Excerpt from the Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Awards
By Bill Moyers • October 20, 2004

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, “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 judge 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.”

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 Baptists 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 sides 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 looks 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 on 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, “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, “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.”

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.

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April 2005