Parker T. Williamson
editor-in-chief
Presbyterians were shocked to learn that a delegation from our
denomination, funded by General Assembly per capita and mission budgets,
made a courtesy call on Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that has
maimed and killed civilians in pursuit of its cause. There should have
been no surprise.
Remember the grant that our denomination made through the World Council
of Churches to guerrilla fighters in Rhodesia? Recipients of that grant
shot a missionary plane out of the sky and slaughtered several
survivors. Today, Robert Mugabe, the thug who led that revolution with
the support of $85,000 from Presbyterian Church offering plates, has
devastated a once-thriving economy, ruined productive farm land, turned
his people against one another, tortured journalists, destabilized the
region, and engendered widespread starvation and misery. Understandably,
denominational headquarters would like to forget its role in enthroning
such tyranny, but the record is indelible. Presbyterian fingerprints are
all over Mugabe.
During the cold war, KBG agents in Eastern Europe forged an alliance
with the World Council of Churches. That unholy alliance persecuted
Christian pastors in Hungary when they would not accommodate their
Reformed faith to Marxist ideology. After the Soviet Union fell, KGB
documents confirmed the complicity. Confronted with the evidence, World
Council leaders expressed their regret for having backed the
persecutors. But Clifton Kirkpatrick and other PCUSA representatives who
were fully involved in those WCC policies have never admitted the part
they played in this demonstrable evil.
In Nicaragua, PCUSA officials supported a ruthless dictator, Daniel
Ortega, and his Soviet-backed Sandinistas. For years our General
Assembly Council sponsored “peacemaking” tours of Nicaragua, a
virtual propaganda machine for a man who routinely gagged his opponents
using police-state brutality. When Ortega was finally forced to allow
free and internationally monitored elections, PCUSA mission workers
aligned themselves with his campaign. Ortega was rejected by his people,
while loud lamentations and expressions of disbelief resounded at PCUSA
headquarters.
In Cuba, PCUSA officials have participated in National Council of
Churches delegations that applaud the Castro regime. Clifton Kirkpatrick
has posed for photo ops with Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, Cuban Christians
rot in prison. Prisoners who have escaped testify to the grief they
experienced when guards showed them pictures of U.S. church delegations
posing with Castro and assuring the world that there was freedom in the
land.
Repeatedly, PCUSA leaders have refused to criticize the North Korean
government for starving its people and denying them fundamental human
rights. Such blindness is inexplicable given the evidence of North Korea’s
atrocities that has poured in from Amnesty International and other
respected international monitors. But the PCUSA is not merely silent
about this regime. With the National Council of Churches, it has
consistently defended North Korea, while criticizing South Korea and the
United States and demanding that UN peacekeeping troops be withdrawn
from the DMZ.
The
faux de jour that has caused the current uproar is the
recent peacemaking caucus with Hezbollah. But Presbyterians would be
well advised to remember that this endorsement of a terrorist group is
merely one in a long list of international misadventures. Taken
together, they reveal that at the very core of the PCUSA infrastructure
(two fired senior staff members are only the tip of the iceberg) is a
lockstep commitment to liberation theology. Since the 1960s,
denominational policies and leaders have romanticized Third World
revolutionaries and declared that the gospel is all about overthrowing
unjust socio-economics.
There is no “theos” in liberation theology. It is, at best,
an intellectually discredited sociology that fails the most elementary
tests of observation and logic. Such foolishness would be laughable were
it not for its consequences in human misery.
Over the years,
The Layman has reported these events to
Presbyterians in the pews, hoping that our readers would recognize a
pattern. What is happening at PCUSA headquarters is not merely an
ineptitude in international politics, but a commitment to a false faith.
That realization is the basis of the Presbyterian Lay Committee’s
Declaration
of Conscience in which we suggest that blank-check giving to
Louisville can no longer be justified.
A column by Parker T. Williamson, chief executive officer of the
Presbyterian Lay Committee and editor in chief of its publications.