{"id":3311,"date":"2009-07-22T10:15:18","date_gmt":"2009-07-22T14:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=3311"},"modified":"2009-07-22T13:18:18","modified_gmt":"2009-07-22T17:18:18","slug":"missions-and-marxism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2009\/07\/missions-and-marxism\/","title":{"rendered":"Missions and Marxism"},"content":{"rendered":"

FrontPage Magazine<\/a> | Mark D. Tooley | July 22, 2009<\/p>\n

During the 1980\u2019s, United Methodist Church missionaries toiled in Nicaragua, not planting churches or winning souls, but flaking for the Sandinista experiment with Central American Marxism. Today, some of those missionaries have reemerged to agitate for Honduras\u2019 ousted leftist President Manuel Zelaya, whom the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court, with the military, removed for attempting unconstitutionally to prolong his presidency. <\/p>\n

Zelaya\u2019s \u201coverthrow was carried out in violation of Honduran law,\u201d and \u201cthose who today control the de facto government of Honduras have no legitimate right to do so,\u201d declared 36 United Methodist missionaries currently or previously in Latin America, in a public statement. Conspiratorially, they implored President Obama to investigate “any involvement of U.S. government-related agencies, including the International Republican Institute, in encouraging or preparing the rupture of the democratic process in Honduras.\u201d <\/p>\n

The independent IRI, along with its Democratic Party counterpart, receives U.S. Government funding to promote democracy overseas. The missionaries\u2019 reference to IRI is a little odd. But a World Council of Churches story about their pronouncement darkly recalls that IRI allegedly \u201csupported and trained opposition parties and leaders during a 2004 coup in Haiti,\u201d which sent radical ex-priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide into early retirement after his third time as president.<\/p>\n

“Given the long record of the U.S government in subverting genuine democracy throughout the region, it is important that your commitment to justice and democracy be reflected by the entire U.S. government,” the Methodists told Obama. They insisted he \u201ctake whatever diplomatic and economic steps are necessary\u201d to restore Zelaya to power.<\/p>\n

The missionaries commended Obama for having condemned the coup as \u201cillegal,\u201d while lamenting that the U.S. and others had \u201cfailed to restore democracy in Honduras, and the Honduran people have paid a heavy price, suffering from media censorship and other serious restrictions to their fundamental human liberties.\u201d They urged a \u201cprecedent throughout the region that democratically elected governments cannot be overthrown without a robust and timely regional response.\u201d<\/p>\n

For some of these missionaries, the interest in \u201chuman liberties\u201d and democracy is selective, as they spent years defiantly defending Sandinista tyranny in Nicaragua, despite its repression of political opposition, churches and independent media. Missionary signers Paul Jeffrey, Lyda Pierce, Howard and Peggy Heiner penned a different letter in 1985, addressed to their United Methodist bishops, decrying U.S. \u201caggression\u201d against the Sandinista regime, and claiming religious and political freedom in Nicaragua. They nonchalantly asserted: \u201cIf you are not a Contra [anti-Sandinista rebel] you don\u2019t have anything to worry about.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cWe witness no general repression of religion in Nicaragua today,\u201d the pro-Sandinista missionaries insisted then. \u201cThere is, however, repression of the right to commit treason.\u201d They even condemned \u201csome sectors\u201d of the Nicaraguan religious community, including the Roman Catholic hierarchy, for having \u201cabused their freedoms of religion and speech to actively work in support of the counterrevolution.\u201d The Methodists faulted these defiant religious counterrevolutionaries for failing to \u201cregister\u201d publications and \u201cmisrepresenting draft evaders\u201d as seminarians. Religious leftists evidently support the draft, and oppose conscientious objection, when the military is upholding Marxism! The missionaries also defended the Sandinista imprisonment of several Protestant pastors who had supposedly urged breaking the law by \u201cnot complying with the Patriotic Military Service,\u201d which is \u201csimilarly illegal\u201d in the U.S. The pastors denied the allegation, but naturally the missionaries believed the Sandinista claims.<\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FrontPage Magazine | Mark D. Tooley | July 22, 2009 During the 1980\u2019s, United Methodist Church missionaries toiled in Nicaragua, not planting churches or winning souls, but flaking for the Sandinista experiment with Central American Marxism. Today, some of those missionaries have reemerged to agitate for Honduras\u2019 ousted leftist President Manuel Zelaya, whom the Honduran … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[65,72,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communism","category-leftism","category-religious-left"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}