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.

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.

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.