How did the United Methodist Church become so liberal?
One answer is the seminaries. Most ministers go to seminaries before they can be ordained.
Here are 5 of the most outrageous United Methodist Seminaries.
1. Iliff School of Theology in Denver
How is this school described? Well, one current staffer and alumna boasted, “The Iliff School of Theology is a United Methodist school of higher education but its alumni and students are Hindus, Universalists, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, and agnostics”
How about the core values of a seminary training future ministers?
The seminary has declared that support for LGBTQIA+ liberationist ideology “is a core value at Iliff” and reported that since 2015, “35% of our student body has consistently identified as LGBTQIA+.” The seminary has offered an entire course devoted to “Queer Spirituality in the Visual Arts,” allowing students to explore such topics as “Queer Tarot.”
In the 2021–2022 academic year, Iliff publicly celebrated the election of
two out of five student government leaders who are openly neo-pagan. According to their bios, one worked for “an inclusive Wiccan Church” and the other worked for and was an “initiate” of “the Firefly House in Washington DC—an organization for Wiccans, witches, polytheists, and other magic workers.”
Iliff offered an entire course on “Social Justice in Western Earth-Honoring Traditions,” which promised to promote social justice “through the lenses of various modern, Western earth honoring traditions, such as: goddess spirituality/Wicca.”
One current staffer boasts in her official bio that she “is ordained with a Norse pagan organization called Forn Sidr of America and serves as their Gudellri/head clergy.”
Iliff celebrates one alumna serving as a chaplain affiliated with the American Humanist Society, and elsewhere profiles a current professor who “now describes himself as a ‘lapsed Buddhist,’ and a current atheist.”
2. Drew University Theological School
Professor Melanie JohnsonDebaufre denied biblical authority, using one lecture to urge church people to, “Invite Paul to be a conversation partner, not one who tells us what to do.”
In 2021, Drew University Theological School hired Dr. Sofía Betancourt, an ordained UU, as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, touting how her “scholarship and teaching in womanist, Latina feminist and mujerista,
and environmental theoethics resonates deeply with Drew’s mission and shared values.”
3. Claremont School of Theology
Claremont’s president declared that Christians who feel compelled to evangelize adherents of non-Christian religions have “an incorrect perception of what it means to follow Jesus.” The United Methodist seminary still offers its own degree program in “Islamic Chaplaincy.
For years, Claremont has trained Muslim imams to lead and promote the Islamic religion in North America.
4. Candler School of Theology.
After the denomination officially forbid “self-avowed practicing homosexual” ministers, the official response of this seminary was, “For more than a decade, Candler’s Methodist Studies Program … has operated a placement service for UMC LGBTQIA+ persons whose home annual conferences will not ordain them,” helping them find “conferences that will ordain them.”
5. Duke Divinity School
This school had some of the most shocking displays of paganism and heresy I’ve found.
Divinity Pride, a student group affirming the “dignity, faithfulness, and strength of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and gender/sexuality non-conforming Christians,” sponsored a service in which many students devoted an entire worship service to claiming God’s support for LGBTQ ideology and relationships and Prayed to “the Great Queer One.”
“Strange one, fabulous one, fluid, and ever-becoming one,” prayed one Master of Divinity (M.Div.) student in opening the service. She stated that God is “mother, father, and parent” and “drag queen, and transman, and gender-fluid.” Another M.Div. student declared that God is a “queer God” who loves “every part of us.” Another, a self-identified trans woman, defended gender transition as biblical, offering a strained, transgenderist interpretation of Jacob’s wrestling with God in Genesis 32.
Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza is a self-described “non-binary transqueer Latinx,” prominent activist, and a Duke Divinity consulting professor who uses “they/them” pronouns. In 2021, Henderson-Espinoza delivered an invited lecture at Boston University School of Theology, another UMC seminary, linking “white supremacy and capitalism and violence,” and attacking not just racism but “whiteness” as something that “breeds scarcity and breeds a kind of selfishness.”
In a NPR interview, Rev. Dr. Amy Laura Hall, associate professor of Christian Ethics and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke Divinity School, demonized conservative United Methodists. She broadly suggested that supporters of the UMC banning non-celibate gay clergy were guilty of unforgivable sin, denouncing this policy as “a sin against the Holy Spirit.”
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