Message from Mark Tooley of the IRD

Well, Blogger is being a real pain in the Gavin. I'm trying to get Locusts & Honey set up to let Mark Tooley of UM Action, the Methodist arm of the Institute on Religion and Democracy guest-blog for a while so that he can communicate with the Methodist blogosphere directly. But Blogger is being troublesome in this endeavor.

Anyway, Mr. Tooley e-mailed me and said that this is what he wanted to post:

What is IRD? Well, it is an ecumenical "watchdog" that works for reform in mainline Protestant churches, while also advocating for a constructive Christian social witness, and urging more attention for the plight of persecuted religious believers around the world.

IRD was founded in 1981. David Jessup, then an official with the AFL-CIO was concerned when one of his children returned home with a dime box, collecting money for projects of the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM). He was motivated to research to whom GBGM was making grants, and was greatly distressed to learn that many recipients were anti-democratic and even Marxist. Jessup's AFL-CIO work included liaison with overseas trade unions and helping them to avoid collusion with Marxist front groups.

Jessup took his report about GBGM to the 1980 General Conference and passed it out to the delegates. This led to his working with Good News and with United Methodist evangelist Ed Robb. Both Robb and Jessup decided a new organization needed to be created to challenge the political stances of U.S. mainline churches, which were too often uncritical towards the Soviet Union and Marxism, to the point of ignoring the plight of persecuted religious believers. Both Jessup and Robb thought there was strong connection between Christian faith and human rights, religious liberty above all.

With help from Roman Catholic ethicist Michael Novak, then Lutheran pastor (later Catholic priest) and writer Richard Neuahaus, Christianity Today founding editor Carl Henry, and others, Robb and Jessup founded IRD. Neuhaus, now the head of the Institute on Religion and Public Life and publisher of First Things magazine, wrote IRD's founding statement,"Christianity and Democracy." Its opening words are "Jesus Christ is Lord." Neuhaus wrote that Christianity, as it approaches political issues, insists upon the dignity of all people while also realizing humanity's fallen nature. Christians should not inextricably align their faith with any political agenda nor with any specific form of government. Yet, in the earthly political options so far available, democracy has shown itself the system of government best able to defend basic human rights.

For IRD's first dozen years, it was focused almost exclusively on the churches and foreign policy issues, above all the Cold War. Religious liberty was and remains a major theme. IRD regularly gave religious liberty awards to heroes of the faith who stood against tyranny. These included dissidents from communist countries and also the Roman Catholiccardinal under General Pinochet's regime who urged a transition towards democratic Chile. More recently, we have honored a Sudanese Anglicanbishop who has withstood the persecution of that country's Islamist regime.

From the start, IRD was highly controversial. It aggressively challenged the National Council of Churches and other mainline church groups for failing to critique communist oppression while frequently aligning themselves with Third World Marxist liberation movements, especially in Latin America, often under the aegis of Liberation Theology. IRD played some role in the exposes of mainline church support for Marxist movements done by Sixty Minutes on CBS and by Reader's Digest.

With the collapse of the Soviet empire and the global discrediting ofMarxist movements, IRD's focus shifted somewhat. A key shift was IRD's role in reporting about the 1993 ecumenical Re-Imagining conference, which was endorsed by the women's ministries of most mainline denominations and which embraced extreme forms of feminist theology, including the advocacy of goddess worship and the acceptance of lesbian practice.

Re-Imagining thrust IRD into the theological and sexuality debates that have been engulfing the mainline churches. IRD is not as specifically theological as many of the renewal groups in mainline churches, such as Good News within United Methodism. Our focus remains on the churches' witness to public policy issues. But we do believe there is a strong connection between bad theology and an erroneous political witness. Theological utopianism led to mainline Protestantism's uncritical stancetowards Soviet communism for its last several decades. Similarly, theologies divorced from the historic ecumenical mainstream continue to lead mainline churches astray, often making their agencies indistinguishable from secular liberal or left-wing advocacy groups.

IRD calls for denominations to be faithful to their historic teachings while shunning the temptation to align the institutional church routinely with specific political and legislative proposals. Ideally, the institutional church will evangelize, disciple, conduct ministries ofcompassion, and instill in its members a biblicaly-grounded worldview that will help them make informed political decisions. Ideally, the institutional church will not align itself with political parties or function as direct political lobbies. These vocations, we believe, belong to Christian lay people.

The Religious Left, of which mainline church agencies are apart, differs from the Religious Right significantly in its organization. The latter is comprised primarily of parachurch groups, like Focus on the Family, or direct political action groups, like the Christian Coalition. The former is comprised of official agencies of church denominations. The latter claims to speak for conservative Christians and other traditionalists. It relies on direct mail for its funding. The former claims to speak for"The Church" and for millions of church members, most of whom are unaware of their churches political involvements, and most of whom, as expressed in voting patterns, differ strongly with the political conclusions oftheir churches' officials. The Religious Left relies on church collectionplate money for its funding.

IRD has three denominational programs: United Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian/Anglican. We also have a religious liberty program, which in recent years has focused on the plight of Sudan and more recently has been looking at North Korea. How did I come to be involved in the politics of the United Methodist Church and with IRD? I will write about that in my next blog.

Wow! That's quite a heritage. Few activities are more redeeming that fighting the moral abomination that is communism, and few are more dispicable than coddling or appeasing it. I wonder if the NCC and the GBCS have ever apologized for their involvement in Marxism?