Interfaith Conference Spurs Debate on Religious Liberty

A recent State Department-backed conference on problems of religious freedom internationally has stirred a bitter domestic religious debate and raised questions of whether the meeting amounted to improper church-state entanglement.

The religious liberty conference, which ended last week with an address by President Reagan, was co-sponsored and partially financed by the State Department together with an interfaith coalition spearheaded by the evangelical-dominated Institute on Religion and Democracy.

It is believed to be the first time the State Department, whose role is to execute the nation’s foreign policy, has teamed with domestic religious groups to co-sponsor an event. Since its founding four years ago, the Institute on Religion and Democracy has devoted its energies to unmasking what it perceives to be Marxist tendencies in mainline churches in the United States.

(The International Conference on Religious Liberty got news attention last week primarily because Reagan took the occasion to defend his decision to honor German war dead at the Bitburg cemetery in West Germany, but to also say that he had altered his itinerary to include a visit to a concentration camp.)

‘Cause of Religious Liberty’

Most of the 22 speakers at the conference concurred with Reagan when he said that “the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.”

But many of the speakers used their turn at the podium in the State Department’s Loy Henderson Conference Room to attack the National Council of Churches for its efforts to develop contacts with church leaders in the Soviet Union.

Peter Berger, a Boston University sociologist, charged that the stance of mainline churches toward religious liberty was “a major scandal of our time, an outrageous and disgusting phenomenon.” National council churches, he alleged, regard religious liberty “as a luxury, if not frivolous.”

“Wittingly or unwittingly, the NCC is deeply involved in concealing and distorting the truth about the Soviet Union,” said Peter Reddaway of the London School of Economics in a discussion of council-sponsored visits of U.S. church members to the Soviet Union.

He also accused the council of “promoting Soviet foreign policy aims in putting the blame for the arms race on the United States.”

200 in Attendance

According to Dianne Knippers of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the conference, attended by about 200 people, grew out of a smaller gathering two years ago that was sponsored by the institute and the National Assn. of Evangelicals.

“We approached the State Department,” she said, which agreed to co-sponsor this gathering. The department also arranged a $44,969 grant from the United States Information Agency to the institute to bring religious leaders from overseas for the conference.

Also enlisted as co-sponsors were the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the Jacques Maritain Center, a right-wing Catholic group.

Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee said his group had been assured that both the United States Catholic Conference and the National Council of Churches had also been invited to participate. “We took it as a matter of good faith that it would be a broad-based effort,” he said.

In fact, neither the Catholic bishops nor the National Council of Churches was invited to join in sponsorship or planning.

Some conference speakers sought to make an issue of the fact that council representatives also declined the invitation to participate in the program. “Let the record show they were invited; they were begged,” said the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus.

The Rev. Arie R. Brouwer, general secretary of the council, said in an interview that he first learned of his “invitation” in late February when a colleague showed him a conference program that listed Brouwer as a conference panelist.

Cites Government Link

Also listed were Roman Catholic Cardinals Franz Koenig of Austria, Stephan Kim of Korea and Jaime Sin of the Philippines, none of whom had agreed to participate, a Catholic spokesman said.

Brouwer declined to participate, citing, among other things, reservations about church-state conflicts. “There is, I think a touch of irony in a conference on religious liberty being co-sponsored by an agency of the state and selected religious groups,” Brouwer wrote Elliot Abrams, who heads the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.

“Since matters of religious liberty by definition concern themselves with points of tension between church and state, would it not be more appropriate for religious bodies to hold a conference on religious liberty completely free from any ‘co-sponsoring’ arrangement with an agency of the state?” Brouwer proposed.

Some of the participants at the conference, particularly those who were unfamiliar with the church politics involved, said they were dismayed with the attacks on the national council.

“I thought the purpose of this meeting was to forge a unity and come together on the question of religious liberty,” said University of Michigan Prof. Juan R. Cole. “I’ve been really disturbed by the amount of squabbling that’s gone on.” He urged that “serious attention be given by the State Department to avoid this in in the future.”

United Methodist Bishop Leroy Hodapp of Indiana raised similar concerns in a post-conference letter to Abrams. Hodapp conceded the right of representatives of the Institute on Religion and Democracy to attack the National Council of Churches.

“But when it is done in a conference co-sponsored by the State Department, moral and ethical . . . questions immediately are evoked,” said Hodapp, who has served on the council’s board.

When church and state join to attack problems of religious freedom “and then use the occasion and the setting, a conference room of the State Department . . . to castigate other religious groups who are not even present, the question of religious freedom in America becomes a high agenda item,” he said.

(Charges that the conference was devoted largely to criticizing the National Council of Churches were denied by the Methodist evangelist Edmund W. Robb, who heads the Institute on Religion and Democracy’s board of advisers. Asked about the lack of involvement by the council in the conference, Robb told the United Methodist news office: “They’ve never invited us to co-sponsor a conference; why should we invite them?”)