Ostensibly the resolution puts the church on record for peace in war torn Afghanistan. But actually it demonizes the United States, itself a 50 year tradition in United Methodism, while ignoring the evils of the Taliban and al Qaeda. And it materialistically assumes that peace can be purchased with ever more U.S. dollars. It never cites radical Islam, a chief cause for strife in Afghanistan, perhaps because liberal United Methodist elites cannot conceive of anyone taking traditional religion any more seriously than they do.

The resolution calls the U.S. presence in Afghanistan the “latest in a long history of foreigners trying to impose by military might their own agenda in Afghanistan.” So presumably the American led 2001-2002 overthrow of the Taliban Islamist dictatorship in response to 9-11 is morally on par with the murderous Soviet invasion of 1979, which created 30 years of war and strife. Oddly, but predictably, the resolution never mentions 9-11 or the Taliban, which might distract from its targeting the U.S. It also never mentions that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan is scheduled to end in 2014.

Afghanistan is ever degenerating, thanks to the U.S. presence, the resolution claims. And it asserts that U.S. resources spent on war distract from “health care, education, and community development,” without acknowledging tens of billions already spent by the U.S. on these goods, or admitting that almost no spending or progress on health care, education, and community development would be possible under the Taliban. The resolution also condemns U.S./NATO unmanned drone attacks on insurgent/terrorist targets, likening them to “extrajudicial killings.”

Self-importantly, the resolution chides the U.S. for spending on “weapons and soldiers” (again without citing billions spent on civilian aid) while boasting, “By contrast, for more than 45 years United Methodists and other humanitarian organizations, in partnership with local Afghans, have supported health care and community development work in Afghanistan.” Of course, such church programs are impossible without some level of security.

Embarrassingly, the resolution recalls that in the immediate wake of 9-11, the United Methodist Women’s Division urged “diplomatic means to bring the perpetrators of terrorist acts to justice and to end the bombing of Afghanistan.” Even more laughably, it recalls the ostensibly prophetic words of California Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee who, after 9-11, was the “lone voice at that time in the U.S. government to question military action against Afghanistan.”

So naturally the Religious Left is opposing these mostly symbolic statements, because largely pacifist prelates do not believe any situation, no matter how dire, ever merits even the implied contemplation of force.  They also are more concerned about military force from the U.S. or Israel than they are about nuclear weapons in the hands of apocalyptic Iranian mullahs.

Complaining that the congressional resolutions would “undermine diplomatic efforts,” the leftist churchmen warn the statements would set a “dangerously low threshold for war” by “ruling out containment,” possibly even, by some interpretations endorsing “military force against Iran now.”

The ecumenical complaint to members of Congress was organized by the Presbyterian Church (USA) chief Capitol Hill lobbyist. It was signed by Quaker and Mennonite officials, a left-wing Catholic order, and the lobby offices of the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church.

Noting that Iran’s theocracy since at least the late 1980s has “engaged in a sustained and well-documented pattern of illicit and deceptive activities to acquire nuclear capability,” the congressional resolutions cite Iran as the “most active state sponsor of terrorism,” according to the U.S. State Department.  They also recalled the U.S. Treasury Department’s finding last year that Iran had a “secret deal” to help al Qaeda. Of course they mentioned Iran’s genocidal threats against Israel.  And they pointed at the Islamic Republic’s “serious human rights abuses,” according to the United Nations, including “torture, cruel and degrading treatment in detention, the targeting of human rights defenders, violence against women, and ‘the systematic and serious restrictions on freedom of peaceful assembly’ as well as severe restrictions on the rights to ‘freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.’”

The Congressional resolutions, noting Iran’s continued failure to comply with international non-proliferation standards, urge continued diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran until it ends its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. It also commends the “universal rights and democratic aspirations of the Iranian people.”

Leftist prelates in the U.S. of course are not particularly interested in disarming or democratizing Iran.  Instead, they complain the congressional resolutions are “undercutting” diplomacy, which “heightens the potential war.” They quote various critics claiming the resolutions resemble pre-2003 justifications for the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein Iraq. They insist Iran has not yet decided for nuclear weapons. And they reiterate: “Direct, sustained diplomacy remains the single most effective way to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran and avert war. And they implore:  “We urge you to support diplomacy, not war, with Iran, and to oppose” the congressional resolutions.

The margin was over 2-1.  African delegates, who comprised 30 percent of the total, were key, as were U.S. evangelical delegates, joined by numerous moderate and liberal U.S. delegates.  United Methodist rejection almost ensures that the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly will reject anti-Israel divestment next month, leaving the divestment movement with almost nowhere to go among U.S. religious groups.

But sadly, the divestment debate among United Methodists frequently demonized Israel, with one intemperate delegate from Montana comparing the Jewish nation and the firms who do business with it to companies who facilitated the Nazi Holocaust.    She was preceded by a delegate from Oklahoma who cautiously tried to point at the threats against Israel, only to be chastised by the presiding bishop, who apparently disapproved of criticism aimed at Hamas.

“Of course we care about the Palestinians and what they have gone through—the loss of land, the loss of homes, the wall,” the Rev. Earl Long opined.  “But we also care for the people of Israel and what they too have gone through.”  He cited a “small, radical, fringe, terrorist Palestinian group who is set on their destruction and resorts to suicide bombing.”

Rev. Long was not even able to name Hamas before he was interrupted by presiding Bishop Warren Brown of Sacramento, who chided him: “Just [to] remind the speaker that the body has adopted a rule to avoid personal attacks of persons.” So even to imply criticism of Hamas is apparently an unacceptable “personal attack,” at least according to Methodist standards of hyper political correctness.

There was no such interruption or chiding for the delegate who levied her Nazi comparison against Israel.  Margaret Mary Novak of Montana, while urging anti-Israel divestment, suggested: “I would just ask us all to imagine that we were United Methodists in the 1930s and ’40s, that our Board of Pensions held stock in the very successful manufacturing firms in Germany that bid and received the bids to manufacture the ovens for the concentration camps. At what point would we decide it was time to divest? How much evidence would we ask for before it was time to stop the wholesale destruction of people?”

Bishop Brown merely reacted by asking Novak whether her Nazi comparison was a “speech for or against” the divestment proposal.  It was, she clarified, decidedly for. Evidently likening Israel to the Third Reich is so unexceptionally routine that the bishop was unclear about Novak’s intent.  Novak is vice president of the Foundation for United Methodist Communications.

More temperately, a Texas delegate pointed out that Israel has legitimate security concerns.   “The small state of Israel, which we support politically, is surrounded by enemies who wish it to be destroyed and will not have peace until it is destroyed,” said Henry Lessner.  “We are only adding fuel to the fire and giving more people more reasons to think they have more support to get rid of Israel.”  But getting rid of Israel as a Jewish democracy, while comparing it to Nazi Germany, seems to be the objective of pro-divestment activists.  Massachusetts minister We Hyung Chang, leading the charge for an Israel stance, displayed a map ostensibly showing ever expanding Jewish territorial expansion against the Palestinians.  The first map showed the region before Israel’s1948 founding, by implication disputing Israel’s basic existence.

Faithful to this myth, officials of the 12 million member United Methodist Church hosted an “Act of Repentance toward Healing Relationships with Indigenous Peoples” at the denomination’s quadrennial governing General Conference in late April in Tampa.   Although 35 percent of the denomination now lives in Africa, church elites decided a church-wide apology to native peoples in America for U.S./European sins should be a chief focus.  “There is a lot of history that has been concealed; you have to go and dig it up,” solemnly warned the Rev. George “Tink” Tinker, a radical professor at the church’s Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

Sporting tribal regalia and clutching a feather fan throughout, Tinker escorted his audience of nearly 1000 delegates through a dark journey of U.S./European crimes against American Indians.   There were of course many gross misdeeds against the native tribes across several centuries, meriting a thoughtful historical and theological analysis.  Instead, Tinker delivered what he was expected to do by the church hierarchs who hired him:  an angry ideological tirade more about grievance than history.  Although supposedly exposing the ostensibly concealed truth about America and its natives, Tinker’s distorted history was far more of a caricature than any 1930’s Hollywood Western.

A bishop introducing Tinker recalled a “violent history of discovering and destroying.”  Another introducer lamented the Europeans brought to America “disease and weapons of mass destruction.”  Methodists need to repent of their “sins and wickedness” for their collaboration with the “political forces” that repressed native peoples.  Still another grim introducer more broadly cited the “injustices to indigenous peoples” that persist “around the world today.”

Tinker lamented that America’s native peoples had lost their land in exchange for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which he snorted was a “bad trade.”  He sarcastically added, “I’m sorry, we’d rather have our land” over Christ, a peculiar sentiment from a seminary professor at a church convention, where Jesus is supposed to be supremely Lord.  “American Christians have a vested interest in not knowing [their] history because it puts the lie to what Christians say about themselves,” he announced.   “We want to say we are good guys,” Tinker complained, citing Fox News’s purported espousal of “American exceptionalism” as a sordid example.

In one of his more minor historical errors, Tinker said the first “Christian invasion” of North America started with the Pilgrims in 1620, momentarily forgetting that English settled Jamestown in 1607.  He chastised the Pilgrims who “stole” Indian corn. He was referring to the corn stored in buried baskets near the shore, which the famished Pilgrims discovered upon landing after nearly months on stormy seas.

In his catalogue of unearthed crimes, Tinker next cited Episcopalians in Virginia who the “next year” invited native people for peace talks and then “slaughtered” 300 of them.   Tinker seems to refer to events in 1622 (or 1621 by the old calendar), when the Jamestown Colony invited Chief Chief Opechancanough and his warriors for a feast and then poisoned and otherwise killed over 200.  Unmentioned by Tinker is that earlier that year, after years of peace between colonists and Indians, Opechancanough led a patiently planned surprise massacre of the Virginians whose aim was to slay every man, woman and child.  Indians walked into the villages and homes of unsuspecting colonists and killed them.  About 400 perished, or perhaps one third of the Virginia colony.   The number was not greater only because a Christian Indian youth, whom Tinker perhaps considers a traitor, warned the colonist family with whom he lived the night before, leading to a general alarm.   Chief Opechancanough escaped the poisoning, only to attempt another surprise massacre in 1644, killing 500 Virginians.   Deliberately plotting to annihilate any entire community of men, women and children, in modern terms, is called a genocide.   Opechancanough was captured and killed after the second massacre.

Voices across the religious and political spectrum have hailed the legacy of Charles Colson, the former Nixon White House staffer who, after his Watergate-related imprisonment, founded a global evangelical ministry for prison inmates.

One exception is Franky Schaeffer, a self-described regretful founder of the Religious Right and son of the late great evangelical theologian, who rejected his father’s legacy and now spits venom at seriously religious people, on his blog, in his books, and sometimes for The Huffington Post.

“Wherever Nixon is today he must be welcoming a true son of far right dirty politics to eternity with a ‘Job well done,’” Schaeffer snarked.  An earlier draft of his diatribe headlined that Colson had “gone to his reward,” implying an eternity other than Heaven.  But even in his reposted new draft, Schaeffer was churlish:  “Evangelical Christianity lost one of its most beloved and bigoted homophobic and misogynistic voices with the death of Charles W. ‘Chuck’ Colson, a Watergate felon who converted to ‘evangelicalism’ but never lost his taste for dirty political tricks against opponents.”

Bitter towards his devout parents and most of his old allies and friends, Schaeffer conspiratorially claims that conservative religious activists target abortion and same sex marriage primarily to trick working class traditionalists into voting Republican.  Or as he elegantly claims of Colson:  “Few men have done more to trade (betray?) the gospel of love for the gospel of empowering corporate America and greed through the misuse of the so-called culture war issues to get lower middle class whites to vote against their own economic interests in the name of ‘family values.’”

Himself now cynical and unmoored from any transcendent moral tradition, Schaeffer assumes that his targets, including Colson, are similarly jaded.

But if Colson’s conversion and over 35-year evangelical ministry were other than genuine, he was a master performer.  Across 4 decades, Colson’s “Prison Fellowship” touched hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.  Prison inmates neither vote nor typically are potential contributors.  But Colson made his life’s work offering otherwise hopeless and forgotten people the hope of transformation that he found in the Gospel as he faced incarceration. He cheerfully proclaimed himself a former miscreant who was delivered solely by God’s grace.  As driven and focused in ministry as he was as Nixon’s ostensible “hatchet man,” Colson was a joyful warrior.

In July, the 2 million member Presbyterian Church (USA) will similarly ponder divestment.  The head of the Presbyterian committee of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network is contacting Methodist delegates encouraging them to sound the anti-Israel trumpet.

“This is an important time for those of us who have worked so hard for peace with justice for Palestinians and Israelis,” Carol Hylkema wrote.  Promising she was “watching/looking for news coming” from the United Methodists, she told them that their decision “will have some influence on the outcome” of the Presbyterian General Assembly. “We will covet your support and prayers at that time,” she told them.

No doubt.  A network of anti-Israel groups, aware of the symbolic importance of Mainline denominations backing their cause, is plotting feverishly for Methodist and Presbyterian approval of divestment. A recent confidential conference call among anti-Israel church activists revealed their strategies for the Methodist event.

About 20 leftist U.S. rabbis recently have endorsed anti-Israel divestment, which excited the church activists. Meanwhile, 1,250 U.S. rabbis from left to right have signed a letter opposing divestment. “It’s important for people who are concerned about Jewish relationships too, and help people understand that this is an interfaith effort that we are a part of,” explained one. They were also excited by support from the Israeli Committee on Home Demolitions [ICOHD]. “That’s another great connection from a group that is on the ground there in Israel and supporting this effort,” it was noted.

Conscious that United Methodism is global, with nearly 40 percent of its members are overseas mostly in Africa, the church activists emphasized their international outreach for divestment.  The church’s official General Board of Church and Society, which is lobbying for divestment, has even hired a Zimbabwean to liaise with African United Methodists.

Citing counsel from the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation, one activist implored her fellow activists that when contacting Methodist delegates  “don’t alienate, so keep your politics in check, if you are talking to a conservative person and you are progressive, keep that in mind.”  And she urged stressing:   “We all support freedom and equality for all people.”

Unlike previous divestment initiatives, this latest round targets 3 firms that ostensibly profit from the “occupation.”  They are Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola.  “We have been very careful to focus only on companies that are directly involved with the occupation,” explained one activist, citing a 2010 trip when a delegation photographed U.S. equipment nefariously at work on the West Bank.  “Caterpillar is knowingly providing equipment that is used to destroy homes, more than 26,000 homes have been destroyed with that equipment, and to destroy water cisterns at orchards,” the activist complained. “The sixty ton bulldozers are used as a key weapon by the Israeli army in the Gaza strip and West Bank.”

Some anti-Israel church activists in the West blast Israel in time for Christmas. Others choose Easter.  Recently, World Vision chief Richard Stearns, who heads one of the largest U.S. evangelical relief groups, proclaimed in the Huffington Post that Palestinian Christians are enduring a Holy Week of “trial and tribulation” thanks to Israel.

Claiming Israel allows only 2,000-3000 travel permits for Jerusalem during Holy Week to a population of about 50,000 Palestinian Christians, Stearns never bothered to acknowledge why Israel has security concerns about visitors to Jerusalem.  Quoting a Palestinian colleague who attended church in Jerusalem in 2010, Stearns ominously recalled: “The crowd, striving to stay joyful, could still feel the change of what Easter had now become and the dark cloud of checkpoints, police forces, and denial of entry that had obscured the joy of this holiday.”  Stearns announced he’s praying for the “miracle” of “full religious freedom to the Christians in the West Bank and Gaza.”

If he has time, maybe Stearns can pray for all Christians in the Middle East, whose problems entail considerably more than travel inconveniences.

Responding to Stearns, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren said Israel has provided more than 20,000 permits this year for Palestinian Christians to enter Jerusalem for Holy Week, plus 500 permits for the handful of Christians left in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

“With the exception of the very few individuals who have raised security concerns, and notwithstanding the measures we must take to protect our citizens, any Christian from the West Bank can reach Jerusalem on Good Friday and Easter,” Oren said.  “Israel, the only Middle Eastern country with a growing and thriving Christian population, remains committed to maintaining its superb relations with Christian communities worldwide. Though we face serious and continuing defense challenges, we uphold the principle of free access to the Holy Places to all religions.”

Ambassador Oren has recently had to address the realities that confront the Middle East’s shriveling Christian populations while many Western Christians prefer silence or blaming Israel.   In   a Wall Street Journal op-ed recently he described the Christian exodus from Palestinian territories thanks to Islamist intimidation.  The Religious Left and its preferred Palestinian voices responded indignantly, since Oren had challenged their narrative that only Israel can be faulted for Christian difficulties in the Middle East.

Oren’s facts were indisputable. About 20 percent of the Middle East a century ago was Christian. Today it’s 5 percent and plunging, as churches are burned in Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere, forcing thousands to flee. Oren likened the Christian exodus to the 800,000 Jews forced from their homes in Arab lands after Israel’s creation.  The only safe place for Christians in the current Middle East is in Israel, he observed with understatement.

As a minority, Christians experience some “intolerance” in Israel, Oren admitted.  “But in contrast to elsewhere in the Middle East where hatred of Christians is ignored or encouraged,” he wrote, “Israel remains committed to its Declaration of Independence pledge to ‘ensure the complete equality of all its citizens irrespective of religion.’”

In contrast, half of Gaza’s almost tiny Christian community has fled since the Hamas coup in 2007, Oren noted.   On the West Bank, the Christian community has fallen to under 2 percent.  Although Israel is commonly blamed for Christian emigration, most Palestinian Christians live in West Bank cities under the Palestinian Authority.  And the Muslim majority population continues to grow.  In Bethlehem, where Christians where once the majority, they have become 20 percent since the Palestinian take-over in 1995.

“The extinction of the Middle East’s Christian communities is an injustice of historic magnitude,” Oren concluded.   But an anti-Israel Christian group called Kairos Palestine denounced Oren’s op-ed as “inaccurate and manipulative” for faulting Muslims instead of Israel’s “illegal Israeli occupation.”  Their response, helpfully broadcast by the United Church of Christ’s Global Ministries Board, did not identify any specific inaccuracies by Oren.  Instead, the Palestinian activists blamed Christian “persecution” on the “occupation that systematically degrades all Palestinians” and the “underlying political oppression that afflicts Christians and Muslims alike.”

“The Episcopal Church does not endorse divestment or boycott,” Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori recently told a Los Angeles group.  “It’s not going to be helpful to endorse divestment or boycotts of Israel. It will only end in punishing Palestinians economically.”

Although often left-wing and politicly correct, the Episcopal Church’s chief prelate and other officials, maybe mindful of interfaith relations with Jewish leaders, have typically steered away from the worst anti-Israel zeal.  Unlike the Methodist and Presbyterians, the Episcopalians will not seriously consider divestment at their own convention this year.

Speaking to a Middle East Peacemakers luncheon, Schori was obliged to make the usual calls for “dialogue” and to imply moral equivalence between Israel’s struggle to exist versus Palestinian calls for its eradication.  “We can urge Israel to freeze the settlement activity,” she suggested, according to Episcopal News Service. “We can urge the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel’s right to exist. We can condemn violence everywhere.”

But strikingly unlike others on the Religious Left, she did not demonize Israel, or glowingly embrace pro-Palestinian Liberation Theology. “We can urge our legislators and government to encourage dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian leaders,” she opined. “We can urge them to refrain from de-funding hopeful initiatives.”  And she urged positive investment in “legitimate development in Palestine’s West Bank and in Gaza.”  Schori called for a “two-state solution with a dignified home for Palestinians and for Israelis.”  Meanwhile, some on the Religious Left are increasingly inclined towards admitting their support for a “one-state” solution that would demographically eradicate Israel’s Jewish democracy.

As Bishop Schori was urging relative moderation, the harder line Religious Left was backing the March 30 “March on Jerusalem.”  It is hoping to mobilize many thousands to denounce Israel’s ostensible “Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and Judaisation policies.”  Besides backing from former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright and Christian Socialist Cornel West of Union Seminary, the march is backed by Friends of Sabeel – North America (FOSNA).  Presbyterian minister Don Wagner is the FOSNA national program director and recently denounced Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s Wall Street Journal column that noted Christians are increasing inside Israel but declining in Muslim-majority Palestinian territory.

The Religious Left does not like budget proposals from Congressman Paul Ryan because they don’t raise taxes or eliminate the U.S. Defense Department.   One activist even denounces his plan as “moral cowardice.”

“Not only does his budget fail to meet the basic teachings of Ryan’s religious tradition [i.e. Roman Catholic], the plan shows moral cowardice,” recently explained Lisa Sharon Harper, who directs “mobilizing” for Jim Wallis’ Sojourners. “I don’t know any world in which a “tough choice” is piling benefits on the already rich and powerful while asking people who are already struggling to pay for it.”

Ostensibly Ryan is a bad Catholic because true Christian faith, as the Religious Left defines it, mandates massive, coercive redistributions of wealth by the federal government, according to political calculations, no matter their overall impact on the national economy.  As evidence for her charge that Ryan’s plan violates Catholic teaching, Harper quoted the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, which in early March urged federal budget choice that “protect” human life and “promote the common good.”  For the Religious Left, the “common good” means chiefly more Big Government.

No matter how many decades illustrate the failures of the Welfare State to ameliorate poverty, and its propensity to create dependency and family disintegration, the Religious Left mindlessly worships at its jealous altar, unwilling ever to admit that Big Government is a failed and cruel deity.  Sanctimoniously, the Sojourners mobilizer bewailed that the “vulnerable” may lack super PACs and “gangs of lobbyists,” but they do have “people of faith,” whom God has summoned to fight Ryan’s “immoral budget.”  She didn’t mention that most active church goers in America routinely vote against the Religious Left’s priorities.  And the Welfare State she invests with such divine majesty is in fact not without political counsel or influence.  Government unions and wealthy left-wing lobbies faithfully expend many millions in defense of the “vulnerable,” i.e. Big Government.

A federal budget vision doubtlessly far more to Sojourners’ liking was unveiled on Capitol Hill on March 22 on the lawn of the historic United Methodist Building.  It was unveiled by the Islamic Society of North America, United Methodist and Presbyterian Church (USA) lobbyists, and a leftist nun, with backing from the wider Religious Left, as part of its “Faithful Budget Campaign.”

Obviously Obamacare supporters seek to blunt widespread religious opposition to Obamacare, especially its facilitation of abortion coverage through insurance exchanges and the recent mandate compelling religious employers to cover insurance for contraception, abortifacients and sterilization.

According to The New York Times, about 100 pro-Obamacare activists representing 60 groups attended a White House meeting in early March to plot the prayer vigil and other pro-Obamacare advocacy across the Supreme Court hearing.  The overall theme will be: “Protect our health care, protect the law.”

Faithful Obamacare devotees will gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court on the morning of March 26.  “The witness will be a compassionate commitment to the common good and will provide a voice for the most vulnerable people in our society,” a Methodist lobbyist explained.  “Those on the margins of society are the most likely to be affected by the results of the Supreme Court deliberations.”

The prayer vigil’s organizer is Cleveland-based “Faithful Reform in Health Care,” whose members include the Islamic Society of North America (which has offices in the Methodist Building), Evangelicals for Social Action, the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society (owner of the Methodist Building), Presbyterian Church (USA), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Mennonite Central Committee, and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, among others.

Faithful Reform in Health Care, representing 60 mostly Religious Left groups, also filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court defending Medicaid’s expansion under Obamacare. “We have elevated a moral vision for our nation’s health-care future and have raised our voices in support of affordable quality health care for all,” explained Faithful Reform’s chief, the Rev. Linda Hanna Walling.

The largest member of the Faithful Reform coalition is probably the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, which claims to represent 7.5 million United Methodists in the U.S.  Its $5 million lobby operation in the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill is the largest Religious Left advocacy operation in Washington, D.C.  “Our United Methodist Social Principles state that providing the care needed to maintain health, prevent disease and restore health after injury or illness is a responsibility each person owes others, and government owes to all,” explained chief United Methodist lobbyist Jim Winkler.  “It is unjust to construct or perpetuate barriers to full participation in community. The United Methodist Church believes it is a government responsibility to provide all citizens with health care.”

The international Religious Left equates Big Government with God’s Kingdom and angrily rejects any limits on government growth as supposed attacks on the vulnerable.

But former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey dissents from Religious Left orthodoxy, recently pronouncing of his own Britain’s precarious public finances:  “The sheer scale of our public debt, which hit £1trillion yesterday, is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today.”

Senior prelates in America are not so discerning. Infamously, Jim Wallis of Sojourners helped form a “Circle of Protection” around the welfare and entitlement state during last July’s federal debt ceiling crisis.  Sadly, his coalition recruited the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Salvation Army.  Meeting with President Obama, they effectively sided with President Obama against congressional Republicans more seriously trying to limit government growth in the face of gargantuan debt.

Similarly in Britain, Church of England bishops, with supine faith in the Welfare State, recently voted in the House of Lords to oppose their government’s proposed cap on welfare benefits to £26,000, or about $40,000.

But their former senior bishop, Lord Carey, who was Archbishop from 1991 to 2002, has criticized his colleagues’ fiscal and moral blindness.  Noting the bishops were insisting that families on welfare qualify for up £50,000 in benefits, or over $78,000, Carey expressed restrained Anglican incredulity.

“They must have known the popular opinion was against them, including that of many hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers,” Carey laconically observed.  “They also knew that the case for welfare reform had been persuasively made, even if they didn’t agree with it.” Carey pronounced that these bishops, in their unquestioning defense of an engorged welfare state, “cannot lay claim to the moral high-ground.”

Carey, writing in a British newspaper op-ed, observed the obvious:  “If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren.”  Surely fiscal responsibility is a moral cause that “mainstream” church leaders should support but too often don’t.   And fiscal health, for Britain, America, and most of the Welfare State addicted West, means some restraints on spending. “We desperately need to reform our welfare system,” Carey concluded, saying what is simultaneously so clear yet so difficult to admit for some.  “Opportunities to do so in times of prosperity have been squandered and now we are forced to do so at a time of high unemployment, under the guise of cutting expenditure.”

Admirably, Lord Carey specified that welfare reform is necessary not just for fiscal sanity but also moral health.  He faulted the Welfare State for fueling the “very vices” it attempted to cure and “impoverishing us all,” while trapping its victims into “dependency” and rewarding “fecklessness and irresponsibility.”  Such critiques do not usually fall from the mouths of bishops, in Britain or America.  Carey also noted the Welfare State stokes “social division” by creating resentment by the “squeezed” middle class against the “hand-outs” ladled to the entitlement class.

In typical fashion, the befuddled, indignant Church of England bishops opposing welfare reform claimed they are defending children and cited the Bible as their political manifesto. Lord Carey countered:   “I can’t possibly believe prolonging our culture of welfare dependency is in the best interests of our children.”

Alex Awad of Bethlehem Bible College

The Evangelical Left is hosting a “Christ at the Checkpoint” jamboree at the birthplace of Jesus Christ to identify the Savior with Palestinian liberation. This anti-Israeli mobilization will include leading evangelicals from the U.S.

“We are not accusing the Israeli military of putting Jesus at a checkpoint,” insists one disingenuous spokesman, who complains that “some” critics will incomprehensibly interpret it that way. “This is a conference about empowering the Palestinian church.” If so, then why is the conference not less provocatively titled?

Palestinian politicians are often accused of speaking sweetly about peace and co-existence in English to Western audiences but far more stridently in Arabic to their own constituency. Perhaps that same spirit afflicts organizers and defenders of Christ at the Checkpoint.

Another spokesman for Christ at the Checkpoint promises it will challenge the “theology of the land” and the “end times” beliefs of pro-Israel Christians, while advocating a “theology of peace.” But will this theology of peace also challenge Islamists and Palestinian nationalists who reject Israel’s existence or any future for Jews or Christians outside of subjugation?

Major U.S. speakers at the March 5-9 Checkpoint event in Bethlehem include evangelist Tony Campolo (former spiritual counselor to Bill Clinton), Florida megachurch pastor Joel Hunter (board member of National Association of Evangelicals and spiritual counselor to President Obama), Chicago megachurch co-founder Lynne Hybels of Willow Creek Community, and popular religious campus anti-war activist Shane Claiborne of The Simple Way in Philadelphia.

Church of England priest and anti-Israel activist Stephen Sizer will also speak, as will Porter Speakman, Colorado producer of the anti-Israel film for evangelicals “With God on Our Side,” plus Gary Burge of evangelical Wheaton College outside Chicago.  So too will Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action and Chris Seiple of the Institute for Global Engagement, along with Sang-Bok David Kim, chair of the World Evangelical Alliance.

Christ at the Checkpoint’s official purpose is help evangelicals to seek “peace, justice, and reconciliation” by empowering the Palestinian church and exposing the “realities of the injustices in the Palestinian Territories,” while also challenging Christian Zionism.

“Some have accused the conference as being part of a process of demonization of state of Israel,” admitted conference organizer Alex Awad of Bethlehem Bible College, who is also a missionary supported by the United Methodist Church.  “I totally and absolutely reject this accusation,” he declared, insisting Christ at the Checkpoint merely wants Israelis and Palestinians to “live in peace and harmony.”  Awad further clarified: “We are not anti-Semitic, we are not against Jewish people.”  But he admitted:  “There may be some criticism of Israel.”  No doubt!

Awad implored that criticism of Israel not equate with anti-Semitism.  Perhaps this appeal would be more persuasive if Christ at the Checkpoint includes serious criticism of Palestinian authorities and attitudes that persist in denying Israel’s right to exist.  And this event would truly convey its desire for “peace” and “reconciliation” if it condemned not just evangelical and Jewish pro-Israel theologies but also critiqued Islamist theology asserting that conquered Islamic lands may never revert to non-Islamic control.  But don’t hold your breath.  In the mindset of many Christ at the Checkpoint organizers and speakers, a Texas Baptist who believes God still blesses the Jews is more morally culpable for Mideast conflict than a Hamas-supporting Islamist in Nasrallah who believes Allah wants to drive the Jews into the Sea.

This week, EEN’s chief testified before a Congressional committee ostensibly on behalf of a “growing” number of evangelicals who are now “consistently pro-life” by adopting political causes of the left on poverty and the environment, according to my assistant Kristin Rudolph who listened in. Reverend Mitchell Hescox insisted that faithful Christians should back new rules potentially costing over $9 billion annually so as to defend the “unborn” from mercury.

Evidently the plan is that evangelicals, whom The Washington Post once infamously called “’poor, undereducated and easily led, will enlist in the zealous green movement after understanding that the “unborn” are now the beneficiaries.  Seemingly, evangelical lemmings are expected not to think through such complexities as cost/benefit analysis or whether the expensive and expansive new regulations actually address a real threat to large numbers.

Expanding the definition of “pro-life” to include environmentalism, for starts, ultimately neutralizes the label altogether.  For this reason, secular left-wing philanthropies, like the Rockefellers Brothers Fund, are possibly shrewd to back EEN’s drive for “pro-life” elasticity.   One EEN television ad portrays a pastor warning:  “I expect members of Congress to protect the unborn.”  An EEN’s radio ad featured the pastor asking Michigan voters to thank their liberal Democratic Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow “for their leadership, and let them know you support continued efforts to keep the unborn safe from mercury pollution.”  By implication, members of Congress who are pro-life on abortion but don’t succumb to the mercury scare campaign are actually less than pro-life.

Congressional staff noted the latest EPA proposal has been “characterized as the most expensive rule ever imposed by the agency on the power sector.” Its implementation would reportedly cost the average family in some areas over $80 annually in increased electricity costs.  (Critics allege the cost could be twice as high.) This cost must seem minor to elitist environmentalists.  But are increased electricity bills for the poor and working class really “pro-life?”  And could that over $9 billion annually in direct costs to the power industry, which critics claim will actually be much higher, be better spent?

Congressman John Shimkus (R – IL) told Rev. Hescox, as recounted by Kristin Rudolph:  “You are masquerading for an environmental cause which I reject and which many in the pro-life community [reject].” And he declared:  “We in the pro-life community take great offense when an evangelical movement tries to usurp the meaning of ‘pro-life.’”  Rev. Hescox countered that “pro-life” must include “environmental health” and “anti-poverty.”  But toxicologist Julie Goodman, a Harvard adjunct professor, testified: “The vast majority of the benefits [from the EPA rule] … are not from mercury reductions, but rather from highly imprecise estimates of mortality reductions from decreasing emissions of fine particulate matter.”

Right before the congressional hearing, pro-life leaders released a letter rejecting EEN’s attempt to appropriate the term for its environmentalist agenda as “disingenuous,” “dangerous,” bound to “confuse voters,” and to “divide the pro-life vote.”  They added:  “This doesn’t mean we should ignore environmental risks. It does mean they should not be portrayed as pro-life. Genuinely pro-life people will usually desire to reduce other risks as well—guided by cost/benefit analysis. But to call those issues ‘pro-life’ is to obscure the meaning of the term.”

Both the 7.6 million United Methodist Church and 2 million member Presbyterian Church (USA) will ponder anti-Israel divestment at their governing conventions later this year.   Specifically targeted are 3 firms that ostensibly profit from the “occupation:” Caterpillar, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard.

Perhaps with this battle in mind, Friends of Sabeel-North America (FOSNA), a chief anti-Israel advocate among churches, has hired a Presbyterian minister as its new organizer to reach a “wider Christian audience.”  Sabeel’s describes his goal as addressing the “increasing awareness among American Christians and the Palestinian Christian community and the principles required for a ‘just peace’ between Israel and Palestine.”

In other words, the organizer will rally U.S. Christians initially for anti-Israel divestment and more ultimately against any special U.S. friendship for Israel, with the final goal of deconstructing Israel as a primarily Jewish democracy.

The new Sabeel organizer is the Rev. Donald Wagner, who recently served at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.   He previously headed Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding, which seeks to disengage U.S. evangelicals from their traditional pro-Israel stance.  In the 1980s he headed the Palestine Human Rights Campaign.   Seemingly Rev. Wagner combines Mainline Protestant, evangelical and Anabaptist connections that will greatly enhance his anti-Israel work.

Mainline Protestant elites have been anti-Israel since the 1967 war.  They identify Israel as a Western, pro-U.S. power and colonialist victimizer, against which faithful Christians must labor under a Liberation Theology theme.  In contrast, evangelicals remain the largest pro-Israel demographic in America.  But increasingly the Evangelical Left is persuading evangelical elites (especially in academia and missions groups) who are anxious to disassociate from the Religious Right to identify with purportedly oppressed Palestinians.  And Anabaptists, such as Mennonites and Brethren, are pacifists and traditionally few in number.  But both left-leaning Mainline Protestants and evangelicals increasingly embrace the Anabaptist tradition to justify their contempt for America and its “empire.”

The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem understandably wants to deploy FOSNA as its U.S. arm to appeal to all these key American religious constituencies.  Rev. Wagner seems ideal for the task.  ”I am very pleased to have Don leading FOSNA’s programs,” explained Sabeel founder and chief the Rev. Naim Ateek, who is a Palestinian Anglican clergy.  “He demonstrated long ago his passion for justice for oppressed Palestinians, and he has been committed ever since.”

British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks visited with Pope Benedict XVI last month in Rome and defended Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage, including the “religious roots of the market economy and of democratic capitalism.”   In a speech there, he urged that Jews and Christians to work together to “help Europe recover its soul.”

Separately, in a speech to the British House of Lords, Sacks denounced increasing persecution of Christians by radical Islam, warning that the “fate of Christians in the Middle East today is the litmus test of the Arab Spring.”  In Rome and in London, he was more outspoken than are many of Europe’s often muted church officials, who typically fear to defend their faith, their culture, or their persecuted brethren.

“If Europe loses the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave it its historic identity and its greatest achievements in literature, art, music, education, politics, and economics, it will lose its identity and its greatness,” Sacks warned during his Rome speech.  “When a civilization loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children … we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice.”

Sacks admired and was encouraged by the warm response the Pope received during his 2010 visit to mostly non-religious Britain, when “everyone was amazed that the interest was so acute and so widespread.” The Chief Rabbi’s visit to Rome clearly was an attempt to strengthen Jewish and Christian voices in defense of historic Western cultural, political and economic principles.

Unlike left-leaning church officials in the West who simplistically equate free markets with sterile materialism, Sacks offered a more balanced perspective.  He critiqued Europe’s secularism and materialism while pointing out that biblical religion created the foundations of prosperous market economies.  “When Europe recovers its soul, it will recover its wealth-creating energies,” he said.  “But first it must remember: humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind.”   In contrast, the Religious Left, both in Europe and America, prefers to believe that markets are innately wicked and must be usurped by coercive national and international regulation.

Of course, much of the Religious Left is itself deeply materialist, preoccupied by the redistribution of wealth but unconcerned about the transcendence and timeless principles that facilitate justice and prosperity.  But appropriately for a spiritual leader, Sacks pointed to the primacy of the “soul” of Europe.

“We are very concerned obviously with the soul of Europe, I mean Europe was built on Judeo-Christian foundations, even the market was built on Judeo-Christian foundations,” Sacks told Vatican Radio.  In his Rome speech, he described the West’s democracy and prosperity relying on biblical understandings of “dignity of the human individual,” respect for property rights and labor, job creation over charity, and creation of wealth so as to become “partners with God in the work of creation.”   He noted that ancient rabbis “favored markets and competition because they generate wealth, lower prices, increase choice, reduced absolute levels of poverty, and extend humanity’s control over the environment, narrowing the extent to which we are the passive victims of circumstance and fate.”

Last month’s United Nations’ climate change summit in Durban, South Africa generated plenty of its own hot air. But it mercifully failed to commit to any meaningful successor to the already failed Kyoto Treaty.

Of course, UN bureaucrats still proclaimed success. After all, one more international conference had generated reams of paperwork, likely cost millions of dollars, and provided another sumptuous setting and continued deep purpose for professional diplomatic busybodies.

But global warming activists, including the Religious Left, discerned the disappointing reality. Their crusade to stymie global economic growth through apocalyptic warnings of a climate catastrophe has lost steam and credibility.

“The global family is now in a perilous race against the clock on climate change,” complained a worried Church World Service, the $83 million dollar relief arm of the National Council of Churches that gets nearly half its funding from the U.S. government. “The lack of necessary action is mortgaging the lives of millions of people in developing nations,” it claimed, sternly warning this failure “threatens the future of the earth.”

Actually, the cooling of the global warming crusade is a great deliverance for “people in developing nations” whom the Religious Left claims to champion.  Climate change inspired restrictions, intending to prevent any expansion of carbon producing industry, would effectively keep poor nations poor.  Environmental extremists, motivated by apocalyptic scare scenarios, always believe the planet is facing disaster absent vast reductions of human activity.  For them, animals and inanimate objects always are more important than improving standards of living for people.

Church World Service accurately and with frustration observed that the Durban summit “once again dangerously postpones meaningful action.” Durban paid lip service to continuing still unfulfilled Kyoto goals. And countless billions were theoretically pledged in international transfer payments without any specific means for their collection. Durban’s homage to global warming was as ethereal and gaseous as the atmosphere itself.

Usually having boundless faith in the UN and international diplomatic forums, the Religious Left perceptively realized the Durban summit was a flop.  Supposedly a new climate agreement will be attained by 2015 and enacted by 2020. But the deadline may as well be 2120. “Church World Service is concerned that the negotiators have pushed decisive action many years ahead,” the federally funded relief activists bewailed. “In view of the history of negotiations and current practice, it is not at all certain that even this longer term process will be successful.” Right.

Emblematic of the Religious Left’s melt-down is a recently vandalized “gay” Nativity scene at a Claremont, California United Methodist Church.  This scene on the avant garde church lawn, under a star of Bethlehem, included an opposite sex couple, and two same-sex couples, with a sign declaring “Christ is Born.”

Naturally a protest against the vandalism was scheduled in what one indignant community member described as an otherwise “progressive college town.”  According to The Los Angeles Times, Claremont United Methodist Church’s previous Nativity displays have not “shied away from controversial topics, including a scene of war in the Middle East, a mother and baby in prison and a depiction of the U.S./Mexico border fence.”  Another Nativity scene portrayed a homeless family.

“Christ’s birth in a stable had a lot to do with poverty and being marginalized,” Pastor Sharon Rhodes-Wickett explained to The Times. “What this church has tried to do through these scenes is say, ‘What would that look like today?’”

Deconstructing the founding historical event of Christianity, at Christmas time no less, to advocate for various multiculturalist political causes is typical of today’s Religious Left.  For it, the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is insufficient.  So the significance must be amplified by an anti-war statement or a blast against U.S. immigration policy.

United Methodism in Claremont, California and throughout the West Coast, so faithfully progressive, has been imploding for over 40 years.  All the radical inclusivity apparently got too boring even for true leftist believers. More significantly, the Religious Left has evinced a national melt-down over this last year that potentially bodes well for the future of American religion.

The rush to embrace Occupy Wall Street was ultimately discrediting to the Religious Left.  Actual Occupiers nationally probably never numbered beyond the thousands or perhaps low ten thousands.  It was primarily a fad for recent college graduates in between jobs, heralded by aging baby boomers in the media nostalgic over the now ancient protest movements of the 1960s.  Protesters of 45 years ago at least had grand causes.  The Occupiers offered only ennui and resentment.  Ultimately, few Americans, especially church-going ones, identified with whiney complaints from bedraggled campers despoiling parks and disrupting traffic. But Religious Left elites, from Sojourners chief Jim Wallis to Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, could not help themselves from spiritually blessing the Occupation as a virtual Second Coming.

The equally fervid embrace by religious elites of Big Government and the entitlement Welfare State during the Summer 2011 federal debt ceiling crisis will also prove discrediting.  In July, representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, National Council of Churches, Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops formed a “Circle of Protection” ostensibly around the needy but actually around the engorged federal bureaucracy.  They decried in the name of most American church members any limits on spending for social welfare or entitlement programs, by implication backing higher taxes and military cuts as the only morally acceptable remedy for burgeoning debt.  Their meeting with President Obama clearly aligned them with the White House and against Congressional Republicans.  Such partisanship aside, no realistic American believes the debt crisis can be addressed without serious limits on growth by entitlement and social welfare spending.   Equating true faith with unlimited Big Government will be remembered unfavorably by history and by American church goers.

The multiculturalist Left wants to dilute Christmas into a vacuous, stern celebration of Winter, divorced from culture and religion.  Not content with banning crèches, trees and carols, anti-Christmas zealots are often even threatened by Santa Claus.  The transcendent authority behind Christmas, even in its commercialized form, is an unwanted challenge to the Left’s preference for all authority vested in the state and its secular clerisy.

Fox News has delighted in lampooning the ongoing absurdities of the “War on Christmas,” which sometimes even include banning green and red from classrooms.  The American Family Association, a para-church group, has also challenged the anti-Christmas campaign by affirming companies that affirm Christmas.

Naturally the Religious Left is troubled by this defense of Christmas, especially by Fox News or conservative Christians, both of whom it despises.  So the Religious Left has decided that the cultural defenders of Christmas are instead betraying Christmas by actually promoting commercialism.

“The Fox News Christmas proffers the constant drumbeat of war, the reliance on military solutions to every conflict, the demonizing of our enemies, and the gospel of American dominance,” insists Evangelical Left activist Jim Wallis of Sojourners at his most rhetorically lugubrious.

A colleague of Wallis at Sojourners has even labeled Fox News the “Headquarters of the Lord’s Resistance Army against the War on Christmas.”

Although this colleague noted that anti-Christmas crusaders were even warring against the display of Poinsettias,  Wallis is still blind with rage against his least favorite cable network:  “The Fox News Christmas heralds the steady promotion of consumerism, the defense of wealth and power, the adulation of money and markets, and the regular belittling or attacking of efforts to overcome poverty.”

Wow, who knew that Christmas, as supposedly defined by Fox News, is so cosmically evil?

Wallis claims that Fox is leveraging its “War on Christmas” campaign to discredit “atheists, agnostics, liberals, leftists, progressives, and separation of church and state zealots — i.e. Democrats.”  The long-time activist for leftist causes, and recipient of George Soros philanthropy, has his own politicized definition of Christmas.  Jesus was born in an “occupied country” under an “imperial power,” adding “political context” to the Christmas season.  “In Jesus Christ, God hits the streets,” Wallis announces.  “That Jesus was born poor…radically defines the social context…and clearly reveals the real meaning of Christmas.” Wallis rejoices that Jesus will “end our warring ways.”

The National Council of Churches (NCC), which still hasn’t figured out it sided with the wrong side during the Cold War, recently visited the isolated communist outpost of Cuba.   And the NCC discerned the major problems between Cuba and the U.S. are America’s fault, specifically the trade embargo and the U.S. imprisonment of five Castroite spies.

Tut-tutting over all the “challenges” that divide the U.S. and Cuba, the NCC’s general secretary lamented:  “And hanging over all of this is the U.S, embargo/blockade and the imprisonment of the Cuban Five, both of which our American churches have forcefully condemned.” Preaching in the Episcopal Church cathedral in Havana, the Rev. Michael Kinnamon regretted “continued U.S. animosity toward Cuba.”

More accurately, the U.S. sustains “animosity” against the 52 year old tyranny that has impoverished and imprisoned the Cuban people.  But the NCC, like most of the Religious Left, has never been able fully to differentiate the tawdry remnant of the dictatorship Fidel Castro built from the people it oppresses.  The only oppressor meriting NCC condemnation is the U.S.    The NCC delegation met with Cuban President Raul Castro, brother of the founding tyrant.  No doubt there were plenty of hugs.

The NCC’s November junket to Cuba included the Presiding Bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church, along with a United Methodist bishop, top officers of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the President the United Church of Christ and a Greek Orthodox bishop, among others.

At a press conference in Cuba, Kinnamon admitted Cuba-U.S. relations “are complicated in an election year.” And he boasted that “since 1968 the position of the NCC (on normalization) has been strong and consistent, taken out of our faith position of reconciliation.”  The NCC stance for U.S. diplomatic and trade ties to Cuba might be defensible if it were willing to espouse human rights for Cuba. But even during some of Fidel Castro’s worse repression of religion, the NCC has remained largely silent.  Indeed, Castro’s dictatorship was across the decades virtually the only repressive regime in Latin America the NCC would not condemn.  Only rightist repression has ever seriously merited the NCC’s concern.

Although apparently not mentioning the plight of any religious dissidents who suffer in Cuba, the NCC delegation did loudly protest the U.S. captivity of the “Cuban Five” intelligence operatives arrested in 1998. The spies, employed at the U.S. Key West Naval Air Station, were transmitting data on U.S. military activities to Castro’s regime and were also monitoring anti-Castro émigré groups in Florida.  Cuba’s 1996 shoot down over international waters of a “Brothers to the Rescue” plane, killing two, originally prompted U.S. surveillance of the “Cuban Five,” who were believed to have facilitated the shoot-down.

In a news release, the NCC nonchalantly complained the “Cuban Five” were imprisoned “even though” they were merely “monitoring the activities of Cuban expatriate counterrevolutionaries plotting against the Cuban government.”  Evidently spying on anti-Castro activists is one form of espionage the NCC is willing to back. Kinnamon complained:  “They should not have been tried.”  Evidently medals and first class tickets home would have been more appropriate, to the NCC chief’s way of thinking. He and the rest of the NCC group met with the heroic wives of the “Cuban Five.”  Kinnamon announced:  “We ache with them for this situation that weighs so heavily.”

Hoping to excite liberal Baptists with leftist political activism and resentment over the “strident” i.e. “conservative” Southern Baptist Convention, Jimmy Carter hosted a New Baptist Covenant II (NBCII) jamboree in Atlanta in November, with satellite meetings across the nation.

Only about 250 people showed up on each of several days of NBCII at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta, according to Associated Baptist Press. “We had hoped for a larger attendance,” admitted one organizer.

The first New Baptist Covenant gathering had attracted over 15,000 in 2008.  Organizers of NBCII reportedly hoped more than 30,000 would participate nationwide this time.

My colleague Jeff Walton attended a satellite gathering at a large Washington, D.C. Baptist church, where all of 5 or 6 people sat in a cavernous sanctuary watching Jimmy Carter appear on a giant screen.  Apparently a 300 seat Philadelphia church was nearly as empty.  There were 9 satellite stations for liberal Baptists to gather and watch the former president, along with Welfare State champion Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund and liberal evangelist Tony Campolo, former spiritual counselor to President Bill Clinton.

Famously prominent at his Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, Carter has for many years condemned the theological and political conservatism of the Southern Baptist Convention.  He has even loudly and publicly “resigned” several times from it, even though only congregations and not individuals are members of the Convention.

Although touted as one of America’s first evangelical presidents, Carter’s theology and politics more closely resemble the stances of declining, leftist-dominated Mainline Protestant denominations.   Arguing that the relatively robust, 16-million member Southern Baptist Convention should become more like the spiraling Episcopal Church is difficult, of course.  But Carter rarely shies from Don Quixote causes.

Speaking at the Atlanta church in an interview format with PBS religion journalist Bob Abernathy, Carter recalled his Carter Center’s admirable work in nearly eradicating the guinea worm parasite in Third World nations.  But Carter quickly got political, praising Occupy Wall Street and bemoaning the “division in the country between the rich and powerful” and the less privileged.   “The powerful people who control government have to be reminded from the bottom that things need to change,” Carter announced, according to my colleague, whose accounts are here and here.  One Carter solution: “I think tax rates ought to be raised for the top 1 percent.”