Former Reagan White House political director Jeffrey Lord took aim this week at the United Church of Christ, his own denomination, for the church’s "liberal politics" in an article for The American Spectator. By liberal, of course, he means the UCC’s stances on issues of war and peace, climate change and economic issues - positions grounded in the Gospels.
Lord actually compares the UCC to a dictatorship in his piece.
As with many hard-core left-wing institutions (think, say, Harvard and its tussle with ex-president Larry Summers or, increasingly, Vladimir Putin's Russia and his treatment of dissenters) there is the not inconsiderable whiff of a totalitarian mindset. Either you're with the liberal national UCC leadership - or you're against them. Discussion over.
Ironically, in his tirade against the UCC he lifts up one of the most important facets of our church: the rich diversity we share.
The saving grace of the UCC church, sometimes an understandably hard one for outsiders to discern, is that one of its central beliefs is the supremacy of the local church. This is another way of saying that while all sorts of statements and issues are trumpeted by the national church, local churches, unlike, say, those in the Catholic Church, are at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom.
Lord worships in a UCC church in Pennsylvania – a congregation he says doesn’t become involved in social / public policy issues. I don’t doubt that the people in his congregation are faithful worshipers. You don't have to be liberal to belong to the UCC (as witnessed by Lord's own membership in our church). But Lord himself rejects the covenantal nature of our denomination.
As I noted today on the blog Wide Open Thinking, the UCC Constitution states:
As members of the Body of Christ, each expression of the church is called to honor and respect the work and ministry of each other part. Each expression of the church listens, hears, and carefully considers the advice, counsel, and requests of others. In this covenant, the various expressions of the United Church of Christ seek to walk together in all God’s ways.
Reagan’s former aide shows no respect for other local UCC congregations or the national leadership and labels all who disagree with his positions as, well, communists. Either you're with him – or against him.
What Lord is unable to do is make a theological case for his charges. No surprise there.
It is tough to sell Jesus, the Prince of Peace, as a supporter of war or as an advocate for the kind of economic or environmental policies that Lord and The American Spectator champion (policies that push people into poverty and that increase global warming and thereby threaten God’s own creation). Lord gets it wrong when he compares the UCC to Russia. What the UCC seeks is to build up the Kingdom of God – and that is a cause that transcends partisan political politics.
Not to be outdone the Republican-Party aligned Institute on Religion and Democracy sent out a press release today with a quote from their spokesman, former CIA analyst Mark Tooley, stating:
The UCC embodies the dysfunction of declining, old-line Protestantism in America. Its elites, unaware or uninterested in the beliefs of average local church members, devote themselves to radical political causes instead of the traditional Gospel.
IRD is not a religious group. They are a political organization that often confuses the Republican Party platform with the Gospels.
Tooley, who also writes for the radical right website FrontPage Magazine, is such an extremist that a couple of years ago the KKK republished one of his articles attacking minorities. Last week IRD’s president testified before Congress that global warming wasn’t worth worrying about.
But if the UCC is on the decline it sure has a funny way of showing it. 10,000 local church members – from every corner of the country...blue state, red state, liberal, conservative – are attending our General Synod this year. More than ever before.
Our denomination has problems (no one would deny that) but numbers and dollars don’t reflect on the true test: faithful discipleship. In that department the United Church of Christ is doing quite well. We might not always take the popular course but we do try and walk the different paths God calls us to walk.
Related Link: A Conservative Crack-up at The American Spectator
