Bill Moyers: Pastor, Politician, Journalist

In a world in which higher education is increasingly thought as preparation for a profession, being multidisciplinary in college and especially in graduate school is decreasingly sought and valued by students at universities in the United States. Unlike in the E.U., where it is more common for the professional schools to be separate from universities given the difference between training and education—skills and knowledge—American universities make it institutionally possible for a person to get a MBA and MPA after a BA in liberal arts or a BS in natural science, or, less commonly, to get a MBA degree and a MDiv degree after having studied in the liberal arts and sciences. The MBA and LLB or JD has been a more popular combination, and I spoke once with a MPA student at Harvard who already had a MBA from Notre Dame and was considering a degree in law. I think the benefits vocationally from being multidisciplinary in one’s formal higher education (i.e., college and graduate school) tend to kick in only after a few decades after one’s final graduation. Perhaps only in retrospect does the traces of such an education reveal themselves in a person’s work-life. I contend that the political aide, pastor, and journalist, Bill Moyers, is an excellent example of how a multidisciplinary education can enrich a person’s career, which is not likely to stay “inside the lines” of one particular industry. This is not a bad thing.

“Billy Don Moyers was born on June 5, 1934, in Hugo, Okla., . . . His father was an unskilled laborer.”[1] The son was anything but. As a young man after graduation from college, Bill Moyers was U.S. “President Johnson’s closest aide,” before serving as that president’s press secretary.[2] Moyers resigned from that administration in 1966 at the age of 32 after a falling out between the two men. Moyers then turned to journalism even though he had studied “journalism, government, history, theology, and ethics in, he said, ‘deliberate preparation for a career in public service.’”[3] That he also “spent two years at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, preaching on weekends,”[4] and was ordained at the age of 25 as a Christian minister is not easily discerned from his years in public service and journalism, but I submit that the study of theology and especially ethics undergirded his studies in journalism and government. That he majored in journalism at North Texas State College and studied religious history on a fellowship at the University of Edinburgh before going to the seminary, and then taught Christian ethics at Baylor University made him what the journalist Ann Crittenden aptly wrote in 1981, “one of the most complicated men that politics or the media ever produced.”[5] I submit that his multidisciplinary college education made him so—not his years in the White House or at the American public broadcasting station, PBS.

In its obituary of Moyers, it is no accident that the The New York Times mentions that “Moyers, an ordained Baptist minister, explored issues ranging from poverty, violence, income inequality and racial bigotry to the role of money in politics, threats to the Constitution and climate change.”[6] His interest in theology, as well as the closely related philosophical field of ethics, can be seen in his choices on topics that he would cover in his “Bill Moyers Journal” and “Now” television programs. So too can his “soft,” or normative sensitivity be seen in his decision to work on President Johnson’s Great Society (anti-poverty) program, and before that, to develop President Kennedy’s Peace Corps program, such that at the age of just 28, Moyers was second in command in the Corps. James H. Rowe, Jr, a friend of President Johnson, wrote to the Peace Corps director, R. Sargent Shriver to praise Moyers as “that curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator.”[7] Moyers’ studies in theology and ethics, and in journalism and government, reveal this seemingly dichotomous blend in distinctly educational terms.  

As a journalist, his background in theology was perhaps most relevant, though not broadcasted by him, in his famous series of interviews of the hitherto little-known scholar of religion, Joseph Campbell in the 1980s on PBS. Titled “The Power of Myth,” the six-part series focused on world religions rather than exclusively on Christianity, and Moyer’s own vantage-point as a Baptist minister remained nearly invisible against the journalist’s ethic to draw out and understand Campbell’s theories on what the world’s major religions share in common. It should be no surprise that Moyers, as a journalist at CBS and PBS, was seen by many viewers as “the nation’s conscience” who brought “a sense of moral urgency and decency” to television journalism even as the news business in the U.S. was becoming, as he put it, too much like show business at the expense of journalistic standards.[8] For him to have been able to see this trend even as it was underway before the advent of the very ideological Fox News and MSNBC, the multidisciplinary nature of formal education can be credited for it provided him with a broad enough cognitive and perceptual platform to take into account many different kinds of data. In other words, he could look at the compromises being increasingly made in American broadcast journalism not just from the standpoint of ethical theory, but also the deeper theological implications from the ethical compromises. The grounding of his understanding went deeper than what studies in journalism and political science could provide, and it is precisely such depth, or breadth, that enabled him to go beyond being a political aide and then a journalist to be reckoned as something as fundamental as the nation’s conscience.

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1. Janny Scott, “Johnson’s Top Advisor, and PBS’s Trusted Voice,” The New York Times, June 28, 2025.
2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

Koko the Gorilla Meets Mr. Rogers

Koko, a western lowland gorilla held in captivity, learned over 1,000 signs from American Sign Language, and achieved a "sophisticated understanding" of spoken English by the age of 44.[1] Research has uncovered, moreover, that "gorillas may be capable of complex vocal behavior that defies previous beliefs about their communicative abilities."[2] In other words, the species is able to have a spoken language. Even though humans branched off from chimpanzees rather than gorillas 7 million years ago (our own species, homo sapiens, began 1.8 million years ago), the findings are hardly surprising; after all, whales and dolphins communicate by making distinct sounds. Even so, the prospect of being able to carry on a "conversation" with a member of another species is astounding. Gorillas like Koko might one day be able to tell us what it is like to be a gorilla. Ironically, we might learn more about our own species in the process. 

Koko teaching Mr. Rogers, star of the children's learning show, "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood,"  the sign for love.

Koko can make the sign for love, but do her keepers know she means the same thing as we do? Do gorillas feel love as we do? It is possible that a gorilla using human sign language is merely manipulating symbols according to rules. If so, it could not be said that Koko understands love. Even if she intends to communicate love by its sign, she might have in mind the love that gorillas have, rather than what we experience as love. Watching her favorite film, she turned away when the parents were saying goodbye to their boy as he boarded a train. Koko signed that it was sad because the mother loves her son. It is possible that Koko was referring to the biological attachment that a mother gorilla has for her baby, rather than what we mean by love. Koko might have meant merely that the mother will miss her boy, rather that the mother feels a selfless love for her son. Of course, what we mean by love may turn out to be more biological and less godly than we conveniently suppose. 

Koko, a fan of the television show, "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood," expressing affection for the star. Mr. Rogers, on the other hand, seems weary of his fan, at least in his body language.

Moreover, the research being conducted on Koko and other gorillas in captivity may bring us one step closer to the realization that we are just one species among many others, rather than unique, as in being made in God's image. This is not to say that God does not exist, whether or not it coheres to the Western conceptions. Perhaps gorillas have a spiritual nature too; they may even have an idea roughly equivalent to ours for God (maybe Koko's god is similar to that of the Exodus). If not, theology may be a function of brain complexity. If gorillas could communicate to us a species-specific spirituality or idea of the divine, then we could put our own in perspective and thus see it in a refreshing light. Perhaps we might find that our religions are human, all too human.[3]

In short, learning more about how gorillas communicate, and teaching those like Koko more human language can potentially increase our knowledge of what it is like to be another species. Even though Koko has a sophisticated knowledge of English and the use of a thousand signs, language would have to be capable of transmitting what it is like to be a gorilla or human. 

1. Carolyn Gregoire, "Apes May Be Much Closer to Human Speech Than We Realized," The Huffington Post, August 15, 2015.
2. Ibid.
3. "Human, All Too Human" is the title of one of Friedrich Nietzsche's books, but I have in mind David Hume's theory of religion. See his "The Natural History of Religion" for his account of how the human brain "translates" religion into distinctly human terms. See also the last chapter of my book, "God's Gold."

Ethical Theory in Business Ethics Courses

It may seem like an oxymoron, but faculty administrators at even research universities can be hopelessly narrow-minded regarding knowledge and how it is to be conveyed. For example, how often are faculty members encouraged to give a lecture or two re-teaching material largely missed on exams (followed by another, shorter examination on that material)? Do faculty administrators work with faculty members in professional schools to see to it that the applied courses are not severed from their basic (i.e., more theoretical substratum) discipline? One of the secrets in the “sauce” at Yale’s professional schools (e.g., Law, Divinity, etc.) is this salience of the respective basic disciplines (e.g., political theory and theology, respectively). Synergy comes gushing through once the false dichotomy is recognized. Before I went to Yale, I was a masters and doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh, where the dichotomy was alive and well in the university’s social reality; I had to “walk back” the dichotomy myself as I discovered philosophy (and religious studies) while I was still studying business.

Business ethics was one of my doctoral fields of study at Pitt. The philosophy department there was at the time one of the best in the U.S., so used an elective to take my first course in the discipline. I began with two intro courses; before I knew it, I was taking junior and senior courses, such logic and philosophy of mind. The latter course turned out to be the most intellectually intense course I took in my 18 years as a university student (had I discovered philosophy in college, I would have three rather than five degrees). It occurred to me at the time to start taking ethical theory courses, as business ethics was one of my doctoral fields. Within philosophy, I gravitated to practical philosophy—in particular, to ethics, political theory, and philosophy of religion. I treated these as foundations for the field of business, government, and society in business.

It dawned on me that none of the business doctoral students concentrating in business ethics had taken an ethical theory course in philosophy. That is to say, I was stunned to find a subfield of ethics reduced to management. Ethics proper is a subfield of philosophy, not business; ergo, business ethics is ultimately grounded in philosophy, with managerial implications. I think business schools have put the cart before the horse and letting go of the horse. A cart without a horse isn't going to go very far (though perhaps it can go in circles).

From my educational experience, I contend that ethics courses in business schools ought to emphasize ethical theory, with managerial implications/applications used as much to illustrate the theories as to understand the ethical dimension of business. Managers in the business world have told me that business schools should do what corporate training cannot, rather than being duplicative. I think deans miss this point, perhaps because they are so oriented to sucking up to corporate managers in order to get corporate donations. In my own thinking, theory enlivens rather than detracts from praxis. I think business school faculties are in the grips of the false dichotomy. Corporate managers would doubtless admit that they are ill-equipped to teach ethical theory. Moreover, training is a better fit with what corporate folks do. Business schools, or else philosophy departments, could offer regular as well as continuing education courses in business ethics with ethical theory readings, lectures, and discussions going beyond the superficial “rights, utility, and justice” hackneyed reductionism of business ethics courses in business schools.