Richard Cizik on the MDGs

On the web @ www.globalinterfaithed.org

On the Role of American Religious Communities
In Achieving the Millennium Development Goals:
A Consultation

The Church Center at the United Nations
New York, New York
June 8, 2005

“The United Nations’ MDG Campaign for a Better World”

Speech given by Rev. Richard Cizik, Vice President for Governmental Affairs,

National Association of Evangelicals

Good Morning. There are few people I admire more than Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg. I ask myself: “What in the world could I say after hearing his remarks?” Do you feel that way? I feel that way. And after a diplomat and a leader challenging us the way Ambassador Herfkens has done. Well, I ask myself “What could I bring to this?” It’s a tall order after such fine leaders and speakers.

Let me begin with just a few comments. In his recent New York Times column entitled “A Natural Alliance” author David Brooks writes about hearing Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church, where 20,000 assemble each Sunday. Brooks writes: “Well, my first thought was how come Christians have all these mega-churches but we Jews don’t have mega-gogues? Mega-gogues? I think the answer is that if some Jews built a mega-gogue the other Jews in town would say ‘that mega-gogue I wouldn’t go to.’ They’d build a rival mega-gogue. You’d end up with about ten big buildings each with about forty people inside.”

Brooks continues: “My second thought was, why don’t my books sell 25,000,000 copies? I thought maybe I should write a book called The Blinking Flat Purpose Driven Tipping Point That Got Left Behind. Or maybe I should write a book for rich Republicans called The Chauffeur Driven Life which I think would do quite well.”

Brooks’ third thought, which may be more profound than the others, is that we can’t have a culture war in this country. We can have either a culture war in this country or we can have a war on poverty, but we can’t have both. That is to say, liberals and conservatives can go on bashing each other for being godless hedonists and primitive theocrats, or they can set those aside, those differences, and work together to help the needy. Brooks concludes: “The natural alliance in this country, at home and abroad, for measures at home and abroad, is between liberals and evangelical Christians. They are the only two groups that are really hyped up about these problems and willing to devote time and money to ameliorating them. If liberals and Evangelicals don’t get together on anti-poverty measures, then there will be no majority for them and they won’t get done.”

Now, I have to tell you, in my community, there is such a divide between liberals and conservatives, between, if you will, the National Council of Churches (NCC) [and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)]. The divide is so great that several years ago, when NAE President Kevin Mannoia proposed eliminating the rule that if your denomination belonged to the NCC it could not belong to NAE, he lost his job. Now, there were other management issues which prompted his resignation, but the point is that the old paradigm that characterizes evangelical and mainline Protestant relations still operates to a significant degree. Incidentally, the NAE rule prohibiting “dual membership” [in the NAE and NCC] for denominations was ultimately eliminated but not without a great deal of controversy. The controversy dates back to the mid 1990’s but things haven’t changed that much since and it illustrates my point: we need to find some way beyond the religious divides that exist. And I hope I can offer some quick encouragement to you.

The political “red state/blue state” divide is another social division we have to find our way through. According to historian Joanne Freeman, it is not unlike what our country faced in the early days of the Republic. “The political arena,” she wrote, “was a world of regional distrust, personal animosity, accusation, suspicion, implication, and denouncement.” It reminds one of the Washington described by author Stephen L. Carter is his book Field Notes on the Compassionate Life. The author writes that our current social and political climate is akin to “a school yard sort of paradigm in which you have some really loud kids taking over the monkey bars and drowning out everyone else….” “We don’t know each other,” Stephen Carter writes, “or even try or want to try. And not knowing each other, we seem to think that how we treat each other does not matter.” I would suggest to you that David Brooks is right. In spite of the polarized country we live in, in spite of the religious divide that exists even in Protestantism, in spite of the differences that exist across religious lines, Evangelicals are at a moment of change. And I will take just a few minutes to say why this is significant.

The evangelical movement is changing rapidly – a new attitude and philosophy about politics and public engagement has emerged. This is not to say that there isn’t a fight going on; there is a huge fight going on in our movement. In 2001 we decided as leaders of the NAE that we lacked a “public theology” to help guide our movement. We lacked the ability to engage on a level that the 21^st century required. And so we began a process in 2001 that took three years to complete but led to the release in 2004 of a document entitled For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. These principles of Christian Political engagement include:

We work to protect religious freedom and liberty of conscience.
We work to nurture family life and protect children.
We work to protect the sanctity of human life and to safeguard its nature.
We seek justice and compassion for the poor and vulnerable.
We Work to protect human rights.
We seek peace and work to restrain violence.
We labor to protect God’s creation.

In seeking justice and compassion for the poor and vulnerable, for example, the document states that “care for the vulnerable should extend beyond our national borders. American foreign policy and trade policies often have an impact on the poor. We should try to persuade our leaders to change patterns of trade that harm the poor and to make the reduction of global poverty a central concern of American foreign policy.”

Now, the challenge is to work that out in practice. As Ambassador Herfkens said “Vision without implementation is hallucination.” So we face the challenge of implementing this together as people who care about what Rabbi Yitz Greenberg has described as “the image of God.” We evangelicals have moved from a place of being the Robert Taft “isolationists” of the 1950’s to what Nick Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, now fifty years later calls “the new internationalists.” How did this happen?

Well, many here will recall that in 1988 we became involved in establishing international religious freedom with the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act -- which many of you, I hope, planned, worked, supported, and were part of. The International Religious Freedom Act is an effort to make religious freedom a component of American foreign policy. In 1998 we began working on the issue of persecution. This has lead in subsequent congresses to the passage of five other major pieces of legislation. They include The Trafficking in Victims Protection Act, The Sudan Peace Act, The Global AIDS Initiative, The Prison Rape Elimination Act, and The North Korea Human Rights Act. A process of evangelical political engagement has commenced. We are not going to engage simply on two domestic issues – e.g., same sex marriage and abortion – but engage as Christians with a global perspective.

And yet there is a struggle going on in our own community over whether we will be able to extend the commitment of our community to the set of principles set forth in An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. A fight is ongoing over how broad our commitment will be and what shape it will take, but I think it is possible to overcome. When we took on, for example, the subject of the environment, we launched an effort called the “Initiative on Creation Care.” Major voices joined us, and these voices are now being supplanted by church pastors who have a broader agenda and who are willing to commit their parishioners to the poor. Why? They know that a problem like global warming is inextricably related to the problem of global hunger.

However, in response to the launch of this campaign we were challenged by major religious right groups saying “Look, we don’t have enough energy in our community to address all the issues. We don’t want to take on global warming. What does Evangelicalism got to do with that issue?”

We are willing to stand up to that kind of criticism because, frankly, we think we are on the right track. We believe that evangelicals will support the broader agenda and moreover, in light of what has occurred over the last ten years, that they are willing now to engage with the people in this room not only on behalf of making the principle of supporting religious freedom a major part of American foreign policy, but also on behalf of the poor. I really believe Evangelicals are at that place. Now you may not believe it, and I’m not saying there aren’t those who are opposed to this emphasis [it’s what I call “the empire strikes back”]. But I do believe that church leaders who have a better appreciation for what ought to be the full Gospel and the full social implications of it, are standing with us. We are going to stick with this commitment for the long haul, and win. It’s very important for what we all care about here in this room, that we do win.

If we lose, we will go back to being the isolationist people who in their evangelical churches say, “Well, we will care about America and America’s self-interest and forget the rest of the world.” For example, according to this mentality, we’ll engage in foreign policies, which admittedly impact the Evangelical church around the world, a church which now has fellowships in over 100 nations, more than three million churches, but we will treat the Evangelical church around the world as though it doesn’t really matter, as though the only interest that matters is that of American evangelicals. This is what is at stake for us, for American evangelicals to take seriously what is right for the world and what is right for these churches overseas, not just what’s just right for me in my little local congregation.

The evangelical stance toward global poverty is complicated, according to Michael Everson and Christian Smith of the University of North Carolina in their book Divided by Faith -- Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race, because evangelicals are more inclined than non-evangelicals to blame an individual’s failure to thrive on his personal shortcomings, character, or lack of motivation, rather than on systemic disadvantages.

For some time now, however, we have been working to change this attitude. And we have been successful so far with our church leaders, and hope to change the attitudes of the congregants in our 50,000 churches as well. We hope to persuade them that while it is true that there are individual pathologies, and such a thing as individual sin which does impede the ability to earn, it is also true that there are structural and systemic evils that impact people’s chances of making it in the world. And wealth and poverty depend on both of these factors, and we have to address both. That’s why we wrote the statement An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. We are committed to addressing these realities of global poverty and making them a major part of American foreign policy. This is so important, and it remains a major hurdle for us.

In 1990, John Green at the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics conducted a survey of our top 474 leaders. In the survey he found that 75% of our leaders believed that you “change the world by changing one heart at a time.” (Incidentally, this is something George W. Bush has recently said too). Ten years later, in the year 2000, after a systematic effort to change that attitude -- with biblical teaching and the rest -- 75% of our leaders now say that “you change the world by changing its structures and by changing individual hearts.” In other words, it takes both to make a difference.

So, Ambassador Herfkens, what we are interested in doing in order to aid the cause of the Millennium Development Goals that you are committed to is to go to our grass roots and act to change the minds of our congregants who in turn will act to change the minds of their legislators. Keep this fact in mind: 40-50% of the GOP Coalition is composed of Evangelicals. Forty to fifty percent. The New York Times checked on this just a few days ago and they came up with 50%. So if 50% of the GOP Coalition is composed of evangelicals and we can convince them that they have an obligation to serve a higher principle than that of their personal or of the national self-interest, as they perceive it, that they have a higher calling, then I believe that we can change the Republican Party and its commitments.

Can we do it? I believe that we can. Heroes, according to Harvard Professor Peter Gibbon, fit into three categories: (1) they have accomplished something extraordinary, (2) they have shown moral valor, and (3) they are great souls who lift us up by noble example. I don’t know that I have accomplished anything extraordinary, but I do know that I can be an example to others. David Aikman, in his book Great Souls, says that those of noble example become great souls.

I would suggest to you that everyone in this room, everyone who is committed to this task -- so compellingly stated by Rabbi Greenberg -- and whose challenge we know to be right, is in fact -- by taking on this challenge -- becoming a noble example to others, a hero, and a great soul.

I've lived during the Vietnam War era and during Watergate, a period of time in which heroes were debunked, in which most politicians were shown to be moral pigmies. And we have been through periods when the religious community has been somewhat discredited by the actions of its leaders.

Today, we have religious leaders esteemed highly, at least in Republican circles. And we say we want our politicians to exemplify, act by, and live by, religious principles. We are not afraid of saying that. And if that is the case and that is the message that evangelicals are carrying, then I have every reason to believe that we can change the reality in Washington.

Recently, in meeting with AID officials, some of these officials questioned the United States’ commitment to these Millennium Goals. They questioned the Zero Point Seven goal, saying that if we put that much money out -- which would be something like eighty billion dollars alone, or sixty billion beyond the twenty billion dollars we currently spend -- we would overwhelm the capacity of recipients to use these funds to meet their needs. Well, I don’t know for certain, but I doubt that this is the case. But I won’t even argue that. I would simply say, “Let’s get about doing as much as we can, as fast as we can and worry about that problem if it ever arises. Let’s not use it as an excuse not to act.”

Can we be, as you said, Ambassador, the first generation to put an end to poverty? I don’t know, but I do know this; it won’t happen without the collaboration of the religious communities in this room. If you really care about this issue, and I presume that by being here you do -- I got up at 4 a.m. this morning to drive to be here with you to say this, I care about it and I am interested in making it happen. I would hope and pray that you are all equally committed to making it happen. We can’t do it, however, without collaboration, a willingness to cooperate together. We have to see ourselves as stewards of our national resources and stewards of our individual congregations’, synagogues’, and churches’ resources. We must pick up this challenge and carry it forward.

We say in our evangelical document that our national leaders have been given a stewardship role on behalf of the blessings of representative democracy, religious freedom, and human rights in a world where nations are endangered by the forces of authoritarianism and radical secularism. That is the world in which we operate today.

Frankly, I do not identify America or the West with my own worldview. The West does not equal my Christian worldview. There was a time when I was growing up when I thought that, but I don’t believe it today. I think today America is more characterized by postmodernism than it is by anything like Judeo-Christian tradition. This makes our challenge all the greater, yet I do believe it can be done.

I’ll conclude with David Brooks. He writes, “Serious differences over life issues are not going to go away, but more liberals and Evangelicals are realizing that you don’t have to convert people. Sometimes you can just work with them….” I have said this before. To quote Brooks again: “The world is suddenly crowded with people like Rick Warren and Bono who are trying to step out of the logic of the culture war so that they can accomplish more in the poverty war.” That’s what I believe as well, and sometimes we need to read it to believe it. It was Jacques Ellul who wrote that modern man often doesn’t believe things unless he reads them and that how much he believes them will be determined by the size of the headline. Well that’s a good enough headline for me. Others are saying the same thing. It was evident in the National Cathedral the other night [at the Anti-Hunger Mobilization] when you had religious communities of the most diverse nature you could find -- and I must confess that I don’t normally do interfaith convocations or interfaith worship. It’s not my style, yet I was willing to participate because I thought that the statement was more important than my picayune proclivities. Making a joint statement was that important.

We’ve been given a challenge and the question is will we accept it? That’s really where we are. Are we willing to use our resources? Of course we are not all of one mind in the Evangelical community about this commitment -- by any stretch of the imagination -- but we are getting there. The Micah Challenge illustrates this. We met in Washington, along with other groups, and we remain committed to taking the Micah Challenge through all of our global networks. This is a way that we evangelicals can send a message to the rest of the world, not only about what we think religiously, not only about who we think God is, but about who we are as a people.

We evangelicals went to the Tibetan Buddhists and said “Let’s pass the International Religious Freedom Act. We invited Gloria Steinem to be on a platform with conservative Bill Bennett to send a message that together we should pass proposed legislation entitled The Trafficking Victims Protection Act. And, we did. The legislation was passed. We went to the gay community to say “Let’s together work to pass an AIDS Bill.” And, we did. We went to the ACLU to together work on the crisis of prison rape, and together we passed legislation. It was entitled The Prison Rape Elimination Act. We then went to the politically inactive American Korean community to pass legislation entitled The North Korean Human Rights Act. Nobody in Washington believed could be done in a year, but it was done. Well, if that’s what we have been able to achieve with collaboration so far, and there are surely other examples that you have from your experience, well, if that’s what can be done, then why can’t we accomplish action on global poverty?

Sixty percent in a survey -- forget the stereotype of evangelicals -- sixty percent of evangelicals said dealing with the problems of the poor and of the needy are our top priority. It was the highest priority; higher than anything else. So with that I am here to say we are here, that I am here, to send a message about what our spirit is and what we are committed to. And I thank you for being a part of this effort today. If I can bring any input from the evangelical world, I am glad to do it.

Thank you very much. It’s a great privilege to be with you today.