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Such conservative distress is not new. A longtime target of complaint is the World Council of Churches, to which many major U.S. denominations also belong but which is separate from the N.C.C. For 13 years the W.C.C.'s Program to Combat Racism has given regular grants to African guerrillas righting to overthrow repressive white regimes. The W.C.C. says it does not "pass judgment on those victims of racism who are driven to violence as the only way left to them to redress grievances." The money is intended for welfare, not arms, but churches do not monitor how it is spent. It is this willingness to bunk potential excess in the sunny glow of the social gospel that has caused so much trouble for the W.C.C., and now the N.C.C. Such bunks disturb Christians who view Marxism as the world's gravest long-term threat to human rights.
Many of the Protestant agencies now under attack do not seem to be greatly concerned with that threat. Next week the United Methodist Reporter, the church's most influential newspaper chain, will begin reporting on its own exhaustive N.C.C. investigation; among other things, it found an overwhelming pattern of left-wing political bias in hundreds of N.C.C. political statements over the past five years. Even James Wall of the liberal Christian Century magazine says council staffers often supply answers "filled with romantic revolutionary rhetoric. Mistakes of the left are either not seen or, as one person put it to me, 'We can't afford to indulge in that kind of criticism as long as people are oppressed anywhere in the world.' "
The critics do not question that honorable or holy men can hold such opinions. But, argues I.R.D. Spokesman Richard John Neuhaus, the church has a responsibility to maintain "a zone of truth which represents the full range of morally serious reflection." And the leftist thrust of the Protestant activists has not won the status of a moral truth. Says Methodist Bishops' President Crutchfield of those who want to rein in the God Box: "This is not merely a right-wing attack. These are people who believe in Christians' being involved in the life of the world. They just don't want the church to come down on the side of the Communists."
—By Richard N. Ostling.
Reported by Jim Castelli/Washington and Adam Zagorin/New York
* The N.C.C. is made up of 32 member denominations that include 36.6 million Protestants, 52% of the U.S. total. Annual budget: $44 million.