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Features > February 9, 2005

Blind Faith

By Bill Moyers

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The offspring of ideology and theology are not always bad but they are always blind. And that is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

One-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup Poll is accurate, believes the Bible is literally true. This past November, several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in what is known as the “rapture index.”

These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans. Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre: Once Israel has occupied the rest of its “bibli-cal lands,” legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I’ve reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That is why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. That is why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations, where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.” For them a war with Islam in the Middle East is something to be welcomed—an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The rapture index—”the prophetic speedometer of end-time activity”—now stands at 153 (http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html).

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? As Glenn Scherer reports in the online environmental journal Grist, millions of Christian fundamentalists believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but hastened as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

We’re not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half of the members of Congress are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian-right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian Coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who before his recent retirement quoted from the biblical Book of Amos on the Senate floor: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.” He seemed to relish the thought.

Onward Christian soldiers

And why not? There’s a constituency for it. A 2002 Time/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the Book of Revelations are going to come true. Tune in to any of the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or flip on one of the 250 Christian TV stations across the country and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible?”

These people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America’s Providential History, which contains the following: “The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie … that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.” However, “[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s earth … while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.” No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He turned out millions of the foot soldiers in this past election, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

Once upon a time I thought that people would protect the natural environment when they realized its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It’s not that I don’t want to believe that—it’s just that I read the news and connect the dots.

Immoral imagination

Mike Leavitt, the former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment—a mandate for an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources.

The Environmental Protection Agency had even planned to spend $9 million—$2 million of it from the administration’s friends at the American Chemistry Council—to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children’s clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this and then look at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer—pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; Thomas, age 10; Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, “Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.” And then I am stopped short by the thought: “That’s not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.”

And I ask myself: “Why? Is it because we don’t care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?”

What has happened to our moral imagination?

The news is not good these days. I can tell you that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free—free to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk.

What we need is what the ancient Israelites called “hocma”—the science of the heart, the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.

Bill Moyers is the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

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  • Reader Comments

    Few are probably surprised with the Bush administration’s policies today now that he has had four years to build a record. So, in spite of the fact that he won by a meager 2.5% on November 2004, nobody should doubt that he will govern the next four years exactly as he did during the first.

    Namely, everything that he proposes to do now, including finishing off government agencies, called “starve the beast,” loathed by the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute to name just a few, will be legislated by what he and his budget slashers consider an absolute and overwhelming mandate. In other words, no discussion, no public debate, no accountability or bipartisan support either to the US Congress or the people, will occur nor should it be expected. In this we can be positive because this is exactly how his first four years were conducted.

    Whether Bush violates Title 6 and Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with over 70% of the religious organizations receiving taxpayer money for his favorite faith-based programs, violations of the First Amendment Establishment Clause on the separation of church and state (think Intelligent Design and Creationism mandates in public schools), violations of international treaties which have held fast for generations guaranteeing humane treatment of prisoners and detainees, whether foreign or US citizens, violations of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, Sixth Amendment violations guaranteeing the right of the accused to a quick and speedy public trial, or any and all laws international and US Constitutional, Bush has nothing but contempt and revulsion.

    These are simply obstacles in his drive for an absolute autocracy and totalitarian power. Existing laws and treaties are impediments to be treated as nuisances while Bush and his parrots like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declare the need to dispense with freedoms in order to pursue what they call a “new war” and a “different kind of war,” refrains she used over and over again at her US Senate confirmation hearings.

    Yes, all must be relegated to the growing trash heap pile of “quaint and obsolete” documents which were written with such reverence for the rights of all citizens by our Founding Fathers.

    Yet, as the stunning Knight report so graphically states in the survey of 112,000 US students, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an entire generation, to the delight of Bush and his radical assault on all of our Constitutionally-guaranteed liberties and freedoms, is emerging as the next mass group-think population that is eerily reminiscent of the end of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the ascendancy of the NAZI Party.

    Posted by Richard on Feb 9, 2005 at 3:52 PM

    Knowing that Moyer’s interviews with Joseph Campbell turned a scholar of the histories of religion into a ‘feel good’ guru, I’m not inclined to trust his perceptions on matters religious. But hey! I’m free to follow my bliss.

    Posted by Mircea Eliade on Feb 9, 2005 at 3:54 PM

    Yes, Mircea, you are free to follow your bliss. But not, I’m afraid, for long. As America as we knew it is being destroyed before our eyes. Don’t take your freedoms for granted; they are but sunlight in the grass.
    The hatred of the earth is a predominant Christian/ old testament theme. This, of course, goes hand in hand with hatred of women, the sons of Ham, whatever their color, and of all things different. I really don’t think the message of Jesus included any of this. It was all made up in the Council of Nicea way back in the 3rd century AD.
    In his series, “The Power of Myth”, Moyers interviews J. Campbell about the necessity of finding a new belief system. I see the belief in the power of love as being a continuity through the ages. If you disagree with that perhaps you’d better re-read your Jeaus stories. Oh, and pick up the “Da Vinci Code” while you’re at it.
    Try to remember, John’s was a dream/hallucination based on the old testament idea of smiting one’s enemies. Maybe that worked for the Bronze Age, but it sure doesn’t seem to be working very well today.
    Not to mention the fact you’ve ignored large parts of Moyers’ writing here. He’s not saying Christians are wrong, simply that they are being mislead around by their noses. Is there much moral about lying to the American public in order to bomb Iraq, steal their oil, kill their people? Do you still believe their were weapons of mass destruction? I do know that propagands is a powerful tool against those who prefer to get their information spoon-fed to them. God Bless us all.

    Posted by Laurie Stetzler on Feb 9, 2005 at 5:02 PM

    The note signed “Mircea Eliade” is perhaps from a devotee of another University of Chicago “guru”, Leo Strauss?

    I have no idea what Mircea Eliade might have said about Moyer’s observations, but the glib “follow your bliss” attributes to Moyer a less than serious attitude. I didn’t like the series of interviews Moyers had with Campbell either. In fact I couldn’t stand to watch them so I cannot comment on their content at all.

    But the phenomenon Moyers is presently describing, the readiness, the relief with which Americans are checking their minds at the door as they allow the present monstrous group, driven by nothing but greed of one sort or another, to seize power first and subsequently to spout their “philosophical” nonsense thereafter is terrifying and worth studying.

    I always used to wonder how the Nazis could have come to power in Germany. I no longer need wonder. A whole society gives up its will to accept its past and to confront its future, abdicating all power to a clique with a “will"… but why here and now?

    We didn’t need wheelbarrows for our marks when thei whole thing began. Certainly 9/11 was a terrible shock, but since then the entire nation has handed over its collective will to these monsters, covered its eyes, plugged its ears, and is waiting for the country to crash, as we all know it must given its present course and the “will” of those in power to “stay the course”.

    It didn’t, and doesn’t now have to be this way… you know? Do you know? Is anybody listening?

    Posted by John Francis Lee on Feb 9, 2005 at 8:33 PM

    Yes

    Posted by Kenneth D. Brown on Feb 9, 2005 at 11:24 PM

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