The Little Institute Facing Goliath

The United Methodist Church, which has lost 1.4 million members since 1968, would normally welcome most converts. But its leaders must rue the day in 1979 when David Jessup, who had become a religious dropout in college, decided to join the Marvin Memorial Church of Silver Spring, Md. Jessup, 42, who works with the AFL-CIO'S Committee on Political Education, began to have questions about organizations that received Methodist funds. The end result of his curiosity is the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which, though small, can justly claim credit for the present furor over Protestant politics.

The I.R.D.'s success is a classic of neoconservative activism: adroitly gathering synergistic boosts from like-minded groups and individuals, the institute has prepared a number of hard-hitting research reports. Rather than submitting them to obscure academic journals, it has sought the interest of media outlets like Reader's Digest and CBS's 60 Minutes to give its conclusions mass exposure.

For a group accused of right-wing bias and "McCarthyism," the I.R.D. has some leaders with unexpectedly left-wing backgrounds. Founder Jessup joined the early Berkeley free-speech movement, and later the Peace Corps as well as black-voter-registration and labor-organizing campaigns. But even in his radical student days he was strongly antiCommunist. In 1980 he and his wife, in what became known as the Jessup Report, totaled up $442,000 in Methodist moneys aiding groups he judged to be Marxist or totalitarian, and sent the list to the denomination's financial overseers.

Through his campaign Jessup met folksy Texas Evangelist Ed Robb, 56, a conservative Democrat and a leader in Good News, an evangelical caucus that had long criticized Methodist agencies for overplaying social issues. Good News promoted Jessup's charges in its publications. A few months later, Jessup and Robb set up the I.R.D. in Washington, D.C., to monitor political activity by various denominations. They enlisted a credibility-building board of advisers whose 28 members range from socialist to right-wing on domestic issues but are pro-U.S. on foreign policy.

The current full-time I.R.D. staff consists of only five professional researchers and administrators and five clerical workers. Following Jessup's lead (though he is now less active), they sift through mind-numbing denominational documents, ferreting out damaging quotations, grants and linkages, especially in the foreign policy field. The I.R.D. now issues a monthly bulletin, topical pamphlets and special publications like last week's 100-page response to critics in the Protestant Establishment, and it answers a growing flood of press and lay inquiries (2,500 since the CBS show). The key researcher is Presbyterian Kerry Ptacek, a onetime member of the Students for a Democratic Society. He says now that "a crisis in my own spiritual life had led me to leftist totalitarian politics." His present work is a reaction against that earlier commitment.

Robb is the institute's board chairman, but the group has no director as such. The top day-to-day tactician is a part-time consultant named Penn Kemble, 42, who, like Jessup, is a member of Social Democrats U.S.A., which is socialist but vehemently antiCommunist. He brought organizational and political talent to the I.R.D. and helped establish the organization's original financial structure. As executive director of a foundation formed by anti-McGovern Democrats after the 1972 election, Kemble took the newborn I.R.D. under his foundation's wing, providing entirely legal tax-exempt sponsorship until the institute became independent last fall. The two organizations still have adjacent offices. With a mere 1,000 dues-paying members, most of the $475,500 in contributions to date has come from the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts ($300,000) and the Smith Richardson Foundation ($146,000), both practiced supporters of influential neoconservative groups. The I.R.D. furiously denies rumors disseminated by a top ecumenical leader that South Africa is also providing funds. In the battle for the hearts and minds of mainstream Protestantism, such a connection would be the kiss of death. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.