These remarks were made by Bill Moyers on receiving an award at the
7th Annual Walter Cronkite Faith & Freedom Award Gala,
October 20, 2004 at the Palace Hotel in New York city.

Bill Moyers’ Speech, courtesy of the InterFaith Alliance website –
http://www.interfaithalliance.org/site/pp.asp?c=8dJIIWMCE&b=257084

Award Recipient Remarks of BILL Moyers

DR. GADDY: Bill Moyers once referred to himself as a journalist and a pilgrim. In his journalism and on his pilgrimage, he has made many of us better people and challenged our Nation to be true to the vision that led to its founding. Bill Moyers.

MR. MOYERS: It was love at first sight, Judith, and it will be love at last sight. Thank you.

Thank you, Erica. I sometimes imagine myself in the Canterbury Tales, and when I turn, you’re right there.

It’s a wonderful, wonderful image, a real spiritual seeker.

It is such a good and wonderful moment to be among so many kindred spirits, Welton, all of you, and in particular to be united with certain kindred souls, from far in the past like Ann and Floyd Craig, Mary Louise and Herb Valentine, whom Judith mentioned, to some very kindred souls from our middle years, Ann Mallouk and Beverly and Ralph Ahlberg to Judith, to my pastor and in‑house prophet, Jim Forbes, and Bettye.

Betty and Jim were married in 1964. Judith and I were married in 1954. Betsy and Walter were married in 1940. I think that is about 154 years of richer and poorer, better or worse, sickness and health, til death do us part.

I’ve known Walter for a long time now, all the way back to when I was White House Press Secretary, and we were often on the opposite side of the fence. It was Walter who said, “Moyers’ credibility is so bad, he can’t believe his own leaks.”

That came right after a quarrel when I objected to some report on the CBS Evening News. The President heard about the exchange that I had had on the phone with Walter and called me the next morning. He said, “Did you call Walter Cronkite, a biased network stooge?”

I said, “Yes, Mr. President, I did.”

“And did you call him a ‘toady’ for the Eastern Establishment Press?”

“Yes, Mr. President, I did.”

“And did you call him a liar?”

I said, “No, Mr. President. I forgot that.”

Walter, of course, became the most trusted man in America. LBJ was jealous. He thought Walter had gotten too big for his britches, and I remember when Walter celebrated his fiftieth birthday, I suggested to the President that he call him and wish him Happy Birthday.

The President thought a moment and said with a little bit of sarcasm in his voice, “It costs too much to call to Bethlehem.”

Walter, of course, became my colleague, my mentor, my friend, and the one who day in and day out, I try to model our journalism after. And it is such a wonderful occasion to share this platform with him.

He and I share platforms from time to time. I received the Walter Cronkite Award from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at the University of Arizona a few years ago. The next year, I gave him the Spirit of Liberty Award from People for the American Way. It has gone on like that until now. There are a lot of organizations that just have one plaque that they pass back and forth between Walter and me.

And then, of course, Jim Forbes and I ‑‑ I mean, I spoke at Riverside recently, and when Jim was taking notes furiously, he came to me after it and he said, “Wow, that was a good speech,” and I said, “It should have been. I got it off your website.”

So my speech has become his sermons and his sermons became my speeches, just like Ralph Ahlberg’s used to be my commentaries on the CBS Evening News.

I was so intrigued a moment ago when Galen was talking about the Jefferson and the roots of conscience in America because I traced my own spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England named Thomas Helwys, who believed that God and not the king was the 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 is what he said, quote, “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 for it. Neither may the King be judged 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.” Now, there’s an interfaith alliance.

The King, by the way, was the good King James I. Yes, that King James as in the King James Bible. Challenges to his authority did not leave his head resting easily on the pillow at night. 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.

We are not called upon to pay that price, but we are called upon to stand for what we believe. In no small part because a Baptist like Thomas Helwys and other free thinkers, the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular republic. The state was not to choose side between competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment.

Another man’s belief said, “Thomas Jefferson neither picks my pocket nor breaks my bones.” It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The red man who lived here first had more than his pockets picked by religious folk. The Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than their bones broken by religious folk. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant heritage and “practically everyone look like me,” we often fail the tolerance test. Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and above all, free thinkers had to struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix master of American assimilation.

So our troubled past asks us tonight to ask in this new era when we are looking even less and less alike, when we are polarized and politicized as we have not been since the election of 1800, when the losers threatened to take to the streets with arms, how are we to avoid the intolerance, the chauvinism, the fanaticism, the bitter fruits that mark the long history of world religions when they crowd each other in the busy streets? This is no rhetorical question.

My friend, Elaine Pagels, who appeared on our show not long ago, says, “There’s practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other people’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 personal identities, but they could also be twisted into a noose.

I keep a folder in my credenza marked “Holy War.” It bulges with Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict: teenaged girls in North Africa shot in the face for not wearing a veil, professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom, the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque, Muslim suicide bombers bit on the obliteration of Jews, of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced on CNN 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 other in Nigeria.

There is a large folder in my desk marked “Timothy McVeigh,” blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people in part as revenge against the U.S. Government for killing David Koresh and his followers.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but the first strike at New York’s World Trade Center in 1993 was a religious act of terror. The second one in 9/11, claiming over 3,000 lives, was another act of religious terror. 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 itinerant preachers not only await the rapture, but believe they have an obligation to get involved politically to hasten the apocalypse that would bring to an end the world. Christians can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious war.

Consider the American general who has turned up as a force in the web of command and action leading to the torture and humiliation of prisoners in Iraq. General William Boykin, you may recall, is the commander who lost 18 men in Somalia trying to capture a warlord in the notorious “Black Hawk Down” fiasco of 1993. He later described the conflict as a battle between good and evil. “I knew,” he said, “that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was the real God, and his was an idol.” Boykin became a circuit writer for the religious right, actively in a group called the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Their manifesto summons warriors in, quote, “a spiritual battle for the souls of the nation and the world.” Traveling the country with his slide show, while an active member of the United States military in uniform, General Boykin declares that, quote, “Satan wants to destroy this nation. He wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.” “The forces of satan will only be defeated,” says the general, “if we come against them in the name of Jesus.”

You might have thought that kind of fatwa from a high military officer in uniform wearing the American insignia would have struck the powers that be in the Pentagon and White House as somewhat un‑American, if not un‑Christian, but not only has General Boykin been kept in office, he turned up as a principal in the chain of command leading to the Iraqi prison. It was Boykin who flew to Guantanamo and ordered Major General Jeffrey Miller, then in charge of prisoners at the highly secret Camp X‑ray, to go to Iraq and extend the methods practiced at X‑ray to the prison system there on orders of Secretary Rumsfeld.

This is the same General Boykin who last June publicly announced that, quote, “George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters. He was appointed by God.”

I am not making this up. “Onward Christian Soldiers” is back in vogue, and the 21st‑century version of the Crusades has taken on aspects of the ferocious righteous veracity that marked its predecessors.

“To be furious in religion,” said the Quaker William Penn, “is to be furiously irreligious.”

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has been brought to the very center of the Oval Office.

We live in a world infused with ideologies stoutly maintained, despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.

Theology and ideology are a lethal toxic weapon for democracy. These ideologues, religious, political, and journalistic, embrace a world view that cannot be changed because they admit no evidence to the contrary, and on the door of their religious belief, they hang a sign, “Do not disturb.” And that is why democracy is so disturbing to them.

For years now, the corporate, political, and religious right ‑‑ this is documented from 1971 on ‑‑ the religious, political, and religious right have been joined in an axis of influence whose purpose is to take back the gains of the democratic renewal in the 20th century and restore America to a rule of the elites that maintain their privilege and their power at the expense of everyone else.

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, when I went to Washington, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30‑fold. Four decades later, it is 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, but that is not the case.

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. It is not only household economics that is the only area where inequality is growing. We are losing the historic balance between wealth and commonwealth in this country, and we are experiencing 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 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 American democracy is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.

And what has been happening to the working and middle class in this country is not the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, but the direct consequence of corporate power, intellectual collusion, the rise of religious orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and political decisions favoring the powerful money 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 work forces 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. And we are seeing today the prophetic fulfillment of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he explained that the rule of money is just as dangerous to democracy as the rule of the mob.

Take note.

The corporate, political, and religious conservatives are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocate, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world and the greatest economic inequality in America since 1929, 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.

I know this sounds very much like a call for class war, but the class war was declared a generation ago in a book I read sitting on the couch in my study in a powerful paperback 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, and when we look back, it seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored it at the time.

As their cover, they formed and alliance with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who launched a cultural war to mask the fact that the very foot soldiers in that war were having their pockets picked by the very elites who had asked them to fight the cultural war.

Just as the war in Iraq is a class war being fought by young men and women whose only route to college is through war, so the cultural war is a great smoke screen for the continuing class war against the masses of American life.

Never has there been a need to recover the prophetic religious tradition, the great tradition of the Hebrew prophets, and the great prophetic mission of Jesus who in the 21st Chapter of Matthew lost his temper and threw the money changers out of the temple.

I am asking you, The Interfaith Alliance, that no matter what happens on the 2nd of November, this must not be just the end of a campaign, but the beginning of a movement to take America back, put America back on the track, and no matter who wins because there will be differences, but you are fooling yourself if you think a corporate Democrat is going to really crack this nut of inequality.

The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience fought for by men like Judas Spoke [ph], Thomas Helwys, and so many others.

Good luck, and God bless you.