Richard John Neuhaus has a piece today on the National Council of Churches. In case you ever wondered how a body supposedly representing millions of American Christians came to be just about as reliable a supporter of left/liberal causes as you could find, he has the story.

The NCC has thirty-five member denominations representing various Protestant and Orthodox traditions, and its founding definition is to be “a community of Christian communions’ with the purpose of advancing Christian unity in “confessing Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, as Savior and Lord.” [RWB: emphasis mine] Beginning in the 1960s, like so many establishment institutions of the time, the NCC took a sharp leftward turn, with the predictable result that it alienated many of the members of its member churches. The contributions of those churches to the NCC precipitously declined, and continue to decline. Since 2000, the decline has been from $2.9 million to $1.75 million–a drop of 40 percent in four years.

So how is the NCC recovering from its financial crisis and near collapse? The answer is that Edgar [the NCC general-secretary] turned to non-church sources of income. In 2003, he obtained a $7 million gift from an anonymous woman who did not belong to any member church but admired the NCC´s politics [RWB wonders: Barbra Streisand?]. Income from other non-church sources has, since 2000, grown from $800,000 to $2.9 million–more than a threefold increase. Such income includes major grants from foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, Tides, and Kellogg, as well as organizations such as the Sierra Club.

Later:

Every enterprise of any size and consequence requires financial support. Support is most likely to come from those who support the purpose of the enterprise. That seems obvious, even embarrassingly obvious. The NCC is not so much to be criticized for “selling out” to its funding sources as for abandoning the purposes for which it was established.

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