Conservative Group Says WCC Program Has Anti-American Slant
by Jenni Parker
January 13, 2004
(AgapePress) - Committees of the World Council of Churches are meeting in New York City to plan a year-long series of events as part of the WCC's "Decade to Overcome Violence" -- events that, according to a spokeswoman for the Institute on Religion and Democracy, will target the U.S. as a proponent of violence.Over 30 U.S. denominations, most of them mainline Protestant, belong to the Swiss-based WCC, which has been a long-time subject of controversy because of its left-leaning politics. IRD President Diane Knippers says in the past, the WCC has largely ignored gross human rights violations and aggression by the old Soviet bloc, instead focusing on the sins, actual and imagined, of the United States and its allies.
And now, Knippers says it is unfortunately to be expected that "the World Council of Churches will exploit the Decade to Overcome Violence to portray the United States as a primary architect of violence and oppression in the world today."
Knippers notes that since the end of the Cold War, the WCC has been "wondrously consistent in continuing to make the United States its main target in the world for condemnation." In August, the WCC's Central Committee designated the U.S. as its 2004 focus for the Decade to Overcome Violence, citing the Bush Administration's apparent refusal to be accountable to the U.N. and its disregard for "the international order" among other grievances.
The committee also called the U.S. military action in Iraq an immoral "act of aggression" and implied that President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair should be charged with war crimes for their "illegal resort to war."
Knippers contends that the WCC is once again showing its preference for the politics of the secular left over and above ministry that genuinely promotes ecumenical Christian unity. "The WCC, as part of its supposed passion for social justice, could investigate the crimes and oppressions of countless communist or Islamic dictatorships, many of them infamous for their continuing persecution of Christians, not to mention hosts of other human rights violations," she says.
But instead, she asserts, the organization is once again echoing the condemnations of American democracy that are "already standard fare on the secular left."
"No one genuinely interested in human rights should take the WCC seriously," Knippers says, "but Christians who care about the global church should be concerned about the WCC's determination to divide rather than unify the Body of Christ."
