Seeking the Nonexistent Pure Line of Ecclesiastical Continuity
Retake the Mainline! Restore true doctrine to its beautiful old churches just as Josiah and Judas Maccabbee purified the Temple. Mainline denominations are ripe for reconquest, for their congregants (unlike most of their clergy) always stayed both theologically and politically conservative. Their overabundance of church buildings, with aging congregations now too small to fill them, can supply a young minister with a sole pastorate right out of seminary. Their confessions, hymnals, and liturgies preserve classic Protestantism at its height. If the churches, colleges, journals, and divinity schools of the Mainline are not retaken for orthodoxy, these institutions will not long endure confessional limbo. They will simply be lost to secularism, just as Oxford and Harvard were before them. Or turned into coffee shops. Such institutions cannot be built again for a century—if ever.
That is the plea that supporters of Operation Reconquista—and particularly, its most eloquent advocate, the Gen-Z influencer and seminarian going by the moniker Redeemed Zoomer (RZ)—have cried out in recent years. And, as a pragmatic argument, it is mighty. Indeed, it almost persuades me. For I am the kind of person who is vulnerable to such pleas—the kind that attends Princeton, writes in The Christian Century, and prefers organs to worship bands. I owe a great deal to Mainline Protestant institutions.
Yet whenever RZ and Operation Reconquista explain the theological—as opposed to the practical and sociological—reasoning behind their movement, persuasion fails. RZ and his associates seek to provide consistent grounds for distinguishing denominational splits in Protestant history that occurred for good ecclesiological or sacramental reasons from those splits that were rotten, sinful schisms. They want to justify why Martin Luther, for example, can rightly divide the medieval church, but J. Gresham Machen cannot leave the Northern Presbyterians. According to Operation Reconquista, church splits are proper when those departing from the denomination have suffered physical persecution or excommunication. But division lacks “Biblical warrant” when confessional Christians leave because a denomination teaches open heresy, embraces rank immorality, or drives orthodox leaders from the ordained ministry. Machen, for instance, was defrocked (but not excommunicated) for violating denomination rules by refusing to fund a denominational missions board that promulgated Modernist theology—so he split the denomination as a “coward” and “retreatist.”
The trouble is that Operation Reconquista has not (and likely cannot) provided grounds for distinguishing good and bad church splits that fit the history of the Mainline denominations themselves. If the Presbyterian Church in America is illegitimate, then a fair assessment of history demonstrates that the United Church of Christ, or the United Methodists, or RZ’s own PCUSA are too.
Consider the UCC, the primary denominational heir of New England Congregationalism. John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams, and the other Puritan settlers who brought Congregationalism to America were not ministers of an independent denomination. They were members of the Church of England, trained at Oxford or Cambridge, who had pastored Anglican churches in England before moving to America. Like Puritans back in the mother country, their goals were to reform the Church of England along Calvinist lines, not to establish a new denomination.
That changed in 1662: the year of the Great Ejection. In the aftermath of the English Civil War, Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity, requiring (among other things) that all clergy in the realms of England and Wales receive episcopal ordination and swear an oath to use the rites of the Book of Common Prayer. Those who refused to swear—about 2000 of the roughly 8000 ordained ministers in the Church of England at the time—were deprived of their livings and prohibited from preaching or holding unauthorized services. Thus, ejected Puritans (by no means all Puritans, as some chose to conform) became dissenters.
Dissenters, however, were not excommunicants, at least not necessarily. They were defrocked (just like Machen) but were welcome—indeed, encouraged—to take communion. Under various Test Acts, anyone who wished to hold public office in the kingdom had to communicate according to the rite in the Book of Common Prayer at least once a year. “Occasional conformity” became a normal practice. That is, dissenters would attend Anglican service once a year, take communion, and thereby preserve their public career. Parsons who refused to give the Eucharist to known Dissenters could be sued in court.
Likewise, physical persecution was rare in Restoration England. When a dissenting cleric such as Richard Baxter or John Bunyan was caught preaching contrary to the laws, they were imprisoned. But dissenters who were content to live quietly as laymen went unmolested.
The formation of the Congregational Church, in both England and America, then, was the sort of sinful division that Operation Reconquista claims to oppose. Congregationalism’s founders could have remained within the Church of England and continued advocating for its purification without persecution or excommunication. But they chose not to, because they viewed the rites and doctrines of the established church as idolatrous.
The same can be said for most of the Mainline denominations. John Wesley, Thomas Coke, and Francis Asbury had not been physically persecuted or excommunicated when they began ordaining elders and bishops for the new Methodist Episcopal Church in America. The Disciples of Christ—one of the so-called “Seven Sisters of American Protestantism”—traces its origin to the Cane Ridge Revival and the movement led by Thomas Campbell and Barton Stone: former Presbyterian ministers who had rejected Reformed doctrine. (Strikingly, although Operation Reconquista targets reconquering seven denominations, these seven are not precisely the “Seven Sisters.” The Disciples of Christ have been replaced by the much smaller Reformed Church in America. Were the Disciples too schismatic to be worth reconquering?)
Even RZ’s own PCUSA was hardly free of schism at its origins. RZ likes to proclaim that his denomination goes back to 1706 (treating the PCUSA as identical with the American Presbyterian denomination founded then, which is, at least, disputable). That is the year that Francis Makemie, an Irish minister who had emigrated to the colonies, set up the first presbytery in America. But Makemie was born and raised in Ireland, at a time when an Irish version of the Act of Uniformity governed and the established Church of Ireland was the sole lawful church. He trained at the University of Glasgow, at a time when even Scotland had an episcopal church and the Archbishop of Glasgow’s cathedral was a short walk away. He had been a member of Britain’s then-established episcopal churches.
Makemie arrived in America in 1683—five years before the Act of Toleration—as a dissenting minister and, as late as 1707, was arrested in New York for preaching without a license. Interestingly, Makemie first came to America to pastor a church at the request of Col. William Stevens, a prominent Maryland Episcopalian. Maryland in the 1680s was in the process of repealing its older policy of religious toleration—a process culminating in a 1692 bill making Church of England the established church of the colony. Presumably, in 1653, Stevens thought that he was importing a conforming Church of Ireland clergyman, not a Presbyterian dissenter.
Thus, the men who brought Presbyterianism to America, like the men who founded Congregationalism, Methodism, and nearly all the Mainline denominations, did not fear schism. They cared deeply for true doctrine and were willing to split from wealthy, powerful, established churches if they believed those churches had fallen into error. They were willing, that is, to start over and abandon the institutions that had reared them to the heretics.
None of this, of course, undermines the pragmatic arguments in support of Operation Reconquista at all. Practical reason may indeed supply many good grounds for joining Mainline churches and opposing innumerable Protestant splits. But RZ and his associates are doing more than just offering pragmatic reasons. They are trying to find a pure line of ecclesiastical continuity, linking the denominations they favor back to the Reformation, and thence to Pentecost. Ironically, Reconquista behaves in the same way as Eastern Orthodox trying to claim that there was unbroken succession of properly-ordained bishops back to the apostles; as Roman Catholics trying to insist that no popes or councils have ever contradicted each other ex-cathedra; or as Southern Baptists trying to convince themselves—Trail of Blood style—that Paulicians and Waldensians were credobaptists of an earlier era. Real church history is an unending jumble of schisms, heresies, post facto rationalizations, and invented traditions. It is turtles all the way down. Church schism is part of our heritage as confessional Protestants, too.
