The financially and demographically struggling National Council of Churches (NCC) is mulling over a new “Social Creed for the 21st Century” that will succinctly articulate its left-leaning political activism. Many of the NCC’s heterodox officials and activist supporters could not affirm traditional Christian theological creeds. For them, political creeds are the desired alternative.
This new creed is supposed to update the Social Creed of 1908 developed by the NCCÂ’s predecessor church council, and which focused on rights for laborers, child labor laws, and old age pensions. The NCC, and its predecessor Federal Council of Churches, were founded by religious and political progressives. Not until the1960Â’s did far-left radicalism began to displace the NCCÂ’s formerly mainstream liberalism.
“It is not enough to celebrate the centennial of the 1908 social creed,” a Presbyterian drafter told the NCC’s General Assembly in November 2007. “It can strengthen the common witness of our communions on a broad range of social concerns — far broader than in 1908.” |