Methodists Withdraw from Religious Pro-Abortion-Rights Group

This is quite a striking vote, cutting against the trend in which mainline Protestant denominations over the years became  increasingly allied, if only in their policy offices, with the broadest versions of the right to abort.

     Evangelicals celebrated the United Methodist Church’s decision yesterday to leave a pro-choice advocacy group it co-founded 43 years before. 

     At its general conference, delegates voted 425-268 to withdraw from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), an interfaith organization whose broad support extends to late-term and sex-selective abortions—a practice that the church’s social principles “unconditionally reject.”

This is one more data point in the emerging pattern that the ideological middle of the country--which Methodists tend to track--will not accept hard-line pro-abortion-rights positions, even as it increasingly accepts the progressive position on the other major culture war issue of gay rights. The two are very different, and their paths in public opinion charts will increasingly diverge.