Conservative Activist Critical of Church Leaders' Soft-Peddling of Hamas
by Jim Brown
March 1, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Christian columnist says leaders of mainline Protestant churches have been non-critical and sometimes conciliatory in their response to the recent victory by the terrorist group Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. He suggests that reflects a focus on secular, political issues -- to the detriment of the task of spreading of the gospel. In a recent column for FrontPageMag.com titled "Left-Wing Churches for Hamas," Mark Tooley writes that mainline church leaders are unwilling to condemn the new Palestinian regime even though Hamas favors the destruction of Israel as well as theocratic Sharia law -- "under which Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims do not typically fare well," he notes.
Tooley, who heads the United Methodist Action Committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), says instead, leaders of denominations like the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church have equated Hamas terrorism with Israeli police action -- and have even urged the U.S. to continue providing financial support to the Palestinian Authority.
Mark Tooley | |
"Once again," laments Tooley, "it underscores how many U.S. mainline church leaders are less concerned about preserving the gospel, much less spreading the gospel around the world, and much more preoccupied with a secular, political message that tends to center around themes of the political Left that portray the U.S. and the West as being innately oppressive." The IRD spokesman contends leaders in these denominations often look very uncritically at oppressive Third World governments and self-proclaimed "liberation" movements such as Hamas.
"The mainline churches in the U.S. -- in their human rights critique around the world -- give disproportionate attention to real and perceived transgressions of both the United States and Israel," he says. And at the same time, he says, they "have almost nothing to say about the far more severe abuses of totalitarian, communist, and Islamist regimes like North Korea or Vietnam or Cuba or Saudi Arabia or Iran or others."
Tooley notes that while mainline leaders try to portray those Third World "liberation" movements as meriting the support of Christians in the West, they continue to stridently criticize the actions of the nation of Israel.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
