Former moderator rails against renewal groups
By Mark Tooley, Institute on Religion and Democracy, October 27, 2000
NEW YORK – An October 19 conference at Union Theological Seminary in New York City spotlighted the “threat” posed to “mainline Christianity” and “fundamental democratic freedoms” by conservative renewal groups within mainline churches.
Speakers included a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), a United Methodist Women’s Division executive, the head of the Interfaith Alliance, and the president of Union Seminary. A co-sponsor of the event was the Institute for Democracy Studies (IDS), a fairly new leftist group that seems to specialize in investigations of vast right-wing religious conspiracies.
IDS has recently published a book, A Moment to Decide, which chronicles the allegedly ominous rise of renewal groups within the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Robert BohlPerhaps the most enraged among the speakers was former Presbyterian Moderator Robert Bohl, who opened by saying, “I’m damned mad and here’s why!” Referring to leaders for renewal within his own denomination, he exclaimed, “I wish they would go away!” He claimed that renewal leaders are not, as they profess, really concerned about Biblical authority but about “control and power.”
Bohl alleged that the issue of Biblical authority has been employed historically to justify slavery, denial of civil rights, and opposition to the ordination of women. “Damn them! They will not go away!” he again complained about conservatives and their program for “theological cleansing.” Bohl predicted that the “extreme right” will continue to exploit the Bible and abuse human reason in its quest for power.
“They rebuke civility as irrelevant,” Bohl said of renewal leaders. He portrayed the Covenant Network that he helped to found as an effort to create dialogue between the opposing camps within the PCUSA. But he predicted that dialogue with the “Religious Right” won’t go anywhere. (The Covenant Network is the leading advocate of ordination of self-affirming, practicing homosexuals and worship services to bless same-gender unions.)
Bohl claimed that he regularly receives hate mail from Presbyterian conservatives, one of whom supposedly told Bohl that he regularly prays for Bohl’s death. “I’m accused of being evil and of being an agent of Satan,” Bohl said. He now advises ministerial candidates not to use his name as a reference because conservative churches will be prone to reject them because of it.
The “extremism,” “absolutism,” and “insidious malignancy” of the extreme Right “will eat away at those of us who are its victims,” Bohl despaired. “But we can’t sit by quietly and hope it doesn’t happen to us,” he implored. “I wish to hell I weren’t here!” he added, but duty has compelled him to speak out against the threats arrayed against the church he loves.
“I long for the long dark night [for our church] to be over,” he said. “But I have no intention of giving in.” Employing more temperate language, Bohl then explained that the church needs liberals to create new ways of thinking and conservatives to ask where God can be found. “We don’t all have to be the same,” he said. “God alone is the judge and Lord of the conscience.”
Then reverting to more apocalyptic language, Bohl pointed to a “chasm” within the church between the “extremists on the right” and “the rest of us.” He predicted the “religious right” in the PCUSA “will exhaust every ounce of energy and every dollar to take us over.” He lamented that conservatives are more determined, better organized, and “more adept at destroying the enemy.”
Bohl specifically deplored the 1997 passage of a constitutional amendment that called for fidelity in marriage or chastity in singleness for PCUSA officers. He called it “bad theology” and emblematic of conservative inroads. He also lambasted the latest effort to prohibit same-sex unions as a further attempt to “micromanage the church.” And he predicted it “will destroy our participatory democracy.”
With disdain and sarcasm, Bohl recalled a meeting he had, as the denomination’s moderator, with the directors of the Presbyterian Lay Committee. It began as a “lovely evening” at a resort. But he said he quickly realized that Lay Committee leaders “wanted to tell me what to do.” Then they “attacked the church.”
“They offered me wine, but I wanted a martini,” Bohl remembered with a smile. “I was outnumbered.” Judging that the Lay Committee had no interest in reconciliation, he “got out on the first flight out of there.”
“They want to drive us out,” Bohl warned. But he pledged: “I won’t roll over and play dead.” Bohl told the crowd at Union Seminary that groups like theirs were needed all over the country to counteract growing conservative influences in the mainline churches.