[I would like to welcome Will Spotts back to the blogosphere. Will's insights into the doings of the Presbyterian Church (USA), its Middle East and divestment activities, have always been thoughtful and valuable, and I will be crossposting his material as it appears. First, an excerpt from his re-introduction, and following, his latest essay. -MS]

About: First Do No Harm

I was a loyal (if mildly oblivious) member of a PC(USA) church for fifteen years. I was a ruling elder in my local church. I taught Sunday School classes, played for services, occasionally preached. I have had relationships with Presbyterian churches for a large chunk of my life. Traditional Presbyterian doctrines, for the most part, held a strong appeal for me - that has increased over the years. I came to discover that they matched my own beliefs more closely than did the doctrines embraced by most other traditions. To me, they had (and have) the ring of truth.

A couple of years ago I left that church. The reasons for this decision were complicated, but the shortest explanation was that the national denominational organization seemed bent on abandoning both those traditional Reformed doctrines I found so compelling, and the historic system of church governance known as Presbyterianism. The truth be told, these were not recent developments - I had just never looked closely enough to realize this fact.

For me - for my mental and spiritual well-being, and for ethical reasons - to leave the PC(USA) was a right decision. And I am better off for having done so. At the time I left, once I gave my reasons, I promised myself I would not comment on internal PC(USA) matters again. With one exception: If there came a time when the PC(USA) was taking actions that threatened to actively cause harm in the world outside the PC(USA), I would be obliged to speak out.

That time has come...[The rest.]

[The following, by Will Spotts, is crossposted from The PC(USA) on Israel and Palestine.]

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is rapidly approaching General Assembly season. As a former member of the denomination, I always find this time period prompts me to a kind of nostalgia and a renewed interest in Presbyterian affairs. It's kind of like hearing news about someone you used to know. Sadly, this year's festivities contain an unusually large number of alarming and sinister elements. Among other things, this General Assembly intends to address the Israel-Palestine Conflict, the relationship between Christians and Jews, and the relationship between Christians and Muslims. It will consider divestment proposals; the application of the label apartheid to Israel; a report on human rights that seems to find violations of religious freedom singly in the State of Israel; an incomplete, inaccurate, and alarmingly biased report on the Middle East; and a proposal to commend "A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith and Hope from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering" (the Kairos document) as a tool for advocacy. I have a sinking feeling, like the witch in Macbeth: "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."

I recognize that for better or worse, people don't pay a whole lot of attention to the pronouncements of national denominations any more. They tend to go in one ear and out the other. The members of a particular congregation often don't even know the stands their national organizations are taking. In many cases (and the PC(USA)'s own statistics compiled by Research Services bear this out), such stands do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of most members. But as much as one might be tempted to pass them off as irrelevant, the political stands of a denomination should not be ignored - even by those outside of the denomination - because they do have a couple very unwholesome effects.

First, public stands of institutions of this kind are used to lend an air of legitimacy to specific political agendas. To have the support of a church (or a college or university, or a municipality, or a union) is to have its imprimatur. Whatever public credibility that denomination or organization had is now given to the particular cause it chooses to support. This applies whether or not the members of the organization actually support that cause. In the case of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, when a church endorses biased materials, fosters a one-sided, anti-Israel narrative, or even trespasses into more blatant anti-Judaism and antisemitism, those things - biased materials, anti-Israel activism, anti-Judaism and antisemitism - gain whatever credibility that church has. These are rendered normal, acceptable in polite conversation, apparently virtuous. This doesn't even function on a wholly conscious level; if a person harbors warm, fuzzy feelings toward the sponsoring organization, he will be far more receptive to the things that organization endorses, no matter how loathsome he might otherwise accurately find them.

Second, the statements and actions of agencies, committees, organizations, and officials of the national denominations eventually will penetrate to local congregations. It will not happen right away; in the case of the PC(USA), anti-Israel activism has been a recurring theme since the late 1980s. But it will show up in local churches, whether in Sunday School materials, worship resources, hymns, prayers. And the members of those churches will accept the biases built into these materials they have received from a trusted source. They will absorb them; and they will do so uncritically, and they will go away feeling well-informed.

I recently attended an event held at a local PC(USA) church. I am familiar with this church. I know many people who attend - some of them quite well. I know them to be thoughtful, basically decent people. They are modestly more intellectually inclined and bookish than is probably the norm for Presbyterians. They participate in a variety of PC(USA) initiatives: they are active in Presbyterian Women; they buy and sell "fair trade coffee"; they go on PC(USA) sponsored mission trips; they support local Presbyterian homeless shelters; they employ PC(USA) curricula in their Sunday School classes.

We met in the church's library, a room lined on two sides with bookshelves. It doubles as a conference and class room. For a while the quirky selection of books occupied my attention: it ranged from historic theology to local history to academic works to the "popular Christian books" of recent years. It was then that I noticed maps displayed on the remaining wall. I could not see them clearly from where I sat, yet their shapes were familiar to me - as they would be to anyone raised in a church. Upon closer examination, I discovered one to be a map of ancient Israel - the Davidic Kingdom I think. Another was a juxtaposition of two maps on one paper; they were obviously intended for comparison. On one side a person could see the borders of the nation of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The other side purported to be a map of Mandate Palestine from 1947. The large majority of the area was yellow; interspersed within the yellow were small, random blobs of dark orange. I consulted the legend. Yellow was labeled: Palestinian lands and publicly owned lands. Dark orange was labeled: Jewish owned lands.

My heart sank. I have, of course, seen this or similar visual displays all too frequently. This time it made me profoundly sad. I was in a local church - a church populated by otherwise decent souls - people who intend to do good. This was not something on the internet. It was not something in Louisville (the PC(USA)'s denominational headquarters). It was not an activist political group. It was my own backyard. These maps were, as you might guess, props from a class or presentation on the subject of Israel and the Palestinian territories. Attendees actually believed they were somehow better informed for having undergone the process. Yet the self-evident problem with this visual map display was completely and utterly lost on them.

This map presentation creates a manifestly false impression. It is an attempt to graphically illustrate injustice. The only problem is that the illustration is itself unjust. And its creators know that - even if ordinary people in church groups or classes don't notice that they have been manipulated. A more honest map would have distinguished a third group: Palestinian owned lands. As is, without overtly lying, by netting together publicly owned lands and privately held Palestinian lands as if they were one and the same, the map is intentionally misleading. There are, naturally, reasons for this deception - many of which stem from complexities of land ownership in the Ottoman period and from certain British practices. An honest person could make the argument that the category of publicly owned lands is a faulty one. However, an honest person would also have to acknowledge the Mandate restrictions on Jewish land purchases, the limits on Jewish immigration (a policy not applied to non-Jewish immigration), and the creation of the state of Jordan. Given the difficulty in graphically and fairly illustrating this complexity, an honest person would never have produced this map comparison.

The map itself is deceptive, but it is commonplace. Much more sinister, however, is the fact that this is being displayed in an ordinary church. I'm honestly not sure what unknown factor prompted ordinary people in a run-of-the-mill church to use materials like the map illustration I described; I'm not sure what would account for a blind spot of that type. But I suspect it is ultimately a predictable result of the activism of the PC(USA).