Through Different Spectacles

It was a shabby sort of notice in every sense. “You are now entering a military guarded area,” it warned. “When called ‘Halt’ stop immediately and follow the instruction of the military guards. The troops are ordered to shoot if the first warning to stop is ignored.” I was thinking of the fellow in the Bible who pioneered delicate walking when I was stopped and searched for the first time in my not untraveled career. The place: Geneva airport in peace-loving Switzerland.

Before I reached my destination next morning, the indignity was repeated at three transit stops. Finally, as our Ethiopian airliner winged in toward Addis Ababa with its jaded and cramped consignment of the overfrisked, the loudspeaker struck up the improbable strains of “God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.”

The prospect thereafter became more pleasing when those of us who had come for the WCC Central Committee meeting were taken in tow and spared the miseries of immigration, baggage-claiming, and customs formalities. The administrative department from Geneva superbly organized every aspect of our Addis sojourn.

It seemed boorish, then, not to remain decently undismayed during the twelve-day sessions, but a WCC staff member cornered me near the end with, “Well, have you got enough controversial material this time?” Touche! A salutary thoughtfulness ensued. Was I really falling into the trap, which tendency I am wont to condemn in other evangelicals, of being a chronic and unbalanced critic?

At that point in the Addis proceedings I was more puzzled than anything else. Here let me concentrate on one specific controversial subject. Without a single dissenting vote, the Central Committee upheld the Executive Committee’s decision to make financial grants to groups of “racially oppressed peoples.” I had talked privately with a number of delegates, and their combined views did not tally with the near unanimity achieved.

Contrary to the WCC press release that attributed the decision to the “120-member” committee, only 103 were at Addis, and some of these were absentees or unrecorded abstainers when the crucial vote was taken.

Still, that some ninety yeas were not offset by one nay was remarkable.

In the British Council of Churches there had been a real battle before a dubious appeal (“the fate of the ecumenical movement is at stake”) helped carry the vote for “general support” of the WCC action. Five weeks later, on returning from South Africa, the archbishop of Canterbury said he felt more than ever “certainly bound to criticize” the WCC decision. In West Germany there was an outcry; the Evangelical Church pointed out that “white” racism provoked an opposing “colored” racism, and that all forms needed to be combatted. In South Africa, 43 per cent of the Presbyterian General Assembly favored leaving the WCC.

How explain the Addis vote and the lack of the intensive criticism expected? Right at the start someone complained about the way in which the awarding of the grants had (or had not) been communicated to member churches—and there is nothing so impressive as this committee in full cry after peripheral hares. They disappeared out of the journalistic sight into policy reference groups soon afterwards. When the matter was brought back to the floor of the house, we found Germans and Britons docilely voting in the affirmative with others who had earlier expressed misgivings. And unhappily the South African churches had no voting member at Addis.

But what was the Addis vote about? The Central Committee was not voting to give aid to racially oppressed groups. It was voting on whether the grants already made by the Executive Committee were “in accord with the Programme to Combat Racism” which the Central Committee itself had authorized at Canterbury in 1969. The fact that some delegates had obviously not realized the implications of the blanket mandate then given was apparent but irrelevant. How could a fast one have been pulled when it was covered by the rules?

Even so, there is something about these ecumenical occasions that makes members avoid head-on collisions. This might on one view befit a “fellowship of churches.” Yet such passivity might truly be not a mark of health but rather an indication of fragility protected by certain well understood taboos. Here I stick my neck out further …

It would jolt the committee if an Eastern church delegate were to vote in a way disapproved by his government. The Orthodox generally, whether under Kremlin or colonels, are notoriously touchy and alert to political implications—and are the largest group in the WCC. For their part. Western delegates would hesitate to take a strong line that they knew their Eastern colleagues would be bound to reject. Delegates from Third World countries are politically watchful: other things being equal, this would ensure, for example, a pro-Arab majority on the Middle East issue (the WCC includes no Jews), and black African unity on white racism or anti-colonialism.

But just as revealing are the subjects seldom mentioned, much less brought to a vote. One dogged journalist at Addis continually raised this point in press conferences. Racism, he insisted, was a dreadful thing, so where was the WCC’s voice over anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R., or over political tyranny generally? Denying partiality, officialdom stressed that protests were often made quietly in delicate areas where publicity would be embarrassing. This view, which should elicit sympathy, would be more credible if the results of past discreet protests could somehow be made known, and if it were not that South African Christians had been greatly embarrassed by the grants issue.

Could it be that the WCC looks first at the extent of a country’s or a church’s representation in its councils, and the probable reaction, before certain policies are protested? (“I must put on different spectacles to look at that problem,” as the late President Nasser would say.) On that basis it is safe to clobber South Africa, Rhodesia, and Portugal. For different reasons it is also all right to attack the United States and Britain, whose delegates, far from taking umbrage, might even lead such an attack (say on Viet Nam, or arms for South Africa). With other nations it would be tricky—or decidedly nasty (Greece, Iron Curtain countries).

The Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, guilty as it is of a particularly odious doctrine, nonetheless was on to a sure thing when its synod acidly stated how noticeable it was that “movements organized against Communism don’t receive support from the WCC.” Indeed, the WCC’s alleged choosiness might prompt the charge of what the London Times described recently in another context as a sort of Doppler shift effect—“the change in the observed frequency of a vibration due to the relative motion between the observer and the source of the vibration.” All this might suggest that if I am still confused after Addis, it is at a much higher level.

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