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[Don Bowen <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

by Bill Moyers

<http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0408&artic>http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0408&article=040810

I trace my spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England
named Thomas Helwys who believed that God, and not the King, was Lord
of conscience. In 1612 Roman Catholics were the embattled target of
the Crown and Thomas Helwys, the Baptist, came to their defense with
the first tract in English demanding full religious liberty. Here's
what he said:

"Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic]
consciences than ours, and that is none at all. …For men's religion
is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer it; neither
may the King be judge betwixt God and man. Let them be heretics,
Turks, Jews, or whatever. It appertains not to the earthly power to
punish them in the least measure."

The king was the good King James I - yes, that King James, as in the
King James Bible. Challenges to his authority did not cause his head
to rest easily on his pillow, so James had Thomas Helwys thrown into
prison, where he died.

Thomas Helwys was not the first or last dissenter to pay the supreme
price for conscience. While we are not called upon in America today
to make a similar sacrifice, we are in need of his generous vision of
religious freedom. We are heading into a new religious landscape. For
most of our history our religious discourse was dominated by white
male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage,
people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of
faith, race, and gender, rarely reached the mainstream. It's
different now. Immigration has added more than 30 million people to
our population since the late 1960s. The American gene pool is
mutating into one in which people like me will be a minority within
half a century.

America is being re-created right before our eyes. The world keeps
moving to America, bringing new stories from the four corners of the
globe. Gerard Bruns calls it a "contest of narratives" competing to
shape a new American drama.

The old story had a paradox at its core. In no small part because of
Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other "freethinkers," the men who
framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular
republic. The state was not to choose sides among competing claims of
faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment.
Another person's belief, said Thomas Jefferson, "neither picks my
pocket not breaks my bones." It was a noble sentiment often breached
in practice. The Indians who lived here first had more than their
pockets picked; the Africans brought here forcibly against their will
had more than their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a
Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked alike, we often
failed the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to
struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant
mix-master of American assimilation.

So our troubled past with tolerance requires us to ask how, in this
new era when we are looking even less and less alike, are we to avoid
the intolerance, the chauvinism, the fanaticism, the bitter fruits
that mark the long history of world religions when they jostle each
other in busy, crowded streets?

It is no rhetorical question. My friend Elaine Pagels, the noted
scholar of religion, says "There's practically no religion I know of
that sees other people in a way that affirms the other's choice." You
only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred
by claims of exclusive loyalty to one's own kin, one's own clan,
one's own country, and one's own church. These ties that bind are
vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted
into a noose.

Religion has a healing side, but it also has a killing side. In the
opening chapter of Genesis - the founding document of three great
faiths - the first murder rises from a religious act. You know the
story: Adam and Eve become the first parents to discover what it
means to raise Cain. God plays favorites and chooses Abel's offering
over Cain. Cain is so jealous he strikes out at his brother and kills
him. Sibling rivalry for God's favor leads to violence and ends in
death.

Once this pattern is established, it's played out in the story of
Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and down
through the centuries in generation after generation of conflict
between Muslims and Jews, Jews and Christians, Christians and
Muslims, so that the red thread of religiously spilled blood runs
directly from East of Eden to Bosnia, Beirut, Belfast, and Baghdad.

In our time alone the litany is horrendous. I keep a file marked
"Holy War." It bulges with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal
conflict. Of teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not
wearing a veil. Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male
and female students in the same classroom. Of the fanatical Jewish
doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque.
Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of the
young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced
to the world that "Everything I did, I did for the glory of God." Of
Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians
and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each another in
Nigeria.

Meanwhile, groups calling themselves the Christian Identity Movement
and the Christian Patriot League arm themselves, and Christians
intoxicated with the delusional doctrine of two 19th-century
preachers not only await the rapture but believe they have an
obligation to get involved politically to hasten the divine scenario
for the Apocalypse that will bring an end to the world. Sadly,
Christians, too, can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious
war. "Onward Christian Soldiers" is back in vogue and the 2lst
century version of the Crusades has taken on aspects of the righteous
ferocity that marked its predecessors. "To be furious in religion,"
said the Quaker William Penn, "is to be furiously irreligious."

THIS IS A TIME of testing - for people of faith and for people who
believe in democracy. How do we nurture the healing side of religion
over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy
against the contagion of a triumphalist theology in the service of an
imperial state? At stake is America's role in the world. At stake is
the very character of the American Experiment - whether "we, the
people" is the political incarnation of a spiritual truth - one
nation, indivisible - or a stupendous fraud.

There are two Americas today. You could see this division in a
little-noticed action this spring in the House of Representatives.
Republicans in the House approved new tax credits for the children of
families earning as much as $309,000 a year - families that already
enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts - while doing next
to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale. This, said
The Washington Post in an editorial called "Leave No Rich Child
Behind," is "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal
policy. You'd think they'd be embarrassed but they're not."

Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today.
Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America
than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of
workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than
they did 20 years ago; not the fact that working people are putting
in longer and longer hours just to stay in place; not the fact that
while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44
million Americans - eight out of 10 of them in working families - are
uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Nor is the political class embarrassed by the fact that the gap
between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years - the
worst inequality among all Western nations. They don't seem to have
noticed that we have been experiencing a shift in poverty. For years
it was said that single jobless mothers are down there at the bottom.
For years it was said that work, education, and marriage is how they
move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we
didn't expect it - among families that include two parents, a worker,
and a head of the household with more than a high school education.
These are the newly poor. These are the people our political and
business class expects to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving
downward.

For years now a small fraction of American households have been
garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large
corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented
levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the
gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20
percent was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold. Such
concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of
society was benefiting proportionately and equality was growing.
That's not the case. As an organization called The Commonwealth
Foundation Center for the Renewal of American Democracy sets forth in
well-documented research, working families and the poor "are losing
ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household
stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation,
and civic life."

And household economics "is not the only area where inequality is
growing in America." We are also losing the historic balance between
wealth and commonwealth. The report goes on to describe "a fanatical
drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and
statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that
have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the
excesses of private power." That drive is succeeding, with drastic
consequences for an equitable access to and control of public
resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water, and
other natural resources to media and the broadcast and digital
spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and
even to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is
undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.

And what is driving this shift? Contrary to what you learned in
civics class in high school, it is not the so-called "democratic
debate." That is merely a cynical charade behind which the real
business goes on - the none-too-scrupulous business of getting and
keeping power so that you can divide up the spoils. If you want to
know what's changing America, follow the money.

Veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew says "the greatest change
in Washington over the past 25 years - in its culture, in the way it
does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions
that go on here - has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey
Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly 20 years for the Wall
Street Journal, put it even more strongly: "[Campaign cash] has
flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink
the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed
of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives."

It is widely accepted in Washington today that there is nothing wrong
with a democracy dominated by the people with money. But of course
there is. Money has democracy in a stranglehold and is suffocating
it. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the
dirty tricks of the Religious Right in South Carolina and big money
from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections
today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which
both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the
highest bidder."

THAT'S THE SHAME of politics today. The consequences: "When powerful
interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions,
they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms
that pay the price, and most of them never see it coming," according
to Time magazine. Time concludes that America now has "government for
the few at the expense of the many."

That's why so many people are turned off by politics. It's why we
can't put things right. And it's wrong. Hear the great Justice
Learned Hand on this: "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be
one commandment: ‘Thou shalt not ration justice.'" He got it right:
The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have
the right to buy more cars, more clothes, or more vacations than
anyone else. But they don't have the right to buy more democracy than
anyone else.

I know: This sounds very much like a call for class war. But the
class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by a
wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of
the Treasury. By the end of the '70s, corporate America had begun a
stealthy assault on the rest of our society and the principles of our
democracy. Looking backward, it all seems so clear that we wonder how
we could have ignored the warning signs at the time.

What has been happening to the middle and working classes is not the
result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of
corporate activism, intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious
orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of
political decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were
determined to get back the privileges they had lost with the
Depression and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social
contract; to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in
search of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was
supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control.
Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do
with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the
idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."

To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public
policy, they funded conservative think tanks - the Heritage
Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise
Institute - that churned out study after study advocating their
agenda.

To put political muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable
political machine. Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post, one of the
few journalists to cover the issues of class, wrote: "During the
1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging
competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the
legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded
the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built
alliances with the Religious Right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority
and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who happily contrived a
cultural war as a smokescreen to hide the economic plunder of the
very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the war.

And they won. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in America and
the savviest investor of them all, put it this way: "If there was a
class war, my class won." Well, there was, Mr. Buffett, and as a
recent headline in The Washington Post proclaimed: ‘Business Wins
With Bush."

Look at the spoils of victory: Over the past three years, they've
pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts. More than half of the
benefits are going to the wealthiest 1 percent. You could call it
trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down
was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them
to cut services and raise taxes on middle class working America.

Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75
trillion over the next 10 years. These deficits have been part of
their strategy. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn
us, when he predicted that President Reagan's real strategy was to
force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering
federal deficits of historic dimensions. President Reagan's own
budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much. Now the leading
right-wing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to
"starve the beast" - with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting
from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the U.S. government is
so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

Take note: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the
political and Religious Right are achieving a vast transformation of
American life that only they understand because they are its
advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the
greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled
our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural
deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for
retirement; and they are systematically stripping government of all
its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

And, yes, they are proud of what they have done to our economy and
our society. If instead of producing a news magazine I was writing
for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this
crew in Washington have been saying. The president's chief economic
adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is
good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers
reports that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be
considered manufacturing workers. The president's labor secretary
says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock
market is the ultimate arbiter." And the president's Federal Reserve
chair says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in Social Security -
but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway.

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it.
This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die
laughing.

But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans and the
poor - and to the workings of American democracy - is no laughing
matter. It calls for righteous indignation and action. Otherwise our
democracy will degenerate into a shell of itself in which the
privileged and the powerful sustain their own way of life at the
expense of others and the United States becomes another Latin America
with a small crust of the rich at the top governing a nation of
serfs.

OVER THE PAST few years, as the poor got poorer, the health care
crisis worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated,
and our political system was bought out from under us, prophetic
Christianity lost its voice. The Religious Right drowned everyone
else out.

And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and
proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the
poor." The very Jesus who told 5,000 hungry people that all of you
will be fed, not just some of you. The very Jesus who challenged the
religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath,
who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the
outcast, who raised the status of women and treated even the tax
collector like a child of God. The very Jesus who drove the money
changers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked and turned
into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion of the
dispossessed. Hijacked, he was made over into a militarist, hedonist,
and lobbyist, sent prowling the halls of Congress in Guccis, seeking
tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapon systems
that don't work, and punitive public policies.

Let's get Jesus back. The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker
named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight-hour
work day. Let's get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise
up against the sweatshop. The Jesus who called a young priest named
John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a
minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor - 10 years before the
New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged the church
to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile
workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble
cutters in Vermont. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis
to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.

That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through
the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege.
Mel Gibson missed that. He missed the resurrection - the spiritual
awakening that followed the death of Jesus. He missed Pentecost.

Our times cry out for a new politics of justice. This is no partisan
issue. It doesn't matter if you're a liberal or a conservative, Jesus
is both and neither. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or
Republican, Jesus is both and neither. We need a faith that takes on
the corruption of both parties. We need a faith that challenges
complacency of all power. If you're a Democrat, shake them up. If
you're a Republican, shame them. Jesus drove the money changers from
the temple. We must drive them from the temples of democracy. Let's
get Jesus back.

But let's do it in love. I know it can sound banal and facile to say
this. The word "love" gets thrown around too casually these days. And
brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another. We're
still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald. The smoke still
rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East Timor. The walls of
Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has love done? Where is there
any real milk of human kindness?

But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his
book of essays Justice and Mercy, where he writes: "When we talk
about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental.
Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our
family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history,
toward the universe of humankind."

What I'm talking about will be hard, devoid of sentiment and
practical as nails. But love is action, not sentiment. When the
church was young and fair, and people passed by her doors, they did
not comment on the difference or the doctrines. Those stern and
taciturn pagans said of the Christians: "How they love one another!"
It started that way soon after the death of Jesus. His disciple Peter
said to the first churches, "Above all things, have unfailing love
toward one another." I looked in my old Greek concordance the other
day. That word "unfailing" would be more accurately rendered
"intense."

Glenn Tinder reminds us that none are good but all are sacred. I want
to think this is what the founders meant when they included the
not-so-self-evident assertion that "all men are created equal." Truly
life is not fair and it is never equal. But I believe the founders
were speaking a powerful spiritual truth that is the heart of our
hope for this country. They saw America as a great promise - and it
is.

But America is a broken promise, and we are called to do what we can
to fix it - to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows us
how: "One loving soul sets another on fire." But to move beyond
sentimentality, what begins in love must lead on to justice. We are
called to the fight of our lives.

Bill Moyers, host of PBS' Now with Bill Moyers, has received more
than 30 Emmy Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism. Moyers
was senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News and Special
Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. He holds a Master of
Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. This
article is adapted from Moyers' keynote address ( available by
clicking here) at Call to Renewal's Pentecost 2004 conference this
May in Washington, D.C.

Don Bowen
Awl Knotted Up Woodworking
Valley Center, CA             http://www.braingarage.com