Sunday, September 14, 2008. 10:10 AM
A New Role for Religion in American Politics
The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith
The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host
Washington National Cathedral opened the 2008–2009 season of the Sunday Forum with a conversation between E. J. Dionne and Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III.
A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of journalism at Georgetown University, Dionne writes a twice-weekly column for the Washington Post. He recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Politics after the Religious Right. The title refers to a selling out of religious issues: the recent perception that faith speaks only to so-called hot-button issues, but not to larger, broader biblical messages about justice, care of the earth, and poverty.
Dionne calls himself both a “family-values liberal” and “incorrigibly Catholic.” In a fast trek through political and social issues, he points out the foibles of both conservative and liberal positions. “We don’t know whom God would vote for,” Dionne comments, adding that sinfulness and hypocrisy are found in people of all political persuasions. He cites the historical example of Christian arguments both for and against slavery.
Dean Lloyd engages Dionne in a discussion about American values and the national character. “The brilliance of our country is not that we ever get things right the first time, because we often don’t, but that we have this brilliant capacity for self-correction,” Dionne says. “…our values are rooted in a simultaneous commitment to individualism and to communitarianism. But our individualism is not a radical individualism… It’s a tempered individualism. Similarly, we have a communitarianism that does understand that we are all in this together, that we have a stake in each other. St. Paul says, ‘We are all part of one another.’ …The great drama of American politics is our struggle between these two sets of values, both of which are good.”
“The hardest decisions in life are not between good and evil,” Dionne asserts, “but between competing goods.”
About E. J. Dionne
E.J. Dionne is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-editor of “What’s God Got to Do with the American Experiment?”