Publishing corporation’s marketers: Conspiracy book a PCUSA ‘resource’
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, September 20, 2006
The leadership of the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation and the marketers of its publications are sending out conflicting messages about a controversial book that claims President George W. Bush treasonously conspired to orchestrate the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
“The views expressed in the book are [David Ray] Griffin’s alone,” said PPC Board Chair Kenneth Godshall. “PPC provides a variety of viewpoints in the books we publish. A few of them from time to time are controversial. This particular book is the work of an independent author and in no way represents the views of the denomination or PPC itself.”
Godshall and Davis Perkins, president of PPC, have both said that the publication of Griffin’s Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 does not include an endorsement by the publishing corporation or the denomination.
But the marketers who are promoting the book say otherwise.
They list Griffin’s book on The Presbyterian Marketplace under the caption: “All things Presbyterian, all in one place.” Furthermore, they describe the “Marketplace” as including “More than 5,000 PC(USA)-related materials, including those produced by the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation (Westminster/John Knox Press and Geneva Press), are available.”
Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 was one of five publications listed on the Marketplace on Sept. 20.
The promotion includes a blurb on the main page of the Marketplace: “David Ray Griffin’s controversial book analyzes the official accounts of September 11, 2001, explores a Christian perspective of the issues, applies Jesus’ teachings, and draws a parallel between the Roman Empire and the current political administration.”
More detailed information is included on the Marketplace’s order page: “Religion and popular writer David Ray Griffin provides a hard-hitting analysis of the official accounts of the events of September 11, 2001 and explores a distinctively Christian perspective on these issues, taking seriously what we know about Jesus’ life, death, and teachings. Drawing a parallel between the Roman Empire of antiquity and the American Empire of today, he applies Jesus’ teachings to the current political administration, and he explores how Christian churches, as a community intending to be an incarnation of the divine, can and should respond.”
Griffin’s “hard-hitting analysis of the official accounts” has been widely lampooned, and the Presbyterian Church (USA) has been criticized because its publishing arm has given credence to a conspiracy theory with a political agenda.
Alan Wisdom, vice president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, wrote a lengthy review – “Choose your conspiracy: depraved or demonic?” – for Presbyterians Today.
“Griffin’s book is not a work of careful scholarship,” Wisdom says. “When citing eyewitnesses to 9-11, he quotes only those whose words seem to support his own thesis. He ignores a mass of contrary evidence: the photos of sheared and bowing columns in the World Trade Center towers, the seismographs that show a progressive collapse rather than a quick series of timed explosions, the eyewitnesses who saw the American Airlines plane slam into the Pentagon, the cell phone calls from passengers on the doomed flights, the cockpit transmissions and black box recordings of the hijackers, the other information subsequently collected about those 19 individuals, and the statements from al Qaeda itself.”
Wisdom also says Griffin’s theology “is as unorthodox as his take on 9-11. He follows a form of panentheism, holding that God is in all things but not identical with the universe. On the contrary, Griffin believes in the eternal existence of self-determining entities autonomous from God. He therefore denies God’s omnipotence and sovereignty, as well as the doctrine of creation out of nothing.”
“Truly, the U.S. government would have to be demonic from top to bottom (rather than merely depraved in the Reformed sense) to have carried out the 9-11 conspiracy as Griffin imagines it,” Wisdom said.
Another recent commentary was a Sept. 8 Wall Street Journal column titled “Anything Goes: The Presbyterian Church gets into the 911 conspiracy theory business” by Heather Wilhelm.
She noted, “Mr. Griffin is not a Presbyterian, nor, as representatives of the publishing company and the church are quick to point out, does he speak for the Presbyterian Church (USA). But is Mr. Griffin, best known for his academic work describing an evolving, nonomnipotent, nonomniscient God, a ‘well regarded theologian’ whose ‘ideas are worth exploring,’ as the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation insists? Or is he, as I heard from Presbyterian laypeople across the country in response to his book, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘a total wingnut.'”
Wilhelm concluded: “The old adage that ‘if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything’ seems to apply to the Presbyterian leadership. Whether the parishioners will put up with this sort of moral confusion in the long term remains to be seen.”