Conservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy

The New York Times ^ | 22 May 2004 | LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

[ahadams2]

Conservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

As Presbyterians prepare to gather for their General Assembly in Richmond, Va., next month, a band of determined conservatives is advancing a plan to split the church along liberal and orthodox lines. Another divorce proposal shook the United Methodist convention in Pittsburgh earlier this month, while conservative Episcopalians have already broken away to form a dissident network of their own.

In each denomination, the flashpoint is homosexuality, but there is another common denominator as well. In each case, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a small organization based in Washington, has helped incubate traditionalist insurrections against the liberal politics of the denomination's leaders.

With financing from a handful of conservative donors, including the Scaife family foundations, the Bradley and Olin Foundations and Howard and Roberta Ahmanson's Fieldstead & Company, the 23-year-old institute is now playing a pivotal role in the biggest battle over the future of American Protestantism since churches split over slavery at the time of the Civil War.

The institute has brought together previously disconnected conservative groups within each denomination to share resources and tactics, including forcing heresy trials of gay clergy members, winning seats on judicial committees and urging congregations to withhold money from their denomination's headquarters.

When the Episcopal Church elected an openly gay bishop last summer, the institute organized and housed a conservative secessionist group called the American Anglican Council, which still occupies an office down the hall. When a conservative Methodist minister floated a breakup proposal at a private breakfast earlier this month, an institute staff member transcribed the speech and posted it on the institute's Web site, where it instantly became a rallying cry for disaffected Methodists.

At the Presbyterian Church's assembly last year, the institute helped block a policy statement that said whether parents were single or gay made no difference to the moral status of a family, and in the process it won the appointment of one of its staff members to a committee to rewrite the policy for this year's meeting.

Although the institute has an annual budget of just less than $1 million and a staff of fewer than a dozen, liberals and conservatives alike say it is having an outsized effect on the dynamics of American politics by counteracting the liberal influence of the mainline Protestant churches. Together, the Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches have 12.5 million members, and for decades they and other mainline denominations have provided theological backbone and foot soldiers for liberal causes like abortion rights, racial and economic equality, the nuclear freeze, environmentalism and anti-war movements.

For their part, the institute and its allies say they are saving the denominations from themselves by agitating for a return to Biblical orthodoxy. They argue that the churches' liberalism has contributed to their steep decline over the last 30 years even as more conservative evangelical churches have grown.

"It's pretty clear that the church elite in the mainline denominations are to the left of the people in the pews," said Diane Knippers, the institute's president and an Episcopalian who helped found the American Anglican Council and now sits on its board.

The group has often called on conservatives to change the liberal denominations from within, especially in the relatively more conservative Methodist and Presbyterian churches. But Mrs. Knippers said she could support the notion of divorce for irreconcilable differences, albeit perhaps with liberals leaving. "Rather than be embroiled in legal battles in church courts over sexuality, let's find a gracious way to say, `we will let you leave this system because you believe it violates your conscience.' "

[snip]

Rev. Robert Edgar, a former Democratic congressman who is general secretary of the National Council of Churches, an ecumenical alliance that is dominated by the mainline churches and a principal target of the institute's criticism, argued that it spoke for only about a third of mainline churchgoers. "They have caused so many internal issues that some progressive leaders are afraid to take the courageous positions they would have taken a few decades ago because a third of their parishioners would cut their legs off."

But in an interview last week, Roberta Ahmanson, a member of the institute's board and the wife Howard Ahmanson, a banking heir from California, contended that the institute's orthodoxy resonated far more widely.

In addition, she argued that the liberal churches were often operating off of endowments left by previous generations who were unlikely to share their modern views.

"The Christian community isn't just who is alive," Mrs. Ahmanson said. "Christians believe that we are in communion with the living and the dead. We pray each week for the living and the dead, and most of the previous generations are in disagreement with a lot of this stuff." She continued: "If you take the weight of Christianity for 2,000 years, all that weight is on the orthodox side."

Mrs. Knippers and Mrs. Ahmanson both noted that the impetus for the founding of the institute came from a labor union activist, not right-wing financiers. Mrs. Knippers said the initial idea came from David Jessup, a staunchly anti-communist union activist and Methodist who objected to church aid to Vietnam and Nicaragua under their leftist regimes.

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and former Lutheran minister, wrote its founding statement and other neoconservatives joined an advisory board. (In addition to Father Neuhaus, the institute's board of directors currently includes Mary Ellen Bork, wife of Judge Robert H. Bork, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and Fox News, and Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute.)

Ms. Knippers, who spoke during two interviews in the last three months, said that during the 1980's the institute's initial budget of about $300,000 came entirely from a few conservative foundations, including the Scaife family foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation as well as from the Ahmansons' philanthropic arm Fieldstead & Company.

[snip]

James Piereson, executive director of the Olin Foundation, said his foundation saw the institute as a Protestant counterpart to the conservative magazine Commentary for Jews or the Father Neuhaus's journal First Things for Catholics. "If no one commented on and criticized the churches' political activities, it would appear that this was an unobjectionable religious position that was being brought to bear instead of a controversial position," he said, adding that "the sexuality issues and the liturgical issues in the churches have never been of great interest to us."

But Mrs. Ahmanson, who is Presbyterian, said she and her husband, who is Episcopalian, were motivated mainly by theological concerns. "My husband and I are what we call classical Christians," Mrs. Ahmanson said, explaining their view that Christians should stick to the the fifth century St. Vincent of Lerins's orthodox standard of "what has been held everywhere in every time by everyone." She added, "It is only in the last hundred years or so that there has been an elite, if you will, who have argued with that."

[snip]

By 1989, fundamentalists had recently taken over the Southern Baptist Convention. And in the liberal mainline churches, the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee and the Methodist group Good News were already growing. "We have had for a number of years a good number of renewal groups," Parker Williamson, chief of the Lay Committee said. "But the I.R.D. and Diane Knippers have been a wonderful help."

Now, as Presbyterians prepare for their General Assembly, Alan Wisdom, the institute's Presbyterian director, said that representatives of the institute will be there in force, calling attention to any liberal positions coming out of the church, distributing position papers to delegates and lobbying them in a conservative direction.

Mr. Wisdom said the institute does not support the idea of Presbyterian breakup, and almost no one expects a split at this year's General Assembly. But some conservatives are already drawing up a plan they call "Gracious Separation" to divide the church's assets. "If we don't see significant changes in the next two General Assemblies, I suspect we we are going to see some manifestation of separation," Mr. Williamson of the Lay Committee said. "I hope and pray it would be gracious."

[ahadams2]

as we've come to expect from the NYT's reporting on things conservative, there are major factual errors in this article. The times claims that the AAC was formed by the IRD after the election of vicki gene last fall. both assertions are false. The AAC was formed in 1997 in response to (among other things) the obvious heretical domination of the ecusa general convention that year. I was at one of their first formational meetings in Northern Virginia - the only IRD members there were those who also happened to be episcopalian; and the meeting was actually run by the AAC, not IRD.

oh well, at least the nyt spelled all of the names correctly...

[ahadams2]

vast right wing conspiracy paranoia ping.

[lightman]

Too bad the Institute hasn't established a beachhead in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)!

[ahadams2]

why don't you contact them and suggest the idea? Their website is
http://www.ird-renew.org/

[RippleFire]

bump

[secret garden]

Look at you! The Ecumenical Evangelical! ;) Hey, if you ever change your user name...

[BibChr]

The thing is, the PCUSA has already been split along liberal/conservative lines. More than once. I attend one of the latter: Presbyterian Church in America. (Yes, a dispensationalist baptist Presbyterian — me, not the church.)

Dan

[Martin Tell]

The IRD has some links to like minded Lutherans. Another source I found for a great deal of information about the church renewal movement (including Lutherans) is Thomas Oden's, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy:Signs of New Life in Christianity. Oden relies heavily of St. Vincent of Lerin's formula of "everywhere, always and by all," quoted by Diane Knippers in this otherwise despicable article.

[lightman]

Thanks for the information and support. There are a lot of like-minded Lutherans out there, mostly readers of "Lutheran Forum" and "ProEcclesia"; but typical of Lutheran movements in the US since the 18th century the tendency is toward fragmentation rather than unity. There are a number of reform groups out there, Word Alone/Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC); Solid Rock, Evangelical Lutheran Confessing Fellowship, and, although decidedly not a political interest group, the Society of the Holy Trinity.

There is a terrible irony in this necessity for reform movements within a reform movement!

[ahadams2]

You wrote "There are a lot of like-minded Lutherans out there, mostly readers of "Lutheran Forum" and "ProEcclesia"; but typical of Lutheran movements in the US since the 18th century the tendency is toward fragmentation rather than unity. There are a number of reform groups out there, Word Alone/Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC); Solid Rock, Evangelical Lutheran Confessing Fellowship, and, although decidedly not a political interest group, the Society of the Holy Trinity."

It would probably be a good idea for you to post the web links to these different groups, so interested folks could bookmark them.

[ahadams2]

You wrote "The thing is, the PCUSA has already been split along liberal/conservative lines. More than once."

True, although the heretics within pcusa have so far refused to admit any such thing has happened (even after losing Coral Ridge down in Florida).

[Honorary Serb]

There are a lot of like-minded Lutherans out there, mostly readers of "Lutheran Forum" and "ProEcclesia"; but typical of Lutheran movements in the US since the 18th century the tendency is toward fragmentation rather than unity.

RIGHT! I am a Lutheran Forum subscriber and an Evangelical Orthodox Lutheran with real Orthodox connections (I attend a Serbian Orthodox church fairly regularly). Part of the problem (typical of Lutherans) is that there are many doctrinal and sacramental disagreements between Evangelical Catholic/Orthodox and WordAlone Lutherans. However, these pale in comparison with the GREAT GULF between orthodox Lutherans and those in the ELCA who push the revisionist/feminazi/gay agenda.

The revsionists are now afraid enough of the orthodox that many of them (like Bishop Rogness) are pushing to decide not to bring the gay agenda to a vote in 2005, but to peck the orthodox to death with "local option". We can all end up getting very old, as we watch American Lutheranism gradually slip-slide away into revisionist semi-paganism.

Because I signed a couple of the "right" petitions, I now get Institute on Religion and Democracy e-mails. It is time for us all to get them to help us organize us orthodox Lutherans to stop the revisionist takeover of the ELCA.

[lightman]

I'd be glad to provide some links but I can't find any instructions on the help pages.

For now, you'll just need to cut and paste (but feel free to reply and turn these into links)

Word Alone/LCMC: http://www.wordalone.org

Society of the Holy Trinity: http://www.societyholytrinity.org

American Lutheran Publicity Bureau (publisher of Lutheran Forum): http://www.alpb.org

Evangelical Lutheran Church Confessing Fellowship: http://www.evenlink.com/pbuzzard/ELCF.htm

Solid Rock Lutherans: http://www.sldrck.org

Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans: http://www.foclnews.org

[Redleg Duke]

Agreed. I think that there is about to be an upheaval in all of the churches...yes, including our brethren in the Roman Catholic Church...to stand up to the forces of perversion.

[ladyinred]

The NYT"S doesn't seem to tell the truth about much of anything. This is a deliberate bashing of conservatives again of course, which is why they got their "facts" wrong.

[redgolum]

One of the more intersting things that has happened lately is that some of the "mammoth" divides that used to serperate orthodox Lutherans from the Orthodox and Roman Catholics don't quit seem so big now.

Case in point. I once had a discussion with a couple of Catholic friends about the nature of justification/sanctification before a religion class I was in at Iowa State. The teacher came in and proceeded to have a speaker talk about how a true "compassionate" Christian view of life would be to allow abortion, euthanasia, and suicide on demand.

I left that class thinking that all of the debates I had been in with true Roman Catholics were pretty much major debates about comparatively minor things. When a liberal has such a distorted world view that the slaughter of innocent children is seen as "compassionate", I figure we can postpone the whole sanctification fight a bit. There are MUCH bigger fish to fry.

[lightman]

"some of the "mammoth" divides that used to serperate orthodox Lutherans from the Orthodox and
Roman Catholics don't quit seem so big now."


They weren't so big in 1530, either. The section of the Augsburg Confession dealing with Justification was one of many on which all parties--Lutheran and Catholic alike--were in agreement. Same for Sacraments, Pennance, and Civil Government.