Bill Moyers Journal; 417; Faith in Politics

BILL MOYERS' JOURNAL

"Faith in Politics"

May 28, 1979

BILL MOYERS' JOURNAL

Transcript of "Faith in Politics"

BILL MOYERS: Set off an explosion in England that has been heard around Christendom.

Dr. EDWARD NORMAN : I believe that Christianity is in great danger of becoming secularized and no longer an authentic religion by taking its terms of reference and its view of the place of men and women in the world from the ordinary secular politics and views of society available today.

MOYERS: On the other side of the Atlantic, this man is firing back.

Rev. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN: While there's a danger of secularization, I think the basic concern of the church to combat poverty and to combat injustice has been there long before the so-called secular views of our time have come about, and if the secular order wants to promote justice, I can only rejoice.

MOYERS: In the next hour, faith in politics: two views. I'm Bill Moyers.

MOYERS: One of the oldest of all disputes has reappeared with new energy and controversy. It is the argument over whether religion should concern itself only with the soul, pointing us mainly to the life hereafter, or whether it speaks also to the here and now, with something unique to say to social, political and economic conditions. In one form or another, the debate has flourished since the great prophets of Israel summoned to judgment the kings of Israel and Judah, and it has divided synagogues, churches, cathedrals, families and nations. Today the arguments are being heard again under the spires of Christendom.

In the 1960s the issue was joined by clergymen and laity who claimed it their Christian duty to oppose segregation and to march for civil rights legislation. On the front line was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King. One of his most famous statements of the era was a letter from the Birmingham Jail answering other Christian ministers who had accused him of mixing religion and politics. The Vietnam War further divided Christians. Even as the President's own minister prayed for divine guidance upon the Commander in Chief, other clergy were denouncing the war as immoral and organizing politically to stop it. The Catholic Church has been embroiled in its own modern controversies over faith in politics. Opponents have charged Church fathers with trying to impose their theological views of abortion on a secular society, and dissident Catholics have marched against their own hierarchy in protest. Pope John Paul II encountered another dispute when he journeyed earlier this year to Mexico.

Some bishops in Latin America have argued that radical change for the impoverished masses can only come by political means and that the Church must join with revolutionary forces, including Marxists, to challenge the status quo. For many Catholics, that is heresy.

It is no less heresy to many Protestants when the World Council of Churches supports militant forces seeking to overthrow white rule in southern Africa. That, they say, is a political act, beyond the sphere of faith.

NORMAN: My lectures will not be greatly concerned with the technical arguments to be found in the theological reinterpretations which are required to represent Christianity as a scheme of secular redemption.

MOYERS: One voice raised against the corporate action of the church in politics belongs to Dr. Edward Norman of Cambridge, England. He is the Dean of Peterhouse and lecturer in History at Cambridge University; an author, chaplain to students, member of the Anglican Church. He was relatively unknown last fall when he was invited to deliver the prestigious Reith Lectures on the BBC. His thesis that Christianity should con- cern itself primarily with cultivating personal spirituality and not with changing the social order provoked an uproar in high places, including criticism from the Archbishop of Canterbury. But his remarks have won considerable and enthusiastic response, particularly at the grass roots, and Oxford Press has now published them in a book called Christianity and the World Order.

I invited Dr. Norman to New York to discuss his ideas, and we talked first across from my home on the grounds of the Cathedral of the Incarnation, the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island.

Among the responses to the Reith Lectures, I've heard you referred to as an agile polemicist, a con artist, and a mad dog. How do you explain such intense criticism to a soft-spoken, mild-mannered, apparently obscure professor from Britain?

NORMAN: Well, you know, during the last couple of decades or so, in the church in England and here in the United States as well, in Canada and the Western world, we've seen the emergence of a really quite well- defined radical and liberal avant-garde in the church's leadership. And they've been very persuaded that they should so alter the understanding and practice of Christianity that it's compatible with modern intelligence, with people who think and live and work in a world of great change. Their fear, I think, when the Reith Lectures took place, was that here was somebody who was going to speak for the great hidden majority which they have managed to exist of people in the pews, and the parish ministers and priests, who are unpersuaded by the sort of way in which they'd wanted to change the church into a vehicle for the modern times, as they see it. And I think their fear was that here was some person, some area of debate which was putting arguments if I may say so, intelligently which they had assumed by nature would be ignorant, from the back benches.

MOYERS: Do you think that what you said in the lectures spoke in some new way for the mass of the hidden majority, as it has been called, of people who felt they no longer had a voice in Christendom?

NORMAN : That's right; that's exactly what I think happened. And that gave me personally great pleasure.

MOYERS:

What were you trying to say in those lectures?

NORMAN : If you strip it down, I think I was actually trying to say that the church has been seduced by secularization.

MOYERS: Give me an example to enable me to see a concrete..

NORMAN : I'll give you an example which is not as concrete as you probably want; because what caused some offense to some people was my allegation that it was an ordinary Western liberal thinking, that there was as much politicization of Christianity as there was in, say, Marxism; or if you can find it, as in South Africa maybe, or certainly in South America, very conservative or militarist understandings of Christianity. The example I would give would be where we say at once that Christianity equals equalitarian democracy, or it equals human rights.

MOYERS: Christian positions were reflecting, increasingly, liberal political postures.

NORMAN : There was the assumption that what we think of as an ordinary agreed common morality for our age and period was in some sense also fundamental Christianity. Now, I thought this was all too relative, it was - furthermore, it was also to me very suspicious that the modern understanding of the faith after 2,000 years should suddenly almost exactly coincide at every joint and juncture with understanding of man and the world which was of very recent manufacture. The world now sees its probems in terms of a new secular ethic which is deeply moralistic; there's hardly anything that we don't claim ought to come within the sphere of the state these days and it's an increasing trend, however may have its setbacks, as in my own country recently, apparently. But it's an on-going trend. In that situation I think Christians have to be very clear that the critique they bring to bear upon the divided political moralism of our world is actually Christianity and not another copy of the same secular moralism given a Christian label by people who believe in it passionately and have every good reason to do so, but who must be clear that what Christianity should bring to bear as a critique of society politics not that world at all but a distinct understanding of man.

MOYERS: Are you saying that in this process Christianity has become increasingly identified with the left, or of liberalism?

NORMAN: Yes; that is well, not liberal. I don't know about liberal as well as the left. That's, I'm afraid, an accident of things, that's because most of the instances tend to be on the left side of politics or in the liberal center. There are just as many on the right, but they're not as evident to the gaze in some ways. Now, one of the difficulties with the left, the left, I may say, is that its rival view of what's achieved by social engineering is a very exact one, and it attracts Christian moralists to it because it has within itself much that we would all agree is ethically acceptable and proper. What it fundamentally, unfortunately, doesn't have, to my judgment, is a sound view about the very great limits which are imposed upon all of us by our natures.

MOYERS: Are you saying that the main concern of Christianity is my relationship to eternity, not my political and economic considerations?

NORMAN : Yeah, in a way.

The distinction I would wish to test for this proposition is between political involvement and making sure the thing you involve is actually Christianity. And there a key question to ask is whether indeed Christ really is to be separated from the moral idealism of each age. Perhaps I'm wrong, and many modern theologians would think this, and perhaps Christ is not separable from the age. Perhaps in every age you look back at the past it has merely offered up its own understanding of Christ and called it unique. My understanding is that even that was the case in the past; because there was no separation of the sacred and secular because the sacred and the religious worlds -- and the secular worlds -- were so closely involved in a common wealth of ideas for the sake of mankind, it would not have been so sinister as it now is. But now the problems are make-and-break ones, because the secular outlooks in the modern world are creating a materialist environment for our conception of man, which if it's fully realized would leave no room for the dimension of spirituality at all, in my understanding.

MOYERS: Is it fair to conclude from the lectures that you think the West is suffering a spiritual crisis?

NORMAN : That's fair. That's exactly what I think. I think that the leaders of its own thought, who are charged with the treasure to preserve, to pass on, are trying, for very good reasons of their own-- they're deeply convinced that they're good men but in practice are surrendering too much of authentic Christianity, as I would say, to make it compatible with the secular world of values. That's what I think.

MOYERS: To test his thesis, Edward Norman traveled last year to Eastern Europe, southern Africa and Latin America. It was in the third world that what he saw most distressed him: clergy, some of them imported from Europe and the United States, translating their moral and religious concerns into political action hardly distinct from Marxist agendas. In Latin America he encountered a new school of Christian thought called liberation theology, which holds that injustice and oppression justify the use of revolutionary violence for political change. It has a Christian edge, but, Dr. Norman wrote, "liberation theology is too cozy with Marxism, too critical of capitalism" and adds up, in his words, to "ordinary political indoctrination. As such, he concluded, it has been employed by radical priests and nuns who, while conscientiously concerned for poor people, are guilty of forsaking the ultimate Christian aim of the soul's salvation for a contemporary political ideology.

Many of the governments in South America are repressive and authoritarian. Should the church stand back, or should it speak to their repression?

NORMAN : That, too, is a complicated question. Repression of what and of whom? If you mean that some fundamental human rights, as one would If say, are being denied, again, how do you translate it into actuality? you mean that people are being tortured, well yes, that's going to be accepted, I think, within our Western moral consensus as an improper thing to happen. On the other hand, on a world spectrum, looking at the various regimes which are available to us to judge, I doubt if it can seriously be maintained that Latin America has remotely among the worst to offer us. That's no reason for intervention or non-intervention by Christian bodies, but again, I think, in contemplating their role in society as critiques of government, they have two problems; one is to make sure, crudely, that in throwing their weight behind the opposition movements to regimes they're not going to bring into existence regimes which are less likely to further their own ulterior interests as men who are concerned with souls and their destiny. For the church to decide, "Right, here is oppression, is exact ly correct; that's what any Christian man and any man of decency would do anyway. But for the church then to say, well, in view of the fact that here are some of the fallible things which happen in human society since time began there's corruption here, there's oppression there, there's torture there; the normal state of mankind during most times to say right there our duty is to end this if we can, but then to see that there are X and Y and Z political forces doing the same thing, and X and Y perhaps not wishing to do the same thing but some other alternatives; they have to be sure in casting the weight of organized Christianity to one of these areas of political interest against the state that it is really Christianity that inspires them in doing this. And that's difficult for them to say. How can they really say, in the world of practical politics, that the Marxist political party is better at doing that than some Christian Democratic party, as some felt able to do at the time preceding Allende's Chile.

MOYERS: Many Roman Catholic priests in Latin America are involved in what is called liberation theology, aimed at ending poverty, discrimination, economic oppression. One activist priest defined it as a "combination of sociology, economics, political science, philosophy and Christian precepts that uses Marxist class analysis as a base for attempting to help the poor. Now, that doesn't sound so terrible, does it?

NORMAN : Why, if it was a true description it would not be so bad, but in fact they speak there as if the exponents of liberation theology have a monopoly on wishing to help the poor. Very far from it. What it does have is a monopoly of an ideological syncretism between Christianity and Marxism, and it does have a monopoly of that; and I don't think actually that the number of priests involved is that large. I have myself and indeed, as I described, I think, in the Reith Lectures --

I have myself visited a number of the poorest areas of Latin American cities. The example I gave, we think, was visiting some shanty towns north of Santiago in Chile, and most of the priests whose work I saw did not belong to the liberation theology school. What the liberation theologians have to confront is the fact that in their society what they're saying is actually unpopular, in very large areas. You'll remember, liberation theology is urban, and it's having to operate, often, most successfully through its programs of conscientization...

MOYERS: Conscientization?

NORMAN: Yes, a phrase invented some years ago in association with the name of Paulo Freire, who is a Brazilian exile now, works with the World Council of Churches and in Africa. Conscientization is a process of making people aware of how oppressed they are, by means of education. It's not neutral education, it's education with a political intention.

MOYERS: You don't see that as the role of a Christian clergyman?

NORMAN : I see the role of a Christian clergyman to educate people. It's been a long duty of the church to educate people.

MOYERS: But not to say to them, "You are oppressed, here are grievances"?

NORMAN : Education to me suggests the opening of the mind to the possible choice amongst values. I don't think conscientization remotely aims at that. It aims at making people aware of how oppressed they are that they should choose a Marxist critique of society as the way forward. And I don't know of anyone who's in the business of conscientization who doesn't

say that.

Indeed, the World Council of Churches Conscientization Kit, which is a packet of literature on the subject which is handed out to teachers in the scheme or several schemes; there are many of them are quite frank and open that their intention is to change society according to the analysis of Marxism, which they see as being the proper one. Now, I don't wish to sound as if I'm opposed to Marxism as such; as I said in the Reith Lectures, much of the social apparatus, which is used within Marxism to explain social fact, is actually true. The problem of regarding it as exclusively politically true, for somewhere like South America, is that what that country is faced with is an insoluble problem: too many people being born, and they're moving into the cities at too great a rate for the resources of that continent to allow to have ris- ing expectations to rise at the present rate. Now, there's no solution to that that there is; there's no known solution to that, short of controlled societies, of the Marxist sort, without doubt, or perhaps of the military regimes of the southern cone, maybe moving towards...

MOYERS: Democracy is out of the question?

NORMAN : I think not, but I mean, there's no when I say no known solution, no known solution within the terms of reference they offer you. That is to say, allowing people's expectations to suppose there is a scheme by political means by which you can within a reasonably foreseeable future time bring about some sort of social justice immediately.

MOYERS: You mentioned the World Council of Churches.

What do you think about the grants by the World Council of Churches to liberation movements in Southern Africa, especially to the Rhodesian Patriotic Front?

NORMAN: If you ask, why should the World Council involve itself in actually assisting, through one of its agencies, indirectly, the physical force movement to overthrow that government and overthrow, incidentally, the chance for its evolution, to change, even radical change -- then I would say that that was the World Council identifying as inherently Christian, which is exactly what's it's doing the movement of people against racism, as it sees it, in the direction of the creation of...some future ethical condition of things? Who knows what it'll be? I think that's an undue set of inferences along the line; it stretches credulity too far...

MOYERS: You think it's misguided as a Christian enterprise.

NORMAN: Well, it's not a Christian enterprise.

MOYERS: The World Council of Churches' support of the Patriotic Liberation Front...

NORMAN: Yes, I wouldn't describe it as a Christian enterprise, I would describe it as an enterprise by Christians who think they're performing Christianity, I would describe it as a set of ordinary political judgments based upon highly partial information.

MOYERS: And is this what you mean by the secularization of Christianity?

NORMAN : Yes, you see, I think they've rightly wished to eradicate racism from the world; so do you, so do I, so do all the people out there, on the whole. There are people who don't, and we know who they are; they're identifiable. In my judgment, they are not being Christian; though many of them confess Christianity, let's not condemn them because they happen to be racists, because in many other parts of their beings they're seeking to be good Christians, too. But they're flawed in this way, the way we're flawed in other ways. So I think the Christian view towards that part of southern Africa and its problems is to recognize that the levels of sin and evil are around all of us and to seek by political means the creation of a society which will offer people the opportunities of change.

MOYERS: Do you think South Africa deserves the moral indignation heaped upon it by many Christians, particularly Christians in your country and mine?

NORMAN : Yes, no that I don't, either -- I don't like the race policies of South Africa, which I believe to be wrong and morally insupportable. But let's be clear about this as well; it's a complicated phenomenon, and there are many virtues in South African society which will be destroyed if that society is brought down on the single test of not backing apartheid. I don't like all this association of culture and race. It offends the sort of Western values that I share with everybody around me; I'm not unusual in this. I think the South Africans are mistaken to associate, in the Homelands policy, race and culture, to say people of this culture will go there. I myself believe -- though there is a lot of racism in southern Africa, as there is in other societies, and perhaps it's more cultivated there than elsewhere, I don't know I do myself believe the government's declared intention that the policy of separate development is not racial discrimination in the sense that some race is being regarded as inferior, but as an attempt to isolate them into cultural units.

MOYERS: The issue is, do you think that a Christian body should be morally denunciatory of the South African government?

NORMAN: Well, I think that world opinion has been very helpful in forming the South African government.

MOYERS: But what about Christians? I mean, do you consider it a Christian witness for a body of Christians to condemn what's happening in South Africa?

NORMAN : No; but I do think it's a duty of Christians to say that they think that the race policies of South Africa are not particularly Christian ones: (Laughs.)

I'm not trying to be particularly evasive, it's a very complicated situation there. And I say to you if you look at it historically there's this long background of trying to preserve a culture, and though I think and you obviously think that apartheid is in itself inherently wrong, wicked, nevertheless it's set in a society which has managed spectacularly to achieve a very large area of personal liberty and freedom. Now. It's largely restricted to whites, you're about to say, I dare say.

MOYERS: (Laughing.)

NORMAN: And so it is, but nevertheless, the personal freedom that is enjoyed by blacks in southern Africa is greater than in many parts of independent Africa, both for economic and social as for political reasons. The trouble is they're not citizens, and that's a great insult. There's nothing so demeaning to a man as to live in his own country and not be a citizen in it. Now, for us to say at once, "Let's destroy this system because its race policies are an insult to a large part of the world, which is undoubtedly a description which fits, and to the poor people who live there -- but to say, "Let's destroy that" is to throw, as we say in England, the baby away with the bath water.

MOYERS: If you were a white Christian minister in South Africa, would you support the white minority government?

NORMAN : I very much doubt it. I would not venture to say no in the terms of how the question was asked. I think it's the duty of Christians to support the South African government, yes, because it's a properly constituted government, it has many good ethical qualities and many of its institutions are free and proper ones. I think a Christian minister would also have the duty to work upon that government by all means that were available to him, and that means political means within the structure of the politics as allowed to him, to seek to bring an end to a situation in which a man's skin color determines his citizenship which I find very offensive an issue. But let's be clear; if you compare what goes on in South Africa with what's

To the true in Africa in general, who's to say what is better or worse? north you have lots of states where there's no overt racism, there's tribalism, which is racism in a worse form, all over the place. Anywhere else in the world, it's no secret that people find governments deeply immoral for reasons of all sorts. The world spotlight is concentrated on South Africa for a number of reasons, some politically suggestive, some because of natural outrage of apartheid. I think that it's an area to approach with I don't a greater balance of judgment than we sometimes do, with caution. find myself an enemy of South African society and government, I find myself in a position of almost weeping that a wrong course was taken that has brought the whole thing into such disrepute.

MOYERS: But is weeping enough? Isn't it fair to say that your thesis would lead to a fairly complacent attitude on the part of Christians toward the social, political and economic injustices around them?

NORMAN : Well, I've just been arguing for Christians to involve themselves in political change in the area, so I doubt it.

MOYERS: But the World Council of Churches should not.

NORMAN : I don't see why the World Council of Churches should feel it's doing a specific Christian act in assisting guerrilla fighters to bring down a society by force of arms, no I don't.

MOYERS (over a scene of congregation singing, led by Rev. Coffin) : Edward Norman's many critics, few match the activism of the Reverend William Sloane Coffin.

COFFIN: I think you have to remember at all times that some of the

Socra- greatest heroes were in their own generation notorious lawbreakers. tes, Jesus -- he broke the holy law, which is much more a serious offense than breaking the civil law -- all the first apostles; Peter and Paul were in and out of jail with great regularity Milton, Bunyan, of course Gandhi and Nehru, and so forth -- that one always has to respect what is legal, but one has to be more concerned with what is right.

MOYERS: Bill Coffin is the senior minister of the famed Riverside Church in New York City, whose mission, he says, is to help the poor around it achieve political, social and economic justice. A former chaplain to Yale University, Bill Coffin was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1961 while on a freedom ride protesting racial segregation. In 1967 he was arrested and convicted in Boston for aiding and abetting draft resisters to the Vietnam War.

Bill Coffin, you have read the Reith Lectures and you've heard our conversation. What do you say to Edward Norman?

COFFIN: How much time?

(Laughter.)

COFFIN: The first thing I'd like to say to my dear Christian brother Norman is that I think you're being a little selective.

I understand your unhappiness at seeing Christians in bed with socialists. On the other hand, it seems to me that you are in bed with capitalists with the covers all the way up to your chin, very nicely tucked in. And I'm not an historian but occasionally do my research, and if I may recall to mind a lecture you gave two years ago, it ends up: "Capitalism has a good case to argue. is the case of freedom. Back here you say, "The World Council of Churches is an agency well known for the partisan nature of its judgment and activities; it is an enemy of capitalism. Then you even go on to say, "In the long term it may even prove to have been one of the forces making for the extinction of religion. The Christian churches should have been a guardian of the values of individual freedom." So the first thing I'd like to say, as I say to my Christian brother over here, is that I really think that you're being a little partisan yourself. Secondly, if you're going to criticize your enemy, you should be able to present his case to his satisfaction. You have not done that. That is not an adequate position on the World Council of Churches, that is not an adequate position on the liberation theologians. And the third thing I would say and I will stop at three is I don't think you know your Bible.

You see, you hardly mention the Bible. And it is true in the Bible that salva- tion let's talk about the Old Testament for a moment is a package deal, if you will, that can't be untied or negotiated, and politics and economics are all part of a package. The prophets are always talking about justice. Now, they do make a differentiation; the prophets say let justice roll down like mighty waters, they don't say which system of irrigation is the best. So the distinction has to be made, I'm in agreement with you on that. But I don't hear any passion from you. I don't hear any great concern about the arms race, which is about to bring us all to the brink, at least, of extinction; I don't hear any passioned concern from you on the part of 400 million people on the brink of starvation; I only hear you, you know, saying it's more complicated in South Africa. than all that. And the liberation theologian, you make very simple cases. But basically I think you're not being very Biblical, because saving one' soul is not a Biblical concept. Transcending oneself is. Loving one's neighbor is transcending oneself, that's not trying to save my soul which is a very self-centered enterprise, as a matter of fact.

And as far as Christ goes, in the New Testament, he was something more than a prophet; but he certainly wasn't something less than a prophet. And if he said no more than you, my dear Christian brother, the nails never would have graced his palm. Now, I'll stop at that, but it makes me a little bit mad, because he's attacking some of my friends and he's ignoring the best while he attacks the worst.

NORMAN : Well, I feel so cut to pieces I can hardly gather enough of myself to answer back.

COFFIN: Well, I'm sure you'll pull yourself together.

(Laughing.)

NORMAN : Now, let me see, first of all on capitalism, you've quoted some pieces from that lecture which are, as people say at this point, wholly out of context. What I defended in that article was a case based on the morality of choice for capitalism in Great Britain in the middle of the 1970's. It wasn't a carte blanche defense of capitalism in all countries at all times and it explicitly says that...

COFFIN: No, but you see...

NORMAN : It was not, furthermore...

COFFIN: .choice is so much more.

NORMAN : It was not, furthermore, in my intention that by defending capitalism one would be arguably identifiable with a particular ideology. And it's...

COFFIN: Capitalism isn't an ideology?

NORMAN : ...it's quite clear that the capitalist system is operable within a quite wide range of different sorts of ideology, as a matter of fact; it's an economic device....

COFFIN: Well, so is socialism.

NORMAN : It's a trick of the Marxists to make it out to be such a universal explanation of things, as you appear to have assumed, to make it seem as if capitalism is itself a great monolithic system. It's novel to me, particularly in a country like the United States, to which we in Europe still look for an example of the morality of choice whatever you may think about your country, we still have considerable belief in it and one of the things that we believe about it is that in this country also capitalism offers people the morality of choice and I say it in the face of all the Marxist cant about false consciousness. And that...

COFFIN: Now, let me interrupt you on..

NORMAN : ...and that, I say, says that..

·

COFFIN: Let's clarify this. What are we talking about when we're I understand you to say very clearly - and I'm in talking about choices? complete agreement with you -- that freedom of choice, when it comes to speech and when it comes to religion, let's say, or when it comes to Bill Moyers over here, freedom of the press and the media is a very good thing. But I don't hear you talking about the freedom of people to choose jobs, or the freedom of people to live in decent housing, freedom of people even to have decent clothes on. How about the right to eat? You know? You never talk about those things! So I can't help but conclude that you're quite indifferent.

NORMAN : I'm sorry that's the conclusion. As to you offered me three points of criticism. I haven't got to the second one yet...

(Laughter.)

NORMAN : It seemed to me that if you imagined that there's a lack of passion in the Reith Lectures, that's quite right.

COFFIN: You know, I think you're better as an adversary than you are as an advocate.

NORMAN : I'm glad

COFFIN: no, no, it's a value... Well, let me say...

NORMAN : If it can be said...

COFFIN: ...about your description...

MOYERS: Let him finish his point.

COFFIN: All right.

MOYERS: He's got to respond. (Laughter.) It's the Christian thing to do.

NORMAN : I'm not sure about that.

(Laughter.)

NORMAN : That's an example of what I've criticized.

(Laughter.)

NORMAN : If it may be said that there's no clear line that emerges from what I'm saying, I'm extremely proud of that, because it's the objectivity of an historian that people may go to his analysis and say, well, that may be true of an historian but we can't quite tell what his own line is. If that's what you've concluded by when you have said there's no passion in it, I'm extremely grateful to you for having conceded the major objective of my professional endeavor.

COFFIN: Yes, but you are purporting to represent what your belief in Christianity, and I'm saying Christianity that doesn't show more concern for the poor has to be questioned.

NORMAN: You're dead right, and that's precisely the point I was trying to make.

COFFIN: And...

NORMAN : Precisely the point I was trying to make in these lectures. There are approaches to the problems of suffering in the world to which the solution should be highly relative. Now, the example you gave in the third of your questions, to which I haven't been allowed to come as yet, was the canonical prophets of the Old Testament. As far as the Old Testament prophets are concerned, you could put up a very strong case for saying looking at the text critically, as I'm sure you would do, as I would do that the Judgment of God fell upon them, upon their society, not because they were not attending to social righteousness, shortness on the weights and all the rest of it, but because they were too political, because they had taken part in the power-politicking of the surrounding states, nation-states around them. That's completely compatible as an explanation with an understanding of the Old Testament prophets which would say and this has been held against me often enough --that God's Judgment on them was for not attending to the realm of the political. It cuts either way.

And we're left with the very point which you yourself made: that in fact the details of the arrangements of the society described by the prophets, to their great sorrow, was not within their purview or explanation.

MOYERS: Let me ask each of you what you think about a statement that you made in the Reith Lectures. Dr. Norman said: "The true Christ of history directed men to turn away from the preoccupations of human society. Is that the Christ that you recognize?

COFFIN: I think, you see, any position of faith at least, Biblically centered has political implications. It's good politics, it's bad politics, but it's never no politics. Because if you say you're above politics, you are in effect for the status quo. Now, I would argue that, let's say, when Christ entered the city on Palm Sunday he was deliberately taking on the trappings of the Messiah. He wasn't less political than the Messiah that was anticipated; he was, if you will, more political with the politics of eternity, as it were. That is, he certainly was for the poor...

is that the politics of eternity, being for the poor?

NORMAN : Sorry

COFFIN: No; no. He certainly let me finish now it's my turn to say that. He certainly was for the oppressed and against the oppressor; he was for the poor; but he was also..

NORMAN : poor?

COFFIN: says he was against the oppressor. ...for non-violence.

NORMAN: No, no these are bubbling out; one thing I want to know: what evidence was there that he was against the oppressor?

MOYERS: Fidel Castro said two years ago in Jamaica that Christ was a great revolutionary. You seem to disagree with Castro; you seem to agree with him.

COFFIN: Well, yeah, but he was a great revolutionary, not in a politimore, but he was something more than just a political revolutionary, but he was not something less than one, is what I'm trying to get at; see, that's another thing. And if I may cite the parable of the Last Judgment, when our Savior comes in all his glory and all his angels with him, he's not going to ask Norman if he saved his soul. He's going to ask you, did you feed the hungry? Did you clothe the naked? I mean, that's a pretty straight humanitarian...

NORMAN : Oh, certainly, that I agree with, yes. But you know, this is like human rights and things. We all agree that these are the objectives which we'll seek in society, as Christians, and often as non- Christians. But that's innocent, because when we come to take action in society, political value comes in; and that's the point at which there's a conflict of ideologies. So it's no good saying, well, you know, your duty is to be attentive to the poor; of course it is.

COFFIN: No, you see, you see, I don't think it's as innocent or as clear as that. I think it's much more like, all right, we're all in agreement that all human beings are created equal. But there are very few people in this world who feel the monstrosity of inequality.

And I feel you saying (mimicking British accent), "Oh, it's very obvious, you know, of course we feed the poor. But (laughing) I don't sense a real concern to do it.

NORMAN: No, you're a conscientization man, you see.

COFFIN: Yes, I make no apologies about that. So it's a

NORMAN: If people don't feel the miseries of inequality, it's because, you know, their expectations haven't been lifted to that level. relative statement.

COFFIN: They made a little...

NORMAN: Maybe they should be, maybe they should be.

COFFIN: But that's what conversion is all about, Brother. Not from this life to something more than life, but from something less than life to the possibility of full life itself, so that all human beings can have dignity and be treated with dignity and feel that God loves them and feel that their neighbor loves them..

NORMAN: Now, that's a classic statement of the position I was trying to say was not actually Christianity (laughing) in the Reith Lectures.

COFFIN: All right, that's why..

MOYERS: Why is it not Christianity?

NORMAN: Out of those come a whole set of contemporary liberal values.

COFFIN: It was there long before contemporary liberal values came around.

NORMAN : Not at all, not at all. The reverberations, as the rhetoric, the style of what you've just said, is a perfect example of the bourgeois radical...

COFFIN: Are you not more valu--

NORMAN : The bourgeois radical of the Western world at the present

time...

COFFIN: Norman, what a lot of nonsense.

MOYERS: What is a bourgeois radical?

NORMAN: Somebody who reflects the values of bourgeois society...

COFFIN: When Christ says....

NORMAN: ...using Marxist...

COFFIN: ...are you not of more value than many sparrows, what's he saying? Every human being is precious in the sight of the Lord, right?

NORMAN: That's certainly...

MOYERS: You disagree with that?

NORMAN: No, no, it's certainly right.

COFFIN: we're all... Then also precious in yours, right? Precious in his

NORMAN : You see, we agree when it comes to the basic fundamental rhetorical statements..

MOYERS: Where do you disagree, then?

NORMAN : Where we're disagreeing is that I believe that all these such statements are in themselves simple but true, but that as they become translated into the real world of actual action they take on political value. And that's the area where I begin to see you introducing a whole lot of contemporary concepts and then claiming they're still as the original is. Now. the point you were originally asking, whether Jesus was a revolutionary, is also very apposite. He patently was not. He was offered the chance to be a messiah -- in the classical sense a messiahship, to be a king in Israel -- and turned it down flat. He attacked the temporal worship of his own day for being itself too much compromise with the existing political structure.

MOYERS: You said a minute ago that you were a conscientization man. If that is so, why aren't you and other American clergymen passing out revolutionary handbills in Watts and Harlem and...Chicago?

COFFIN: It isn't a question of well, let's see. What conscientization is all about and Freire is one of the great educators; you gave him the back of your hand after saying that the church is involved with the business of education is really to make, first of all, to make people believe that God believes in them. I mean, from a religious point of view, it's like the parable of the talents and the difficulty of making a one-talent person believe that he or she is as precious in the sight of God as the person who has three or five talents.

Now, that's one of the great problems that the church faces in this world, where people really feel they're hopeless, that they're helpless and there's nothing that can be done. To make them believe that God believes in them and that Christ died for them is a very difficult thing to do. Now, to bring that kind of dignity to people is an essential religious enterprise. That's what education is fundamentally about.

MOYERS: Can a capitalist be a Christian?

COFFIN: Yeah. I'm not for socialism that much; I mean, if I think we have an industrial-military complex in this country, I'm sure they have one in the Soviet Union; I think the Soviet Union is one of the dreariest regimes, one of the most inefficient regimes. They eat that miracle corn, you plant it in the Ukraine, it comes up in Canada. I'm not holding any great...

MOYERS: Well, all I'm trying to get at is if...

COFFIN: Concern for the poor is certainly a Christian thing, and if you're callous to the poor it's hard to argue you're that Christian.

NORMAN : Well, of course.

COFFIN: And many capitalists seem to be...

MOYERS: But how do...

COFFIN: ...much more concerned with disorder than injustice.

MOYERS: But isn't Dr. Norman's issue how that concern is expressed? I mean, are you concerned about the poor?

NORMAN: Indeed, of course. Any Christian must be. What I don't think is possible is the simple one-dimension view which you have, if I may put it that way, of seeing a given thing you approve of and grasping it as essentially Christian, as if the others who approved of it did not have ulterior political motives of a sort which may or may not tend towards the creation of a kingdom of righteousness, which you want, on the one hand; and whether or whether you may not identify the particular means of achieving that good as being specifically or especially Christian -- in the great sum of things that the church, the Christian church, has managed to find itself happy with in 2,000 years. Had you lived 1,500 years ago, you'd have been one of the people who created feudalism, I've no doubt, because you'd have seen that as a central moral backdrop to your application of Christianity. You would have said, "Here are the poor, they need somebody a patron; somebody to look after them, a feudal overlord. the way in this wicked world they will find the goodies of the world given to them.

Today, you see it in some means of equality or other. Well, that's good. But it's highly relative.

COFFIN: Of course it's highly relative. First of all, let's agree that human nature is fallen, and it's very prevalent, all right? I heard you say that earlier, only you've seemed to say socialists deny that...

NORMAN : I didn't say that at all.

COFFIN: Well, okay, I'm glad to hear that. But, so that.. any solution to a problem is going to be defective...

NORMAN : Of course it is. That's something I did say, yes.

COFFIN: And nobody's going to undertake anything for one motive alone; all our motives are always going to be mixed. But something there are sins not only of commission, which seem to trouble you, but there are also sins of omission, which trouble me, I must say, very much. Particularly when I see that the poor in this world are simply getting much more help, often enough, from Marxists than they are from Christians.

NORMAN : Now, what makes you think that?

COFFIN: But the Christians.

NORMAN : Now, what makes you think that?

COFFIN: Hmm?

NORMAN : What makes you think that? On whose record does that go?

COFFIN: Well, I have traveled a bit and listened a bit and read a bit, and I find many, for instance, Latin American missionaries coming back from Latin America and I don't think they went down there with a big revolutionary message; many of the Maryknoll priests who went down there became...

NORMAN : But if you look...

COFFIN: Wait a minute, turned when they saw the oppression that was going on down there, which is so much worse even than in our own country; and they have come back saying time and again that Marxism seemed to have more genuine concern for the poor..

NORMAN: try at all.

COFFIN: Well, I don't see much oppression going on in this coun- But you do, and...

Well, if you weren't sitting in Bill Moyers' lovely back. yard but in the backyard of my church, I could show it to you very quickly...

NORMAN : But Marxists have been working in Latin America for a long time, in the case of Allende's Chile and the Peruvian regime; in its early phases after '68, they had an opportunity to put their work into effect. The result has been negligible in helping the poor.

COFFIN: No, I wouldn't say it went quite that way.

MOYERS: I asked you the question about being a Christian and a capitalist. I'll also ask you, could a socialist be a Christian, and the answer to both is obviously yes. If a Christian can be a capitalist and if a Christian could be a socialist, then isn't Dr. Norman's point valid, that you cannot appropriate either one as the purely Christian approach to...

COFFIN: I wouldn't take socialism and capitalism; I think it's harder, you see -- I was saying the Messiah came to the poor and the rich were nervous. Now, it's blandly assumed that the Messiah comes to the president of Tiffany with the same ease he comes to a mother on welfare in New York City. Now, that I would question, you see, as to whether it's a question of the rich and their attitude to the poor much more in my mind than it is a particular system like socialism or capitalism.

NORMAN : I think what Christ did say to the rich was if they allowed themselves to be preoccupied with the worldly things in their case it was riches

then they would not enter the Kingdom of Heaven; that I think is absolutely correct.

COFFIN: And that's hard to be a rich capitalist without being pre-occupied with those things, isn't it?

NORMAN: I don't see that.

COFFIN: Oh, you don't.

NORMAN: No. Not at all. Your value...

COFFIN: I see. You see them giving.

NORMAN : Yes, indeed I do, as a matter of fact. And in this country, if I may again say so -- (laughing) there's a very honorable record of large business corporations subsidizing things like this; this program, I mean.

COFFIN: That's charity as a substitute for justice, Dr. Norman.

NORMAN : Well, the great philanthropic institutions of this society, and including large parts of the beginnings of the welfare programs were paid for by capitalists.

COFFIN: I know, but I think we've learned that giving without receiving is a downward motion.

NORMAN : I'm sorry to hear you say that.

(Laughing.)

MOYERS: Bill Coffin, do you think that if the opponents of racism in southern Africa win, a more moral state of affairs will prevail?

COFFIN: Not necessarily, because by the time they get to that point a great deal of hatred may have been generated, and it could -- - at least for a while -- be an exceedingly vengeful kind of regime. But I'm certainly not going to point my fingers at the vengeful blacks without first pointing my finger at the basic exploitation on the part of the whites that produced it in the first place. One has to be very clear about that. And I'm amazed that you can't get madder about prejudice; it's a legal imperative, which is what it is in South Africa. And certainly that's the kind of thing that's going to bring about the Marxism which you hate so.

NORMAN : I don't hate Marxism so. I've given a number of reasons, I hope as coolly as I can, why I think that Marxism as a moral monopoly has some problems. But again, as I was saying about South Africa in particular, it seems to me that here is a society in which the black population is receiving better and more education than anywhere else in black Africa, and it is receiving, certainly, a better and higher standard of living and better housing. Its problem is one of paternalism. Its problem is...

NORMAN : Housing? That's like saying in the United States...

..is the indignity of men who are not given citizenship in their own country, let me repeat.

COFFIN: Which is a very central problem.

NORMAN : And it seems to me that on the other side of the equation is that here is a modern, rapidly growing Western-style society to which it is possible, by the natural operation of internal political mechanisms and there that is in my judgment a considerable probability; perhaps that's mistaken the South African government deserves our support and the hope that the world's moral loathing of apartheid will begin to continue to bear the fruits in adjustment of that system which have already begun. Now, I think that's a perfectly tenable position. I think that it's one which ought to be more wide ly expressed in the West than it is. And I think that the results of bringing that society with all its freedoms into collapse will be the creation of one of the most appalling regimes the world has seen.

COFFIN: I invite you, after we are finished here with Brother Moyers, to walk through Harlem with me and tell the citizens of Harlem who are sitting around on the street corner wondering if there's ever going to be a job opening for some of them, let's tell them that they're better off than some of the citizens of Bolivia that you've seen. Now, do you think that would be a really Christian enterprise?

NORMAN :That's not a.

COFFIN: You're saying the blacks in South Africa...

NORMAN : ...pure question.

COFFIN: Look, you're better off than they are out there in certain parts of Ethiopia.

NORMAN : Okay, but I wouldn't do that, it would be deeply insensitive. But on the other hand, let's be clear; it does highlight something which I do think is true, which is the relative nature of the sort of judgments we make and then pretend they're absolutes. This is a world where what determines our moral attitudes in fact are expectations, and expectations are manipulated by ourselves in our own moral histrionics, our own demands for attention, our own claims on things of the world that the world doesn't owe us at all; most of the problems that you and I have come across as clergymen are problems in the end, I think, stripped down bare, of people who think the world owes them something. Sometimes you may say it does; I don't think it owes any of us anything at all; I think that we owe the world a more just society and should strive to bring that into effect.

MOYERS: Isn't the question is, what is expected of the black man in South Africa and what does he expect of society? Does Christianity have to say anything to that?

COFFIN: Certainly it does. Prejudice is evil, there's no question about that.

NORMAN : Well, prejudice is always a fact; I mean, it depends on the form it takes or how institutionalized it is.

COFFIN: Prejudice is always evil.

NORMAN : I don't think that, no; prejudice is a shorthand way of saying that long ago you arrived at a series of conclusions which by testing them out experientially you think is okay. So it's just a value- loaded word, prejudice. It's what we all do all the time. You and I don't go through all the intellectual calculations every time we do anything.

COFFIN: It's saying that...

NORMAN : And it's beside the point, actually.

COFFIN: It's wrong.

MOYERS: Let's move beyond that, though, Bill. It's one thing to say: feed your neighbor, clothe the naked, visit those in prison. How socially and politically does that particular Christian concern impinge upon those social and economic considerations?

COFFIN: Well, I think that this, see, is sort of practical. This where certainly people can go wrong. But let's say you were the Good Samaritan okay, and you're passing through East Harlem in New York. some poor fellow who's been beaten up and he's lying in the gutter. right. In the New Testament you'd pick him up and take him to a hospital, pay for him, or whatever sort of hospital there was, right? As it was in the story. Nowadays you're enjoined not to touch him, because you could do him more harm than good. You're supposed to take off your jacket or a coat if you have one and put it over him so he doesn't fall into shock; then you get on the phone and you call the nearest city hospital, tell them to send the ambulance. Now, if the city hospitals have shut down, as Mayor Koch proposes to shut them down now..

COFFIN: ...because he says there's no money for this sort of thing, and it takes the ambulance coming from the voluntary hospital, which is a couple of miles further away, an hour to get there, so that by the time the poor fellow's back there two hours later he's dead, what are you as a Good Samaritan going to do in New York City today? Now, if he's fallen among thieves, that says something about the city police, it says something about unemployment, which is causing a lot of thieves, it says something about cocaine and marijuana and heroin, which is causing a lot of people to rob in order to keep themselves on the habit; it's saying something about hospitals, it's saying an awful lot about city politics. we're going to do something about all those things that I described, you can't stay out of politics, and I think you'd agree with me.

NORMAN : (Laughing.) Now... If

COFFIN: ...I'm not saying that if you vote Republican or whether you vote Democratic or liberal in New York City you necessarily have got the right Christian solution. But I am saying if you're going to be a serious Good Samaritan these days you have to be involved in some kind of political action, because that's the way help is given so often.

MOYERS: Do you have to be for the welfare state?

COFFIN: You have to be for the welfare of individuals; see, I don't want to get trapped in these things.

MOYERS: I'm not trying to trap you, but I want to know how..

COFFIN: .You have to be, as opposed to the warfare state? Yes.

MOYERS: No, no. Do you have to be for a level of taxation and spending that makes those services you just said were failing functionable and efficient?

COFFIN: I would think you're not serious -- I would doubt the seriousness of your concern, unless you can demonstrate that all the churches, the synagogues, in some way can do this for people and you don't need any federal legislation at all.

NORMAN : Well, I can't begin to answer that, because the whole statement was so white-hot with controversy about the politics in New York City, about which I confess a rather large ignorance; but it was clearly very polemical and would illustrate, I think, some of the hazards of drawing the dust of eternity to throw it onto the heap of human life.

MOYERS: But he has been specific in saying whether he's right or wrong that the logical conclusion of his position is that a Christian in New York would be for the welfare state. What is your logical conclusion as to expressing in political activity your Christian concern for the poor? Where does it lead you?

NORMAN: It leads me to look, as I think Christians must in every generation, at the problems of their society, accepting that they are going to be represented in a highly relative way, for all sorts of emotional and unpractical reasons -- look at the problems of society and then look at the available ways in which the available political, moral, economic and social culture as well as religious culture leads you to think that there are solutions, i.e., the parties and the politics. Because we do agree that the facts of the modern collectivized society require political solutions to problems that charity won't do. The charity must continue, of course, alongside it as one individual responsibility. Where we begin to differ is that I then see the life of Christ as bringing to bear in that judgment about which of these various political solutions would be the right one for you, in your understanding of Christianity; the set of judgments you bring to bear on that occasion are derived, as I have said before, from a view of man and his condition, and they will lead you to judgments...

COFFIN: We have to say human beings these days, in this country anyhow. You know, the sexist...

NORMAN : A view of man

COFFIN: And women.

NORMAN: and women, which will lead you to...to express your Christianity in really quite a wide range of equal solutions. I mean, I don't have the exclusive views that you appear to have about these things, and I...

COFFIN: I don't have exclusive views..

NORMAN: ...think that in each generation people, in the knowledge that because their view of man and his capabilities of producing righteousness on earth, are highly defective...

COFFIN: I never said that they were anything else but that. You know, I really resent your feeling that you're the only one who has a kind of tragic view of human nature. You know, that's nonsense.

NORMAN : Oh, I don't...

COFFIN: My view of human nature's altogether as tragic as yours, only it leads me to say: Look out, the poor are going to get a little bit more oppressed. You're so worried about, ah, yes, but if those poor ever rise up, you see, they may get just as oppressive as the oppressor today which is perfectly obvious, it's perfectly true. You're absolutely right. So if Castro is right about Jesus being a revolutionary, he'd be well advised to say, but a permanent revolutionary. So that when the Marxists come in to replace the capitalists, then the Christian will be altogether as critical of the Marxist regime as he was of capitalism. Now, that kind of permanent revolutionary is a little different than the kind of revolutionary, say, that Castro might have been talking about, which would see the revolution fulfilled in Fidel Castro.

NORMAN : Well, that's okay, but now let's come back to Christianity as such.

One of my fears about the secularization of its content by politicization, as I've called it, is that it's ceasing to be an authentic religion. We have now spent a lot of time discussing the application of Christianity in the social and economic sphere, which is very proper particularly as that happens to be one of the ways in which we may legitimately find a means of expressing Christian truth in the expectations of the present world. But Christianity is not a blueprint for society for social change, and it's not primarily directing us towards those ends. Christianity is a religion, like other religions; that is to say, it's meant to be a link between time and eternity. It's a link between men and women and the destiny which is now perceived through a sense of transcendence. My complaint in the Reith Lectures and elsewhere is that by absorbing itself increasingly with secular panaceas and by seeing its essential expression through the doing of good works..

COFFIN: Who's talking about secular panaceas? that if I may (laughing)

NORMAN :

in that sort of direction, that it's ceasing to fulfill its native function as a religion. Like the other ancient religions of the world, it's ceasing to be a bridge between men and eternity. And that is because I see the sort of approach which you in part characterize, though not entirely we have some common ground, I'm happy to say -- as sucking the content out, very frequently, of a genuine religion and replacing it with a sort of desiccated moralism.

COFFIN: Listen, I pray every day, I read the Bible...

NORMAN : No, no, I didn't say you didn't.

COFFIN: ...I go to church regularly, we have staff services and all these sort of things, you know; the transcendence is remembered, you know?

NORMAN: I'm sure it is.

COFFIN: But when I pray to the Lord and say, "Lord, what am I to do?" and He says, "You know, your nearest neighbor's need may give you an answer." I'm not saying that's the entire answer, but that's part of the answer, and it's -- there's no and the Lord says, "Remember, there are no secular panaceas, Coffin. I say, "That's right, Lord. I constantly remember that. I know the Lord says that. You know? And I don't see anybody, even your favorite liberation theologians, coming forth with secular panaceas. I met Gutierrez, he doesn't talk that way; I know Bonino, he doesn't talk that way.

NORMAN:

COFFIN: But they write that way. And the writing is their influence. I've even read them, and...

NORMAN : You and I have heard countless sermons whose content has been preoccupied with good social causes, and quite right. But what people really...

COFFIN: I haven't heard that many...

NORMAN: What people really want in the end and are entitled to have because it's what is authentically theirs, is that true dignity of men and women, which you are contending, which rests upon their citizenship of eternity. And the authentic note of a religion is to provide them with the spiritual equipment now in earth, where the kingdom is created already in us, that when the entry from this experience to the eternal one takes place we shall be equipped for it.

COFFIN: Yes, but we also pray, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth.... So while our souls are mounting to Heaven, we may pass the young man on his way down to earth, in the form of the Messiah.

NORMAN : Unless you happened to, by your social preoccupation not yours; I'm speaking generically to have assisted the creation of such secular attitudes in the world and such secular governments or such controlled states that the opportunities for the acquisition of faith is no longer there.

MOYERS: Gentlemen, the kingdom may not have come, but the end of the hour has.

(Laughter.)

MOYERS: Anyone who wishes to carry this discussion forward can purchase from Oxford Press a copy of the Reith Lectures by Edward Norman, entitled Christianity and the World Order; or, anyone can come to Riverside Church in Manhattan and hear the Reverend William Sloane Coffin....

COFFIN: Talk about prayer, the divinity of Christ, and all these important things that relate us to the transcendent.

MOYERS: I'm Bill Moyers.

Coffin. Thank you,

Ed Norman; thank you, Bill