Tom Quarlous
2005-09-11 20:00:57 UTC
9/11 and the Sport of God
By Bill Moyers
Commondreams.org
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091105X.shtml
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.
By Bill Moyers
Commondreams.org
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091105X.shtml
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.