esrosedotblog

ORGANIZED BIGOTRY

The Methodist Church has always been filled with bastards. Social control.

Caught in Methodism's Split Over Same Sex Marriage

But they used to be more liberal bigots.

When I was a kid I was brought up in a Methodist Church. Notice I do not say "the Methodist Church".

In our Methodist Church, the social gospel was non-existent. It was a social organization with the usual approval disapproval mechanisms. Not a lot of theology.

I never really understood much of any of it. The Trinity? Huh?

When I was 8 or something my cousin Gordon got me to help him as sunday school secretary so I got out of going to class. We bummed around when we were done counting the money.

Then Gordon got me to be an usher. Hand out programs. Show people to seats. Take off when the service started, go to the diner across the street for a snack.

Our church was really a family deal. My two families on either side were a big element in how the church got run.

But in the background of this kind of liberal loose garment kind of institution there was the church structure and the minister that it provided to you.

Small enough, we got the losers, the drifters, or, sadly, the occasional authoritarian. But we were a back water. The bigger families ran the deal.

Jesus was there alright but he didn't have a whole lot of rules.

I got into some scuffles between the families. I was a busy bee with the gossip and such. But I left there and it all drifted into the past.

Oddly, just when I was free of the church and safely at MIT, I got dragooned into an actual, honest to god sunday school class at the ultra liberal Harvard Epworth Methodist that was run by a philosphy prof at BU. A great guy. He was all about the social gospel, human rights. At that time, they were all fighting a rear guard battle with the institutional church which was trying to get them to throttle it down.

I went there for a year or more and then passed out of the scene.

Some time later, my wife and I joined a small congregation of people who were building a church. When the minister came to our house it was easier to say yes than no and he found out I played the piano and I became the organist. It was fun. Young couples. Social stuff again. Not much theology. This was the Evangelical United Brethren Church which had a liberal history in many respects and less of a hold on their ministers and congregations.

They were on shakey ground institutionally and were, after we left there, sucked up by the Methodists. The Methodist United Church.

I just give all this history to show that in the colonies, distant from the church center, the Methodists were basically good people using the church as a social glue to hold their new or old marriages together, to keep their families within the safe confines of some moral code and, surprisingly, to have a good time together.

But at the center? A bunch of bastards. Hard nosed moral dictators with a bent for punishing their own ministers who strayed.

Lacking the resources to punish the people for their trespasses they kicked their ministers' asses and made a hard conformity necessary for personal success. They always rotated preachers. No one stayed in one place very long and so they were able to gain a fairly tight hold on the young minister's attention to hew, the line.

Somehow, when it came to gay rights, the Methodists became the worst of the non-evangelical non-born-again denominations. They became worse than the southern baptists and, faced with controversy, dug their hole even deeper until today they are being torn apart.

Serves the bastards right.

This marriage thing is going to kill them.

They are big, now, on church trials. Just like the fucking inquisition. Gay has become a central issue. The wrong fight at the wrong time for the wrong cause.

Labels: bigotry, gay rights, marriage equality, religion