The United Methodist Church and War

Matthew May at The American Thinker looks at the United Methodist Church's opposition to war -- unless it's their war against President Bush.

Denunciation of President Bush has emanated from seemingly all corners of the world. Few individuals or groups have matched the slurs, lies, and outright hatred that have come from officials of the United Methodist Church (UMC), which incidentally happens to be the church of George W. Bush. Official UMC has portrayed President Bush as a war criminal, wicked and wickedly ignorant; an object of derision unworthy of the church and its educational institutions. They have distorted and denied his accomplishments while distorting and denying the teachings of the founder of Methodism in a misguided and dishonest attempt to beat the president about the head for acting incompatibly with the philosophy of the denomination.
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During a meeting in November 2001, at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, the Council of Bishops debated and rejected issuing a public statement explaining the church's teachings on just war theory. Instead the bishops declared their neutrality in U.S. action against Osama bin Laden's organization and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Additionally, language introduced by two of the bishops to specifically request UMC members pray for men and women of the United States military was voted down; rather, the statement offered prayers for "people who have been placed in harm's way and their loved ones."[3] "People" could certainly have meant U.S. military personnel, but it could have also meant Osama bin Laden and his surrogates, no?

Not all of the bishops on the council reflexively ignored the denomination's teachings on just war theory or endorsed the explicit suggestions of other bishops that the United States was complicit "in creating some of the chaos," as did Bishop Ann Shearer of Missouri.[4] Bishop Tim Whitaker of Florida disagreed with such language that amounted to justifying terrorist acts and stale denunciations of American imperialism and oppressive foreign policy as if lifted from an SDS manifesto. Unfortunately, voices like Whitaker's were outnumbered and his ideas and thoughts, while politely considered, ended up on the cutting-room floor.
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The United States is described within the Standards as "a sovereign and independent nation, and ought not to be subject to any foreign jurisdiction." As such, the 2004 letter argued that Iraq held the same status and rights as the United States "no matter what anyone's opinion is of its former head of state. Attacking a sovereign nation except in cases of legitimate self-defense is a violation of international law." Also notable was what the letter did not say about Saddam Hussein; that he harbored al-Qaeda terrorists (Abu Nidal, to name one), that he flouted the United Nations time and again, that he presided over murder, rape, and the execution of homosexuals among other acts about which some of us may or may not have an "opinion." In the eyes of the group proffering the petition, Hussein's Iraq and the United States stood on equal footing.

A neat trick, that. Such a formulation ignores that it was not President Bush's "opinion" that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to his neighbors, Israel, and the United States; it was the policy of the United Nations in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War in its various resolutions, which Saddam Hussein continually defied. Randall Hoven thoroughly decimates the left's arguments regarding the reasoning for invading Iraq to begin with here. Mr. Hoven points out that the president was not engaged in "cowboy" antics, but acting upon the written law of the United States as passed by Congress. As he writes: "The invasion of Iraq was arguably the most justified case of military action the US has ever taken in its history, based on national defense, validated intelligence and legal authority, not to mention morality.  Articles of impeachment would have made more sense if Bush had not invaded."

Notably, no such exhortations of repentance for causing violence in Iraq were put upon President Clinton by the United Methodist Church following his airstrikes against "sovereign Iraq" in December 1998, airstrikes that may be plausibly argued amounted to nothing more than an attempt to defect attention away from the House of Representatives voting to impeach President Clinton. On the contrary, the Detroit Annual Conference of the UMC - to cite one example - passed a resolution the following year that read, in part, "Military sanctions are reasonable policy in that they seek to contain the ability to create and use weapons of mass destruction."[5] Apparently it depends on who is ordering the military strikes on "sovereign nations" in deciding who is and who is not acting in defiance of the teachings of the New Testament.
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The Founder

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What left-leaning United Methodists hope you do not know or recall when they selectively lift passages from the writings of John Wesley in furtherance of discrediting conservatives or anyone else on the question of military action by this republic is that Wesley was a proponent of just war theory.
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If a Christian denomination refuses to call true evil by its name yet remains comfortable promoting the idea that those who attempt to destroy that evil in the cause of freedom are worthy of its condemnation, how can anyone take the teachings within that denomination seriously? The United Methodist Church has been unable to get a basic moral absolute correct. History will not look kindly upon the deliberate acts of relativism, hypocrisy, inconsistency, and mean-spiritedness committed by the United Methodist Church on questions of its own theology, morality, and the responsibilities of the state in the face of grave threats and acts of war these past eight years. The shame of such behavior will never be expunged.

There's a lot more.  Read the whole thing, as they say.