Major churches fend off accusations of political partisanship
For months national leaders of old-line liberal Protestant churches have feared that what amounts to a counterrevolutionary civil war is about to break out among their flocks. They have good cause for concern. In the most thoroughgoing attack since these churches were daubed with a pink brush during the McCarthy era, conservative critics have mounted an anti-Establishment research-and-destroy campaign. Their charge: collection-plate donations are being misused by Protestant officials and agencies who have become unduly partisan on behalf of leftwing, even Marxist, causes.
By last week, the grass-roots questions had begun to affect Protestant institutions directly. At a closed-door meeting in Atlanta, President Finis Crutchfield and other executives of the Council of Bishops in the huge United Methodist Church took the unusual step of scrapping the agenda for the hierarchy's May meeting. Instead it will consider a demand that the church investigate whether church offerings are supporting questionable programs.
The insurgents' assault intensified dramatically in January with a media one-two punch. First came a piece in Reader's Digest (circ. 17.9 million), then a broadside from the top-rated CBS-TV show 60 Minutes (audience: 22.9 million households). In a scene that Protestant leaders were to denounce as unrepresentative, cameras panned a Methodist church in Logansport, Ind., and Correspondent Morley Safer intoned that members had discovered that some collection-plate money was being spent "on causes that seem closer to the Soviet-Cuban view of the world than Logansport's."
Both reports relied heavily on evidence supplied by a small, neoconservative group called the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which set off the present furor (see box). Last week the I.R.D. produced a 100-page booklet with more documentation for its sweeping claim that the foreign policy activity of many Protestant agencies "often leans in some significant ways toward the Marxist-Leninist left."
The conservatives' main targets are the National Council of Churches, whose president is United Methodist Bishop James Armstrong, and the national bureaucracies of the council's key member denominations, particularly the Methodists and the United Presbyterian Church.*
From their shared New York City headquarters, the "God Box" to insiders, the accused Protestant agencies have fought back with a barrage of publicity, defensive polemics and at least 36,000 explanatory packets sent to local church leaders. N.C.C. General Secretary Claire Randall admits no serious mistakes in the council's political judgments and believes the attacks result from "our firm and unwavering adherence to Gospel as our churches interpret it." Says the Rev. Randolph Nugent, who runs the Methodists' Board of Global Ministries: "Our only bias is toward the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not any political system. Jesus Christ and the Gospel do have a bias toward the poor."