Summer film, Kirkpatrick’s WARC join in denouncing global capitalism
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, August 25, 2004
The remake of The Manchurian Candidate and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches have identified a shared villain: capitalism.
The groups blame capitalism and “the multinational corporation” for an assortment of evil, including AIDS, crime, poverty, violence, joblessness, environmental degradation, etc. In the movie, the corporate enemy is the Manchurian Global Corporation, a veiled imitation of such companies as Halliburton.
Both the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and The Wall Street Journal have taken note of the harmonic convergence of Hollywood and religion and criticized their attack on free enterprise.
Besides the cast of The Manchurian Candidate, one of the principal figures in this latest denounciation of capitalism is Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the new president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.
The World Alliance of Reformed Churches approved a statement called the Accra Confession, declaring capitalism an “immoral economic system defended by empire … In biblical terms such a system of wealth accumulation at the expense of the poor is seen as unfaithful to God and responsible for preventable human suffering.”
The WARC also said capitalism has created “job loss and grinding poverty, an unprecedented rise in crime and violence, ecological degradation, and the spread of HIV/AIDS.” It called for “creating effective institutions of global governance” that will counterbalance the “unaccountable power of transnational corporations and organizations who often operate around the world with impunity.”
Kirkpatrick agreed.
“I invite every one of our churches to support WARC and one another in points of needs; to be a community that truly covenants for justice in the economy and the earth; to be a community that works in our churches all over the world for gender justice, for full participation of youth in all our activities,” Kirkpatrick told Ecumenical News International, an agency that is funded by the alliance and the World Council of Churches.
Meanwhile, The Manchurian Candidate was depicting capitalism as the world’s evil empire. (In the 1962 classic, the enemy was communism – the opposite of capitalism – but Hollywood no longer considers communism a crowd-attracting commodity.)
The Rev. Gerald Zandstra, programs director for the Acton Institute, first drew the analogy between The Manchurian Candidate and Kirkpatrick’s World Alliance of Reformed Churches. Zandstra suggested that the alliance was drawing its conclusions from Hollywood, not Scripture.
“Unfortunately, a number of religious leaders – who should know better – have bought into the warped and delusional view of the business world presented by this summer’s The Manchurian Candidate,” Zandstra, a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, said in a commentary posted on the Acton Institute Web site.
“Some of these religious leaders argue that the multinational company, unregulated and driven only by insatiable thirst for profit, is the source of all evil. Using imagery like the ‘evil empire’ to describe the global economy, they warn us the multinational Tower of Babel is covered by advertisements from corporations that control our minds, our purchasing decisions, and our pocketbooks.”
Zandstra called the movie and the alliance resolution “bad political theory, bad economics, and bad theology. Corporations and those who lead them are accountable both to their shareholders and to those who purchase their products. They cannot force us to buy their products and most operate under strict legal requirements imposed by their governments.”
He added, “It is, instead, ‘institutions of global governance’ that are some of the most unaccountable organizations on earth. Does anyone recall voting for a United Nations representative? Is the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund accountable to the citizens whose taxes pay its bills?”
The Wall Street Journal said, “It’s hard to say which is worse: Hollywood’s view of religion or some religious leaders’ view of corporations.”
Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Church (USA) staff was shoring up the case against capitalism with a commentary by Aimee Moiso, a student at San Francisco Theological Seminary, who attended the recent meeting of the General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.
Moiso declared that “the United States has a large hand in the global imbalance that threatens life for millions of God’s children. We who are citizens of this nation live in the world’s last remaining economic, political and military superpower. Because we wield the power, the decisions of our elected leaders affect the global community every day.”
The thrust of her column was that, because of her experience at the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, she would vote the right way in the U.S. presidential election.
She didn’t say whom she would vote for: the former capitalist and incumbent president or the long-time politician who married the wealthy heir of a capitalist’s fortune.