by Mark Tooley | 4\/20\/2010<\/p>\n
America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201copenness and growing self- confidence\u201d and by urging a \u201cnew trust and compassion throughout the world.\u201d They also warned against the imposition of Eastern or Western value systems, as though the two were morally equal. <\/p>\n
East German United Methodist Bishop Rudigor Minor assured his fellow prelates that East Germans would not exchange communism for West German capitalism\u2019s \u201csociety of sharp elbows\u201d and would instead prefer a \u201cnew democratic socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat people [in East Germany] are seeking is not a return to capitalism,\u201d Bishop Minor insisted. \u201cThey are looking for something beyond the old dichotomy between capitalism and communism.\u201d Agreeing with the East German bishop was World Council of Churches Central Committee member Janice Love, who was attending the bishops\u2019 gathering. \u201cBecause of the events in the USSR and Eastern Europe, there appears to be a new-found triumphalism about capitalism that I find to be uncritical, unwarranted and chauvinistic,\u201d she fretted.<\/p>\n
Love seemed to regret there is \u201cgreater cynicism than ever before about socialist forms of organization, some of which is justified, some not.\u201d She also suggested \u201cmore creative work needs to be done on alternative economic futures for ourselves in the United States as well as other parts of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few months after the bishops\u2019 gathering in the U.S., Bishop Minor was still hoping that Marxism was not dead. \u201cAs critics, I think Marxists are still relevant,\u201d he opined. \u201cMarxism has insights into power that we can learn from.\u201d Minor asserted that capitalism\u2019s critique of \u201ccompetition structures\u201d was still valid. \u201cChristians need to be seriously concerned about capitalism\u2019s profit-maximizing at the expense of the Third World,\u201d he warned. And the bishop suggested that \u201cperhaps the utopian element in Marxism is still worth talking about\u201d among Christians. Still, Minor admitted that East German Marxism had been \u201cshamefully bad\u201d and a \u201cflop.\u201d<\/p>\n
Minor\u2019s partial criticism of Soviet Bloc communism came only after the Berlin Wall\u2019s fall. Himself having lived under the former communist regime, he can perhaps be excused for the reticence. But mainline Protestant and ecumenical officials as a whole, in the U.S. and throughout the West, were largely silent throughout the 1970s and 1980s about communist repression in East Europe and the old Soviet Union. This silence was accompanied by loud and aggressive human rights activism aimed at rightist dictatorships in Latin America and Asia, as well as apartheid South Africa. This double standard left little rationale for Religious Left celebration when East Bloc communism fell.<\/p>\n
After the fall, there were some reluctantly expressed public regrets and defensiveness about the Religious Left\u2019s preference for supposedly \u201cquiet diplomacy\u201d with the old East Bloc regimes, especially by groups like the Swiss-based World Council of Churches (WCC). In 1990, WCC chief Emilio Castro admitted that his group \u201cdidn\u2019t speak strongly enough, that is clear. That is the price we thought we needed to pay in order to help the human rights situation inside Romania.\u201d<\/p>\n
Romanian protestant Pastor Laszlo Tokes helped spark some of the 1989 protests against Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu that precipitated his overthrow. Barely months after Ceausescu\u2019s fall, Tokes publicly complained \u201cthere was a refusal [by Western church groups] to present the true conditions of churches in Romania and a pretension that in our country everything is fine, [that] the churches perform their mission in peace and freedom.\u201d He was mostly targeting the WCC and also the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.<\/p>\n
Under communism, Romanian government-controlled church officials succeeded in \u201cmisleading their sister churches and the public opinion of the ecumenical movement abroad,\u201d Tokes decried. These clerics were \u201cdeeply intertwined with state policy structure, and under the label of ecumenism successfully represented the direct interest of an inhuman, ungodly and oppressive regime \u2013 all at the expense of their own believers.\u201d<\/p>\n
In early 1990, the Romanian Orthodox Church publicly expressed \u201cregret that under the dictatorship some of us may not always have shown the courage of the martyrs, and have not publicly acknowledged the hidden pain and suffering of the Romanian people.\u201d The church statement apologized for \u201cpaying the obligatory tribute of artificial praise to the dictator.\u201d<\/p>\n
This apology from the Romanian Orthodox Church was more candid than any initial regrets emitted from the WCC. Emilio Castro claimed the WCC refrained from public critique of commu- nism to spare Eastern European Christians from communist reprisals. \u201cWhat do we need to repent of if we were trying to help the Romanian people?\u201d he rhetorically asked. \u201cLet us confess our wrongness, but let us not go beyond that.\u201d A 1990 WCC Central Committee statement regretted \u201cmistaken judgment in failing to speak adequately\u201d about Romania, but rejected a proposed stronger apology. The WCC\u2019s Assembly in 1991 tersely admitted that, after recent events, \u201cthe limits to bureaucratic control have become clearly visible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Newly installed National Council of Churches chief Joan Brown Campbell was more candid in 1993. \u201cWe did not understand the depth of the suffering of Christians under communism. We failed to…cry out under the communist oppression.\u201d Many years later, former WCC chief Konrad Raiser similarly confessed that the WCC should have spoken out on behalf of human rights in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile being aware of the situation and basically sympathetic to their struggle, the WCC gave priority attention to the struggles against racism and for justice and liberation in the southern countries,\u201d Raiser announced in 2004, a year after leaving the WCC. \u201cIn retrospect, it would appear that the ecumenical organizations have not sufficiently recognized\u2014at least at the official level\u2014the historic legitimacy and the political potential of the dissident movements in the Communist countries.\u201d The WCC had \u201ctried to break through the Iron Curtain and to include the churches in Communist countries in the ecumenical movement,\u201d Raiser explained. But \u201cin place of prophetic protest, the ecumenical movement concentrated on bridge- building and cooperation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former chief of the Conference of European Churches John Arnold, also speaking in 2004, insisted that church groups like his had made contacts and wanted to keep open lines of communication across the so-called Iron Curtain, when few others could. Supposedly, the ecumenical movement was for East European church groups \u201ca lifeline and oxygen supply combined, and the only means of engaging in public issues other than by simply supporting the \u2018peace policies\u2019 of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arnold did acknowledge that the admission of East European Orthodox Churches into ecumenical councils in the 1960s did \u201cradically change the ethos\u201d of the WCC. \u201cIts focus of concern shifted away from Europe to the Third World, and this was skillfully exploited by representatives of the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) to sideline or at least \u2018relativize\u2019 the concern felt in many western European churches for persecuted Christians and dissidents,\u201d he said. \u201cI prefer to say simply, \u2018No, we did not do enough.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
A strong example of \u201cnot enough\u201d was the 1975 WCC Assembly, which diluted a proposed expression of solidarity with persecuted East Bloc religious believers into an innocuous recognition that \u201cchurches in different parts of Europe are living and working under very different conditions and traditions.\u201d Soviet Bloc Orthodox clerics successfully argued for the dilution. The 1983 WCC Assembly also obligingly spoke of \u201ccollective human rights,\u201d in deference to regime-controlled East Bloc delegates, who resented any potential reference to Western style human rights.<\/p>\n
Many Western church group contacts with communist-directed East Bloc church groups were influenced by the Prague-based Soviet front Christian Peace Conference (CPC), whose officials actively participated in the WCC. The CPC\u2019s U.S. affiliate was Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe (CAREE), which operated as a division of the National Council of Churches, and whose coordinator was often salaried by U.S. denominations. CAREE defended the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and obligingly supported Soviet Bloc strategic goals throughout the 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n
No doubt under CAREE\u2019s influence, the NCC issued virtually no statements of concern about human rights or religious liberty about Eastern Europe during the 1970s or 1980s. One exception was a careful criticism of Poland\u2019s 1981 martial law, which an NCC official balanced with a warning that the U.S. not \u201cuse Poland as a pawn in our superpower conflicts Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Business Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, Encounter, 2008 with the Soviet Union.\u201d In 1977, the NCC criticized the \u201charsh sentences\u201d imposed by the Czechoslovak communist regime against human rights activists.<\/p>\n
Silence about communist repression in the East Bloc by Western mainline Protestant and ecumenical groups was possibly motivated partly by concern for reprisals against East Bloc churches by their regimes. This same concern, of course, did not deter Western church groups from condemning rightist regimes. More pervasively, left-leaning Western church groups did not want to critique Marxism, especially during the high tide of Liberation Theology, which tried to merge Christianity with Marxist class struggle. Nor did they want to disrupt disarmament initiatives or hopes for coexistence with the East Bloc, which the church groups more highly prized than human rights or religious freedom.<\/p>\n
When East Bloc communism imploded, these same Western church groups were simply too embarrassed or emotionally incapable of celebrating the downfall of a system to which they had never strongly objected. Over time, some Religious Left clerics reluctantly admitted error, especially as they were confronted by former East Bloc Christians now free to speak candidly. But the Religious Left has learned very little, as it continues to apologize for remaining Marxist regimes in North Korea and Cuba.<\/p>\n
Communism\u2019s collapse did further discredit the Religious Left, and the political witness of mainline Protestantism and ecumenical groups like the WCC and NCC has arguably, and thankfully, never quite recovered from the events of 1989-1990.<\/p>\n
HT: Acton<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Mark Tooley | 4\/20\/2010 America\u2019s 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 … 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":[65,142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communism","category-leftist-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4437","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=4437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}