Leaders on both sides know it may take a U.S. Supreme Court decision to tie up the many loose ends in this legal fight – affecting millions of dollars worth of pensions, endowments and church properties nationwide.
Similar conflicts are shaking the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and other old-line Protestant bodies.
There will be unity in the future, said [Parker] Williamson, but it will not look like the unity of the past.
“There isn’t going to be a central, merged denominational office somewhere,” he said. “The new church unity will be in new networks of people with common beliefs. It’s going to look more like the World Wide Web, not the old industrial model.”
I very much doubt this will be resolved by a “U.S. Supreme Court decision.” These fights are pretty much controlled by each state’s laws carried out in state courtrooms, either because the situation is governed by state property law, or because of the states’ traditional common-law supervisory powers over charitable entities. This is why you can have one result in California and another result in Virginia or New York.
The only exception would be if the state’s courts so intruded into issues of denominational doctrine or belief that it would be considered a federal constitutional violation of “separation of church and state,” but state courts are generally very cognizant of not crossing that line, and the federal courts also are very wary of picking up that hot potato. This is why the courts focus either on “neutral principles” of state property law, or defer to the “hierarchical structure” of the denomination as controlling, rather than getting into the issues of whether one group or the other is departing from doctrine.