"The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) has adopted a new pro-liberalized immigration stance that is creating ripples among its conservative membership," writes Mark Tooley at American Spectator.

"Although NAE had touted its board's supposedly unanimous backing, at least one prominent NAE member, the Salvation Army, has apparently already disavowed it."

What's going on? The AmSpec kicker puts it like this: "The National Association of Evangelicals moves in the direction of the National Council of Churches."

Members of the Presbyterian Church in America may want to take note:

Another prominent NAE member, the 340,00 member Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), issued a statement, more defensively, but also asserting that NAE does not speak for member churches. "The NAE Immigration Resolution of 2009 has not become the PCA position on immigration," insisted PCA Stated Clerk Roy Taylor, who also chairs the NAE's board. But he still affirmed his own support for it: "The NAE Immigration Resolution of 2009, in my view, is a biblically-based, theologically reflective, carefully balanced, concise document."

In his conclusion, Tooley notes that the National Council of Churches (NCC) "became mostly irrelevant when its Mainline Protestant voices stopped speaking for its churches and started speaking 'prophetically' to them. Similarly, the NCC moved beyond issues of Christian consensus to adopt more morally ambiguous, and ostensibly more fashionable, political causes du jour. This sad history should be familiar to evangelicals. But the NAE seems determined to repeat what has already been tried and failed."