Rightwing foundations intervene in Protestant politics

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, May 22, 2004
Conservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

As Presbyterians prepare to gather for their General Assembly in
Richmond, Va., next month, a band of determined conservatives is
advancing a plan to split the church along liberal and orthodox lines.
Another divorce proposal shook the United Methodist convention in
Pittsburgh earlier this month, while conservative Episcopalians have
already broken away to form a dissident network of their own.

In each denomination, the flashpoint is homosexuality, but there is
another common denominator as well. In each case, the Institute on
Religion and Democracy, a small organization based in Washington, has
helped incubate traditionalist insurrections against the liberal
politics of the denomination's leaders.

With financing from a handful of conservative donors, including the
Scaife family foundations, the Bradley and Olin Foundations and Howard
and Roberta Ahmanson's Fieldstead & Company, the 23-year-old institute
is now playing a pivotal role in the biggest battle over the future of
American Protestantism since churches split over slavery at the time of
the Civil War.

The institute has brought together previously disconnected conservative
groups within each denomination to share resources and tactics,
including forcing heresy trials of gay clergy members, winning seats on
judicial committees and urging congregations to withhold money from
their denomination's headquarters.

When the Episcopal Church elected an openly gay bishop last summer, the
institute organized and housed a conservative secessionist group called
the American Anglican Council, which still occupies an office down the
hall. When a conservative Methodist minister floated a breakup proposal
at a private breakfast earlier this month, an institute staff member
transcribed the speech and posted it on the institute's Web site, where
it instantly became a rallying cry for disaffected Methodists.

At the Presbyterian Church's assembly last year, the institute helped
block a policy statement that said whether parents were single or gay
made no difference to the moral status of a family, and in the process
it won the appointment of one of its staff members to a committee to
rewrite the policy for this year's meeting.

Although the institute has an annual budget of just less than $1 million
and a staff of fewer than a dozen, liberals and conservatives alike say
it is having an outsized effect on the dynamics of American politics by
counteracting the liberal influence of the mainline Protestant churches.
Together, the Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches have 12.5
million members, and for decades they and other mainline denominations
have provided theological backbone and foot soldiers for liberal causes
like abortion rights, racial and economic equality, the nuclear freeze,
environmentalism and anti-war movements.

For their part, the institute and its allies say they are saving the
denominations from themselves by agitating for a return to Biblical
orthodoxy. They argue that the churches' liberalism has contributed to
their steep decline over the last 30 years even as more conservative
evangelical churches have grown.

"It's pretty clear that the church elite in the mainline denominations
are to the left of the people in the pews," said Diane Knippers, the
institute's president and an Episcopalian who helped found the American
Anglican Council and now sits on its board.

The group has often called on conservatives to change the liberal
denominations from within, especially in the relatively more
conservative Methodist and Presbyterian churches. But Mrs. Knippers said
she could support the notion of divorce for irreconcilable differences,
albeit perhaps with liberals leaving. "Rather than be embroiled in legal
battles in church courts over sexuality, let's find a gracious way to
say, `we will let you leave this system because you believe it violates
your conscience.' "

More liberal Protestants argue that the institute's financial backers
are interfering with the theological disputes mainly for broader,
secular political reasons. "The mainline denominations are a strategic
piece on the chess board that the right wing is trying to dominate,"
said Alfred F. Ross, president and founder of the Institute for
Democracy Studies, a liberal New York-based think tank which produced a
research report in 2000 on the Institute's influence in the Presbyterian
Church.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/national/22CONS.html

--
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org