Some of you may have misread the title "The Need for a Moral Minority," and assumed that I was going to address the Moral Majority. I am going to make some references to the Moral Majority in the course of these remarks, but I do not want to concentrate exclusively on that movement. I particularly do not want to have the Moral Majority setting my agenda, or our agendas, for the eighties. I think that agenda is somewhat politically naive and theologically unb]iblical.

My overall concern is much more how we can relate religion and politics positively. If along the way we can learn some things from the Moral Majority, about how not to do it, I am willing to call that a gain. This whole problem of a religious presence on the political scene which has been highlighted for us in this rather recent emergence of the theological right wing, the problem of religion of the political scene is illustrated for me by a comment from an anonymous 17th century writer, one of my favorite anonymous comments. This writer wrote: "I had rather see coming toward me a whole regiment with drawn swords, than one lone Calvinist convinced that he is doing the will of God." Now that statement illustrates both the glory and demonry of Calvinism, and by a not very difficult extension, the potential glory and potential demonry of all political involvement on the part of religiously minded persons. On the one hand, there is something immensely freeing and energizing about the feeling that one is doing God's will, and that the outcome of one's activity is therefore safe in God's hands. Such an attitude can liberate one to new kinds of courage, to immense risk taking, even to the point of death. Archbishop Romero of El Salvador is surely an example of this. He became convinced that the junta in his country, the one we are currently supporting, was an instrument of injustice and repression against the poor, and he said so, boldly and loudly, knowing the risks; and soon after he began speaking out he was gunned down in the very act of saying mass for his people. There have been glorious chapters in the history of faith that have been written and enacted by those who felt that in commitment to God's will, they had to oppose the will of other human leaders.

But there can be a demonry as well in the invoking of God's support which we find exhibited when individuals or groups decide what they want to impose on others, and then claim divine sanction for it. This gives them carte blanche to do whatever they feel is necessary to stop their opponents since their opponents, being opposed to them, are clearly opposed to God as well, and do not finally deserve the right to speak or act or persuade, and Christians have often been guilty of this. The Crusades were an example, Christian anti-Semitism is another, and sometimes the Christian willingness to kill, whether in support of a Nazi ideology, or extreme nationalism, whether of the Russian or American variety, these are other instances that come to mind. And as I look at the current American religious scene, it is this tendency that seems to me in danger of characterizing this recently emerged religious right of which Moral Majority is at least one very clear-cut example.

Jerry Falwell, the leader of that movement, states that he knows just what is wrong with our country, and tells us: "God has called me to action. I have a divine mandate to go into the halls of Congress and fight for laws that will save America." As this position develops, it turns out that those who disagree with him are really by definition disagreeing with God, since he, and not they, have access to God's will. Liberals, for example, who Mr. Falwell abominates, are not just political liberals or theological liberals, they are godless liberals. They are the ones who must be removed from public office, since they are not only wrong, but evil. What we must have in office are God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians, which is bad news to Jews and secularists.

I do not for a moment challenge Mr. Falwell's right or anybody's right to get into the American political process, to work for change, to support candidates, urge people to vote and all the rest. That is the way the American system works, and the more people that are doing that, the better for the health of the system. And it would be a very perverse logic to claim that only people with whom I agree ought to be engaging in political activity, and I want no part of such an argument. I have taken my own political stands in the past; I intend to keep doing so in the present and in the future. So can and should everyone, whether named Billy Graham or Bill Coffin, whether named Jerry Falwell or Robert Drinan.

In Christian terms, and I think in terms with which all Jews could also agree, my real complaint about the Moral Majority's intrusion of the Bible into American politics, is that they are not biblical enough.

So let me illustrate that in two ways. First of all, it seems to me that the Moral Majority's biblically inspired political agenda involves a very selective, very partial, and therefore very distorted use of the Bible. They have isolated a set of concerns that they say get to the heart of what is wrong with America—homosexuality, abortion, and pornography. These are the things that are wrong and that are destroying our nation. We need to be for prayer in public schools, and for more bombs. Jesus wants our kids to pray and he wants the Pentagon to be able to kill more people if necessary. I know that sounds a little crude, but I believe it is. I am not denying that there are moral dimensions involved in all those issues and that people can take different moral positions in response to them, but the notion that they represent what the Hebrew and Christian scriptures offer us as the key for understanding what is wrong with the world today, is one that strikes me as grotesque.

Take the issue of homosexuality. If one turns to the scriptures as a whole, to try to come up with their central concerns, homosexuality is going to be very low on such a list even if indeed it makes the list at all. The Moral Majority creates an agenda and then proceeds to impose that agenda on scripture by developing little strings of unrelated verses to give divine sanction to the position. As those who work with the Bible know, one can prove absolutely anything that way.

So let me suggest very briefly five characteristics that I think would be appropriate to the moral minority.

A moral minority might be called a remnant within the remnant. By and large, institutional Christianity is going to reflect the culture around it more than it will challenge it, but there could be a remnant within that remnant to define some ways to offer a different model. There is an exciting set of experiences out of the church in Latin America that offers a way of thinking about that model. For centuries the Catholic Church in Latin America was at the beck and call of a little group of the wealthy who had all the power, who had all the money, all the prestige and who had enough military hardware to keep everyone else in line. But in recent years, the churches have been getting away from that uncritical alliance with those in power, and there have grown up literally tens of thousands of what they call "communitatas da basa," base communities or grassroots communities. These people do not wait for the word to come through an ecclesiastical chain of command. They tackle a local problem, oppression by a local large landholder, or inadequate wages to live on, or the disappearance of someone who is speaking out politically, and they look for ways to act, perhaps fifteen, or twenty of them together. The point is, one does not need to be a loner, one also does not have to have a huge structure behind one in order to begin to act.

Secondly, what would be the resources such a group could employ? Here I think we have a couple of very good things going for us. One of them is the Bible. If we could break out of the kind of "culturally-conditioned" ways we have read the Bible, we would find it an explosive arsenal of materials for creative change. In the last two years I have had to begin rereading the Bible in the light of what I have learned from Christians in such places as Latin America, trying to see it through their eyes, hear it with their ears, and I am amazed at what is in this book.

The third thing the moral minority could stress, perhaps the most important thing in the time in which we live, would be the necessity of a global perspective. This world is now just too small to allow for anything else. And to look at the world simply in terms of what is good for the United States, is ultimately going to be self-defeating. To put the main stress and priority on more weapons, as the national debate is now suggesting, is truly likely to increase the likelihood that we will use them. A perspective can no longer be national or regional, it has to be global.

That suggests a fourth thing the moral minority might become; it could become that group in our society which is genuinely committed to the powerless and the voiceless. The church, it seems to me, or at least the moral minority in the church, must be that place where the voiceless are empowered to speak on their own behalf, and are guaranteed a hearing. Instead of the church speaking through a microphone to the world on behalf of the voiceless, the church must be the place where the microphone is offered to those who have not been able to gain access to it.

Fifth, and finally, a moral minority must set its own agendas. You may not like the ones that I have been suggesting so far. Certainly there can be others. Moral minority agendas must not be set by the Moral Majority movement. We must not fall into a trap of single-issue politics, or politics narrowly conceived on a tiny set of issues. I find it kind of morally oppressive to be told, again and again, some kind of obsession about other people's sex life is the burning issue of the day, when the majority of the human family went to bed hungry every night or to be told to rally around getting prayers back into schools when millions of people are unable to find jobs, or get minimal help if they are unemployed and disadvantaged. So I hope we can find ways to begin to rally around the problems, for the whole human family is hurting from the mad escalation of the arms race, the need for more equitable distribution of food, coming to terms with denials, both abroad and at home, of basic human rights, such as education and medical care and jobs and all the rest.

I think we need to create a moral minority that could propose convictions without arrogance, insight without absolutism, commitment but without coercion, and democracy without demagoguery.

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