Home / What the Other Side Chose
The Prosecution Brief
What the other side chose in pursuit of “purity.”
When a denomination splits, the two halves are not symmetrical. One of them left for a reason. This is the record of what they left for.
The Roster
The bodies that walked out, and where they walked to.
When the United Church of Christ ordained Bill Johnson in 1972, when the Episcopal Church consecrated Gene Robinson in 2003, when the ELCA voted in 2009, when the PCUSA moved from 2011 to 2015, when the UMC reached formal change in 2024 — each of those decisions produced a counter-movement.
The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) organized in 2009 out of the Episcopal schism. The North American Lutheran Church (NALC) organized in 2010 out of the ELCA schism. A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO) organized in 2012 out of the PCUSA. The Global Methodist Church (GMC) launched in 2022 as the destination for UMC disaffiliations.
Each of these bodies was founded on the stated principle that its parent denomination had abandoned orthodox Christian teaching. Each has since revealed, through its partnerships and its political voice, what the word orthodox was being made to mean. The pattern is too consistent to be accidental.
The Evidence
Four commitments, consistently observed.
Not a theological footnote. A political program, revealed by what they do.
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Whiter.
The racial demographics of the breakaway bodies and their political coalition partners are measurably less diverse than the denominations they left. The pragmatic mainlines are predominantly white too — nobody escapes that indictment cleanly — but they are at least trying. The breakaways have stopped trying. The coalition they feed is organized, in part, around the proposition that demographic change is itself a civilizational threat. That proposition is incompatible with a gospel that begins at Pentecost with every nation and tongue hearing the word in their own language.
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More anti-gay.
This was the triggering issue for most of the splits, and it remains the defining commitment. Not a matter of doctrine held humbly alongside other doctrines. A line in the sand. The breakaway bodies have made opposition to the full inclusion of gay people the criterion of Christian authenticity, which is a remarkable position for a movement whose founder spent his ministry criticizing the Pharisees for doing precisely that with their own criteria of authenticity. The red letters do not contain a single word of Jesus on homosexuality. They contain dozens of words on religious leaders who use their authority to exclude.
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Forced-birth.
Not pro-life in any consistent sense that would also oppose the death penalty, support universal maternal healthcare, protect children from gun violence, feed hungry kids, or welcome refugees from war. Forced-birth as a standalone commitment, decoupled from every other teaching that would make it coherent as an ethic of life. The Catholic bishops who ask for the consistent ethic are ignored. The movement wants the narrow commitment that delivers the political coalition. The broader commitment that would require the coalition to govern differently is inconvenient.
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Reconciled to political power.
Willing to endorse, defend, and explain away a politics that the red letters plainly condemn: the warnings against wealth; the command to care for the stranger, the poor, the prisoner, the sick; the blessing on the peacemakers; the refusal to return evil for evil; the insistence that whatever is done to the least of these is done to Christ himself. The coalition has spent a decade rationalizing a political figure who inverts each of these teachings publicly and proudly. The breakaway churches have had to choose between their stated theology and their political alliance. The record shows which one they chose.
The Red Letters
What the author of the faith actually said.
Cited in brief, because the text speaks for itself.
On the stranger: when the nations are gathered at the final reckoning, the criterion of judgment is explicit. Did you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the prisoner. The righteous ask when they did these things. The answer is that whatever was done to the least of these was done to Christ himself. Matthew 25. Not ambiguous.
On wealth: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The disciples are astonished because they understand the claim being made. Jesus does not soften it.
On enemies: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you. The command is not a suggestion. It is repeated in both Matthew and Luke with emphasis. It is what distinguishes the followers of Jesus from the followers of the Law.
On hypocrisy: woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. You tithe the mint and the dill and the cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. These you should have done, without neglecting the others. The condemnation is not of religious practice. It is of religious practice that has substituted itself for righteousness.
On peacemakers: blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The Beatitudes describe a disposition of soul incompatible with a politics of grievance and retribution.
The red letters have not changed. The question is which churches are still reading them.
The Verdict
What these churches are becoming.
The breakaway denominations are not apostate. That is the wrong word. They are something older than apostasy and harder to name. They are churches in the sense that an armed denomination in the Wars of Religion was a church — institutionally intact, theologically disciplined, politically captured, and unable to recognize in the mirror what the gospel would have said about them.
Their trajectory is not mysterious. Captured Christianity has a history. It grows for a generation, hardens into identity for a second, becomes indistinguishable from its political host in a third, and is buried by the host when the host no longer needs it. Constantine's church, the Tudor church, the tsarist church, the Spanish imperial church, the Dutch Reformed church of apartheid South Africa. Each of these was, in its day, the large and confident and obviously-winning expression of Christianity. None of them is what anyone remembers when they say the faith.
The faith survives the capture. It does not survive unchanged, and it does not survive in the captured body. It survives in the minority that refused the bargain, carried the red letters out of the building, and waited for the host to exhaust itself.
That is a Christian claim about Christian history, available from any honest reading of the past two thousand years. It is also the working proposition of this site.