National Council of Churches Promotes Communist Agenda

5/26/2010 – Faith McDonnell -
Conducting “truth commissions” to denounce American armed forces and organizing divestment campaigns to cripple Israel are vital issues to some American church officials. Raising the banner of Intifada and expressing solidarity with Palestinians are also very important to this collection of liberal leaders. They “spiritualize” the Democratic immigration and health care reform agendas with pompous prayer, but their social justice-focused prophetic vision has strange blind spots. Leftist church leaders hardly ever see, let alone condemn, the imprisonment, enslavement, torture, and murder of Christians in the Islamic world, North Korea, and China.

Church officials and partner organizations such as the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) issue strident policy statements on such topics as “eco-justice,” broadband access for “economically depressed rural areas,” the Israeli “occupation,” and “unnecessary Department of Defense spending.” But one is hard-pressed to find these church leaders denouncing the recent appointment of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. One searches in vain for an expression of solidarity with the Christian community in Jos, Plateau State, in central Nigeria, where hundreds of Christians were slaughtered by Fulani jihadists during March and April of 2010. If there are any such statements, they address vaguely “ethnic conflict” and are masterpieces of moral equivalency. more »

by Mark Tooley | 4/20/2010

America’s Religious Left, having invested decades in dialogue with and advocating accommodation of the Soviet Bloc, was flummoxed and uncelebratory about the momentous collapse of East European Communism in 1989-1990.

The United Methodist Council of Bishops, representing 9 million church members in the U.S. were actually in session when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. They reacted by blandly commending the East Germans for their “openness and growing self- confidence” and by urging a “new trust and compassion throughout the world.” They also warned against the imposition of Eastern or Western value systems, as though the two were morally equal. more »

FrontPageMag | Mark D. Tooley | Apr. 3, 2008

Was it really an April Fools trick or did the World Council of Churches (WCC) actually admit that Christians in Islamist Sudan endure some unpleasantness? According to an April 1 report from the WCC news service, a WCC delegation recently visited Khartoum and was “shocked” to learn that a Christian cemetery in the nation’s capital is also being used as a used car lot. more »

FrontPageMag | Mark D. Tooley | Feb. 21, 2008

The imploding National Council of Churches (NCC) is always flailing about for a new raison d’etre. This month, it took its Global Warming alarmism to Northern Ireland , where it hopes that fears about a climate catastrophe will “inform the peace and reconciliation process.” Even First Minister Ian Paisley, the once firebrand Ulsterman who is now an elderly pillar of the Ulster peace settlement, met with the ecclesiastical busybodies. more »

FrontPage Mag | Mark D. Tooley | Feb. 7, 2008

In a remarkable January 22 letter, the head of the World Council of Churches (WCC) exclusively denounced Israel for the crisis in Gaza while avoiding all mention of Hamas’ misrule and its firing of Qassam rockets into Israeli border towns. Naturally, Kobia did not mention Egypt’s having joined Israel in its partial embargo against Gaza since Hamas’s June 2007 putsch there against the Palestinian Authority. more »

FrontPageMagazine.com | Mark D. Tooley | September 10, 2007

At its recent convention in Chicago, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) honored the National Council of Churches’ top interfaith official with its “Interfaith Unity Award.”

Undoubtedly, the award was well deserved! The NCC, like most of the Religious Left, defends or accommodates radical Islam, even as it denounces “fundamentalist” Christianity and condemns Israel. Despite the Religious Left’s support for liberal social causes like same-sex unions and abortion rights, it prefers the supporters of Islamic “Sharia” law to Christians or Jews who might sometimes vote Republican.

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Ed. (Jacobse) The religious left is at it again.

FrontPageMagazine.com | Mark D. Tooley | July 31, 2007

Muslim Groups in the U.S. have joined with left-wing Protestants and Catholics in planning an “interfaith fast” on the upcoming “day officially known as ‘Columbus Day,’” according to fast organizers. Called “From Conquest to Community, From Violence to Reverence: An Interfaith Fast to End the War in Iraq,” the day of October 8, 2007 will conveniently synchronize with Islam’s “Night of Power” during Ramadan.

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Townhall.com Janice Shaw Crouse April 17, 2007

Jim Wallis has devoted his whole career to trying to force the round peg of leftist ideology into the square hole of biblical orthodoxy. When he wrote his “vision” designed to “transcend” the ideologies of the religious left and right, he ended up further polarizing instead of unifying the two evangelical movements. He rails against the “political language” of the right as well as the tendency of conservative evangelicals, in his opinion, to claim their use of scripture as authoritative. In so doing, Wallis hoists himself on his own petard.

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Acton’s Jordan Ballor jumps on the NCC’s silly “eco-justice” objections to bottled water

The IRD criticism of the NCC (discussed here earlier) is getting some good discussion at the Get Religion blog.

The Institute on Religion and Democracy released their report Yokefellows that examines the funding sources for the National Council of Churches (NCC). It’s not pretty. The Tides Foundation and other leftwing groups contribute a good chunk of change. Read the Executive Summary.

I got an advance copy a month or so ago. Read my comments.

FrontPageMagazine.com Mark D. Tooley September 29, 2006

The head of the U.S. National Council of Churches (NCC) has a burden on his heart for prison inmates…if they are former al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives at Guantanamo Bay.

In his www.middlechurch.net blog, NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar records his chagrin that the U.S. government has denied his request for a visit with the Gitmo prisoners.

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NCC PRESIDENT URGES COMMUNICATORS, TAKE ON ‘FALSE RELIGION’

New York, March 30, 2006–The president of the National Council of
Churches, the Rev. Michael Livingston, strongly urged church
communicators to, “Tell our story. By any means necessary.”

“Mainline Protestant and Orthodox churches have been pounded
into irrelevancy by the media machine of a false religion,” Livingston
said. He described what passes as religion to be, “a political
philosophy masquerading as gospel; an economic principle wrapped in
religious rhetoric and painted red, white and blue.”

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Ed. Peace activists are rescued by the military they disdain. I hope they have the decency to thank the men and women in uniform who risked their lives to save them. Who best exemplifies Christian sacrifice here — the soldier or the activist?

New York Times Christine Hauser

Three Western peace workers who were held hostage in Iraq for four months were freed in a military operation today, two weeks after their American colleague was killed in captivity.

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Baltimore Sun Cal Thomas March 15, 2006

ARLINGTON, VA. — The death of “peace activist” Tom Fox, and the threatened execution of the three others held with him in Iraq, is doubly tragic.

It is tragic whenever an innocent person is murdered. It is also tragic because the likelihood that the presence of Mr. Fox and his colleagues would change the attitude or behavior of their captors was zero to none.

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