I knew the minute the story hit the streets I was …

Archive: On Thin Ice

By Roy Howard Beck

In his new, sure-to-be-influential memoir, On Thin Ice: A Religion Reporter’s Memoir, Roy Howard Beck gives a riveting narrative of his biggest stories during his years at the United Methodist Reporter. In the following excerpts we concentrate on one of the most controversial and one that was too hot to write.

Beck, in his first year at the Reporter, covered a New York City anti-Apartheid meeting sponsored, in part, by United Methodist agencies. He thought the event might be boring. But as the meeting’s closing rally began, Beck could hardly believe what he was hearing.

The crowd really began cheering when the former Marxist-Leninist prime minister of Guyana spoke. “I remember when we heard the United States say there will be no more Cubas in the Caribbean,” he said at the end. “But now we are so happy to see Grenada and Nicaragua.”

Sustained applause.

“The United States stopped us in Bolivia and the Dominican Republic. But they met their match in Vietnam!” the Guyanan screamed. The audience leaped to its feet with a thundering ovation. The people on the stage surrounded the speaker, embracing and kissing him.

“Hysteria,” I wrote on my note pad. This was not dull. But I was growing increasingly bewildered about the church angle here.

Another standing ovation ensued when the moderator of the conference introduced a man from a “tiny island which refused to be intimidated or frightened by U.S. imperialism. They have said, to the terror of this planet, ‘[The U.S.] Go to hell!”’ Comrade Unison Whiteman, minister of foreign affairs of the new coup-created Marxist government of Grenada, moved to the microphone, “I bring you warm and fraternal revolutionary greetings.”

In the hallway just off the stage, a scuffle began. Journalists from the New York News World, a conservative daily paper owned by the Unification Church, had offended the conference leaders. The managing editor told me later that he had been asking one of the conference leaders about funding for the event. Carl Bloice, the conference coordinator, ordered the managing editor away from the stage. When Bloice saw him near the stage later, he asked him to step into the lobby. Once there, the newsman asked Bloice if any speakers would be making any statements on behalf of the Afghan freedom fighters against the Soviet Union, since the conference has wholeheartedly endorsed the revolutionary movements in Africa and some parts of the world.

That was the last straw for Bloice. Two people then blocked the door to keep the newsman from getting back into the auditorium.

The managing editor began to yell. The conference staff shoved him against the wall, grabbed his throat and banged his head repeatedly against the wall. A News World photographer began taking pictures, but Bloice’s men pushed the camera into her face. They forced both journalists into the street

A third News World journalist who had remained in the auditorium was forced out a short time later. When the photographer took pictures of that, the conference coordinator’s men chased her up the sidewalk. The third journalist grabbed the arm of one of the attackers. Two men threw the newsman against a car, tore off his glasses and punched him in the face. One then chased down the photographer, threw her to the ground and tried to take her camera, pulling it with enough force to snap the leather strap around her neck.

And this was a church-sponsored, bishop-endorsed conference!

Back inside, I was shaking my head about how the churches had gotten involved with a conference like this one. The church’s backing of the event was why I was assigned to cover it. I thumbed through the sheaf of pre-conference publicity and weekend materials to make certain I’d not gotten mixed up.

No, every piece of paper had the name “Conference in Solidarity with the Liberation Struggles of the Peoples of Southern Africa” and right under it, “c/o United Methodist Office for the UN.” I later would find that the recommendations I heard adopted were printed on stationary with the United Methodist name on it.

The list of sponsors on the program I was looking at included 23 national leaders and clergy of the United Church of Christ, Catholic Church, United Methodist Church, World Council of Churches, National Council of Churches and African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Returning to Dallas, Beck decided to check out the members of the conference’s around “Secretariat” (i.e. controlling body). To his amazement more than half were either associated with the U.S. Communist party or with organizations strongly linked to the Soviet Union.

The Reporter’s staff decided the church deserved to know the facts. But how could Beck explain what he saw?

To set the scene and the mood, I decided to start the story as if every Reporter reader was getting off the subway with me. After a couple of false starts, I put in a clean sheet and typed three simple paragraphs:

NEW YORK—I climbed from the subway tunnel onto sundrenched Broadway Avenue and into a dimly-lit, dingy auditorium at Columbia University. It was Sunday morning.

 

Several hundred people inside were cheering a harangue against “U.S. imperialism.”

 

Several United Methodist general agencies had joined with a wide variety of groups to sponsor this conference. It was billed as a national mobilizing event “to combat current U.S. policy trends” in relation to Southern Africa.

I had no idea of the ribbing and ridicule I would take through the years for those paragraphs. I sounded like a country yokel in the big city for the first time, several said. Many church leaders took the lead sentence to suggest that it was my first time to New York, therefore I was simply overwhelmed by being exposed to urban diversity that didn’t look like the midwest or Dallas, Texas. Mainly, though, it provided a nice joke for people to use in greeting me.

“Hey, Roy, been down in the subway lately?”

“Is that something you learned down in the subway?”

“What does he know, he hasn’t come up out of the dark subway tunnel yet.”

Sometime around midnight I wrote the last paragraph on my South Africa conference story. Then it happened—a chill ran through my tired body. The feeling simultaneously inspired both fear and euphoria. I’d had that feeling several times during my years as a reporter. It came when I felt the full emotional impact of the explosiveness of a story I was writing. I didn’t feel it on every explosive story, but it seemed to hit me when I knew that the integrity covered a lot of bases and that no other person could vouch for its truthfulness.

It was a chill that ran through me when I knew that the minute that story hit the streets, I was on thin ice.

After this story ran in the paper, a church-wide uproar ensued. Most readers focused their anger on the UM agencies which sponsored the conference. But a growing number of left-leaning officials began attacking Beck’s motives for writing the story.

By the first of November, the Reporter’s support base among some of the church hierarchy was eroding. Officials in some of the annual conferences were questioning whether their conferences should be attached to a newspaper that would report what I had.

“I protest the timing of your article,” came the cry from a California local church leader. “Did you deliberately plan to run this expose just before Stewardship Sunday? Some laypeople who do not understand the economic, social and political implications of liberation struggles may be tempted to withhold or reduce their pledges to the local church.” Then in a comment laden with judgments that seemed to undercut the very support he was trying to give the agency, the writer concluded, “Our leaders in New York need support, not criticism, from Dallas. In future years, please wait until after Stewardship Sunday to run articles about the activities of our Board of Global Ministries.”

A Western New York district superintendent wrote about the “‘contribution’ of Roy Beck.” (He put the word “contribution” in quotes.) “It was not reporting as I understand reporting. The article which he wrote was more of a Paul Harvey type of thing.”

Paul Harvey? With the release of one story, I’d gone from a darling of the church left and scourge of the religious right to Ronald Reagan’s radio alter ego! I was feeling a real identity crisis. I didn’t like being labeled a right-winger or McCarthyite or Paul Harvey.

Never before had I done anything that was so despised by liberals. These were the kinds of responses I’d become accustomed to getting from the right wing.

At one church function Beck went to lunch with some UM agency officials. Because of his story on the South Africa conference, the conversation grew tense.

It didn’t take long for the conversation to get around to the value of Marxist systems. Leading the way was Nora Boots, head of the Board of Global Ministries’ mission efforts in Latin America. A Bolivian native, she had bitter experiences with missionaries and U.S. policies she felt were misguided. She now was in a position to place her own imprint on missions.

Nora had a voice that could vary from the sound of a lilting musical instrument to that of a spewing volcano. Her English always was understandable even as it carried rich accents and trills of her Latin roots. As I took my first bite of a BLT sandwich, Nora took a bite out of my profession.

“There’s nothing particularly free about the press in the United States,” she said. “The press is much freer in Cuba.” Nora had a way of offering ideas for people to choke on.

People try to put down Cuba by calling it Communist, she said, but Cuba is one of the few governments in the Americas truly trying to help the poor. On the other hand, she continued, most newspapers in America are in the hands of a few dozen media corporations which run them to make a profit. In Cuba, the press is not beholden to fat-cat corporate advertisers, but it is run for the benefit of the people, Nora continued.

By the time I got fully involved in the conversation, the others at the table had taken to the sidelines. “I agree that the continued media concentration in this country is troubling,” I said. “And the advertiser-supported system of newspapers is not perfect When I worked at daily newspapers I had quite a few disagreements over what I thought were influences over our operations by certain elite groups, whether advertisers or the people who played golf with the publisher. But it is the multiplicity of publications that allows all views to be heard and readers to judge for themselves.”

Not all views are heard, Nora said. The U.S. news media are so conservative people rarely hear the views of liberation movements presented in fairness, she said, in a labeling that defied the common public epithet that the news media are too liberal.

“Well, I visited the Granma newspaper in Havana last spring,” I replied, “and there just is no way that publication, controlled entirely by the Cuban Communist Party, can rival the free flow of information in this country’s publications.”

The mission executive and I had to call it a draw. We just didn’t seem to have enough common ground to reach any kind of consensus on the topic.

Several years passed and Beck followed his South Africa coverage with a series of stories on UM-agency misadventures in Mississippi, when the agencies heavily backed a campaign to free a jailed black official, Eddie Carthan, convicted of assault, corruption, and other offenses, whom they claimed was a victim of a white conspiracy. But when Beck went to Mississippi to find the facts, he discovered most black officials in the area resented church intrusion. Most believed Carthan to be unworthy of such support.

Along the way Beck also wrote a plethora of positive stories on Methodist activities. Yet evidence for a breakdown in intellectual integrity among some church officials continued to haunt him. Perhaps his most disturbing observations concerned moral breakdown. In 1983, he attended a National Council of Churches meeting in San Francisco where the NCC refused to admit a homosexual denomination, the Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, as members of the council. After that vote, Beck heard a shocking claim.

Rev. Troy D. Perry, founder of the denomination, told me the denominations had their heads in the sand. What many didn’t seem to realize, he said, was that a substantial percentage of the mainline Protestant agency leaders were homosexual.

He said at least a fourth of those working at 475 Riverside Drive in all the denominational, NCC, WCC and related organizations were practicing homosexuals. They blended easily into New York’s influential and large homosexual community, he said.

I commented that was a rather easy claim to make and obviously was designed to bolster his position. I asked Perry, “Will you name them?”

He declined, of course, saying individuals had to make decisions on their own about “coming out of the closet.” He insisted, though, that he knew from experience about the preponderance at 475 and that he had talked with many of the homosexual staff people and knew of the others from those talks. I heard him repeat those claims to several others in the press corps.

Walking San Francisco’s hilly streets and dining with others in the press corps, the subject of the lifestyles of church leaders came up. Several people said they knew a number of lesbians and gays in high offices at 475 Riverside. Some influential names were tossed around, as well as that of a bishop whose story created a sensation a few years later, after his death from AIDS.

I filed the rumors in my memory but essentially forgot about them for awhile, choosing to assume they were only rumors.

But as the months passed, more and more stories about agency workers and leaders came my way from a number of sources. Some people told me of sitting in bars with some of the individuals and getting an earful as the night and the drinks passed. Others had been in gatherings where the travails of homosexual church leaders were discussed openly.

I encountered a meeting like that once at the beginning of my stint at the Reporter. My arrival was a surprise to the participants. When I sat down I noticed several people looking awkwardly at me and whispering among themselves. A couple of people eventually asked me to step into the hall.

Several minutes later, a man came out and explained that a number of people were nervous about the presence of the press. The group would allow me to attend the meeting, he said, if I agreed not to quote anybody by name unless given permission.

I realized rather quickly into the meeting that several of the church leaders were homosexuals. Public knowledge of that fact could ruin their careers. The United Methodist Church recognized practicing homosexuals as “persons of sacred worth” who were welcome as church members, but who generally were deemed ineligible for ordination because the sexual practice was considered “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Part of the agenda of the meeting was to talk about increasing and supporting the number of gay men and lesbian women in church leadership. (As the years passed, several of the national boards and agencies—with many of their members having a very personal stake—joined the effort.)

Piece by piece, there seemed to be some indications of validity to the claims made by Troy Perry. An informal network of lesbians and gays appeared to be present in high Protestant offices.

At the Reporter, we weren’t sure how to handle all the tales. But we talked about them a lot, trying to ascertain their significance. The tales came from liberals, conservatives, “straights,” homosexuals, pastors, lay people, agency staff people and bishops.

One high official at 475 confided to one of us that the reason he couldn’t bring about a solution to an entirely unrelated situation was because of the cohesive power of what he called “the single women.”

Another 475 staffer said outward gestures among some homosexuals had become common enough in one of the restrooms that higher officials had to ask the employees to “cool it.” I soon found that the tales of heterosexual misconduct were even more numerous.

Increasingly it seemed that one couldn’t understand the complete measure of critics’ dissatisfaction with national church leadership without knowing a lot about the sexual conduct of the people in whom they had lost trust.

Even some promotions, staff changes and decisions in some agencies couldn’t be understood without knowing the sexual politics.

A pastor called me once to say an African missionary had been in his home and complained of an affair between two mission executives.

Pastors told me that they had gone to bishops about specific situations and been told there was little they could do.

A wife of an agency official told of fruitlessly seeking help from district superintendents and bishops for years as her husband had one affair after another.

Such stories were multiplied about local pastors. Some bishops told me General Conference had taken so much power away from them over the last two decades there was little they could do if an accused minister denied wrongdoing and if others weren’t willing to appear before a full-fledged church trial.

I began to receive phone calls from secular reporters of daily newspapers around the country, alerting me of rumors of outlandish behavior by ministers in their cities.

Paul’s word to the Christians in Corinth came to mind. He chastised groups of Christians whose personal conduct violated even the pagan world’s idea of morality (I Cor. 5:1).

It would be only a matter of time, I thought, before some of what we in the church feared to challenge would burst forth into the public’s awareness and severely compromise our ability to work toward the kingdom of God.

In fact, a few years later bizarre immoral actions involving sex, violence and finances of a rather large number of Christian leaders became a mainstay on the pages of supermarket scandal tabloids and tittering TV comic monologues. Some instances of efforts to manage the original breaking of scandals—as in decisions to suppress the news—just seemed to heighten the public sensationalism.

Caught in the act were TV evangelists, tall-steeple mainline preachers, bishops, well-known charismatic leaders, highly-visible lay leaders, revered small church pastors, Pentecostals, liberals and conservatives alike.

What a commentary on the church’s role in uplifting society!