How the United Church of Christ Betrayed Its Flock
By Embracing the Ideology of Settler Colonialism, the UCC Demonizes Its Parishioners
In 2022, I interviewed Umar Lee, a prominent Muslim activist from St. Louis, for the publication I edit, Focus on Western Islamism (FWI). One of the electrifying moments of the interview came when Lee said that he discourages young white men from converting to Islam. Muslims born into the faith regard white male converts with suspicion that will likely never go away, he warned. Some prominent white intellectuals will be held up as trophies by the Muslim community, Lee reported, but in the main, people born into the faith will regard white men with disdain and wonderment, curious as to why they would join a community undergoing such undeniable difficulties in the modern world. “A friend of mine says, ‘When I look at a convert, I think this guy is a nut.’ What he’s trying to say is ‘Why would he join this madhouse?’” Lee reported. Lee is not leaving Islam anytime soon, however, comparing his relationship to his faith to a thirty-year marriage. “I might as well ride it out,” he said.
As shocking as it was listening to a fellow white guy telling other white men (and women) to stay away from the faith he himself has been an adherent of for 30-plus years, I had to admit that I have an even harsher attitude about the United Church of Christ (UCC), the faith community I had belonged to for 42-plus years before leaving the denomination in 2007.
My message is that not only should people of all races stay away from the denomination, its younger members, most of whom are white, need to leave — and find another church to join — before the denomination inflicts any more spiritual and psychological harm on them. The denomination does not purvey the gospel in a manner that helps its dwindling membership confront and accomplish the developmental tasks they face as adults in the light of Christ. Instead, it promotes an ideology that portrays white people as a singular source of evil in the world.
That this anti-gospel—which talks about white people the way the church has historically spoken about Jews—has been propounded by mostly white pastors in the denomination is a great irony. But the fact is, the UCC’s lay members are supporting a cohort of leaders who aggrandize themselves by burdening children in the denomination, white kids especially, with crippling self-hate and shame—all in the guise of Christian progressivism.
Settler Colonialism
In sum, the UCC does to white people, including its own parishioners, what its peace activists and staffers have done to Israeli and American Jews since the early 2000s—and for largely the same reasons. Out of a combination of white guilt, moral arrogance and class privilege, UCC staffers and pastors propound and affirm unreasonable grievances against the country in which its parishioners live in a manner that legitimizes violence against it.
Just as the UCC affirmed the narrative the Palestinians used to justify violence during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, the denomination affirmed the narrative used to justify the Black Lives Matter riots that took place in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. These riots, and the false narratives used to justify them, didn’t help anyone but made life worse for just about everyone in the United States.
Just as the story used to justify violence against Israel did irreparable damage to the Palestinians it was supposed to uplift (take a look at Gaza post-October 7), the story used to justify the BLM riots promoted an unrelenting sense of grievance in the African American community. The people who ran BLM got rich while average Americans became increasingly alienated from one another. The moniker “Buy Larger Mansions” didn’t come from nowhere. Hamas leaders got rich off the story they told about Israel; BLM activists got rich from the story they told about the United States.
The UCC wasn’t a driving force in either of these uprisings, but by legitimizing them, the denomination sent a message that Israeli and American Jews and white people in the United States were intractable obstacle to the advance of human progress in both the Middle East and the West. In the story told and affirmed by the UCC, the people allegedly oppressed by Jews and white people were in no way responsible for their own plight and ultimately could do no wrong worthy of condemnation.
The narrative put forth by UCC leaders was rooted in an ideology of “settler colonialism” which Adam Kirsch describes as a set of ideas that portray the founding of the United States, Israel, and Western democracies as something that should never have happened. Writing in his book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (Norton, 2024), Kirsch reports that for adherents of this ideology, countries like Australia, United States, Israel and are permanently illegitimate because they were “created against the will of the people previously living there.” In light of their permanent illegitimacy, the current inhabitants of these countries, white people especially, are legitimate targets for demonization. (For some reason, African countries inhabited by people—whose Bantu ancestors took the land from tribes that lived there before them—are not delegitimized.)
Family Not Part of the Equation
I fought against the anti-Israel narrative offered by the UCC and other mainline churches for about 17 years and eventually gave up the ghost largely because I felt like a fire fighter trying to extinguish a fire in a home that had burnt to the ground. And while I left the church in part over its anti-Israelism, another important factor was its inability to sustain me as I confronted the tasks of being a husband and a father. This point was driven home to me one Father’s Day when my wife, a lifelong Catholic who had been taking our two children to a nearby Catholic church on Sunday mornings, came to the church where I served as chairman of the Board of Deacons. Aside from a young baby born to a single mom who sat a few pews away, my two daughters were the only children under the age of 18 in the church that Sunday.
During the service, I kept wondering when the pastor, a good and decent person, was going to acknowledge Father’s Day. She had acknowledged Mother’s Day a few weeks before, but for some reason made no reference to Father’s Day even as my wife and daughters sat in the pew next to me. Yes, it was immature and juvenile of me to expect an affirmation for being a dad, but then again it was Father’s Day and my family was sitting right next to me. Afterwards, the pastor stated she didn’t acknowledge the day to avoid embarrassing people in the congregation whose fathers were not present in their lives.
It’s a legitimate concern, but there had to have been some way to thread the needle. But the pastor didn’t make the effort even with my wife and children sitting nearby. I left the UCC on a Saturday in early November in 2007 and when I went to a Catholic church for the first time the following day, I saw something I hadn’t seen in church in a long time: children—and fathers my own age.
I still respond with astonishment every Father’s Day when I am asked to stand for a blessing for the fathers attending Catholic mass. For all its problems, the Catholic church acknowledges the role of parents in the Christian nomos. The UCC has a tough time even acknowledging the existence of a nomos, chasing after one new fad after another, leaving its flock in perpetual disarray or worse, assailing it with racial contempt. These days, I go to masses led by Korean, Latino, and every once in a while, African, pastors who affirm my status as a child of God and my struggles as a husband and a father.
The UCC’s indifference to the challenges parents face became evident to me on Good Friday a few years back when the church I left years before displayed a sign that read “Easter Comes Once a Year. How Often Do you?” I called the local office of the United Church of Christ in Framingham, Mass., to complain about the sexualized double entendre of the Easter message broadcast by its local church and was told “That’s only in your mind,” by a denominational official who answered the phone.
He backed down a little after I told him that my wife agreed with my assessment that the sign was wholly inappropriate. He apparently understood that while it was OK to suggest I, married man and father in his 50s, had a dirty mind, it was probably not a good idea to suggest the same thing about his wife. Good job!
In 2022, right before Thanksgiving, the same church displayed a sign that read “We Are On Stolen Land” and included the hashtag “#Thankstaking.” After I complained that the “Thankstaking” message “turned U.S. citizenship into a criminal category,” the church posted a sign challenging people to think about what they could do to help indigenous peoples with the likely answer being more virtue signaling and land acknowledgements.
During all of this, the church has also broadcast the message “Black Trans Lives Matter” on a banner hung on its front columns. Sure, their lives do matter, but are there enough of Black Trans people to help the church keep the lights on? Probably not.
Let’s be honest. Most young families are not going to join a church that puts dirty jokes on its front lawn in celebration of Easter, even if they are of the progressive sort. And let’s get real. The virtue signaling in which the UCC (and other mainline churches) specialize is an enemy of genuine virtue.
The Loss of a Pilgrim Church
It wasn’t always this way. From the 1960s to the mid-1990s, the congregation I was baptized into in Dedham, Mass., had been led by two theologically conventional pastors who steered clear of politics and assiduously attended to the pastoral needs of their flock which gathered in an old wooden church built in the 1800s. The first of these pastors helped my mother deal with the difficulties of being married to an alcoholic husband. When Dad got sober, the second of the two pastors attended to his needs as well, ushering him back into church life by asking him to serve on the prudential committee which managed the church’s property.
When one of the other members of the committee warned against renting the basement to a local AA meeting for fear of the having a “bunch of damn drunks” burning the church down by leaving an unextinguished cigarette in a sofa, the pastor sent a private note to my father acknowledging the offense and the harm it caused. A few years later, the same pastor who wrote the kind note to my father counseled me as I struggled with the emotional fallout of my father’s death and my early departure from the Peace Corps, my first job right out of college.
Both pastors had a powerful relationship with Christ, with the first of the two much sterner in his preaching than the second. An old white-haired man, the first of the two pastors proclaimed the resurrection of Christ with a gripping ferocity. It was no metaphor, but an actual fact. One Easter Sunday he declared that Christians believed in the physical resurrection of Christ regardless of how unreasonable it seemed to modern sensibilities, so take it or leave it.
In retrospect, I suspect that he was trying to ward off the changes that were already afoot in the denomination. Folks I trust tell me he was a personable man, but I was too young to have any meaningful interactions with him. But as a kid, I admired his pugilism on behalf of Jesus. Years later, after I left the UCC, I was shocked to see that one UCC pastor wrote an entry for the denomination’s daily website meditation that denied the divinity of Christ. The entry was taken down and replaced, but the damage was done. For the author of that daily meditation, a UCC pastor, Jesus was a good guy, an exemplar for us to follow, but apparently not the son of God. Well, if Jesus isn’t the son of God, then to hell with him (with apologies to those I’ve offended and Miss Flannery whom I have plagiarized and misquoted.)
The second pastor was taller than the first, who was himself over six feet tall. Despite his imposing figure, the second pastor had a more intimate way about him. I still remember the cracking of his voice as he preached about King David’s grief over the loss of his son Absalom. After mournfully recounting the brokenness of the family Absalom was born into, the pastor told the story of his death as if he were recounting the death of his own son. As he ended the sermon with David’s words, “Oh Absalom, Oh Absalom, I wish it were me!” tears streaked down his cheeks.
Clearly, he was using the bible to interrogate and give order and meaning to his own experiences and the suffering of the people in front of him. In one of the last sermons he gave at the church, he spoke about the errors and missed opportunities that afflict people as they struggle with the “swift, solemn trust of life.”
I’ve meditated a lot about that phrase as I’ve gotten older. I’ve also meditated about a phrase that same pastor regularly used during prayers of the faithful in which he asked God to give us “strength more suited to our tasks” as opposed to “tasks more suited to our strength.” He was a man who understood that his flock that the people in the pews were facing huge difficulties in their lives and needed God’s strength and presence to withstand them.
The church I grew up in was a messy place under these pastors, but for all its faults, it was geared toward helping people raise their families and deal with the challenges of adulthood in the light of Christ. This emphasis was diminished when the church hired its first, long-awaited baby boomer as pastor. He was a scholarly go-getter whose first sermon from the pulpit was a checklist of all the progressive bromides that, judging from the applause he got afterwards, people had longed to hear from the pulpit for a long time. I applauded too, hoping, along with so many others, that he was going to invigorate and modernize the church he had been called to lead. Those old guys were boring, uninspiring and this guy made us feel we were on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, boldly going where no one had gone before.
We aimed for the Age of Aquarius but ended up in a ditch. The new pastor had a lot of grand ideas about how Christians should behave in the political realm, but a limited sense of how to deal with the people right in front of him. Within a year or so, he resigned, leaving behind a great sense of acrimony between the folks who wanted him to usher the church into a utopia and another group that resented being treated as building blocks for castles in the sky. At the time of his departure, I was pretty sympathetic to his agenda and unhappy about his ouster. But in the years since, I get the sense that he viewed—and tried to use—the church as a workshop for a man-made millennium, which is a pretty good description of the denomination’s larger ideology. Like I said, take a look at the UCC’s websites and YouTube channel. It’s political activism all the way down.
The pastor who was driven from his post was not unique, nor was he without his strengths. He gave one of the best sermons I ever heard when he said that when we look at the bare cross we sometimes forget the suffering we have to endure to achieve victory. “We have to go through the bone-yard,” he said. Many years later, I sat behind a young couple before mass late on a Sundy afternoon. They were looking pretty intently at Christ on the Cross at the front of the church. They remarked on his suffering.
“That’s a map of adulthood,” I said. They looked back at me with a sense of shock and dismay, feelings which I shared with them. “Where did that come from?” I asked myself.
From my vantage point, the people who run the UCC tend to view themselves as social engineers and keep looking around for a lever with which to change the moral arc of the universe. They guard the vessels they have hijacked with great jealousy with little concern for the passengers on board. Well-educated, literate, articulate, and ambitious, they are more connected to the ideas in their heads than they are to God and the flocks they are called to tend. Their spirits are rooted more in the milieu of the French Revolution than the God of the Bible. This isn’t to say that they don’t read the Bible, they do. But instead of reading the text on God’s terms, they mine it for passages that affirm and lend credence to the secular ideologies that they’ve embraced. They twist scripture as a rubber nose to affirm things that it explicitly condemns, removing the guardrails necessary for human flourishing. Take a look around. You know what I’m talking about.
The UCC, and much of the mainline in general, is governed by a class of intellectuals who have embraced and enunciated sexual antinomianism, making it a doctrine that everyone must accept or be denounced as Nazis. Much of mainline has become an adjunct to an agenda that encourages young people to think of sexual fulfillment as the ultimate end and purpose of their lives. That’s not a good thing. And instead of propounding the theology of original sin, which afflicts all humanity, it encourages its members to embrace notions of white guilt rooted in the sins of their ancestors, with settler colonialism becoming, if you pardon the expression, the bête blanche of the modern world.
Through it all, I’ve concluded two things: The people who talk the most about the evils of white privilege enjoy the most of it and expressions of white guilt have nothing to do with confronting personal sin. Of course, there is such a thing as political sin, but by embracing and promoting the ideology of “settler colonialism” the UCC is legitimizing a narrative that renders many of its members criminals for living where they do.
Now, that’s a sin if I ever saw one.