WASHINGTON — As funding from its member denominations continues
to decline, the National Council of Churches (NCC) is increasingly
relying on support from liberal foundations and polemical direct
mail campaigns.
A recent fundraising letter from NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar
blasts “Jerry Falwell and his friends,” “hard-right
fundamentalists,” libertarians, President Bush, Rush Limbaugh, the
Heritage Foundation, and the organization for which I work (the
Institute on Religion and Democracy).
Reading the June 2005 letter, it is hard to remember that the
NCC ostensibly represents nearly 50 million American church members
and was once a mainstream organization that championed civil rights
and supported the U.S. in the Cold War.
Edgar condemns the “easy certainty” with which President Bush
and his “fundamentalist supporters” approach “complex problems.”
Never defining what he means by “fundamentalist,” the NCC chief
lumps together nearly all conservatives with the tiny movement of
Christian “reconstructionists,” who want to revive the old Hebrew
penal code (stoning adulturers, for example), and which includes
almost no major conservative Christian leader, not even the dreaded
Rev. Falwell.
Preoccupied with its political purposes, Edgar’s letter never
once mentions what is officially still the NCC’s purpose: to foster
ecumenical unity within America’s churches. Talking too much about
Christianity might sound too “fundamentalist.”
So, seemingly writing for a largely secular audience, who are
expected to react viscerally to the mere mention of names like
Falwell and Limbaugh and Bush, Edgar hacks away at hard-core
political themes. In so doing, he seems to want to confirm the
worst allegations of the NCC’s critics: that the NCC has ceased to
be a church organization and has instead become a political lobby
of the Left. Indeed, to remove all doubt, Edgar mentions that the
NCC works closely with the far-left MoveOn.org, which, though
unmentioned by Edgar in his letter, also has provided funding to
the NCC.
Surreally, Edgar never indirectly acknowledges that most of the
NCC’s own purported constituency, millions of Americans who attend
NCC denominations, do not politically support the NCC’s goals and
decidedly vote differently from Edgar’s preferences. Church-going
mainline Protestants once again last year voted more Republican
than Democrat.
Much of Edgar’s theme is that the NCC, unlike the
“fundamentalists” he repeatedly condemns, is subtle, nuanced, and
reflective. But the NCC is not a think tank or even a careful
political commentator. Its policy statements, usually delivered as
brief news releases, merely provide a slight religious veneer to
talking points that could just as easily be found on MoveOn.org.
Although Edgar rejects the supposed “easy certainty” of his
adversaries, the NCC’s politics are in fact quite simple: anti-U.S.
military and pro-big government. Its stances are largely the now
aging protest slogans of the 1960s and 1970s, the era in which
Edgar came politically of age, culminating in his six years as a
Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania.
Returning to the simple old political themes from his salad days
of chronic protest is no doubt reassuring to Edgar. Still, unaware
of the irony, Edgar insists in his fundraising letter that “easy
certainty” has led to many human disasters: communist and Nazi
genocide, along with Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers. This
assertion is remarkable, not only for its implied comparison of
conservative Christians to mass murderers, but also because it is a
rare occasion for the NCC to criticize communism and radical
Islam!
EDGAR BOASTS OF THE NCC’S STRUGGLE against the “tragic ‘easy
certainty’” of the “war of liberation” in Iraq, ostentatiously
putting quotation marks around “liberation.” Liberating the Iraqi
people from Saddam was never a major concern for the NCC.
Incredibly, Edgar also brags that the NCC helped tsunami victims in
Africa because it rejects the “religious fundamentalist confidence
that disasters… are to be welcomed as ‘end-times signs’ pointing
the select few towards the paradise beyond Armageddon.”
Who are these Christian monsters who rejoice over natural
disasters and the deaths of innocent thousands? Edgar does not name
them, of course. At this point, it is easy to suspect that Edgar
does not actually know any conservative Christians, so he must rely
exclusively on angry stereotypes constructed by his secularist
neighbors in Manhattan. But perhaps that is a generous
interpretation.
Edgar regrets that “progressives and moderates” underestimated
the political impact of the “gospel of easy certainty.” But
“progressives and moderates” (i.e. liberals) in the faith community
were energized by the 2004 presidential election and increased
voter turnout “dramatically,” he enthuses.
Promising a “positive vision of a world built on justice and
compassion, Edgar reveals that the NCC needs a “sustained
investment” of $1 million a year to be truly competitive with the
“Heritage/Cato/Institute for Religion and Democracy complex that
sustains and backs the right wing agenda.”
Edgar proposes to set up a “24 hour dialogue team” that will
confront the “biased statements” of Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson and
Richard Land (an officer with the Southern Baptist Convention.).
And he boasts of the NCC’s political e-mail organizing tool called
FaithfulAmerica.org, which he reports works “closely” with
MoveOn.org. Distressed about the influence of Rush Limbaugh, Edgar
also proposes to set up a “progressive faith radio.”
THE LETTER FROM EDGAR is formulaic, as most such fundraising
letters are. It identifies the enemy (conservatives who are derided
as “fundamentalists”) and offers the politics of the NCC as the
savior. It also emerges out of the context of the NCC’s near
financial collapse. When Edgar became NCC general secretary in
2000, the NCC was millions of dollars over budget. To survive, the
NCC trimmed its spending from nearly $10 million to just over $6
million. Its staff has also fallen from over 100 persons to fewer
than 40.
Under Edgar, giving from the NCC’s 36 member communions has
declined by about one third, to less than $2 million a year. Edgar
has shifted to reliance on foundation income and direct mail, which
together provide more than what is received from churches. Groups
like MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club, the Tides Foundation, and the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, along with liberal celebrity donors such
as Ben Cohen, Peter Yarrow and Vanessa Redgrave, have contributed
heavily to the NCC’s anti-war advocacy, among other political
causes.
Actual church members are becoming less and less important to
the NCC’s survival. Secular foundations and non-religious celebrity
donors are more important. With the consequent polemical demands of
direct mail aimed at a mostly secular audience, Edgar’s rhetoric
inevitably will veer even further left and away from any pretense
of importance attached to promoting Christianity.
