The PCUSA Agenda

Will Spotts, my friend and partner over at Bearing Witness 2010 recently wrote up a list of the issues that will be coming before the PCUSA General Assembly relating to the Middle East. In brief, they include resolutions and reports that ask the church to officially:

"· divest from Caterpillar

"· strongly denounce Caterpillar

"· charge Israel with the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people

"· endorse the Kairos document, ‘A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith and Hope from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering,’ [This is problematic because of the attitudes of the document rejecting the existence of a Jewish State and casting Palestinian violence solely as a response to the occupation.]

"· cut off military aid to Israel – or tie such aid to Israeli compliance with certain demands

"· call on Israel and Gaza to consent to independent evaluations of their actions in the recent conflict

"· approve a human rights update that alone, out of all the world, finds Israeli Jewish violations of religious freedom worthy of Presbyterian attention, and alone, out of all the world, finds Palestinian Christians and Muslims to be the only victims of religious discrimination worthy of comment

"· endorse the concept of “universal jurisdiction” (currently used as the basis for politically motivated trials of Israeli officials in various European courts)

"· endorse right of return (for Palestinians – though no mention is made of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people also displaced and dispossessed in 1948)

"· make the Middle East Study Committee a permanent monitoring group of PC(USA) policy

"· support the establishment of an international council for Jerusalem

"· approve a paper on Christians and Jews – unique in that it cautions against continuing Christian antisemitism

"· refer the paper on Christians and Jews for a re-write because of complaints from the Israel/Palestine Mission Network contained in a letter that among other things, publicly accused (without offer of proof) American Jewish organizations of bomb threats against Presbyterians and of arson at a Presbyterian church, and that cast the increase in antisemitism as a reaction to Israel’s actions.

"· approve the paper on Christian Muslim Relations

"· acknowledge the inherent complexity of the conflict and defer from taking positions that appear to favor either side in the conflict

"· defer from taking actions or making statements that align the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) with unilateral support for any of the specific parties involved in the struggle.

"· approve part of the MESC report, and receive another portion of it."

The details of all of these resolutions and reports require further dissection, but I think it’s safe to say that the sheer quantity of votes that will be taken on Middle East affairs means this issue is once again the top political priority of the General Assembly. And, as the list above demonstrates, the vast majority of actions being requested are once again variations on condemning the Jewish state.

How is it that the church which officially rejected divestment in 2006 and carefully (and, again, officially) limited the mandate of standing committees within the church regarding actions to be taken on the Arab-Israeli conflict finds itself embroiled this year in their most lopsided debate ever?

Part of this has to do with the quasi-democratic nature of the institution. The church is organized by regions (called Presbyteries) and each Presbytery is allowed to submit resolutions (called Overtures) to be considered by the General Assembly. And if you’ve got Presbyteries (such as the one in San Francisco) that is ready to push its political agenda regardless of what the vast majority of members voted in 2006 and 2008, then divestment, accusations of Apartheid and calls to cut off military aid to Israel can appear on the agenda again and again, the rest of the country be damned.

But this agenda also reflects changes at PCUSA over the decades where the church’s official bureaucracy in Louisville has morphed over time into quasi-executive leadership. Given that PCUSA manages (among other things) vast property holdings and billions in retirement savings for its members, the professionalization of church institutions was inevitable. But it is this non-traditional executive leadership within what was once a de-centralized institution that has been at the forefront of anti-Israel agitation over the last 10-20 years.

As noted previously, this leadership travels in interfaith circles, meaning they tend to be more sensitive to the needs of interfaith partners (like the leaders of other Protestant denominations or Sabeel) than they are to their own members. As such, they more and more resemble the “executive class” of global corporations which are more comfortable dealing with fellow executives on interlocking boards of directors than they are with engaging their own employees and customers.

These two phenomena: semi-democracy from below and concentrated executive authority from above work together. And thus church leaders anxious to get around restrictions placed on them by previous GA votes need to simply throw their support behind Overtures and committees that reflect their (increasingly anti-Israel) opinions, while adopting a “wait-and-see” attitude about resolutions that do not. Thus resources are thrown to committees dedicated to generating official PCUSA reports on the Middle East, while a blind eye is turned to the fact that these committees have ended up stacked against even a semblance of balance and objectivity, leading to an inevitable result.

More on the most egregious example of this gross imbalance, the report from the PCUSA’s Middle East Study Committee (MESC), tomorrow.