Jesus Has Been Hijacked
By Bill Moyers, New York City, NY
Note: On July 2 at the American Baptist Churches Biennial in Denver, CO, 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, who read Moyer`s speech.
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. But even as we speak I am in Europe fulfilling a long-standing commitment . There is no one I would rather 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 under-secretary of defense in 2003, declaring that George Bush had been elevated to the presidency by a miracle" and, who, 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." Who among us did not cringe at the official of the United States Air Academy justifying the taunting and harassing of non-Christian cadets-including (and I quote) "a dirty Jew."
Ten years ago, when then Representative 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 CentralBaptistChurch in Marshall, Texas, we believed in a free church in a free state.
My spiritual forbearers did not take kindly to living under theocrats who 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, Massachusetts. 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 rack or in the stocks for failing to salute the prevailing orthodoxy. It put and end to the subpoena of conscience by magistrates who ordered citizens to support churches they did not attend and recite creeds that they did 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, and 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, hedonist, and lobbyists, sent prowling the halls of Congress like a Gucci-shod 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, who would shame today`s Republican Party and shake up timid Democrats. 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 today you have bestowed on me.
