Washington National Cathedral

Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum where we are exploring issues of faith and public life and how they interact with each other. The Forum is an important part of the Cathedral’s ongoing work of trying to provide a voice of thoughtful, intelligent, generous spirit of Christian faith, and also to be a catalyst for reconciliation where people from all sides of all issues, and certainly people of faith from all different expressions, can come together to think and reflect with one another.

We hope these conversations can be the starting point for larger discussions that will flow from some of the things that begin here in these sessions.

Today we’re joined by a truly international agent for change, a man three times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, someone who’s been called the conscience of the Congress, a daunting undertaking that, for his efforts in caring for the hungry and the poor and the needy.

Tony Hall is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations agencies for food and agriculture. He was for twelve terms a Democratic congressman from Ohio, and he’s the author of a splendid book called Changing the Face of Hunger: One Man’s Story of How Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans and People of Faith Are Joining Force to Help the Hungry, the Poor and the Oppressed. This book will be on sale at our coffee hour just following our conversation today.

Tony, it’s great to have you with us.

Hall: Thank you, dean. It’s great to be here.

Lloyd: Been looking forward to it. You may be the only politician I’ve heard, certainly the only one I’ve ever heard of, who actually got faith on Capitol Hill. You became, I understand, a committed Christian only after joining the Congress. How in the world did that happen?

Hall: Well, it’s kind of a funny story, but it’s true I had to come to the Congress to find the Lord and I always seem to get a laugh out of that. I remember somebody, a good friend, introducing me once to an audience like this, and he got so excited he said, “Now I want to introduce Tony Hall. He’s a U.S. congressman, and a Christian.” And it got real quiet. And an older man, down front—he was squirming and sitting and he just couldn’t take it much longer, and he hollered up to me, “Make up your mind, buddy, you can’t be both.”

Lloyd: So how did this miracle occur?

Hall: Well, I believe it started back in Dayton, Ohio. There was a prayer breakfast in Dayton, Ohio. They call it the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast. The speaker was Chuck Colson. I was a state senator at the time. I didn’t really want to go and hear him, but as a politician I thought, “You know, there’s going to be 1,500 people there. And if I go there maybe this God kind of thing will rub off on me, and maybe people will say maybe this guy is okay.” So I went, and I was kind of unprepared for what Chuck Colson said. It was right after he was in jail. I wasn’t really prepared to really listen. And I was taken aback by his sincerity and what he said that day. And I never got over that.

And then it wasn’t until a few months later I was elected to Congress. And I came to Congress and I began to get up on Sunday and go to a different church. My wife and I, we kind of felt the same: we had respect for people that had faith, but it was not for us. But I had this vagueness in myself, and I was secure in my feeling from the standpoint that I needed something different. I didn’t like the way I was going. I didn’t like the way I was thinking. And I needed to change. I knew it had to do with God. So every Sunday I would get up and go a different place, a different church. And nothing was taking. I didn’t quite understand exactly everything that Chuck Colson said.

And after about a year of searching, a freshman congressman kind of befriended me and asked me to his house, my wife and three other congressional couples, one night. And this man walked in and began to speak about this person of Jesus. And as soon as he did I knew that that was what I was searching for. I fell in love with this person. This person of Jesus. And never looked back.

And it’s pretty much that simple. I was searching, I was ready, I had had great success. It’s not to say I was tired of my success, but I was tired of the vagueness and I was tired of the fact that “Is this it? There’s got to be more in life than this.” I knew it had to do with God, but I didn’t know what.

Lloyd: You got involved with several weekly Bible studies, breakfast groups, other groups. It was through that I understand that you met and got to know very well Frank Wolf, a congressman from Virginia and a Republican. Can you say a little bit about the role of those groups in your own formation? How that helped you along the way.

Hall: Well, there are many Bible studies on Capitol Hill. They have one in the Senate and one in the House every week that Congress is in session. And the one in the House has House members, any member can come. The speaker is always from the list of members. It’s never anyone from the outside. Staff’s not allowed to come. Reporters are not allowed to come. It’s completely closed to Congress people. And that’s every Thursday morning at 8 o’clock. They have a prayer and they sing a song, and then a member gives a little talk. The same thing goes on in the Senate, and they meet on Wednesday morning. And it’s a wonderful time. It’s a time when Democrats and Republicans, everybody, puts aside their labels.

And through that and other ways, Frank and I were kind of brought together to see if we would be interested in forming a little group, maybe three or four people, to pray together and get to know each other. Congressman Frank Wolf, as many of you know, represents the northern suburbs of Virginia, and he and I began to meet. And at first it didn’t work very well because what happened was as we began to concentrate on politics and issues, and when we began to do that we began to divide. And it was an early lesson for me from the same point that if the only thing that’s going to bring us together really is our issues or how we feel about certain things in our political life, that’s not enough. So we had decided after a while, let’s put all the politics aside. Because Frank and I were different. He was a conservative Republican and I was a Democrat, and we voted differently on a number of issues. But we had found out over time by prayer and by reading the Scriptures, by traveling together.

You know when you travel together with another member there’s a focus on your goal. Whether you’re going to Romania or you’re in Darfur, you focus. And when you get up in the morning and you pray together, it’s very, very powerful. And Frank and I began to travel and experience that. And after awhile there began to be a trust that was built in. And we decided that it was kind of silly to get into fights about politics and talk about issues that divide us. We had enough issues relative to humanitarian work and poverty and family values and those kinds of things that keep us really busy.

Lloyd: He must have been with you when you when you describe what was in many ways your other personal awakening, one to your faith in Christ. But the other piece was your awakening to the problem of extreme poverty around the world. And it was on a trip to Ethiopia, I think you say, when that whole journey began for you. Could you say something about that?

Hall: Frank was not with me on that trip. That trip I went by myself with an aide, and at the time I was the chairman of the sub-committee on international hunger. It was a time where 200,000 people had died in a matter of weeks in Ethiopia because of this civil war and a great famine that was going on. It was 1984, and I had remembered that I had mentored a fellow by the name of Jerry Regier who worked with me, would come in like Frank, and he would pray with me. He would answer my questions. A very fine man. He said to me prior to this trip, “Tony, you know you’ve been a believer, a person of faith for a year. Don’t you think it’s time you start to bring God into your workplace?” You know, I began to think, “How do I do this without being a hypocrite?” I don’t want to wear it on my lapel. I don’t want to tell people that they have to find God, that they have to do it this way. I would prefer to show it in some way. And I’ll never forget a pastor saying I would rather see a sermon than hear one. I thought that was a pretty good statement.

Lloyd: Preachers don’t like that so much.

Hall: Well, what happened was a few weeks later I went to Ethiopia, and I had a very difficult three and four days. It was difficult for me, but certainly more difficult for the people I was looking at.

Lloyd: Difficult in what way? What was it that grabbed you there?

Hall: The numbers of people that died in front of our eyes while I was there. One day I remember walking among 50,000 people who had been walking across this plateau, and they had heard there was going to be food at this one site. And they just had to get there. Some had been walking for over a hundred miles. And they had sold everything to get there. And to make a long story short, when they got there, there was nobody there. I happen to be in the area at the time. I knew that these thousands of people were moving and I wanted to go see this and try to understand it. When they got there, there was no blankets, there was no food. There was no water, and they just lay down. And they died. And as I was walking between them I began to hear this moaning. I mean, there was no rioting. There was no civil war going on at that particular area. I mean, I began to see children just fall away from their mothers just plopped down and die. And it was, I had to put my sunglasses on because tears were just flowing down. I’d just never seen anything like that.

I never got over that. And I saw that that day, and I saw a number of things the next day, and I came home thinking, “You know, this is what I can do in Congress. I have found the thing, the way I can bring God into my workplace without preaching about it.” You know, as you look to the Scriptures, there’s over 2,000 verses that deal with the issue of the poor and the sick and the hungry and the orphans and the widows. I mean, you can’t pick up a chapter without reading something about it. And this was a way that I could bring God into my workplace by concentrating on legislation, by traveling, by being with these people. And sometimes when you travel and see this, there’s not much you can do. I mean, you can pray to yourself silently. You can touch them. You can come home and try and do something about it. And that was the way I was going to demonstrate what my faith was about.

Lloyd: And so you’ve been just about everywhere, something like a hundred countries. Sudan and India, North Korea, same desperate people in all those places.

Hall: I’ve been to about 118 nations, and the nations that you talked about, all difficult nations like North Korea, Sudan…

Lloyd: …where you describe the children eating grass to survive.

Hall: Yep. In North Korea for the past few years, especially starting about five years ago, there’s basically, even today, there’s no energy in the country. You’ll drive through the towns at night and the only thing you’ll see in a window is a candle. And you might be in a town of 50-60,000 people. You’ll see people eating grass. They also have something which they call substitute food. They’ll take grass and twigs and they’ll grind it up and they’ll put a little bit of flour in it and try to make noodles. And they do make a noodle. Matter of fact I brought some back with me, not to last time I was in North Korea but a couple years ago. And they eat this, they cook this, they eat it. And it gives you a false feeling that you’re really eating something, but it’s really called substitute food. And what you’ll see at hospitals is all these people in North Korea holding their stomachs because you can’t digest substitute food. And that’s the situation in North Korea today. I suspect there’s been at least a couple million people die in North Korea of a population of about 25 million.

Lloyd: What’s it feel like, Tony, to expose yourself to that kind of suffering? I mean, you could sit home and read the reports, but you go there and you spend time with those people. And then you would come back to the halls of Congress, or come back to your work as a UN—ambassador to the UN. How do you move between those two worlds emotionally, spiritually, to be present there and then to come back to a very bureaucratic place where the policy has to be moved along? Do you find receptivity when you come back? Are you frustrated and angry when you come back?

Hall: Yeah, the first time I went to North Korea, people, including people in South Korea, people in my own government, people in my own party… “Why would you feed our enemy?” I said, “You know, the women and children that I see dying, they’re not my enemy.” I said, “You know, maybe we don’t get along with the government; we’re not crazy about the government; we don’t have a relationship with the government. But I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about feeding the people.” And God says, “Feed the people.” He doesn’t say, “Now, I want you to feed everybody in the world except those people in North Korea.” He says, “Feed them.” And I believe that.

So it is frustrating. You come home and you get criticized by the newspaper. You get criticized by your own party and by people in the other party. I told my frustration to Frank Wolf and a good friend that’s in the audience today, John Nakamura, about this. And Frank would travel with me, but John, he travels with me all the time. And one of the ways we overcome not only the squalid conditions but these conditions of extreme poverty and sometimes death, is we, very simply, we pray every morning. And as we go through the day having different meetings, meeting people, my friends, including John Nakamura and another fellow by the name of Dave Austin, they pray for me. Like I might be asked to do the speaking, responding to various things, but they’ll be praying silently. And there’s great power in that.

Lloyd: You tell a story of being so frustrated by the closing down of the select committee that dealt with hunger that it was in that moment of frustration that you decided to do something pretty radical and undertake a fast, a real fast. Tell us about that.

Hall: That was radical. What happened was is that in the Congress, I think it was in the early 90s—1994 or 1993, around there—I was now the chairman of the full committee. And this committee was doing, I felt, really great work. We were called the “conscience of the Congress.” We had passed a lot of legislation that’s still in existence today on immunization, on basic education of mothers, on micro finance, on feeding people, etc. But the Congress decided to eliminate my committee because they said we have too many committees, and we’re just going to show everybody in the country that we know how to live within our budget. And the Congress was right because we had high deficits.

But sometimes in Congress we throw the baby out with the bath water when we’re trying to do something. And they decided to start with my committee. So I was so mad and so frustrated at this, not that I needed my committee back, but the lack of conscience I felt was in the Congress. I went home. I told my wife. I said, “You know, I’m going to quit. I’m sick of this place. I’ve had it.” And she said to me, “Did you ever think about going on a fast?” I said, “Fast?” And I thought, what do you mean? She says, “So let’s go read Isaiah 58.” So we went and read Isaiah 58, and Isaiah 58 is a great chapter on fasting. What is a true fast? And God spells it out pretty good.

So we read that. I thought about it. I went and asked some friends that I trusted, “What do you think? I’m thinking about going on a fast. I’m not going to eat. I’ll just drink water. I’m not going to hurt myself, but I’m going to stop eating for a long period of time because I’m sick and tired of this.” I said, “My only other way out is just to get out, or quit, or get mad and get even with them.” And I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t feel comfortable at that time doing that, and I was a different person.

So, I announced to the Congress at a press conference that I was going on a fast because, you men and women, they don’t have a conscience for these issues. And I’m going to stop eating, and I’ll drink water. And I’m not going to start eating again until something good happens about this issue of hunger. I’m not asking for my committee back, but I’m asking you, that you start doing something.

You talk about stepping out of your comfort zone! And I’m not really a flashy kind of a person in that I didn’t want to look like a clown, and this was kind of a dramatic step. But I went back to my district of Dayton, Ohio, and I thought, well, this is the end of my political career. My staff thought I was crazy: why would you do this? You could ruin your career. So I went back to Dayton, Ohio, and I thought, well, I don’t know what’s going to happen here, but I’m going to face the music. And this large Catholic high school, called Chaminade Julien, they decided to fast with me. Everybody in the school, all the parents, all the teachers, they took two or three days. And that started it.

And the word and the publicity spread, and they tell me there were 10,000 high schools that fasted with us across the country. And a couple hundred universities. Not everybody in the universities or in the high school, but you know ten, twenty, a hundred, hundred fifty here or there. And the press began to write about it in a very good way, both conservative press and the liberal press. It was quite remarkable. Now, the congressmen, they want to know me a little bit better because they were kind of avoiding me like I had the plague because they couldn’t understand somebody that would do this. Meanwhile, I’m losing weight.

And so after the twenty-second day, after a number of great things happened, but the most important is that the World Bank called me and said, “We’re moved by your fast, and we want to do an international conference based around your fast, based around feeding people, and we’ll take care of it. We’ll invite all these people.”

They invited Jimmy Carter, and at the time the secretary general of the UN was a man by the name of Boutros Boutros-Ghali and some world leaders. They had it here. Not in your church, but in Washington. They put a hundred million dollars behind my fast. That day. And most of that money went to women on micro finance. That money has now grown to be much higher than a hundred million. It’s, I don’t know what the figure is, but they say it’s around a half billion dollars now. One fast.

I didn’t have a committee. I just had a few friends and my wife that was with me. I didn’t pass any legislation. We didn’t appropriate any money. All I did was stop eating. I gave it unto the Lord. I fasted unto him. And that’s important. A lot of people fast to lose weight, and I lost a lot of weight. And that’s okay, but I fasted for other reasons.

It’s amazing how God honored that. I, I, I… it’s hard to explain, but I never felt so close to God in all my life during those twenty-two days.

Lloyd: Let me ask you one more pretty big question, and then we’re going to go to questions from the audience. The passion that you bring to this is so powerful, and your record of living into this for so many years is inspiring. If you could describe—without going into programs—in particular, what your hope is for what our country could do, and also something about what your vision what we as individuals could do. Because reading your book and hearing your talk brings home the heart-breaking gravity of what’s going on as we speak. And I think the big question is, “What’s possible for our country, and what’s possible for us?”

Hall: Well, I think what’s possible for our country is I think it’s possible for us, as a group of believers and even non-believers, to work together, to just take one issue, hunger, and solve the problem in our own country. We’ve got 37 million people in this country that go to bed hungry at some time during the month, two or three days, and these people are not the people that you see out on the street. These are people who are women and children, women that maybe they’re living on a minimum income. By the time they pay day care and hospital bills, transportation, etc., they run out of food. Senior citizens are the same way, many of them. And there’s about 37 million of these people every month, in this country, that go to bed hungry two or three days. Not the kind of hunger in Sudan or Congo or North Korea, but nevertheless hunger that is very detrimental, especially later in their life.

Lloyd: So we could do something about that, for sure.

Hall: There shouldn’t be anybody that ever goes to bed hungry, ever again in this country. We have enough food. We waste something like 110 million tons of food every year. And we do that through waste, and we can go get it. We do that through—even in our own icebox, we do that through what’s thrown out in grocery stores and those kind of places. We should make a pact with each other, with churches, with synagogues, with people of faith, people that are not of faith, the government should do this as well. Join in. We’re going to end hunger. Nobody’s going to bed hungry ever again in this country. We’re going to take care of our own.

The second thing which answers part of your question is, what can we do? In the book I talk about meeting Mother Teresa, spending time with her. I met her maybe five or six times, and one time in Calcutta I was with her. We were walking down the street, and the poverty in Calcutta was so overwhelming that we had to step over people because they were sleeping in the street. Here again you get frustrated, and I said to Mother Teresa, “Look at this. How can we possibly make a difference here? Where do we start?” And she said, “Do the thing that’s in front of you.” She went, picked a man up who was sick. Took him home. Began to wash him off and take care of him, love him, hug him. She loved everybody. She hugged everybody. She felt everybody. I mean she just brought them in and…

Lloyd: “Do the thing that’s in front of you.”

Hall: Do the thing that’s in front of you. We don’t all have to go to Calcutta. What’s going on here? We probably could go a couple blocks from here and find out people who are needy. What’s going on? What’s going on with your next door neighbor? What’s going on in your church here? What do we need here? What’s going on where you work? There’s somebody there that’s hurting. Do the thing that’s in front of you. If we all did that, you know, we’d solve most of the government problems when it came to poverty.

Lloyd: And you made a point of exposing your own family to this, but not in a lecturing way, but introducing them to what you were experiencing. Say something about that.

Hall: Well, my daughter and my son… actually, it was my wife’s idea, and it was a great idea. We took them to Africa with us. We took them to Uganda and Kenya, and they worked in AIDs orphans’ kinds of compounds. We also took them to Dayton, Ohio, and we’d sometimes go to food banks and soup kitchens. I’d take them with me. They saw this. It really had an impact on them. It was not—and my daughter has said to me many times—she said, “You know it’s not so much what you said. It’s what we saw and what you felt.” And now that’s what she does. She’s in ministry and she’s working in a church. She works with the homeless and the poor.

Lloyd: We should go to our questioners. Do we have any questions for Tony Hall? I can begin with a question that came in off the website just for starters, which seems to me a pretty good place to begin. This came in just before we began today: How do I truly respond to the person on the street who asks me for food or money? Do I tell this person, the face of Christ, to get lost? Do I refer to a local agency? How am I to show Christ to this person?

Hall: You know, that’s a good question. It’s a tough question. I don’t think I have a very good answer for it, because sometimes, when I’m walking down a street, I’ll help them, I’ll give them something, or I’ll talk to them. And other times I’ll pass by them. The only thing I can tell you is that the people I’m talking about are not the people that you see on the street. The 37 million people that are really hungry and suffering are the people that you don’t see. These are the people that are embarrassed, and they don’t want you to see them. They’re embarrassed they have to go to a food bank and soup kitchens.

So the answer is, if you feel like your money is going to benefit this person, it would be nice to be able to give them some kind of token or some kind of piece of paper where they could go and get a meal. That’s much better than handling money. And sometimes you see somebody that you know are not going to do a very good job with the money that you’re going to give them. And sometimes I walk past. I don’t have a good answer. I think you just do what is in front of you.

My problem—it’s not a problem—my son Matt, when I was trying to teach him how to help hungry people, we’d walk down the street. And I’d say, “Well, you should help this person.” So he’d get some money from me and go give a quarter, fifty cents, a dollar, whatever. The only problem is I taught him so well that I couldn’t walk past a poor person begging without giving money. It cost me a bundle with my son walking down the street.

So I think what you have to do is look at your own conscience: how do you feel? I think the fact is, do the thing that’s in front of you. And it’s not always helping that person that’s on the street. There’s plenty of people out there that need your help.

Q: Mr. Ambassador, I want you to imagine a scenario, and it’s one that will quite likely happen. It’s January 21, 2009. You get a call from the White House. The president invites you into the Oval Office and says, “I agree with the agenda. Tell me what it is, what can we do on the policy side, on domestic and international. If you’re sitting where I’m sitting, what is your list of policy initiatives to deal with hunger?”

Hall: I’d say, Mr. President, let me loose! I’m going to feed everybody in this country and nobody’s going to bed hungry. Then, once I do that, I’m going to have hunger-free communities across this country, where communities will work together so that nobody will ever go without shelter or hunger, ever be hungry in America. Then, after that, I’m going to attack the international hunger. Before the day is over, today, 25,000 people will die in this world. And yesterday, 25,000 died, and tomorrow 25,000 will die. And they’ll die of hunger-related diseases. Half the world lives on two dollars a day or less. And there’s at least a billion people that live on a dollar or less. So after I take care of this problem in America—and it’s not a simple problem; but if we have the political will, and the spiritual will which I think is important—then I would go after international hunger.

Q: There are those that say that government bureaucracies really don’t have a conscience. And my question for you is, does our government have a conscience? And, if so, where is it? And how can it be improved upon?

Hall: I think there are some really good people in politics. Matter of fact, there are more people in politics that really care, that work hard, that you would be surprised—the morals of our elected officials. One of the reasons why they don’t understand these kinds of issues is that nobody ever presents these issues to them. They are so busy, so overwhelmed sometimes, and a lot of people getting the attention of the elected officials in this city and in state capitals are people that represent wealthy people. And the advocates for the poor, they very seldom ever get into somebody’s office. Not because they don’t want to, but because they’re out there advocating trying to help the poor. So, there are people that do have a conscience.

The president of the United States, President Bush—and I can say this; I’m a Democrat, he’s a Republican—he’s put more money and more programs into HIV AIDs and in emergency feeding than any president I ever served under. He never gets credit for that. Matter of fact, nobody knows that he does it. And he doesn’t even take credit for it which I think he should. And he has a conscience about it. Now, we might disagree on other issues, but on this issue he has a conscience. And there are members of Congress like that, and other political people like that. The problem is we haven’t been able to mobilize the—not only the spiritual will, but the political will—to put it together. It’s not there. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the conscience. Just means they’re working on other things.

And the advocates for the poor—which is us, we’re supposed to be advocates for the poor—we’re not getting to these elected officials and demanding that they do something about it.

Q: Hi. How do you approach things internationally in terms of emergency relief versus the sustainable programs. I used to live in Zimbabwe, and you can go in and try and feed people. But there’s a bigger problem there. And I get torn between those issues.

Hall: You have to do both because there are 25,000 people who will die today, and they’ll die of hunger or hunger-related diseases. So they need food and they need clean water just to keep them alive. But what’s happened over the years is we’ve cut our development assistance substantially. And we need a lot more of that. Micro finance, immunizations, basic education of mothers.

I find it very interesting—and we did some studies on this on the Hunger Committee—is that, when you teach a mother in a poor nation how to read and write, what happens is, the population goes down and the gross national product goes up in that country. And it happens because, in some of these developing nations, most people believe that what happens is, they’ve got to have a tremendous number of children because their security is not what they get from the government, but the government doesn’t have any social security or welfare programs or anything like that. Their social security is their children. And they expect a few of their children to live. And if they live to the ripe old age of 30, maybe they can take care of their moms and dads. That is their social security. So they have a lot of children.

But when you teach a mother how to read and write, what happens is, she learns about boiling water, she learns about nutritious food, she learns about breast feeding, and she learns about micro finance and other kinds of things, and immunizing her children, she has less children. She gets really smart, and she starts developing her own jobs and her own work, and now for the first time she’s beginning to show some money. The gross national product for the country goes up, the population goes down. It works.

Q: Hello, Mr. Ambassador. It’s very inspirational listening to you. It seems as though your most moving experiences came not from the U.S., but came from watching the people dying from poverty, like in Sudan. And you also mentioned North Korea. I may have missed this, and it’s not too clear to me, your efforts to rich out to people and to help the people dying. You said you had these world leaders stepping in and together you were able to raise close to a million dollars. Did you do anything like to help those people in the countries that were most affected by poverty, like North Korea and Sudan? Because, listening to you, I would have been very interested to hear how these funds actually aided those people.

Hall: That’s a good question, and actually we don’t do development assistance in North Korea and Sudan, especially in Darfur, because we’re not permitted because it’s very difficult for our leaders—not our leaders, our NGOs—to get in there. And they’re really only permitted to do emergency feeding in the refugee camps, especially in Darfur and North Korea. We’re not permitted to give development assistance to North Korea. You know, there’s always that debate that goes on. But those are two countries that you mention, and about the only thing we do there is immunization. We do some health care with pharmaceuticals, and we do emergency feedings. And that’s it.

Q: And again, I’m not the most knowledgeable, you know, most worthy read person for the most part, until I come to like a place like this. That’s when I’m aware what’s going on like in other countries. But I think North Korea—you mentioned the substitution feeding, and then this other country said there were mothers and kids who travel these long distances and then they were just falling down and dying from poverty. And my question to you, if this is not emergency feeding, then what is?

Hall: I’m not sure I understand your question. That is emergency feeding. We do produce a lot of food and feed these people in that particular situation. And you’ll be happy to know, and you might be surprised, that of all the people that are being fed in the world today, of hungry people, the United States feeds 50% of them. We have 50% of everything. The other 50% is carried by the rest of the world.

Lloyd: I want to move on to another subject before we close. You have a whole chapter in your book with advice for the Democratic Party, your party. Last week we had Michael Gerson here offering advice to his Republican Party and a lot about addressing issues of injustice and inequality and poverty. You’re urging your Democratic Party to claim some of a religious tone to what they’re doing, being able to talk about religion more comfortably, but you’re also challenging them to be a more wide-ranging and open party than they’ve been. Would you say something about that?

Hall: You know, I look at the last campaign, and our presidential candidate, John Kerry, a good man. It was almost like he was afraid to talk about faith. And some people do have trouble personally talking about faith in a public arena. And the Democrats need to get over that. They don’t have to wear their label on their chest. But they need to be more comfortable in talking about what faith is and what it isn’t. And I think what people are looking for in elected officials—they’re looking for sincerity. And, you know, I get frustrated with the Democratic Party, because I think they look like warmed-over Republicans. I think they ought to look like Democrats.

What are Democrats? Well, Democrats have always been the party of poor people, of working people, of the middle class, of helping them, and they’ve always been one that’s put that forward and fought for that. And now, you know, I don’t see a lot of difference between the parties. I see a lot of rhetoric.

Lloyd: And you’ve had some trouble finding your place in the party because along the way you became pro-life, and you’ve had some difficulty with the party because of that.

Hall: I have. And when I became a pro-life congressman, it changed a lot of things, especially in my home district. A lot of people didn’t like the fact that I was pro-life and I was a Democrat because our leadership is for the most part very pro-choice. And it caused me a lot of problems. But what happened was that, under President Clinton, he asked me to make a speech at the convention in Chicago about being a pro-life Democrat, because the Democratic Party should be a party of inclusion. We should be reaching out to everybody. And Democrats that were pro-life didn’t feel like they were part of the party.

So I gave a speech at the Democratic Convention about being a pro-life Democrat and what that means. They went through the hall in the convention center and said, “Now, when Congressman Hall speaks, don’t boo him because we’re on national television.” So when I got done making my speech about being a pro-life Democrat, and it’s okay to be part of this party, nobody booed. But there was no spontaneous applause either. It was like, ‘clap… clap… clap.”

Lloyd: Last question for you. As you look particularly at the problems of poverty in the world—and they are overwhelming as you describe them—are you hopeful that our world can develop a conscience? You’re calling America, and you’re prepared to go speak to the new president of the United States on this. Are you hopeful for our country? Are you hoping for our world that we can do something about that half the world’s population who are struggling today to survive?

Hall: I remember when I first started on this issue well over thirty years ago. At that time over 40,000 people were dying every day. Now, that number is down to 25,000. That’s still a significant amount of people dying, but progress is possible.

I think this issue is becoming more and more important. I think you’re starting to see national, international celebrities like Bono, and even some of the great evangelical leaders are taking it on. You’re going to have one here next week. Rick Warren. Yes, I’m hopeful. I’m always hopeful. And you know, when you’re in the Lord, he gives you hope. It’s the only thing that keeps you going. Yes, I am. I think there are good people and I think it’s a matter of… I think this responsibility of trying to get the world and our country motivated really is the responsibility of people of faith. I don’t think it necessarily belongs to the government. It’s for us to get motivated. It’s for us to do the things in front of us. It’s for us to not necessarily give a sermon, but show one.

Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation. We need to wrap this up. A great conversation. Come back next week and we’ll continue some of this with Rick Warren, certainly the most significant Protestant pastor in America, who’ll be with us for a conversation at the Forum.

Tony Hall is going to linger for some coffee and some conversation in the Churchill Porch which is at the West End of the Church. I hope you’ll come greet him there, and join us at 11:15 for our service today.

Join me in thanking Tony Hall.