Neil Maghami. National Post, Canada. Wednesday, January 19, 2000
One of the most prominent spokespeople in the Elian Gonzalez case has been the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, the U.S. National Council of Churches' outgoing general secretary. Rev. Campbell, with firmness and certainty, has been arguing that young Elian (who arrived in the U.S. in late November)
must be returned to Cuba on the grounds that "[w]e need to be concerned for a small boy rather than politics."
"Politics" seems to be Rev. Campbell's (a Baptist) way of dismissing out of hand the case made by the Cuban exile community (and Elian's relatives in Miami) that this six-year-old boy deserves better than to be sent back to a totalitarian backwater and trained to recite endless paeans
to el jefe maximo. Elian's mother, it seems to have been forgotten, drowned in the Florida straits in order to give her son the opportunity to live free.
But it is good to know that the Rev. Campbell wants to avoid politics -- and quite a surprise too. The National Council of Churches (an ecumenical, largely Protestant outreach group) in general, and Rev. Campbell in particular, have not been shy of getting involved in politics in the past.
Last January, for example, the NCC castigated Bill Clinton for maintaining the U.S. embargo against Cuba. In late 1998, Rev. Campbell urged religious people to support the Kyoto treaty on climate change on religious grounds. She called it a "litmus test for the faith community" --
which puts it up there somewhere with the Divinity of Christ and Justification by Faith alone. In 1993, she called for liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be restored to power in Haiti. (The Rev. Aristide's theological insights could rarely be heard in Haiti above the sounds of gunfire,
not all emanating from his opponents.) And in 1990 (prior to Rev. Campbell becoming general secretary), the NCC passed a resolution decrying the European explorers of North America for their legacy of "genocide, slavery, 'ecocide' and exploitation of the wealth of the land." And so on, and
so on.
Lest readers think the NCC is frittering away time on every passing fashionable secular cause I should point out there is one struggle it will not take up: anti-communism. This tradition goes back many years, and has led to some embarrassing situations.
There was the time in 1984 during an NCC-organized goodwill tour of the former Soviet Union by U.S. religious leaders when, in the midst of a prayer service, a couple of Soviet Baptists suddenly hauled out a banner reading "Remember, We Are A Persecuted Church." Soviet police dragged
them off, with nary a peep from the NCC.
The NCC was also conspicuously silent when it came to protesting the harsh treatment of dissidents under communism. It did, however, find time for an attack on the Reagan arms build-up. How accommodating and gratifying this pliant crew must have seemed to their Kremlin hosts.
It was certainly keeping with the established behaviour patterns of the NCC that last June, it sent a group that included Rev. Campbell to Havana. Fidel Castro provided an audience of thousands for his visitors. Rev. Campbell rose to the occasion and uttered a stream of inanities, the kind
rarely found outside of a Monty Python sketch.
"It is on behalf of Jesus the Liberator that we work against this embargo," she said in the course of announcing her hope that the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba would change. Lifting the Cuban embargo may well be the right policy -- the Pope has also opposed it. But invoking Christ's
name against it without also criticizing Castro for the persecution of dissidents, including Christians, is not a moral stance but a political leeching off religious capital. How would Rev. Campbell have reacted if one of her opponents on the right invoked the Prince of Peace's name to justify, say,
tax cuts?
But the Rev. Campbell seems to have little feel for religion in general or Christianity in particular. A few years back, she made a curious statement to The New York Times : "If you look at the Nazi regime, you see in it the philosophy of Christian superiority." Unless she is using the
word "Christian" here in an ethnic rather than a religious sense -- an odd usage in the mouth of a Christian leader -- she is falsely blaming Christians for a regime that was an odd mixture of paganism, science, superstition and atheism.
Supported by these insights, she tells us Elian's father, a man living under a totalitarian regime who daily leads the Hate Hour against the U.S. on behalf of Castro, is making his requests for the boy's return absolutely voluntarily and sincerely. Sincerely? Perhaps. But how can we be certain?
Despite the testimony of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn et al, Rev. Campbell is firmly wedded to the myth that the true nature of Communist regimes is somehow misunderstood in the West. Her faith in Marxism-Leninism may not have been particularly Christian at any time, but by the year 2000 it is
positively miraculous.
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