Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons has been signing a lot of letters lately. Of course, I’m sure he signs letters all the time—the kind of routine correspondence that any organization puts out. But the letters he’s been so prolific in signing lately are of a different sort. These letters are really political manifestoes, endorsed by church officials, taking one side of a controversial issue.
Let’s review: On February 28 Parsons sent a letter backing the Wisconsin public employee unions in their battle with Governor Scott Walker. Also on February 28, the Stated Clerk joined prominent oldline and evangelical leftists in affixing his signature to a full-page advertisement in the Capitol Hill newspaper Politico declaring, “Our budget should not be balanced on the backs of poor and vulnerable people.” The very next day, he signed a letter from oldline denominational heads even more directly denouncing congressional Republican proposals to cut federal spending. Then, after giving his pen a short rest, on March 7 Parsons endorsed a letter from many of the same church leaders demanding “concrete measures to halt” Israeli settlements on the West Bank. All in all, it was a busy week of political pronouncements from the Stated Clerk.
These letters are not like the New Testament epistles. They are not pointing people to Christ or instructing believers in how they should live as his followers. On the contrary, they are instructing public officials in a secular state about which choices they ought to make in complicated situations. These are situations where there is no direct biblical teaching that gives a definitive answer. The Bible doesn’t tell us which topics should be subject to collective bargaining between public employee unions and state governments, or how the federal budget should be balanced, or how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved.
The Stated Clerk’s letters go beyond any scriptural or confessional convictions that Presbyterians hold in common. They go beyond explicit General Assembly policies. They identify the PCUSA with only one position on matters where Presbyterians disagree. And the position supported is in every case on the left side of the political spectrum. The letters do not even mention the concerns that moderate or conservative Presbyterians might have in these matters.
Siding with Unions against a Governor
Parsons’ letters make all sorts of dubious assumptions that many church members would contest. The February 28 letter to Wisconsin Governor Walker rightly affirms workers’ freedom of association to form unions to represent their interests. But it goes on to accuse Walker of failing to “enter into good-faith negotiations with Wisconsin’s public employee unions.” It denounces the governor for allegedly trying to “take away their future right to collective bargaining.” (In fact, Walker sought to limit collective bargaining to wages currently being paid, excluding the extravagant promises of future benefits that have jeopardized so many states’ finances in the long run. This change would still leave Wisconsin employees with more collective bargaining opportunities than federal workers or workers in most other states.)
The Stated Clerk’s intervention in the Wisconsin imbroglio asserts categorically “the rights of all workers to collectively bargain for wages and benefits.” It never asks the crucial question: Is a public employee union different from a union at a particular private corporation? In many cases, the public employee unions hold effective monopoly power, as there are no competitors to the government that could offer different salary and benefit packages. Government employees who deliver essential services have the power to wreak havoc on the public, with citizens having few other options to obtain those services. Public employee unions also have the ability to elect the state officials who sit on the opposite side of the bargaining table from them, thus potentially rigging the results.
Do these facts justify treating public employee unions differently from private sector unions? Presbyterians would disagree. Parsons gives one answer. He does not consider the other perspective.
Did Jesus Make a List of Budget Cuts?
The February 28 Politico ad cites various social programs and declares that “all are sound investments that a just nation must protect, not abandon.” It asks, “What would Jesus cut?” The ad endorsers, including Parsons, do not offer any suggestions for budget cuts—perhaps because the Jesus of the New Testament never gave a list of U.S. government programs he would cut in 2011. The focus of the ad seems to be to preserve the anti-poverty programs that the signatories favor. They leave to others the hard task of figuring out what to cut.
The March 1 letter to members of Congress likewise rails against “[t]he unprecedented and dangerous cuts to discretionary domestic programs and poverty-focused foreign assistance.” Parsons and the other signatories excoriate the Republicans’ proposed reduction of $61 billion—about 1.5 percent of the $3.8 trillion federal budget—as a violation of the second Great Commandment. “These deep and unwise spending cuts are a betrayal of our call to love our neighbor,” the denominational officials maintain. (Many of these “cuts” are actually reductions in the anticipated rate of spending growth after a period of rapid increases.)
The Parsons-endorsed letter does offer an idea for how to bring the budget back to balance: “Unchecked increases in military spending combined with vast tax cuts helped created our country’s financial difficulties and restoring financial soundness requires addressing these root imbalances.”
But this simplistic approach fails to deal with arguments to the contrary. It does not note that cutting defense and abrogating tax cuts would not solve budget problems in the short run—much less in the long run. Even if Congress abolished the Defense Department and eliminated all the Bush tax cuts, the federal government would still run a 2011 deficit in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Even a totally disarmed America would face trillion-dollar deficits far into the future.
Parsons and the other oldline church heads write as if all “domestic discretionary spending” were directed towards helping the poor, when much of it benefits the middle class. They apparently assume that all federal anti-poverty programs are effective, and therefore untouchable. They say nothing about the largest and fastest growing categories of federal spending: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care programs. Almost all budget experts agree that the nation faces a choice between cutting these entitlement programs or imposing massive tax increases, or some combination of the two. But the March 1 letter does not grapple with any of these fiscal realities that concern many Presbyterians. The purportedly prophetic church leaders have a single focus: to preserve current patterns of domestic discretionary spending.
Singling Out Israel as the Problem
The March 7 letter to President Obama starts with a brief reference to “the current upheaval in the Arab world.” But it quickly moves to the top foreign policy priority shared by Parsons and the other oldline church heads: opposing Israel’s presence on the West Bank. They “express [their] regret that the United States vetoed” a UN Security Council resolution that would have branded as “illegal” Israel’s “settlement activities in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.” The letter urges “concrete measures to halt this activity.” It does not criticize any Middle East actor other than Israel, nor does it demand “concrete measures” against any party other than Israel.
In fact, the church leaders insist that “[n]eighbors and powers in the region should be engaged no matter what their current relations with Israel.” This clause suggests that governments and movements sworn to Israel’s destruction—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Islamist Iranian regime—should be treated as full diplomatic partners in the “peace process.” Parsons and his oldline colleagues also contend that “an interim agreement [between Israel and the Palestinian Authority] at this time would be folly.” They will be satisfied only with “resolution of all final status issues and a definitive end to this conflict.”
Every one of the arguments and assumptions in the March 7 letter is debatable. In a region of 450 million people today aflame with movements for democracy, is the long-running Israeli-Palestinian dispute (involving only 11.5 million of those people) really the only issue to be addressed? Is Israel the only party deserving of criticism? Are Israeli settlements on the West Bank really the main problem in the Middle East, or just one among many? Is it really sensible to invite violent, anti-Semitic movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah into the “peace process”? If “resolution of all final status issues” is not possible, wouldn’t some limited measure of peace between Israel and the Palestinians be preferable to no agreement at all?
Parsons apparently knows his answers to all these questions. Other Presbyterians, in whose name he speaks, are not so sure. They may also wonder whether signing all these letters on political issues is the best way to lead a church. Maybe, before the Stated Clerk instructs governors and members of Congress and the President about all manner of complicated controversies, he might first have a dialogue with members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The denomination, after all, does have a few problems of its own these days.
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