Archive: In Celebration of Faith & Freedom With the IRD

By George Weigel

In 1977, David and Linda Jessup joined the Marvin Memorial United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. As things turned out, that simple act of Christian re-connection would have repercussions throughout the United States, and indeed throughout the world.

In terms of their politics, the Jessups were, by any reasonable definition, liberals: indeed they were classic liberal internationalists of the Humphrey-(Scoop) Jackson variety. Which perhaps explains why the Jessups began to wonder just what was going on in the United Methodist Church when they examined the materials their children brought home from Sunday school. The children’s lessons took a benign view of the government of Vietnam, then at the height of its “re-education” efforts. And they waxed positively enthusiastic about the achievements of the Castro regime in Cuba. All of this struck the Jessups as a bit odd.

On investigation, David Jessup discovered that United Methodist funds were supporting a lavish menu of revolutionary causes around the world, all in the name of “prophetic justice.” Nor were his children’s Sunday school materials aberrations; rather, they defined the norm in what then passed for “religious education” in mainstream United Methodist circles. It seemed to David Jessup that something ought to be done about all this.

Being an organizer at heart (much of his professional life had been spent helping struggling Latin American trade unionists), Jessup began to look for allies in the United Methodist Church, and found them in the members of the Good News movement and in two prominent UM clergymen, the Rev. Edmund Robb, Jr., and the Rev. Ira Gallaway. When Jessup and his friends tried to raise the issue of gross politicization within the appropriate United Methodist circles they were dismissed, not always gently, as so many Neanderthals. And so David Jessup began to cast the net of his concern wider.

He soon found colleagues among other dissidents from the predominant radicalisms then found in American mainline Protestantism and in certain sectors of American Catholicism. Richard John Neuhaus for one, a founder of the anti-war group Clergy and Laity Concerned; Neuhaus, then a Lutheran and for 17 years the pastor of a poor black-Hispanic parish in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had broken with “the movement” over the question of human rights violations in “liberated” Vietnam. Michael Novak, for another; Novak, a Roman Catholic, had written speeches for Sargent Shriver during the 1972 presidential campaign, but had made his own break with the left by suggesting that there might be a moral case to be made for market economies. Penn Kemble, an old friend of Jessup’s and one of the chieftains of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, James V. Schall, a Georgetown Jesuit dissenter from the received radical orthodoxies, and myself filled out the dramatis personae in these initial explorations of what was to be done.

It wasn’t all talk, though; for out of the conversations begun by David Jessup came a new ecumenical organization, the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). And out of IRD came, in time, a veritable revolution in the discussion of the role of the churches in the foreign policy debate.

The initial reaction by the left-liberal and radical church establishment to the founding of IRD was little short of apoplectic—particularly when the IRD’s critique of the churches’ softness toward the communist persecution of Christians, and its analysis of the ways in which a radical political agenda was being supported by the unwitting contributions of mainstream church-goers, got aired in the Readers Digest and on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” IRD people were accused of all manner of clandestine conspiracies. The United Methodist Church even hired two “researchers” to sketch, in lurid detail, the web of political, denominational, and philanthropic connections that bound IRD’s ecumenically disparate leadership together: an exercise that was one part House Un-American Activities Committee, and one part Laurel and Hardy. Charges of “McCarthyism” were recklessly thrown about, as were baseless accusations that IRD leaders supported Afrikaner apartheid and Latin American oligarchy. In the more fevered religious and leftist press, IRD was portrayed as the centerpiece of a sinister Reaganite attack on the churches, the game plan for which could be found in the “Santa Fe Documents ” (which no IRD leader remembers ever having seen). In retrospect, it all seems passing strange. Yet such was the temper of the times.

IRD is now 10 years old, and there is little need here to rehearse the extraordinary changes that have taken place in the world during the past decade. Suffice it to say that, on the great issue of the contest between freedom and totalitarianism, between imperfect democracies and pluperfect tyrannies, IRD was right, and its detractors wrong. The men and women who benefitted from IRD’s advocacy on behalf of religious freedom—the martyr-confessors of the persecuted church throughout the world—know that IRD has made a difference for the good; even if those who work in the “Prophetic Justice Unit ” at the National Council of Churches don’t. (Yes, there is a “Prophetic Justice Unit ” at the NCC! Some things never change.)

What needs emphasizing now, though, is that IRD’s primary concern was never politics; it was, and is, the integrity of the Church. IRD opposed politicized Christianity, not just because it thought the politics of the NCC were disastrous—and they were. IRD opposed the politicization of the Church because radical activism demeaned the Church by making ultimate what was only penultimate—politics. IRD was, in short, a protest against the soft idolatry of the justice-and-peace bureaucracies, and a call for a new reformation in which Christian social witness would be more firmly tethered to orthodox Christian faith and practice.

That call has not gone forth without effect. One striking (indeed, mind-boggling) symbol of IRD’s success is that it begins its 11th program year with its executive director, Dr. Kent Hill, off campus. Hill will be teaching Christian apologetics in the former Department of Atheism at Moscow State University. This was not something that the founding fathers and mothers of IRD anticipated. But it has happened, and we thank God for it.

It is also important to note that IRD’s success—in defending the persecuted, in supporting Christian democrats in their nonviolent struggle for freedom, in calling the churches to a wiser social witness—would not have been possible without the people who have really made IRD—the staff which has worked long and hard at salaries beneath what they could command in other arenas. When the history of 20th-century American Christianity is written years from now, names like Diane Knippers, Alan Wisdom, Maria Thomas, Stan DeBoe, Walter Kansteiner, Larry Adams, and Kerry Ptacek may not be cited very frequently. But the Lord of history knows the story of history; and that, in the minds and hearts of these dedicated men and women, is what really counts.

IRD has been both an activist center and an intellectual catalyst. Its work deserves new attention as we enter the second decade of IRD—the decade in which issues of democratic consolidation will press hard on old and new democracies alike. IRD’s mission has been directly addressed to Christians. But its moral case for democracy should be of interest to those of other faiths who share the Christian conviction that the human person is made in the image and likeness of God.

Happy birthday, IRD!

George Weigel is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in. Washington, D.C. He is the editor of four books and author of seven others, most recently Just War and the Gulf War (Ethics and Public Policy Center). Reprinted by permission of American Purpose, October 1991.