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9/11 and the Sport of God
By Bill Moyers
Commondreams.org
Friday 09 September 2005
This article is adapted from Bill Moyer's
address this week at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where
Judith and Bill Moyers received the seminary's highest award, the
Union Medal, for their contributions to faith and reason in America.
At the Central Baptist Church in
Marshall, Texas, where I was baptized in the faith, we believed in a
free church in a free state. I still do.
My spiritual forbears did not take kindly
to living under theocrats who embraced religious liberty for
themselves but denied it to others. "Forced worship stinks in
God's nostrils," thundered the dissenter Roger Williams as he
was banished from Massachusetts for denying Puritan authority over
his conscience. Baptists there were a "pitiful negligible
minority" but they were agitators for freedom and therefore
denounced as "incendiaries of the commonwealth" for
holding to their belief in that great democracy of faith - the
priesthood of all believers. For refusing to pay tribute to the
state religion they were fined, flogged, and exiled. In 1651 the
Baptist Obadiah Holmes was given 30 stripes with a three-corded whip
after he violated the law and took forbidden communion with another
Baptist in Lynn, Massachusetts. His friends offered to pay his fine
for his release but he refused. They offered him strong drink to
anesthetize the pain of the flogging. Again he refused. It is the
love of liberty, he said, "that must free the soul."
Such revolutionary ideas made the new
nation with its Constitution and Bill of Rights "a haven for
the cause of conscience." No longer could magistrates order
citizens to support churches they did not attend and recite creeds
that they did not believe. No longer would "the loathsome
combination of church and state" - as Thomas Jefferson
described it - be the settled order. Unlike the Old World that had
been wracked with religious wars and persecution, the government of
America would take no sides in the religious free-for-all that
liberty would make possible and politics would make inevitable. The
First Amendment neither inculcates religion nor inoculates against
it. Americans could be loyal to the Constitution without being
hostile to God, or they could pay no heed to God without fear of
being mugged by an official God Squad. It has been a remarkable
arrangement that guaranteed "soul freedom."
It is at risk now, and the fourth
observance of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 is an appropriate time
to think about it.
Four years ago this week, the poet's
prophetic metaphor became real again and "the great dark birds
of history" plunged into our lives.
They came in the name of God. They came
bent on murder and martyrdom. It was as if they rode to earth on the
fierce breath of Allah himself, for the sacred scriptures that had
nurtured these murderous young men are steeped in images of a
violent and vengeful God who wills life for the faithful and
horrific torment for unbelievers.
Yes, the Koran speaks of mercy and
compassion and calls for ethical living. But such passages are no
match for the ferocity of instruction found there for waging war for
God's sake. The scholar Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer carefully traces this
trail of holy violence in his important book, Is Religion Killing
Us? [Trinity Press International. 2003]. He highlights many of the
verses in the Koran that the Islamic terrorists could have had in
their hearts and on their lips four years ago as they moved toward
their gruesome rendezvous. As I read some of them, close your eyes
and recall the scenes of that bright September morning which began
in the bright sun under a blue sky:
"Those who believe Fight in the
cause of Allah, and Those who reject Faith Fight in the cause of
Evil."(4:76)
"So We sent against them A furious
Wind through days of disaster, that We might Give them a taste of a
Penalty of humiliation In this Life; but The Penalty of the
Hereafter will be More Humiliating still: And they Will find No
help." (41:16)
"Then watch thou For the Day That
the sky will Bring forth a kind Of smoke (or mist) Plainly visible,
Enveloping the people: This will be a Penalty Grievous."
(44:10-11)
"Did the people of the towns Feel
Secure against the coming Of Our Wrath by night While they were
asleep? Or else did they feel Secure against its coming in Broad
daylight while they Played About (carefree)? Did they then feel
secure Against the Plan of Allah? - But no one can feel Secure from
the Plan of Allah, except those (Doomed) to ruin." (7:97-99)
So the holy warriors came - an airborne
death cult, their sights on God's enemies: regular folks, starting
the day's routine. One minute they're pulling off their jackets,
shaking Sweet n' Low into their coffee, adjusting the height of
their chair or a picture of a child or sweetheart or spouse in a
frame on their desk, booting up their computer - and in the next,
they are engulfed by a horrendous cataclysm. God's will. Poof!
But it is never only the number of dead
by which terrorists measure their work. It is also the number of the
living - the survivors - taken hostage to fear. Their mission was to
invade our psyche; get inside our heads - deprive us of trust,
faith, and peace of mind: keep us from ever again believing in a
safe, just, and peaceful world, and from working to bring that world
to pass. The writer Terry Tempest Williams has said "the human
heart is the first home of democracy." Fill that heart with
fear and people will give up the risks of democracy for the
assurances of security; fill that heart with fear and you can shake
the house to its foundations.
In the days leading up to 9/11 our
daughter and husband adopted their first baby. On the morning of
September 11th our son-in-law passed through the shadow of the World
Trade Center toward his office a few blocks up the street. He
arrived as the horrors erupted. He saw the flames, the falling
bodies, the devastation. His building was evacuated and for long
awful moments he couldn't reach his wife, our daughter, to say he
was okay. Even after they connected it wasn't until the next morning
that he was able to make it home. Throughout that fearful night our
daughter was alone with their new baby. Later she told us that for
weeks thereafter she would lie awake at night, wondering where and
when it might happen again, going to the computer at three in the
morning to check out what she could about bioterrorism, germ
warfare, anthrax and the vulnerability of children. The terrorists
had violated a mother's deepest space.
Who was not vulnerable? That morning
Judith and I made it to our office at Channel Thirteen on West 33rd
Street just after the second plane struck. Our building was
evacuated although the two of us remained with other colleagues to
do what we could to keep the station on the air. The next day it was
evacuated again because of a bomb scare at the Empire State Building
nearby. We had just ended a live broadcast for PBS when security
officers swept through and ordered everyone out. This time we left.
As we were making our way down the stairs I took Judith's arm and
was struck by the thought: Is this the last time I'll touch her?
Could what we had begun together a half century ago end here on this
dim, bare staircase? I forced the thought from my mind, willed it
away, but in the early hours of morning, as I sat at the window of
our apartment looking out at the sky, the sinister intruder crept
back.
Terrorists plant time bombs in our heads,
hoping to turn each and every imagination into a private hell
governed by our fear of them.
They win only if we let them, only if we
become like them: vengeful, imperious, intolerant, paranoid. Having
lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause
to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too;
if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had
not struck us; allow our leaders to use the fear of terrorism to
make us afraid of the truth; cease to think and reason together,
allowing others to tell what's in God's mind. Yes, we are vulnerable
to terrorists, but only a shaken faith in ourselves can do us in.
So over the past four years I have kept
reminding myself of not only the horror but the humanity that was
revealed that day four years ago, when through the smoke and fire we
glimpsed the heroism, compassion, and sacrifice of people who did
the best of things in the worst of times. I keep telling myself that
this beauty in us is real, that it makes life worthwhile and
democracy work and that no terrorist can take it from us.
But I am not so sure. As a Christian
realist I honor my inner skeptic. And as a journalist I always know
the other side of the story. The historian Edward Gibbon once wrote
of historians what could be said of journalists. He wrote: "The
theologians may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as
she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more
melancholy duty is imposed on the historian [read: journalist] He
must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which
she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and
degenerate race of beings."
The other side of the story:
Muslims have no monopoly on holy violence. As Jack Nelson-Pallmayer
points out, God's violence in the sacred texts of both faiths
reflect a deep and troubling pathology "so pervasive,
vindictive, and destructive" that it contradicts and subverts
the collective weight of other passages that exhort ethical
behavior or testify to a loving God.
For days now we have watched those
heart-breaking scenes on the Gulf Coast: the steaming, stinking,
sweltering wreckage of cities and suburbs; the fleeing refugees; the
floating corpses, hungry babies, and old people huddled together in
death, the dogs gnawing at their feet; stranded children standing in
water reeking of feces and garbage; families scattered; a mother
holding her small child and an empty water jug, pleading for someone
to fill it; a wife, pushing the body of her dead husband on a wooden
plank down a flooded street; desperate people struggling desperately
to survive.
Now transport those current scenes from
our newspapers and television back to the first Book of the Bible -
the Book of Genesis. They bring to life what we rarely imagine so
graphically when we read of the great flood that devastated the
known world. If you read the Bible as literally true, as
fundamentalists do, this flood was ordered by God. "And God
said to Noah, 'I have determined to make an end of all flesh...
behold, I will destroy them with the earth." (6:5-13). "I
will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in
which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on
the earth shall die." (6:17-19) Noah and his family are the
only humans spared - they were, after all, God's chosen. But for
everyone else: "... the waters prevailed so mightily... that
all the high mountains....were covered....And all flesh died that
moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts...and every man;
everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life,
died...." (7:17-23).
The flood is merely Act One. Read on:
This God first "hardens the heart of Pharaoh" to make sure
the Egyptian ruler will not be moved by the plea of Moses to let his
people go. Then because Pharaoh's heart is hardened, God turns the
Nile into blood so people cannot drink its water and will suffer
from thirst. Not satisfied with the results, God sends swarms of
locusts and flies to torture them; rains hail and fire and thunder
on them destroys the trees and plants of the field until nothing
green remains; orders every first-born child to be slaughtered, from
the first-born of Pharaoh right on down to "the first-born of
the maidservant behind the mill." An equal-murderous God, you
might say. The massacre continues until "there is not a house
where one was not dead." While the Egyptian families mourn
their dead, God orders Moses to loot from their houses all their
gold and silver and clothing. Finally, God's thirst for blood is
satisfied, God pauses to rest - and boasts: "I have made sport
of the Egyptians."
Violence: the sport of God. God, the
progenitor of shock and awe.
And that's just Act II. As the story
unfolds women and children are hacked to death on God's order;
unborn infants are ripped from their mother's wombs; cities are
leveled - their women killed if they have had sex, the virgins taken
at God's command for the pleasure of his holy warriors. When his
holy warriors spare the lives of 50,000 captives God is furious and
sends Moses back to rebuke them and tell them to finish the job. One
tribe after another falls to God-ordered genocide: the Hittites, the
Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the
Jebusites - names so ancient they have disappeared into the mists as
fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, grandparents and
grandchildren, infants in arms, shepherds, threshers, carpenters,
merchants, housewives - living human beings, flesh and blood:
"And when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you
defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no
covenant with them, and show no mercy to them...(and) your eyes
shall not pity them."
So it is written - in the Holy Bible.
Yes, I know: the early church fathers,
trying to cover up the blood-soaked trail of God's sport, decreed
that anything that disagrees with Christian dogma about the
perfection of God is to be interpreted spiritually. Yes, I know:
Edward Gibbon himself acknowledged that the literal Biblical sense
of God "is repugnant to every principle of faith as well as
reason" and that we must therefore read the scriptures through
a veil of allegory. Yes, I know: we can go through the Bible and
construct a God more pleasing to the better angels of our nature (as
I have done.) Yes, I know: Christians claim the Old Testament God of
wrath was supplanted by the Gospel's God of love [See The God of
Evil , Allan Hawkins, Exlibris.]
I know these things; all of us know these
things. But we also know that the "violence-of-God"
tradition remains embedded deep in the DNA of monotheistic faith. We
also know that fundamentalists the world over and at home consider
the "sacred texts" to be literally God's word on all
matters. Inside that logic you cannot read part of the Bible
allegorically and the rest of it literally; if you believe in the
virgin birth of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection, and the
depiction of the Great Judgment at the end times you must also
believe that God is sadistic, brutal, vengeful, callow, cruel and
savage - that God slaughters.
Millions believe it.
Let's go back to 9/11 four years ago. The
ruins were still smoldering when the reverends Pat Robertson and
Jerry Falwell went on television to proclaim that the terrorist
attacks were God's punishment of a corrupted America. They said the
government had adopted the agenda "of the pagans, and the
abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians"
not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way (The God of
the Bible apparently holds liberals in the same low esteem as
Hittites and Gergushites and Jebusites and all the other pagans of
holy writ.) Just as God had sent the Great Flood to wipe out a
corrupted world, now - disgusted with a decadent America - "God
almighty is lifting his protection from us." Critics said such
comments were deranged. But millions of Christian fundamentalists
and conservatives didn't think so. They thought Robertson and
Falwell were being perfectly consistent with the logic of the Bible
as they read it: God withdraws favor from sinful nations - the
terrorists were meant to be God's wake-up call: better get right
with God. Not many people at the time seemed to notice that Osama
bin Laden had also been reading his sacred book closely and
literally, and had called on Muslims to resist what he described as
a "fierce Judeo-Christian campaign" against Islam, praying
to Allah for guidance "to exalt the people who obey Him and
humiliate those who disobey Him."
Suddenly we were immersed in the
pathology of a "holy war" as defined by fundamentalists on
both sides. You could see this pathology play out in General William
Boykin. A professional soldier, General Boykin had taken up with a
small group called the Faith Force Multiplier whose members apply
military principles to evangelism with a manifesto summoning
warriors "to the spiritual warfare for souls." After
Boykin had led Americans in a battle against a Somalian warlord he
announced: "I know my God was bigger than his. I knew that my
God was a real God and his God was an idol." Now Boykin was
going about evangelical revivals preaching that America was in a
holy war as "a Christian nation" battling Satan and that
America's Muslim adversaries will be defeated "only if we come
against them in the name of Jesus." For such an hour, America
surely needed a godly leader. So General Boykin explained how it was
that the candidate who had lost the election in 2000 nonetheless
wound up in the White House. President Bush, he said, "was not
elected by a majority of the voters - he was appointed by God."
Not surprising, instead of being reprimanded for evangelizing while
in uniform, General Boykin is now the Deputy Undersecretary of
Defense for Intelligence. (Just as it isn't surprising that despite
his public call for the assassination of a foreign head of state,
Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing was one of the first groups to
receive taxpayer funds from the President's Faith-Based Initiative
for "relief work" on the Gulf Coast.)
We can't wiggle out of this, people.
Alvin Hawkins states it frankly: "This is a problem we can't
walk away from." We're talking about a powerful religious
constituency that claims the right to tell us what's on God's mind
and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation
of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a
whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their
faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.
True, people of faith have always tried
to bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American laws
and morals - this very seminary is part of that tradition; it's the
American way, encouraged and protected by the First Amendment. But
what is unique today is that the radical religious right has
succeeded in taking over one of America's great political parties -
the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is - and
they are driving American politics, using God as a a battering ram
on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health
care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.
What's also unique is the intensity,
organization, and anger they have brought to the public square.
Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs:
Their viral intolerance - their loathing of other people's beliefs,
of America's secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of
the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective
knowledge - has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state
power. They use the language of faith to demonize political
opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists,
ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor. These are the foot
soldiers in a political holy war financed by wealthy economic
interests and guided by savvy partisan operatives who know that
couching political ambition in religious rhetoric can ignite the
passion of followers as ferociously as when Constantine painted the
Sign of Christ (the "Christograph") on the shields of his
soldiers and on the banners of his legions and routed his rivals in
Rome. Never mind that the Emperor himself was never baptized into
the faith; it served him well enough to make the God worshipped by
Christians his most important ally and turn the Sign of Christ into
the one imperial symbol most widely recognized and feared from east
to west.
Let's take a brief detour to Ohio and
I'll show you what I am talking about. In recent weeks a movement
called the Ohio Restoration Project has been launched to identify
and train thousands of "Patriot Pastors" to get out the
conservative religious vote next year. According to press reports,
the leader of the movement - the senior pastor of a large church in
suburban Columbus - casts the 2006 elections as an apocalyptic clash
between "the forces of righteousness and the hordes of
hell." The fear and loathing in his message is palpable: He
denounces public schools that won't teach creationism, require
teachers to read the Bible in class, or allow children to pray. He
rails against the "secular jihadists" who have
"hijacked" America and prevent school kids from learning
that Hitler was "an avid evolutionist." He links abortion
to children who murder their parents. He blasts the "pagan
left" for trying to redefine marriage. He declares that
"homosexual rights" will bring "a flood of demonic
oppression." On his church website you read that
"Reclaiming the teaching of our Christian heritage among
America's youth is paramount to a sense of national destiny that God
has invested into this nation."
One of the prominent allies of the Ohio
Restoration Project is a popular televangelist in Columbus who heads
a $40 million-a-year ministry that is accessible worldwide via 1,400
TV stations and cable affiliates. Although he describes himself as
neither Republican nor Democrat but a "Christocrat" - a
gladiator for God marching against "the very hordes of hell in
our society" - he nonetheless has been spotted with so many
Republican politicians in Washington and elsewhere that he has been
publicly described as a"spiritual advisor" to the party.
The journalist Marley Greiner has been following his ministry for
the organization, FreePress. She writes that because he considers
the separation of church and state to be "a lie perpetrated on
Americans - especially believers in Jesus Christ" - he
identifies himself as a "wall builder" and "wall
buster." As a wall builder he will "restore Godly presence
in government and culture; as a wall buster he will tear down the
church-state wall." He sees the Christian church as a sleeping
giant that has the ability and the anointing from God to transform
America. The giant is stirring. At a rally in July he proclaimed to
a packed house: "Let the Revolution begin!" And the
congregation roared back: "Let the Revolution begin!"
(The Revolution's first goal, by the way,
is to elect as governor next year the current Republican secretary
of state who oversaw the election process in 2004 year when a surge
in Christian voters narrowly carried George Bush to victory. As
General Boykin suggested of President Bush's anointment, this fellow
has acknowledged that "God wanted him as secretary of state
during 2004" because it was such a critical election. Now he is
criss-crossing Ohio meeting with Patriot Pastors and their
congregations proclaiming that "America is at its best when God
is at its center.") [For the complete stories from which this
information has been extracted, see: "An evening with Rod
Parsley, by Marley Greiner, FreePress, July 20, 2005; Patriot
Pastors," Marilyn Warfield, Cleveland Jewish News, July 29,
2005; "Ohio televangelist has plenty of influence, but he wants
more", Ted Wendling, Religion News Service, Chicago Tribune,
July 1, 2005; "Shaping Politics from the pulpits," Susan
Page, USA Today , Aug. 3, 2005; "Religion and Politics Should
Be Mixed Says Ohio Secretary of State," WTOL-TV Toledo, October
29, 2004].
The Ohio Restoration Project is
spreading. In one month alone last year in the president's home
state of Texas, a single Baptist preacher added 2000 "Patriot
Pastors" to the rolls. On his website he now encourages pastors
to "speak out on the great moral issues of our day...to restore
and reclaim America for Christ."
Alas, these "great moral
issues" do not include building a moral economy. The Christian
Right trumpets charity (as in Faith Based Initiatives) but is silent
on social and economic justice. Inequality in America has reached
scandalous proportions: a few weeks ago the government acknowledged
that while incomes are growing smartly for the first time in years,
the primary winners are the top earners - people who receive stocks,
bonuses, and other income in addition to wages. The nearly 80
percent of Americans who rely mostly on hourly wages barely
maintained their purchasing power. Even as Hurricane Katrina was
hitting the Gulf Coast, giving us a stark reminder of how poverty
can shove poor people into the abyss, the U.S. Census Bureau
reported that last year one million people were added to 36 million
already living in poverty. And since l999 the income of the poorest
one fifth of Americans has dropped almost nine percent.
None of these harsh realities of ordinary
life seem to bother the radical religious right. To the contrary, in
the pursuit of political power they have cut a deal with America's
richest class and their partisan allies in a law-of-the-jungle
strategy to "starve" the government of resources needed
for vital social services that benefit everyone while championing
more and more spending rich corporations and larger tax cuts for the
rich.
How else to explain the vacuum in their
"great moral issues" of the plight of millions of
Americans without adequate health care? Of the gross corruption of
politics by campaign contributions that skew government policies
toward the wealthy at the expense of ordinary taxpayers? (On the
very day that oil and gas prices reached a record high the president
signed off on huge taxpayer subsidies for energy conglomerates
already bloated with windfall profits plucked from the pockets of
average Americans filling up at gas tanks across the country; yet
the next Sunday you could pass a hundred church signboards with no
mention of a sermon on crony capitalism.)
This silence on economic and political
morality is deafening but revealing. The radicals on the Christian
right are now the dominant force in America's governing party.
Without them the government would not be in the hands of people who
don't believe in government. They are culpable in upholding a system
of class and race in which, as we saw last week, the rich escape and
the poor are left behind. And they are on they are crusading for a
government "of, by, and for the people" in favor of one
based on Biblical authority.
This is the crux of the matter: To these
fundamentalist radicals there is only one legitimate religion and
only one particular brand of that religion that is right; all others
who call on God are immoral or wrong. They believe the Bible to be
literally true and that they alone know what it means. Behind their
malicious attacks on the courts ("vermin in black robes,"
as one of their talk show allies recently put it,) is a fierce
longing to hold judges accountable for interpreting the Constitution
according to standards of biblical revelation as fundamentalists
define it. To get those judges they needed a party beholden to them.
So the Grand Old Party - the GOP - has become God's Own Party, its
ranks made up of God's Own People "marching as to war."
Go now to the website of an organization
called America 21 (http://www.america21.us/Home.cfm ). There, on a
red, white, and blue home page, you find praise for President Bush's
agenda - including his effort to phase out Social Security and
protect corporations from law suits by aggrieved citizens. On the
same home page is a reminder that "There are 7,177 hours until
our next National Election....ENLIST NOW." Now click again and
you will read a summons calling Christian pastors "to lead
God's people in the turning that can save America from our
enemies." Under the headline "Remember - Repent -
Return" language reminiscent of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell
reminds you that "one of the unmistakable lessons [of 9/11] is
that America has lost the full measure of God's hedge of protection.
When we ask ourselves why, the scriptures remind us that ancient
Israel was invaded by its foreign enemy, Babylon, in 586 B.C.
....(and) Jerusalem was destroyed by another invading foreign power
in 70 A.D. .... Psalm 106:37 says that these judgments of God
...were because of Israel's idolatry. Israel, the apple of God's
eye, was destroyed ... because the people failed... to repent."
If America is to avoid a similar fate, the warning continues, we
must "remember the legacy of our heritage under God and our
covenant with Him and, in the words of II Chronicles 7:14: 'Turn
from our wicked ways.'"
Just what does this have to do with the
president's political agenda praised on the home page? Well, squint
and look at the fine print at the bottom of the site. It reads:
America21 is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to
educate, engage and mobilize Christians to influence national policy
at every level. Founded in 1989 by a multi-denominational group of
pastors and businessmen, it is dedicated to being a catalyst for
revival and reform of the culture and the government ."
(emphasis added).
The corporate, political and religious
right converge here, led by a president who, in his own disdain for
science, reason and knowledge, is the most powerful fundamentalist
in American history.
What are the stakes? In his last book,
the late Marvin Harris, a prominent anthropologist of the time,
wrote that "the attack against reason and objectivity is fast
reaching the proportions of a crusade." To save the American
Dream, "we desperately need to reaffirm the principle that it
is possible to carry out an analysis of social life which rational
human beings will recognize as being true, regardless of whether
they happen to be women or men, whites or black, straights or gays,
employers or employees, Jews or born-again Christians. The
alternative is to stand by helplessly as special interest groups
tear the United States apart in the name of their "separate
realities' or to wait until one of them grows strong enough to force
its irrational and subjective brand of reality on all the
rest."
That was written 25 years ago, just as
the radical Christian right was setting out on their long march to
political supremacy. The forces he warned against have gained
strength ever since and now control much of the United States
government and are on the verge of having it all.
It has to be said that their success has
come in no small part because of our acquiescence and timidity. Our
democratic values are imperiled because too many people of reason
are willing to appease irrational people just because they are
pious. Republican moderates tried appeasement and survive today only
in gulags set aside for them by the Karl Roves, Bill Frists and Tom
DeLays. Democrats are divided and paralyzed, afraid that if they
take on the organized radical right they will lose what little power
they have. Trying to learn to talk about God as Republicans do,
they're talking gobbledygook, compromising the strongest thing going
for them - the case for a moral economy and the moral argument for
the secular checks and balances that have made America "a safe
haven for the cause of conscience."
As I look back on the conflicts and
clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands
above all others: Bullies - political bullies, economic bullies and
religious bullies - cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with
a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these guys
don't fight fair; "Robert's Rules of Order" is not one of
their holy texts. But freedom on any front - and especially freedom
of conscience - never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping
someone else will do the heavy lifting. Christian realism requires
us to see the world as it is, without illusions, and then take it
on. Christian realism also requires love. But not a sentimental,
dreamy love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theological
Seminary and wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics to
political life, put it this way: "When we talk about love we
have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love
means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our
civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the
universe of humankind."
Christian realists aren't afraid to love.
But just as the Irishman who came upon a brawl in the street and
asked, "Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?"
we have to take that love where the action is. Or the world will
remain a theatre of war between fundamentalists.
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Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist
and former host the PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers. Moyers also
serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.
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