Posted on 02/23/2006 8:26:14 PM PST by Sam Gamgee
The World Council Combats Free Enterprise
The World Council of Churches is blatantly and unashamedly opposed to the free market and makes full use of its U.S. funds to combat the free enterprise system. It channels money from U.S. churches to the Christian Conference of Asia, the Urban Rural Mission, and other foreign programs. The Conference and Mission share offices in Hong Kong. They evidently do not stress trade union values.
A meeting of the Christian Conference-Urban Mission committee in February 1983 in Bangladesh discussed the "economic domination and exploitation by TNCs (transnational corporations)." They also approved an annual budget of $345,000 for 1983 and the same for 1984, to be provided by non-Asian churches.42
The World Council's Program on Transnational Corporations in 1982 adopted a report which states that "This system (world market system) and TNC's operation within it are incompatible with our vision of a just, participatory and sustainable society. . . ." The document was accepted at the 1983 Vancouver World Council of Churches Assembly.43
Yet, when the literature is examined in depth, it is clear that the World Council feels as much enmity toward the U.S. as it does transnational corporations. The World Council almost always links transnational corporations with America despite the fact that American corporations make up only 44 percent of the world's largest firms and Third-World transnationals are becoming much more common. For example, South Korea's Samsung Group, a general trading company, operates in twenty-nine countries in products such as hotel construction and sugar refining. Hindustan Machine, an Indian company, sells machine tools to Algeria, and SGV, a Philippine firm, does public accounting and provides management services in every Asian capital.
In its battle against free enterprise, the World Council and the denominations have sometimes called for a world economic order or have advocated some sort of international control of the earth's economies. Typical was the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty, a project for which the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries alone spent $203,449 between 1981 and 1983. Had it been signed by the United States, the treaty would have authorized the U.N. to equally distribute sea products (minerals, oil, etc.) regardless of who did the work or made the investment. Poor Third-World countries would have undoubtedly found this a profitable treaty; however, it is not a fair treaty and it is unlikely that a bureaucratic, totally political institution such as the U.N. could have been impartial or efficient.
Why the World Council and mainline denominations advocate such quixotic schemes is not really a mystery. Every ideology needs an appealing belief system or it cannot gather adherents to its cause. Therefore, the Religious Left puts forth the notion that the fortunes of the world's disadvantaged would improve if the world's economic system were under a gigantic bureaucracy. Another such assumption - which is constantly repeated - is that America's poor face a deteriorating economic situation. It is also asserted that the free enterprise system is not fair to the poor and they need more help from the callous U.S. government. The former assertion is false, and the latter is highly debatable.
fighting and more fighting.
Or so it seems.
You'd be surprised how many people think that money/influence = evil, therefore poverty/irrelevance = godliness.
Sadly, that is true for many Christians.
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