Getting Permission to Break the Rules: Clergy Respond to LGBTQ Exclusion in the United Methodist Church

Abstract

Abstract Organizational scholars expect organizations to conform to the norms and expectations of their institutional environments. In some cases, though, organizations may reject rules if they perceive a greater advantage to defiance than to conformity. This project analyzes a sample of sermons given by United Methodist Church (UMC) clergy surrounding the 2019 UMC General Conference. We focus on a subset of sermons in which clergy explicitly mention they will not follow denominational rules, meaning they will marry and ordain LGBTQ people, to investigate how clergy legitimize their rule breaking. We find that clergy draw on several sources of religious authority to justify their decisions, including meso-level structures in the UMC tradition, the autonomy of local congregations, and religious texts and leaders. This project provides empirical evidence of how organizations resist institutional pressure and construct their decision as legitimate, with implications for other organizations and for LGBTQ inclusion.