Renewal or Ruin

Although they have been active since the early 1980s, until a few months ago I had never heard of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. After I came across Culver and Dorhauer’s book Steeplejacking, I blogged about issues related to the IRD several times. Despite this, what I saw tonight was still an eye-opener.

Tonight we watched Steven D. Martin‘s documentary Renewal of Ruin? The Institute on Religion and Democracy’s Attack on the United Methodist Church (I was also impressed with his Theologians Under Hitler). I thought the film was done well, and was quite effective – it consisted of a series of interviews both with people in the United Methodist Church and others who have fallen afoul of the IRD. As Martin said at Talk To Action:

Interviewees in this ground breaking film include: Talk to Action co-founder Frederick Clarkson; Columbia University Professor Randall Balmer, United Methodist Bishops Beverly Shamana and Kenneth Carder, Talk to Action writer and prolific author Andrew Weaver; Jim Naughton of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, and Jim Winkler of the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society (an agency the IRD aims to dismantle). Many others served as consultants, critics and advisors as I brought the film to fruition.

From reading Culver and Dorhauer I learned about the way the IRD operates against the UCC. In the UCC, each congregation owns its own property. In the connectional UMC, the church owns the property. Consequently, the tactics are different. But more than that, the prizes are different as well. The mainline Protestant churches have been major vehicles for social justice – they played an important role in the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements in the US. Thus, it is politically important for the right wing to neutralise them. Major targets in the UMC have been the United Methodist Women and the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society. Overall, the IRD has been immensely successful – several of the interviewees used the term “intimidated”. Jim Winkler (of the General Board of Church and Society) says he was “stalked” by the IRD.

Part of the mission of the IRD has been to change the governance structures of the mainline churches. As was pointed out in the documentary, the IRD has mounted a campaign against the democratically governed churches, not those without democratic governance systems (like the Catholic Church). In typical Orwellian doublespeak, an organisation with “democracy” in its name appears to be seeking to undermine the democratic governance of these institutions.

While the tactics of the IRD are highly distasteful (attracting, in at least one case, solidarity from a Ku Klux Klan group), it is on the issue of funding where things get especially bad. As Jim Naughton wrote:

Contributions from Ahmanson and the Bradley, Coors, Olin, Scaife and Smith-Richardson family foundations have frequently accounted for more than half of the operating budgets of the American Anglican Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, according to an examination of forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service and an analysis of statements made by both donors and recipients.

Naughton’s two-part series, Following the Money is well worth the read (part 1; part 2).

Update: A few ground rules.  To begin with, make sure your comments don’t impute things about the mental health of others that you cannot support with documentation.  I’m responsible for the posts here, and while I don’t believe in censorship, I don’t see any reason to tolerate what looks like libel to me.  Please read my post before you comment on what “I said”.  Ditto for Culver & Dorhauer’s book.  If you feel the need to comment on what they said, you should really read their book.  It’s pretty obvious that most people criticising the book didn’t.  And, one more thing.  Try coming up with something original to say.  Don’t just repeat the IRD talking points.  Not to mention, if you really want to talk about Culver & Dorhauer’s book, why not start a discussion at one of my posts related to their book?  I’m fascinated by what you have to say about Renewal or Ruin?  Or has the IRD not come out with anti-Martin talking points yet?  And say something original – we’ve heard the IRD talking points already.

The value of speaking up

While I found Culver and Dorhauer’s book Steeplejacking to be very disturbing, it also has an element of hope – both in the story of a church that was saved from steeplejacking, and in the idea that, but getting the word out, it was possible to avert some of these tragedies. The IRD, it would appear, sees matters the same way, and has done its best to discredit the book.

In a recent post at Talk2Action Dorhauer details how a church group managed to avoid steeplejacking by a pastor trained in a Presbyterian Church in America* seminary. In an email to Culver, one of the people involved in resisting the attempt wrote:

They were using your book as their “bible” for helping them through this take over. They discovered last night how dishonest their pastor, their (Covenant Sem) minister has been and is. He even appeared at our clergy group this past Wednesday and was met with good strong confrontation by several of our clergy. (I was at lectionary and didn’t make that mtg.) YOUR BOOK HAS BEEN A GREAT HELP TO THEM TO SEE WHAT HAS & IS GOING ON

The rest of the story (as told in Dorhauer’s article) is equally disturbing – of a UCC pastor being physically ejected from the church for trying to answer attacks on an UCC seminary, of attacks being spread through church mailings, all sorts of awful happenings. It has got to be terribly traumatic to a congregation to have to go through something like this. But it’s great that Culver and Dorhauer have given congregations a tool to see “what hit them”, and a chance to resist.

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*The Presbyterian Church in America is a right-wing church which split from the mainline Presbyterian Church in 1973 over theological and social issues; according to the Wikipedia article:

According to the PCA’s official website, it “separated from the PCUS in opposition to the long-developing theological liberalism which denied the deity of Jesus Christ and inerrancy and authority of Scripture.” Additionally, the PCA espoused a complementarian interpretation of Scripture regarding the matter of women in church offices, excluding them from the offices of elder and deacon, whereas the PCUS had begun accepting the ordination of women over a decade earlier. According to PCUS author Rick Nutt, a less explicitly stated motive that was likely also influential in some quarters was the dissatisfaction with the PCUS’s general opposition to the Vietnam War and support of the civil rights movement and the Equal Rights Amendment.^[3]

Answering the far-right

John Dorhauer replies to criticisms levelled by IRD employee Steve Rempe in his review of Steeplejacking. Dorhauer answers Rempe’s accusations quite effectively by quoting from IRD documents, and concludes that either:

If Rempe is still unclear about how the IRD is infiltrating our churches, then it means he has not been included in these internal discussions, or has not been invited to the semi-annual invitation-only training events. More likely it is the case that he knows and is betting on the prospect that I don’t know, you don’t know, and we couldn’t possibly be resourceful enough to find this stuff out; or having found it couldn’t possibly be smart enough to figure out what their plain language really means.

Rempe also complains about Dorhauer’s characterisation of the issued used by the IRD to infiltrate congregations as “wedge issues”. Of course, IRD characterises these as “positive proactive initiatives that unite traditional religious believers and discredit the Religious Left.” In other words – wedge issues. Of course, not Ahmanson-funded group ever wants to be associated with “wedges” – not after the damage that was done to the Discovery Institute after their Wedge Strategy for intelligent design was leaked (the DI is another Ahmanson project).

Right-wing backlash

As I mentioned previously, I found Culver and Dorhauser’s book Steeplejacking to be both highly informative and deeply disturbing. Most importantly – it was effective. It was well-written, and it did a good job of conveying the threat to mainline churches. It also sheds light on the actions of the neo-conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy an organisation that is probably most effective when it remains in the shadows.

Unsurprisingly, this has has prompted backlash by the IRD. Also unsurprisingly, the IRD smears have been uncritically parroted by other rightwingers. Frederick Clarkson has documented two of these smears by the IRD – one last week, and now a new one. Clarkson reports that both of these are highly inaccurate attack pieces. Hopefully it says that Steeplejacking is having the desired effect. An organisation founded by rightwing Catholics and funded by the ultra-rich (including the Scaifes and the Ahmansons) that campaigns to destroy mainline churches for doing the mission that Jesus gave to the church… Well, you’d think they’d want to keep their role as low-key as possible.

For more details, see Talk to Action’s Shadow War On Mainline Churches section.

More Steeplejacking

I have always had immense respect for the United Church of Christ. I love their Marriage Equality position and their history of openness. And this is why I find the book Steeplejacking so distressing.

Culver and Dorhauser discuss the development of the Institute on Religion and Democracy from the early 1980s when it accused pastors of supporting communism, through the 90s when it accused them of supporting “radical feminism” and abortion, to the present day when its wedge issue is homosexuality (so why haven’t they been targeting Ted Haggard?)

They describe “steeplejacking” as the takeover of churches by small groups who divide the membership, often alienating everyone but a core group. As UCC clergy they focus on congregations in their own denomination. Since UCC congregations own their own property, they are both vulnerable to steeplejacking, and they are rich prizes. In denominations like the United Methodist Church, where property belongs to the denomination itself, steeplejacking is a less viable strategy. Instead, there is a movement to split the United Methodist Church itself.

This is all deeply disturbing. I would probably be a little sceptical of their assertions if this was the first time I was hearing this, but it isn’t. There appears to be an organised campaign against the mainline Protestant churches, and one that originates not within the churches, but from outside. But then…what do you expect of the “religious” right?

“Doing the Lord’s work is a thread that runs through our politics since the very beginning,” Barack Obama told an Iowa crowd on Saturday — but added the important distinction that religion should be used to bring people together for good causes, not to divide. “It got hijacked,” Obama said. “Part of it is because the so-called leaders of the Christian right are all too eager to exploit what divides us.”

(From Sioux City Journal, via Talk to Action.)

Steeplejacking

I was chilled when I first heard of the Institute on Religion and Democracy a few months ago. As Charles Currie said:

IRD, as a refresher, is a conservative political group set-up in the early 1980s by Republican activists who aimed to silence Christian voices opposed to the Reagan administration’s foreign and domestic policies. The group is funded by extremists such as Richard Mellon Scaife. Their ongoing goal: to actually take over mainline churches, silence those prophetic voices still speaking out against war and economic injustice, and to use the resources of Christian churches to promote the conservative political agenda.

In their new book Steeplejacking, United Church of Christ ministers John Dorhauer and Sheldon Culver document the organised right-wing movement to eliminate progressive voices in mainline churches. The preface, written by Michelle Goldberg, has been posted at Talk To Action.

I was thrilled to discover progressive Christianity and St. Stephen’s. I was aware that the deep divisions around the issue of homosexuality (including gay ordination, gay marriage and even church membership in some cases) in the United Methodist Church (especially as a supporter of the Reconciling Movement in the UMC). What I find very disturbing is the existence of an external organisation, funded by people like Scaife family and Howard Ahmanson, working against the progressive movement in the church.

“Of course, it goes a little further than that. There was a period of time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich…I don’t know what Bible they are reading,” Obama said, as the crowd applauded. “Didn’t jive with my version.”

(From Radio Iowa, via Talk to Action.)