"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
News Vet Bill Moyers Raps 'the Rapture'
Fundamentalist Evangelism Driving Bush Foreign Policy, Journalist Asserts
Posted 7:34 p.m., Oct. 7, 2004
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Kevblog note: What follows is a partial transcription of a very powerful speech delivered by the veteran newsman and former White House aide Bill Moyers to a group of journalists Sept. 11, at the Society of Professional Journalists national convention in New York. In it, Moyers sounds an alarm about the enormous challenges facing reporters who try to make sense of an increasingly senseless world, to an audience that increasingly is unwilling to have its illusions shattered and its ideologies disturbed.Its centerpiece is a pointed challenge to journalists to delve into one of the crucible issues of our time: the religious fundamentalism that Moyers suggests drives the foreign policy of George W. Bush, represented by a vast swath of Bible Belt Americans that Moyers maintains welcomes a global Christian war versus Islam, as signaling the end-times prophecy of "the Rapture."
A final note: I Interviewed a number of high-profile journalists at the SPJ conference, including Moyers, Nat Hentoff, Clarence Page and others about the state of journalism, the challenges it faces and the danger to the business from its undeniable tendency toward creeping irresponsibility and eroded standards. I hope to post a column based on that reporting as early as this weekend.
-- Kevin Featherly
... [Journalism] has never been easy, and it's getting harder. For more reasons then you can shake a stick at.
One is the sheer magnitude of the issues we need to report and analyze.
My friend Bill McKibben enjoys a conspicuous place in my pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment; his bestseller "The End of Nature" carried on where Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" left off. Recently in Mother Jones, Bill described how the problems we cover -- conventional, manageable problems, like budget shortfalls, pollution, crime -- may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable situations.
He puts it this way: If you don't have a job, "that's a problem, and unemployment is a problem, and they can both be managed: You learn a new skill, the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates to spur the economy. But millions of skilled, well-paying jobs disappearing to Bangalore is a situation; it's not clear what if anything the system can do to turn it around."
Perhaps the most unmanageable of all problems, Bill McKibben writes, is the accelerating deterioration of the environment. While the present administration has committed a thousand acts of vandalism against our air, water, forests, and deserts, were we to change managers, Bill argues, some of that damage would abate. What won't go away, he continues, are the perils with huge momentum -- the greenhouse effect, for instance. Scientists have been warning us about it since the 1980s. But now the melt of the Arctic seems to be releasing so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is alarmed that a weakening Gulf Stream could yield abrupt -- and overwhelming -- changes, the kind of climate change that threatens civilization.
How do we journalists get a handle on something of that enormity?
Or on ideology. One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. How do we fathom and explain the mindset of violent exhibitionists and extremists who blow to smithereens hundreds of children and teachers of Middle School Number One in Beslan, Russia? Or the radical utopianism of martyrs who crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center? How do we explain the possibility that a close election in November could turn on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index?
That's what I said -- the Rapture Index; Google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the left-behind series, which have earned multi-millions of dollars for their co-authors, who earlier this year completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George W. Bush's armor of the Lord. 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 millions of people believe to be literally true.
According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its "biblical lands;" when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins.
"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 which follow.
I'm not making this up. We've reported on these people for our weekly broadcast on PBS, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you that they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why they have staged confrontations at the old temple site in Jerusalem. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men."
As the British writer George Monbiot has pointed out, for these people the Middle East is not a foreign policy issue, it's a biblical scenario, a matter of personal belief.
A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed; if there's a conflagration there, they come out winners on the far side of tribulation, inside the pearly gates, in celestial splendor, supping on ambrosia to the accompaniment of harps plucked by angels.
One estimate puts these people at about l5 percent of the electorate. Most are likely to vote Republican; they are part of the core of George W. Bush's base support. He knows who they are and what they want. When the President asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, over 100,000 thousand angry Christian fundamentalists barraged the White House with emails and Mr. Bush never mentioned the matter again.
Not coincidentally, the administration recently put itself solidly behind Ariel Sharon's expansions of settlements on the West Banks. In George Monbiot's analysis, the President stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli expansion into the West Bank than he stands to lose by restraining it: "He would be mad to listen to these people, but he would also be mad not to."
No wonder Karl Rove walks around the West Wing whistling "Onward Christian Soldiers." He knows how many votes he is likely to get from these pious folk who believe that the Rapture Index now stands at 144 -- just one point below the critical threshold at which point the prophecy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the sky is filled with floating naked bodies, and the true believers wind up at the right hand of God. With no regret for those left behind. (See George Monbiot. The Guardian, April 20, 2004.)
I know, I know: You think I am bonkers. You think Ann Coulter is right to aim her bony knee at my groin and that O'Reilly should get a Peabody for barfing all over me for saying there's more to American politics than meets the Foxy eye. But this is just the point: Journalists who try to tell these stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged and dismissed.
This is the very kind of story that illustrates the challenge journalists face in a world driven by ideologies that are stoutly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. Ideologues -- religious, political, or editorial ideologues -- embrace a worldview that cannot be changed because they admit no evidence to the contrary. And Don Quixote on Rocinante tilting at windmills had an easier time of it than a journalist on a laptop tilting with facts at the world's fundamentalist belief systems.
For one thing, you'll get in trouble with the public. The Chicago Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about half of those surveyed said there should have been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those people don't want the facts to disturb their belief system about American exceptionalism.
The poll also found that five or six of every 10 Americans "would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic."
No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.
-- Bill Moyers, a veteran newsman and former special assistant to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, is retiring as host of PBS-TV's "NOW with Bill Moyers"
