By Sam Francis
05/13/2004
Big Business and its bottomless appetite for cheap labor are by no means the only pillars of the Open Borders Lobby that has helped flood the country with Third World immigrants.
There are also the churches, themselves ever hungry for new members as their own religious liberalism drives away their old members. This week the Washington Post carried a story on how Protestant churches in the Washington area are using immigration to keep their collection plates full. [Prayers in Pr. George’s Take On a New Dialect, Washington Post, May 8, 2004]
The Protestant churches are the Open Borders Lobby at prayer — though a good many churches seem to spend more time preaching politics than praying.
The Post story explains how white American worshippers have simply taken a powder — "The Presbyterian Church (USA), with a membership of about 2.5 million, says it has been losing about 30,000 members a year," while "A national survey conducted every 10 years by the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville shows that membership of mainline Protestant denominations is dwindling."
They're not dwindling because so many Americans have suddenly become atheists. The Post readily acknowledges the decline of mainline church membership is largely due to the conservatism of those leaving and the liberalism of the church establishments:
"While older members are dying off, younger parishioners have been drawn to more conservative evangelical churches or have quit attending altogether."
So what are thoroughly modern church leaders going to do?
It doesn’t seem to occur to them to alter their own liberalism. What they have actually done is recruit immigrants — a tactic that not only helps swell attendance and membership but also is compatible with the ideological catacomb in which they have entombed themselves.
"To stem the losses," the Post reports, "Protestant churches, including the Presbyterians, have launched outreach campaigns directed at immigrants. National Presbyterian leaders want to increase minority membership to 10 percent by 2005 and 20 percent by 2020. The Presbyterian Church is now about 93 percent white, 3 percent black, 2.6 percent Asian and 1.2 percent Hispanic."
The Post recounts the sad story of one local church, Hyattsville Presbyterian in suburban Maryland, that has flourished for more than 300 years — until next month, when, due to the defection of the whites who have been its mainstay, it will turn its building and the whole caboodle over to the Umoja International Community Church, "a large, thriving African Presbyterian congregation that conducts its main weekly service in Swahili."
Nevertheless, in the long run, immigration won’t help the churches, let alone the country.
It may save the churches as organizations and thereby put more meat on the platters of those who run them, but it won’t bring the white Christians back.
It’s all very well to talk about how God doesn’t care about the color of your skin or what language you speak, but the human beings who worship Him do care — and have good reason to.
Race and culture affect no human institution more deeply than how people practice their religion.
Language, music, ritual and even theology vary widely according to race and culture.
But like many other truths about the human (and super-human) condition, that lesson seems to be lost on the liberal leadership of the churches, who are eager not only to support immigration as a national policy but also want to make their own churches as multicultural as possible.
Several weeks ago, the Post ran another story reporting how "faith leaders are prodding churches to better reflect and appeal to the country’s changing demographics — and they are doing it from the top, placing minority pastors in white congregations."[Minority Pastors Preach Diversity, April 4, 2004]
(Notice they don’t seem to be putting white ministers into non-white congregations, probably because the non-whites would walk out that day.)
Whites who are comfortable worshipping in Swahili may like the new multicultural church into which their shepherds are herding them just fine, but my bet is that most won’t.
Yet whether they do or not, how the churches are using immigration is of interest.
The churches use immigration in the same way that other failed institutions in American society are.
Labor unions have lost gobs of members in the last 30 years or so, and today they're booming the virtues of mass immigration so they can restore their muscle.
Republicans and Democrats both compete for immigrants' votes as American voters yawn and stay home.
One main reason that national elites not only tolerate but actually promote mass immigration is that they have totally failed to retain the loyalties of their own people.
Immigrants help them stay leaders because they provide new followers.
Americans who are not followers saw through the fakery of the liberal churches long ago.
I'll also bet they will see through their newest gamble to use immigration to keep themselves and their crumbling institutions intact.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
[Sam Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred’s review.]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.