The First Church of Liberalism

IT MIGHT BE no accident that the national decline in church attendance has mirrored the rise of activism by church leadership. One religious group famous for its social agenda is the National Council of Churches. Although supposedly a nonpartisan organization, for the past 40 years the NCC's politics has usually sat on the far left of the political spectrum. Since Rev. Bob Edgar took over as the NCC's general secretary in 2000, the group hasn't jettisoned its liberal ways.

For starters, he's carried on the NCC's ongoing love affair with Cuba. One of his first acts in office was to pick up where his predecessor Joan Campbell Brown left off and immerse himself in the Elián González saga. His NCC secured a Washington lawyer for Elián's father and then chartered the plane that flew him to the United States. Edgar's press office in New York released statement after statement urging the Clinton administration to send Elián back to Cuba. At every turn Edgar's positions were identical to those of the Cuban government--right down to demanding that the boy be denied U.S. citizenship.

Edgar's affinity for Cuba didn't end with Elián. He has also advocated that the United States lift its trade embargo. And last year, after President Bush denounced Castro as "a tyrant who uses brutal methods to enforce a bankrupt vision," Edgar claimed that Bush's anti-Castro rhetoric could be chalked up to an attempt by the president to shore up support for his brother Jeb in Florida and secure his own reelection in 2004. "In many ways," Edgar said in an anti-embargo speech to the Washington Office of Latin America, "this president is blind and continues to encourage blindness in others."

The NCC has also begun to cater more to homosexual interests under Edgar's watch. "Although they are officially neutral on [homosexuality], Edgar shows a lot more public support for [homosexual] interests than Joan Campbell Brown did," says Alan Wisdom, vice president of the Institute for Religion and Democracy.

In late 2000 Edgar withdrew his signature from an ecumenical Christian Declaration on Marriage that sought to "recognize an unprecedented need and responsibility for churches to help couples begin, build, and sustain better marriages." He objected to the phrase in the Declaration defining marriage as "a holy union of one man and one woman." He later issued a "public apology"--his words--and explained that he supports "a blessing of [same-sex] partnership, marriage of people who love each other." Yet he has never thrown a tantrum over Fidel Castro's longtime policies of expelling and sending homosexuals to labor camps and quarantining AIDS patients.

Edgar also opposed the war in Iraq: "The president and others in the U.S. government rhetorically divide nations and peoples into camps of 'good and evil.' Demonizing adversaries or enemies denies their basic humanity and contradicts Christians' beliefs in the dignity and worth of each person as a child of God," reads one NCC resolution from last November.

In a postwar policy paper presented to the University of San Diego last month, Edgar wrote that "President Bush has given us his vision. It is a vision of America as the world's sheriff . . . Iraq did not have any connection to the al Qaeda attacks . . . the president and his highly ideological team played fast and loose with intelligence reports, alleging connections between Iraq and al Qaeda that were disingenuous at best." Recent evidence shows that Edgar was incorrect in this criticism.

And that wasn't his only mistake. As Joseph Loconte reported in The Weekly Standard three weeks ago, Edgar insisted that American troops would ignore the rules of warfare and wouldn't hesitate to kill women and children, saying, "The ordinary people in Iraq are going to be the targets of the bombing." Also, in an antiwar ad in the New York Times last December, Edgar implied that God had taken a position on the war. "President Bush: Jesus changed your heart. Now let Him change your mind. Your war would violate the teachings of Jesus Christ. It is inconceivable that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior and the Prince of Peace, would support this proposed attack."

Maybe, maybe not. It is, however, inconceivable that God intends his church to be used as a front for left-wing politics.

How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism

The UCC Does It Again! (Ad Wars by the Religious Left - Barry Lynn's Church - Major Barf Alert!!!)

Whatever Happened to Sin?

SELECT QUOTES

“The New Left also affected religious life in the West. The Protestant mainline churches turned to the left; the World Council of Churches identified itself with the Third World as against the West. . . . Liberation theology affected young Catholic priests and nuns who became soldiers in the antiwar, anti-capitalist, and anti-American empire movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. While they condemned ‘cutthroat capitalism’ they seldom` criticized ‘cutthroat socialism.’” –L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan, Hoover Institute

The NCC – “has taken the ideas of the liberal-left, clothed them in theological garments, and accorded them the status of quasi-dogma. Political “liberation” seems more important than spiritual salvation; sin, now only rarely personal, is often identified with “unjust structures” – capitalism or anything “reactionary”; an earthly kingdom of “justice for the oppressed” displaces or even claims to be the Kingdom of God; and corporations, the military, and the United States are labeled “demonic powers.” Revolutionary movements, on the other hand, are “new thrusts for human dignity and freedom”; revolutionary leaders, the new messiah figures, are “co-workers with God.” –Ernest W. Lefever

“If religion is being altered internally by the forces of feminism and left wing ideology, it is simultaneously being marginalized in our public life.” –Robert H. Bork

“If a church changes doctrine and structure to follow its members’ views, it is difficult to see the value of that church and its religion.” –Robert H. Bork

“Religions must claim to be true and, in their essentials, to uphold principles that are universal and eternal. No church that panders to the zeitgeist deserves respect, and very shortly it will not get respect, except from those who find it politically useful, and that is less respect than disguised contempt.” –Robert H. Bork

“It is one of the commonest beliefs of the day that the human race collectively has before it destinies of various kinds, and the road to them is to be found in the removal of all restraints on human conduct, in the recognition of a substantial equality between all human creatures, and in fraternity or general love.” –James Fitzjames Stephen (He added, “I do not believe it.”)

“The Religion of Humanity is not Christianity or Judaism but tends to oust those religions or soften them to irrelevance.” –Robert H. Bork

“The problem is not merely that much of the hierarchy has gone politically left. There is also the problem Tocquiville identified: the influence of the surrounding culture, in this case, the elite culture. The most striking manifestation of that is, of course, the ordination of practicing gays and lesbians as denominational ministers. That is a flat rejection of biblical principle for a secular, egalitarian and therefore permissive outlook.” –Robert H. Bork

“Religious conservatives cannot “impose” their ideas on society except by the usual democratic methods of trying to build majorities and passing legislation. In that they are no different from any other group of people with ideas of what morality requires. All legislation “imposes” a morality of one sort another, and, therefore, on the reasoning offered, all law would seem to be antithetical to pluralism.” –Robert H. Bork

“One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles and to purchase peace at the expense of logic. There have ever been and will ever be men who, after having submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle of authority, will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from it and to keep their minds floating between liberty and obedience.” –Alexis de Tocqueville

"It is helpful that the ideas of salvation and damnation, of sin and vrtue, which played major roles in Christian belief, are now almost never heard of in the mainline churches. The sermons and homilies are exclusively about love, kindness, and external life." --Robert Bork

A few more quotes for the mill...

"...These two world views [Christian theism vs naturalist, impersonal matter or energy shaped by impersonal chance] stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results--including sociological and governmental results, and specifically including law.

It is not that these two world views are different only in how they understand the nature of reality and existence. They also inevitably produce totally different results. The operative word here is inevitably. It is not just that they happen to produce different results, but it is absolutely inevitable that they will bring forth different results..."
- Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (1983), page 2.

"...Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society.

Do not take this lightly! It is a horrible thing for a man like myself to look back and see my country and my culture go down the drain in my own lifetime. It is a horrible thing that sixty years ago you could move across this country and almost everyone, even non-Christians, would have known what the gospel was. A horrible thing that fifty to sixty years ago our culture was built on the Christian consensus, and now this is no longer the case..."
- Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (1984)

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