RfrancisR

Really? I thought I read somewhere that Southern Baptists started because of the issue of African-Americans' role in the church, in the days following the Civil War. That doesn't sound very free-thinking to me. Although, I suppose they could shift in cycles.

That MAY be true. But it was far from universal. And there were many local congregations that were, for their day, progressive. Carter, as he tells in his Our Endangered Values, believed his more progressive worldview was in complete keeping with his Southern Baptists tradition.

I may be mistaken, but I believe that Huey Long, a great progressive of his time, was a Southern Baptist. Clinton was also a Southern Baptist. Southern Baptists most certainly have had their fair share of progressives. Those progressives may have been an aberration, but they were made possible because, until the 80s and 90s takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by fundamentalist like Falwell, free thinking was allowed in that denomination. That doesn't put them in league with the Quakers or the UCC, but it doesn't entirely segregate them from progressives either.

Well, one of the worst things about what's happened to the Southern Baptist Convention is that it used to be a body of free thinkers. The idea of enforcing orthodoxy on local churches would've appalled Southern Baptists of old. Remember Carter and Clinton both came from Southern Baptist traditions.

These are two issues in one: the media's discrimination against mainline churches and IRD's successful campaign to undermine them.

Over the past nine years, prominent Religious Right leaders have appeared more than 40 times on the major Sunday morning new talk programs. But the principal leaders of the UCC, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), American Baptist Churches, African Methodist Episcopal Church, Reformed Church in America, among others, haven't appeared once. Why?

By J. Bennett Guess

June - July 06

 

On Easter Sunday, April 16, NBC's "Meet the Press" hosted its annual installment of "Faith in America," where seven religious commentators spent an hour discussing the state of religious life in this country. Representing the "Christian perspective" were a conservative Roman Catholic priest, a liberal Roman Catholic nun and a charismatic Pentecostal pastor. Not a mainline Protestant leader among them.

 

It was at least the second consecutive year that "Meet the Press" had snubbed the 35-member- body National Council of Churches by excluding any representation of its mainline communions. A year earlier, NBC had invited the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, a charismatic evangelical and a Roman Catholic priest to discuss the same topic. Again, no Episcopalians, no Presbyterians, no Lutherans. And certainly no one from the UCC.

 

Meanwhile this year, over at CNN, Wolf Blitzer's "Late Edition" spent about 10 minutes on Easter Sunday talking about Christian voters. Blitzer's guest? Jerry Falwell.

 

If you've noticed lately that a news interview with a United Methodist bishop is just about as likely as a UCC commercial on network television, then you're starting to get the point.

While some suggest the pervasive public silence is linked to decades of mainline decline, others suggest a more-sinister plot.

 

The Rev. Peter Laarman, former pastor of Judson Memorial Church (UCC/American Baptist) in New York and now director of the national Progressive Religious Partnership, believes the silencing is the direct result of a coordinated, decades-old strategy by so-called "neo-con" organizations, most notably the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), to disrupt mainline churches, discredit their national agencies and "decapitate" mainline leaders.

 

The rise of the Religious Right not only depended on its ability to attract more political power, Laarman says, but its growth in influence also required a squelching of mainliners' longstanding clout. Because these more-moderate churches stood at the literal center of America's heartland and held significant sway on public opinion, their Christian credentials needed to be undermined. (More than 50 percent of members of Congress still belong to mainline Protestant churches.)

 

Articulating a thesis once put forward by theologian John B. Cobb, a United Methodist, Laarman says the mainline church enjoyed remarkable success through the 1970s: The Vietnam War, long opposed publicly by mainline leaders such as the UCC's William Sloane Coffin, had been ended. The sin of racial segregation had been exposed through the help of more-courageous mainline clergy. Civil rights legislation, advocated by mainline church agencies, was being enacted. The ordination of women was growing in practice and acceptance, and a "liberationist" reading of the Bible — not biblical fundamentalism — was gaining prominence.

 

"These were not only significant cultural milestones but certain moral victories for the mainline church, and the mainline church became a victim of its own success," Laarman believes. "After the 1970s, a significant part of the mainline church went to sleep."

 

"But then it was torpedoed by this offensive [from the IRD] that it didn't see coming," Laarman says. "Unbeknownst to most people, there was a huge counter thrust that was well-funded and well-organized. Of all the vehicles of the Right in the last 40 years, its success at dividing the mainlines is its best and least known success. These [divisions] are not indigenous reactions within these communions. These are being orchestrated by the IRD."

IRD: 'Looking to divide and destroy'

 

Founded 25 years ago, IRD works through a three-pronged programmatic strategy referred to as "United Methodist Action," "Presbyterian Action" and "Episcopal Action," whereby it routinely hounds mainline leaders as "bureaucrats and elites" and portrays elected heads of mainline communions as rejecters of true Christianity.

 

According to Laarman, IRD's goal is a simple one: Portray mainline church leaders as anti-Christian, anti-American fools, and by so doing, cripple any mantle of respect or credibility their words or actions may have, either within their own denominations or within the public at large.

 

IRD's website ird-renew.org reveals how its attacks are most often personal, and how its stated commitment to "promoting democracy and religious freedom" often fails to include any respect for the democratic processes that are hallmarks of mainline Protestantism.

 

Randall Balmer, an evangelical Christian and professor of American religious history at Columbia University, is writing about IRD in his newest book — which he describes as "an evangelical's lament" — called "Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Destroys America" (Basic Books, 2006).

The Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, says there is a growing body of evidence that groups like the IRD are working to "deliberately divide and undermine institutional churches."

 

"This is a concerted effort, not just against the National Council but the mainline churches themselves, to erode the confidence in leadership of these churches," Edgar says.

 

The NCC and the World Council of Churches were early targets of IRD and became the subject of an IRD-inspired segment on CBS' "60 Minutes" in 1983, when it reported IRD's allegations that both the NCC and WCC were using mainline members' offerings to "promote communism." However, in December 2002, when "60 Minutes" Executive Producer Don Hewitt was asked on CNN's "Larry King Live" to name any show he regretted during his 36-year career, Hewitt named just one: the story berating the ecumenical church bodies, calling the allegations "a lot of nonsense."

UCC News

Thoughts?

Hello, I'm R Francis R. I am a Christian, dislocated from New Orleans where I was a member of St. Paul's United Church of Christ. There is no UCC Church where I am at, so I am seeking a new mainline denomination to join.

I don't know what this board is really about, but I see terms like "progressive Christians" and I presume it means that I will be in company of those people who value both progressive politics and progressive theology around here. I presume that by "progressive" you feel impelled to support social justice. I earned my education at a Jesuit university, Loyola University New Orleans, where social justice and social responsibility was emphasized.

I hope to meet good and fun people to be around here.

Oh, and I suppose you might be interested in what I look like, so here's a pic: