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 (