Reading notes

Bill Moyers’ Now on PBS is my favorite news/discussion program. Bill and David Brancaccio strike me as “fair and balanced,” at least as thoroughly as humans can be, rather unlike Fox News which claims to be. At minimum they bring fairness and balance to the table. Without doubt Now is the most thoughtful news and discussion program I know of on television. I sometimes just sit with my mouth open, awed by Now’s articulate and knowledgeable guests. It demonstrates what good TV can be, IMO.

Bill’s views are informed and undergirded by his theology, and it shows; he’s thought deeply about every opinion he shares. I love that. (He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.)

Bill spoke at Call to Renewal’s Pentecost 2004 conference this past May in Washington, D.C.:

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. …

This hijacked Jesus sounds rather like Patriotboy’s ongoing “Republican Jesus” political satire cartoons (example), which are a devastating indictment of how the Religious Right has remade Jesus in their own image.

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. …

The love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book of essays Justice and Mercy, where he writes: … “Basically love means … being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind.”

Yes. In light of this understanding of love, how can anyone support an administration that refuses to be responsible to anyone, to recognize its mistakes, to accept responsibility for anything?

I have a friend whose mind was finally changed because “Bush lied to my face” about the Iraq war. My analogous point of no return is this administration’s pathological irresponsibility that will tell any lie, smear any messenger, delude any constituency to weasel out of the consequences of its actions.

As Bill observes, power corrupts across the board; hence, Democratic party leaders aren’t inherently better. But they are, generally speaking, teachable, and therein lies some hope.

Thanks, Bill.