Mark Tooley, recently of White House Easter Egg Roll fame, and the director of the United Methodist Committee at the Institution on Religion and Democracy (a religious front group for Republican politicos), penned the following in FrontPage Magazine (emphasis mine):The Episcopal Church, at its upcoming General Convention in June, will consider whether to endorse reparations for 250 years of American slavery."Slow but inexorable," my ass. It took at least 1700 years before the Church, in its official capacity, even brought it up, and we're still struggling with its aftermath to this day.
The two-million member Episcopal Church is the embodiment of the declining and aging Protestant denominations whose elites prioritize left-wing politics. And, like the other "mainline" denominations, it is largely white and upper-middle class. To compensate for their failure to attract racial minorities, Religious Left prelates often adopt radical race-related causes. It is the perfect issue for anti-American religious elites. Obsess over a social sin of past centuries that will portray the United States and Western Civilization in the most sinister light. Meanwhile, ignore or minimize the personal sins and spiritual needs of leftists. Mainline prelates feel "prophetic" and "relevant" when they adopt causes such as reparations for slavery.
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The Religious Left, on slavery reparations, as on most issues, misses the point. Slavery was endemic to every culture at some point. The universalization of the Jewish God through the Christian Church fueled to [sic] the slow but inexorable demise of slavery. Human equality before a sovereign and loving deity made slavery morally impossible.
Two things I know for certain: that the issue of reparations deserves honest debate from both sides, and that this guy needs help.
2 comments:
Reparations may or may not be a bad idea, but to discount a debate over them as a cynical ploy on the part of mostly white protestants to curry favor with African Americans is not, by itself, a real argument against them.
> but no group targeting the Baptist Alliance? [etc...]
Well, Daniel, that's because the IRD is not actually interested in the 'R' in their name except from the perspective of the IRD being political operators and neoconservative power brokers.
It ruffles their feathers badly and they have never forgotten that the largest of the mainline denominations were home to most of the political progressive movement that questioned the authority of the status quo in the latter half of the 20th century. These Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists had the audacity to question the power abuses behind Joe McCarthy's activities. And the Vietnam War. And racial inequality. And women's [lack of] equal rights. And that Communism might actually not be plotting to pollute our precious bodily fluids.
So the IRD has had a long term plan to get the "liberal elites" out of the mainlines. How to best do that? Wedge issues. Scare tactics. Lies. Homophobia. Lots and lots of Scaife, Coors, and Ahmanson money appealing to an anti-intellectual reactionary element of the population.
It's about getting mainline church street cred, and valuable mainline church assets, under the control of the neocons. Then, in their vision, the political progressives among us will have no quarter.
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