During my early years as a Christian, I attended an Evangelical church that knew little and cared less about denominational distinctions. When I started to get more serious about theology, and first became acquainted with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I learned a little about the history of Presbyterians in America. It’s not a thrilling story. <\/p>\n
The Presbyterian church split north – south over slavery. Years later, during the fundamentalist \/ modernist controversy, both the northern and southern churches split conservative \/ liberal. The two liberal branches then reunited, while the two conservative branches remained apart. <\/p>\n
This is, of course, a simplification of the history of the “split Ps” in America. Presbyterians have divided into lots of different denominations. There’s even a funny song about it, which I wasn’t able to find on YouTube. <\/p>\n
I was reminded of all that when William sent me this article. United Methodist Church Announces Proposal to Split Over Gay Marriage.<\/a> <\/p>\n The “United” Methodists are going to split into conservative and liberal branches. <\/p>\n We’re often told that there was a time in America when mainline, Protestant Christianity informed the moral conscience of the nation. Whether that was ever true or not, it seems there’s another side to the story. The moral conscience of the nation likes to rip up and reorganize churches. <\/p>\n Today it seems the moral suasion is going mostly from the culture to the church, rather than the reverse. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During my early years as a Christian, I attended an Evangelical church that knew little and cared less about denominational distinctions. When I started to get more serious about theology, and first became acquainted with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I learned a little about the history of Presbyterians in America. It’s not a thrilling story. … Continue reading “Does the church drive morality, or does morality drive the church?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}