The National Council of Churches has had a rough ride in recent months with its Orthodox Christian constituency. The Antiochian jurisdiction has formally pulled out, citing a politicized agenda, and the Orthodox Church in America, which traces its roots to the Russian church, has been debating a similar move.
In an article on Front Page magazine, Rev. Johannes Jacobse takes a detailed look at the hard-left politics of the NCC and its long history of supporting communist despots. In “United Churches of Castro,” Fr. Hans, the editor of OrthodoxyToday.org, writes about the NCC’s track record of supporting “liberation” movements all over the world:
Like many of its left-wing counterparts, the NCC displayed a slavish devotion to Marxist ideas and anti-American cant. It strove to become the official dispenser of religious respectability to those who adopted either. Dispensing respectability made NCC bureaucrats feel important and offered the rationale that justified the NCC’s existence.
“Liberation Theology” was the dominant fad in the late 1960’s and 1970’s – a patchwork of ideas that claimed that the Christian obligation to care for the poor was synonymous with Marxist social dogma. Liberation Theology dressed Marxist ideas in the Christian moral lexicon convincing gullible activists that Christ was really a crypto-Marxist. The ideology swept through the religious left like wildfire. The NCC was front and center.
When he was hired to run the NCC in 1999, Rev. Bob Edgar said he had “no issue” with the group’s history. And what is the NCC doing today to further the goal of Christian unity? It is organizing opposition to the Iraq war, camping out with Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Texas, opposing private Social Security accounts, stumping for the Kyoto protocol, etc., etc.
