The Iran-contra hearings have provided a summer-long opportunity for Reagan administration spokespersons to make their case for the contras on national television. During the hundreds of hours of testimony and speeches, I heard only one person make reference to the significant and constant opposition of U.S. church people to the contra war.
In his testimony before the joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra arms scandal, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams declared that he simply could not understand why churches and church groups in the United States would oppose aid to the contras. I would like to help Mr. Abrams and the administration he represents to understand.
U.S. churches and church-based groups have sent more people to Nicaragua and sent them for longer periods of time than have the State Department, the U.S. Congress, and very likely the entire U.S. government. What we have seen and heard convinces us that U.S. policy toward Nicaragua is wrong and horribly destructive.
The Reagan administration policy to overthrow the government of Nicaragua is not just mistaken, but is, in our view, morally corrupt and politically indefensible.That is our firm conviction. Church groups challenge almost every assertion made about Nicaragua by this administration. What the administration says are facts that support its policy we say are lies that are used to justify unspeakable violence.
Truth-telling is central to our biblical tradition, and this war has been built on a scaffold of deception. We have seen the work of Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters" and know them to be terrorists instead. His "Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance" is in reality a U.S.-created and -sponsored mercenary army carrying out a proxy war for the Reagan administration.
Nicaragua is not a "totalitarian dungeon," as President Reagan asserts, any more than the U.S.-backed governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are "Central American democracies." Truth has given way to the obsessive anti-communism of this administration, which can readily find an East-West confrontation and Soviet plot to cover over any and all of our own national sins.
The source of the problem in Central America is not a Soviet-Cuban effort to control the whole region from Panama to Mexico, as Mr. Abrams asserts. The root cause of the violence in Central America is the endemic poverty and repression that the majority of the region's people have endured for decades at the hands of economic oligarchies and military elites supported by the U.S. government. As U.S. church people committed to political democracy and religious freedom, we believe that the Nicaraguan revolution poses no threat to our national security or to the real interests of the American people, but only to continued U.S. control of the region of Central America.
Human rights are very important to the religious community because they are God-given rights. We are opposed to U.S. policy in Nicaragua precisely because it does not defend human rights as claimed but rather makes them even harder to secure. U.S. policy toward Nicaragua does not advance the cause of democracy but rather makes democracy more difficult by imposing a constant state of war.
The Reagan administration's profession of concern about human rights rings hollow in the face of its unswerving support of the contras, who are unquestionably the most flagrant violators of human rights in Nicaragua. We cannot believe the righteous professions of the U.S. government to be seeking freedom for Central America in its policy when this administration has, in each country of the region, acted to remain in political control.
Biblical faith calls us to a special concern for the poor in any situation, and it is the poor who have been, as always, the principal casualties in this war. Continued war will only continue their suffering. It is the poor who long for peace most of all, while this administration has put ideology ahead of both peace and compassion.
U.S. churches have consistently advocated political negotiations, along the lines suggested by the Contadora nations of Latin America, to resolve the legitimate fears and concerns of all sides. But the Reagan administration has consistently obstructed peaceful solutions in favor of military ones.
CLEARLY, MANY CHURCH PEOPLE disagree with the Reagan administration about Nicaragua, on both moral and political grounds. The beauty of a democracy is that we have a perfect right to do so. We have the right to dissent absolutely and unequivocally with U.S. government policy. And we do.
We should be able to exercise that right to dissent without being maligned as unpatriotic, disloyal, communist sympathizers or worse. We are none of these. We are church people and U.S. citizens--pastors and lay people, priests and nuns, bishops and heads of denominations--who love the gospel and our country and believe our government's policy in Central America is an offense to the best values of both.
Because this is a democracy, Mr. Abrams doesn't need to agree with us, either. But he and other government officials must abide by the rules of democracy. The hearings indicate that many of them have not.
The defense that these government officials, their co-workers outside the government, and their congressional sympathizers now seem to be mounting is that their purpose was justified but their tactics were mistaken--a case of flawed means for noble ends. Even most of the administration's opponents on the congressional panel have accommodated to such a view, focusing more on the execution of U.S. policy in Nicaragua than on the policy itself.
The new argument for continued contra funding can be seen emerging from the hearings. The argument goes that there are bad consequences when a good foreign policy is conducted secretly and outside of official channels; therefore, let that policy be conducted out in the open, with benefit of law and bi-partisan congressional support, to build a new consensus for U.S. policy in Nicaragua. The hearings have been used by some as a platform for seeking to develop that public consensus.
The churches and church groups so often attacked by the Reagan administration will never be drawn into such a consensus, and, in our view, neither will the majority of the American people who do not support aid to the contras. The church constituency has been the bulwark of the opposition to U.S. policy in Central America and will continue to be so.
We do not see the issue as a case of wrong means employed for right ends. Rather, we believe the U.S. war against Nicaragua has been immoral behavior and bad political policy from the start and has inevitably corrupted the means and the people used to carry it out. In biblical language, such a policy cannot be redeemed. It can simply be repented of and turned away from. That is what many of us in the churches will continue to say and do until the nation regains its senses and its moral sensibility.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.
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