UMR Communications is offering the latest headlines in the RSS format.
Reviews
Documentary exposes IRD's tactics Robin Russell, Apr 16, 2007
By Robin Russell Managing Editor
A new documentary offers some insights into an organization that some United Methodists say is trying to disrupt and even dismantle mainline denominations.
Renewal or Ruin? The Institute on Religion and Democracy's Attack on the United Methodist Church is a 24-minute film available on DVD from Vital Visuals, an independent film production company headed by ordained United Methodist minister Steven D. Martin.
Vital Visuals also produced the well-received 2006 documentary Theologians Under Hitler, which showed how Nazism had influenced German churches in the 1930s.
Mr. Martin says on his Web site that he left parish ministry two years ago to run the film production company. He chose to tackle the Washington, D.C.-based IRD after he noticed last summer that a divisive resolution introduced at his Holston Annual Conference meeting had been lifted word-for-word from the IRD's Web site.
When he later wrote about his experience on a Web site, he says the IRD staff attempted to intimidate him. He'd heard about those kind of tactics, but hadn't experienced it for himself. Until then.
"That's when I decided it was my problem, and it was time to take action," Mr. Martin said. "Hearing about this kind of hardball was an eye-opener. I want people to know about it. If Holston's no longer safe, no place is."
Mr. Martin's documentary includes interviews with United Methodist and other mainline clergy and authors who also had reason to help shed light on the IRD's tactics.
Headed by former CIA operative Mark Tooley, the IRD Web site describes itself as "working to reform the social and political witness of American churches, while promoting democracy and religious freedom at home and abroad." Much of its activity is directed at criticizing what it perceives as liberal elements in mainline denominations.
But the Rev. Andrew Weaver of Brooklyn, N.Y., an ordained United Methodist minister and frequent critic of the IRD, says he was "flabbergasted" by what he learned when he started researching the organization.
Far from offering a mere critique, the IRD's tactics were "attempts by political operatives to undermine mainline churches in the United States," Dr. Weaver says in the documentary.
"It was a relentless propaganda style with character assassination ad nauseum. About everybody of conscience in mainline churches has been attacked at some level by these people."
The documentary would have been more effective had it included some rebuttal from IRD staffers, or perhaps some interviews with United Methodist laypersons who have heard about the IRD.
Nevertheless, it does provide some interesting observations.
Jim Naughton, director of communications for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., says he discovered that the IRD is heavily funded by a "who's who of the far right wing in the United States," including Catholics and other neoconservatives who have donated more than $70 million to the organization. Among them are California-based, conservative Republican millionaires Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, listed by Time magazine as some of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. Their foundation has backed conservative groups such as the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a leading proponent of the intelligent-design movement.
Mrs. Ahmanson chairs the IRD board of directors. The board also includes several well-known Catholic conservatives, including Richard John Neuhaus, a priest and writer who edits the conservative journal First Things and who is an informal advisor to President Bush on issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, cloning and the defense-of-marriage amendment, and Michael Novak, a writer, diplomat and longtime activist for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank that is considered a leading architect of the Bush administration's public policy.
"What interest would they have in renewing mainline denominations?" author Frederick Clarkson asks in the documentary. Mr. Clarkson has written on the influence of the Religious Right and is editor of Talk2Action.org, a "pro-religious equality" Web site that promotes abortion rights and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
Mr. Clarkson recalls one of the IRD's first projects: a media campaign that accused the National Council of Churches and its member churches of contributing to Marxist guerillas.
"The whole thing was a smear job and a lie," Mr. Clarkson says in the documentary. "It was picked up by 60 Minutes and Reader's Digest -- the two biggest media outlets in the world... This was not the work of some small inside-the-Beltway interest group. This was about real political power and real serious political objectives."
United Methodists will find it interesting to hear the experience of several church leaders who have felt targeted by the IRD.
Retired Bishop Kenneth Carder says he has had "considerable experience" in dealing with the IRD, and adds the organization should be exposed for how it has "siphoned away some of the energy of the church, how it causes a kind of unnecessary dissension, and how it often manipulates a controversy for the purpose of a political, or an ideological or perhaps a financial agenda."
The organization's fund-raising letters, Bishop Carder says, are designed in such a way as to "foster a sense of crisis" over some hot-button issue and intimidate church leaders. "Many are afraid to speak out because they don't want their name to appear in one of the articles or Web sites, particularly to be labeled as unpatriotic or un-American or as a political radical," he says.
Jim Winkler, top executive of the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society and a frequent target of the IRD, says he believes the IRD wants to "strike a blow at some important social justice struggles in this country," including mainline denominations that have supported advances in civil rights, women's rights and anti-war efforts.
"They'll never, ever say a positive word," he said. "I can't remember ever reading a positive word the IRD has said about me, much less about the United Methodist Church."
Bishop Beverly Shamana (San Francisco Area), who is president of the General Board of Church and Society, says it's the IRD's potential effect on church-goers that disturbs her.
"They really dismantle the purpose and high calling of the church in such a way that it does create suspicion, and causes in people of good heart and goodwill to really question the ministry and mission of the United Methodist Church-and that bothers me."
When he later wrote about his experience on a Web site, he says the IRD staff attempted to intimidate him. He'd heard about those kind of tactics, but hadn't experienced it for himself. Until then. 
