The Gospel of Marx
Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World.
by Ernest Lefever.
Ethics and Public Policy Center. 128 pp. $10.00.
For the past half-century, ecumenicism has been a preoccupation of top officials in most of the established American Protestant denominations. Several generations of church leaders have been dedicated to this effort, which has proceeded mainly through the agency of two conglomerate bodies, largely Protestant in composition—the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. (Though the latter is now composed of church organizations claiming to represent churches in 100 countries, it originated in the U.S. and even today a large proportion of its budget is provided by American, and recently German, church organizations.)
What is most interesting about the evolution of both these bodies is how far their original spiritual and ecumenic purposes have been displaced by secular activities. As Ernest Lefever shows in Amsterdam to Nairobi, the bureaucratic apex of the WCC—in effect the motor force for all its activities—has become secularized by now to a really startling degree, with the staff drawn preponderantly from “socialist” intellectual circles in Western Europe and the United States. As this has occurred, the original spiritual mission of the ecumenicists has been displaced by the quite unabashed mission of carrying secular revolutionary change into the Third World—a new form of theological neocolonialism. Whereas the colonial missionaries of bygone times brought the message of Christ to “backward peoples,” now the church bureaucracy is bringing them the message of Marx.
Needless to say, this novel form of secular ecumenicism, complete with terrorists, guerrillas, and national-liberation fronts, has not gone unnoticed. In England, Edward Norman has published a devastating indictment of the social-action tendency of the contemporary Protestant religious establishments (Christianity and the World Order). And in England, too, the social satirist Peter Simple, whose amusing columns appear in the Daily Telegraph, was inspired to create the mythical Dr. Spacely Trellis, D.D., Bishop of Bevindon, who from time to time, waving a submachine gun from his pulpit, exhorted his stupefied parishioners to join with the Patriotic Front’s plan to displace the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia regime with one more to his liking.
The caricature was not far from the mark. For several years the WCC routinely appropriated money to support the activities of “freedom fighters” in the tragic Rhodesian civil war, in which, ironically enough, many Christian missionaries and their young wards, among others, were—as a good revolutionary would put it—“liquidated” by the very forces the WCC was supporting. The justification for all this was presumably to free blacks from oppression. Yet the WCC has been singularly silent about conflicts in other parts of Africa, and Asia as well. That Rhodesia was its pet project tells us something about its judgmental standards: the war there, while for “socialists,” was against white men; if it had been among non-whites, no doubt the WCC would have remained as discreetly silent as it has been elsewhere.
According to Lefever, in its funding of revolutionary movements in Southern Africa (which includes Southwest Africa, or Namibia, as well as Zimbabwe) the WCC expended a mere $300,000 of churchgoers’ money—a figure far eclipsed by the vast, somber endowments of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact friends. And the budget allotted by this less than Midas-like organization for “liberating” other non and anti-white groups in other parts of the world—blacks and Indians in North America, for instance—has been equally restrained. But it is the symbolism that matters, not the amount: the body claiming to represent Protestant Christendom in the Western world is busily at war with its own culture.
That culture today is already so cluttered with single-purpose organizations speaking on behalf of one or another category of oppressed people (or other mammals), that it seems almost superfluous for Lefever, in this amply documented study, to draw attention to yet another case. Yet for those who view these multifarious “caring” activities with some skepticism, as working to disrupt the civic bonds of Western societies, the story he tells is particularly revealing. Why should the WCC, as a kind of global Protestant curia, presume to speak on behalf of Christians when it endorses terrorism? And how could these bureaucrats, speaking for Christians, have distanced themselves so successfully from the profound sources of their faith?
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An equally interesting question has been the silence of Christian churchgoers, at least in the non-evangelical sects, concerning the activities of such groups which claim to speak on their behalf. The matter is not, of course, confined to the Protestant churches. James Hitchcock, professor of history at St. Louis University, when dealing with similar manifestations within the Catholic Church in America, recently observed in his pamphlet, On the Present Position of Catholics in America (National Committee of Catholic Laymen, Inc.): “The ultimate fault of American Catholics is their continued willingness to allow other people to define the questions for them, their failure to take aggressive action of their own except in reaction to other people’s initiatives.”
The sturdy persistence of the Christian faith despite such difficulties may be explained by the fact that when you come down to it, this faith is manifested for the most part in ways indifferent to the higher reaches of bureaucratic church organization. If polls recently taken are correct, American churchgoers are larger in proportion to their own culture than those of most other countries. And they do not go to church to be swept into the cauldron of politics. While it is true that some Unitarian or Quaker meetings often seem more like political caucuses than occasions of common worship, these are in no way representative of the American religious culture as a whole: most Christians go to church in order to worship, and in this respect they are no different from persons of other faiths. But this very apolitical aspect of the religious life also requires that those for whom religion matters maintain vigilance against those who, presuming to act politically in their name, distort the meaning of faith, and place it at the disposal of its enemies.
