Smiley-face corporatist liberalism inevitably paves the way for radical leftism

My relationship with my father was multilayered and complex, but I'm inclined to believe that , given the community I grew up in, his flat-top-and-plaid-golf-slacks / small-business / manufacturing-trade-association / Boy-Scouts / Exchange-Club brand of disregard for the way the cultural tide was turning in the 1960s was the only thing that kept me from turning out to be some kind of bureaucratic, corporatist, green-and-diverse, bike-path-and-recycling cog in the statist machine.  Actually, in my adolescence and early adulthood, I went much further to the left than that, deeming that whole milieu every bit as square and stultifying as dad's Paleolithic ways.

I've written before about the small midwestern city in which I grew up.  Remarkably, for its size, it was, during my growing-up years, home to two Fortune 500 companies.  One has since been parceled off, but the other is still very much the 800-pound gorilla in the local economy.  It's unusual for a publicly traded multinational corporation in that the family that financed the founder's vision has remained a major shareholder.  For many years, the now-deceased patriarch of that family was the CEO and board chairman.  He made the town a showcase of mid-century modernist architecture.  He helped Martin Luther King organize the 1963 march on Washington.  He was the first lay president of the National Council of Churches, and he sat on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He was from the Rockefeller wing of the GOP - in fact, personal friends with David Rockefeller.

While he didn't attend our church, he was good friends with our minister.  It was a Presbyterian congregation, and our minister likewise had national stature, serving as moderator of the PCUSA.  (Our local human-rights commission gives out an annual award in his name.)

It was the quintessential leftward-drifting mainline Protestant church.  Lots of executives from the above-mentioned company and their families were active members.  Adult Sunday school classes discussed modern theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.  It was where I first saw first-hand the effort of the corporatist-statist liberals to keep the ever-more-radicalized youth in the fold, indulging their desire to have a folksinging coffee house, inviting a college-age gal from the congregation to share her experiences at a recently attended Saul Alinsky workshop (my first exposure to him), and hosting the monthly meetings of a community "peace fellowship."

Finally, in 1970, my father invited the minister to lunch to explain to him why he was leaving the church.  The final straw was the PCUSA's financial contribution to Angela Davis's defense fund, and the local leadership's lack of opposition to it.

Some years later, while still immersed in a bohemian lifestyle and embracing a vague, all-is-one "spirituality," I heard a speaker from this peace fellowship - and an active member of the Presbyterian congregation - recount, at a Unitarian service, his recent "fact-finding" mission to El Salvador and Nicaragua.  The seeds of my conversion had been planted by my, out of idle curiosity, having read up on the real nature of the Sandinistas and the Faribundo Marti Liberation Front.  I heard this speaker whitewash that aspect of the situation and, to my surprise, felt a bracing jolt of outrage.  I came out of that Unitarian sanctuary that day a changed man.  I subscribed to National Review, began attending think-tank conferences, and began work on my master's degree in history.

In fact, my master's thesis was on the fact that it was the lurch to the left that emptied the pews of the mainline churches from the 1960s onward.

That lurch continues, as does their declining membership.  And the PCUSA in particular, like the town I grew up in (the above company has explicitly warned the Indiana state legislature that if it amends the state constitution to affirm the millennia-old definition of marriage, the company will be forced to cease creating employment opportunities in Indiana) has proven the hypothesis that a soft-left organization will, if it meets no internal countervailing forces, move continually in a harder-left direction.

It's now to the point where a PCUSA minister - a liberal minister - cannot lead a junket to Israel and meet with both (left-leaning) Jews and Palestinians without getting into major trouble:

What has happened is that a Virginia Beach pastor who was slated to take a leadership role in a church forum at its annual General Assembly has been pressured to resign by Presbyterian Church USA officials. What was his offense? Taking part in two trips to Israel sponsored by a Jewish group. As Rev. Albert Butzer relates in a piece he wrote about his experience for The Presbyterian Outlook, he had looked forward to being the official moderator of the Committee on Middle East Issues at the denomination’s General Assembly. But he was forced out when it came out that he had gone to Israel on trips organized by the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond, Virginia. Though he had previously been to the region on two trips organized by the Palestinians, the mere fact that he had been exposed to Israel’s side of the story in the conflict was enough to brand him as untrustworthy.

While the question of who sits on church committees may not strike many people as an earthshaking question, Butzer’s treatment is significant. His ouster signals a new turn in interfaith relations. Whereas in the past Israel’s foes in mainline Christian churches have sought to cloak their hostility to Zionism and to affirm that they did not wish to harm interfaith relations, it’s now clear that this is no longer the case. By saying that participation in any trip that allows Christians to hear Israel’s point of view even alongside the voices of Palestinians is beyond the pale, the Presbyterian Church USA is telling us that they are declaring war on American Jews as well as Israel.

What is also interesting about this tale is that Butzer should in no way be considered an ardent advocate for Israel. In his piece, he goes to great lengths to demonstrate his sensitivity and even sympathy for the Palestinian point of view. He is willing to view Israel in a negative light and seems not to challenge the Palestinian narrative. But he is willing to listen to the other side in the conflict and that is something that BDS supporters inside the church rightly consider to be dangerous to their cause.

Of course, the BDS crowd at the Presbyterian Church USA isn’t saying who is sponsoring the various pro-Palestinian dog and pony shows in the region (here and here) that it is schlepping its members to this year.

But the point here is that it is drawing a line in the sand and labeling anyone who makes common cause with mainstream American Jewish groups as beyond the pale. In return, Jews and all Christians and people of faith who truly care about peace should make it clear that so long as the Presbyterian Church USA is waging war on the Jews, they will treat it as a hate group masquerading as a community of faith.

Hate with a smiley-face.

Clearly, my dear, square old dad would have been disgusted, but I have to believe that Reverend Laws, who was a kind and deep, albeit misguided, man, would be troubled by this degree of rot as well.