9/11 AND THE SPORT OF GOD

Larry Kramer forwarded me this email. It's a long, but definitely worth it read, containing some shocking biblical passages about a violent, veangeful god which don't often see the light of day. It's also contains a rarely heard (by me anyway) liberal christian viewpoint stressing the importance of the separation of church and state, which is totally lost on Bush's fanatical fan base. As a treat for those of you who make it through the article, I've added some pornographic images to keep your "interests" up and to demonstrate that I proudly represent the sodomites and their "hordes of hell." ---Lady Beelzebub



Published on Friday, September 9, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
* 9/11 And The Sport of God *
*by Bill Moyers*

This article is adapted from Bill Moyer's address this week at Union
Theological Seminary in New York, where Judith and Bill Moyers received
the seminary's highest award, the Union Medal, for their contributions
to faith and reason in America.

At the Central Baptist Church in Marshall, Texas, where I was baptized
in the faith, we believed in a free church in a free state. I still do.

My spiritual forbears did not take kindly to living under theocrats who
embraced religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others.
"Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils," thundered the dissenter Roger
Williams as he was banished from Massachusetts for denying Puritan
authority over his conscience. Baptists there were a "pitiful negligible
minority" but they were agitators for freedom and therefore denounced as
"incendiaries of the commonwealth" for holding to their belief in that
great democracy of faith - the priesthood of all believers. For refusing
to pay tribute to the state religion they were fined, flogged, and
exiled. In 1651 the Baptist Obadiah Holmes was given 30 stripes with a
three-corded whip after he violated the law and took forbidden communion
with another Baptist in Lynn, Massachusetts. His friends offered to pay
his fine for his release but he refused. They offered him strong drink
to anesthetize the pain of the flogging. Again he refused. It is the
love of liberty, he said, "that must free the soul."

Such revolutionary ideas made the new nation with its Constitution and
Bill of Rights "a haven for the cause of conscience." No longer could
magistrates order citizens to support churches they did not attend and
recite creeds that they did not believe. No longer would "the loathsome
combination of church and state" - as Thomas Jefferson described it - be
the settled order. Unlike the Old World that had been wracked with
religious wars and persecution, the government of America would take no
sides in the religious free-for-all that liberty would make possible and
politics would make inevitable. The First Amendment neither inculcates
religion nor inoculates against it. Americans could be loyal to the
Constitution without being hostile to God, or they could pay no heed to
God without fear of being mugged by an official God Squad. It has been a
remarkable arrangement that guaranteed "soul freedom."

It is at risk now, and the fourth observance of the terrorist attacks of
9/11 is an appropriate time to think about it.



Four years ago this week, the poet's prophetic metaphor became real
again and "the great dark birds of history" plunged into our lives.

They came in the name of God. They came bent on murder and martyrdom. It
was as if they rode to earth on the fierce breath of Allah himself, for
the sacred scriptures that had nurtured these murderous young men are
steeped in images of a violent and vengeful God who wills life for the
faithful and horrific torment for unbelievers.

Yes, the Koran speaks of mercy and compassion and calls for ethical
living. But such passages are no match for the ferocity of instruction
found there for waging war for God's sake. The scholar Jack
Nelson-Pallmeyer carefully traces this trail of holy violence in his
important book, /Is Religion Killing Us? / [Trinity Press International.
2003]. He highlights many of the verses in the Koran that the Islamic
terrorists could have had in their hearts and on their lips four years
ago as they moved toward their gruesome rendezvous. As I read some of
them, close your eyes and recall the scenes of that bright September
morning which began in the bright sun under a blue sky:

"Those who believe Fight in the cause of Allah, and Those who reject
Faith Fight in the cause of Evil."(4:76)

"So We sent against them A furious Wind through days of disaster, that
We might Give them a taste of a Penalty of humiliation In this Life; but
The Penalty of the Hereafter will be More Humiliating still: And they
Will find No help." (41:16)

"Then watch thou For the Day That the sky will Bring forth a kind Of
smoke (or mist) Plainly visible, Enveloping the people: This will be
a Penalty
Grievous." (44:10-11)

"Did the people of the towns Feel Secure against the coming Of Our
Wrath by night While they were asleep? Or else did they feel
Secure against its coming in Broad daylight while they Played
About (carefree)? Did they then feel secure Against the Plan of
Allah? - But no one can feel Secure from the Plan of Allah,
except those (Doomed) to ruin." (7:97-99)

So the holy warriors came - an airborne death cult, their sights on
God's enemies: regular folks, starting the day's routine. One minute
they're pulling off their jackets, shaking Sweet n' Low into their
coffee, adjusting the height of their chair or a picture of a child or
sweetheart or spouse in a frame on their desk, booting up their computer
- and in the next, they are engulfed by a horrendous cataclysm. God's
will. Poof!



But it is never only the number of dead by which terrorists measure
their work. It is also the number of the living - the survivors - taken
hostage to fear. Their mission was to invade our psyche; get inside our
heads - deprive us of trust, faith, and peace of mind: keep us from ever
again believing in a safe, just, and peaceful world, and from working to
bring that world to pass. The writer Terry Tempest Williams has said
"the human heart is the first home of democracy." Fill that heart with
fear and people will give up the risks of democracy for the assurances
of security; fill that heart with fear and you can shake the house to
its foundations.

In the days leading up to 9/11 our daughter and husband adopted their
first baby. On the morning of September 11th our son-in-law passed
through the shadow of the World Trade Center toward his office a few
blocks up the street. He arrived as the horrors erupted. He saw the
flames, the falling bodies, the devastation. His building was evacuated
and for long awful moments he couldn't reach his wife, our daughter, to
say he was okay. Even after they connected it wasn't until the next
morning that he was able to make it home. Throughout that fearful night
our daughter was alone with their new baby. Later she told us that for
weeks thereafter she would lie awake at night, wondering where and when
it might happen again, going to the computer at three in the morning to
check out what she could about bioterrorism, germ warfare, anthrax and
the vulnerability of children. The terrorists had violated a mother's
deepest space.

Who was not vulnerable? That morning Judith and I made it to our office
at Channel Thirteen on West 33rd Street just after the second plane
struck. Our building was evacuated although the two of us remained with
other colleagues to do what we could to keep the station on the air. The
next day it was evacuated again because of a bomb scare at the Empire
State Building nearby. We had just ended a live broadcast for PBS when
security officers swept through and ordered everyone out. This time we
left. As we were making our way down the stairs I took Judith's arm and
was struck by the thought: Is this the last time I'll touch her? Could
what we had begun together a half century ago end here on this dim, bare
staircase? I forced the thought from my mind, willed it away, but in the
early hours of morning, as I sat at the window of our apartment looking
out at the sky, the sinister intruder crept back.

Terrorists plant time bombs in our heads, hoping to turn each and every
imagination into a private hell governed by our fear of them.


They win only if we let them, only if we become like them: vengeful,
imperious, intolerant, paranoid. Having lost faith in all else, zealots
have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if
we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike
first at those who had not struck us; allow our leaders to use the fear
of terrorism to make us afraid of the truth; cease to think and reason
together, allowing others to tell what's in God's mind. Yes, we are
vulnerable to terrorists, but only a shaken faith in ourselves can do us
in.

So over the past four years I have kept reminding myself of not only the
horror but the humanity that was revealed that day four years ago, when
through the smoke and fire we glimpsed the heroism, compassion, and
sacrifice of people who did the best of things in the worst of times. I
keep telling myself that this beauty in us is real, that it makes life
worthwhile and democracy work and that no terrorist can take it from us.

But I am not so sure. As a Christian realist I honor my inner skeptic.
And as a journalist I always know the other side of the story. The
historian Edward Gibbon once wrote of historians what could be said of
journalists. He wrote: "The theologians may indulge the pleasing task of
describing religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native
purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian [read:
journalist] He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and
corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a
weak and degenerate race of beings."

The other side of the story:

Muslims have no monopoly on holy violence. As Jack Nelson-Pallmayer
points out, God's violence in the sacred texts of both faiths reflect a
deep and troubling pathology "so pervasive, vindictive, and destructive"
that it contradicts and subverts the collective weight of other passages
that exhort ethical behavior or testify to a loving God.

For days now we have watched those heart-breaking scenes on the Gulf
Coast: the steaming, stinking, sweltering wreckage of cities and
suburbs; the fleeing refugees; the floating corpses, hungry babies, and
old people huddled together in death, the dogs gnawing at their feet;
stranded children standing in water reeking of feces and garbage;
families scattered; a mother holding her small child and an empty water
jug, pleading for someone to fill it; a wife, pushing the body of her
dead husband on a wooden plank down a flooded street; desperate people
struggling desperately to survive.

Now transport those current scenes from our newspapers and television
back to the first Book of the Bible - the Book of Genesis. They bring to
life what we rarely imagine so graphically when we read of the great
flood that devastated the known world. If you read the Bible as
literally true, as fundamentalists do, this flood was ordered by God.
"And God said to Noah, 'I have determined to make an end of all flesh...
behold, I will destroy them with the earth." (6:5-13). "I will bring a
flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the
breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall
die." (6:17-19) Noah and his family are the only humans spared - they
were, after all, God's chosen. But for everyone else: "... the waters
prevailed so mightily... that all the high mountains....were
covered....And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle,
beasts...and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was
the breath of life, died...." (7:17-23).

The flood is merely Act One. Read on: This God first "hardens the heart
of Pharaoh" to make sure the Egyptian ruler will not be moved by the
plea of Moses to let his people go. Then because Pharaoh's heart is
hardened, God turns the Nile into blood so people cannot drink its water
and will suffer from thirst. Not satisfied with the results, God sends
swarms of locusts and flies to torture them; rains hail and fire and
thunder on them destroys the trees and plants of the field until nothing
green remains; orders every first-born child to be slaughtered, from the
first-born of Pharaoh right on down to "the first-born of the
maidservant behind the mill." An equal-murderous God, you might say. The
massacre continues until "there is not a house where one was not dead."
While the Egyptian families mourn their dead, God orders Moses to loot
from their houses all their gold and silver and clothing. Finally, God's
thirst for blood is satisfied, God pauses to rest - and boasts: "I have
made sport of the Egyptians."

Violence: the sport of God. God, the progenitor of shock and awe.



And that's just Act II. As the story unfolds women and children are
hacked to death on God's order; unborn infants are ripped from their
mother's wombs; cities are leveled - their women killed if they have had
sex, the virgins taken at God's command for the pleasure of his holy
warriors. When his holy warriors spare the lives of 50,000 captives God
is furious and sends Moses back to rebuke them and tell them to finish
the job. One tribe after another falls to God-ordered genocide: the
Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites,
the Jebusites - names so ancient they have disappeared into the mists as
fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, grandparents and
grandchildren, infants in arms, shepherds, threshers, carpenters,
merchants, housewives - living human beings, flesh and blood: "And when
the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you
must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and
show no mercy to them...(and) your eyes shall not pity them."

So it is written - in the Holy Bible.

Yes, I know: the early church fathers, trying to cover up the
blood-soaked trail of God's sport, decreed that anything that disagrees
with Christian dogma about the perfection of God is to be interpreted
spiritually. Yes, I know: Edward Gibbon himself acknowledged that the
literal Biblical sense of God "is repugnant to every principle of faith
as well as reason" and that we must therefore read the scriptures
through a veil of allegory. Yes, I know: we can go through the Bible and
construct a God more pleasing to the better angels of our nature (as I
have done.) Yes, I know: Christians claim the Old Testament God of wrath
was supplanted by the Gospel's God of love [See /The God of Evil/ ,
Allan Hawkins, Exlibris.]

I know these things; all of us know these things. But we also know that
the "violence-of-God" tradition remains embedded deep in the DNA of
monotheistic faith. We also know that fundamentalists the world over and
at home consider the "sacred texts" to be literally God's word on all
matters. Inside that logic you cannot read part of the Bible
allegorically and the rest of it literally; if you believe in the virgin
birth of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection, and the depiction of
the Great Judgment at the end times you must also believe that God is
sadistic, brutal, vengeful, callow, cruel and savage - that God slaughters.

Millions believe it.

Let's go back to 9/11 four years ago. The ruins were still smoldering
when the reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell went on television to
proclaim that the terrorist attacks were God's punishment of a corrupted
America. They said the government had adopted the agenda "of the pagans,
and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians"
not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way (The God of the
Bible apparently holds liberals in the same low esteem as Hittites and
Gergushites and Jebusites and all the other pagans of holy writ.) Just
as God had sent the Great Flood to wipe out a corrupted world, now -
disgusted with a decadent America - "God almighty is lifting his
protection from us." Critics said such comments were deranged. But
millions of Christian fundamentalists and conservatives didn't think so.
They thought Robertson and Falwell were being perfectly consistent with
the logic of the Bible as they read it: God withdraws favor from sinful
nations - the terrorists were meant to be God's wake-up call: better get
right with God. Not many people at the time seemed to notice that Osama
bin Laden had also been reading his sacred book closely and literally,
and had called on Muslims to resist what he described as a "fierce
Judeo-Christian campaign" against Islam, praying to Allah for guidance
"to exalt the people who obey Him and humiliate those who disobey Him."

Suddenly we were immersed in the pathology of a "holy war" as defined by
fundamentalists on both sides. You could see this pathology play out in
General William Boykin. A professional soldier, General Boykin had taken
up with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier whose members
apply military principles to evangelism with a manifesto summoning
warriors "to the spiritual warfare for souls." After Boykin had led
Americans in a battle against a Somalian warlord he announced: "I know
my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his
God was an idol." Now Boykin was going about evangelical revivals
preaching that America was in a holy war as "a Christian nation"
battling Satan and that America's Muslim adversaries will be defeated
"only if we come against them in the name of Jesus." For such an hour,
America surely needed a godly leader. So General Boykin explained how it
was that the candidate who had lost the election in 2000 nonetheless
wound up in the White House. President Bush, he said, "was not elected
by a majority of the voters - he was appointed by God." Not surprising,
instead of being reprimanded for evangelizing while in uniform, General
Boykin is now the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.
(Just as it isn't surprising that despite his public call for the
assassination of a foreign head of state, Pat Robertson's Operation
Blessing was one of the first groups to receive taxpayer funds from the
President's Faith-Based Initiative for "relief work" on the Gulf Coast.)

We can't wiggle out of this, people. Alvin Hawkins states it frankly:
"This is a problem we can't walk away from." We're talking about a
powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what's
on God's mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their
interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the
nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of
their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.

True, people of faith have always tried to bring their interpretation of
the Bible to bear on American laws and morals - this very seminary is
part of that tradition; it's the American way, encouraged and protected
by the First Amendment. But what is unique today is that the radical
religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America's great
political parties - the country is not yet a theocracy but the
Republican Party is - and they are driving American politics, using God
as a a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment,
foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social
services and so on.

What's also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have
brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists,
and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance - their loathing of
other people's beliefs, of America's secular and liberal values, of an
independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for
objective knowledge - has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for
state power. They use the language of faith to demonize political
opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists,
ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor. These are the foot
soldiers in a political holy war financed by wealthy economic interests
and guided by savvy partisan operatives who know that couching political
ambition in religious rhetoric can ignite the passion of followers as
ferociously as when Constantine painted the Sign of Christ (the
"Christograph") on the shields of his soldiers and on the banners of his
legions and routed his rivals in Rome. Never mind that the Emperor
himself was never baptized into the faith; it served him well enough to
make the God worshipped by Christians his most important ally and turn
the Sign of Christ into the one imperial symbol most widely recognized
and feared from east to west.



Let's take a brief detour to Ohio and I'll show you what I am talking
about. In recent weeks a movement called the Ohio Restoration Project
has been launched to identify and train thousands of "Patriot Pastors"
to get out the conservative religious vote next year. According to press
reports, the leader of the movement - the senior pastor of a large
church in suburban Columbus - casts the 2006 elections as an apocalyptic
clash between "the forces of righteousness and the hordes of hell." The
fear and loathing in his message is palpable: He denounces public
schools that won't teach creationism, require teachers to read the Bible
in class, or allow children to pray. He rails against the "secular
jihadists" who have "hijacked" America and prevent school kids from
learning that Hitler was "an avid evolutionist." He links abortion to
children who murder their parents. He blasts the "pagan left" for trying
to redefine marriage. He declares that "homosexual rights" will bring "a
flood of demonic oppression." On his church website you read that
"Reclaiming the teaching of our Christian heritage among America's youth
is paramount to a sense of national destiny that God has invested into
this nation."

One of the prominent allies of the Ohio Restoration Project is a popular
televangelist in Columbus who heads a $40 million-a-year ministry that
is accessible worldwide via 1,400 TV stations and cable affiliates.
Although he describes himself as neither Republican nor Democrat but a
"Christocrat" - a gladiator for God marching against "the very hordes of
hell in our society" - he nonetheless has been spotted with so many
Republican politicians in Washington and elsewhere that he has been
publicly described as a"spiritual advisor" to the party. The journalist
Marley Greiner has been following his ministry for the organization,
FreePress. She writes that because he considers the separation of church
and state to be "a lie perpetrated on Americans - especially believers
in Jesus Christ" - he identifies himself as a "wall builder" and "wall
buster." As a wall builder he will "restore Godly presence in government
and culture; as a wall buster he will tear down the church-state wall."
He sees the Christian church as a sleeping giant that has the ability
and the anointing from God to transform America. The giant is stirring.
At a rally in July he proclaimed to a packed house: "Let the Revolution
begin!" And the congregation roared back: "Let the Revolution begin!"

(The Revolution's first goal, by the way, is to elect as governor next
year the current Republican secretary of state who oversaw the election
process in 2004 year when a surge in Christian voters narrowly carried
George Bush to victory. As General Boykin suggested of President Bush's
anointment, this fellow has acknowledged that "God wanted him as
secretary of state during 2004" because it was such a critical election.
Now he is criss-crossing Ohio meeting with Patriot Pastors and their
congregations proclaiming that "America is at its best when God is at
its center.") [For the complete stories from which this information has
been extracted, see: "An evening with Rod Parsley, by Marley Greiner,
FreePress, July 20, 2005; Patriot Pastors," Marilyn Warfield, /Cleveland
Jewish News/, July 29, 2005; "Ohio televangelist has plenty of
influence, but he wants more", Ted Wendling, /Religion News Service/,
Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2005; "Shaping Politics from the pulpits,"
Susan Page, /USA Today/ , Aug. 3, 2005; "Religion and Politics Should Be
Mixed Says Ohio Secretary of State," WTOL-TV Toledo, October 29, 2004].

The Ohio Restoration Project is spreading. In one month alone last year
in the president's home state of Texas, a single Baptist preacher added
2000 "Patriot Pastors" to the rolls. On his website he now encourages
pastors to "speak out on the great moral issues of our day...to restore
and reclaim America for Christ."

Alas, these "great moral issues" do not include building a moral
economy. The Christian Right trumpets charity (as in Faith Based
Initiatives) but is silent on social and economic justice. Inequality in
America has reached scandalous proportions: a few weeks ago the
government acknowledged that while incomes are growing smartly for the
first time in years, the primary winners are the top earners - people
who receive stocks, bonuses, and other income in addition to wages. The
nearly 80 percent of Americans who rely mostly on hourly wages barely
maintained their purchasing power. Even as Hurricane Katrina was hitting
the Gulf Coast, giving us a stark reminder of how poverty can shove poor
people into the abyss, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that last year
one million people were added to 36 million already living in poverty.
And since l999 the income of the poorest one fifth of Americans has
dropped almost nine percent.

None of these harsh realities of ordinary life seem to bother the
radical religious right. To the contrary, in the pursuit of political
power they have cut a deal with America's richest class and their
partisan allies in a law-of-the-jungle strategy to "starve" the
government of resources needed for vital social services that benefit
everyone while championing more and more spending rich corporations and
larger tax cuts for the rich.

How else to explain the vacuum in their "great moral issues" of the
plight of millions of Americans without adequate health care? Of the
gross corruption of politics by campaign contributions that skew
government policies toward the wealthy at the expense of ordinary
taxpayers? (On the very day that oil and gas prices reached a record
high the president signed off on huge taxpayer subsidies for energy
conglomerates already bloated with windfall profits plucked from the
pockets of average Americans filling up at gas tanks across the country;
yet the next Sunday you could pass a hundred church signboards with no
mention of a sermon on crony capitalism.)

This silence on economic and political morality is deafening but
revealing. The radicals on the Christian right are now the dominant
force in America's governing party. Without them the government would
not be in the hands of people who don't believe in government. They are
culpable in upholding a system of class and race in which, as we saw
last week, the rich escape and the poor are left behind. And they are on
they are crusading for a government "of, by, and for the people" in
favor of one based on Biblical authority.

This is the crux of the matter: To these fundamentalist radicals there
is only one legitimate religion and only one particular brand of that
religion that is right; all others who call on God are immoral or wrong.
They believe the Bible to be literally true and that they alone know
what it means. Behind their malicious attacks on the courts ("vermin in
black robes," as one of their talk show allies recently put it,) is a
fierce longing to hold judges accountable for interpreting the
Constitution according to standards of biblical revelation as
fundamentalists define it. To get those judges they needed a party
beholden to them. So the Grand Old Party - the GOP - has become God's
Own Party, its ranks made up of God's Own People "marching as to war."

Go now to the website of an organization called America 21
(http://www.america21.us/Home.cfm ). There, on a red, white, and blue
home page, you find praise for President Bush's agenda - including his
effort to phase out Social Security and protect corporations from law
suits by aggrieved citizens. On the same home page is a reminder that
"There are 7,177 hours until our next National Election....ENLIST NOW."
Now click again and you will read a summons calling Christian pastors
"to lead God's people in the turning that can save America from our
enemies." Under the headline "Remember - Repent - Return" language
reminiscent of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell reminds you that "one of
the unmistakable lessons [of 9/11] is that America has lost the full
measure of God's hedge of protection. When we ask ourselves why, the
scriptures remind us that ancient Israel was invaded by its foreign
enemy, Babylon, in 586 B.C. ....(and) Jerusalem was destroyed by another
invading foreign power in 70 A.D. .... Psalm 106:37 says that these
judgments of God ...were because of Israel's idolatry. Israel, the apple
of God's eye, was destroyed ... because the people failed... to repent."
If America is to avoid a similar fate, the warning continues, we must
"remember the legacy of our heritage under God and our covenant with Him
and, in the words of II Chronicles 7:14: 'Turn from our wicked ways.'"

Just what does this have to do with the president's political agenda
praised on the home page? Well, squint and look at the fine print at the
bottom of the site. It reads: America21 is a not-for-profit organization
whose mission is to educate, engage and mobilize Christians to influence
national policy at every level. Founded in 1989 by a
multi-denominational group of pastors and businessmen, it is dedicated
to being a catalyst for revival and reform of the culture /and the
government/ ." (emphasis added).

The corporate, political and religious right converge here, led by a
president who, in his own disdain for science, reason and knowledge, is
the most powerful fundamentalist in American history.

What are the stakes? In his last book, the late Marvin Harris, a
prominent anthropologist of the time, wrote that "the attack against
reason and objectivity is fast reaching the proportions of a crusade."
To save the American Dream, "we desperately need to reaffirm the
principle that it is possible to carry out an analysis of social life
which rational human beings will recognize as being true, regardless of
whether they happen to be women or men, whites or black, straights or
gays, employers or employees, Jews or born-again Christians. The
alternative is to stand by helplessly as special interest groups tear
the United States apart in the name of their "separate realities' or to
wait until one of them grows strong enough to force its irrational and
subjective brand of reality on all the rest."

That was written 25 years ago, just as the radical Christian right was
setting out on their long march to political supremacy. The forces he
warned against have gained strength ever since and now control much of
the United States government and are on the verge of having it all.

It has to be said that their success has come in no small part because
of our acquiescence and timidity. Our democratic values are imperiled
because too many people of reason are willing to appease irrational
people just because they are pious. Republican moderates tried
appeasement and survive today only in gulags set aside for them by the
Karl Roves, Bill Frists and Tom DeLays. Democrats are divided and
paralyzed, afraid that if they take on the organized radical right they
will lose what little power they have. Trying to learn to talk about God
as Republicans do, they're talking gobbledygook, compromising the
strongest thing going for them - the case for a moral economy and the
moral argument for the secular checks and balances that have made
America "a safe haven for the cause of conscience."

As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one
lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies - political
bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies - cannot be appeased;
they have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is
never easy; these guys don't fight fair; "Robert's Rules of Order" is
not one of their holy texts. But freedom on any front - and especially
freedom of conscience - never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping
someone else will do the heavy lifting. Christian realism requires us to
see the world as it is, without illusions, and then take it on.
Christian realism also requires love. But not a sentimental, dreamy
love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theological Seminary and
wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics to political life,
put it this way: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we
will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible,
responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the
pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."



Christian realists aren't afraid to love. But just as the Irishman who
came upon a brawl in the street and asked, "Is this a private fight or
can anyone get in it?" we have to take that love where the action is. Or
the world will remain a theatre of war between fundamentalists.

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.