>From InsightMag.Com
<"> As the NCC’s president-elect, Young defended China’s human-rights
record and Castro’s Cuban dictatorship. Whatever the future holds for his two-
year term as NCC president — an unpaid position but similar to a corporation’s
chairman of the board — he certainly knows how to lead a movement into the
Democratic Party, say critics. <">
{{<Begin>}}
InsightMag.com
Edgar Politicizes the Social Gospel
By Aimee Howd
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Two former Democratic Party partisans have taken the leadership of the liberal
National Council of Churches and may hope to make it into a left-wing political
powerhouse.
Two former Democratic congressmen, Bob Edgar and Andrew Young, have assumed the
top positions at the National Council of Churches, or NCC. The surprising news
is not that they are men of the left but that they are aggressive political
partisans. From the time the NCC was born in 1949, replacing the left-wing
Federal Council of Churches after World War II, its leaders have been advocates
of the social gospel. As it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the NCC
is seeking to regain some of the momentum it has lost since liberalism’s heyday
in the 1960s.
Money is a problem. Global relief efforts through its mission unit,
Church World Service and Witness, or CWS, bring in roughly 80 percent of its
$60 million annual budget. This goes to famine relief in Ethiopia, su
rvival kits for cyclone victims in Mozambique and help for AIDS patients in Africa.
The CWS has mor
e than three times the budget and twice the staff of all the other NCC operations
combined. Some co
ntributors don’t like t
he increasing amount that the NCC extracts from CWS donations for other purposes.
Certainly, the social and political positions NCC leaders have trumpeted
through its Washing
ton legislative office and a steady stream of political resolutions have wrought
controversy within
member denominations a
nd criticism from others. “Their radicalization came in the 1960s,” says Alan Wisdom,
vice presiden
t of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a religious watchdog group founded to
combat the perc
eived liberalism of mai
nline churches. “The NCC became a harsh critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam and began to
publish thing
s critical of the United States but sympathetic to Marxist policies.”
There were the laudatory statements about Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba,
the cheering of
the revolution in China and the stunned statements of horror after Ronald Reagan was
elected presi
dent. There were those
public prayers against Republicans during the government shutdown of 1995. And there
was the public
letter signed by NCC leaders during President Clinton’s impeachment calling for
absolution of the
president, a “return to
the real needs of the people” and the raising of “voices of reconciliation, grace,
mercy and redee
ming love.” This March, there was the advertisement Edgar placed in California
newspapers decrying
the effort of Propositi
on 22 to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
The NCC Website (www.nccusa.org) catalogs statements in support of
affirmative action, gun control, opposition to welfare reform, more funding for
government schools, stricter environmental regulation, racial justice,
environmental justice, women’s justice and so on, echoing the Democratic Party
platform — loudly.
Lately, the NCC has been active in affirming the high quality of life
that Cuba — with its great educational system and socialized health care — has
to offer Elian Gonzalez if only the United States will let him go home to
Castro. Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, recently told reporters that
the NCC has a history of underestimating the repression of communist regimes.
But while the NCC has been proud to promote liberal social goals under
the auspices of advancing holy writ, the religious organization never before
has sported a pair of leaders with such overtly political biographies and such
partisan connections.
“It is interesting that Andrew Young and Bob Edgar were both members of
Congress, were both pastors when we took office,” Edgar himself muses to
Insight, “and that we both still balance political passions with the passions
of the Old and New testaments, and there’s a blending of that in our public
life.”
An ordained United Methodist elder, Edgar was the first Democrat in 120
years to be elected to Congress from his highly Republican Pennsylvania
district as a result of the reaction to Watergate in 1974. He joined in
revisionist investigations of the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. and John F. Kennedy and fought what he called “pork-barrel” water projects
as a crusading environmentalist. He held the seat for five terms until 1986
when he braved — and lost — a Senate run against moderate GOP incumbent Arlen
Specter. Later, he served a stint as finance director for a presidential bid by
Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois between gigs as a professor and an arms-control
advocate for a think tank in Washington. Then, in 12 years as president of the
Claremont School of Theology in California, he restored the once dying
institution into a thriving ecumenical Methodist seminary.
Perhaps it was not his loyalty to the Democratic Party but his success
at Claremont that caught the attention of the NCC’s search committee last year.
In November, he was elected unanimously to a five-year term as the NCC’s
general secretary, its highest staff position. In January, he began the
transition to the New York headquarters.
Edgar replaced Joan Brown Campbell, who departed her second consecutive
term as general secretary a year early and left him an unwieldy administrative
structure, no cash reserves, $4 million in debt and some very skittish groups
among its 35 Protestant and Orthodox member communions and denominations. Under
pressure from church members, the United Methodist Church — one of the seven
mainline churches that together give more than 90 percent of the NCC’s budget —
actually froze funding temporarily.
Edgar called on his connections in the Democratic Party and the left-
wing “peace” and “justice” communities. In no time at all the NCC had paid off
that $4 million deficit, and he now is overseeing a major restructuring of the
management and financial practices of the NCC, as mandated at the February
meeting of his executive board.
The meeting set a budget of roughly $71 million for 2000. Almost $63
million must go to CWS, about $2 million to the general secretariat and $6
million to the “Mission Cluster,” which includes education and advocacy
projects. That’s an increase of 18 percent in CWS funding and a cut of 41
percent in funding for other units. The precise structure of the NCC and its
more powerful foreign-missions daughter, CWS, will be discussed at the
executive board’s May meeting — at which CWS may cut the NCC’s apron strings.
Edgar says he is optimistic about the NCC’s future. “Any organization
that’s 50 years old needs to be retooled periodically,” he tells Insight. A new
position of general manager has been created to aid the general secretary and
nearly 30 positions have been eliminated, Edgar says.
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, who heads the member denomination Reformed
Church of America and led the NCC board’s transition-management team, published
editorials last year saying that the immediate financial crisis of the NCC was
“only a symptom of a deeper crisis” of eroded trust in the organization on the
part of “the leaders and constituency of many of its member communions.” He
tells Insight that while the short-term crisis has been averted, the long-term
questions remain. “The question the general secretary must ask is not how well
can you keep this institution together but rather what is the ecumenical future
to which God is calling the church?”
Alongside Edgar as he hears this question, of course, is that other
former Democratic Party congressman Andrew Jackson Young, who took office as
president last fall for a two-year term. His term in Congress as the first
African-American legislator elected from Georgia since Reconstruction
overlapped Edgar’s. He has been involved with the NCC almost since its
inception. After his ordination in the United Church of Christ in 1955 at the
age of 23, he worked internationally on behalf of revolutionary movements in
Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In a recent interview Young
commented, “I believe I was later able to bring a new perspective to a lot of
our nation’s policies. I saw that our government was ruled by our fears of
communism rather than wisdom and understanding about the world in which we
live.”
Young’s three terms in Congress began in 1972, but he increased his
profile when President Carter appointed him ambassador to the United Nations,
where eventually he had to resign for making statements contrary U.S. policies
and interests. He went on to become mayor of Atlanta, successfully drawing
scores of businesses to the city and continuing his crusade against poverty as
the true root of crime. Young served as cochairman the Atlanta Olympic
Committee in 1996 and now is chairman of the Atlanta-based consulting firm,
GoodWorks International.
As the NCC’s president-elect, Young defended China’s human-rights record
and Castro’s Cuban dictatorship. Whatever the future holds for his two-year
term as NCC president — an unpaid position but similar to a corporation’s
chairman of the board — he certainly knows how to lead a movement into the
Democratic Party, say critics.
So all things considered, does the NCC have the potential to become the
Democratic Party’s answer to the Republican religious right? Edgar can’t resist
a chuckle as he ponders the question. “Let me say, uh, that we are not a
partisan organization.… I think that one thing that has happened since the 80s
high point of the religious right is that when [the average reader] sees the
word Christian in the newspaper they don’t automatically think religious
right.… We’re going to try to continue to improve on our effectiveness in
getting our faith-based messages across to elected officials and to
constituents in local churches. My hope is that when our organization manages
to heal financial difficulties and reenergize its leadership that it can make a
difference, and we’ll know in the next two years if that’s possible.”
But trying is not the same as succeeding. “The NCC is not very effective
in advancing its political agenda,” says Wisdom. “At this point, it is so well-
known as being on the far left and not representative of the c
onstituency they claim.”
This document was printed out from InsightMag.com.
You can find the original at
http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200005154.shtml
{{<End>}}
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