By Bill Moyers
July-August 2005
On July 2 at the American Baptist Churches Biennial in Denver, Colo., veteran reporter
and ordained Baptist minister Bill Moyers was given the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Accepting the award on his behalf was family friend, James M. Dunn. Dunn read a
portion of Moyers’ acceptance speech, which contained reflections on freedom of
conscience and church-state separation.
I do not deserve this award. On the other hand, I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that,
either. So thank you from the depth of a grateful heart.
I wish that I could have made it. I would like to be with you in person. There is no one I
would rather accept this award for me than my soul-brother James Dunn. Actually, he
and Howard Moody truly deserve this honor.
There could not be a more timely moment for you to be proclaiming once again freedom
of conscience as the well-spring of our faith and our freedoms. The militant rhetoric of
holy war echoes around the globe and, sadly, from the precincts and pews of our own
country.
Who among us does not wince at the Republican congressman who said that “Democrats
cannot help but demonize Christians.”
Or Pat Robertson speaking of liberal America doing to evangelical Christians “what Nazi
Germany did to the Jews,” and of non-Christians as “termites destroying institutions that
have been built by Christians.”
Who does not remember Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, deputy undersecretary
of defense in 2003, declaring that George Bush had been elevated to the
presidency by a “miracle” and who said, speaking of his encounter with a Somali
warlord, “that I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God
and his was an idol.”
Ten years ago, when then Rep. Charles Schumer of New York held a special hearing on
violence and harassment by militia groups, his office was deluged with hate calls and
faxes, many stamped with the hot fury of religious anger. One message warned him:
“You should make no mistake that you are a conceited, arrogant [expletive]. You will
suffer physical pain and mental anguish before we transform you into something a bit
more useful … a lamp shade or wallets or perhaps soap.”
Ten years ago Arlen Specter, the moderate Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, ran
for his party’s nomination for President. His avowed purpose was to save the party of
Lincoln from extremism. He described what he called “a continuum from Pat Buchanan’s
declaration of a ‘holy war’ at the Republican National Convention to Randall Terry
calling for ‘a wave of hatred’ to ‘the guy at Pat Robertson’s law school who says
murdering an abortion doctor is justifiable homicide to the guys who are pulling the
triggers.'” When Senator Specter spoke out against the radical agenda of the religious
right at the Iowa Republican convention, he was booed and jeered.
That was the time Thomas Kean, the former governor of New Jersey, tried to warn his
fellow Republicans against giving control to dogmatists.
He, too, was booed–and then announced that he would not run for the Senate because it
had fallen under the grip of the radical religious right.
What was anticipated a decade ago has now been realized.
To be furious in religion, said the Quaker William Penn, “is to be furiously irreligious.”
Over my long life I have traveled a long way from home, but I have never left the ground
of my being. At the Central Baptist Church in Marshall, Texas, we believed in a free
church in a free state.
My spiritual forbearers did not take kindly to living under theocrats that embraced
religious liberty for themselves but would deny it to others. “Forced worship stinks in
God’s nostrils,” thundered the dissenter Roger Williams as he was banished from
Massachusetts for denying the authority of Puritans over his conscience. Baptists there
were only a “pitiful negligible minority,” but they were denounced as “the incendiaries of
the commonwealth” for holding to their belief in the priesthood of believers. For refusing
tribute to state religion Baptists were fined, flogged and exiled. In 1651 the Baptist
Obadiah Holmes was given thirty stripes with a three-corded whip after he violated the
law in taking communion with an elderly and blind Baptist in Lynn, Mass. Holmes
refused the offer of friends to pay his fine so that he could be released. He refused the
strong drink they said would anesthetize the pain. Sober, he endured the ordeal; sober
still, he would leave us with the legacy that “it is the love of liberty that must free the
soul.”
Over time and at great struggle, the First Amendment has made of America “a haven for
the cause of conscience.” It checked what Thomas Jefferson called “the loathsome
combination of church and state” which had been enforced in the old and new world alike
by “weapons of wrath and blood” as human beings were tormented on the rock or in the
stocks for failing to salute the prevailing orthodoxy. It put an end to the subpoena of
conscience by magistrates who ordered citizens to support churches they did not attend
and recite creeds that they did not believe in.
The Constitution of the new nation would take no sides in the religious free-for-all that
liberty would make possible and human nature would make inevitable. It would neither
inculcate religion nor inoculate against it. For my Baptist ancestors, this delicate balance
between faith and freedom encourages neither atheism nor animosity toward religion. We
learned that Americans can be loyal to the Constitution without being hostile to God.
I confess that I do not understand the new breed of our co-religionists who invoke the
separation of church and state to protect themselves against encroachment from others
but denounce it when it protects others against encroachment from them; who use it to
shelter their own revenues and assets from taxation but insist that taxes paid by others
support private sectarian instruction in pervasively religious schools; who loath any
government intrusion into their sphere but are laboring mightily to change federal tax
laws so that churches may intrude upon government; who stand foursquare behind the
First Amendment when they exercise their own right to criticize others–sometimes with a
vengeance and often with vitriol, as when Jerry Falwell circulated videos implicating
President Clinton in murder; but who when they are challenged or criticized, whine and
complain that they are being attacked as “people of faith.”
Make no mistake about it. The language of religion has been placed at the service of a
partisan agenda. God is being invoked to undermine safeguards for public health and the
environment, to demonize political opponents, to censor textbooks, to ostracize “the
other,” to end public funding for the arts, to cut taxes on the rich, to misinform and
mislead voters.
The fact is: Jesus has been hijacked. The very Jesus who stood in his hometown and
proclaimed, “The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor.” The very
Jesus who told 5,000 hungry people that all people–not just those in the box seats–would
be fed. The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the
hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the
outcast, who raised the status of women, and who treated even the despised tax collector
as a citizen of the Kingdom. The indignant Jesus who drove the money changers from the
temple has been hijacked and turned from a friend of the dispossessed into a guardian of
privilege, a militarist, and a hedonist, sent prowling the halls of Congress like a Guccishod
lobbyist, seeking tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapon
systems, and punitive public policies against people without power or status.
The struggle for a just world goes on. It is not a partisan affair. God is neither liberal nor
conservative, Republican nor Democrat. To see whose side God is on, just go to the
Bible. It is the widow and the orphan, the stranger and the poor who are blessed in the
eyes of the Lord; it is kindness and mercy that prove the power of faith and justice that
measures the worth of the state. Kings are held accountable for how the poor fare under
their reign. Prophets speak to the gap between rich and poor as a reason for God’s
judgment. Poverty and justice are religious issues, and Jesus moves among the
disinherited.
This is the Jesus who challenges the complacency of all political parties. He drove the
money changers from the temple of Jerusalem; I believe today he would drive them from
the temples of democracy.
It is this Jesus you honor by your faithfulness to the greatest of all Baptist principles–our
belief that we are most likely to hear God’s eternal call to love and justice and redemption
in the still small voice of the soul.
Thank you for that fidelity, for the work you do and the witness you render–and for the
recognition that you have bestowed on me.
