Beds of Ivory and a Donate Button: The Merger Took the Pulpit Sunday
Now, somebody is already typing it, so let me say it before he can: yes, a federal judge in Texas dismissed that particular settlement in March of this year, ruling he did not have the authority to sign off on it. Fine. Noted. But do not mistake a procedural dismissal for a wall getting rebuilt. The judge did not resurrect enforcement. He did not order the IRS to start policing pulpits again. He just declined to bless the paperwork. The agency had already spent decades not enforcing the thing, and a one-paragraph technicality in Tyler did not put the bricks back. The fence is still down. The dog is still in the yard. Splitting hairs over which lawyer dropped which motion does not change the fact that your side drove to the courthouse to kill that rule, and the only reason it is not formally dead is a judge’s signature, not a change of heart.
THE MERGER NOBODY ADMITTED- Part 3: The Fault Line
In December of 2023, one quarter of the United Methodist Church’s congregations formally split from the denomination. The United Methodist Church used to be the third-largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with more than 30,500 churches and six million members. ULC
The split resulted in 7,658 congregations departing — historians are calling it America’s worst denominational schism since the Civil War.
Let that land for a moment. The worst denominational split in American life since the country tore itself in half over slavery. In 2023. Over a debate about human sexuality and who gets to stand in the pulpit.
Except that is not quite what it was over. The theological question was the presenting symptom. The political sorting was the disease. And before this post is done, the data will make that distinction impossible to ignore.
The Numbers On The Ground
A little more than half of the 7,631 departing United Methodist churches chose to affiliate with the Global Methodist Church, the splinter group formed in 2022 as a more theologically conservative alternative. The ten conferences with the highest number of departing churches were all in the South and in Texas. In the Northwest Texas Conference, 81% of churches left. The North Alabama Conference came next with 52% of churches leaving.
71% of all disaffiliating churches came from the Southeast and South-Central regions. While the United Methodist Church is 89% white, the departing churches were 97% white.
Look at that geography. The South and Texas. Nearly entirely white congregations leaving a denomination whose leadership had moved in a direction the Southern white membership would not follow. Map the departures onto a political map of the 2024 presidential election and the overlap is not coincidental. It is precise.
Tucker Carlson Just Found Out the Machine Was Never His Friend
For three weeks now I have been documenting a merger nobody will admit to — the fusion of the political machine and institutional religion into one apparatus that feeds on the faithful and answers to nobody. This week one of the most recognizable faces in conservative media walked up to a microphone and confirmed the whole thesis without meaning to.
Tucker Carlson is out of the Republican Party.
Not disappointed. Not frustrated. Out. “There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party,” he said on a podcast last week, and then, because he is not a man given to half measures, he added that he would not support the Democrats either. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Sit with that last line for a minute. Because that line is the whole story.
THE MERGER NOBODY ADMITTED- Part 2: The Business of God
In 2020, during a global pandemic that put millions of Americans out of work, Kenneth Copeland looked into a camera and told his congregation to keep tithing.
Not when they got back on their feet. Not when things improved. While they were unemployed. While the bills were stacking up. While the country was locked down and the economy was in freefall. Keep sending the money.
Kenneth Copeland’s net worth at the time was estimated at somewhere between $300 million and $760 million, depending on which financial analysis you consult. His ministry operates from a 1,500-acre campus in Tarrant County, Texas, that includes a private airstrip and a hangar for his collection of private aircraft.
He did not offer to return any of it to help his congregation weather the pandemic.
That is not the most absurd sentence in this post. It gets worse from here.
THE MERGER NOBODY ADMITTED- Part 1: The Sorting Is Complete
There is a test you can run right now that should disturb anyone paying attention.
Pick a denomination. Any denomination. Methodist, Episcopal, Southern Baptist, Presbyterian USA, Assemblies of God. Look up their official positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, social welfare policy, and racial justice. Then check the party platform that matches those positions almost point for point.
You will not need a calculator. You will not need a theology degree. You will need about four minutes and a search engine.
What you will find is that the merger between American institutional religion and American political machinery is so complete, so thorough, and so precisely sorted that you can now predict how a congregation votes from their denominational affiliation with the accuracy of a census tract analysis. The church did not merely wander into politics. The political machine did not merely borrow religious language. They fused. They became functionally identical institutions running parallel operations on the same population, and neither one has had the honesty to admit what happened.
This series is going to name it.
WHAT THEY DIDN’T WANT YOU ASKING
The Restoration Movement launched in the early 19th century on a premise that was as simple as it was ambitious. The church had buried the New Testament under centuries of human tradition. Strip it all away. Go back to the text. Restore what the first century Christians actually did and be the church Jesus actually built.
It was a noble premise. It produced genuine fruit in many ways. And it contained an irony so complete and so visible — once you know where to look — that it deserves to be named plainly and without apology.
The men who set out to restore the New Testament pattern of the church walked out of their studies, stood behind their pulpits, and conducted Sunday morning in a format that looks nothing like what the New Testament describes.
WELL, THEY CAME- A Response To The Responses
Called it.
The previous post in this series said the responses were coming. It named the passages that would be cited. It described the argument that would be made. And right on schedule, with the reliability of a car alarm going off in the church parking lot during the third verse of the invitation song, the responses came.
Romans 16:17. Matthew 18. You have not done the exegesis. You do not understand the Greek. Paul said mark and avoid. Jesus said treat him as a Gentile and a tax collector. The text supports the application and if you understood the original language you would know that.
Fair enough. The text deserves the full treatment. So here it is — the Greek, the scholarship, the context, and the argument the original language actually makes when you follow it where it leads rather than where the institutional machinery needs it to go.
That destination is not where the machine has been sending people.
BEFORE THE COMMENTS FILL UP- Part 3 of 3
Parts 1 and 2 of this series laid out a seventeen-century paper trail connecting the institutional church’s control machinery to Saul Alinsky’s documented playbook and back again. By this point a significant portion of the readership — particularly those with a Churches of Christ background — has been composing a response in their heads since approximately the third paragraph of Part 2.
The response goes something like this. What about Romans 16:17? What about Matthew 18? The Scripture addresses this. Paul told us to mark and avoid. Jesus himself laid out a process that ends in treating an unrepentant brother as a Gentile and a tax collector. You can’t critique the mechanism without dealing with the text.
Fair enough. Let’s deal with the text.
Because here is what a careful reading of both passages actually produces — not a defense of the institutional playbook, but an indictment of it. The machinery has been using Scripture as cover for behavior the Scripture itself does not authorize. And the gap between what those passages say and how they have been applied is wide enough to drive a bus through.
WHO TAUGHT WHOM- Part 2 of 3
Part 1 ended with a question. If Saul Alinsky learned his organizing principles by watching institutions operate — and one of the primary institutions he spent his career embedded in was the Catholic Church — then who taught whom?
The answer requires going back considerably further than 1971. It requires going back to the moment the church stopped being a called-out people and started being an institution with property, power, and political arrangements worth protecting. Once that happened, everything that followed was predictable. Institutions protect themselves. That is not cynicism. It is documented historical fact. And the church has been doing it longer than anyone else.
Alinsky did not invent the playbook. He watched it run, wrote it down, and dedicated the documentation to the appropriate party.
THE MAN WHO WROTE IT DOWN- Part 1 of 3
I have a confession to make.
When I started seeing Saul Alinsky’s name showing up in conservative commentary around 2008, my first instinct was the same as every other right-leaning blogger at the time. Here is the radical. Here is the playbook the left has been running. Here is the manual that explains Obama, explains the organizing machinery, explains why everything feels coordinated even when nobody admits to coordinating it.
I read the rules. I wrote about the rules. I nodded along with Glenn Beck going wall-to-wall on it and Rush laying it out for the audience that had never heard the name before. And I filed it where most of us filed it — under political threat, leftist origin, something the other side does.
I was wrong about that last part. It took me a while to figure out why it all felt so familiar. It was not until I started watching the same moves run in a fellowship hall that I understood what I had actually been reading.
Alinsky did not write a political manual. He wrote an institutional power manual. He just had the honesty to admit what it was.
The church never admitted anything.