WHO's
FOR ABORTION AND AGAINST THE BIBLE?THE PRESIDENT'S PASTOR
By Mark Tooley
Abraham Lincoln once attended Foundry Methodist Church in Washington and, after sitting through a sermon of interminable length, and pledged $100 of his own money if the preacher would stop talking. Nearly a century later, Harry Truman walked into a service at Foundry and was so irritated by the obsequious attention the pastor lavished on him from the pulpit that he never returned. Bill and Hillary Clinton, however, seem to be content parishioners. They listen to the sermons at Foundry and relish the attention.
The President's church has a history that dates back to the War of 1812, when a grateful merchant funded construction of a new church after his foundry was spared from flames set by invading British troops. In subsequent 180 years, Foundry Methodist has relocated and rebuilt several times. Its current stone and brick, turn-of-the-century structure sits a half mile due north of the White House, in a racially mixed neighborhood of Victorian rowhouses and ethnic restaurants.
On a typical Sunday, parishioners parade single-file through metal detectors as Secret Service officers surround the church. The Clintons are seated in a front pew below the pulpit and congregants note their presence with surprisingly little head-turning or whispering. Excepting a request from the pastor that worshippers remain seated at the service's conclusion until the Clintons have departed, the presidential couple's presence does little to disrupt the service.
One of the reasons, perhaps the primary one, the Clintons are members of Foundry Methodist is the pastor, Philip Wogaman, who appears before them Sunday mornings adorned in a white robe cinched in a rope belt, monk-style. He presides over the service elegantly, without notes, with a smooth, professorial voice he perfected while teaching social ethics in Washington's Wesley Seminary for three decades. Wogaman punctuates his sermons with occasional smiles and wry humor.
Hillary Clinton's Methodist roots are lifelong, while her husband is a cradle Baptist. But they both have reason to feel comfortable in the church of Rev. Wogaman, who was a Democratic Party activist in California during the 1960s and is well-known throughout United Methodism as a major force for liberal social and economic causes. Indeed, Wogaman's intelligence and eloquence, his leadership within old-line Protestantism's largest denomination, and his role as pastor to the First Family, have given him national prominence. And it doesn't hurt that he serves as vice president of and frequent spokesman for the Interfaith Alliance, the self-anointed Religious Left counterweight to the Christian Coalition. Wogaman and Foundry are further left, both socially and politically, than most of the 8.5 million national members of the United Methodist Church. In this, he exemplifies the new, postmodern clergyman - obsessed with political issues, theologically casual, and employing his church as a bully pulpit for politically correct social ideas.
Under 'Wogaman's leadership, Foundry Church has become a "Reconciling Congregation" - one of 120 of United Methodism's nearly 37,000 churches that rejects the denomination's official disapproval of homosexual practices. Located in Washington's bohemian Dupont Circle neighborhood, Foundry has, in fact, become the religious meeting place for the homosexual community of the nation's capital. The aggressive pro-homosexuality stance was one reason why former parishioners Bob and Elizabeth Dole, when heading into the Republican primary season, decided to quit the church nearly 15 years of attendance, thus disappointing Wogaman, who had liked to boast that his hosting the chieftains of both Democratic and Republican parties at the same worship services was "unprecedented in American history.
Actually, I must declare an interest here in that I played a role in the Doles' decision to shake the dust off their feet and search for a new church. Early in 1995 I attended a service at Foundry and found myself in a pew next to Elizabeth Dole. From the pulpit, Wogaman welcomed her back from recent surgery. In a later announcement, he asked the congregation to pick up church materials opposing the Republican Party's Contract with America in the social hall after the service. The church bulletin urged the congregation "to take a close look at the Contract ... some [of whose] provisions have potentially devastating effects on the weakest elements of our society." Mrs. Dole declined to visit the display table, instead shaking Wogaman's hand and quickly departing. A Washington Times article later in the week, quoting me, noted the irony of her attending a church whose pastor actively opposed Republican policies.
Neither she nor her husband ever returned to Foundry. Several months later Cal Thomas, in his syndicated column, described Wogaman's left-leaning politics as giving "moral nurture" to President Clinton's policies. Citing some research I had done as his source, Thomas outlined the Methodist minister's long infatuation with liberal economic and social causes, and asked why Bob and Elizabeth Dole still attended Foundry Church. The following Sunday, with Hillary Clinton in the congregation, Wogaman charged that Cal Thomas and myself were not simply after him, but after the President as well. "I think much of this was a political attack aimed at getting at President Clinton through the practice of his religion," he said, and then went on to blame the negative coverage on "the climate of the times in which we live." In a subsequent newspaper op-ed, Wogaman linked negative articles about his ministry to the Oklahoma City bombing. "People in the media don't plant bombs," he wrote. "But if they plant hatred and division, doesn't that affect the behavior of unstable hearers or readers?"
Three weeks later, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press all carried stories from a "person close to the Doles" who said that the Republican couple were searching for a church that would "more accurately reflect their traditional Christian beliefs." Wogaman declined to comment. Perhaps he concluded the Doles were among the "unstable hearers or readers," although last year during the presidential campaign, he finally admitted that he had "grieved over their departure."Although accustomed to staking out highly controversial positions in defense of statistic economics, abortion rights, and lifestyle radicalism, Phil Wogaman has always couched his stances in the language of dialogue and accommodation and thus criticism is a fairly new and unwelcome experience for him. On the Sunday previous to Elizabeth Dole's last Sunday at Foundry, former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the Roe vs. Wade abortion rights decision, had been scheduled to speak from the pulpit. Pro-life demonstrators outside the church persuaded him to cancel. (The Clintons also chose to worship elsewhere that morning.) Wogaman was displeased. In explaining Blackmun's absence to the congregation, most of whom accepted the demonstrators good-naturedly, Foundry's pastor issued a stern rebuke to the pro-lifers. It was not a spur-of -the-moment decision. Wogaman has authored a pro-abortion rights tract for what is now the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights, a church group that helps United Methodists and other mainline denominations to give religious justification to the abortion rights movement.Nor was this an isolated instance. The Rev. Wogaman has been more outspoken in his politics and more committed in his ideology than most who are vilified as the Religious Right. In response to the Contract with America, Wogaman warned in 1995 that "it would be reprehensible for American society to abandon the poor." Behind this denunciation was more than simple humane concern for the underclass. Wogaman has lauded "Christian socialism," and although he has declined to adopt the label for himself, he told a 1992 conference that Soviet-style communism failed in part because it did not take socialism seriously enough. He also said that free marketeers in the U.S. "must not prevent us from using aspects of socialism."Often Wogaman sounds more like a pamphleteer than a preacher, someone who just got out of one of Washington's increasingly irrelevant and intellectually vacuous liberal think tanks. He has been enthusiastic about the persistently left-leaning and increasingly archaic National and World Councils of Churches. ("The depth and thoroughness of some of the ecumenical documents is not well known at the local church level," he wrote in 1987, when the church councils were still busy apologizing for collapsing communist regimes. "The series of Assemblies of the WCC since 1948 has produced some of the best commentary on 20th century moral dilemmas available anywhere.") In a 1991 article entitled, "Human Rights: Christians, Marxists and Others m Dialogue," Wogaman wrote: "Whatever truth there is in [the] free enterprise model, it is best expressed, in modern conditions, with the mixed-economy, of the welfare state." In a column written a year earlier for Christian Century (it was headlined "Socialism's Obituary Is Premature") Wogaman warned that Marxism's collapse in Eastern Europe was not a judgment on "Christian socialism." He went on to charge that "unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism" has created "social breakdowns," like "drug abuse, murder, unethical business practices, family breakups, and homelessness." He concluded, "Christian socialism's critique of the excesses and brutalities and idolatries of the free market still need to be heard."In 1989 Wogaman wrote in Theology & Public Policy, "Certainly U.S. economic policy will not become socialist in the foreseeable future. But it clearly needs to reverse the decline toward greater inequality." His prescription was an increase in tax rates for the higher brackets, a progressive social security tax, "more generous" welfare programs to reverse Ronald Reagan's "abandonment of public assistance to the poor," and the addition of health care to education as a "public responsibility." Wogaman had already criticized Ronald Reagan in a 1986 book (Economics and Ethics) for his "over-reliance on the free market." In this work he also noted that while socialism may have failed in Mozambique and Cambodia, it "can claim modest but real economic success" in China and Cuba.Wogaman has written of his childhood in depression-era Ohio small towns, where his father also served as a Methodist pastor. A move later in his childhood to southern Arizona exposed him to the severe poverty of a local Indian tribe. While at college in California, Wogaman worked at industrial plants and conversed with union activists. "Those experiences formed a deep, though not uncritical, commitment to organized labor as a necessary protection for workers and their families," he has said."I was never greatly tempted by communism." Wogaman wrote after his exposure to "manipulation" by the U.S. branch of the party and his visits to the Eastern Bloc. But moral equivalence was appealing, and he concluded that both Marxist socialism and laissez-faire capitalism were "seriously flawed." Nor did tyranny behind the Iron Curtain seem much of a problem to him. "The USSR is characteristic of the more tolerant Communist arrangements for religion," he wrote in his 1967 work, Protestant Faith and Religious Liberty. "In Russia there are specific constitutional guarantees of freedom of worship, and some provision has even been made for the upkeep of churches and theological seminaries." He wondered if "Christians in Russia or China are treated any worse than Marxists are treated in the United States."Like his economic, defense and foreign policy views, Wogaman's positions on social issues are left of center. In a booklet that he wrote during the 1970s for what was then the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, he commended the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion as "a landmark of humane spirit and practical wisdom" and its practice "may be faithful obedience to the God of life and love." More recently, he has defended the partial-birth abortion procedure. After signing a public statement with 29 pro-abortion rights religious leaders last year, he told the Washington Post that a ban on the late-term abortion method would be "unfeeling." Said Wogaman, "These are matters where the- law needs to proceed with sensitivity and compassion."Outspokenly pro-homosexual, Wogaman told the Washington Blade, a gay newspaper, in 1995, "I want to emphasize that I honor the number of people in our congregation who are gay who are in deeply committed relationships. I have found many examples of love which I find deeply moving." A year later he repeated this message to the church's General Conference in 1996. Just hours before he addressed the meeting, Wogaman had shared the podium with Hillary Clinton, who asked United Methodists, during her speech, to "throw open the doors of our churches." The Reverend was undoubtedly proud of his star parishioner and pleased by her support. Despite more than 2 years at active campaigning by Wogaman for joining the "Reconciling" pro-homosexuality movement, Foundry's Church administrative board had approved the idea by only a 52-46 margin in 1995.Wogaman found another kindred spirit in the eccentric Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, who predictably speculated in a speech at Foundry that St. Paul was homosexual and then charged that "our primary understanding of God's grace came from a self-hating gay man."
After these typically weird comments, Wogaman then said, "Bishop Spong's remarks this morning were so stimulating." Asked about the possibility of Jesus Christ being depicted as a "drag queen," he responded, "I don't condemn. I just don't know. I'll have to think about it some-more."Theologically, as well as politically, Wogaman is considerably more liberal than most of his fellow United Methodists, 69 percent of whom have told a church pollster that they are "conservative." In a recent article,. he reported that pastors do not tell their parishioners the-"truth" based upon the latest Biblical "scholarship," for fear of upsetting their faith. He approvingly quoted a layperson who said, "It took me almost 50 years to free myself up from what I was taught in Sunday school by honest, good people who were Bible teachers but not Bible students." Wogaman expressed concern about people who have been "injured" by "literalistic interpretations of scriptural passages." Women and blacks have been particularly harmed by such readings of the Bible, he wrote. The Scriptures are a "human document," he believes, that reflect the limitations of the life and culture of the writers.""Human limitations" in the Bible have kept good people out of the church, Wogaman believes. He described a "morally sensitive political leader from another country," who left the church because he could not accept the Virgin Birth. "What a tragedy," Wogaman declared. "We create stumbling blocks for people who are thoughtful enough to see moral and factual errors in those Scriptures for themselves."To judge from two recent sermons, Wogaman is trying to remove such "stumbling blocks." He told his congregation one Sunday: "There are inconsistencies in the Bible.... There are parts of the Bible no longer consistent with deep convictions of faith and moral life that we now share." Frequently drawing laughter, he cited Scriptural passages that called for rebellious children to be stoned, slaves to obey masters, women to wear veils, and which condemned homosexuality. "This the type of thing that has hurt people," said Wogaman. He asked that the Bible be seen as containing truth, like the New York Times or the Washington Post, but, like those newspapers, having errors.In another sermon, he rejected the Virgin Birth as a required belief for Christians, saying, "The Gospel contains many stories that probably are true. But we should be concerned about the overall picture."At the 11 a.m. services (which the Clintons attend), Wogaman preaches to a full house. In a 1994 interview with Newsweek, he trumpeted Foundry Church's diversity. In a typical service, he said, young singles and married people sit up front, gays prefer the far right, African-Americans congregate in the center, while older whites are in the back. Yet a glance at the church audience over numerous Sundays shows a less rosy picture. There are male homosexuals seated together, but very few non-whites are in evidence, although Foundry's neighborhood is racially mixed. Many blacks and Hispanics are seen in the street outside on Sunday morning, but only a handful stop at Foundry.
A glance at Foundry's directory shows most members living in upscale Northwest Washington neighborhoods or in the suburbs. Judging by appearances is often unfair, but Foundry's members give the impression of affluence and education. They do not represent a cross section of the city's population, more than 70 percent of whom are black and one-eighth of whom receive public welfare. It makes sense: people who are not upper middle class or highly educated are not a likely following for theological leftism. Working-class people with more traditionalist religious views - and needs - may be more inclined to want the "crutch" of Bible against which Wogaman has preached.Philip Wogaman claims that he represents the mainstream of the United Methodist clerical leadership. Perhaps so. But with a 1,000 member loss every week of every year for the last 30 years, United Methodism is among the fastest declining churches in America, as parishioners vote with their feet - and their hearts - for varieties of other religious experience. Despite Foundry's strenuous efforts at "inclusion" and "diversity," and despite the draw of the President and First Lady every Sunday, the church has followed the national Methodist trend of decline. Membership and attendance have fallen more than ten percent since Wogaman became pastor and the Clintons became regular congregants. Old members uncomfortable with Foundry's new regime have left. Most of Foundry's liberal neighbors are more inclined to attend the Broadway shows regularly produced in the church's fellowship hall than attend the Sunday services, where the sermons offer a message so smoothly tolerant as to be inconsequential.None of this is likely to cause a crisis of conscience in the President's preacher, who is almost as smooth as the President himself. But while Foundry may appeal to Bill Clinton, one must wonder what Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman would think if they were to attend Foundry today. They would probably be even more disgusted than before that Foundry Church has slipped from over-confidence, to obsequiousness, and now, under Philip Wogaman, to political correctness and growing irrelevancy.
Mark Tooley works at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.
See David Horowitz's web site for more information.
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