible for private men to judge the measures taken by men in public offices,” he observed in a 1782 letter. “We do not see many of the grounds which determine them to act in this or the contrary manner. Generally, therefore, it behooves us to be silent, as we may suppose they know their own business best” ("How far is it the duty of a Christian Minister to preach Politics?").
Explicitly political preaching is sometimes required as a matter of conviction, Wesley allowed. But it should not be done to the detriment of a minister’s primary purpose, “it being our main business to preach ‘repentance toward God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.’”
Still, it was Wesley's view that we bear responsibility for sins committed by our political leaders or which become prevalent in our countries. “God frequently punishes a people for the sins of their rulers, because they are generally partakers of their sins, in one kind or other,” he preached in 1775 (“National Sins and Miseries”).
“When there is a such a general wickedness spread abroad, all suffer even when they did not directly participate in the decisions that eventually led to a calamity,” Methodist theologian Tom Oden explained in his book John Wesley’s Teaching Volume IV: Ethics and Society, one of the better summaries of Wesley’s political theology. “Why? Because nations and families have entered jointly into covenant with God. Divine-human covenants may be corporately made with whole nations involved.”
Oden concluded, “The sin we knowingly do contributes to the burden of sin dispersed through the whole society.” All this has relevance to a society beset by broken families, racial division, political polarization and social isolation.
Indeed, benefits would accrue from building on the foundations Wesley laid for a humane, God-centered political theology responsive to the needs of our divided land. But it would require moving on from the hubris that led to Prohibition, a failed government program in which Methodists played a disproportionate role, or the Religious Left’s embrace of secular, increasingly “woke” ideologies with the thinnest veneer of Christian theology.
The coming split in United Methodism offers an opportunity for such a new focus, as it will lead to the creation of an orthodox Wesleyan denomination that is global in reach. But this would also require evangelicals within Methodism not to repeat their own failures or those of the old-line Religious Right. Like Catholic social teaching, a Wesleyan political theology has unmistakable conservative implications. It is not, however, strictly liberal or conservative in any human ideological sense, as it is rooted in eternal things.
A country riven by identity politics and mutual hatreds sorely needs a political theology fundamentally premised on the ideas that each human being bears the likeness of God and God’s grace is available to all people. And with God’s grace, we may yet see such a witness prosper.
W. James Antle III is the politics editor of the Washington Examiner.