Warring over Where Donations Go

By Richard N. Ostling

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."

In their rebuttals, Protestant church spokesmen have scored some telling points. For instance, it is true that substantial church money went to a Nicaraguan government literacy campaign that was suffused with revolutionary propaganda. But in its show, CBS omitted the fact that the U.S. Government has supported the same program with far more cash than the churches sent.

But much of the argumentation skirts the core questions: What is the political line of secular groups that receive Protestant funding? Do the churches take enough responsibility for the political activities of these groups? Have in-house church programs and pronouncements shown a leftist pattern? The situation is complex, but there is some fire behind the acrid smoke. Items:

> The N.C.C. says flatly that its money goes only to church agencies and "is not given to political organizations." Actually, it has funded a number of secular groups that are unarguably political, and one-sidedly so. One recipient is the North American Congress on Latin America. Unapologetically leftist, it hardly ever finds anything to criticize in Cuba or Nicaragua. Two other groups funded by the churches helped set up the n Washington-based Committee in Solidarity with the People of E1 Salvador, a totally uncritical support group for the partly Marxist guerrilla forces in that nation. Shrugs one of its officials: "In a war, innocent people get killed. We've picked a side. It's not our place to comment on how the people in El Salvador are fighting."

> The N.C.C. points to three resolutions on Soviet religious repression in the past six years to prove it is not soft on Communism. But the N.C.C. aids Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe. CAREE, in turn, is a U.S. coordinator for the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference, a Kremlin mouthpiece so shameless that it supports the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

> The N.C.C. denies the charge that it has funded Communist governments. But it has in fact channeled material goods to the Viet Nam regime in order to help peasants. While that is the only way to operate in the totalitarian country, N.C.C. statements consistently ignore the fact that the "new economic zones" it supports are part of an oppressive political pattern. Churches would never be so shortsighted in treating, say, South Africa.

In the din of charge and countercharge it is sometimes hard to remember that this is a very large battle over very small sums. The bulk of the $115 million a week collected by N.C.C. member churches goes to good works, and even in the modest portion of the budgets dealing with political controversy, only a fraction goes to disputed causes. But Theologian Carl EH. Henry, an I.R.D. board member, observes, no doubt accurately, that many Protestants object to helping Marxists with even a single penny: "It's like virginity. You don't lose it in percentages."

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.

With reporting by Jim Castelli and Adam Zagorin This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.