Religion: Relative Route to Absolute

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Racial segregation should be continued in the Methodist Church for the foreseeable future, a 70-member Methodist commission reported last week. There was no minority dissent to the report, which was based on four years of study and hearings in 24 cities. Moreover, leaders of the 360,000 Methodist Negroes (out of the 10 miliion total membership) agreed with the decision.

The reason for this extraordinary state of affairs lies in the special way the Methodists set up their regional structure in 1939, when Northern and Southern branches of the church—split like most large church groups during the Civil War —united to form a single denomination.

U.S. Methodism was then divided into five regional jurisdictions, each almost entirely white, and one so-called Central Jurisdiction overlapping them all, and exclusively Negro. But this segregation brought some advantages for Negro Methodists in terms of representation and influence in the church. The Central Jurisdiction elects its own bishops and has equal representation on national councils. Thus Negroes cut far more Methodist ice than would otherwise be the case; there are four Negro Methodist bishops in the Central Jurisdiction, for instance, while the theoretically nonsegregated Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. has none at all in the continental U.S.

"To legislate the immediate elimination of the Central Jurisdiction," said the report, "would be harmful to the church and especially disastrous to Negro Methodists." Attorney Charles C. Parlin, a vice president of the National Council of Churches, who headed the commission, believes that integration now would turn Methodist Negroes into "a hopeless minority." But he added: "Eventually, the Central Jurisdiction is doomed. It will go one way or another. It's the trend of the times."

Methodism's leading liberal, Washington's Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, agreed. "I am personally opposed to the Central Jurisdiction and always have been," he said. "But I believe we move to the absolute by way of the relative."