Prominent Church Alliance Accused of Secular Backing
WASHINGTON – A well-known church group headed by a former Democratic congressman is accused of receiving the majority of its financial support from left-leaning secular groups rather than its church members.
The conservative Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy confronted the National Council of Churches – a New York-based alliance of 35 Christian denominations – for abandoning its mission to promote Christian unity and instead seeking funds from liberal groups.
“Several of these [non-church] groups that the NCC has turned to for financial and other forms of support are so blatantly partisan that they can be accurately described as … the shadow Democratic Party,” said the report’s main researcher, John Lomperis, according to The Washington Post on Thursday.
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Lomperis said that during NCC board meetings that he attended, he was “surprised” at the Council’s discussion of receiving grants from secular and leftist groups such as MoveOn.org, the National Education Association, the Ford Foundation, and the philanthropies of billionaires George Soros and Ted Turner – both atheists, reported AgapePress.
"At the NCC's Spring 2004 board meeting," Lomperis said, "no one expressed any disagreement or even words of caution when one board member exhorted the Council to actually alter its programming in order to appeal to such non-church benefactors.”
Both NCC and IRD call themselves nonpartisan.
IRD released a 90-page report titled, “Strange Yokefellows: The National Council of Churches and its Growing Non-Church Constituency,” on Wednesday. The report was authored by Lomperis and IRD vice president Alan Wisdom.
According to the report, in the fiscal year ending June 2005, the Council received $1.76 million from secular foundations and non-church groups, exceeding the $1.75 million it received from member churches.
The report noted that the enrolled membership in mainline Protestant denomination has decreased from 17 percent of the U.S. population in 1950 to 7 percent, and that only six of the Council’s top 16 current funders are church groups.
Wisdom said at the press conference that NCC no longer represents the views of the 45 million Christians in its member church, according to The Washington Post.
The report’s authors were joined by other conservative Protestants leaders – Methodists, Presbyterians, and Orthodox – who supported the reports findings.
John Reeves, pastor of Holy Trinity Orthodox Church in State College, Pa., said NCC did not seek to advocate for Christian unity, but instead for “political and social agendas antithetical to orthodox, moral standards – especially in the areas of abortion and homosexuality," according to AgapePress.
“The position of the Orthodox church is unequivocal," said Reeves, "that both abortion and homosexual relations distort the image of God in human beings and are contrary to the clear, consistent teachings of our church throughout two millennia of Christian history."
The Council concentrates on issues such as reducing poverty, Iraq policies, cloning, global warming, Darfur, and interfaith events, among others.
NCC general secretary Bob Edgar – a six-term member of the U.S. House of Representative from Pennsylvania and a Methodist minister – openly supports same-sex “marriage.”
Edgar, who although was present at the news conference, did not speak, according to The Washington Post. He did, however, shake hands with the report’s authors afterward and thank them for recognizing that he turned around the finance of the Council, which was at a $5.9 million deficit when he came to office in 2000.
Edgar, 63, will step down as head of the NCC at the end of the year.
The Institute on Religion and Democracy, founded in 1981 to challenge the “leftist” political and social leanings of mainline Protestant denominations, is opposed to same-sex unions and aligned with conservative groups.
