Presbyterian Church Torn by New Divisiveness

The Presbyterian Church was divided into religiously liberal and conservative camps more than 100 years ago, but the geographical, economic and cultural factors that led to the Civil War overrode those theological fights.

Now, as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) begins celebrations here today of the 200th anniversary of its first General Assembly, it will be only five years after the northern and southern branches of the church reunited after a 122-year split.

In the past, the Presbyterian Church thrived on controversy. During the most bitter divisions, its membership grew. As the North-South split was occuring last century, there was a split between conservative Old School and liberal New School Presbyterians over such matters as biblical inerrancy. However, Old School and New School Presbyterians in the South joined forces at the outset of the Civil War and the theological opponents in the North also reunited in 1869.

New Divisiveness

Today, there is new divisiveness over issues such as abortion, the nuclear arms race and homosexuality, and the prognosis for theological peace is not so sanguine.

The disputes are occurring in a denomination that has experienced precipitous declines in membership. From 1970 to 1986, the church lost more than a quarter of its members, with the total dropping by more than a million to barely more than 3 million.

In a 1967 Gallup poll, 6% of the national sample identified their religious preference as Presbyterian. By 1986, the number had dropped to 2%. Studies show it is an aging church, with young Presbyterians not leaving for other churches but leaving organized religion altogether. Opinions are mixed on whether controversy and dispute are added reasons for the membership decline.

Bitter infighting today is not the product of one-issue groups the church has been familiar with throughout its history. Those groups are being replaced by what Stated Clerk James E. Andrews refers to as “a more dangerous phenomenon”--the formation of liberal and conservative organizations that promote a theological and social agenda over a range of issues.

Toward Another Church

“They come dangerously close to . . . the establishment of another church,” said Andrews.

The Presbyterian Church has been affected by the same societal forces as other mainline groups that have watched membership decline. Society of the 1980s, where individualism is prized, is vastly different from the America of the 1950s, in which a form of civil religion held sway that encouraged churchgoing and attached a particular social status to attending the relatively affluent Presbyterian churches.

Perhaps this year’s celebration of the bicentennial of the first General Assembly is a good time to reassess the church’s direction, said the Rev. James H. Smylie, a professor of American church history at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Va. After expending so much organizational effort to accomplish the merger, Smylie said, “we’re taking a new look at ourselves in this particular period.”

Statement of Faith

This General Assembly, which will close on June 16, will be working on a new statement of Reformed faith. The denomination also recently completed work on a new school curriculum and plans to develop a new hymnal by 1990. A four-year Bicentennial Fund drive being kicked off at the same time will attempt to raise $125 million over the next four years. A portion of the amount will be designated for revitalizing existing congregations and starting new churches.

Conservative voices, such as the Presbyterian Lay Committee and Presbyterians for Democracy and Religious Freedom, argue that the church’s controversial stands on social issues have been a major reason for the denomination’s decline. The church, in their opinion, would be better served by emphasizing evangelism and spiritual renewal.

“The national church is in severe trouble,” said J. Robert Campbell, president of the Presbyterian Lay Committee. “The only way that we see is going to reverse the decline is a return to the top priority of proclaiming the Gospel.”

National Church Actions

In a denomination where Republicans outnumber Democrats by a 2-to-1 margin, conservatives also claim that national church actions such as a decision to bar investments in companies involved in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, or the General Assembly’s refusal, by a 281-266 vote in 1986, even to undertake a further national study of the abortion issue, leaves many members feeling disenfranchised.

“It points up one of our basic problems: In this denomination, only one viewpoint is allowed,” Campbell said. “We make the claim congregations across the land are much more conservative and evangelical than the denominational bureaucracy.”

But the Rev. Dean H. Lewis, director of the church’s Advisory Council on Church and Society for the last 20 years, said he does not buy the argument that “the church has been captured by this little band of McGovernite radicals.”

Rather, according to Lewis, “the nation veered while the church remained steady.”

‘Ugly’ Involvements

Thus, he said, U.S. foreign policy with humanitarian aspects such as the Marshall Plan that the denomination could support has been replaced by a doctrine of what he terms imperialism that led to the “whole ugliness” of the nation’s involvement in Latin America and South America. Similarly, Lewis said, the church finds itself in constant criticism of domestic policies that have amounted to “a vicious war on the poor in this country.”

A more vigorous social witness, rather than a church that retreats from controversy due to internal tension, is the path to a growth in membership, according to Lewis.

Ronald H. Stone of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary was one of the authors of a 1985 study paper on peacemaking that shook up the denomination by saying resistance tactics such as providing sanctuary to military deserters and tax resisters and withdrawing Presbyterian chaplains from the military may be called for as a matter of faith.

He maintains that the theological understanding of the church is that it “bears witness to Christ when it tries to shape the moral life of the nation.”

Attacking Communism

While some people think the denomination has not attacked communism strongly enough, Stone said, “we also lost members who thought we haven’t been socially significant enough.”

Just as it has since the time of the American Revolution, when more Presbyterian pastors were hanged by the British than clergy from any other denomination, the Presbyterian presence continues to be felt in national public policy debates. The church sanctuary movement, which protects Central American refugees from federal immigration authorities, went public in March, 1982, at the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson.

But observers note that another Reformed tradition that Presbyterians have been particularly proud of--producing first-class theologians from Jonathan Edwards down through the Niehbuhrs--has been fallow in recent years.

In their influential book, “Habits of the Heart,” sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-researchers wrote that without such a creative intellectual focus, “the quasi-therapeutic blandness that has afflicted much of mainline Protestant religion at the parish level for over a century cannot effectively withstand the competition of the more vigorous forms of religious individualism” or the resurgence of religious conservatism.

The church has concentrated in the last 50 years on distancing itself from fundamentalists, according to John M. Mulder, president of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.