"Just-the-Facts"

I once devoted an edition of this column solely to trashing public television as an anti-democratic instrument pandering to elitist tastes and corporate power. As a rule, that's still true. But, as with every rule, there have to be exceptions.

One notable exception is some of the public affairs programming produced by Bill Moyers, especially two documentary projects he turned in during the last quarter of 1987. The first, which aired in November, was his retrospective on the Iran-Contra affair called The Secret Government. That report (see "Without Consent of the Governed," page 6) was mostly a historical account of the withering of American democracy over the past 40 years leading up to the Iran-Contra scandal.

According to Moyers, the response to The Secret Government was overwhelming, and overwhelmingly positive. That's not surprising. Given the typical run of TV news programming, The Secret Government was a breath of fresh air both in style and content. Content-wise, it was mostly a straightforward recitation of America's shameful postwar record of coups, assassinations, and secret wars. "Just-the-facts," but with facts that seldom see the TV light.

In style, The Secret Government was a textbook case of the difference between being truthful and being balanced. Every assertion could be backed up by documentary evidence or firsthand accounts. But the impact of the truth was not diluted by the usual clutter of counter-quotes, that classic device of objective journalism by which a truthful statement from one source can be "balanced" with an outright lie from another.

The other Moyers project was God and Politics, a three-part series which aired December 9, 16, and 23. In those broadcasts, Moyers (a former Baptist seminarian) turned his sights on the role of the Religious Right and Left in Central America, the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic movement for a Christian Republic that is building at the fundamentalist grassroots.

IN EARLY DECEMBER, I had the opportunity to participate in a telephone press conference in which Moyers discussed the then-upcoming series. I'm turning the rest of this column over to excerpts from his remarks.

Of his time in Nicaragua for the first installment of God and Politics, Moyers says, "I suppose one preconception I had when I went to Nicaragua is that everybody there reads Das Kapital, since we've heard so much from the White House and other sources that this is a hard-line Marxist revolution and a Marxist government. That isn't the case. The Sandinistas passed out Bibles in their literacy campaign. You find Bibles in every house, you find Bibles being sold on the street, you find Bibles in public places, in a way that is astonishing and puts Americans to shame. They don't hide them down there in the desk in a hotel room underneath the phone book.

"The Bible, not Das Kapital, is the source of the ferment that is most identified with the Sandinista movement. The Methodist missionaries I met in Nicaragua and Honduras [featured in the report] are all good analysts of the flaws of the Sandinista revolution. But they don't see it in the simplistic way that it is often seen by observers from afar who have never set foot in Nicaragua."

In response to my question about links between his successive reports on the national security state and New Right fundamentalists, he said, "There are elements in all fundamentalist religion that glorify the state and substitute the state for God. You find this in Iran, you find it in this country, and you run the risk of it in liberation theology in Nicaragua.

"When the state becomes the way of carrying out one's faith, the state often becomes the master. So I think in all religion there is a danger of developing an idolatry of the state that is very dangerous and might well be repudiated by Jesus were he to be around today.

"But to be specific, it was intriguing to me, and a surprise, that as I reported some of the names and players kept showing up in different areas. In the first broadcast, I interviewed an evangelical in Honduras who is running a relief program there. He acknowledged to me, finally, though he didn't want to disclose it, that he was encouraged to go preach to the contras by one Lt. Col. Oliver North, who called him from the White House."

Of his own views of religion and politics, Moyers said, "I do not know in my own mind ... where my religion ends and my politics begins. But I make a conscious effort to say that, no matter what my religious beliefs, I live in a democratic society where pluralism is the best safeguard against my fanaticism or someone else's ... But I do think that this holy war among Christians is being fought, as the holy war in Iran is being fought, with a lot of spiritual teenagers whose growth has been arrested because they turned prematurely from an understanding of themselves and the spiritual pilgrimage to becoming foot soldiers in someone's political agenda.

"At the end of the first show, I used a quote from Pascal that I remembered from seminary, where he says, 'Truth on this side of the mountain is falsehood on the other.' I think all of these Christian groups [Right and Left] would be well-served to begin their criticisms of each other, and their effort to shape a political agenda, from the other side of the mountain first."

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.