Bill Moyers “A Time for Heresy”
Bill Moyers’ “A Time for Heresy” at TomPaine.com is from a speech he gave last week when establishing a religious freedom scholarship at Wake Forest Divinity School. His tale of the Tom DeLay/Jack Abramoff/Ralph Reed brand of corruption in Washington is summed up simply: “American democracy is threatened by perversions of money, power, and religion.” Moyers continues:
For a quarter of a century now a ferocious campaign has been conducted to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks that sustained America’s social contract. The corporate, political, and religious right converged in a movement that for a long time only they understood because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries.Their economic strategy was to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe for even cheaper labor, and relieve investors of any responsibility for the cost of society. On the weekend before President Bush’s second inauguration, The New York Times described how his first round of tax cuts had already brought our tax code closer to a system under which income on wealth would not be taxed at all and public expenditures would be raised exclusively from salaries and wages.
Their political strategy was to neutralize the independent media, create their own propaganda machine with a partisan press, and flood their coffers with rivers of money from those who stand to benefit from the transfer of public resources to elite control. Along the way they would burden the nation with structural deficits that will last until our children’s children are ready to retire, systematically stripping government of its capacity, over time, to do little more than wage war and reward privilege.
Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God’s favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral. [emphasis added]
[…]
This is the heresy of our time – to wrestle with the gods who guard the boundaries of this great nation’s promise, and to confront the medicine men in the woods, twirling their bullroarers to keep us in fear and trembling. For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy. [emphasis added]
No one can deliver a speech quite the way Bill Moyers can. People of the religious left—as well as the rest of us—need to put him alongside Michael Lerner and Jim Wallis as examples of a religious-based morality that doesn’t surrender its principles to money and power. Moyers’ sentiments, coupled with rising frustration with the scandals of GOP Washington, can help turn the tide in November.
(Thanks to Peter at The Daou Report for the tip.)