Mark Tooley asks:
Is the NAE becoming a carbon copy of the left-wing and largely irrelevant National Council of Churches (NCC)? As the evangelical Left continues to exploit the leadership void at the once staunchly conservative NAE, the similarities between the NCC’s notorious decline from mainline to sideline is sadly similar.
Ironically, even as evangelicals are now America’s largest demographic group, their supposed representatives at the NAE think they must turn Left to become more popular.
"The United States historically has been a leader in supporting international human rights efforts, but our moral vision has blurred since 9/11,” the NAE complained, in a statement called “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror.”
At issue here is not the "rightness of torture" but a disposition to fault the U.S. in ways essentially unfair to the facts or general principles already in place.
. . . the drafters of the torture statement were hardly “conservative” or supportive of the War against Terror. The 17 member committee, called “Evangelicals for Human Rights,” is comprised nearly exclusively of pseudo-pacifist
academics and antiwar activists who sharply condemn the Bush administration. The lack of any pretense towards balance was odd. Polls show that evangelicals are America’s most reliably conservative voting bloc. But apparently only anti-Bush diehards qualified for this committee.
. . . Much of the campaign against “torture” is a barely disguised crusade against the U.S. war against terror. The NAE is not yet eviscerated enough to align openly with the National Council of Churches. But evangelical Left activists and academics got as much as they could get from the NAE, at least so far. Left-wing religionists rarely create broad-based organizations. Instead, they usually subvert religious groups founded by conservatives, and then preside over their decline, after expending all remaining moral capital.The National Council of Churches was once an admirable expression of mainstream Christianity in America, before it substituted left-wing politics for its original spiritual purpose. For some reason, the NAE seems to find the NCC’s downward trajectory a laudable example to follow. (more)
Me: I lament this trajectory. The NAE Office of Governmental Affairs in Washington, D.C. remains small, with eight employees (headed by Richard Cizek), and a $686,000 annual budget. The NAE claims 30 million constitutents. In what sense do these employees represent the views of their essentially conservative constituents? What do member denominations of the NAE think about this hijacking of their Association? Will we be hearing from them? We'll have to wait and see.
Same Day Update: Further internet browsing has turned up a letter that was sent March 1, 2007, to Dr. L. Roy Taylor, Chairman of the NAE Board of Directors, complaining about Richard Cizek, head of the NAE Office of Governmental Affairs, regarding the NAE's public position on global warming. The letter reflects concerns that I, myself, came to independently. One of the signers is Dr. James Dobson. A segment of the letter follows:
The liberal media has given wide coverage to Cizik’s views and has characterized them as being representative of the NAE member organizations. We are not aware of any evidence to support that assumption. More importantly, we have observed that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children. In their place has come a preoccupation with climate concerns that extend beyond the NAE’s mandate and its own statement of purpose.
** Update 3/19/07 - I should have included a link to an article by Mark Tooley reporting on the tift between Dr. James Dobson and Richard Cizek over NAE's position on global warming. It can be found here. It was written August 21, 2006.