NAIROBI TO VANCOUVER
The World Council of Churches And the World, 1975-1987
Ernest Lefever
Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1988
149 pp., $19.75
In our times, the line separating religious life from secular action--church and state--has been more in the nature of a zone (sometimes a war zone) that shifts according to dubious encounters between transcendental and immanent forces. In some times and places, the secular-political has triumphed over the religious by sheer force, even to the point of destroying it or driving it into catacombs. In other times and places, what T.S. Eliot dubbed the "deliquescence of faith" may so atrophy the institutional church as to transform it into simply one among many political actors with its own religious agenda lost among the secular agendas of others. In the communist world, the former experience has recurred again and again. In the West, the latter has characterized many of the mainstream Christian churches.
In the West, what the English theologian Edward Norman has called the politicization of religion has meant "the internal transformation of the faith itself, so that it comes to be defined in terms of political values." Religious values have been redefined "according to the categories and references provided by the compulsive moralism of contemporary [secular] intellectual culture."
A Leftist Agenda
Ernest Lefever's Nairobi to Vancouver vividly illustrates this contemporary situation. It is a study of the World Council of Churches' political activities over the past twelve years (1975-1987). During this time, the council, claiming to bear Christian witness to a world filled with great poverty, ecological disruption, social injustice, and superpower tension, had advanced an agenda for Christians notably derived from leftist secular causes. The council has called for nuclear disarmament and support for the Sandinistas. It has not condemned political persecution in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, it has spoken of the war-prone North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the evils of multinational corporations, and so forth. Lefever observes that "the cast of heroes and villains promulgated by the World Council [is] virtually indistinguishable from that of the propaganda and disinformation spokesmen in Moscow and Havana."
Lefever's book is the sequel to one he wrote in 1979, Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World, in which much the same tale is told, though of a previous decade. Nothing much has changed. Only a few religious groups like the Salvation Army have defected from the council. The clout of the official Russian Orthodox Church, however, has increased, enabling it to exercise threatening veto powers over any attempts to actually single out the USSR for criticism as one of the world's chief persecutors of Christians and other religious people. Such criticism harms delicate East-West relations, so the argument goes. It endangers ecumenical, if not world, peace.
It would be a supreme irony if, under glasnost, the world were treated to authentic revelations of the full scope of Soviet religious persecution by Russians themselves. The long and deliberate
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