Since its founding in 1950, the New York City-based National Council of Churches (NCC) has remained faithful to the legacy of its predecessor, the Communist front-group known as the Federal Council of Churches, which the NCC absorbed in 1950. At one time an unabashed apostle of the Communist cause, the NCC has today recast itself as a leading representative of the so-called religious Left. Adhering to what it has described as "liberation theology"--that is, Marxist ideology disguised as Christianity--the NCC lays claim to a membership of 36 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox Christian denominations, and some 50 million members in over 140,000 congregations.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the NCC has soft-pedaled its radical message, dressing up its demands for global collectivization and its rejection of democratic capitalism in the garb of religious teachings. Yet the organization’s history suggests that it was—and remains—a devout backer of a gallery of socialist governments. In the 1950s and 1960s, under cover of charity, the NCC provided financial succor to the Communist regimes in Yugoslavia and Poland, funneling money to both through its relief agency, the Church World Service. In the 1970s, working with its Geneva-based parent organization, the World Council of Churches, the NCC supplied financial support for Soviet-sponsored incursions into Africa, aiding the terrorist rampages of Communist guerrillas in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, and Angola.
As one of the leading contributors to the Program to Combat Racism (a program created in 1939 by the NCC-parent group, the World Council of Churches, and discontinued in 1996), the NCC played a central role in subsidizing revolutionary Communist movements in the Third World. Sensitive to the controversy which over the years has enveloped the Program to Combat Racism (PCR), the WCC has consistently declined to divulge both the contributors to, and the recipients of, the program. The WCC has gone so far as to establish an independent budget, the Special Fund to Combat Racism, in order to conceal details about the funding of the program. Despite these efforts, the WCC has not been entirely successful in obscuring the PCR's paper trail.
An August 1982 report by Reader's Digest revealed that during the 1970s the PCR disbursed over $5 million to some 130 organizations in 30 countries. While the WCC held fast to the claim that the funds were directed solely toward those organizations dedicated to fighting racism, the facts suggested otherwise. According to the Reader's Digest report, more than half of the money that went to the PCR wound up in the hands of Communist guerrillas. The report further traced PCR funds to a series of Communist rampages in Africa. During the 1970s, over $78,000 went to Cuba's Soviet-sponsored MPLA to foment Communist revolution in Angola; some $120,000 went to the Marxist FRELIMO in Mozambique; and another $832,000 to Namibia's Communist regime, the SWAPO; another grant, for $108,000, was funneled to the Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), a Communist guerrilla force whose campaign of indiscriminate terror claimed the lives of 207 white civilians, 1,721 blacks, and nine missionaries as well as their children. In the face of this grim evidence, PCR administrators--many of whom were culled from the ranks of the NCC--continued to push the line that, rather than bankrolling Communist death squads, the organization was simply supporting "liberation movements." From this position the WCC has never wavered. In an archival overview of the PRC, published in 2004, the WCC dusted off its claim that "the main aim of the PCR is to define, propose and carry out ecumenical policies and programs that substantially contribute to the liberation of the victims of racism."
Other beneficiaries of the NCC's leftist philanthropy included El Salvador’s Sandinista guerrillas. Using the Evangelical Committee for Aid to Development (CEPAD), an organization established to distribute the charity donations collected by U.S. churches in Latin America—and whose leadership openly professed solidarity with the Sandinistas’ Marxist aims--the NCC made common cause with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, contributing nearly $400,000 to the Sandinista Party between 1981 and 1983. Documents seized from El Salvador's guerrillas in 1983 revealed yet another Communist group on the take from the NCC's collection plate.
Another of the NCC's leftist faith-based initiatives is support for Communist Cuba. Having pushed for the United States to normalize relations with the Castro regime since 1968, the NCC throughout the Cold War pressed its considerable authority on moral issues into the service of whitewashing the hard-line regime’s record of oppression. In 1977, after heading a delegation of American church officials to Cuba, the Methodist bishop James Armstrong, who would be elected NCC president the following year, issued a report that may justifiably be described as supportive of the murderous dictatorship. "There is a significant difference," Armstrong insisted, "between situations where people are imprisoned for opposing regimes designed to perpetuate inequities, as in Chile and Brazil, for example, and situations were people are imprisoned for opposing regimes designed to remove inequities, as in Cuba."