God Save Us from the Religious Left

Being conditioned by the Left to consider organized religion to be a front for the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” we forget that it is the Left that has most effectively used religion as a tool to further political objectives.

An article by Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute in the Fall, 2007 issue of City Journal provides an excellent update on this neglected phenomenon. He concentrates on the recently regenerated alliance between Leftist clergy and organized labor:

That alliance disintegrated during the 1960s. Left-wing clerics like the notorious rebel priests the Berrigan brothers began to agitate for a wider range of radical causes—above all, a swift end to the Vietnam War. The more culturally conservative blue-collar workers who formed the union movement’s core wanted no part of this. The rift between the Religious Left and labor leaders would last for several decades. The mending of that rift—and the arrival on the political scene of a new, union-friendly, Religious Left during the mid-nineties—owes much to the tireless efforts of savvy labor bosses, especially AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.

Father Daniel Berrigan helped to blaze a path for many of his fellow 1960s radicals, who came to see that the clergy offers a convenient career path to “activism.” Many who did not have the aptitude or temperament for academia went down this road. As time went on, they filled the ranks of the seminary faculties as well, producing an impact that is similar to the politicization of the universities.

There is no doubt that both Christianity and Judaism contain elements that could be interpreted as supporting a liberal agenda. But these elements must be balanced against a vast array of traditional teachings that are anything but politically correct. The Bible, after all, considers male homosexuality to be a capital crime. The militants, however, are skilled at cherry-picking the “peace and love” exhortations, using this as a license to transform Marx into a latter-day Jesus.

Leftist priests, ministers, and Reform rabbis have formed an intricate network that has become a self-sustaining force, quite impervious to the laity. A good example is the National Council of Churches (NCC), an umbrella organization for moonbats from the mainline Protestant denominations. Any resemblance between this group and the Bible is purely coincidental. They sit in their New York headquarters, funded by left-leaning millionaires and foundations, safely insulated from the man in the pew.

I myself attended NCC meetings (not as a supporter, mind you) during the 1980s and 90s, and I can testify to the rabid neo-Marxist dogma that wafted through the air like cigar smoke. They had a fairly extensive menu of enemy du jour, taken from the usual suspects among the running dogs of Western imperialism, as Chairman Mao used to say. One of their favorites was Israel, for whom no venom was spared. They seemed to be in competition with the UN to see how many anti-Israel resolutions could be passed. (If only they would have had such concern for the plight of Christians in the Middle East.)

Most congregants are ideologically far removed from these antics. As Malanga points out,

While the NCC and its member churches pursue a variety of left-wing causes—even partnering with the activist organization MoveOn.org and featuring speakers like Michael Moore at events—a Pew poll has found that 54 percent of white, mainline Protestants and 50 percent of Catholics voted Republican in the 2004 presidential elections. Those who attended church regularly voted Republican even more heavily—at nearly the same rate as evangelical Christians, in fact.

At an interfaith meeting in Philadelphia back in 1990, I had a discussion with a high-ranking official of the American Friends Service Committee, the home for moonbat Quakers. I had always been perplexed by the fact that the AFSC, a group preaching unqualified non-violence, was a leading supporter of the PLO. So I put the question to my interlocutor: How can this be possible? Politics aside, even if Israel is as evil as you say it is, how can you as uncompromising pacifists support an organization that was built on violence of the most extreme kind? His answer: We don’t support them—we understand them.