Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  You preached that sermon on the Sunday after 9/11. That was almost seven years ago. This year, when people saw some sound bites from it, they were upset because you seemed to be blaming America. Did you somehow fail to communicate?

  The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly. The failure to communicate is when something is taken out of context like a sound bite for a political purpose and looped over and over again, looped in the face of the public. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to communicate—to paint me as some sort of fanatic or, as a learned journalist from The New York Times called me, a “wackadoodle.” It’s to paint me, to say something’s wrong with me; there’s nothing wrong with this country. We’re perfect; we have no blood on our hands. I say it again, that’s not a failure to communicate. The message that is being communicated by the sound bites is exactly what those pushing those sound bites want to communicate.

  What do you think they wanted to communicate?

  I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. And—hint, hint, hint—guess who goes to his church? Hint. That’s what they wanted to communicate. They know nothing about the church. They know nothing about our prison ministry. They know nothing about our food-sharing ministry. They know nothing about our senior citizens’ homes. They know nothing about all we try to do as a church and have tried to do, and still continue to do as a church that believes what Martin Marty said, that the two worlds have to be together—the world before church and the world after the benediction. And that the gospel of Jesus Christ has to speak to both of those worlds, not only in terms of the message preached on a Sunday morning but in terms of the lived-out ministry throughout the week.

  When you began to see those very brief sound bites circulating as they did, what did you think?

  I felt it was unfair. I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt those who were doing that were doing it for some very devious reasons, to put an element of fear and hatred into the “game” and to stir up the anxiety of Americans who still don’t know the African American church, know nothing about the prophetic theology of the African American experience, who know nothing about the black church, who don’t even know how we got a black church in this country in the first place.

  What’s happened at the church since this controversy flared?

  Our members are very upset, because they know it’s a lie, the things that are being broadcast. Church members have been very supportive. But they’re upset by the behavior of some of the media—picking up church bulletins to get the names and addresses and phone numbers of the sick and shut-in, calling them to try to get stories. One lady they called was in hospice. Our members are very upset about that. Very upset. They know it’s happening because of the political campaign. What have we gotten into here? Some people—Christians, some of them—threatening us, quoting scripture, telling us how they’re going to wipe us off the face of the earth in the name of Jesus.

  There have been death threats?

  Yes, there have. Both on myself and on my successor, Pastor Moss, and bomb threats at the church.

  Did you ever imagine that you would come to personify the black anger that so many whites fear?

  No. I did not. I have been preaching since I was ordained forty-one years ago. I’ve been reminding people since all this happened of the stance I took in standing against apartheid along with our denomination back in the ’70s and how putting a “Free South Africa” sign in front of the church put me at odds with the government. Our denomination’s defense of the Wilmington Ten7 put me at odds with the establishment. Being at odds with policies is nothing new to me. But taking bits and pieces of sermons I preached six, seven, ten, fifteen years ago and turning them into a media event—not the full sermons, but snippets and sound bites making me the target of hatred—that is something very new and something very, very unsettling.

  I know how in times like this music is very important to you and your congregation.

  It is. I told you earlier that I struggle with how to take a people who are hurting and bring them to healing. How do you take a people who are suffocating with hate and give them hope? Well, a part is through the musical tradition. The blues is key. We learned how to sing the blues. That’s why our suicide rate wasn’t much higher, because we started singing the blues. Well, people sitting there in the pews every Sunday, they know that tradition. That’s a part of what helps us hold it together.

  You said something about suicide?

  Blacks learned how to sing the blues rather than just give up on life. A guy’s wife walks out on him with his best friend and he’s crushed. Instead of going out and taking a gun and killing, he sings a song. “I’m going down to the railroad to lay my poor head on the track. I’m going down to the railroad to lay my poor head on the track. And when the locomotive comes, I’m gonna pull my fool head back.” He’s not giving up life over this. Life goes on beyond this. Pain is just for a moment. This whole notion about what we’re going through is only a season. “And this came to pass, didn’t come to stay.” That’s what the blues do. And that’s what the music tradition does. So, trying to keep that as an integral part of worship is crucial for us.

  So what blues are you singing right now?

  “Don’t know why they treat me so bad.” I’m singing the sacred blues, the songs of our gospel tradition. That I’m so glad trouble don’t last always. That “what man meant for evil, God meant for good.”

  “What man meant for evil, God meant for good.”

  That’s a quote from Joseph, in the Book of Genesis.

  And what do you take it to mean?

  That human beings many times do things for nefarious purposes. And God can take that and turn it—make something good out of it. For instance, using that Joseph passage, when his brothers sold him into slavery, they thought for sure that their daddy was going to get them. And Joseph reassured them by saying, “No, no, what you meant for evil, God has turned into something good. I’m not trying to do revenge or payback. God is about restoration. And I restore you. As brothers, we’re all brothers.”

  Sure, those sound bites, those snippets were taken for nefarious purposes. But God can take that and do something very positive. In Philadelphia, as you know, Barack Obama made a very powerful speech about our need as a nation to address the whole issue of race. That’s something good that’s already starting because of those guys playing these sound bites; something very positive may come out of it. God can take what they meant to hurt somebody and help our nation come to grips with truth, to help a nation come to grips with miseducation, to help a nation come to grips with things we don’t like to talk about.

  In the twenty years that you’ve been Obama’s pastor, have you ever heard him repeat any of your controversial statements as his opinion?

  No. No. No. Absolutely not. I don’t talk to him about politics. At a political event he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of God about the things of God.

  Here’s a man who came to see you twenty years ago wanting to know about the neighborhood. At the time Barack Obama was a skeptic about religion. He sought you out because he knew you knew the community. You led him to the faith. You performed his wedding ceremony. You baptized his two children. You were for twenty years his spiritual counselor. In that speech in Philadelphia the other day, he was obviously trying to have it both ways in responding to the controversy over you. He condemned statements by you that “have caused such controversy.” He said they express “a profoundly distorted view” of America and are not only “wrong but divisive.” But he also defended you. He said—and this is a direct quote—“Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but
courtesy and respect.” He praised your learning, your patriotism, your faith and compassion. And he said that while “we can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue,” the whole controversy reflects the complexities of race that the country has yet to work through. How did it go down with you when you heard Barack Obama say those things?

  It went down very simply. He’s a politician, I’m a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. Those are two different worlds. I do what I do. He does what politicians do. What happened in Philadelphia, where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I’m a pastor.

  Even some of your admirers say it would be wrong to gloss over what Martin Marty himself—who loves you—called your “abrasive edges.” For example, Louis Farrakhan lives in the south part of Chicago, doesn’t he? You’ve had a long, complicated relationship with him, right?

  Yes.

  And he’s expressed racist and anti-Semitic remarks. Some indefensible things—

  Twenty years ago.

  Twenty years ago, but indefensible, no?

  The Nation of Islam and Mr. Farrakhan have helped more African American men to get off drugs, more African American men to respect themselves, more African American men to work for a living instead of gangbanging. Turning people’s lives around. Giving people hope. Now, he and I don’t believe the same things in terms of our specific faiths. He’s Muslim, I’m Christian. We don’t believe the same things that he talked about all those years ago. But that has nothing to do with what he has done in terms of helping people change their lives for the better. When Louis Farrakhan speaks, black America listens. They may not agree with him, but they’re listening.

  What does it say to you that millions of Americans, according to polls, still think Barack Obama is a Muslim?

  It says to me that the miseducation or misinformation or disinformation of the corporate media still reigns supreme. Thirty-some percent of Americans still think there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You tell a lie long enough, people start believing it. What does the media do? “Barack Hussein Obama! Barack Hussein Obama! Barack Hussein.” It sounds like Osama, Obama. That’s why many people still think he’s a Muslim.

  The United Church of Christ—our denomination—has called for a “sacred conversation” on race in America. What are the steps that can be taken to move race relations forward?

  There are many. Let’s start with the paradigm about how one sees God. Your theology determines your anthropology. And your anthropology—how you see humans—determines your sociology. Let’s look at how we’ve come to see race based on an understanding of God who is said to see others as less than important. You know, there are plenty of passages in our sacred scriptures that are racist. They’re in the Vedas, the Babylonian Talmud, in the Koran, they’re in the Bible. How do we grapple with these passages in our sacred texts? The same way you grapple with that passage in the book of Judges where it’s all right for a preacher to have a concubine and cut her up into twelve pieces. We have to argue with our texts that are anti-Semitic. That old Christian notion, “the Jews killed Jesus.” We have to come to grips with these texts that were written by certain people at certain times with certain racist understandings of others who were different. We have to understand that “different” doesn’t mean deficient. Barack Obama talked about the need to start a new conversation. Let’s have the conversation we need to have.

  Note: There was more I wanted to hear about from Jeremiah Wright, including his relations with Jews and his views on Israel, but at this point our interview was interrupted by Wright’s daughter, who was acting as his media advisor. She came into the studio and announced that he had to leave. The reverend didn’t seem to be in any hurry to go—he seemed comfortable in the intimate space where we talked—but no sooner had we resumed the conversation than his daughter reappeared with his security detail (traveling with him because of earlier death threats) and insisted our time was up.

  The following Monday, at the National Press Club in Washington, the reverend delivered a statement that he had carefully prepared for an audience who obviously had never attended a service like that one described by Obama, people Wright knew to be “completely outside the black religious experience.”

  He wanted them to understand the theme of transformation—“God’s desire for changed minds, changed laws, changed social orders ... a changed world.” But during the question period that followed—no longer surrounded by an adoring congregation and unaccustomed to a throng of inquiring reporters—Wright was rattled. The quiet and composed man I had met on Friday grew querulous, aggrieved, and, at moments, incomprehensible. It was a disastrous performance. The next day Obama denounced Wright, and a month later, the candidate resigned his membership in Trinity Church.

  BARRY LOPEZ

  When Barry Lopez accepted the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams back in the mid-1980s, I clipped an article about the occasion from The New York Times and dropped it into a file labeled “Worth Pursuing,” as was my habit then and now. More than a score of years later, heading for the final weeks of the Journal, while thumbing through the bulging folder, I came upon that now yellowed clipping. Our paths had not crossed in all these years—we seemed always to be traveling in different directions—but I realized the moment had come for a conversation.

  Throughout that time, Barry Lopez had kept writing—nonfiction and novels, essays and short stories, volumes of prose about travel, photography and language—setting a gold standard for those of us journalists whose selfproclaimed mission is to explain things we don’t understand. Barry did it the old-fashioned way: going out to see for himself. He became as familiar with the playas of Texas and the deserts and canyons of the American Southwest as he did with the frigid extremes at both poles. But always he returned home to western Oregon to write with what one reviewer called “the snap and hiss of a campfire.” Natural landscapes have fascinated him since he was a boy, but he also explores the interior journeys that shape our own private worlds.

  As another reviewer wrote, Barry Lopez “restores to us the name for what it is we want.” He would be my final guest on the Journal, which meant a trip back to the asphalt and skyscrapers where he had spent part of his childhood.

  —Bill Moyers

  How is it to be back in the canyons of New York City after all the time you’ve spent in the far places of the world?

  I like it here. There is a shade of blue in the sky here that I always associate with the city. Whenever I see it, driving in from the airport or on a winter evening, just moonlight and the blue and the canyons below the buildings—well, Bill, it intensifies my sense of hope to see a vibrant aggregation of human imaginations underneath this mantle of a blue sky. I don’t have a sense, “Oh, my God, I’m coming into Sodom and Gomorrah,” some dead-end place for humanity. A city like this, it’s the best we can do. It’s uplifting.

  Paradoxically, as you talk I’m thinking about the clear blue sky over New York on the morning of September 11. One of the most beautiful mornings you could hope for. My wife and I were looking out the window in awe of it when, just a couple of miles away, terrorists were driving those two planes into the World Trade Center. I will always associate the blue sky with that moment. You’ve written about “courting the imagination.” How does such a paradox—the beauty and the terror—affect your imagination?