Things heated up in The United Methodist Church this summer when its Western Jurisdiction elected San Francisco Pastor Karen Oliveto as the denomination’s first gay bishop. Oliveto has been legally married to a woman for over two years, according to the United Methodist News Service. In response to the election, the UMC Council of Bishops publicly reaffirmed the denomination’s position against homosexual clergy. After that, an activist group called Love Prevails criticized the council’s response as “more interested in advancing a unity built upon the invisibility of LGBTQ people, whose grace-filled lives you never mentioned.”

With U.S. Methodists in conflict over same-sex marriage, some observers believe the denomination’s prospects lie outside of America. Mark Tooley, a United Methodist and the president of The Institute on Religion & Democracy, told me that 4 out of every 10 United Methodists live in Africa. Their influence will only increase as the mainline U.S. branch shrivels and the African one flourishes, he said: “The Africans are the hope and future of United Methodism.”

Those Africans openly expressed their concerns following Oliveto’s election. “The Christian Church, bought and birthed with the blood of Jesus Christ, is not and cannot be a social club; it cannot be directed by any form of political activism that contradicts the teachings of Scripture,” wrote the UMC Africa Initiative, an unofficial coalition of Methodist leaders. Carolyn Moore, a UMC pastor in Georgia, expressed gratitude for the Africans on her blog, noting, “Their jurisdiction is sufficiently removed, both geographically and politically, that they could easily extract themselves and move on independently with little reverberation.” Instead, they stay, “passionately defending orthodoxy.”

It’s not just the Methodists. Anglicans need foreign aid, too. On Sept. 2, Nicholas Chamberlain, Bishop of Grantham, publicly announced that he is gay—the first Church of England clergy to make such a statement. In both denominations, the themes are the same: The global south stays faithful to the Bible and grows, and North America and Great Britain depart and shrink.

The Africans are nothing if not bold: This summer Archbishop Nicholas Okoh of Nigeria lent his public support to the Anglican Mission in England, a parallel communion in England to rival the Church of England itself.

Fit to print

They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but what about the journalists who cover the fighting? Using America’s Public Bible, a free online tool, you can see what Bible verses newspapers quoted and when they did so. The database matches verses from the King James Version with 11 million newspaper pages from 1837 to 1922.

It’s tempting to speculate why some verses were more popular at different times. Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3 (both asking God for daily bread) are among the top 10 most quoted verses of the 1860s. Should we take these references as poignant reminders of starvation in the Civil War, or something else?

To my surprise, references to 1 Timothy 5:23 (“use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake”) peaked in 1899, rather than in 1920, the start of Prohibition. Perhaps 1920s journalists, fresh from the speakeasy, didn’t want to bring attention to themselves by mentioning alcohol in their reporting.

Lincoln Mullen, the George Mason University professor who developed America’s Public Bible, told The Washington Post the automated tool is about 90 percent accurate: “Any human who’s been to a few Sunday school lessons is going to be a lot better at picking up on these references and allusions,” Mullen said. “But humans are a lot slower.” —J.B.