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.

Read More: http://www.theird.org/page.aspx?pid=1841

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