• Author(s): Grayson Quay
• Date published: January 13, 2020
• URL: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/liberal-methodists-toss-out-the-africans/
• Tags:
  • liberal-colonialism
• Date accessed: January 15, 2020

This article highlights the “liberal colonialism” in the recent announcement to split the United Methodist Church. The attitude towards the African Methodists has been condescending and even racist. A similar attitude has appeared in the past when African Anglicans were caught between liberal and conservative factions of the Episcopal church in America.

Quotes

• One liberal minister compared the Traditional Plan to a “virus” that would cross the ocean and “make the American church very sick,” in what appears to be an attempt to draw a theological parallel to the racist Ebola panic of 2014.

• When I mentioned to a dapper Anglo-Catholic gentleman over post-Mass drinks that I normally attended an ACNA parish, he said with scorn in his voice, “We don’t need a bunch of Africans telling us what to do.”

• In 1998, when the African bishops led the charge to defend Christian sexual ethics at the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference, Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, New Jersey, who is not in any meaningful sense a Christian or even a theist, made the shockingly racist claim that African Christians had “moved out of animism into a very superstitious kind of Christianity.” Others found even more creative ways to infantilize black people, suggesting that if African Christians oppose gay marriage and clergy, they must have been brainwashed into doing so by American right-wingers.