{"id":336,"date":"2004-05-25T09:50:51","date_gmt":"2004-05-25T09:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/?p=336"},"modified":"2004-05-25T09:50:51","modified_gmt":"2004-05-25T09:50:51","slug":"institute_on_religion_and_demo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/?p=336","title":{"rendered":"Institute on Religion and Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting article from the NY Times<\/a>:
\nConservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy<\/b>
\nMay 22, 2004
\nBy LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
\nAs Presbyterians prepare to gather for their General
\nAssembly in Richmond, Va., next month, a band of determined
\nconservatives is advancing a plan to split the church along
\nliberal and orthodox lines. Another divorce proposal shook
\nthe United Methodist convention in Pittsburgh earlier this
\nmonth, while conservative Episcopalians have already broken
\naway to form a dissident network of their own.
\nIn each denomination, the flashpoint is homosexuality, but
\nthere is another common denominator as well. In each case,
\nthe Institute on Religion and Democracy, a small
\norganization based in Washington, has helped incubate
\ntraditionalist insurrections against the liberal politics
\nof the denomination’s leaders.
\nWith financing from a handful of conservative donors,
\nincluding the Scaife family foundations, the Bradley and
\nOlin Foundations and Howard and Roberta Ahmanson’s
\nFieldstead and Company, the 23-year-old Institute is now
\nplaying a pivotal role in the biggest battle over the
\nfuture of American Protestantism since churches split over
\nslavery at the time of the Civil War.<\/i><\/p>\n


\n
\nThe institute has brought together previously disconnected
\nconservative groups within each denomination to share
\nrescources and tactics, including forcing heresy trials of
\ngay clergy, winning seats on judicial committees and
\nencouraging congregations to withhold money from their own
\ndenomination’s headquarters.
\nWhen the Episcopal Church elected an openly gay bishop last
\nsummer, the institute organized and housed a conservative
\nsecessionist group called the American Anglican Council,
\nwhich still occupies an office down the hall. When a
\nconservative Methodist minister floated a breakup proposal
\nat a private breakfast earlier this month, an institute
\nstaff member transcribed the speech and posted it on the
\ninstitute’s Web site, where it instantly became a rallying
\ncry for disaffected Methodists.
\nAt the Presbyterian Church’s assembly last year, the
\ninstitute helped block a policy statement that said whether
\nparents were single or gay made no difference to the moral
\nstatus of a family, and in the process it won the
\nappointment of one of its staff members to a committee to
\nrewrite the policy for this year’s meeting.
\nAlthough the institute has an annual budget of just less
\nthan $1 million and a staff of fewer than a dozen, liberals
\nand conservatives alike say it is having an outsized effect
\non the dynamics of American politics by counteracting the
\nliberal influence of the mainline Protestant churches.
\nTogether, the Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal
\nchurches have 12.5 million members, and for decades they
\nand other mainline denominations have provided theological
\nbackbone and foot soldiers for liberal causes like abortion
\nrights, racial and economic equality, the nuclear freeze,
\nenvironmentalism and anti-war movements.
\nFor their part, the institute and its allies say they are
\nsaving the denominations from themselves by agitating for a
\nreturn to Biblical orthodoxy. They argue that the churches’
\nliberalism has contributed to their steep decline over the
\nlast 30 years even as more conservative evangelical
\nchurches have grown.
\n“It’s pretty clear that the church elite in the mainline
\ndenominations are to the left of the people in the pews,”
\nsaid Diane Knippers, the institute’s president and an
\nEpiscopalian who helped found the American Anglican Council
\nand now sits on its board.
\nThe group has often called on conservatives to change the
\nliberal denominations from within, especially in the
\nrelatively more conservative Methodist and Presbyterian
\nchurches. But Mrs. Knippers said she could support the
\nnotion of divorce for irreconcilable differences, albeit
\nperhaps with liberals leaving. “Rather than be embroiled in
\nlegal battles in church courts over sexuality, let’s find a
\ngracious way to say, `we will let you leave this system
\nbecause you believe it violates your conscience.’ ”
\nMore liberal Protestants argue that the institute’s
\nfinancial backers are interfering with the theological
\ndisputes mainly for broader, secular political reasons.
\n“The mainline denominations are a strategic piece on the
\nchess board that the right wing is trying to dominate,”
\nsaid Alfred F. Ross, president and founder of the Institute
\nfor Democracy Studies, a liberal New York-based think tank
\nwhich produced a research report in 2000 on the Institute’s
\ninfluence in the Presbyterian Church.
\n“It will give them access to three important pieces,” said
\nMr. Ross, a lawyer and former official with the Planned
\nParenthood Federation. “One is the Sunday pulpit. Two is
\nmillions of dollars of capacity internally, with control of
\nchurch newsletters and pension funds. And three is foreign
\nmissions,” the agencies that dispense missionaries, and
\nwith them their brand of Christianity, around the world.
\nRev. Robert Edgar, a former Democratic congressman who is
\ngeneral secretary of the National Council of Churches, an
\necumenical alliance that is dominated by the mainline
\nchurches and a principal target of the institute’s
\ncriticism, argued that it spoke for only about a third of
\nmainline churchgoers. “They have caused so many internal
\nissues that some progressive leaders are afraid to take the
\ncourageous positions they would have taken a few decades
\nago because a third of their parishioners would cut their
\nlegs off.”
\nBut in an interview last week, Roberta Ahmanson, a member
\nof the institute’s board and the wife Howard Ahmanson, a
\nbanking heir from California, contended that the
\ninstitute’s orthodoxy resonated far more widely.
\nIn addition, she argued that the liberal churches were
\noften operating off of endowments left by previous
\ngenerations who were unlikely to share their modern views.
\n“The Christian community isn’t just who is alive,” Mrs.
\nAhmanson said. “Christians believe that we are in communion
\nwith the living and the dead. We pray each week for the
\nliving and the dead, and most of the previous generations
\nare in disagreement with a lot of this stuff.” She
\ncontinued: “If you take the weight of Christianity for
\n2,000 years, all that weight is on the orthodox side.”
\nMrs. Knippers and Mrs. Ahmanson both noted that the impetus
\nfor the founding of the institute came from a labor union
\nactivist, not right-wing financiers. Mrs. Knippers said the
\ninitial idea came from David Jessup, a staunchly
\nanti-communist union activist and Methodist who objected to
\nchurch aid to Vietnam and Nicaragua under their leftist
\nregimes.
\nThe Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and
\nformer Lutheran minister, wrote its founding statement and
\nother neoconservatives joined an advisory board. (In
\naddition to Father Neuhaus, the institute’s board of
\ndirectors currently includes Mary Ellen Bork, wife of Judge
\nRobert H. Bork, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and Fox
\nNews, and Michael Novak of the American Enterprise
\nInstitute.)
\nMs. Knippers, who spoke during two interviews in the last
\nthree months, said that during the 1980’s the institute’s
\ninitial budget of about $300,000 came entirely from a few
\nconservative foundations, including the Scaife family
\nfoundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the
\nJohn M. Olin Foundation as well as from the Ahmansons’
\nphilanthropic arm Fieldstead & Company.
\nBill Schambra, director of the Bradley Center at the Hudson
\nInstitute and a former director of the Bradley Foundation,
\none of the biggest conservative donors, said the
\nfoundations’ supported the institute as part of a broader
\neffort to build a conservative infrastructure after decades
\nof liberal ascendancy had shut out the right.
\n“The I.R.D. is a kind of parallel universe that upholds the
\nconservative standpoint in the world of religion,” Mr.
\nSchambra said. “It is no different in that sense from what
\nthe National Association of Scholars is for University
\nProfessors or the Federalist Society is for lawyers,” he
\nsaid, referring to two other groups backed by the same
\nfoundations.
\nJames Piereson, executive director of the Olin Foundation,
\nsaid his foundation saw the institute as a Protestant
\ncounterpart to the conservative magazine Commentary for
\nJews or the Father Neuhaus’s journal First Things for
\nCatholics. “If no one commented on and criticized the
\nchurches’ political activities, it would appear that this
\nwas an unobjectionable religious position that was being
\nbrought to bear instead of a controversial position,” he
\nsaid, adding that “the sexuality issues and the liturgical
\nissues in the churches have never been of great interest to
\nus.”
\nBut Mrs. Ahmanson, who is Presbyterian, said she and her
\nhusband, who is Episcopalian, were motivated mainly by
\ntheological concerns. “My husband and I are what we call
\nclassical Christians,” Mrs. Ahmanson said, explaining their
\nview that Christians should stick to the the fifth century
\nSt. Vincent of Lerins’s orthodox standard of “what has been
\nheld everywhere in every time by everyone.” She added, “It
\nis only in the last hundred years or so that there has been
\nan elite, if you will, who have argued with that.”
\nAfter the fall of communism, Mrs. Knippers said, the
\ninstitute’s focus on policing the churches’ support for
\nleftists abroad faded away. “We talked about whether the
\nI.R.D. should just fold up,” she said.
\nInstead the institute turned more of its attention to
\nsocial issues closer to home. “In the seminaries, what
\nreplaced the liberation theology of the 80’s was a radical
\nfeminist theology,” Mrs. Knippers said, noting that in 1993
\nthe Presbyterian Church organized a conference encouraging
\nwomen to “re-imagine” God in a new way. “And if feminism
\nwas the theology du jour on many campuses in the 90’s, now
\nit is homosexuality that is the issue.”
\nFeminism and homosexuality are also subjects that make for
\nmuch more effective fund-raising appeals than foreign
\npolicy, marketers say. And in recent years the institute
\nhas broadened its direct-mail fund-raising to cover roughly
\n60 percent of its annual budget, Mrs. Knippers said.
\nBy 1989, fundamentalists had recently taken over the
\nSouthern Baptist Convention. And in the liberal mainline
\nchurches, the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee and
\nthe Methodist group Good News were already growing. “We
\nhave had for a number of years a good number of renewal
\ngroups,” Parker Williamson, chief of the Lay Committee
\nsaid. “But the I.R.D. and Diane Knippers have been a
\nwonderful help.”
\nNow, as Presbyterians prepare for their General Assembly,
\nAlan Wisdom, the institute’s Presbyterian director, said
\nthat representatives of the institute will be there in
\nforce, calling attention to any liberal positions coming
\nout of the church, distributing position papers to
\ndelegates and lobbying them in a conservative direction.
\nMr. Wisdom said the institute does not support the idea of
\nPresbyterian breakup, and almost no one expects a split at
\nthis year’s General Assembly. But some conservatives are
\nalready drawing up a plan they call “Gracious Separation”
\nto divide the church’s assets. “If we don’t see significant
\nchanges in the next two General Assemblies, I suspect we we
\nare going to see some manifestation of separation,” Mr.
\nWilliamson of the Lay Committee said. “I hope and pray it
\nwould be gracious.”
\n<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting article from the NY Times: Conservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy May 22, 2004 By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK As Presbyterians prepare to gather for their General Assembly in Richmond, Va., next month, a band … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politicsculture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}