9/11 And The Sport of God
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050909/911_and_the_sport_of_god.php
9/11 And The Sport of God
Bill Moyers
September 09, 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. Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former
host the PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers. Moyers also serves as president
of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which gives financial
support to TomPaine.com.
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 l651 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/ll 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/ll 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-l3). “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:l7-l9) 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 l, 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 2l
(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 l06:37 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: America2l is a not-for-profit organization
whose mission is to educate, engage and mobilize Christians to influence
national policy at every level. Founded in l989 by a multi-denominational
group of pastors and businessmen, it is dedicated to being a catalyst for
revival and reform of the culture and the government .” (emphasis added).
The corporate, political and religious right converge here, led by a
president who, in his own disdain for science, reason and knowledge, is the
most powerful fundamentalist in American history.
What are the stakes? In his last book, the late Marvin Harris, a prominent
anthropologist of the time, wrote that “the attack against reason and
objectivity is fast reaching the proportions of a crusade.” To save the
American Dream, “we desperately need to reaffirm the principle that it is
possible to carry out an analysis of social life which rational human
beings will recognize as being true, regardless of whether they happen to
be women or men, whites or black, straights or gays, employers or
employees, Jews or born-again Christians. The alternative is to stand by
helplessly as special interest groups tear the United States apart in the
name of their “separate realities’ or to wait until one of them grows
strong enough to force its irrational and subjective brand of reality on
all the rest.”
That was written 25 years ago, just as the radical Christian right was
setting out on their long march to political supremacy. The forces he
warned against have gained strength ever since and now control much of the
United States government and are on the verge of having it all.
It has to be said that their success has come in no small part because of
our acquiescence and timidity. Our democratic values are imperiled because
too many people of reason are willing to appease irrational people just
because they are pious. Republican moderates tried appeasement and survive
today only in gulags set aside for them by the Karl Roves, Bill Frists and
Tom DeLays. Democrats are divided and paralyzed, afraid that if they take
on the organized radical right they will lose what little power they have.
Trying to learn to talk about God as Republicans do, they’re talking
gobbledygook, compromising the strongest thing going for them—the case for
a moral economy and the moral argument for the secular checks and balances
that have made America “a safe haven for the cause of conscience.”
As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one
lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies—political bullies,
economic bullies and religious bullies—cannot be appeased; they have to be
opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these
guys don’t fight fair; “Robert’s Rules of Order” is not one of their holy
texts. But freedom on any front—and especially freedom of conscience—never
comes to those who rock and wait, hoping someone else will do the heavy
lifting. Christian realism requires us to see the world as it is, without
illusions, and then take it on. Christian realism also requires love. But
not a sentimental, dreamy love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union
Theological Seminary and wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics
to political life, put it this way: “When we talk about love we have to
become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means…being
responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now
by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind.”
Christian realists aren’t afraid to love. But just as the Irishman who
came upon a brawl in the street and asked, “Is this a private fight or can
anyone get in it?” we have to take that love where the action is. Or the
world will remain a theatre of war between fundamentalists.
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Posting and reading from alt.politics.usa.constitution OR alt.education
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members]
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.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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