Washington National Cathedral

Lloyd: Good morning. It’s wonderful to have you here today. This is something that has been in the planning for a long, long time, and we are thrilled to be underway with the Sunday Forum at the Washington National Cathedral. We’ve sensed for a long time that an important conversation is getting underway all across the country, and it was important for this Cathedral to be part of it. Religion is now on the agenda for America. And it seemed to us that a Cathedral that seeks to serve the nation ought to be jumping to be part of that conversation, and in this case, to bring the liveliest, most creative thinkers, both in Washington and beyond Washington, to come be part of the conversation with us.

So week by week we plan to gather in this space at ten o’clock to open up the floor, to hear what people have to say, and also to ask as we go, what are the important things America ought to be thinking about as it reflects on religion as an essential part of its life?

So whether you’re a believer or seeker or something else, this place is for you, and we hope you will come and join in along the way.

We are very fortunate to have with us today two stellar guests to launch this new venture, John Meacham and Sally Quinn. They have very graciously decided to make this part of their conversation for today. John Meacham, you may know, is editor of Newsweek magazine. Sally Quinn writes for the Washington Post. But what brings them here today is this marvelous new venture they have undertaken called “On Faith.” They are co-editors of this interactive forum about religion jointly sponsored by washingtonpost.com and Newsweek. Since the launch of “On Faith” last year, Sally and John have gathered a really stunning array of contributors to the site, including the likes of internationally renowned religion scholar Karen Armstrong, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and representatives of a wide array of faith traditions.

Today, we want to find out what Sally and John have learned about religious faith in America through the “On Faith” experience, and what questions we can be exploring as this Forum moves forward.

So let’s begin with Sally. Sally, I have to ask you, what’s a nearly life-long atheist doing starting a web called “On Faith”?

Quinn: Well, first of all I would like to tell you a little something that happened to me yesterday. The doorbell rang and I went to answer it, and there was a man there delivering the most beautiful orchids I’ve ever seen. And I couldn’t imagine who they were from. I opened the card, and it said, “I just want to wish you well and I want you to know I am praying for you and for your appearance tomorrow. Signed, Jan (from New Mexico)”. So Jan from New Mexico, if you’re here today, I want to thank you for that, and I want to say that two years ago if I had gotten that note, I would have been, I guess, dismissive that someone would be praying for me. Because I was an atheist two years ago, and I was amazed to find that, when I saw that note, it made me feel really good and secure and like I didn’t need anybody to pray for me because Jan was out there. If you are there, it’s all going to go very well.

I was an atheist. I became an atheist as a child. I didn’t even know the word then. My father was in World War II, and he was in Dachau the day it was liberated and had his staff photographer take photographs of the corpses and the whole concentration camp, and the starving people. And he made a scrapbook of it, and brought it home. And so the first pictures I remember seeing in my life were these pictures of Dachau. And I remember thinking at the time, I was four or five, there can’t be a God. How could there be a God and have something like this happen?

So I didn’t really articulate it. It’s just I didn’t believe it. And I remember I first learned the word ‘atheist’ when I was thirteen and I announced to my father that I was an atheist. And he went completely crazy. We were in Greece and he was on his way to Paris for a meeting, and came back and he brought me these beautiful high-heeled shoes. And I was thirteen and I’d never had a pair of high-heeled shoes, and he said, “If you decide not to be an atheist, and go to church, I’ll give you these shoes.” So I said, “Okay.” I went to church the next Sunday and marched right down to the front of the altar so everybody would see me in my high-heeled shoes.

But it didn’t really do the trick. And I just I found over the years—I was in the hospital in Tokyo during the Korean War. I was there for a year and saw these wounded soldiers coming in, dying, and crying out to their mothers. And it was just, again, I couldn’t believe that a God who was a good God, could exist and let this happen.

And then when I became older, I became really angry about religion. I was militant. I hated everything about religion. I thought religion was the cause of all evil. And I was very contemptuous and very dismissive. And when I married my husband, Ben Bradley, who’s an old WASP Yankee Episcopalian, and told him I was an atheist, Ben just kind of went into denial: It can’t be true. He wouldn’t accept it, and no matter how much I tried to persuade him of my feeling, he just wouldn’t accept it. And once, about ten years ago, I wanted to do a piece about how I was an atheist for Outlook, and my editors said at the Post, “Don’t do it; it will ruin your reputation. You cannot say that you don’t believe in God in this country because it’s not acceptable.”

And then, one day about three years ago, John Meacham and I started talking. John and I had just met, and we had this long lunch at this restaurant called Raphael’s in New York. And I remember during that lunch that I told John I was an atheist, and John said, “No, you’re not.” So we had this little bickering thing back and forth. “Yes you are.” “No, I’m not.” But really, he just sat down and wrote a list of books that I should read. And he said, you know, first of all you don’t want to define yourself negatively. And saying you’re an atheist is a negative definition. So I thought, okay, fine. So I agreed that I shouldn’t be calling myself an atheist and not really know anything about religion. So I started on this reading and studying. And I was absolutely amazed at what I learned. And I have to say I was really—I felt embarrassed, after I had done about a year’s worth of reading, that I had been so glibly talking about being an atheist when I knew absolutely nothing about religion.

So I got more and more interested in religion. I felt particularly after 9/11, and then with what’s going on in world affairs and American politics, that we really needed to do more about religion. So it was last year that I went to Don Graham and suggested we do a website on religion. Meanwhile, I continued to read and study; and of course the more you read and study, the more you realize you know nothing. And I certainly cannot describe myself as a religion scholar. John is. And John has given the website the gravitas that it needs. But I would, I would have to give John the credit for my turning around.

And today—somebody asked me the other day, ‘Well, what are you if you’re not an atheist?’ And I don’t have a word. I tried ‘seeker’ out, but that didn’t… And Karen Armstrong described herself as a freelance monotheist, and I tried out, um… And I thought, well I call myself a freelance polytheist. But that didn’t really work either.

So, I finally decided that what, if I had to describe myself as anything, it would be grateful: that that is really what gives me the most solace is to wake up every morning of my life and say how grateful I am for everything I have in my life and for all of my blessings. And when I wake up and I feel that and I think that way, it just changes my whole life. So I would have to say that gratitude is my religion right now. And that is subject to change.

Lloyd: John, yours is a different story, a life-long Episcopalian. A graduate of a distinguished university, the University of the South. You have taken Newsweek magazine and made it one of the places people look to for thoughtful commentary on religion. How—for someone who is an historian, a newsman—how did you find your way to this passion of religion, and what is making you work so hard at putting it out front for people to look at as they think about where America is going?

Meacham: Well, thank you. If Sally knew too little about religion, I knew too much. One of the things—I did grow up in the church—I was formed under the chaplaincy of a man who has not done well since. He left Sewanee, named Sam Lloyd. We’re hoping he’ll make something of himself at some point.

I’m a southerner and an Episcopalian. So it’s a minority position on both fronts. And one of the things that always interested me is the historically based nature of faith. If, in fact, this is how we tell time—this is 2007 because at one point a group of authorities decided that we would mark how we mark our own progression through the world by the birth of this figure in the ancient Middle East—then it has to be interesting. This building is here. Why is this building here? This is the largest dominant building in the nation’s capital. Why is that? Why do you wear what you do around your neck? Why is it significant that pulpit is made from stone from Canterbury Cathedral? And so it’s a simple question of curiosity for me at first.

Secondly, I think it’s the most pervasive and least understood force in the country. I think it’s more important than, or as important, as economics in that sense. Every newspaper in America has a business section. Very few have a religion section. Yet when you think about what shapes people’s choices, their votes, their attitudes, their destinies, it is in fact faith. So, I’ve always believed it should be a matter of empirically based, not necessarily faith-based. I am the most unlikely evangelist you will ever meet… that I had this effect. But I do believe it is essential.

And the most recent episode that led to the emphasis that we put on it at the Magazine came in the spring of 2004 when Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ. It was Ash Wednesday ’04. And I had seen an early version of it. I found it to be anti-Semitic and to violate virtually every standard that the Catholic Church lays out for the dramatization of the Passion. And so I wrote this. And I wrote a piece about the historicity of the Gospels, about how one has to read the Gospels. St. John told us that ‘it’s written that ye might believe.’ He acknowledged his bias. He said, this is why I have put this down. And it was a fairly tough piece.

And I went into the office on Monday morning. These were the days before Blackberries. There was an era actually, pre-… like BC and AD. And I had an email from an evangelical at my native south that simply said, “Dear Mr. Meacham, I’m praying for you, but I hope you go to Hell.” And so I answered, of course. Saying, that shows a certain doubt in the efficacy of prayer, and…” But that was the first time I realized what we casually refer to as ‘the culture wars’ were quite real. And I think that was a hugely important point.

Lloyd: Your important book, American Gospel, looks back at the founders of our country for some guidelines for how we sort out this faith in the public square question. Can you tell us a word or two about what you think comes out of looking at them for guidance now?

Meacham: I did this book called American Gospel. It’s… I trotted out the argument actually in a Washington Post piece a couple years ago with the idea being that the great good news about the country is that religion has shaped us without strangling us. Shaped us without strangling us. Because you can’t, as much as I admire Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and others and would fight to the death to defend their right to make their case, I don’t think it’s a particularly productive argument to tell someone like me or presumably like many of you, “You’re idiots. You’re superstitious and you’re buying into a fable that’s actually destroying the world.” That doesn’t make me eager to hear the second paragraph of what you want to say.

So, I wanted to go back and look at the history of it on the principle that, broadly put, the center-left might be more willing to listen to historically based argument because it would be empirically based. And the center-right might be open to it because it would appeal to the original intent part of the brain, the Berkian [?] tradition.

So I think even the most cursory look at the founding suggests that they took a very traditionalist view in terms of what I think the theological view of Christianity, as a matter of choice, not coercion. Faith coerced is not faith. It’s tyranny. And we had a debate just this past week or so about whether we’re a Christian nation. My argument about that is it’s a theological impossibility. Because if you actually believe that Jesus said what he said, and St. Paul said what he said, and they meant it, then there’s neither Jew nor Greek, there’s neither male nor female, there’s neither slave nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus. God is no respecter of persons. Like Jesus said, “my kingdom is not of this world.”

So the idea that you would use religion for secular or political purposes of power is in fact I think un-Christian. And so I think what you find when you look back is a very wise group of men who understood that religion could not be legislated out of the public square, but wanted to make it one force among many. I think Federalist Ten, Madison’s work, is one of the great pieces of secular scripture. Because it acknowledges it is one force we have to deal with. It should not be dominant, but it should not be pushed aside because it can’t be pushed aside.

Lloyd: You have an article in today’s New York Times about just this thing. Are you worried about just how much this discussion of a Christian nation is being injected into the campaigns?

Meacham: Yes. I think Senator McCain, an unlikely person to say this, is the one who said, “We were established by the Constitution as a Christian nation.” The fact that he grew up at Episcopal High School… He probably picked that up when he went to get his honorary degree at Liberty with Jerry Falwell… because I guarantee he didn’t learn it at EHS. As you all know, the main thing you learn there is how to make a good martini. So, my sense is that you do have too many people, I believe, who are roughly put, right of center, who think that we are a Christian nation. Doesn’t mean we’re not a special nation. It doesn’t mean that we’re not a nation dedicated to principles informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition. We absolutely are. There’s no question about that.

But I think a proper understanding of both faith and of power is that one has to be humble. If we’ve learned anything in the last 231 years, it’s that we do best when we approach things in a spirit of humility, and a spirit of expanding freedom without forcing ourselves on other people. We’re a very bad empire. We’re very bad at it.

Lloyd: Sally. “On Faith” is underway. It’s been going for eighteen months? Twelve months? Eleven months. Eleven months of a question being put out every week and asking some of the contributors to respond and watching what happens in the conversation on the internet. What have been some of the particularly hot questions? What are some of the questions people seem to get really excited about?

Quinn: Well, first of all, one of the things that has been so excited about “On Faith” is having this incredible diversity of views. We have Catholics, and we have Episcopalians, and we have Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and evangelicals and right wing and left wing and Muslim. There’s nobody we don’t have. We even have a Wiccan on the site. And so we get this diversity of ideas and points of view. And the thing that’s so exciting is to have people who have been very rigid in their views on faith, or views against faith, actually become friends with people who are so different by saying, you know, I’m reading what they’re writing and what they’re saying, and I’m learning so much, because I had no idea this is what that faith was about. Or this is what they thought about whatever.

We try to have a really interesting range of questions. The last two or three have been really… Mother Teresa, we got a lot of response from Mother Teresa’s acknowledgement that she had trouble believing. We got a lot of attention from Islam: we invited a group of Muslim religious leaders to talk about why they didn’t speak out against terrorism. And we got double the amount of traffic on that because we actually had some Muslim religious… some radicals who said they did not believe in roadside bombing.

This past week we had a question about Senator McCain. There was an atheist conference this week and we had enormous amount of interest in that, because we had Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, and it was an amazing array of atheists talking about how they felt about religion. Next week we have a question about the afterlife. And I’m sure we’re going to get a lot of attention. My son’s closest friend—my son is 25—fell to his death about two months ago, and his mother, who is a friend of mine and who’s a brilliant woman, very articulate woman, she’s a writer, was suicidal. And she went a medium. And she contacted her son, Justin, through the medium. And she said to me, “I know this sounds crazy, but all I can tell you that when I walked into that room I wanted to commit suicide, and when I walked out, I felt at peace.” So we’re going to ask a question of our panelists next week, “Do you believe in an afterlife; and if so, do you believe you can contact people from the other side?” And Justin’s mother is going to write a piece about her experience.

Now again as I said earlier today, I might have dismissed that years ago, but one of the things I learned… I took a trip around the world this spring to study the great faiths of the world. It was a three-week trip, and we went to about twelve countries, literally all over the world. I remember talking to Elaine Pagels, the religion scholar, and I told her about the trip. And she said, “How long did it take?” And I said, “Three weeks.” And she said, “But you can’t do that trip in less than three years!” But I felt, having had no background in religion, that this would be sort of a crash course. And it was, and it was riveting. I learned too much. It was almost too much for me to take in.

One of the things that became clear to me, and when I was thinking about Justin’s mother the other day, is, someone said, “What was the thing that you learned from this trip? What was it that stood out the most?” And the thing that stood out the most to me was how similar all these religions were. That they manifest themselves in different ways. They have different cultures. They have different creeds. They have ways of praying. But in fact everyone is looking for an answer. Everyone is looking for some solace. Everyone is looking for some mystery, some spirituality. And that even reinforced my idea when I came back that what we’re doing on this website is really important because we’re appealing, we’re reaching out to everyone and asking people to tell us about their faiths and hopes that the more understanding we have of each other, the better off everyone will be.

Meacham: Just one thing about the historical nature of that experience. And also I think what you all do so well here at the Cathedral, which must be a very tricky mission, given what you’ve… being an institution of the Episcopal Church in the Christian tradition, but having to represent a country explicitly not founded on a sectarian faith, is what the founders understood brilliantly: that religion by and large had been a destructive force in the affairs of nations.

Just think about our own Anglican tradition. You know England went in the 16th and 17th centuries from being entirely Roman Catholic one day to be entirely Protestant the next, to being entirely Roman Catholic the next, to being a little bit of both. And a lot of people died along the way. And the founders grew up in the shadow of that bloodshed. They grew up in the shadow of Colonial Virginia in which Quakers and other non-establishment sectarian believers would be stripped of the rights of custody of their children. They would be unable to hold military office. The Connecticut Code of 1650 is something, if we read it out loud, it would make your skin crawl. Even the great John Winthrop and others in Massachusetts Bay, were essentially running a theocratic state. And so what they saw was it’s going to be hard enough to live in a democracy, to live in a republic. Let’s at least minimize the potential for divisive forces to take over. Of all kinds, whether it’s geography, economic commercial interests, basic partisanship for religion. And it’s a great achievement that, I think, faith has become part of the atmosphere, as opposed to the dominant element. Which, when you look around the world and the places where it is the dominant element, it’s not the dominant element in places where I suspect many of us would want to go live.

Lloyd: It’s a pretty nuanced thing we’ve achieved here. This being religious, but not sectarian, and doing the careful dance to keep that alive.

Meacham: It is. And to the credit of the faithful, again just from this pulpit, in his last Sunday sermon, Martin Luther King preached that our causes is just and we will overcome because the justice of our demands is grounded both in Scripture and in our founding documents, meaning the Declaration of Independence. So he linked the two. But again it was in the culture of liberty, because if you force it, it is not a choice. And if God himself gave us free will to love him or not, obey him or not, then who are we to try and force people?

Quinn: You know, Sam, one of the things I’ve been doing while I’ve been doing this website is to try and go out to different kinds of churches and synagogues and ceremonies. And what has become clear to me is the most interesting and exciting and moving part of any religion is the rituals. And I sort of felt, I was telling John earlier, I fell a little schizophrenic because in the last two-three weeks, it was the Jewish holidays, I went to Rosh Hashanah at Washington National Hebrew. And it’s a wonderful service where you basically talk about peace and love. It’s a lot about ethics and morals, and you end up by saying, “may you be inscribed in the Book of Life for the next year,” which I always think is a wonderful message. And then the next day, on Rosh Hashanah, I walked down to the Potomac River with a bag of breadcrumbs. As is traditional in the Jewish faith, I sat on the edge of the Potomac and tossed the breadcrumbs into the water. You’re tossing away your sins for that year. And it was a very peaceful nice experience. Then I went to Kol Nidre at Kesher Israel, which is an Orthodox Synagogue down the street from me. The following weekend, I spent the weekend in an atheist conference, where—an atheist revival, right.

Meacham: Go forth and don’t believe!

Quinn: But where Sam Harris was actually made this amazing speech about how we shouldn’t call ourselves atheists. We shouldn’t call ourselves anything. We should work for the things that we believe in, moral issues, and moral causes, and doing good works, and not have to

Lloyd: To follow up, just on this whole atheist phenomenon right now: What’s going on? What has gotten into their breakfast cereal that they’re now charging forth to challenge the whole world with atheism? Why now, and why so vocal, and why so vociferous in the way they are doing this?

Meacham: Bluntly, I think it’s an unfair combination of two things. One is the attacks of September 11th and the resulting war again Al Qaeda, and I think there’s an unfair sense that the incumbent president, President Bush, has pushed religion too far into the public square. I actually do not believe that’s true. His religious references are quite in the mainstream of presidential rhetoric, and if you actually go in search of places where allegedly faith has affected public policy in ways it might not have, it’s hard to find. That’s not a popular thing to say. But I think it has the virtue of being true, as Dr. Kissinger likes to say.

I think they feel, they being the atheists I guess, that they have been pressed to the side by a kind of evangelical force that took shape after Roe vs. Wade. You can pretty much trace the beginnings of the modern religious right to the 22nd of January 1973, when Jerry Falwell read about the decision against Wade. He had preached a sermon in 1965, Falwell had, saying that ministers of the Gospel should not be engaged in politics. That was two weeks after Bloody Sunday in Selma when John Lewis and Hosea Williams were nearly killed. He changed his mind rather radically in ’73. Then President Carter actually comes in for part of this because not many Americans understood the phrase, or even knew the phrase, ‘born again’ or even ‘evangelical’, until he ran in 1976. And then in 1980 we had what we think of as the religious right more fully coalesced.

My other nickel theory, which is perhaps not even worth that is, one of the reasons that both sides fell they are using is that it’s been 40 years since the high water mark of the Great Society, since the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act. President Carter and President Clinton were not seen ultimately as great liberal presidents, rightly or wrongly. And on the right, they entered the public arena in ’73–’74 with two central claims. One was a pro-life amendment to the Constitution, and the other was a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. Currently, the same-sex marriage has entered that. Neither of those has ever been remotely close to passing, and I doubt ever will. And so when you have both sides feeling that they are losing, that creates a sense of desperation.

Lloyd: We’re going to start taking questions from the audience, and our producer will be looking for people raising their hand and someone will come around with a microphone, but I want to stay with this atheism question for a minute. Go ahead.

Quinn: Well, having been an atheist, and I mentioned ten years ago when I wanted to write a piece about atheism and my editor wouldn’t let me because he said it would destroy my reputation, it really made me angry. Because what I really wanted to be able to say was “I don’t believe in God.” And I couldn’t say that out loud because it was not acceptable. And I think the atheists are right now where the gay movement was about twenty years ago, which is, there were a lot of people who were gay who did not dare come out of the closet because it was not socially acceptable. And I think slowly as being gay has become more acceptable, one of the things you see all these books are on the bestseller list for almost a year, somebody is buying these books. And why are they buying them? Because they are speaking to something that a lot of people have been thinking.

Like Mother Teresa, there are a lot of people out there who have doubts. But in their communities and societies and culture, it has not been acceptable to say that you have doubts. You go to church on Sunday morning, or you go to the synagogue or whatever, and you pretend to believe. So the fact these people are coming out, and these are really intelligent people that are not crazy people, coming out and saying we don’t believe, has given an awful lot of people the freedom to say, well, maybe we don’t believe in God, maybe we don’t believe in an organized religion, but that doesn’t make us immoral.

I think this has been the real issue for atheists and agnostics and secularists and humanists. There’s been this sense that you cannot be a moral person if you don’t believe in God or if you’re not religious. About a year ago the Dalai Lama came. There was a small lunch for him, and I asked him, “Could you be a moral person if you’re not religious?” and he said, “Of course!” And I thought, “Oh that’s interesting, because you don’t hear that often from religious people, and I think it’s made a lot of people who are not just atheists, but people who just don’t know, or who are non-believers, to be able to say, “Look, we’re good people, we’re good parents, we’re good partners in our marriages, we’re good people in our community, we do our duty, we’re fine upstanding citizens, we’re moral, we have ethics and values, we are being devalued and told we can’t be good unless we actually have these beliefs.” So I think that is a lot of the reason why this is suddenly coming to the fore, because people are beginning to stand up and say, “Yes, we can be good and we can also talk about it.” It doesn’t mean that… I think where they go overboard is when they say religion is feeble or bad.

Lloyd: But the overkill, that religion poisons everything, the sense religion has nothing good, has never had anything good about it, that’s the strange part about it.

Meacham: I almost never disagree with Sally on whose right hand I sit appropriately here. I should say quickly, she mentioned the Dalai Lama. When Sally called and asked if we would do this site, I said, “I’m busy. Get the Dalai Lama and I’ll do it.” Hung up. The next morning she had the Dalai Lama! If I’d said Dolly Parton, maybe I’d have a better chance! But, I think you’re right, but I think Christopher and others are making a mistake in stuffing the straw men as tightly and as counter-productively as—broadly put again—the right has done. If you believe that there’s this secular humanist force out there, I keep looking for it. I can’t find it. This idea there’s a war on Christianity. Again, I just don’t… you know, I’m a Christian, and I don’t believe it. But I think unfortunately we have a battle of superlatives. It can’t be, unfortunately, to use the dean’s terms, it can’t be nuanced for whatever reason. I think the press has a lot to do with that. It’s hard to, when you’re producing a TV show or even doing a magazine, if you want to say “on the one hand, on the other hand,” Michael Kinsley used to say that whenever he didn’t want to go on television to talk about something when a booker called him, he would say, “Well, I’m of two minds about that.” And you would hear the Rolodex flipping in the background. And I think that’s too bad. Because it’s an incredibly complex thing. And I think, again, the atheist revivalists are committing the same sin they impute to the other side.

Quinn: I agree exactly with what you just said.

Meacham: Oh my God. I’m sorry.

Quinn: No, I think that’s absolutely true. I was only trying to explain what’s going on here, but I mean they’ve gone so far to the other side that they have become the fundamentalists. I mean they’re no different from the religious right fundamentalists or the Muslim fundamentalists. They’re the same because they’re all saying our way or the highway. Anyone who believes in God or who is religious is stupid. Well, that’s not acceptable.

Lloyd: To the audience.

Q: [not audible]

Meacham: The book that I recommended to Sally. I think anything should begin with people like John Mayer of Notre Dame on the historical Jesus. I think arguably the best Biblical scholar at work today is N. T. Wright. It’s unusual because he’s an Anglican, and he’s actually read the Bible. And that sets him apart in many ways. But he’s the bishop of Durham. My friend George Weigel, who is the papal biographer of John Paul II, says that reading Bishop Wright’s book The Resurrection of the Son of God was the most intellectually exhilarating experience in a decade. Obviously, Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels are terrific. We should actually post that list. That’s a good idea on the website. It would be like the Laffer Curve on a cocktail napkin. We’ll do that. Chesterton, yes.

Lloyd: This is the list that converted Sally.

Quinn: Yes, you too can be converted.

Q: Hello. I’m a Catholic seminarian. I have a question more for Sally. I always like atheists because I think they do a lot to keep religion honest. Being in a religious community myself, I feel the urge to go more the right way and all that kind of stuff. But my question is I have this bias because I don’t know many atheists but I’ve just done some reading, every time I read atheist writing, they say, “I don’t believe in God,” and then it’s usually a list of problems they have with religion. So I’m wondering if you can talk more about is it more atheists have a problem with religion, or is it the belief in God itself? Or where do you see that interplay?

Quinn: Is it more, I guess I didn’t get it…

Q: Like usually the arguments I hear, like, atheists make are more arguments against religion, and as someone with a religious life I agree with a lot of those arguments, but is it “I don’t believe in God and this is why I don’t think God exists”?

Quinn: I think if you’re asking about religion believing in God versus the church? Well, I think they’re more after organized religion. I know Christopher Hitchens quite well. I’ve come to know Sam Harris and Dawkins and Dennett. They’re all quite jolly people, and nice. For instance, Hitchens, John is one of the people he admires the most. A lot of Hitchens’ friends are very religious. I think their big problem is the idea of imposition, that anyone would impose their own faith or their own views on others. And I think that’s what makes them crazy. And I don’t like it either, and neither does John. Neither do any of us. This is a pluralistic and should be a pluralistic society. And my view is religion and belief in God is not a choice. You either believe or you don’t. There’s nothing that could make me believe in God or make me not believe in God.

But if the church, I don’t know if you saw a story in the Post a couple days ago about how Christians in Iraq are being persecuted and signs being put on their doors saying “Either convert or move out” where there is in Islam and some of these very Islamic communities, apostasy is, you can be sentenced to death for not believing in Islam or for converting to another religion. This is so completely un-American, but it seems to me “I’m Christian, I’m God-like”—this is what the atheists are most concerned about. I don’t think they care if people believe what they want to believe. I do think they feel religion as John McCain would say, that’s the kind of thing that scares people: “I wouldn’t vote for anybody who wasn’t a Christian because this is a Christian nation”—it makes everyone’s hair stand on end because they see that attitude as being pervasive.

Meacham: There’s a wonderful line from an Archbishop of Canterbury you don’t often hear those words in that order that it’s a mistake to believe that God is chiefly or even mainly concerned with religion.

Q: My name is Donna [Seharia Shevitz]. Atheism has always confused me a bit because… the imposition of not mentioning God. I feel if an atheist doesn’t want to pray, they can close their mouth, and they don’t have to pray. But if you ban public prayer in schools or anywhere else, you are taking away the right to pray at that moment from other people. And I can’t quite understand the illogic of that and the anger of atheists. You’ve talked a little bit about that. But what do you think about taking away the right of prayer or to have a manger scene? I’m not offended by seeing a menorah at Christmas time on the Mall. To me that’s what pluralism is about.

Meacham: I actually have journeyed on this position. President Kennedy, when the major school decision was handed down, held one of his wonderful press conferences in which he said that this just means that families need to pray more at home and pray more at church. And I completely agree with that. One of the great things about the religious clause in the First Amendment is it doesn’t single out religion for either particular help or a particular harm. It does seem to me a reasonable thing to believe that public school prayer is worrisome to some degree.

And if you believe, again, if we accept what’s said in this building and elsewhere is real, then saying a quick prayer, or even a long prayer, which I did say before math tests, which would always concentrate the mind about faith, is something that’s universal. If God is everywhere, then you don’t need an organized moment for it. On the question of the famous nativity scenes and whether they should be on public property or not, you know, Christians are 80% of the country, more or less. And just put the manger scene on the church lawn. Put it on your lawn. Don’t put it on the courthouse lawn. First of all, no one goes by the courthouse because it’s downtown, and no one goes downtown anymore. It’s one of these pointless debates. Let’s feed the hungry.

Lloyd: We have time for just one more question.

Quinn: Can I just say one thing about prayer in the schools. When my father was stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, I was eleven or twelve. And I did not believe in God at that time. I went to the school at Enterprise, and we had to pray all the time in school. We had to stand up. Everybody else was Southern Baptists. And the people who didn’t pray or didn’t want to pray would be taken up to the front of the class and be put on the teacher’s desk and paddled! They would have to lie on the desk and the teacher would paddle them. So guess what? Everybody prayed. And this is what happens when you have prayer in the school. People also say prayer in the school. What kind of prayer in the school? Suppose you were Jewish, Orthodox Jewish and you were the only Christian in a school or there were two or three Christians and the Orthodox Jewish kids were saying, “thank God I’m not born a woman.” Would that be okay? I mean, what people say when they talk about prayer in the schools, they’re talking about ‘my’ kind of prayer in the schools.

Meacham: Let me say one thing quickly because I can already feel the email coming. Sally and I work for what is known as the mainstream media. I am often called a liberal elitist when I’m in the South and a crazy conservative when I’m in the North. And I haven’t said anything different either place. That means the center of the country is somewhere over Roanoke if you’re looking for it.

I want to be very clear here. What we’re saying about public school prayer in response to your very good question, is often used as an example of “see how out of touch the press is”—or some often ill-defined elite is—“about the real values of the country.” It is absolutely true that this is a culture that is largely informed by religious values. It’s one that, if in fact public school prayer is a compelling issue to enough people, the founders gave us a system in which we can effect that. If that is the issue. Whatever it may be. That’s the issue you want to focus on, then you go to the country with it, you elect state legislators and congressmen and senators and a president who will only appoint judges who will do x or y. It’s just that the founders made it really hard for any single-issue person to win. And I think actually there’s wisdom there. And so if it’s really important, go fight for it. So… I respect very much the conviction that leads people to passion about that question.

Lloyd: We have to stop this fascinating conversation right here. We could go on a long time with this. John Meacham, Sally Quinn, thank you so much for being here. Be sure you go to washingtonpost.com and newsweek.com and click on “On Faith” to track these fascinating conversations going on about religion and American life.

Thanks so much for being here today. We’ll be back next week.