Bill Moyers: This Is A Time for Heresy, Democracy is For Sale

by Bill Moyers

(Excerpts from a speech given at Wake Forest University)

This is a time for heresy. American democracy is threatened by perversions of money, power, and religion. Money has bought our elections right out from under us. Power has turned government of, by, and for the people into the patron of privilege.

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 beneficiariesTheir 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 childrens 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 Gods favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.

At the intersection of these three strategies was money: Big Money.

holding preachers and politicians to a higher standard than they want to serve has marked the entire history of both religion and politics. It is the conflict between the religion of the priests ancient and modern and the religion of the prophets.

It is the vast difference between the religion about Jesus and the religion of Jesus.

Yes, the religion of Jesus. It was in the name of Jesus that the young priest John Ryan ten years before the New Deal crusaded for child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor. And it was in the name of Jesus that Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis to march with sanitation workers who were asking only for a living wage.

This is the heresy of our time to wrestle with the gods who guard the boundaries of this great nations 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.

Please check the Featured Stories section of www.ohvec.org for a link to the entire, powerful speech by Bill Moyers.