To convey the tone of General Synod for those who did not attend, we asked Les Switzer to select the portions of Bill Moyers' keynote address that were the most meaningful to him.  

Photo left of Bill Moyers from Editor & Publisher

First, a positioning statement:  "Like other mainstream churches across the land, you [UCC] have been in the bull's eye of a highly organized and heavily funded campaign by corporate, political and religious forces who would stifle the prophetic voices that speak truth to power and call the Empire to repentance."

Another good quote for me, says Les, relates to saying one thing and doing another.   "Thomas Jefferson got it right. . . . But [by owning slaves] he lived it wrong. . . . He knew the truth, and he lived the lie. As we are [doing] today."

"So the authors of our freedom produced the Constitution that tolerated slavery and the cruel dispossession of Native Peoples . . . . And we've been wrestling with the contradiction in our nation's soul ever since, the conflict between power and justice."

He goes on to remind us of Job's "earliest indictment of poverty and injustice as intentional:" And my favorite: Job's "outcry defines evil and innocence as socially ordained arrangements of power."

He issues this warning for those who have ears to hear:  "America 's revolutionary heritage, and America's revolutionary spirit, life, liberty and the pursuit of justice, for government of, by and for the people – is under siege.  And if churches of conscience don't take the lead in their rescue and their revival, we can lose our democracy."

He provides detailed examples of America 's traumatic realities to illustrate the disconnect between power and powerlessness in America.  And he drives the point home by quoting Attorney General John Michell in the Nixon administration 30 years ago:   "This country is going so far to the right, you won't recognize it."

". . . a class war," says Moyers, "was declared from the top down against the idea and ideal of equality.   It has been driven ever since by a radical elite, seeking to gain ascendance over politics and to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that check the excesses of private power."

"We have the worst inequality in the world among industrial democracies. . . . It's like inviting a hundred people over for some pie, carving the pie into 5 slices, giving 4 of the slices to just one person, and leaving one slice for the remaining 99."

Moyers used information from the Wall Street Journal and The Economist to support his message!

In what he termed an "altar call," and drawing on the story of Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple of God , Moyers declared:

 

 ". . . it is a small, committed, determined People of Conscience who can turn this country around!"

". . . this new struggle for a just world . . . [is] not a partisan affair.  God is not a liberal or conservative.   God is not a Democrat or Republican. . . .  But to see whose side God is on, just go to the record.  It's the widow and the orphan, the stranger and the poor who are blessed. . . It is kindness and mercy that prove the power of faith, and it's justice that measures the worth of the state, not empire."

"This is the Jesus who drove the money changers out of the temple of Jerusalem, and it is this Jesus called back to duty who will drive the money changers out of the temples of democracy."

In these few paragraphs, I can only suggest how powerful this speech is.   The entire text is well worth reading!  Just key into your browser "Moyers at General Synod" or go to www.UCC.org which offers tapes/dvds of Moyers and more.                                                                            --Les Switzer