Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World
Lefever, Ernest W.
AMSTERDAM TO NAIROBI: THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES AND THE THIRD WORLD Ernest W. Lefever / Ethics and Public Policy Center I $10.00 Joseph Shattan Shortly before the Depression, a now-obscure...
...AMSTERDAM TO NAIROBI: THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES AND THE THIRD WORLD Ernest W. Lefever / Ethics and Public Policy Center I $10.00 Joseph Shattan Shortly before the Depression, a now-obscure writer named Bruce Barton wrote a book called The Man Nobody Knows, an account of the life of Christ which portrayed Him as a successful business executive: "He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business," Barton opined, "and forged them into an organization that conquered the world...
...He who seeks the salvation of souls," wrote Max Weber, "his own as well as others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics...
...Virtually silent on human-rights violations in Communist countries, the Nairobi Assembly waxed indignant at the alleged sins of American capitalism...
...Unfortunately, these same Western Christians seem to rer gard radical political activity as a form of personal penance, a means to salvation in a wicked world...
...Rather, He was an urban guerrilla with Marxist leanings...
...Jesus Christ, it is now clear, was not a businessman...
...Lefever and Will both agree that Christians should be politically active, should not withdraw themselves from the affairs of the world, but they also take the Council to task for conflating the religious and political realms...
...By 1966, however, when the Council held its Conference on Church and Society in Geneva, its political orientation had veered sharply to the Left...
...Will attributes the Council's behavior to "bad sociology, bad theology, bad faith, and, yes, sin " Lefever cites the determination of many religious leaders to "recapture moral authority, if not the headlines, by running with the radical-chic pack-which usually takes its cue from the hard Left on political issues...
...Employing terrorist tactics (shortly before receiving the WCC grant, for example, Patriotic Front guerrillas had murdered 35 Christian missionaries and their children in Rhodesia), supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and contemptuous of democratic norms, the Patriotic Front struck many observers as a rather unsuitable candidate for Christian charity...
...These Western Christians are acutely conscious of the poverty and misery of the larger part of mankind, and are guilt-ridden by their own, and the West's, relative affluence...
...Whether this burden of guilt is justified or not is a separate question...
...National Council of Churches, Lefever has written an instructive account of how the World Council of Churches, over the last 20 years, has been transformed from an ecumenical movement into a vehicle for "liberation theology"-a form of syncretic dottiness which seeks to reconcile Christianity with Marxism...
...To be sure, not everyone subscribes to this catechesis...
...It is an admonition which the World Council of Churches, bent as it evidently is on promoting salvation via Marxist "liberation,' ' would do well to heed...
...so much so, indeed, that John P. Roche, then special consultant to President Johnson, complained that at times the Geneva Conference led one to suspect that anti-Americanism had "become a substitute for the Nicene Creed as the focus of Christian unity...
...Nonetheless, within a month of the announcement, the Council awarded $125,000 to SWAPO, a Marxist-oriented, Soviet-armed, and Cuban-trained guerrilla force operating in South West Africa (Namibia) whose aims parallel those of the Patriotic Front...
...There is opportunity in America...
...For political activity, as John Bunzel has argued, is essentially "the civilizing process of conciliation...
...Founded in 1948 in order to promote Christian unity and influence, the World Council of Churches is an association of some 295 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations from 100 countries-the largest ecumenical movement in the world...
...Of the various and sundry actions which the World Council of Churches has undertaken, none has stirred more controversy than the decision, announced on August 10, 1978, to award a grant of $85,000 to Patriotic Front guerrillas dedicated to the violent overthrow of the then interim interracial regime in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia...
...The keynote speaker, an American professor of Christian ethics, apologized to the Assembly for the massive evil his country had perpetrated on the Third World, blaming American business, in particular, for its "exploitation...
...A quondam official in the U.S...
...Christian compassion, at any rate, is surely creditable...
...Rejecting both Communism and laissez-faire capitalism, its inaugural Assembly in Amsterdam endorsed the ideal of a "responsible society" where "freedom is the freedom of men who acknowledge responsibility to justice and public order, and where those who hold political authority or economic power are responsible for its exercise to God and the people whose welfare is affected by it.'' This "theology of order" and peaceful change, writes Lefever, guided the World Council of Churches for about a decade and a half...
...A best-seller for two successive years, The Man Nobody Knows was widely hailed as a testament to American religiosity, but in retrospect its success is rather embarrassing...
...So contrite was the American penitent, in fact, that he delivered his address in Spanish, lest he be defiled by the language of imperialism...
...They thereby distort the very nature of politics...
...and sometimes, for the sake of mutual conciliation, it is necessary to engage in morally problematic transactions, to accommodate the lesser evil in order to avoid the greater evil...
...Among the more articulate recusants is Ernest Lefever, director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center at Georgetown University...
...Council spokesmen, meanwhile, attributed criticism of the initial grant to ''misinformation" spread by "hate-mongering journalists...
...The largest and most influential bloc within the World Council of Churches consists of North Americans and West Europeans...
...It remained for the 1975 Nairobi Assembly, though, to complete the apotheosis of anti-Americanism...
...Neither Lefever, who holds a doctorate in Christian ethics from Yale, nor George F. Will, who contributed the Foreword to Lefever's study, can be dismissed as a hate-mongering journalist, yet their criticism of the World Council of Churches is severe...
...Fortunately, such an egregious misreading of the Gospel is unlikely to recur...
...At Nairobi," Lefever avers, "everything Western and most things Northern were suspect, while the awakened Southern Hemisphere-with the exception, of course, of any Third World regime allegedly kept in power by Western political or economic interests-was viewed in a romantic and revolutionary light...
...Joseph Shattan is a Hoover Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Theologically sophisticated writers have taken up the cudgels against Philistinism...
Vol. 12 • October 1979 • No. 10
