US churches respond to bias claims
-15/10/04
A fresh argument has broken out about American churchesí criticisms concerning the policies of the US and Israeli governments.
Calling it a case of 'journalistic malpractice,' National Council of Churches of the USA head Bob Edgar is publicly challenging the content and conclusions of a US News & World Report columnist who suggests that the Council's criticisms of the Israeli government were 'anti-Semitic.'
In a letter to the magazine's editor-in-chief Mortimer Zuckerman, Edgar says that columnist John Leo, in the current edition of US News, has wrongly attacked as biased criticism by four American Protestant churches and two ecumenical bodies (NCCUSA and World Council of Churches) of human rights actions by both Israeli and US governments.
The reporter apparently obtained his information from a survey carried out by the conservative political lobby group, the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD).
'No one at the National Council of Churches was asked, in advance of publication or since, to confirm, clarify or refute any of the statements or statistics quoted as fact,' Edgar says.
The column had claimed that 37 per cent of the churches' human rights resolutions (and 80 percent of the NCCUSA's) were aimed at Israel. Yet, Edgar notes, in the entire 54-year history of the National Council of Churches, only two policy statements have referred to Israel and Palestine.
Out of 650 resolutions adopted during that time, he says, fewer than 40 have dealt with the Middle East, many of those concerned such matters as Christians in Egypt, hostages in Iran and Lebanon, and war in Kuwait and Iraq.
Only five NCC statements about Israel were issued during the period of the IRD's survey, and several of those also criticized Palestinian leaders.
'This readily available public record hardly represents an anti-Israel bias,' Edgar says, noting that the current NCC policy statement, adopted in 1980, explicitly calls on US Christians 'to work with Jews and Muslims toward cooperative relationships based on friendship and trust.'
John Leo, whose columns are nationally syndicated, also echoed the IRD's criticism of the Protestant churches' emphasis on U.S. government policies, saying that the faith groups failed to criticize other governments on similar policies.
In response, Edgar has written to Zuckerman: 'The right and responsibility of our nation's churches to speak out on issues of national policy is Ö as vital to our public life as the freedom of the press which you enjoy.'
He goes on, 'as we are an association of American churches, most of our statements on public policy logically deal with the work of our own government.'
The reach of the US government is so broad and powerful, the NCCUSA leader says, that 'it touches issues of moral and spiritual concern as diverse as the environment, civil liberties, war and peace, poverty, foreign policy and national budget priorities.'
The National Council of Churches, with 36 Christian faith groups, is the largest and broadest ecumenical association of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox and African-American Christians in the United States, encompassing more than 100,000 local congregations in all 50 states.
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