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TechnoratiThe National Council of Churches (NCC), which once represented America's premier churches, sort of celebrated its 100th anniversary recently. Although the NCC was not created until 1950, in a flurry of post-war enthusiasm, its predecessor, the Federal Council of Churches, was founded in 1908.
Meeting in Denver just after the Obama win, the NCC's General Assembly was notably excited about a new administration more akin to its own century-long liberalism. The pastor of Obama's former Chicago church, the Rev. Otis Moss, successor to the infamous Jeremiah Wright, keynoted the NCC gathering and was received fulsomely, of course.
But the NCC fête also included more serious self-reflection than is customary. Both in 1908 and in 1950, the NCC and its predecessor represented the prestige denominations of American religion: primarily the Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, northern Baptists, and Disciples. All of those denominations are now facing their fifth decades of membership decline and cultural marginalization.
About 30 denominations were present at the start and, remarkably, the NCC is only a few denominations larger a century later. Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists, not to mention Pentecostals, were never persuaded. Most of the Eastern Orthodox, viewing the church councils as the pathway to America's religious mainstream, gladly did join, though remaining parsimonious in their contributions. About 40 million American church members, or about 25 percent of the estimated total American church membership, today belong to NCC denominations.
The old Federal Council of Churches was founded in the heart of the Progressive era amid vast cultural optimism. Its churches were America's oldest and wealthiest, and its members included most of America's political and economic elites. Having accepted doctrinaire Darwinism and Germanic critical attitudes towards the Bible, the council was theologically and politically liberal from the start. Anxious for consensus, it fudged about theology, claiming to locate Christian unity instead in charity and progressive political reforms. The NCC's predecessor was the old Social Gospel's chief promoter and legitimizer.
Reminding the NCC crowd in Denver about some of this history appropriately was Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Following a trajectory like the NCC, and now a shadow of its former self, Union Seminary was once the premier school of ascendant liberal Protestants in America. Niebuhr, of course, was the premier American Protestant ethicist of the mid-20th century. At first a leftist critic of the NCC's predecessor and its Social Gospel, he later espoused Christian realism, which was still liberal, but rejected utopianism.
Sadly, Dorrien repeated many left-wing buzz phrases that are customary for the NCC, and which would probably have irritated Niebuhr. "If those of us who are Caucasian fail to interrogate white supremacism and its privileges, we will resist any recognition of our own racism," Dorrien inclusively implored. "If those of us who are male fail to interrogate our complicity in sexism, we will perpetuate it. If those of us who are Christian fail to repudiate anti-Semitism and Christian supercessionism, we will perpetuate the evils that come with them. If those of us who are heterosexual fail to stand up for the rights of gays and lesbians, we will have an oppressive church. If we sign up for militarism and empire, we will betray the way of Christ. We need a wider community of the divine good." Continue »
Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.
