I was a little disappointed but not much surprised to hear that our governor told the Methodists to mind their own business, so to speak. Specifically Mr. Underwood, a long-time United Methodist himself and regular delegate to the Annual Conference, was responding to the resolution, passed by that Conference, calling for an end to mountain-top removal as a method of strip mining. Underwood’s reply, as reported in the Charleston Daily Mail, was that such actions fall outside the church’s primary role.

That was carefully worded! Of course, technically the governor is correct! Jesus never mentions strip-mining, and by that measure it is not the primary role of the church to discuss strip mining. Nobody said it was! But our governor, in his carefully worded statement, noted that the Methodists have been losing members in recent years, so I imagine he is implying that caring for our membership rolls is our primary role. Like the Nielson ratings for the television networks.

Of course, there are times when the church must carry out chores which are indeed beyond its primary role. It may be outside the primary role of the church to speak out against slavery, but there are times when we must do it. It might just be outside the primary role of the church to speak up for abused women and battered children, but there are times when the church must do it. It may have been outside the primary role of the church to speak out against the horrors of the Third Reich, but there was a time when we should have done it, and our voice was miserably weak. It might have been outside the primary role of the church to speak out against the Jim Crow laws of Mississippi or the lynch mobs of Alabama, but we needed to do it anyway, though for many years our voice was still and small.

I don’t know what hymns our governor used to sing as he grew up in the Methodist Church, but where I came from we often sang on Sunday mornings, "For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies ... this our hymn of grateful praise." And then from time to time we used to read together a Psalm which said, "The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, let us rejoice and be glad in it."

So I guess I grew up thinking that while it was perhaps outside the primary role of the Church to criticize Governor Underwood for selling out to the powerful forces on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line which prey upon this beautiful land, responsible stewardship of our natural resources was clearly one of the tasks of Christian living. And I never thought a good Methodist ought to spend a lot of time destroying the beauty of the earth.

Our governor has surrounded himself with a team of parrots who use fine-sounding words to disguise his plan of destruction. I hear them telling us that we need to develop a "scientific study" to settle the questions surrounding mountaintop removal, and of course this deceptive team wants the strip mining to continue its devastating work all the while. By the same token, I suppose, these voices would have called for a scientific study to determine the long-term effects of the Holocaust before taking action against it, and would have done the same with Jim Crow laws, lynching practices, child and spouse abuse, and so forth. These are not scientific questions, and they cannot be analyzed scientifically. "Science" is just a smoke-screen.

These are religious and moral questions. I just wonder what the primary role of the church might be if it is not to speak to these issues. Of course, we Methodists believe that mountaintop removal is outside the primary role of Governor Underwood too, and we said as much at our Annual Conference. And the destruction of the beauty of the earth is certainly a religious and moral issue. And as we took that vote, I just wondered how many folks in that assembly had posted "Another Democrat for Underwood" on their front lawn eighteen months ago!