Clerical Opposition to War in Gulf Builds Quickly : Protest: Unlike Vietnam, mainline religious leaders have come out early and in unprecedented unanimity against possible use of U.S. military force.

Thousands of Americans had died in Vietnam and years of warfare had passed by the late 1960s before most religious leaders became actively involved in the movement to stop the fighting.

Yet, within weeks after Iraq invaded Kuwait, ranking clerics ranging from Catholics to Lutherans to Episcopalians began opposing the possible use of military force by U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf.

With U.S. troops still amassing in Saudi Arabia and Iraq facing a U.N. deadline to pull out by Jan. 15, mainline church leaders have reached unprecedented unanimity and stepped up their anti-war lobbying.

Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning of the Episcopal Church met Thursday with President Bush, a lifelong Episcopalian, at the White House and urged against war. Then, on Friday, Browning and 18 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox church executives--just back from a trip to Baghdad and other Middle Eastern points--said in a collective statement at the United Nations that they are “utterly convinced” that war is not the solution.

They have not been persuaded by Bush Administration reasons for fighting, including protecting economic interests and punishing an aggressor. Many are anguishing over the billions being spent for a military buildup while domestic poverty programs go begging.

Harking back to the long, bloody lessons of Korea and Vietnam, a chorus of mainline church leaders say the time has come to settle international disputes through nonviolent means.

“There is no compelling reason for going to war, and all that war means in destruction, crippling and killing,” said Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, who spent eight days in Baghdad this month accompanying relatives of hostages.

“For 40 years, ever since the Korean War, people were easily swayed (to back fighting) by the threat of communism,” said Gumbleton, an auxiliary bishop in Detroit.

War of any kind “is abhorrent,” said the Rev. Daniel Weiss, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches. The fact that the Bush Administration initially offered “economically grounded reasons” for fighting especially disturbed church leaders, he said.

“At this time of year particularly, we are reminded of the coming of the Prince of Peace who has called us to be peacemakers in his name, and we need to urge the governments of the world to find alternate ways to settle differences,” Weiss said last week.

The United States “has not learned anything” from its wars in Korea and Vietnam, said United Methodist Bishop Melvin Talbert of San Francisco, a onetime Los Angeles pastor who took part in anti-war protests during the 1960s.

The contrast between today’s anti-war spirit in mainline Christianity and the slowly evolving views about Vietnam have heartened religious veterans of the 1960s protests.

“It is remarkable that wide religious opposition has already taken place in the case of this projected war,” said the Rev. John C. Bennett, former president of Union Theological Seminary in New York now in retirement in Claremont.

Bennett, who was writing magazine editorials against U.S. involvement in Vietnam by 1965, recalled that most religious leaders did not reach a consensus against that war until 1969. It was not until November, 1971, that the U.S. Catholic bishops declared it was morally imperative to bring “this tragic conflict” to an end.

“Bishops are historically, naturally inclined to be patriotic, and not to condemn their own government,” said Jesuit Father George H. Dunne, a retired Loyola Marymount professor.

“But the bishops have done a lot more thinking about war since the Vietnam War ended in 1975,” he said, citing the long study preceding the 1983 U.S. Bishops Pastoral Letter on War and Peace that was highly critical of the nuclear arms race.

Just weeks into the current crisis, top officials from mainline denominations began questioning the White House’s impatience with an economic embargo, inconsistent objectives and what the president of the United Church of Christ called “the steady drumbeat of war messages.”

But it took Bush’s announcement on Nov. 8 that he would double U.S. troop strength to galvanize opposition by the two largest bodies in U.S. organized religion--the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, whose parishes serve 54 million Catholics, and the National Council of Churches, whose 32 denominations embrace 42 million members.

Both groups were holding their annual meetings the following week and both promptly placed the buildup on their agendas.

Not all religious groups, however, are raising objections to a possible U.S. military offensive.

American Jewish leaders and evangelical Christian clergy on the whole see Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a dangerous, unpunished threat who needs to be declawed lest Israel and other Middle Eastern countries fall prey in the future.

The Jewish community “is particularly sensitive over whether some interest of Israel is going to be sacrificed in interest of appeasing Saddam Hussein,” said Rabbi David Gordis, director of the Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.

The memory of appeasement to Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s is also at work among Jews, said Gordis, a rabbi in the conservative wing of Judaism. “To rule out any response of force, even as a last resort, cannot help but be described as capitulation to evil, something that is wrong philosophically and ideologically and pragmatically won’t work,” he said.

A resolution adopted without dissent last month by the Council of Jewish Federations backed “the maintenance of a firm posture of position to Saddam Hussein’s belligerence.”

Jewish tradition regards preemptive military action as a form of legitimate defense if diplomatic means fail, said Union of American Hebrew Congregation’s board of trustees.

Reform rabbis, in an executive committee statement, urged Bush to seek legal means to charge Hussein with war crimes and reject any linking of Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to other Mideast issues. “Should peaceful means proved inadequate, we support the timely use of force in consonance with American constitutional procedures to reduce Iraq to a regional power and to remove the nuclear, biological and chemical warfare threats,” the rabbis said.

Most conservative evangelical leaders have been quietly supporting the direction of Bush’s policies.

“I don’t hear groups complaining,” said Robert Dugan, a Washington-based representative of the National Assn. of Evangelicals. “I think the great bulk of the evangelical community would support President Bush’s policies,” he said.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has condemned Iraq’s ruler as a “madman” developing a nuclear weapon threat.

It is crucial for the stability of the Middle East and the existence of Israel that Hussein “be removed from Kuwait, from power and his arsenal dismantled,” hw said.

While never using such strident language, Catholic and mainline Protestant leaders initially backed Bush’s deployment of troops to enforce the U.N.-backed economic blockade of Iraq.

But that changed quickly.

Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony was in the forefront for the Catholics in his final weeks as chairman of the bishops’ International Policy Committee.

After a mid-September letter to Secretary of State James A. Baker II asking that food and medicine not be denied to Iraqi citizens, Mahony said in an interview: “I, and my committee and other bishops began looking at the situation more carefully. It was beginning to have an ominous shift.”

Mahony prepared a second letter to Baker in late October, raising moral objections to the possible use of force and laying out Catholic criteria for a “just war.” The letter was purposely not mailed until one day after the Nov. 6 elections, Mahony said, so that it could not “be used by people in various ways not intended by us.”

Then, Bush announced that he would double troop strength in the gulf to give the United States more offensive capability. Four days later, the nation’s 250 Catholic bishops gathered in Washington for their annual meeting.

“So many bishops wanted to associate themselves with Archbishop Mahony’s letter that it was put on the agenda as the first item of business,” said a staff official at the bishops’ headquarters.

Like the Catholic bishops, the National Council of Churches, holding its general board meeting Nov. 14-16 in Portland, Ore., had not originally scheduled discussion on the Persian Gulf crisis.

The Council, whose denominations run from liberal-to-moderate mainline Protestant to the normally reserved Eastern Orthodox churches, were also stirred by the troop buildup announcement.

“That really turned things,” said Dale Bishop, the Middle East director for the New York-based Council. “I was bowled over by the amount of energy behind this particular issue,” Bishop said.

About 200 delegates gave unanimous approval to a resolution calling for a major reduction in U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf and direct U.S. negotiations with Iraq.

Public reactions to religious pronouncements are hard to measure, said Archbishop John Roach of the Minneapolis-St. Paul diocese, who testified Dec. 6 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the bishops’ new international policy chairman.

“But the fact that church leaders raise these questions, I think, makes it easier for people to raise such questions and not feel they are disloyal,” Roach said. “We help them form a language that can be used in urging steps to avoid war.”

Churches have kept up their public commentary at each new twist in the crisis.

A national meeting early this month in Los Angeles of about 70 clergy and lay regional officials of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) praised Bush for his proposal of high-level, U.S.-Iraqi talks in Baghdad and Washington. But the group’s pastoral letter, expressing “grave concerns” over war, asked its 1 million members to write to government leaders to support all diplomatic initiatives.

Likewise, United Methodists in 400 Southern California and Hawaii churches were recently asked by their regional Council on Ministries to write Congress and the White House, and to cite denominational principles against “interventions by more powerful nations against weaker ones.” The council also suggested peace vigils and armbands to symbolize their concern.

Many church leaders say they hope to balance their opposition to war with compassion and sensitivity toward church members involved in the military buildup.

“We want to make sure that we don’t make the same mistakes that were made during the Vietnam conflict, where criticism of the conflict was taken as criticism of the individuals caught up in that conflict,” said Steve Smith, a Presbyterian regional official based in Los Angeles.

“There are no hawks. Most are hoping that it will end peacefully,” said Smith.

Some local congregations near Southern California military bases have conducted letter-writing campaigns to servicemen and women stationed in Saudi Arabia. About 550 Frisbees with personal Christmas greetings attached will be distributed Dec. 25 to troops in Saudi Arabia--courtesy of members of the Northridge United Methodist Church.

Among vigils for peace held in the Southland was a day of prayer and fasting Friday at New Life Community Church in Artesia, a Reformed Church in America congregation.

Many church leaders plan more than prayer.

A newly formed Religious Community Against War in the Persian Gulf, based at Pasadena’s activist All Saints Episcopal Church, mailed a theological rationale for opposition to war to 2,500 priests and ministers in the Los Angeles area as well as to selected Reform Jewish rabbis.

“At least a half-dozen rabbis have responded favorably to our stance to resist war,” said an All Saints staff member.

Rabbi Leonard Beerman, one of the coalition organizers, cited several reasons for his stance, including his belief that “war is not the way to resolve international conflicts.”

Just as a small number of rabbis oppose military action, evangelical opinions are not unanimous.

A letter to Bush calling for peaceful settlement under U.N. auspices circulated at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and got more than 200 student signatures.

Events in the Middle East have sparked new speculation by some fundamentalist preachers about whether the convergence of major armies signals “the last days” before the return of Jesus Christ.

However, Dugan, of the National Assn. of Evangelicals, said fatalism is not sweeping churches.

“Responsible evangelicals are going to desire peace and work for it,” he said. “At the same time, it doesn’t hurt to take an intelligent look at the Scriptures to see what may fit. I don’t think it’s frivolous.”

Researcher Michael Meyers assisted in preparation of this story.