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Be Careful with Your Mail

Published: 6/19/2006

Then I realized that the IRD had been up to their old tricks. The so-called Institute on Religion and Democracy raises money by mailing thousands of unsolicited emails and letters to Methodists warning them of the dire consequences of the sorry leadership of the church, and saying, in effect, send us money so we can save the Methodist church from itself.

I have been both the victim of attacks by the IRD and of praise by the IRD. (They praised me for opposing the Hearts Aflame meeting last August, when it was our entire Cabinet who wrote the letter, not me. The IRD has difficulty with facts.) They have brought the hardball politics of attack into the church and, in my opinion, are doing much mischief among people who take their mailings at face value. The amazing thing is -- considering the thousands of letters that the IRD blitzed Alabama with - only two of you took them seriously! Good for you. The IRD, like most of these fringe groups, has a small constituency but (unlike the other groups) has big financial support, much of it from questionable sources.

The thing that gets me about the IRD is their enslavement to the political right (similar to the way some other church attack organizations are mindlessly enslaved to the left). They call themselves an institute for religion and democracy, overlooking that scripture is not particularly concerned with either. Whatever religion they are defending sure doesn't look like the faith that is taught in the Methodist Discipline.

Scripture is concerned with Jesus Christ as Lord. As United Methodist Christians, we are focused upon trying to talk and to walk like Jesus. Our Conference vision statement is Every church challenged and equipped to grow more disciples of Jesus Christ by taking risks and changing lives. (Not much mention of Jesus in the IRD publications.) They have little concern for our evangelistic mandate to make disciples or to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land, preferring to focus mostly upon issues of politics and sex.

The IRD is almost devoid of discernable theological commitment to the historic Christian faith. It's mostly a political agitation group. Their letters could be just as well published by an Islamic or Buddhist group -- if that group is obsessed with homosexuality and the stupidity of United Methodist Bishops!

A friend of mine, Jason Byasee has a good review of a new book on the IRD. I attach excerpts of the review below. Jason manages to be fair to the fallacies of both the left and the right in his review.

Indeed, one of the great curiosities in these fringe, attack groups of the right and the left is that they tend to employ the same mean tactics, the same weak theology, and to show the same sort of secular political enslavement.

I hope that the United Methodists of North Alabama are too engaged in witnessing to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and in making more disciples of Jesus to be distracted by the histrionics of the IRD. The IRD claims to speak for the majority of United Methodists. I have found few Alabama United Methodists as obsessed with sex and politics as the IRD, but maybe our Methodists are different from the IRD and their Washington, D.C. cronies.

I probably shouldn't have wasted this much time on a mostly ineffective group like the IRD, and I may spend the next few weeks screening my emails and calls ( having been assaulted by them before), still, North Alabama United Methodists want me to teach, so for today, that's my lesson!

Blessings upon you in your ministry.

Will Willimon

Excerpts from a review of Hard Ball on Holy Ground: The Religious Right v. the Mainline for the Church's Soul. Edited by Stephen Swecker. Boston Wesleyan Association, 108 pp., $11.95 paperback.

Just after the Iraq war began, a parishioner said to me," I hear that the National Council of Churches is funding the war protesters! That's money I put in the plate-now it's paying for those people to disrespect our country!"

That story was false, as best I could tell, though the NCC along with most United Methodist bishops was on record as opposing the war.

For three decades the IRD has been monitoring mainline churches for political statements that are out of step with the views of rank-and-file members. The IRD has a division for each of the three denominations in its crosshairs: the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Episcopal Church. Each division sends out unsolicited mailings that are critical of ecclesial leaders and invite support for the IRD. The program works because often there is indeed a gap between the views of church leaders and those of people in the pews. The more controversy this gap generates, the better for the IRD.

When the UMC's bishops condemned the U.S. military presence in Iraq, a fax arrived almost immediately at the Century from the IRD's top Methodist watchdog, Mark Tooley. Like some kind of Methodist pope perched over the bishops, Tooley dressed them down: "How woefully absurd that church prelates condemn the United States for attempting to build democracy in Iraq."

And precisely who is Mark Tooley to pass such judgment on the Methodist Council of Bishops? A former CIA operative with no formal theological training. Journalists often use Tooley's material when they report on church squabbles, since he offers a "conservative" soundbite to balance the bishops' "liberal" voice. Tooley doesn't care that the bishops said nothing in their statement to suggest that they oppose building democracy in Iraq. But that doesn't stop the IRD from accusing them of such a position. The IRD has operated largely under the radar. But now some Methodists are fighting back. The essays in Hard Ball on Holy Ground, produced by the publishers of Zion's Herald, a liberal Methodist magazine, explore the IRD's history, goals and tactics.

. . .Richard Mellon Scaife, Howard and Roberta Ahmanson and the John Birch Society are among those that have given the IRD millions of dollars over the years. Scaife also funded much of the litigation against President Clinton in the 1990s. (Swecker and colleagues report that Scaife is on public record as claiming that Bill and Hillary Clinton have murdered dozens of friends and colleagues.)

The Ahmansons have been supporters of a Christian Reconstructionist organization that seeks to impose Levitical law on America. The Birch Society seeks to eliminate virtually all government regulation of business and any requirement for corporations to negotiate with unions. The IRD may complain about mainline elites, but clearly it needs its own set of financial elites to pay the bills. . . Why, the writers ask, should those who are not even members of mainline Protestant churches play such a prominent public role in criticizing those churches?

. . . The IRD's tactics often seem based more on Tooley's CIA experience than on Christian behavior. .

The IRD does plenty that warrants criticism, but the authors of Hard Ball frequently overplay their hand... A chapter titled "Working on a Coup d'Etat" hypothesizes that the IRD's goal is "a hostile takeover of mainline denominations." Let's tone down the alarm bells to suggest an alternative explanation: perhaps conservatives just think they're right, and are fighting for their views.

The volume mocks the IRD's "sophomoric" and "amateurish" policy analysis. But the IRD is not exactly amateurish. It is usually careful to maintain some form of plausible deniability regarding its political stances. Tooley, for example, insists that he is not endorsing the war in Iraq but is simply urging the church to be more modest in its political pronouncements; it should leave the political stuff to politicians while it goes about saving souls. (That's actually a discordantly modern view of the separation of faith and politics for one who claims to be a traditionalist!) This stance is disingenuous. The IRD advocates political positions when it uses Republican talking points in excoriating those on the opposite side. But one has to admire the cleverness.

Church trials are repeatedly brought up as evidence of the IRD's hardball tactics. But somebody has to resolve disputes over morals and doctrine. That's why church structures exist. And though the writers repeatedly praise the "open" and "democratic" nature of the UMC's government, it's easier to get in touch with the IRD than with the elected officials on the church's various boards and agencies. It is no small thing that the IRD returns e-mails immediately, while church leaders often ignore critical inquiry altogether. (On the other hand, church leaders have other tasks to attend to, while the IRD lives to encourage dispute). Those who feel that church leadership is elitist and out of touch have a point.

The writers of Hard Ball have not just made the tactical mistake of trying to beat the IRD at its own game. (This volume reveals that the IRD is better at the one-line zinger and the bob-and-weave of plausible deniability than the people at Zion's Herald.) Their book is also no more Christian than what it attacks. Each side screams, face red and veins bulging, at the other's evil, nowhere confessing its own sin or admitting its own susceptibility to grabbing power within the denomination for its own gratification. Just once I would like to hear one side say, "I may be wrong about this", or, miracle of miracles, "Forgive me." If both sides humbly realized that they have more in common with one another by virtue of their common ecclesial and sacramental life than with those of similar political persuasions at Fox News or Air America, we could have a far less dreary argument. . . . . .

Copyright 2006 Christian Century. Reprinted by permission from the May 16, 2006 issue of the Christian Century. Subscriptions: $49/yr. from P.O. Box 378, Mt. Morris, IL 61054.