(AgapePress) - Members of the United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race are vowing to continue their fight to stop the use of Indian team names and mascots.

Native American commission members are joining with four other United Methodist ethnic minority caucuses to oppose team names like the Washington Redskins and Atlanta Braves. At a recent meeting, several commission members said the supposed "racist, demeaning portrayal" of Native Americans should be cause for action by the entire United Methodist Church. [See Related Article]

Mark Tooley is director of United Methodist Action, an agency of the Institute for Religion and Democracy. He says the "anti-mascot" campaign has been an ongoing cause for several national Methodist Church agencies.

Mark Tooley

"As is usually the case on these types of issues, the vast majority of church member have no idea about this campaign [and] have no idea that we even have a church agency called 'Commission on Religion and Race'," Tooley says. "I'm sure it's not a very effective boycott campaign when their own professed constituency, the United Methodists, are not even aware of the campaign."

Tooley says instead of pushing the church to engage in genuine evangelism or apply traditional Christianity to social issues, the Commission on Religion and Race has become a liberal political agency.

"This particular agency is supposed to be an advocate for racial healing and full inclusion of racial minorities within leadership positions of the [Methodist] Church," he says. "But as is often the case, I think this commission falls into the trap of spouting many of the political themes of 'professional' minority groups that specialize in proclaiming their agreed status and advocating quotas and other political causes that tend to be on the left side of the political spectrum."

According to the United Methodist News Service, last year the commission gave a $10,000 grant to a group seeking to eliminate Chief Illiniwek as a symbol of the sports program at the University of Illinois.

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