Can the WCC get on course?
WCC thinking is a revolutionary doctrine indistinguishable from current Marxist concepts.
Between Amsterdam 1948 and Nairobi 1975 the World Council of Churches has shown an increasing interest in the problems and demands of the Third World. In [doing so, it] has moved from a largely Western concept of political responsibility to a more radical ideology that by 1975 embraced the concept and practice of “liberation theology.”
In its early years the WCC advocated creating “the responsible society” by peaceful, democratic, and constitutional means. Gradually this gave way to a qualified approval of violent and revolutionary change in the Third World, and in several cases even support for terrorist groups. Western political norms were replaced, at least in part, by an ideology that laid the chief blame for the ills of the Third World on the sins of the West, particularly the United States—its foreign policy and its transnational corporations. At the 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society, WCC thinking on “rapid social change” was transformed into a revolutionary doctrine that became most dramatically evident in the Program to Combat Racism.
In diagnosis and prescription, the WCC’s liberation theology is strikingly similar to current Marxist concepts. The positions the WCC has taken in some controversial situations have been indistinguishable from those taken in Moscow or Havana. The most dramatic example is the “humanitarian” grants to the two Marxist-led guerrilla groups in the latter part of 1978: $85,000 to the so-called Patriotic Front, which was seeking to shoot its way into power in Rhodesia, and $125,000 to SWAPO, which was fighting toward the same objective in South West Africa—both against interim interracial regimes. There were three reasons for this concurrence in the perspectives of the WCC and the Marxists: (1) The WCC’s almost obsessive concern with “white racism” tended to blind it to all other factors in the situation. (2) The WCC leaders tended to find Marxist “solutions” to racism more convincing than peaceful, constitutional, and democratic approaches. (3) WCC leaders persisted in seeing a radically changed racial-political situation in obsolete and nonfactual terms. Hence, the Rhodesian and South West African cases in 1978 are full of irony: the issue was no longer race or racism but rather how power was to be transferred and what policies the new majority regime was likely to pursue. In the real world the net effect of these WCC grants was to support guerrillas who sought to install by terror a minority authoritarian regime against the parties that were vying for power by democratic and constitutional means.
Another point of concurrence between the WCC and the Marxists was Vietnam. The WCC’s (1966) Geneva Conference said U.S. military action to defend South Vietnam against aggression from the North “cannot be justified” but was only mildly critical of that aggression itself, which it called “the military infiltration of the South by the North.”
The concurrence of the WCC and the Marxists on certain Third World issues does not mean that the WCC leaders were Marxists. It does suggest, however, that these leaders found Marxist analyses of the cause and cure of such problems more convincing than the more gradual, democratic, and peaceful approaches. One reason for this is the dogged determination of many religious leaders in an increasingly secular society to seek to recapture moral authority, if not headlines, by running with the radical-chic pack—which usually takes its cue from the hard Left on political issues. Trendy clergymen and laymen are often engaged in a thinly disguised rivalry with secular revolutionaries for “relevance.”
The Jamaica meeting of the Central Committee in January 1979 makes it clear that the concept and practice of liberation theology has prevailed in the inner circles of the Council. But the debate before, during, and after this meeting shows that the issue is far from settled. For years there has been a growing backlash against the radicalization of the WCC. This has been expressed in verbal protest and also in the withholding of contributions not only to the WCC’s social-action efforts but to the ecumenical movement in general.
The wellspring of WCC radicalism may be the Geneva headquarters staff [one of whom] reportedly said WCC officials admit that the staff are “nearly all socialists.” This does suggest a strong influence of Marxist thought at the core.
The double standard sometimes found in WCC pronouncements on repression or human rights suggests an apologetic posture toward, if not an affinity for, socialist and Marxist rather than democratic and nonsocialist regimes in the Third World. In the last decade or so, WCC spokesmen have often protested alleged violations of human and political rights in the Western democracies and allied nations, while remaining strangely silent about more grievous violations in Marxist states or in Third World countries that embrace, at least in part, the Marxist model.
The ambiguity toward Marxism—a mixture of infatuation and fear—that characterizes the Third World ideology is evident in both secular and Christian circles in the West. This ambiguity stems from a profound confusion between ends and means—the ends of justice, freedom, order, and plenty and the appropriate means for achieving these goals, or at least moving toward them. The Marxists have a clear-cut diagnosis and simple answers. They play upon Western feelings of guilt. These feelings are especially strong among upper-middle-class intellectuals and idealists—and it is mainly persons of this sort who founded and still shape the WCC.
Christianity offers no simple cure for poverty, injustice, or lack of freedom. And so Christians who are rightly concerned about the world’s ills are often confused about how to mitigate them. Many Western Christians, feeling guilty that they are rich while most of the rest of the world is poor, are prone to exaggerate the sins of their own society and play down the great evils of the Marxist solution. Looking at the vast problems in the Third World, they are sometimes beguiled by the totalitarian temptation—the acceptance of a temporary tyranny to impose order and justice on poor, confused, and often unwilling people. The democratic and peaceful way seems too slow, undramatic, and unfashionable.
The churches as churches should take no sides in armed power struggles in Rhodesia or elsewhere. Governments and Christians as citizens should support what they believe to be right or in their interests. If the WCC insists on supporting terrorists over an interracial coalition seeking power by peaceful means, it should not do so in the name of humanitarian aid. That is a sham. Refugees on both sides of the Rhodesian border needed help, and any aid to the political force on either side would enable it to divert more resources to the fighting. Further, the WCC had no way of ascertaining how the guerrillas would use the funds, and it made no provision for monitoring their use. Nor did it channel the grant through a respected impartial agency like the International Red Cross—because, according to one WCC official, this would have implied that the WCC did not trust the guerrillas.
The WCC’s Central Committee should have been honest with itself, its member churches, and the world by invoking the Christian concept of the just war to explain the moral basis of its grants. In fact, that was precisely what it was doing, but it lacked the courage or candor to say so. Had it done so it would have undercut the charges of hypocrisy and double-talk and earned respect for an honest explanation of its direct involvement in a political power struggle. But it would also have faced the herculean task of documenting what made revolutionary terrorism just.
There are several measures that would help the WCC and its constituent denominations make a more responsible political witness in our troubled world:
1. The WCC should ponder deeply the long theological and ethical heritage of its Protestant and Orthodox member churches—a heritage that draws upon the Old Testament prophets, the teachings of Jesus, and the writings of the great theologians down to the modern interpreters of this tradition. The rich body of Christian social teaching needs to be studied, refined, and updated. In “leapfrogging from one problem to another,” says Paul Ramsey, the WCC has been escaping the difficult task of rebuilding a “disintegrated” social ethic. Among other things, this rebuilding would mean a renewed emphasis on the Faith and Order mission of the WCC and a more vigorous dialogue between the Faith and Order movement and the Church and Society movement.
2. The churches have frequently acted with superficial knowledge and with little understanding of either political theory or the dynamics of social structures. Ecumenical leaders should make fuller use of the research and analysis of social, political, and economic issues generated by universities and public-policy research centers.
This information not only would be vastly more trustworthy than the ideological slogans of the extreme left or right, but it would help to distinguish what should be preserved, what should be improved, and the best means of accomplishing the desired objectives. Churches cannot be and should not strive to be competent in scores of complex economic and political issues that only specialists and large agencies are capable of handling. Their realm of competence is moral judgment.
3. The WCC should develop a clearer understanding of the different but complementary functions of church, state, and citizen. The church is the conscience not only of the state but of society as a whole. Hence the church can speak to the contemporary situation by making broad moral judgments but not by giving specific advice better left to individual Christians and other citizens working in these institutions.
4. The WCC should use more fully the rich diversity of traditions and gifts within its ranks. The Geneva staff has suffered from too much ideological homogeneity. Church and Society activities, including the Program to Combat Racism, have been run largely by a self-perpetuating elite who have been heavily influenced by the radical liberation approach to the Third World. There has been some diversity, but far too little. An effort should be made to recruit a headquarters staff more varied in theological, ethical, and political outlook. The social-action establishment has often been more eager to talk to Marxists than to conservative evangelical Christians. This is a sad irony. Also largely excluded from inner WCC circles are persons who have special knowledge or skills on matters with which the WCC is occupied but whose ideology deviates too far from the current ecumenical fashion.
5. One way of increasing the diversity of the WCC in the Church and Society area is for the Council and its constituent churches to become more democratic, more reflective of the millions of Christians they represent. Most Protestants believe in the “priesthood of all believers,” which means that clergy and laymen have equal responsibility for the Christian mission. If politicians benefit from consulting the man in the street, ecumenical leaders would likewise benefit from consulting the man in the pew. Politicians, unlike intellectuals, cannot afford to be elitists.
The problem is complicated by an organizational fact. Cynthia Wedel, one of the WCC presidents, laments that “half the member churches cannot be represented even in the Central Committee, and many who represent their churches on commissions and committees have no direct access to the decision-making bodies of their own churches.” This problem would not be so serious if the Geneva staff and the laymen in the pew were guided by the same ethical norms and committed to the same causes, but, as CHRISTIANITY TODAY pointed out, if they are “marching to different drummers, the elite can take up a position that, if not arrogant, is highly condescending.”
6. The primary obligation of the WCC in the political realm is to speak to its member churches, not for them. Council and denominational leaders should seek to clarify political and social issues in the light of the Christian ethic and to motivate individuals to be responsible citizens. This is by far the most important task. WCC pronouncements should be more like papal encyclicals, which instruct the faithful in basic moral precepts and relate those precepts to current realities. There are situations of grave danger or great opportunity when the Council may appropriately address pronouncements to secular authorities or other agencies, but these statements should focus on moral judgment rather than on specific policy or tactical advice. In the name of all that Christianity stands for, the churches should raise their voices against genocide, the refusal of a government to permit impartial humanitarian aid to civilian victims of war or natural disaster, and other cases of gross inhumanity.
7. The WCC should not presume to speak for the churches, much less for their millions of members. The Council has neither a theological nor an institutional justification for claiming to represent Christians from 100 countries. Perhaps this confusion over whom the WCC represents is not really that serious, because there is little evidence that church pronouncements either instruct or influence statesmen. After all, morally concerned statesmen who from childhood have been instructed by Christian ethics are wise enough to reject foolish advice from the churches precisely because of their loyalty to what the churches fundamentally stand for. Christian men and women in positions of political responsibility are in a far better position to relate the Christian ethic to the perplexing and sometimes tragic realm of political necessity than are professional churchmen, because the statesmen have been disciplined by a deeper sense of history and chastened in the crucible of responsibility.
8. The churches should make the fundamental distinction between a condition and a problem. The vast majority of regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are weak, fragile, and poor and are run by authoritarian elites. The range of political and economic choice is very narrow, but great expectations are engendered in these countries by their envy of the West’s wealth and power. Ever present is the totalitarian temptation, which seems to offer a short cut to control, modernization, and plenty.
In all Third World Countries expectations far outpace the available material and human resources. This is the condition of the Third World. A condition in this sense cannot be changed; it must be faced and endured. Perhaps over time a condition will alter and yield some problems that can be at least mitigated, if not solved. This tragic Third World situation is a mirror, perhaps a distorted mirror, of the human situation.
The utopian Marxists and theologians sympathetic to them both have a naive and stereotyped view of the Third World. They look upon it as malleable, subject to external manipulation, responsive to quick reform or revolutionary transformation. The liberationists of the West have selected Third World spokesmen who share their romantic vision. Utopians of all stripes refuse to accept the intractable realities of the Third World.
The course of wisdom and moral responsibility for the WCC would be to encourage the peaceful and lawful forces that are trying to deal constructively with the problems of poverty, injustice, and lack of freedom. There have been, of course, situations so rigid or dangerous that armed violence was the only responsible option. The strike against Pearl Harbor and North Korea’s invasion across the thirty-eighth parallel in 1950 were situations that justified a violent response. Most crises are more ambiguous.
WCC leaders should develop a deeper appreciation for the tenacity of the political, economic, and ethnic problems in the Third World. Only then will the Council’s words and deeds speak to the real condition of concerned citizens and statesmen in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who are trying to make a better life. We would all do well to recall the truth of Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer, “God, grant me the courage to change what can be changed, the patience to accept what cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.
