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From: Full
Transcript of Bill Moyers'
Address from Sojourners
Bill Moyers Keynote Address: Call to Renewal
Let's Get Jesus Back!
Speech at Pentecost 2004
by Bill Moyers
WASHINGTON, DC
MAY 24, 2004
I was honored by your invitation to share this day with you.
Call to Renewal is an inspiration to me and so is Jim Wallis
– for his witness of faith, his generous heart, his way
of life, his engagement with politics, and his magazine: I could
not do without Sojourners. I also appreciate Jim because he knows
there are different kinds of Baptists in America. Not everyone
knows this, and it can be confusing when a young reporter, learning
you are a Baptist, asks: “Oh, like Jerry Falwell?”
I reminded her that there are more than two dozen varieties of
Baptist in this country. Pat Robertson is a Baptist. So is Bill
Clinton. Al Gore is a Baptist. So is Trent Lott. Jesse Jackson
is a Baptist. So is Jesse Helms. Richard Gephardt is a Baptist.
So is Newt Gingrich. Small wonder Baptists have been compared
to jalapeno peppers: one or two makes for a tasty dish, but a
whole bunch of them together in one place brings tears to your
eyes.
So I thank Jim Wallis for discerning the difference. I trace
my own spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England
named Thomas Helwys who believed that God, and not the King,
was Lord of conscience. In 1612 Roman Catholics were the embattled
target of the Crown and Thomas Helwys, the Baptist, came to their
defense with the first tract in English demanding full religious
liberty. Here’s what he said:
“Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic]
consciences than ours, and that is none at all. …For men’s
religion is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer
it; neither may the King be judge betwixt God and man. Let them
be heretics, Turks, Jews or whatever. It appertains not to the
earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”
The King was the Good King James I – yes, that King James,
as in King James Bible. Challenges to his authority did not cause
his head to rest easily on his pillow, so James had Thomas Helwys
thrown into prison, where he died.
Thomas Helwys was not the first or last dissenter to pay the
supreme price for conscience. While we are not called upon in
America today to make a similar sacrifice, we are in need of
his generous vision of religious freedom. We are heading into
a new religious landscape. For most of our history our religious
discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally
conservative European heritage, people like me. Dissenting voices
of America, alternative visions of faith, race, and gender rarely
reached the mainstream. A friend on the west coast once sent
me a clipping from a cartoon strip showing two weirdoes talking
in a California diner. One weirdo says to the other, “Have
you ever delved into the mysteries of Eastern religion?”
And the second weirdo answers: “Yes, I was once a Methodist
in Philadelphia.”
Once upon a time that was about the extent of our exposure
to the varieties of religious experience. It’s different
now. Immigration has added more than 30 million people to our
population since the late 1960s. The American gene pool is mutating
into one in which people like me will be a minority within half
a century. I only need visit my grandchildren in St. Paul, Minnesota
to see how America is being re-created right before our eyes.
Once upon a time the Twin Cities were populated by the descendents
of Martin Luther. Now the heirs of Leif Ericsson live down the
street from the descendents of Montezuma and Genghis Kahn. Diana
Eck describes traveling the country and seeing an America dotted
with mosques in places like Toledo, Phoenix, Atlanta. We have
huge Hindu temples - in Pittsburgh, Albany, California’s
Silicon Valley. There are Sikh communities in Stockton and Queens,
New York, and Buddhist retreat centers in the mountains of Vermont
and West Virginia. The world keeps moving to America bringing
new stories from the four corners of the globe. Gerard Bruns
calls it a “contest of narratives” competing to shape
a new American drama.
The old story had a paradox at its core. In no small part
because of Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other “freethinkers”,
the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance
in a secular republic. The state was not to choose sides among
competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion
in the First Amendment. Another man’s belief, said Thomas
Jefferson, “neither picks my pocket not breaks my bones.”
It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The red
man who lived here first had more than his pockets picked; the
Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than
their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant
heritage and practically everyone looked alike we often failed
the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to struggle
to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix-master
of American assimilation. So our troubled past with tolerance
requires us to ask how, in this new era when we are looking even
less and less alike, are we to avoid the intolerance, the chauvinism,
the fanaticism, the bitter fruits that mark the long history
of world religions when they jostle each other in busy crowded
streets.
It is no rhetorical question. My friend Elaine Pagels, the
noted scholar of religion, says “There’s practically
no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms
the other’s choice.” You only have to glance at the
daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive
loyalty to one’s own kin, one’s own clan, one’s
own country, and one’s own church. These ties that bind
are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also
be twisted into a noose.
Everyone here knows that religion has a healing side, but
it also has a killing side. In the opening chapter of the Book
of Genesis – the founding document of three great faiths
-- the first murder rises from a religious act. You know the
story: Adam and Eve become the first parents to discover what
it means to raise Cain. They have a second son named Abel. Both
boys want to please God so both bring God an offering. Cain is
a farmer and offers the first fruits of the soil. Abel is a shepherd
and offers the first lamb from the flock. Two generous gifts.
But God plays favorites and chooses Abel’s offering over
Cain. Cain is so jealous he strikes out at his brother and kills
him. Sibling rivalry for God’s favor leads to violence and
ends in death.
Once this pattern is established, it’s played out in
the story of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his
brothers, and down through the centuries in generation after
generation of conflict between Muslims and Jews, Jews and Christians,
Christians and Muslims, so that the red thread of religiously
spilled blood runs directly from East of Eden to Belfast, Bosnia,
Beirut, Belfast and Baghdad. In our time alone the litany is
horrendous. I keep a file marked “Holy War.” It bulges
with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict. Of
teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not wearing a veil.
Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female
students in the same classroom. Of the fanatical Jewish doctor
with a machine gun mowing down thirty praying Muslims in a mosque.
Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of
the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then
announced to the world that “Everything I did, I did for
the glory of God.”
Of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of
Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each
another in Nigeria. There’s a large folder about Timothy
McVeigh blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City, killing
l68 people, in part as revenge against the U.S. government for
killing David Koresh and his followers. We didn’t realize
it at the time but the first strike on New York’s World
Trade Center in 1993 was a religious act of terror; the second
one on 9/ll claimed over three thousand lives. Meanwhile, groups
calling themselves the Christian Identity Movement and the Christian
Patriot League arm themselves, and Christians intoxicated with
the delusional doctrine of two l9th century preachers not only
await the Rapture but believe they have an obligation to get
involved politically to hasten the divine scenario for the Apocalypse
that will bring an end to the world. Sadly, Christians, too,
can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious war.
Consider the American general who has turned up as a force
in the web of command and action leading to the torture and humiliation
of prisoners in Iraq. General William Boykin, you may recall,
is the commander who lost l8 men in Somalia trying to capture
a warlord in the notorious Black Hawk Down fiasco of 1993. He
later described the conflict as a battle between good and evil.
“I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my
God was a real God and his was an idol.” According to Sidney
Blumenthal in The Guardian on May 20, Boykin became a circuit
rider for the religious right, active in a group called the Faith
Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles
to evangelism. Their manifesto summons warriors in [a] “spiritual
battle for the souls of this nation and the world.” Traveling
the country with his slide show, while an active member of the
United States military command, General Boykin declared that
“Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy
us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.”
The forces of Satan will only be defeated, said the general,
if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” You might
have thought that kind of fatwa from a high military officer
would have struck the powers-that-be in the Pentagon and White
House as somewhat un-American, if not unchristian. But not only
was General Boykin kept in office, he has now turned up as a
principal in the chain of command leading to the Iraqi prison.
It was Boykin, says Blumenthal, who flew to Guantanamo and
ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, then in charge of prisoners
at the highly secret Camp X-Ray, to go to Iraq and extend the
methods practiced at X-Ray to the prison system there, on orders
of Secretary Rumsfeld. This is the same General Boykin who last
June publicly announced that “George Bush was not elected
by a majority of the voters. He was appointed by God.” I’m
not making this up. “Onward Christian Soldiers” is
back in vogue and the 2lst century version of the Crusades has
taken on aspects of the righteous ferocity that marked its predecessors.
“To be furious in religion,” said the Quaker, William
Penn, “is to be furiously irreligious.”
So Jim Wallis has called you together at a time of testing—for
people of faith and for people who believe in democracy. How
do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side?
How do we protect the soul of democracy against the contagion
of a triumphalist theology in the service of an imperial state?
At stake is America’s role in the world. At stake is the
very character of the American experience—whether “We,
the people” is the political incarnation of a spiritual
truth – one nation, indivisible—or a stupendous fraud.
There are two Americas today. You could see this division
in a little noticed action last week in the House of Representatives.
Republicans in the House approved new tax credits for the children
of families earning as much as $309,000 a year – families
that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts—while
doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income
scale. This said the Washington Post in an editorial called “Leave
No Rich Child Behind” – is “bad social policy,
bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You’d think they’d
be embarrassed but they’re not.”
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington
today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty
in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact
that millions of workers are actually making less money today
in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact
that working people are putting in longer and longer hours just
to stay in place; not the fact that while we have the most advanced
medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans –
eight out of ten of them in working families—are uninsured
and cannot get the basic case they need.
Nor is the political class embarrassed by the fact that the gap
between rich and poor is greater than it’s been in 50 years
– the worst inequality among all western nations. They don’t
seem to have noticed that we have been experiencing a shift in
poverty. For years it was said that single jobless mothers are
down there at the bottom.
For years it was said that work, education, and marriage is
how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing
up where we didn’t expect it - among families that include
two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more
than a high school education. These are the newly poor. These
are the people our political and business class expects to climb
out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns. During the
last decade I produced a series of documentaries for PBS called
“Surviving the Good Times.” The title refers to the
boom time of the 90s when the country achieved the longest period
of economic growth in its entire history. But not everyone shared
equally in the benefits. To the contrary. The decade began with
a sustained period of downsizing by corporations moving jobs
out of America and many of those people never recovered what
they lost.
We found two families – one black, one white—in
Milwaukee whose breadwinners were laid off in the first wave
of layoffs in 1991. We reported on how they were coping with
the wrenching changes in their lives, and we stayed with them
over the next ten years as they tried to find a place in the
new global economy. They’re the kind of Americans my mother
would have called “the salt of the earth”. They love
their kids, care about their communities, go to church every
Sunday, and work hard all week - both mothers have had to take
full-time jobs. Although they were running hard they kept falling
behind. During our time with them the fathers in both families
became seriously ill. One had to stay in the hospital two months,
putting his family $30,000 in debt because they didn’t have
adequate health care. At one point we were there when the bank
started to foreclose on the modest home of the other family because
they couldn’t meet the mortgage payments after Dad lost
his good-paying manufacturing job.
Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns
were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end
of the decade they were running harder just to stay even, and
the gap between them and prosperous America was widening and
hardening.
What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty
is that they are patriotic. They love this country. But they
no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country.
When our film opens both families are watching the inauguration
of Bill Clinton on television in 1992. By the end of the decade
they were no longer paying attention to politics. They don’t
see it connecting to their lives. They don’t think their
concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate,
and media elites who make up our dominant class. They are not
cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity
for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them.
And they’re right.
For years now a small fraction of American households have
been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income
while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained
unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily
life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20%
and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more
than 75 fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less
of an issue if the rest of society was benefiting proportionately
and equality was growing. That’s not the case. As an organization
called The Commonwealth Foundation Center for the Renewal of
American Democracy sets forth in well-documented research, working
families and the poor “are losing ground under economic
pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics,
social mobility, political participation, and civic life.”
And household economics “is not the only area where inequality
is growing in America.” We are also losing the historic
balance between wealth and commonwealth. The report goes on to
describe “a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions,
the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural
frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social
harms arising from the excesses of private power.” That
drive is succeeding, with drastic consequences for an equitable
access to and control of public resources, the lifeblood of any
democracy. From land, water and other natural resources, to media
and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery
and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad
range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift
in the direction of private control.
And what is driving this shift? Contrary to what you learned
in civics class in high school, it is not the so-called “democratic
debate.” That is merely a cynical charade behind which the
real business goes on—the none-too-scrupulous business of
getting and keeping power so that you can divide up the spoils.
If you want to know what’s changing America, follow the
money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth Drew, says
“the greatest change in Washington over the past twenty-five
years – in its culture, in the way it does business and
the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on
here – has been in the preoccupation with money.” Jeffrey
Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for
the Wall Street Journal, put it even more strongly: “[Campaign
cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and
threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine
the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect
our daily lives.” It is widely accepted in Washington today
that there is nothing wrong with a democracy dominated by the
people with money. But of course there is. Money has democracy
in a stranglehold and is suffocating it. During his brief campaign
in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious
right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush’s
wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing
less than an “influence peddling scheme in which both parties
compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest
bidder.”
Hit the pause button here and recall Roger Tamraz. He’s
the wealthy oilman who paid $300,000 to get a private meeting
in the White House with President Clinton; he wanted help in
securing a big pipeline in Central Asia. This got him called
before Congressional hearings on the financial excesses of the
1996 campaign. If you watched the hearings on C-Span you heard
him say he didn’t think he had done anything out of the
ordinary. When they pressed him he told the Senators: “Look,
when it comes to money and politics, you make the rules. I’m
just playing by your rules.” One Senator then asked if Tamraz
had registered and voted. And he was blunt in his reply: “No,
Senator, I think money’s a bit more than the vote.”
That’s the shame of politics today.
Listen to one summary of the consequences:
“When powerful interests shower Washington with millions
in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But
its ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of
them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don’t
contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying.
You pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill.
You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts
to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation
have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide
by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must
pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred
from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent
on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment.
You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government
creates another set for your competitors. In contrast the fortunate
few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right
lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make
a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want
to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides
the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts,
the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity
from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore
rules their competition must comply with, the government gives
its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended
for the public, it gets killed.”
I’m not quoting from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Or
Mao’s Little Red Book. I’m quoting Henry Luce’s
TIME magazine. TIME concludes that America now has “government
for the few at the expense of the many.”
That’s why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned
off by politics. It’s why we can’t put things right.
And it’s wrong. Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this:
“If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment:
‘Thou shalt not ration justice.’” He got it right:
The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They
have the right to buy more cars than anyone else. More gizmos
than anyone else; more clothes and more vacations. But they don’t
have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know, I know: This sounds very much like a call for class
war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful
paperback polemic by a wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who
was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. By the end of the 70s
corporate America had begun a stealthy assault on the rest of
our society and the principles of our democracy. Looking backwards,
it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored
the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to the
middle and working classes is not the result of Adam Smith’s
invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism,
intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that
has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of political
decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were determined
to get back the privileges they had lost with the Depression
and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social contract;
to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in search
of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was supposed
to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business
Week put it bluntly: “Some people will obviously have to
do with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans
to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can
have more.”
To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in
public policy, they funded conservative think tanks – the
Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American
Enterprise Institute – that churned out study after study
advocating their agenda. To put political muscle behind these
ideas, they created a formidable political machine. One of the
few journalists to cover the issues of class – Thomas Edsall
of the Washington Post – wrote – and I quote: “During
the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging
competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in
the legislative area.” Big business political action committees
flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they
built alliances with the religious right – Jerry Falwell’s
Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition –
who happily contrived a cultural war as a smokescreen to hide
the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as
foot soldiers in the war.
And they won. One of the richest men in America and the savviest
investor of them all – Warren Buffett – put it this
way: “If there was a class war, my class won.” Well,
there was, Mr. Buffett, and as recent headline in the Washington
Post proclaimed: ‘BUSINESS WINS WITH BUSH.”
Look at the spoils of victory:
Over the past three years, they’ve pushed through $2 trillion
dollars in tax cuts – almost all tilted towards the wealthiest
people in the country.
Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.
Cuts in taxes on investment income.
And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.
More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest
one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except
that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in
our state and local governments. Forcing them to cut services
and raise taxes on middle class working America.
Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling
$2.75 trillion over the next ten years.
These deficits have been part of their strategy. The late
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted
that President Reagan’s real strategy was to force the government
to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits
of historic dimensions. President Reagan’s own Budget Director,
David Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing political
strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to “starve
the beast” – with trillions of dollars in deficits
resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United
States government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned
in the bathtub.
Take note: The corporate conservatives and their allies in
the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation
of American life that only they understand because they are its
advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating
the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they
have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties
with structural deficits that will last until our children’s
children are ready for retirement; and they are systematically
stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the
rich and waging war.
And, yes, they are proud of what they have done to our economy
and our society. If instead of producing a news magazine I was
writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn’t have made up
the things that this crew in this town have been saying.
The president’s chief economic adviser says shipping
technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy.
The president’s Council of Economic Advisers reports
that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered
manufacturing workers.
The president’s Labor Secretary says it doesn’t
matter if job growth has stalled because – and I quote –
“the stock market is the ultimate arbiter.”
And the president’s Federal Reserve Chairman says that
the tax cuts may force cutbacks in Social Security – but
hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway.
You just can’t make this stuff up. You have to hear it
to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where
the victims will die laughing.
But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans
and the poor – and to the workings of American democracy
– is no laughing matter. It calls for righteous indignation
and action. Otherwise our democracy will degenerate into a shell
of itself in which the privileged and the powerful sustain their
own way of life at the expense of others and the United States
becomes another Latin America with a small crust of the rich
at the top governing a nation of serfs.
Your Call for Renewal comes, then, at a time of testing. Over
the past few years, as the poor got poorer, the health care crisis
worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated,
and our political system was bought out from under us, prophetic
Christianity lost its voice. The religious right drowned everyone
else out. And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in
Nazareth and proclaimed, “The Lord has anointed me to preach
the good news to the poor.” The very Jesus who told 5000
hungry people that all of you will be fed, not just some of you.
The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the
day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness
to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast, who said the
kingdom of heaven belongs to little children, raised the status
of women, and treated even the taxpayer like a child of God.
The very Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple.
This Jesus has been hijacked and turned into a guardian of privilege
instead of a champion of the dispossessed. Hijacked, he was made
over into a militarist, hedonist, and lobbyist….sent prowling
the halls of Congress in Guccis, seeking tax breaks and loopholes
for the powerful, costly new weapon systems that don’t work,
and punitive public policies.
Let’s get Jesus back.
The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward
Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight hour work day.
Let’s get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise
up against the sweatshop. The Jesus who called a young priest
named John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance,
a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor – ten years
before the New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged
the Church to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen
and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New
York, and marble cutters in Vermont. The Jesus in whose name
E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield challenged a Mississippi system
that kept sharecroppers in servitude and debt. The Jesus in whose
name a Presbyterian minister named Eugene Carson Blake - “Ike’s
Pastor” - was arrested for protesting racial injustice in
Baltimore. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis to
join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.
That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through
the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege.
Mel Gibson missed that.
He missed the resurrection—the spiritual awakening that
followed the death of Jesus. He missed Pentecost.
Now comes the resurrection all over again. Our times cry out
for a new politics of justice. This is no partisan issue. It
doesn’t matter if you’re a liberal or a conservative,
Jesus is both and neither. It doesn’t matter if you’re
a Democrat or Republican - Jesus is both and neither. We need
a faith that takes on the corruption of both parties. We need
a faith that challenges complacency at all power. If you’re
a Democrat, shake them up. If you’re a Republican, shame
them. Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. We must
drive them from the temples of democracy.
Let’s get Jesus back.
But let’s do it in love.
I know it can sound banal and facile to say this. The word
“love” gets thrown around too casually these days.
“Don’t you just love this?” “I loved that
movie.” “I’d love to get away for the weekend.”
And brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another.
We’re still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald.
The smoke still rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East
Timor. The walls of Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has
love done? Where is there any real milk of human kindness?
But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr
in his book of essays, Justice and Mercy, where he writes: “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.”
So let us love our country. But let us remember the words
of G.K. Chesterton: “To say my country, right or wrong,
is something no patriot would say except in dire emergency; it
is like saying, ‘my mother, drunk or sober.’”
Let us love our neighbor, but let’s not allow him to
poison our well -- from ignorance or intent.
Let us love our enemy, even as we resist his aggression. We
cannot defeat the terrorists if we become like them. We cannot
stand up to the religious right if we imitate them.
What I’m talking about will be hard, devoid of sentiment
and practical as nails. But love is action, not sentiment. Someone
asked a few years ago, who gave us the authority to change the
meaning of the Church? How did we let creed override compassion?
Drive though any city, he said, and you’ll pass so many
churches. You pass the Presbyterian Church and say: “They’re
Calvinists. They believe in predestination.” You drive past
the Methodist church and say, “They accept infant baptism.”
You drive past the Catholic Church and say, “They believe
in papal infallibility.” And it’s true—theological
formulations give shape to our beliefs. Intellectual assent provides
a foundation to our faith. But when the church was young and
fair, and people passed by her doors, they did not comment on
the difference or the doctrines. Those stern and taciturn pagans
said of the Christians: “How they love one another!”
It started that way soon after the death of Jesus. His disciple
Peter said to the first churches, “Above all things, have
unfailing love toward one another.”
I looked in my old Greek concordance the other day. That word
“unfailing” would be more accurately rendered “intense.”
It was also Peter who said that love covers a multitude of sins.
I struggled with that one a long time. I was never sure I understood
the idea or liked it: “Love covers a multitude of sins.”
But I saw it in a new light one day when I opened an envelope
from my second grandson Thomas. Thomas sent me a drawing he had
made of a man. And what a man it was! He had a green head, one
large blue hand, and one small red hand. One of his eyes was
pink, the other yellow. He was a deformed creature if you ever
saw one. At first I took it as Thomas’ effort to draw a
picture of me. So I didn’t pay attention to the disproportion
in the picture; I didn’t see the deformity; I saw only a
figure drawn for me by a little boy who loves me. And I knew
that one day this little boy would be drawing with strong and
clear strokes. And why could I see past those deformities to
the gift of the drawing and the promise of a child’s potential?
Because I love this child, and this child loves me, and love
covers a multitude of imperfections.
Glenn Tinder reminds us that "none are good but all are
sacred". I want to think this is what the founders meant
when they included the not-so-self-evident assertion that “all
men are created equal.” Truly life is not fair and it is
never equal. I believe the founders were speaking a powerful
spiritual truth that is the heart of our hope for this country.
They saw America as a great promise – and it is. But America
is a broken promise, and we are here to do what we can to fix
it—to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows
us how: “One loving soul sets another on fire.” But
to move beyond sentimentality, what begins in love must lead
on to justice. Your Call to Renewal is the fight of our lives.
Full Transcript of Bill Moyers' Speech at Pentecost 2004.
by Bill Moyers. Sojourners Magazine, August 2004 (Vol. 33, No.
8, pp. ). Cover.
(Source: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0408&article=040810x)
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