 For the record  The Layman Volume 37, Number 5, Posted December 28, 2004
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. |
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