Archive: Our Embarrassing Leftward Tilt

By Steve Beard

In our focus on political systems, we have been more pathetic than prophetic.

For Western Christians who have worked long and diligently on behalf of persecuted believers in the Eastern bloc, recent developments in the region must engender a deep sense of satisfaction. Sadly, our own United Methodist Church may find it difficult to share that kind of fulfillment. While we United Methodists pride ourselves on being at the forefront of numerous social movements, we have not been seriously engaged in the move to displace communism with freedom. In the quest for liberty in Eastern Europe, we have been more pathetic than prophetic.

This was not always the case. In 1952 the UM bishops asserted, “The communist threat must be met; to surrender to it or to be overcome by it is to forfeit the supreme values underlying our highest culture and our Christian gospel.” In the same year, the General Conference described communism as “the major foe of Christianity and freedom in the world today” (Biases and Blind Spots, Bristol Books, 1988, p. 29).

Such language is no longer to be found in our denominational literature, mission studies or resolutions. Rarely will you hear a peep of criticism directed toward communism—unless, of course, it accompanies a parallel or harsher critique of Western democratic capitalism. Herein lies the maxim of moral equivalence: Never criticize the failings of Marx and Lenin without an equally ominous pronouncement about the shortcomings of the West.

At times our denomination’s view of economics has moved from a skepticism of capitalism to an all-out advocacy of socialism. The Women’s Division of the Board of Global Ministries published An Economic Primer in 1980 to help UM Women understand “economic development in the world. One section of the primer states that Americans “must endeavor to bring their bias against socialism under control” (p.75).

At the same time Soviet citizens were standing in line for rations, Primer readers were told that socialist countries “find it relatively easy to provide ample employment opportunities at adequate wage levels because they rely on an economic plan in deciding how much to produce and what to pay rather than the profit motive” (p.26).

At the same time East German party bosses were living it up at hidden hunting lodges, the primer goes on to say that extremes of wealth and poverty are more or less automatically avoided in the system” (p.26).

While the primer does admit to a lack of political rights in socialist countries, it says that “the sting does not seem to be as acutely felt by the mass of the population because their basic material needs are being equitably attended to” (p.28). How oddly that statement reads after watching TV reports of thousands of Czechs shouting for freedom and hundreds of thousands of East Germans pouring through the defunct Berlin Wall for a day of shopping in the West.

UM Women were also told that while “opportunities for political participation … may seem more limited, … they are at least likely to be more or less equally shared” (p.30). Lest the reader should feel some concern for inequality in the state-controlled framework, we are assured that even the “most authoritarian of the socialist regimes are often more democratic than the capitalist ones which they replaced” (p.30), and their workplaces are “likely to be far more democratic than what we are accustomed to … in the United States (p.30). If this is the case, what was the need for a Lech Walesa in Poland?

The problem isn’t that the UM Church has ignored Eastern Europe entirely. In the early 1980s the church utilized the National Council of Church’s (NCC) study guide on Europe, Must Walls Divide, in which the Rev. James Will identifies the wounds of Europe’s “ideological divisions” as being “irritated by continuing concerns for human rights and ‘captive nations’” (p.6). This would come as small comfort to Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians who have long suffered under communist rule and who now seek independence.

In one chapter Will published the thoughts of a Romanian church leader who claims that his country guarantees “civil and religious rights,” “freedom of worship” and “liberty of conscience” to accept or reject a religious faith. All of this was published as numerous congregations found their sanctuaries demolished after state bulldozers plowed through town.

But what are we Methodists saying now? At the most recent semiannual meeting of the UM Council of Bishops (November 6-10), the bishops called United Methodists to prayer for Eastern Europe and issued a refreshing statement to remind us that places such as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and [at that time] Czechoslovakia saw “practically no change … ” (United Methodist News Service, 11-13-89). After encouraging Western economic support for Eastern Europe, the bishops oddly warn against the “imposition of traditional Eastern or Western value systems” (United Methodist Reporter, 11-17-89), again implying a moral equivalence between the two.

In a formal presentation to the bishops at the same meeting, Janice Love, a UM member of the World Council of Churches (WCC), told them that the recent developments in the USSR and Eastern Europe have spurred “a new-found triumphalism about capitalism” that she found to be “uncritical, unwarranted and chauvinistic” (United Methodist News Service, 11-13-89). During a lengthy critique of capitalism, she called on Christian leaders in the United States to “break the mental chains that strident anticommunist ideology has imposed on us in this century” (ibid.).

One would have to struggle to find a critical comment—even a whisper—against the Soviet Union in our church documents. Blame for the Cold War has been effectively shoved onto the guilty shoulders of the United States, while the Soviets continue to send massive shipments of arms to Marxist groups in Africa and Central America.

Resolutions and comments directed toward the Soviets are designed to be non-threatening so as not to offend, a pattern which consistently undermines the integrity of our so-called “prophetic” church. South Africa would never receive the kid-glove treatment granted the USSR.

Consider the fate of an amendment to the US/USSR exchange resolution at the General Conference in 1988. It asked for unlimited importation of Bibles, release of remaining prisoners of conscience, an end to state limitations on seminary enrollment, and guarantees of special relief for Christians in Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine. Opponents of the resolution said that it would “mess up a simple petition” and that its tone was “imperialistic” and even “preachy” (Religion and Democracy, July 1988).

Eastern Europe is not the only place we have missed the boat. In the 89 pages of the 1984 NCC mission study, Fire Beneath the Frost: The Struggles of the Korean People and Church, editor Peggy Billings, at the time the head of the UM World Division, only once briefly discussed the “communist persecution and purge of Christians in the North … (p.21). Worse, this cursory reference was found in the midst of a passage damning refugees from the North for their subsequent “blind” anti-communism (p.71).

Billings felt no constraint in condemning the majority of South Korean Christians as “fundamentalists,” “self-righteous,” and “intolerant” as she set out to herald the glories of “minjung” theology, a form of South Korean liberation theology.

Unfortunately, our church resolutions have been as willfully blind. The 1980 “Human Rights in Korea” resolution cites only problems in South Korea while never mentioning Stalinist North Korea. The 1988 General Conference resolution was headed on the same track until the Korean-American caucus, disturbed at being excluded from the drafting process, organized to amend the resolution. Their valiant effort produced one of the more judicious US church statements by emphasizing democracy as a prerequisite for Korean reunification (Religion and Democracy, Sept./Oct. 1988).

Numerous annual conferences commendably condemned the brutality of the Chinese government toward those seeking reform and democracy in Tiananmen Square last spring. The resolutions ranged from overwhelming support of the students to complete condemnation of the government’s violence. But a careful reading of news reports fails to find one conference which denounced the communist system itself, despite China’s long record of repression.

We should not be surprised. The 1984 General Conference resolution on China went so far as to say, “While the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Church differ on their views of religious belief, the Constitution now provides for both the policy and practice of religious freedom” (Book of Resolutions 1984, p.440). This terminology makes it sound as though the two simply disagree on whether to baptize by sprinkling or immersion.

Elsewhere around the world:

• The most recent UM resolution on the Philippines carefully avoids any criticism of the brutal, communist New People’s Army, in contrast to its criticism of right-wing vigilante groups which bring “terror and murder to the countryside” (IRD Special Report, April 1988).
• While resolutions on South Africa tend to be some of the most lengthy and detailed, the political ideology of the African National Congress (ANG) is never seriously questioned, even though the 1988 NCC study guide, South Africa’s Moment of Truth, admits that “there can be little doubt that the ANG is an organization of the political left in which the communists play a strong role.”
• Through the World Council of Churches, the Marxist-oriented South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) received a 1989 grant of $165,000 despite WCC General Secretary Emilio Castro’s acknowledgement of “serious allegations about torture and other forms of brutal treatment in the hands of SWAPO officials” (Religious News Service, 9-22-89).
• While Ethiopians starved by the millions in the early 1980s—the result, in no small part, of the Marxist government’s brutal policies of forced resettlement, collectivization and repression—UM officials found no fault with the government. In fact, after returning from Ethiopia in 1984 Norma Kehrberg, chief staff executive of the UM Committee on Relief, commented that she was impressed with the country’s “openness and accessibility” (UM Communications News, 12-14-84), while one UM bishop commented that the USSR had done more to help Ethiopia than had the United States (ibid.).
• Mysteriously the 1984 “Recognition of Cuba” resolution leaves out any condemnation of Castro’s heinous human rights record (Book of Resolutions 1984, p. 402).

There was, however, one General Conference resolution in 1980 that commended democracy and religious freedom. It read, “We believe that people have the right to choose their own government through democratic, competitive elections, free from internal or external coercion” (Book of Resolutions 1984, p.142).

It goes on to proclaim that we unalterably oppose all governmental systems that deny human rights to the people within their borders, including fascism, communism, apartheid, and all forms of military and authoritarian dictatorship” (ibid.). Unlike most resolutions, these affirmations were offered by concerned laypeople, not by one of our church agencies.

General agency personnel sought to have the resolution superseded by a resolution for the 1988 General Conference deleting the specific affirmation of democracy. An attempt to amend the resolution by observing that “democratic systems of government best protect religious freedom” failed because opponents objected to “code words” and statements which “would play into the hands of those who have too narrow a definition of democracy” (Religion and Democracy, July 1988).

Sadly enough, the opposite is true. Our church leaders and publications in the last 30 years have shown little sympathy for the spread of democracy. By refusing to firmly and specifically critique communism—the system that has been energetically rejected in Eastern Europe today—United Methodists have been on the wrong side in the human struggle for freedom. The collapse of the Berlin Wall will occasion serious rethinking of international relationships and priorities. Some of that rethinking needs to take place among the leaders of the United Methodist Church.

Steve Beard is a United Methodist layman and a research assistant at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.