The quarter century war of attrition that has been waged by elements of the religious and political right against the mainline Protestant churches in America, has gone largely unchronicled. To read the mainstream press, you would think that people were so upset about homosexuality that they want to divide their historic churches into little warring camps. But these conflagrations have been far from spontaneous — and have always been about much, much more than homosexuality.
A magazine article I wrote recently on this subject has just been posted online. The Battle for the Mainline Churches appears in the Spring issue of The Public Eye.
Here are some excerpts:
“Make no mistake,” wrote Avery Post, the national president of the United Church of Christ in 1982, “the objectives of the Institute on Religion and Democracy are the exact opposite of what its name appears to stand for. The purpose of its leaders is to demoralize the mainline denominations and to turn them away from the pursuit of social and economic justice.
“We must not wait for this attack to be launched in the congregations of the United Church of Christ. I urge you to move quickly to tell the ministers and members of the churches in your conference about this campaign to disrupt our church life and to explain to them how and why the National Council of Churches has been chosen to be its first victim and the opening wedge for attacks on the denominations themselves.”
Post’s letter to regional leaders of the 1.7 million-member church followed the Institute of Religion and Democracy’s (IRD) media attacks against the National Council of Churches (NCC) and its member denominations in Readers Digest and on 60 Minutes. Both were smear jobs, alleging that money from Sunday collection plates were financing Marxist guerrillas. 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt told TV talk show host Larry King in 2002 that it was the one program he truly regretted in his career. Twenty years late, but at least he acknowledged the error.
Avery Post was prophetic in his warning. Unfortunately, he was not widely heeded. Although the episode was big news at the time, it seemed to drift from people’s consciousness. These days, the battle lines are drawn over such issues as same sex marriage and ordination of gay and lesbian priests and ministers. But as important as these matters are, the stakes are far larger. They go to the extent to which the mainline churches will continue to play a central role in American public life, or the extent to which they will be marginalized, perhaps forever.
People outside of the churches may wonder, why they should care? Methodist minister Andrew Weaver, who has researched the Institute and its satellite groups, explains that the member churches of the National Council of Churches account for about 25% of the population and half of the members of the US Congress. “NCC church members’ influence is disproportionate to their numbers,” he says, “and include remarkably high numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture…. Moreover, these churches are some of the largest landowners in the U.S., with hundreds of billions of dollars collectively in assets, including real estate and pension funds. A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment.”
What is more, the institutional moral authority, leadership, and resources of the churches have been vital to major movements for social change throughout the 20th Century–from enacting child labor laws, to advancing the African-American civil rights movement, to ending the war in Vietnam.
For much of the 20th century, the mainline Protestant churches maintained a vigorous “social witness.” That is what these Protestants call their views on such matters as peace, civil rights and environmental justice. While there was certainly conservative opposition to the development of these views, and to the activities that grew out of them, the direction of mainline Protestantism was clear. The churches became powerful proponents of social change in the United States. They stood at the moral and political center of society with historic roots in the earliest days of the nation. Indeed, they epitomize the very idea and image of “church” for many Americans. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that powerful external interests would organize and finance the conservative rump factions into strategic formations intended to divide and conquer–and diminish the capacity of churches to carry forward their idea of a just society in the United States–and the world.
When the strategic funders of the Right, such as Richard Mellon Scaife, got together to create the institutional infrastructure of the Right in the 1970s and 80s, they underwrote the founding of the IRD in 1980 as a Washington, DC-based agency that would help network, organize, and inform internal opposition groups, while sustaining outside pressure and public relations campaigns.
IRD was started as a project of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), an organization of conservative Democrats (many of whom later defected to the GOP), who had sought to counter the takeover of the party by liberals associated with 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern. IRD was originally run by Coalition chief, Penn Kemble–a political activist who did not attend church. According to a profile by the International Relations Center, IRD received about $3.9 million between 1985 and 2002 from The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, Castle Rock Foundation, The Carthage Foundation, and JM Foundation.
The Institute remains a well-funded and influential hub for a national network of conservative factions called the Association for Church Renewal. The member organizations, called “renewal” groups, variously seek to neutralize church tendencies of which they don’t approve; drive out staff they don’t like; and seek to take over the churches, but failing that–taking as many churches and assets out as possible. The network’s spokespersons are treated as credible voices of conservative dissent by mainstream media.
…in 2002, a foundation controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife “gave $225,000 to the IRD for its “Reforming America’s Churches Project”– among whose stated goals is the elimination of the Methodists’ General Board of Church and Society, the church’s voice for justice and peace, as well as discrediting United Methodist Church pastors and bishops with whom they disagree by instigating as many as a dozen church trials over the next few years.
The longtime director of IRD, the late Diane Knippers was, according to Salon.com’s Max Blumenthal, “the chief architect” of an initiative “to `restructure the permanent governing structure’ of `theologically flawed’ mainline churches… in order to `discredit and diminish the Religious Left’s influence.’
IRD and its agents in all of the major denominations have indeed used the internal church judicial system to create division while seeking to enforce their versions of orthodoxy. The Presbyterian Church USA, for example, has seen many judicial battles over, among other things, ordination of gay clergy and the carrying out of same sex commitment ceremonies during this period.
You can read the entire article at the web site of The Public Eye.
[crossposted at Talk to Action and Political Cortex]
Reporting and analysis about rightist efforts to divide and conquer the mainline Protestant churches in order to marginalize thier influence is a major focus at Talk to Action.
Whether or not one is a member of the mainline Protestant churches, these institutions have been bulwarks of social justice and separation of church and state for a very long time. This is why they are under attack by the right.
Nothing bad about posting here, but is there a reason you’ve not sent this over to Street Prophets? This sort of material is their bread and butter.
Chuck Currie already front paged it at Street Prophets.
Thanks. I’m checking out your blog.
This is an issue that is creeping into the spotlight in progressive politics–which probably isn’t the proper vantage.
My complaint: IRD tried to get me to leave my church and/or have an anti-gay clergy/gay marriage speaker come and talk to the congregation. I was a Deacon in a PCUSA church for ten years.
It became obvious that the political rancor and prejudice of IRD & Co. are anti-Christian. However, they succeeded in throwing my congregation so defensively back around the issue of homosexuality, that we became, in effect, a “gay” church. The intensity of the conflict is such that there is no middle ground within the churches.
Yes, this is wrong. But are the mainline churches right? I don’t think so. Jesus never mentions homo-sexuality in the gospels–not once.
Yet, in some mainline churches, entire apologetic tomes, Sunday school curricula, sermons, committe meetings and special programs have become FIXATED on the problems of acceptance of homosexuals in church and society.
I went to college and graduate school in Manhattan, where I now live and work. I have close friends who are gay. My brother was gay.
In the churches now, though, anyone who doesn’t want to make gay apologetics or antagonism their major obsession will be unhappy wherever they worship. The Christian world has become divided over this. As much as the cons may have initiated the division, the mainline churches have embraced the dialectic that has led to this situation.
Has it been wrong for the IRD to politicize the mainline churches? yes. But it is equally wrong for the mainline churches to reactively join in to the politicization.
You know, a lot of it has to do with church governance and community balance–and that has to be something that everybody respects. If one group is allowed to dominate church governing bodies to propound a social or political agenda that isn’t clearly “Jesus Christ,” that church is going to become weighted on one side or the other of this debate. It becomes unwelcoming to half the community.
Congregations and denominations are being destroyed over this. I refuse to accept the fact that all the blame resides with the conservatives. They’re wrong, but they’re not the only believers involved. The division has been as much a result of liberal reactionary tendencies as conservative attacks.
Jesus wanted his followers to go out into the world and spread the gospel.
When the world comes into the church instead, to divide and politicize it, then something anti-Christian is happening there.
Your experience is different than mine, and all that I have seen, heard and reported.
You say: “Has it been wrong for the IRD to politicize the mainline churches? yes. But it is equally wrong for the mainline churches to reactively join in to the politicization.”
While it may be that some churches have gone overboard and done as you describe, I think it is far more the exception than the rule.
In any case, I disagree with your framing.
The churches have sought to be inclusive and have struggled with social change in this area, just as they struggled with matters of racial and gender equality. It is not a matter of the world coming in and politicizing the churches when it comes to affirming the equality of gay and lesbian people. It is the churches coming to terms with the meaning of Christianity in thier lives, in the Church and in the world — all of which include gay and lesbian people, long oppressed.
The same people who oppose the social justice traditions and goals of the mainline churches, did so long before homosexuality became much of an issue. If you read the diary, and for that matter the article, and take it even half-way seriously, one cannot claim that the primary issue is really homosexuality. It has always been about organizing to neutralize and dismember the mainline churches — because of all that they stand for; and thier successes in standing for the things that they believed.