NCC leader says ‘progressives’ have their work cut out for them
By Mark Tooley, Institute on Religion and Democracy, November 17, 2004
Speaking at a post-election symposium in Washington, D.C., National Council of Churches (NCC) General Secretary Bob Edgar expressed sadness over President Bush’s re-election.
“I hope we moderates and progressives are not too disheartened,” Bob Edgar said. He was part of an election analysis panel sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group. Edgar said the switch of 70,000 votes in Ohio would have resulted in a more favorable result.
The NCC that Edgar leads includes over 30, mostly Protestant denominations, whose memberships total up to 50 million Americans. Historically, the NCC is politically liberal. But polls, including polls for the latest presidential election, show mainline Protestants favored President George W. Bush over Sen. John Kerry by at least 54 to 40 percent.
Edgar, who is a former Democratic member of the U.S. Congress and an ordained United Methodist minister, lamented the success of the “religious right” in claiming “morality” and “values” for themselves.
Abortion and homosexuality should not be the “sum total of morality,” Edgar insisted. He called these issues relatively “minor” compared to others that involve caring for “the least of these on the planet earth.”
Urging a better definition of the differences between “public morality” and “personal piety,” Edgar suggested that issues important to religious conservatives, such as abortion and homosexuality, belong more to the latter category and involve a “narrow” notion morality. Issues important to religious “progressives” belong in the first category, he said.
“A first strike foreign policy is immoral,” Edgar said of the war in Iraq, which he called a morality issue. He also said it was immoral for the U.S. to continue to detain former al Qaeda and Taliban fighters at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
“Nine million children who don’t have health care is immoral,” Edgar continued. So too is air pollution, he said.
Edgar recalled the glory days of liberal religious activists in the 1960s and 1970s when they organized anti-Vietnam War protest marches and supported the civil rights movement. He admitted that the religious left has been politically less effective than the religious right for the last three decades.
“We shut down the Vietnam war in 1975,” Edgar recalled. “After that there was a civil marriage between the religious right and the secular right.” He complained that “tele-evangelists” portrayed Ronald Reagan as more Christian than Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.
Although the religious right has a more “narrow set of issues,” Edgar said it has been more effective than the religious left in setting egos aside to work for political success.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, our churches were filled,” Edgar recalled about mainline Protestant churches. “In the 1970s, we started coasting,” he said. All mainline Protestant denominations have been losing members since the mid-1960s. Critics of the NCC say that liberal political activism by their church leaders has contributed to the exodus of more conservative church members.
Over the last two years, “progressive” religious leaders have been getting better organized politically in response to the war in Iraq, Edgar said. He noted that 3,500 liberal religious officials marched in Washington, D.C. in protest even before the U.S. military action in Iraq had begun.
In contrast, Edgar claimed it took “50,000 body bags” to organize religious opposition to the Vietnam War. He also said church members were slow in backing the civil rights movement.
Edgar boasted that liberal religious groups registered more than 2 million voters for the recent presidential election. He specifically cited the work of his own NCC, Soujourners/Call to Renewal and the Children’s Defense Fund.
Citing the fact that Kerry has received more votes than Al Gore four years ago, Edgar said, “I have a great deal of hope coming out of this election.”
“We can bring hope to this fragile planet we call earth,” Edgar assured the audience. But he also said the Democrats need to “not waffle” about their liberal principles. He expressed hope that moderate voters would turn against Republicans during a second Bush term.
Edgar warned that Bush will have a hard time pleasing his supporters from the Religious Right, whom Edgar named as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham and James Dobson.
“All of us have been hurt by religious fundamentalism around the world, whether Christian, Islamic or Jewish,” Edgar said. “Especially here in this country,” he added.
Recalling his own service in the U.S. Congress, Edgar said he was elected in a Republican district of Pennsylvania by “fiscal conservatives” who were pro-environment and “pro-choice.”
Edgar said he “thanked God” that U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, against whom he ran for Senate in 1986 in Pennsylvania, is in line to chair the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. In that position, Specter can “block judges who would undue basic law,” Edgar said. He was referring to Specter’s public comments about the implausibility of judicial nominees who question abortion rights.
Boasting that “a lot of us were chaplains to world opinion” after U.S. foreign policy became international unpopular under President Bush, Edgar said he is opposed to using war to combat terrorism.
“If bombing capital cities helps in the war on terror, then we should have bombed Oklahoma City,” Edgar said, recalling the 1995 bombing by domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh. He said terrorism should be combated with “international police action” and getting at the “root causes” of terror, not by war.
Much of Edgar’s remarks hearkened back to his early years of protests rallies against the Vietnam War. Those protests culminated in 1975, when the U.S. Congress of which Edgar was then a member, voted to shut off all aid for South Vietnam, ensuring a communist take-over of Southeast Asia.
Boasting of his role in that, Edgar did not mention the millions in Southeast Asia who were thereafter killed, detained, forced into exile or impoverished by their new communist rulers.
Another panelist at the symposium, former Republican presidential speechwriter David Frum, dismissed Edgar’s comments as a “trip down memory lane.”
Frum pointed out that the Presbyterian, Lutheran and Episcopal clergy who participated in Edgar’s protests of the 1960s – “back when they still had congregations” – either “don’t exist anymore” or don’t have congregations. He was referring to the demographic implosion of mainline Protestantism, which is Edgar’s main constituency, and which has been in continuous membership decline since the early 1960s.
Neither Frum nor Edgar noted that what is left of mainline Protestantism still votes more Republican than Democrat, despite the political stances of leaders such as Edgar.
Edgar did not respond to Frum’s demographic point. Instead, he challenged Frum to write a speech for President Bush in which the president would acknowledge his “inability” to admit mistakes.