Bill Moyers describes himself as a “Christian Realist”. He gave a speech recently at a Christian seminary where he was receving an award.

The speech was akin to a declaration of holy war again the Fundamentalist movement in the USA. In the long speech, Moyers uses the 4th anniversary of the 911 attacks as a jumping off point to warn against the dangers of allow religious Fundamentalists to obtain power.

Moyers consolidates the major arguments I have heard over the years. For example, he discusses the seemingly unholy alliance between Christians and the wealthy, where Christians are pushing harder for tax breaks for the wealthy than they are of improvements in social justice for the poor.

I could go on and on. Read a small snippet below, and go over to TomPaine.com and read the whole thing.

Moyers is not trying to shake anyone’s faith - he is instead trying to make people realize the danger to Democracy inherent in allow Fundamentalism to turn us into a theocracy.

The essay is powerful and is a keeper.

I expect Fundamentalists will question Moyers’ faith, because that’s the tendency of Fundamentalists when faced with dissenters. Moyers calls them “Bullies”, and says we should oppose them at every turn, and not appease them.

Im my experience, there are different breeds of Christian Fundamentalist in the USA. We have seen in the last 25 years a form of “Political Christian Fundamentalist”. But I think there are just as many religious fundamentalists who think it’s sinful for believers to be so enmeshed with politics.

I keep waiting for the large number of “Liberal” Fundamentalists to take over the movement and rebuke the Religious Right for its ambition for power and its embarrassing alliances with big business and the wealthy.

TomPaine.com - 9/11 And The Sport of God

My spiritual forbears did not take kindly to living under theocrats who embraced religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others. “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils,” thundered the dissenter Roger Williams as he was banished from Massachusetts for denying Puritan authority over his conscience. Baptists there were a “pitiful negligible minority” but they were agitators for freedom and therefore denounced as “incendiaries of the commonwealth” for holding to their belief in that great democracy of faith—the priesthood of all believers. For refusing to pay tribute to the state religion they were fined, flogged, and exiled. In l651 the Baptist Obadiah Holmes was given 30 stripes with a three-corded whip after he violated the law and took forbidden communion with another Baptist in Lynn, Massachusetts. His friends offered to pay his fine for his release but he refused. They offered him strong drink to anesthetize the pain of the flogging. Again he refused. It is the love of liberty, he said, “that must free the soul.”

Such revolutionary ideas made the new nation with its Constitution and Bill of Rights “a haven for the cause of conscience.” No longer could magistrates order citizens to support churches they did not attend and recite creeds that they did not believe. No longer would “the loathsome combination of church and state”—as Thomas Jefferson described it—be the settled order….

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We can’t wiggle out of this, people. Alvin Hawkins states it frankly: “This is a problem we can’t walk away from.” We’re talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what’s on God’s mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.

True, people of faith have always tried to bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American laws and morals—this very seminary is part of that tradition; it’s the American way, encouraged and protected by the First Amendment. But what is unique today is that the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties—the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is—and they are driving American politics, using God as a a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.

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As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies—political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies—cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these guys don’t fight fair; “Robert’s Rules of Order” is not one of their holy texts. But freedom on any front—and especially freedom of conscience—never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. Christian realism requires us to see the world as it is, without illusions, and then take it on. Christian realism also requires love. But not a sentimental, dreamy love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theological Seminary and wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics to political life, put it this way: “When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means…being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind.”