CBS

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The Rev. Bill Moyers clashed, early and often, with religion gaps in major newsrooms

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The Rev. Bill Moyers clashed, early and often, with religion gaps in major newsrooms

The year was 1976 and Jimmy Carter, a Sunday school teacher from Georgia, had shocked major newsrooms by discussing his "born again" faith.

Presidential candidates were not supposed to do things like that.

At CBS News, special correspondent Bill Moyers received a green light for a prime-time feature, "What It Means to be Born Again." After seeing the finished piece, a network executive pulled Moyers aside to chat.

The man's face was so serious, "that I thought he was about to tell me he'd been born again," Moyers told me in 1987. No, the executive said: "That was the worst show I have ever seen in my life."

The program was "cut to bits," Moyers said. Network leaders "didn't think it was news. They just didn't understand what was going on."

The broadcaster faced this disconnect many times. Moyers died on June 24 at the age of 91, after a long and complex career in which he served as speech writer and press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, followed by decades of work with CBS, NBC and PBS. However, before that, the Rev. Bill Moyers was a Southern Baptist pastor in Texas towns like Brandon and Weir. He was proud of those roots and his convictions as a progressive Baptist.

"By no means is Moyers a typical Southern Baptist," I noted, in a 1993 "On Religion" column. "He is the rare Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary graduate whose books and tapes are popular at New Age conventions. He is a hero wherever there are Baptists whose annual donations to National Public Radio are greater than their gifts to Focus on the Family."

Preaching before the first presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton, another Baptist progressive, Moyers got down to basics, sharing a saying passed on by his father -- Cain and Abel were "the first Baptists because they introduced fratricide" to the biblical drama.

At the heart of Baptist life "is what we call soul competency," he explained.

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From John Henry Newman to Stephen Colbert: Ancient truths on suffering and death

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While it's hard to journey from the intellectual legacy of the Blessed John Henry Newman to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, it can be done.

This is a story worth hearing for those truly interested in centuries of Christian teachings about pain, suffering and loss, according to the social-media maven poised to become an auxiliary bishop in the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

 "God's providence is a mysterious and wonderful thing," noted Bishop-elect Robert Barron, founder of Word of Fire ministries. "One of the most potent insights of the spiritual masters is that our lives are not about us, that they are, in fact, ingredient in God's providential purposes, part of a story that stretches infinitely beyond what we can immediately grasp."

 Thus, a story that ends with Colbert begins with Newman and the 19th Century Church of England. Newman's interest in ancient doctrines and worship led the famous scholar-priest into Roman Catholicism. Called a traitor by many Anglicans, Newman started over -- creating a humble oratory in industrial Birmingham. Eventually he became a cardinal and, today, many consider him a saint.

The next connection, noted Barron, writing online, was the Rev. Francis Xavier Morgan, a priest in that Birmingham oratory who shepherded two orphaned brothers after their mother died in 1904. Her family had disowned her when she became a Catholic.

One of the brothers was J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote "The Lord of the Rings." As an adult, the Oxford don wrote a letter in which he addressed pain and suffering. A key point in the letter directly links this story to Colbert, an outspoken Catholic who is one of the most outrageous, controversial figures in American popular culture.

The comedian -- youngest of 11 children in a devout Catholic family in Charleston, S.C. -- has frequently discussed the deaths of his father, a former Yale Medical School dean, and two of his brothers in a 1974 plane crash. But Barron noted that, in a wrenching new GQ interview, Colbert dug much deeper than before.

During his work with Chicago's Second City troupe, Colbert was taught to risk failure, to push comedy to the point of transforming pain. A mentor told him: "You gotta learn to love the bomb."

Ultimately, Colbert learned to link that concept to the 1974 crash.