Sanctifying Revolution: Protestantism's New Social Gospel
Isaac, Rael Jean & Isaac, Erich
Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac SANCTIFYING REVOLUTION: PROTESTANTISM'S NEW SOCIAL GOSPEL The Sword is my Shepherd . . . and give us this day our open gay. The Reverend Dr. Spacely-Trellis,...
...In the United States, according to the final policy statement, "law in itself is unjust and the 'criminal justice system' is poisoned at its source...
...One recipient is the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) whose main problem is deciding with which branch of the Palestinian revolution to identify...
...In his introduction to the church's reply to Jessup, Methodist Bishop Roy Nichols, President of the Board of Global Ministries, admits as much: "When the church commits itself to identification with the poor and oppressed, we may sometimes become involved with people whose blend of Marxist interpretation and Christian theology may be different from our own.'' Since a number of the groups receiving church funds professed no Christian theology at all, the blend did not have to be very diluted...
...In Norman's words: The contemporary equivalent of burning your opponent at the stake is to give aid, as the World Council of Churches does, either actively or by moral support, to those engaged in armed attempts to extinguish their political opponents in the developing world...
...The statement developed out of a series of hearings by a Council task force in five regions of the country during which 120 people gave testimony...
...Although the Executive Director and secretary were given $40,000 upon their release as "a pastoral response to their financial need," the church's support was insufficient, according to Episcopal Bishop Robert DeWitt who condemned any cooperation by the church with federal authorities...
...The church's reply to Jessup defines it as "solidarity with the poor and the powerless...
...Paul McCleary, its executive director, "You can hand-carry anything into Cuba...
...In 1975, a bomb in New York's historic Fraunces Tavern killed four and injured dozens more...
...Bishop DeWitt is not without a certain optimism, however, for this is the way it was in the land of Egypt until someone preached "Let my people go...
...The climate in some church agencies has grown so fevered that they have literally become breeding grounds for terrorists...
...In 1978, the World Division of the Church also gave $5,000 directly to the African National Congress...
...The only concrete proposal contained in the paper is the suggestion to replace imprisonment with restitution...
...The following did happen...
...While the police were still looking for Torres, the Hispanic Commission's Executive Director and its secretary went to jail rather than testify about his whereabouts...
...Its Church World Service is opening what it describes as an "advocacy office" in Washington, D.C...
...Remarkably, even small peace churches like the Quakers and Mennonites have been seized by revolutionary fervor...
...As the Reverend Jerome Politzer has observed with pained humor, "the Protestant Episcopal Church may someday be known as the Marxist Party at prayer.'' The leadership of the United Presbyterian Church has also displayed marked sympathy for radical causes for more than a decade...
...According to Dr...
...And that rebuttal is fascinating for the insight it provides into church rationalizations for supporting totalitarianism and terror...
...intelligence activities...
...Jessup points out that John Adams of the Board of Church and Society was leading marches of Iranian students as late as September, "his lanky frame pacing along about 20 feet in front of the first row of life-size posters of the Aya-tollah Khomeini...
...Paul Washington for participating with Ramsey Clark in the Iranian hearings on the crimes of America...
...In the two-year period prior to the grant the Patriotic Front had massacred 33 foreign missionaries and their children...
...Thus, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (a National Council affiliate) is eager to impose criminal sanctions and prison penalties on corporation executives whom it holds responsible for public injury caused by corporate decisions...
...In the National Council world view social determinism applies only to the poor and minorities...
...It is little wonder that Muzorewa, head of the Zimbabwean Methodist Church, expressed hurt anger when he learned of the Methodist action: We just can't understand why the American Church sides with our enemies...
...But the reality is not much less bizarre...
...Jessup has identified over forty such groups which have received Methodist funds...
...crimes in Iran...
...Methodist officials have not been deterred by the forcible transfer of thousands of children as young as seven from Africa to Cuba for training as revolutionary cadres for Soviet-backed regimes...
...but most culpable is society itself whose injustices have created the criminal...
...Let us look at one example: the National Council's policy statement on criminal justice...
...As the audience reached for their translation headsets to return Dr...
...The Council includes 32 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations, and it is even further detached than the Methodist bureaucracy from the views (and potential pressures) of lay church members...
...Mrs...
...It is not surprising, then, to find the National Council's President, the Reverend M. William Howard, visiting "political prisoners" in the United States...
...At the end of the 12-page document it transpires that there are three levels of culpability...
...The hostages had been in captivity for 231 days when the General Assembly passed a resolution which, while calling for release of the hostages, professed embarrassment at "our quickness in expressing righteous indignation when our own people are hurt, but our slowness to do so when brutal indignities are imposed on others with our tacit support.'' The United Church of Christ is probably the most radical of the larger churches...
...In fact there was a slight change, which meant little in substance: "Challenges to the Injustice of the Criminal Justice System...
...Least at fault is the criminal...
...The keynote speaker at its foundation meeting announced that the members were being asked to join a "revolution...
...In 1980 the World Council of Churches announced record donations to the Program to Combat Racism, under which the grants to terrorist organizations are made...
...Welch was referring to the same 1978 World Council of Churches grant to the Patriotic Front guerillas operating against the elected interracial government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia that had angered Peter Simple...
...No, this did not happen...
...The bishop then brandished a submachine gun, causing his parishioners to duck beneath their pews...
...John the Divine in New York and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, have become centers of what Episcopal Canon William Rauscher describes as "the church in frenzy...
...When protests were raised in the United States, the United Presbyterian Church issued a statement defending the grant...
...The criminal and his victim will negotiate the resolution of their conflict "with appropriate safeguards against vin-dictiveness and intimidation...
...John the Divine was made available for light shows, Shinto rites, Sufi workshops in Dervish dancing, ceremonies for striking farm workers and for Indians at Wounded Knee, special anniversary masses for the musical Hair and political protest rallies...
...Methodist funds provided transportation, bail, and other assistance to the noisy pro-Khomeini street demonstrations by the Moslem Students Association in August 1980, when the hostages were in their tenth month of captivity...
...The FALN is not always so incompetent...
...It is a tool "to suppress non-violent political dissent, to cope with social problems, and to provide cheap labor...
...More than half of all American contributions to the World Council of Churches come from the United Methodist and the United Presbyterian Church...
...its first headquarters were in the building housing the National Council of Churches...
...Says Reverend Howard: "One of our favorite beliefs in this country is that we have no political prisoners" when "much of our prison population is comprised of people who are victims of the social, economic and political structures of our society...
...trade ban by flying supplies to Cuba in small Cessna planes...
...He argued that a less loaded title would be more likely to attract serious attention from members of the criminal justice system...
...Also receiving Methodist funds is the Palestine Solidarity Committee and its Middle East Resource Center, directed by Sheila Ryan, formerly of the Weather Underground...
...A further bit of evidence: Attitude surveys have shown that ministers of the United Church of Christ approve of the National Council of Churches more than the ministers of any other of its member denominations...
...DeWitt likens the United States to the Roman Empire and the Pharaohs' Egypt...
...Brown testified that as a white male bourgeois American he embodied "racism, sexism, classism, and imperialism...
...Instead the Methodist bureaucracy prepared a rebuttal to Jessup's study...
...The most influential of these is the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), which was founded as the research arm of the famed SDS of the 1960s...
...This is reflected in its funding, its personnel, and the degree of lay support enjoyed by its leadership...
...The National Council must satisfy only the likes of Dr...
...But ever conscious of the fatal impediments of his being and upbringing, Dr...
...The Indochina Resource Center became distinguished by its defense of the Pol Pot regime...
...In addition to providing intellectual, moral, and political support for radical change, the National Council is also involved in revolutionary "field work," much of it carried out through the Division of Overseas Ministries, which absorbs by far the largest portion of the Council's $31 million annual budget...
...The "liberation" movements in Africa, the . Middle East, and Latin America are none of them in need of money for arms, since all receive arms directly or indirectly from the Soviet Union...
...Many millions of dollars in cash and services for such purposes are contributed annually by the National Council of Churches, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopalian Church, the United Presbyterian Church, and the United Church of Christ...
...whose purpose is to lobby for the establishment of commercial and diplomatic ties with Cuba...
...Brown's Spanish to English, he described Jesus as a spokesman for social and political liberation...
...Toward the end of 1975, the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches convened in Nairobi, Kenya...
...On the whole, the activist church leadership sees itself as a bona fide-if unwilling and penitent-member of the class of affluent oppressors...
...But after Muzorewa accepted an internal settlement in 1979, the Methodists gave money only to the Patriotic Front then employing terror against the Muzorewa-led government...
...By restricting itself to the funding of support groups, the Methodist Church performs a far more valuable service for their causes than it would if it channeled the weapons directly to the terrorists...
...In 1977, the Church appointed the former spiritual adviser to the Black Panthers, the Reverend Earl Neil, to head its Coalition for Human Needs, responsible for giving money to minority community action groups...
...The National Council report suggests how its program works: A few leaders of campesino...
...Since the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, however, it has become permissible to attack Pol Pot...
...In view of the attitude of church leadership toward revolutionary change, those members may well have believed they were doing the church's work by both day and night...
...Stevens and Nestle...
...Our legal system oppresses the poor and racial minorities who "sometimes serve a scapegoat function for society...
...These include Friendshipment and the Indochina Resource Center...
...The ideas of Bishop DeWitt are clearly dominant in the new Episcopal Urban Caucus, established in February 1980...
...Seabury writes: In 1971, during one nature ceremony in the cathedral, a decidedly ecumenical audience watched reverently as the poet Allen Ginsberg, wearing a deer mask, joined others similarly garbed to ordain Senators Alan Cranston and John Tunney as godfathers of animals (Cranston of the Tule elk and Tunney of the California brown bear...
...Well-known political science professor and Episcopal layman Paul Seabury has described how St...
...The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), then a program of the National Council of Churches, argued that although some might contend it was the duty of church people to aid the authorities in apprehending criminals, "that may be true so long as the trail does not lead through the church.'' (Italics in the original) At the April 1980 United Methodist Church's General Conference, Methodist layman David Jessup presented a report on contributions to radical political groups made by several church agencies between 1977 and 1979- In Jessup's words: Most Methodist churchgoers would react with disbelief, even anger, to be told that a significant portion of their weekly offerings were being siphoned off to groups supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization, the governments of Cuba and Vietnam, the pro-Soviet totalitarian movements of Latin America, Asia and Africa, and several violence-prone fringe groups in this country...
...In 1980, the 44-member Executive Council of the Church voted to commend Fr...
...The statement even rejected suggestions that the World Council make sure the money went for medicine rather than guns on the grounds that "the way we make the grants is part of our statement of trust.'' The slashing attacks of Welch and Simple are reinforced by more sober-sounding but equally critical analyses from respected churchmen like William Rau-scher (Episcopalian), Richard Neuhaus (Lutheran), and Paul Ramsay (Methodist) in the United States, and Edward Norman (Anglican) in England...
...The true criminals are those who represent the institutions that oppress the poor, forcing them into what is interpreted as criminal behavior...
...Substantial sums were promptly granted to various individuals accused (in some cases already convicted) of murder and robbery...
...Many of these groups served as propaganda agencies for Communist states, especially for Cuba and Vietnam...
...The heroes and causes follow hard upon one another...
...Incarceration should only be imposed with a formal, legally prescribed demonstration that no acceptable alternative exists...
...Jterhaps the most surprising center of chic-guilt psychosis mixed with radical political activity is the once-staid Episcopal Church, the economic well-being of whose members had earned it the sobriquet "The Republican Party at Prayer...
...Our legal system simply reflects "the interest and privilege of the powerful...
...An important critic of church radicalism, Richard Neuhaus, observes that when "the people at 475 Riverside Drive" (the great block-square structure that houses the National Council) talk of lining up the churches on an issue, what they really mean is that they have contacted a small network of "progressive" bureaucrats in a handful of dwindling denominations...
...After the hearings the drafting group met with representative panels for further study...
...embargo against Cuba, and then it presses for an embargo against El Salvador...
...What they all have in common is an earnest desire to promote the view that America is an evil society...
...The main speaker was Dr...
...The Council sends missions of solidarity to the oppressed of Uruguay, Bolivia, Guatemala, Argentina, etc., but to Cuban political prisoners-per capita probably the largest group in Latin America-it pays no accord...
...Dewitt edited a Study Action Guide for groups within the church in which it is declared, "the system which creates and sustains much of the hunger, underdevelopment, unemployment and other social ills in the world today is capitalism...
...They discover in one meeting that the most serious problem in the region is the.proliferation of transnationals in agribusiness...
...His grounds...
...Shortly after receiving it the Front shot down a civilian plane and massacred the survivors...
...Much more church money, however, goes to fronts for terrorist organizations and totalitarian states, and for field work, both in the United States and overseas, designed to raise consciousness of oppression and to organize the oppressed against their designated oppressors...
...government action against them...
...The clergy is not exempt from servitude because its members drive, shop, and buy insurance...
...The Methodist's World Division at first funded information offices for both Bishop Muzorewa and Robert Mugabe...
...The painstaking preparation of these statements suggests that they are important enough to warrant examination for what they may reveal about the National Council's perspective...
...That same month Ramsey Clark was given the use of Methodist facilities in Washington to announce to the press his plan to investigate U.S...
...In 1978 the Commission's former Northeast Regional representative, William Morales, lost his fingers and part of his jaw while inexpertly making bombs for the FALN in his apartment...
...When in November 1979 the final product was presented to the Governing Board for approval, one member objected to the title, "The Injustice of the Criminal Justice System...
...Paul McCleary, associate general secretary of the United Methodist Board of Ministries, has lauded the Cuban program as one that will produce "highly trained and disciplined leaders [who] will be a decisive force in the future direction of their nations...
...Its governing body is composed largely of the board of the Witness and heading the staff is the magazine's former associate editor...
...They feel helpless and ill-equipped to even begin to plan strategies for action...
...many of its founders were seminary students...
...Spacely-Trellis, Bishop of Bevindon, condemned the World Council of Churches for its decision to send 45,000 pounds to the guerillas then operating inside Rhodesia...
...It is enough for any group to proclaim itself for the poor to become a theologically appropriate beneficiary of Methodist funds-which explains why Marxist groups invariably qualify...
...In seeking to discredit the Jessup study, the Board of Global Ministries of the Church brushed the criticism off as "right wing extremism...
...Jessup documented $442,000 in direct grants to political activist groups, many of them terrorist and totalitarian support groups, and calculated that in-kind services to these groups went into the millions...
...Writing in the Center's publications, Gareth Porter, coordinator of the Center from 1974-76, denied there was hunger in Cambodia...
...The cathedral dean was dimly seen through marijuana smoke, wrestling atop the high altar to remove a cameraman, while movie projectors simultaneously cast images of buffalo herds and other endangered species on the walls and ceilings to the accompaniment of rock music...
...What was this mission...
...His defense of Pol Pot during 1977 congressional hearings so offended liberal Congressman Stephen Solarz that he called the testimony contemptible and compared Porter to the writers who deny that Hitler killed six million Jews...
...A representative of the task force countered that the document was speaking to victims of the system and so any change in title was unacceptable...
...On the other side of the continent, Seabury continues, Bishop Kilmer Myers welcomed to Grace Cathedral light shows, guitar liturgies, nature festivals, and pagan ceremonials...
...Patterson added: "As a Christian I was particularly moved by this...
...Jessup asked the General Conference of the United Methodist Church to establish a Committee on Accountability to reassess the extent of aid given by the church to such groups and to consider carefully whether anti-democratic groups should be funded at all...
...The direct funding of terrorists is the most dramatic form of support for revolution given by church organizations...
...Once revolutionaries seize control, the National Council becomes mesmerized by their rhetoric...
...It is English satirist Peter Simple's portrait of radical churchmen...
...Its sympathies clearly lie with George Habash in his tactical struggle with Arafat's organization...
...The World Council could not be absolutely sure that the money would be spent on arms rather than on food, clothing, and medicine...
...In the Council's view, funding this sort of program represents an improvement over previous efforts in the war against hunger, which were confined to the sending of food, seeds, and tools...
...One has visions of an old lady in a Bronx housing project sitting in her living room over tea "negotiating" with the thugs who robbed her...
...They decide to hold a seminar and invite Gonzolo Arroyo, director of the Research Centers in Latin America and the Third World to help them understand something about transnationals in the agrarian sector, how they function and the power they hold over campesinos...
...The agents of enslavement are supermarkets, insurance companies, and banks, what he terms the local precincts of the empire...
...Instead, it passes resolutions calling for an end to the U.S...
...Yet, the National Council never hesitates to speak in the name of 41 million Christians to the media and before Congress...
...Palestine Human Rights Bulletin #12, included in the packet, calls for a PLO state on the West Bank and in Gaza as an intermediate step toward a "secular democratic" state-the PLO's euphemism for Israel's destruction...
...The Board of Global Ministries and Board of Church and Society of the Methodist Church defended the grants on the grounds that they conformed to the social principles and social resolutions of the General Conference and were consistent with the Church's mission...
...Doubtless, the Methodist leaders believe their money is being used in the fight against racism and colonialism, but Methodist Church resolutions have the peculiar habit of singling out Soviet-dominated African countries as being especially deserving of economic aid from the United States...
...Spacely-Trellis argued: "Would it not have been prudent to take no chances and send actual weapons instead, through whatever ecumenical channels are available, thus expressing the Church's concern for the Third World in terms which everybody can understand...
...Instead, "a constructive social relationship" is to be established between the victim and the offender...
...But Jessup scarcely qualifies even as a conservative...
...What they do need is legitimacy...
...Another recipient is the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, the chief PLO support group in the United States...
...NACLA developed a "Church Project" designed, in its own words, to expose the churches as "velvet-gloved counterparts of the iron fist of capitalist violence and exploitation.'' The Board of Global Ministries also sponsors tours to Cuba and participates in Cuban-sponsored international conferences, which according to one glowing Methodist report "deal with the liberation of people from oppressive political, economic and social systems...
...Until February 1980, Church World Service defied the U.S...
...In a report on its Agricultural Missions program, the Division of Overseas Ministries recognizes hunger "as a problem of injustice more than food scarcity, injustice based on economic inequality, racial and sexual discrimination, technological elitism and on political barriers to change...
...Methodist contributions to the PLO are streamed through Palestinian support groups in the United States...
...Doesn't it seem strange to you that our brothers and sisters . . . would support people who want to close our churches...
...groups from different countries in Latin America get together annually...
...A model for emulation is China where the old human tendencies to be selfish and exploitative are disappearing...
...American churches provided initial funding for NACLA...
...The amount of the grants was not disputed by the church (Jessup had obtained his figures from the church bodies themselves), nor was the radicalism of the groups to which the money was given...
...Brown apologized: "You may feel that I have not made Jesus political enough, and that I am too conditioned by bourgeois categories to understand the full thrust of liberation.'' Alow did the representatives of modern Christianity come to the point where London Daily Telegraph Editor Colin Welch could explode in fury: "Those wretched Churchmen: in a way one could respect them more if they went to Africa themselves to murder missionaries and children rather than hire a pack of savages to do it for them...
...In token of his penitence he announced that he would no longer be guilty of "linguistic imperialism" and switched to Spanish...
...In the ministry and message of Jesus, the way in which we treat 'the least of these' transcends the question of whether the political system is totalitarian or democratic...
...In other words, the National Council's overseas aid program, ostensibly directed to alleviate suffering and hunger in underdeveloped lands, believes its major function to be the creation of rural leadership cadres who will struggle against "oppressive" governments and "transnational corporations...
...The Caucus plans to seek $12 .million from the 1982 Convention of the Church...
...Agricultural Missions emphasizes support for "local indigenous movements that [have] tended toward total liberation of rural people-spiritual, economic and political...
...One member of the Commission observed ruefully that some of its members seem to have been doing the church's work by day and throwing bombs by night...
...The National Council unfortunately does not believe that thugs terrorize low-income housing projects...
...In 1980, the General Assembly of the Church voted to set up an Emergency Fund for Legal Aid for Racial and Intercultural Justice to provide financial assistance to members of racial minorities for costs stemming from litigation...
...United Presbyterian national headquarters donated $10,000 to the Angela Davis defense fund at the time of her murder trial...
...Presently the Methodists fund American support groups for the Soviet-backed African National Congress and the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO...
...These leaders are then better able to enter into the process of conscientization [consciousness-raising] with their communities...
...Robert McAfee Brown, Professor of World Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York City...
...At the time of their release from jail ten months later (their legal fees paid for by the Episcopal Church and the National Council of Churches), three other members of the Commission remained incarcerated for refusing to testify before grand juries...
...I have never seen nor heard people taking reconciliation so seriously...
...Pat Patterson of the Board of Global Ministries staff was part of a Friendshipment delegation to Hanoi, and at a May 1977 press conference she told of how the Vietnamese had taught her that their reeducation process was "a way to make people ready for a new society...
...The Methodist Board of Global Ministries gave money to some organizations that produce pro-Cuba propaganda...
...Several, like the American Indian Movement, cooperate with Soviet efforts to publicize the "plight of American political prisoners...
...The Conference refused...
...A reader's letter to the conservative Presbyterian Layman noted that "Caesar Chavez had been 'bumped off the first page and draft dodgers have disappeared but they have been adequately replaced by homosexuals, J.P...
...The lion's share of the money ($350,000) went to the African National Congress and to the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), both Soviet-backed movements operating in southern Africa...
...He works for the AFL-CIO and was active in the Peace Corps in Peru and in the civil rights and farm worker movements in California...
...A former Commission member, Carlos Alberto Torres, joined the FBI's most wanted list in 1976, after police found 211 sticks of dynamite, 50 pounds of carbon nitrate, and a dozen batteries and blasting caps in his apartment...
...The criminals are more than likely to leave the place with whatever they missed the first time...
...Actually, since in totalitarian states all but a small elite are powerless to control their fate, what the Methodist leadership is saying is that the real mission of the church is solidarity with the poor-not the powerless...
...None of this has stopped NACLA from viewing the church as a prime instrument of imperial oppression...
...The great Episcopal cathedrals, St...
...These critics have decried the political radicalization of an influential segment of Western Protestant clerical leadership...
...In a novel departure, however, Episcopal Bishop Robert DeWitt, editor of a journal called the Witness, has included the church in the ranks of the oppressed...
...A goodly part of the Episcopal Church's National Commission on Hispanic Affairs wound up in jail, for either committing acts of terror for the Puerto Rican FALN or covering up for those who did...
...As in the case of the Methodist Church, actions of the National Council are supposed to follow from its policy statements...
...They need to be accepted in the United States as positive forces for social change, so as to inhibit any U.S...
...During the hostage ordeal, the same General Assembly was more concerned with explaining than condemning Iranian actions...
...Some are concerned with domestic issues-for example, denying legitimacy to U.S...
...partly culpable is the unjust criminal justice system...
...Nor does it stop with resolutions...
...Morales promptly filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against New York officials, charging these officials with confiscating his fingers instead of arranging for them to be resewed...
...Paul McCleary and his counterparts among the United Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and other denominations...
...and one of its founders was the well-known Presbyterian theologian Richard Shaull...
...He did not stay around to collect, however, preferring to escape from a prison ward at Bellevue a month after being sentenced to a 29-89 year prison term...
...Anxious to work for refugee aid within the church, Jessup first became aware that something was amiss when his children came home from Sunday school with appeals for surprising causes...
...For example, the Community Information and Legal Aid Center run by the American Friends Service Committee in East Jerusalem is essentially a legal-aid center for arrested PLO terrorists...
...MERIP's publications are included in the Methodist resource packet Middle East Mosaic distributed to church study groups...
...Even though many in the anti-war movement have condemned human rights violations by the victorious North Vietnamese, the Methodist Church has financed organizations that continue to endorse Vietnam uncritically...
...As the largest contributor ($4.7 million) to the National Council of Churches, the Methodist Church has a strong influence on its policy and direction...
...Its chief social worker served a four-month prison sentence for participation in a PLO cell...
...The hierarchy gave no funds to her less chic, non-Communist co-defendant Russell McGee...
Vol. 14 • May 1981 • No. 5
