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WASHINGTON, D.C. — For the first time since its founding in 1950, the National Council of Churches is receiving a majority of its operating revenue from non-church sources and foundations that often support liberal causes, a report issued by the Institute on Religion and Democracy said Jan. 10.
“Strange Yokefellows: The National Council of Churches and Its Growing Non-Church Constituency,” also claims that the NCC has aligned with leftist political organizations such as MoveOn.org and People for the American Way to combat and “defeat the alleged totalitarian ambitions of a right-wing conspiracy involving President Bush, Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, and the IRD, among others.”
People for the American Way was founded by Hollywood magnate Norman Lear to oppose conservative public policies and political candidates.
Alan Wisdom, vice president of the IRD, a conservative ecumenical alliance working to recapture a biblical social witness for the church, said in a news conference at the National Press Club that the NCC has abandoned its essential mission of Christian unity and is working to “construct a Religious Left that will be a counterweight to the much-reviled Religious Right.”
Wisdom said the NCC’s political stances “fall almost uniformly left of center,” including the church group’s stance on gay marriage.
NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar, who also attended the news conference, has declared his personal support for gay marriage, Wisdom said.
“He and other NCC leaders repeatedly criticize fellow Christians who defend the traditional definition of marriage,” Wisdom said. “In thus fostering the impression of an evenly split U.S. Christian community, the NCC serves the interests of its “progressive yokefellows who are campaigning for the legitimization of same-sex marriage,” Wisdom said.
The IRD report is the result of two years of research by Wisdom and John Lomperis, an IRD research associate and former Bush-Cheney campaign volunteer. Both men say they found that mostly liberal foundations are filling NCC coffers as much, if not more, than the member churches the NCC represents.
Money troubles
The NCC experienced financial problems in the 1980s and 1990s as contributions from many of the churches of its 35 member denominations diminished. Gifts to the NCC declined from $2.9 million in the 2000-01 fiscal year to $1.78 million in the 2004-05 fiscal year—a drop of 40 percent—according to the IRD report.
But Edgar, a former six-term Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, was named general secretary of the church group in 2000, and began trimming costs and cutting staff in order to make the NCC more financially stable. He also sought non-church funding sources, with $2.9 million coming from foundations and non-church groups in 2004-05.
Edgar told BP News in an interview that the NCC’s financial reserves have increased from $2 million to $10 million under his leadership and that the organization has operated with a balanced budget for the past five years.
“I am delighted that the IRD has validated what I was called to the National Council of Churches to do, and that is to raise money and raise money,” Edgar said. “I am also delighted that the IRD admitted that it, too, receives 40 percent of its funding from foundations, albeit conservative foundations.”
Differing approaches
IRD was founded as an anti-communist parachurch organization in the 1980s and has since received the support of foundations concerned with spreading democracy and making a place for religion in American public life. One of the IRD’s largest supporters is the Castle Rock Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Coors Brewing Co. The IRD also receives support from the mostly conservative Carthage, Sarah Scaife, John M. Olin, W.H. Brady and Lynde and Harry Bradley foundations.
The IRD, however, is not a “church group” like the NCC, under the guidelines set in place by the Internal Revenue Service, Wisdom said.
“We are a parachurch group and advocacy is exactly what we should be doing,” Wisdom said. “We should be, as an organization made up of Christians, advocating our positions in the public square. But the NCC is a church group, and they have a special obligation to avoid being on one side of political arguments.”
In the news conference, Lomperis said he and Wisdom “found numerous common themes among the dozens of non-church entities from which the church council has recently sought or received funding. These groups have very little demonstrated interest in religion beyond recruiting faith communities to support their favored social and political causes.”
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