We Don’t Get No Respect
Think Tank Considers Why the Mainline Is Ignored
by Mark Tooley
In a recent speech, columnist George Will described Washington, D.C., as “an enclave surrounded on four sides by reality.” One could say the same thing of many of the offices of the mainline churches.
In March, the Washington-based Aspen Institute hosted a two-day symposium on the public policy witness of mainline Protestant churches. But hardly anyone at the conference fully recognized an obvious problem for mainline church lobby offices in the nation’s capital: Their left-leaning staffs do not speak for most mainline church members.
Instead, speakers such as Robert Wuthnow of Princeton University lamented that journalists ignore mainline pronouncements because they are “boring” and not as “interesting” as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson.
Wuthnow did not give the mainline churches enough credit. They do indeed provide spokesmen as colorful and ideological as Falwell or Robertson. But unlike the televangelists, liberal mainline leaders are not able to politically influence a significant segment of their own constituency. Like political fossils from a distant past, the mainline lobby offices are little more relevant to the US political scene than the US Socialist Workers Party or the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
Wuthnow and other speakers lamented the “quiet” nature of mainline lobbying. In fact, mainline church lobbies are hardly quiet. Like the religious right, these church offices frequently publish news releases and participate in press conferences involving controversial and timely issues.
Unappreciated Progressivism
The conference speakers also noted how mainline churches are unappreciated for their “progressive” political stances. A review of some recent mainline rumblings makes this lack of appreciation quite understandable:
• Mainline leaders renewed their campaign to ban land mines through an international treaty that the United States has refused to sign. “This treaty has slowed the carnage and begun the long process of healing lands broken by land mines,” said Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches (NCC), speaking at a Capitol Hill rally in March. His council is launching an effort to persuade every church, mosque, and temple to support the treaty. Edgar’s church council has been joined by the US Catholic Conference, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and numerous other denominations in demanding quick US ratification of the treaty.
• Heated opposition to the appointment of John Ashcroft (a Pentecostal) as US Attorney General in February emerged from, among other places, the Interfaith Alliance, led largely by liberal mainline Protestants. At a press conference in Washington, the Alliance offered a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew, a Sikh, and two liberal Baptists to warn of the impending threat to their freedoms supposedly posed by Ashcroft.
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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