WASHINGTON — “Impeach President Bush!”
urged Jim Winkler, head of the Capitol Hill-based United
Methodist Board of Church and Society. Winkler was speaking earlier
this spring here in town to an “Ecumenical Advocacy Days” rally for
liberal religious activists, organized by the National Council of
Churches, mainline denominations, several left-wing Catholic
orders, and Jim Wallis’s Sojourners group.
Winkler, ostensibly a spokesman for 8 million United Methodists,
whose numbers include both Bush and Vice President Cheney, said
impeachment is the correct response to an “illegal war of
aggression” that was “sold on lies.” He also cited the NSA’s “spy
program,” which he insisted is “unconstitutional.”
“These are actions far more serious than a failed land deal on
the White River or a sexual indiscretion with a White House
intern,” Winkler said, comparing Bush to Clinton, whose
impeachment was never urged by Winkler’s agency. Had the Iraq war
been led by John Kerry or Al Gore, Winkler surmised, the “Limbaughs
and Gingriches of the world would be screaming for their
impeachment.”
Winkler insisted that Bush’s removal was a religious imperative:
“When I speak it is my desire to bring about the transformation of
people and systems in order to advance the Kingdom of God even when
it is painful.”
It is not clear how many church members Winkler actually speaks
for. Polls show that most church going mainline Protestants voted
for Bush, though his sagging poll numbers undoubtedly have affected
his overall support. Still, it is doubtful that most United
Methodists, two-thirds of whom call themselves conservative, want
their church funding a liberal lobby office on Capitol Hill.
THE UNITED METHODIST BUILDING, which is run by Winkler’s agency,
sits prominently across the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Supreme Court. It
was built 85 years ago to advocate temperance and Methodist-style
clean living When the last of the old temperance activists were
fading away in the early 1960s, the building was transferred over
to the current liberal lobby group, with the stipulation that it be
devoted to fighting alcohol abuse.
Energized by the radicalism of the 1960s, the church’s new lobby
office had little interest in temperance. Instead, the United
Methodist Building became the headquarters of the Religious Left in
the nation’s capital. The Methodist lobby group, along with other
liberal religious lobby agencies, pushes for an ever larger welfare
and regulatory state, ultra-environmentalist causes, abortion
rights, and opposition to a vigorous U.S. foreign and military
policy.
Winkler’s $5 million agency, staffed by two dozen people,
strives to be “prophetic” rather than actually represent the still
largely conservative church membership. Very unlike most of his
fellow Methodists, Winkler insists on an absolutist form of
pacifism and portrays the United States as the world’s main
villain.
“Now, we are widely hated and despised,” Winkler noted, probably
with some pleasure. “Despite the President’s insistence he was
placed in office by God for this moment, there was nothing
Christian in his response to September 11.”
According to Winkler in his impeachment speech, the “war on
terror…has brought disaster.” He cited the usual litany of
complaints about “secret prisons” and “widespread spying,” but
remarkably omitted a few positives: the Taliban and Saddam Hussein
are gone, Afghanistan and Iraq have elected governments, and the
United States has gone five years without a second major domestic
attack.
STRAINING TO MAKE HIS CASE that the U.S. is evil, Winkler repeated
the old canard that even though it was the Khmer Rouge who killed
millions of their fellow Cambodians in a communist holocaust in the
1970s, it was actually America’s fault. “The terror they unleashed
would likely not ever have taken place if not for the terror the
U.S. unleashed on Cambodia,” Winkler smugly asserted. Yes, the U.S.
struck at communist Vietnamese who had invaded Cambodia to exploit
it as a refuge for attacking U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.
According to left-wing folklore, this action so enraged the Khmer
Rouge that they went genocidal after seizing power several years
later, deposing a government that the U.S. supported.
Winkler would prefer not to mention that the Religious Left,
like the secular Left, denounced the U.S. for helping the
resistance to a Khmer Rouge take-over, and for many years refused
to acknowledge the Khmer Rouge’s horrendous crimes. But that would
disrupt his anti-U.S. thesis.
“Not only has our nation failed to accept responsibility for the
consequences of many of our actions — invasions, coups,
assassinations, and slaughters — we deny our guilt or complicity,”
Winkler complained. He suggested that “our denominations,” i.e. the
Religious Left, should lead a “truth and reconciliation commission”
to reveal the “past half-century of mistakes.” In contrast, most
Americans recall that over the last 50 years, America rebuilt
Europe and Japan while successfully leading the Free World to
success against the Soviet Empire, and helped to create a global
economy that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. But
Winkler ignored that bit of good news.
The “real” axis of evil is not Iran, Saddam’s old Iraq and North
Korea, Winkler mentioned, but rather “environmental degradation,
pandemic poverty, and a world awash in weapons.” Alas, President
Bush “denies global warming, refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol,
takes from the poor and gives to the rich, and does nothing to halt
the arms trade.” So he must be impeached!
Winkler derided the “many intelligence agencies” in the U.S.
that are actually “the secret police.” He also urged an 80 percent
cut in U.S. military spending and insisted on nuclear disarmament.
“When was the last time you heard a president of the United States
or other major elected leaders express this vision?” he asked
sarcastically. Well, actually President Reagan expressed exactly
that vision of a world free of nuclear weapons when he promoted the
Strategic Defense Initiative. But undoubtedly Reagan is not a hero
to Winkler.
AT THE END OF HIS speech, Winkler got theological. “Jesus Christ,
if not a pacifist himself, would certainly resemble Mahatma Gandhi
and Martin Luther King in terms of his political strategies,”
Winkler declared. “Like Gandhi and King, Jesus understood power and
like them he built a power base. That’s why the Romans executed
him.”
There, in a capsule, is the Religious Left notion of Jesus: a
savvy organizer who had “political strategies,” “understood power,”
and “built a power base,” for which he suffered capital punishment
by the regime of His day. This notion of Jesus more resembles
Salvador Allende than the Savior of the world recognizable to most
Christians, who recall that Jesus, who carefully avoided political
statements, was killed for His audacity in claiming deity for
Himself.
“The war ON terror is a war OF terror,” Winkler cleverly
concluded his Bush impeachment talk. It would be tempting to call
the ostensibly “prophetic” Winkler a false prophet, but false
prophets at least had audiences. The President may indeed have many
worries ahead, but denunciations from bureaucrats of his own
denomination should not number among them.
