Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to our second season of the Sunday Forum as we pick up again a conversation about the relationship between faith and public life, and as one particular piece of public life that is much on our minds and in the news everywhere these days, which is of course the life of politics. So we have with us today one of the most astute political analysts and commentators around, and someone particularly sensitive to the relationship between religion and politics.

If you’re like me, E. J. Dionne’s columns in the Washington Post are one of the essential pieces of keeping up with what’s going on. He has also been a frequent guest on National Public Radio on the Sunday news programs. I thanked him for clearing his calendar, for not being on the Sunday programs somewhere this morning, and being here with us, and I was marveling that he could even be off the road these days after so much traveling that all the people in the press have been a part of in this remarkable political year.

E. J. Dionne is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, one fairly recently out, particularly helpful for what we are talking about today, called Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right. That’s what we will be talking about today. E. J. Dionne, welcome. It’s great to have you with us.

E. J. Dionne: Thank you. Could I just say, before we start, what a privilege it is to be at this Cathedral, which is a real gift to our community and our nation. Also it is very intimidating to be up here knowing the sermons and speeches that have been given from this altar, that pulpit.

I have had a lot of experiences in this church, many of them joyful but some bittersweet and I was thinking on the way over here tonight... this morning, about a service here sixteen years ago for a wonderful person called Paul Tully. Some of you may remember Paul, who was the basically the number two at the Democratic National Committee to Ron Brown, and of course I’ve been thinking of Ron who died later in a plane crash in Bosnia, but Ron Brown got up to a packed church full of very, very political people—Republicans and Democrats, all of whom loved Paul Tully, and he began his eulogy with the following words. He said, “You know, I feel lost without Paul. I never said anything without consulting him, and I thought, what would Tully tell me here today? And what Tully would tell me is, there is not a persuadable voter in that church, and you can tell them anything you want.” And I took heart from thinking about that as I remembered Paul and Ron, and I suspect there is not a persuadable voter in this church today. So I will try to say anything I want but I thank you very, very much for having me here. It’s a real honor to be here.

Dean Lloyd: Let’s start with your book; Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right—spelled S-o-u-l-e-d, souled out. What is being ‘souled out’ and to whom?

E. J. Dionne: I should give credit to my almost-16-year-old son for that title. Where the title came from: a conversation in our car as we were going out to the Eastern Shore, and my wife, with three kids in the back, and James was close in. And my wife gave the best title to anything I’ve ever written, a book called Why Americans Hate Politics. So I said, “Mary you have to get me off the hook again,” and so she was working on excellent titles involving the word ‘soul.’ And my son shouted out, “Souled!” And in good call-and-response fashion I shouted back, “Out.”

And “souled out,” I sort of thought, was the perfect title, because I use it in two senses. On the one side, it is an exceptional sellout of our religious traditions, in my view, to say that they are only about a very, very narrow set of issues that our faith only speaks to us about: abortion or stem cell research, but never about the larger questions of war and peace, social and economic justice, how we arrange ourselves as a society. And you can’t read the old testament prophets or the preachings of Jesus without knowing that our tradition speaks to us about these large questions.

But it is also sold out in another sense, because I think that there is a sense of exhaustion in the country with religion used in a very narrow—and I believe often partisan—way in our politics. My friend Jim Wallis printed up these bumper stickers that said ‘God is not a Republican or a Democrat.’ And to be honest about the nature of my household, my son said, “I love that sticker, but can you cut off the ‘or a Democrat’ part.”

But, in fact, I think it is fair to say that we don’t know whom God would vote for, should not presume to know whom God would vote for, and that we have to figure out that question for ourselves. And so I think that what you are seeing now is a real opening again in the faith community toward a broader understanding of this. You are seeing it in the Evangelical world with a renewed interest in poverty, in the environment, in justice towards suffering in the Third World. And I think you are seeing it on the liberal side, where you know you could say Democrats discovered God in the 2004 exit polls. But since God can be discovered anywhere, that’s just all right with me.

But I don’t think it’s entirely cynical. I think what you had were a lot of people who were progressive in religious... who were kind of tongue-tied in talking about their faith in public and I think in the case of both Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, in the case of Tim Kaine, the governor of Virginia, and many others, there was much greater openness in talking about this. And I think its much healthier for religion and for our civic life if we recognize that the separation of church and state is not the same thing as a separation of religion from politics, because, if you look at our history and look at the abolitionist movement or the civil rights movement or the progressive movement, these were all movements that had a deep inspiration from people of faith, and that we have lost track of that over the last several years. And I think we are rediscovering it.

Dean Lloyd: Let me ask you if you have some, may be some rules of the road in the relationship between faith and politics, because we’ve seen a lot of models of fairly secular approach for years. But in the last fifteen or twenty years, a lot of models of, for example, heavy Evangelical involvement in politics, but of course in 1960s it was the mainlines and the African American churches heavily involved. What constitutes, would you say, a healthy engagement of an individual or a faith tradition in politics, as opposed to one that steps over the line and starts getting destructive?

E. J. Dionne: Well, I think that the first rule is to recognize our own sinfulness and hypocrisy in these matters, which I think is in keeping with our tradition. One of my heroes is Reinhold Niebuhr, who spoke constantly of our obligation to question our own motives, to look at what we are doing, even when we believe we are doing it for the best of reasons. And so I do think there is always a temptation, that if you are a liberal, that you honor the prophetic role of religion when religion is on the side of peace and civil rights, and then see religion as narrow-minded when it is on the side of a conservative cause, its take it as a conservative cause now to opposition to abortion, for example.

And similarly, on the right there is a tendency to say that faith is being misused when it’s being used on behalf of social justice or peace and it is only appropriate, so I think, when it’s used on behalf of conservative causes. So rule number one is recognize our own sinfulness and hypocrisy on this.

Interestingly, Jerry Falwell himself in later life acknowledged his own inconsistency. I agree with Jerry Falwell on very little, but I did admire that moment he had, because Falwell had once written very sharply against the engagement of religious people in politics. Preachers are called upon to be soul winners, not politicians, he said. When he was talking about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, and later he did at least acknowledge that his later behavior and action contradicted what he had said in the civil rights years.

I think the second point is to acknowledge that there is always a battle within our tradition about what our tradition says about contemporary events. I argue in my book that in many ways religious faith, religious tradition, certainly the Christian tradition, is simultaneously conservative and progressive, and that preserving a tradition involves honoring it and protecting it from the latest fads. But preserving tradition also involves challenging it and asking if what we take to be the tradition is, in fact, the product of cultural encrustations of the past that we should be rid of.

A good example of the latter were the many Christians who made Christian arguments on behalf of slavery. And we learned—and Mark Noll, the great Evangelical thinker has a new book out coming, I think in the fall, in the next couple of months, about this debate about slavery among Christians—we decided rightly that this was a radical misreading of the Gospel tradition. Now it was progressives who did that, but they did it in order to preserve the tradition. And so I sort of think that, when you think about these things, you need to sort of preserve both passion and humility, and those two don’t tend to go together very well. And yet I think our struggle is to try to do both at the same time.

Again, humility to question our own motives, to challenge ourselves, but passion because, if you really do believe what the Gospel says, you have to be dissatisfied with the way the world is arranged at the current moment. You have to assume that things can be better. And in my book, I pick what I hope is a charitable fight with our neo-atheist friends, because I believe that faith in God, far from sending you down a road of narrow-mindedness and violence, actually does something quite different. That faith in God requires you to challenge all of the ideologies of this world, all of the governing structures of this world. That it is a higher standard against which we measure ourselves, and indeed a standard that we ourselves cannot ever hope to achieve. So we shouldn’t drag God down into our own fights is, I think, the sort of core rule, but rather try to aspire to Godly standards.

Dean Lloyd: You draw one particular distinction, I think, pretty early in your book, of where you disagree with simply the thoroughgoing sort of right wing religious agenda. And that’s where you say that the tendency there seems to be, or the argument seems to be, most of all with the counter-culture of permissiveness and the sort of moral decay, the unwinding of the family and all the rest. But you say it seems to you the more critical issue has to do with allowing market values to crowd out everything else. Say something about what you meant by the danger of market values infiltrating every part of our lives.

E. J. Dionne: Thank you for... Richard Nixon used to say I’m glad you asked that question. I think of myself as a family values liberal, and I don’t think being a family values liberal means that you’re against your gay or lesbian friend. Being a family values liberal means that you understand that healthy family lives are essential to social justice.

I think that one of my favorite set of speeches Obama has given, echoing, interestingly, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan—he took a lot of grief when he said it back in the 1970s—is that family breakdown is the result of economic injustice. But it actually deepens economic inequality. And so, again, if you care about social justice, you have to care about family values.

But I am not persuaded that family breakdown is primarily the product of some permissive, terrible, permissive culture, and I say that as someone with two and soon to be three teenage kids; and I can assure you there’s a lot about the culture I don’t like.

A conservative friend of mine says that a social conservative is a liberal with a daughter in high school, and you could make that less sexist by saying a son or a daughter in high school. On the other hand, I think that when you look at family breakdown, a lot of it has economic causes. We don’t talk nearly enough about how we might do far better than we do and other countries do better than we do at balancing the obligations to work and the obligations to family.

We don’t talk nearly enough about, I think, how little support we give to middle and lower income people who are trying desperately to raise good kids and to be responsible for their families. My friend Jim Wallis likes to talk about Burger King mom. He said we talked a lot about soccer mom, or now hockey mom, but we don’t think about Burger King mom, and he spoke about the woman he ran into at a Burger King one day. And she was waiting on him, and she had two kids in the back, and the two kids were busily doing their homework at the Burger King and it was because she needed the money from her job and she was going to be self-sufficient—as we tell people they’re supposed to be—but she wanted to keep an eye on those kids and so they were sitting back in the midst of that lovely smell of french fries, doing their homework in the Burger King.

Now A) we honor that woman and we should honor that woman a lot more than we do. But B) we should think hard about might we do more to help that woman out in her honorable work of trying to raise good kids. And, if I may, since it may not come up, I’m very much of the view that we need to change the debate on abortion in the United States and I’ve been making this argument both to my pro-choice friends and to my pro-life friends, that it’s my view that, even if Roe v. Wade falls, it is highly unlikely that abortion will become illegal in the United States, particularly highly unlikely that it would become illegal in the first trimester. There may be a couple of states that will ban it, but somewhere there’s a study that came out this summer that, if you look at public opinion, something like 90% of the American population—even if Roe fell, just based on what states would do, 90% of the population would continue to live in states where abortion is legal.

But I think the pro-choice side can and should take very seriously the moral difficulties, to put it gently, that a lot of people in the right to life community have with abortion. Abortion is a moral problem, and I think it’s not hard to see how our right-to-lifers see it as a moral evil. Couldn’t we do a whole lot more to reduce the number of abortions in the country? And I think you can do that, and the abortion rate dropped eleven percent in the Nineties, and I think you can do it on the front end obviously with more attention to contraception, family planning, sex education that includes both talk of abstinence and talk of contraception. But at the back end to help poor women have their kids, poor women who want to choose life.

The abortion rate is four times higher among poor women than it is among wealthy women. If I can close on this: Bob Carey, the former Senator, gave a great little talk at Fordham, where he spoke of a single mother working in a factory in North Carolina. That was the example he sort of offered in his thought experiment. And he said, imagine this woman working in a factory where she gets a decent wage, gets health coverage and becomes pregnant. Then imagine the same woman who loses her job, loses her health coverage and becomes pregnant.

Under which circumstances is that woman more likely to choose life? When she has a job, where she can support her child, healthcare to cover herself during her pregnancy? Or when she loses both? And I think that is how I link sort of the economic questions and the social justice questions with the question of values.

Dean Lloyd: You’re talking like a classic Catholic now.

E. J. Dionne: Even though my very conservative Catholic friends are going to challenge this, I think I’m incorrigibly so...

Dean Lloyd: And that’s why I want to hold up the marvelous phrase: a seamless garment. Could you say something about the richness of that phrase and how it has guided a lot of Catholic thought in the last twenty or thirty years?

E. J. Dionne: The seamless garment is a phrase invented by the late Cardinal Bernadine, the archbishop of Chicago, one of the truly great religious leaders in our country and in the Catholic church and Cardinal Bernadine argued that you couldn’t look—and he was a very orthodox Catholic, he was a right-to-lifer, he opposed abortion—but he saw abortion in the context of a larger culture of life, and he argued that you could not really adhere to a cultural life unless you saw these things as a seamless garment, where opposition to the death penalty, a concern for social justice, and a deep skepticism of war—and he was not a pacifist, but a deep skepticism of war were linked up to opposition to abortion.

And I think one of the unfortunate things that’s happened, and certainly happened in the 2004 election, within my church, is that some voices in the church—I still believe a minority—were arguing that there was only a narrow list of nonnegotiable issues and somehow those nonnegotiable were all in the Republican Party platform: you know, they were stem cell, some gay marriage, and abortion, and cloning, and I’ve forgotten the fifth at the moment. And you know, somehow all the other parts of Cardinal Bernadine’s seamless garment were left out in that, of that.

And I’ll prove I’m incorrigibly Catholic in one other sense. It does seem to me that our religious traditions probably have the job of making us all feel guilty about something, and that it seems to me that those of us who are liberal or progressive probably do need to give more thought than we do to questions of family life, to all of the issues raised by abortion, and those among us who are conservative Christians have to give a lot more thought than conservatives might routinely do to the situation of the poor, to the least among us, to remember what Jesus and the Old Testament prophets said about such things. And I think the beauty of the seamless garment is that it probably did make everybody feel guilty about something. I don’t think I believe that guilt is on the whole a more constructive than destructive force, but I’m glad to argue that with anyone here. Others may disagree, I know that.

Dean Lloyd: So you’re almost talking about a complementarity: that the more religious conservative view says some things that the commonweal needs to listen to. And the progressive liberals are saying a great deal that the common good is going to require as well. We’re seeing some hints in the Evangelical worlds these days, of Evangelical leaders paying attention to care for the environment, for care for the poor, and for global poverty. Are you hopeful that, in what still looks like a fairly polarized election, that there is increasingly some common ground for some collaboration and some learning from each other?

E. J. Dionne: Well, you know, things have gotten pretty rough in the last both number of years and particularly in the last couple of weeks. I’ve recently said, forgive me the partisan statement here, that the campaign that Senator McCain is running, which is very disappointing to me because I’ve always had a lot of respect for Senator McCain as making Carl Rove look like a member of Common Cause. It’s a very peculiar sort of phenomenon here, and I want to share with you... Some of you may, I’m sure, have heard of this as a button or bumper sticker floating around on the web that you can buy, that says, “Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor.” And so that gives us a sense of how divided things are.

But yes, in the book I very much believe that you know, Senator Moynihan, if I can quote him again, loved the idea of social learning. And I love the idea of social learning, and I love the idea of social learning because it says something that is very true, which is, we don’t only learn ourselves sitting in library reading learned books. We constantly learn from each other in exchanges and argument. And it seems to me that, at its best, argument is about teaching each other something.

Now what passes for argument in our society is often not argument at all, it’s just contradictory statements that fly past each other. Somebody recently, by the way, told me a great Mario Cuomo line: that in Queens, we say a day without an argument is just a lost opportunity. But real argument, you put your own views at risk, and you try, and this is Christopher Lasch’s language: you try to enter imaginatively into the ideas of your opponent partly so you can refute them; but in the process, you may actually be converted, or partly converted, or at least see the truth in your opponent’s error and the error in your own truth. And I think, on many of these issues, our conservative Evangelical friends, as I say, are not crazy to see abortion as at least, at least, a moral problem. They’re not crazy to care about the nature of family life, they’re not crazy to say that there is a lot of junk in the culture that we need to argue about and in some cases fight against.

On the other hand, I think that liberals and progressives, and obviously I’m on that side of things, are not crazy to insist that there are times when certain conservative concerns can cross over into forms of prejudice. I think we see that, notably on issues involving gays and lesbians. They are not wrong to say that, if you care about all these things, why can’t you ask questions about the structure of the economy? And I do think that, out of this dialogue, not in the next two months alas, but perhaps in the longer haul, we will see change. And that, you know, in my book I write about Rick Warren, who I think is on a kind of journey himself; and you know, in the 2004 election, he was a pretty hardcore politically orthodox Evangelical, and then he sort of started thinking, as he does all the time as a preacher, about the Scriptures, and his wife actually got him deeply involved in the problems of AIDS in Africa.

He set up a mission there, and in 2006 he invited two senators to his church to talk about the problem of AIDS. One was Sam Brownback, a good conservative Republican who actually does care very much about Africa. And the other Barack Obama, then a young state senator from Illinois. And some of the right wing really came down hard on Rick Warren for doing this, and Rick Warren was asked by an ABC news reporter what did he make of this attack on him from the right? And he said, you know, people ask me if I’m right wing or left wing. Actually, I’m for the whole bird, he said.

And I think what you’re seeing is an effort of whole-bird Christianity struggling to be born. Somebody else had talked about is Rich Cizik at the National Association of Evangelicals, who fought hard, has been fighting hard for the environment, but I think it is about our contemplation of Rick Warren’s whole bird.

Dean Lloyd: We’re going to go questions from the audience, but I want to ask you about one fascinating piece, right at the end of your book, where most people are gathering up their great final thoughts, making their case, and you trot out your favorite movie—It’s a Wonderful Life—as your model for civility and living together in community and what liberals and conservatives are trying to create. Would you explain to us why It’s a Wonderful Life is your model for how we should live together?

E. J. Dionne: My dear brother-in-law who, along with my other brothers-in-law, gave me a copy of that movie for one Christmas in honor of my love for the movie, I want to honor Brian. And you may think that it very schmaltzy in the year 2008 to build an argument around a movie It’s a Wonderful Life and I just want to, since I probably will do better sort of reading it here, you know, I’ve talked to friends who say my love for It’s a Wonderful Life is mistaken.

You know, some say the movie has a gender problem, that’s from my feminist friends, and it may well have one. Some of my conservative friends say it paints capitalism and threw Mr. Potter in an unfairly flattering light and maybe that’s true, but ultimately I say balderdash. Is there anybody here who has not seen this movie? Otherwise, I won’t... I’ll skip the... you’ve never seen It’s a Wonderful Life. Will you forgive me if I just... I’ll note briefly, George Bailey, small-town guy, grows up in Bedford Falls. You know, he runs his family savings and loan, while his brother is off winning glory in World War II. He marries his sweetheart, played by Donna Reed, has a bunch of kids.

Managing the S&L entails lending money to the town’s working people so they can own their own stake. In doing so he faces down the town’s evil big banker, Mr. Potter, who doesn’t care at all about the working stiffs in those new homes. At the end of the movie, George is close to killing to himself when he bank is threatened with bankruptcy because his absent-minded uncle loses a bank deposit and his bank’s failure would give Mr. Potter a local monopoly. And that’s when George’s guardian angel, Clarence, shows up, and he shows how poor the world would have been without him. George is convinced that his life is wonderful, and call me a sap, I always get a tear in my eye at that closing scene when George bursts into the Christmas celebration at his home where all his neighbors have gathered to help him.

Now I argue in my book that this movie tells us almost everything we need to know about American values, and that watching it is a lot cheaper than paying for polls or focus groups. So I write up my analysis of the movie as a focus group report. And I’ll just read that part. Focus group point number one: Americans are deeply egalitarian but also believe in upward mobility and the value of owning property. Mr. Potter is a cad because he doesn’t believe in the town’s ordinary people who are worthy of respect. George respects them enough to help them become property owners.

Focus group point number two: Capitalists can be good, but only if they recognize moral limits, the social mortgage on their wealth. George Bailey is a capitalist who makes a good living and is a leader of his community. He is a smart capitalist too, saving his bank during the Great Depression—a fact grudgingly admired by Mr. Potter, but George is loved because he has put his bank’s money to work for others, letting them share capitalism’s bounty. Mr. Potter, the parody of the selfish miser so popular in Christmas stories, is loathed because all he cares about is cash. He has no friends, no concern for Bedford Falls.

Dean Lloyd: What struck me... let me stop you right there. What struck me so much in it was your picture that the heart of American is both this ferocious, well not ferocious, but this deep commitment to individualism, capitalism, personal responsibility, and communitarianism. That we belong to each other, we have a responsibility to each other, we stand together or we sink together, and it’s the blending of those two, and you say that’s really at the heart of the American character.

E. J. Dionne: Right. I will just read one more focus group point where I get to that that these commitments to egalitarianism, upward mobility, property ownership, capitalism within moral limits are important because they underwrite a set of values. When George shows... Uh, when Clarence shows George what life would have been like without him, he shows him a Bedford Falls renamed Pottersville, as you remember, that has been turned into a honky-tonk gambling town. Rackets, drunkenness, prostitution, meanness have replaced the quiet warmth of a real community. The proud working people George knew had become sullen, angry, resentful, robbed of the chance to rise and to own their own stake. By showing life with and without George Bailey, Capra shows us two alternative social systems and makes clear which one works. And I do think the genius of the United States, I think the brilliance of our country is not that we ever get things right the first time, ’cause we often don’t, but that we have this brilliant capacity for self-correction. And that our values are rooted in a simultaneous commitment to individualism and to communitarianism.

But our individualism is not a radical individualism—everyone is always on their own. Our values and our commitments are only to ourselves and not to our kids and our communities and our country. 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. But that communitarianism is tempered by a respect for the individual person, individual rights and that the great drama of American politics is our struggle between these two sets of values both of which are good and each of which, and at various moments in our history we need a kind of correction in one direction or the other. My own view is that the hardest decisions in life are not between good and evil but between competing goods and I think in our commitment to both individual rights and to community, we have competing goods that we struggle to balance as a country.

Dean Lloyd: Right. Thank you. Question.

Q: E. J. Dionne, I think you wrote with regard to the designation of Governor Palin, that it was breathtakingly reckless. With due regard to her religious perspective as since publicized, are you still of that persuasion?

E. J. Dionne: I am very much of the view that the choice was breathtakingly reckless for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with her religious views, to how she raises her kids. I’m willing to stipulate happily that she is a good mom, I’m willing to stipulate that she can be a good mom and be a vice president of the United States or even president of the United States. Other countries have had mothers as presidents. Why can’t we? And indeed I think actually being vice president, if that’s all she did, might take some pressure off her compared to her current job, given what the vice president absolutely has to do.

What I find breathtakingly reckless is that Senator McCain chose someone not only with a relatively thin resume, because resumes aren’t always... aren’t the only thing or the most important thing—but also someone who, as far as I can tell, he had spent about fifteen minutes with before he decided... he moved to make this choice.

As best I can tell he met her twice. If Senator McCain could have come to us and said, “Look, no, she doesn’t have this long national experience, but I’ve worked with her, I know her, I understand who she is and what she’s like,” I think it would have been, I probably still wouldn’t have liked the choice, but I would have said it’s a defensible choice. But I think, under the circumstances, and given the fact that, as Senator McCain himself has said, because of his age, this choice is perhaps more important because she could become president. She seems to have absolutely no grounding in national or international, certainly internationally. I was not comforted that she said that because you can see Russia from Alaska this is a certain qualification. That was unpersuasive to me, I’ve got to say.

Dean Lloyd: I’m going to jump in and make a suggestion and that is that we not talk about specific political candidates.

E. J. Dionne: I think that’s a good idea.

Dean Lloyd: There’s a lot to talk about in how political and religious people...

E. J. Dionne: But I honor the gentleman for raising the question because I have noted that in this city nobody wants to talk about McCain, Obama, or Joe Biden. Everybody wants to talk about Sarah Palin. So it’s a perfectly fair question. I’m sorry, I do get worked up about this one. I will try to be bipartisan again.

Q: I’d like to go back to Sam’s comment about market values crowding out everything else, and I’m coming at this from the perspective of a professional Ph.D. economist and a concern I have for the economy about that kind of ideology that has come to pervade our lives. Because what I recognize as an economist is that, for the markets to really function well, depends on this undergirding of moral formation that we have that comes in large part in our society from our religious communities. I remember—I’m also a lawyer; some people don’t know when to stop going to school—but I remember having a conversation with an attorney in Cedar Rapids, back home in Iowa, and his comments about... He drafts Iowa contracts, not Chicago contracts, and the difference was a Chicago contract has to try to nail down every single contingency that could possibly ever arise, an Iowa contract doesn’t have that many terms, and the reason is his perspective on it is a contract is only as good as the good faith between the people interacting and if you have to go to court, you’ve already lost. And I see the same sort...

Dean Lloyd: Wait, we need your question. Question.

Q: Well I...

Dean Lloyd: We only want a question.

Q: So my question is, do you have a sense... I think that needs to change: that that kind of ideology that there needs to be a renewal of the recognition that it’s our values that underlie our interactions...

Dean Lloyd: Let’s get E. J. Dionne’s response to that.

Q: ...and when you see that could happen?

E. J. Dionne: I think my answer to your question is, I think I agree with every word you just said. That Daniel Bell wrote a book some years ago, called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, and I think what the paradox is is that, for capitalism to work, we need a set of values that aren’t necessarily individualistic capitalist values. That trust is vital to the performance of a economy, and if you’re going to have trust, you have to know that people are living by some values other than just “I’m going to make as much money as I want out of any given deal,” that I will be willing to live up to certain truths.

Secondly, most good economists know that markets are imperfect, and Lord knows, look at this financial crisis that we are confronting. I was arguing about this with a conservative friend and I said, “Gee, I want my rapacious capitalist to be smart,” and what really worries me about what they’ve done is, they were really dumb in making some of these deals and that we, you know, deregulate sectors of the financial industry, and what is regulation? Regulation is a set of rules that we have. We have rules about how we write contracts, about what we owe each other in a contract, about things you can’t buy and sell in this society, morally.

So I couldn’t agree more that if you do not have a set of values, capitalism falls apart and you just need to look at what’s happened. I use Russia as an example of a place where, for awhile and still to this day, you don’t have, you know, really, you can move very easily from, you know, a form of capitalism into a kind of gangsterism, where force becomes dominant, if you don’t have a set of values and underlie the economic system.

And lastly, and I won’t go into it, but there are distributional problems that I think market transactions create that we’ve just got to deal with, because we are much better with an economy where wealth is broadly spread.

I’m not talking about equality. My brother-in-law and I were talking on the way over here about his son’s visit to Caracas, where when you have extreme disparities of wealth. The rich can’t be secure in those societies, because there is a degree of violence in resentment. I think it’s John Kennedy who said, if we cannot stand for the many who are poor, how will we save the few who are rich? And so bless you for your work as a moral economist.

Q: I’m very, very thankful for your book because it makes clear there is a lot more complexity than just conservative Evangelicals and progressive atheists. But one thing that unites everybody whose been raised in the church, or is Jewish, is that you learn about the Ten Commandments before the age of ten. And the ninth commandment says, do not bear false witness, don’t lie. And yet, in the last three or four weeks, we’ve seen an extraordinary number of not just misstatements or distortions or half-truths, but cynical, downright, bald-faced lies in campaign ads, in internet ads and the like. The problem with all this is, when people lie during the campaign, they tend to lie when they govern. And the other problem is that negative campaigning seems to work. Why do you think that is, and do you think there’s any hope that negative campaigns might not work in the future?

E. J. Dionne: I thank you for that. I wrote on Friday in a column that for the media, balance should not mean giving equal time to lies and truth. And I do think there is a heavy burden on the media when this sort of thing happens.

I agree with the premise of your question and I’m going to honor the canon’s request and not get partisan about this, but I think that a couple of things can happen to sort of try to move away from this.

The first is, I do think there is an obligation on the part of the candidate who is being lied about to correct the record in a very strenuous way. As I stated before, I am not a pacifist, I believe in just war, and so I think that turning the other cheek in a political campaign is something we probably have to think about. I can probably come up with a Jesuitical explanation for how fighting back in a campaign still involves turning the other cheek, but I think that needs to be done. I think the media need to do it, and I do think that if the lies and distortions get out of hand, at some point I think people, voters, start noticing it, and I think we’re on the verge of having that happen in this campaign.

Yes, we are more likely to remember negative information—and it tends to stick with us, by the way, studies show, even when its discredited. It’s still already formed our view of someone. If someone tells me something about you that’s really, really negative, it does something in my head about you that it takes an awful lot to excavate, even when I know that the thing said about you is a lie.

So I agree there is a problem here, but I think we may be at a point where this has gone so far that there will be a backlash, and I do think there will be a backlash. I was seeing, on the media, you mention the Ten Commandments... There is a story told by journalists who are worried about how we have to reduce things so much. The story is told of a journalist being sent to cover Moses receiving the ten commandments comes down... Moses comes down, offers the commandments, the reporter calls his producer back home and the producer says, look we don’t have much time, can you just tell us about the three most important commandments? And so it’s a tricky problem, the media.

Oh, in the back, ma’am.

Q: Yes, in this election and the last election, when religion became such an important aspect, does the media know the difference in the terms Evangelical and....

E. J. Dionne: God is still speaking, as the United Church of Christ says...

Q: ...fundamentalist Pentecostal, because they use it as similar terms.

E. J. Dionne: My friend Mike Cromarty, who is actually a conservative, is himself an Evangelical, and he says Evangelicals are fundamentalists who aren’t mad about something. And that’s actually not fair to fundamentalists actually, but it’s a good line.

No, I think some people in the media do know this. I think the media have gotten better at religion over the last ten or fifteen years. There have always been some good religion writers in the country, people deeply engaged in this. When I was on the New York Times, my friend Ken Briggs, who is actually a Methodist minister, my friend Peter Steinfeld I think understood, Arty Goldman, who I know teaches at the Columbia Journalism School, among others, I think Gus Niebuhr at the Post.

I think there are journalists who know a lot about these distinctions. I think a lot of voters don’t, and I think there are... and journalists are not unlike voters, and they don’t... the Pentecostals—I just saw, on the dean’s bookshelf, by my old divinity school teacher Harvey Cox, called Fire from Heaven. I think the Pentecostals have gotten more attention.

And if I can just say one quick thing about Pentecostals, one of the things I love about that tradition is that they were actually one of the first genuinely biracial integrated traditions in our family’s life. There was a revival in Los Angeles at the Azusa Street church in 1906, and it was an African American–led revival that attracted all sorts of white Americans. And there was then, as so often happened in American life, segregation actually imposed itself on this tradition in that, starting in the Twenties, there was a kind of separation of these traditions. And so I always loved the idea that Pat Robertson subscribes to a tradition that was actually started out as an African American tradition in 1906. But you know, just as none of us is trained enough in economics, none of us is trained enough in religion sectarian and doctrinal differences. But I do think some journalists actually know a lot about these distinctions. Sir?

Dean Lloyd: We have sixty seconds, so...

E. J. Dionne: Could I take both of the folks real quick? Because they’ve been standing there.

Q: If you care about social justice, you’ve indicated, you’ve got to care about family breakdown, and the two institutions in society that are the most important to the morals mentioned to, are the family and the church. If only in its own self-interest, why doesn’t the church do more for families? I’ve had experts of your caliber say churches don’t do marriage and help people through divorce well, obviously families don’t do families well, I disagree with you on Sarah Palin...

Dean Lloyd: Let’s come on the answer...

Q: Why don’t churches get more involved in helping families and vice versa?

Dean Lloyd: Shall we take the next question?

E. J. Dionne: Thank you. Let me take the next question and I’ll answer them both together it let’s me evade the hard one too.

Q: Mine is more of a comment, I read with great interest your columns in the Post, but I value what you’ve been saying this morning about families and values, and may the need to dialogue. I’m absolutely appalled by the lies and slanders and negativity that’s been going on. I know that I’m working...

Dean Lloyd: We need a question.

Q: It’s just a comment.

Dean Lloyd: Well, we don’t have comments, we have questions.

Q: Okay.

E. J. Dionne: Fifteen seconds to get your voice in and I’ll respond. Go ahead.

Q: Okay, well, I thank Sam for your sermon about forgiveness because I know the candidate I’m supporting does not get elected, I’m going to have a heck of hard time dealing with forgiveness for the other team.

Dean Lloyd: Thank you for that.

E. J. Dionne: I must say, when I search my soul, I know I’ll feel the exactly the same way, so I understand that, but what I’m talking about, in terms of your question, very briefly, is, we’re talking about something that’s going on in the midst of a political campaign that I think is very harsh. I’ve written very critically in my newspaper column about what is happening in the campaign, and I am very upset by what I see as lies and distortions. The same ones you do.

But what I’m trying to do this Sunday, right here in this church, is try to talk about what we might do after this, and I do agree that the nature of this campaign could make it harder or easier for us to do that. So I think we’re of one mind on the campaign, but I don’t think that we need to say of all our conservative Evangelical, for example, brothers and sisters, that they all fall into that camp, and I don’t think you think so either.

In terms of the churches, that is a question more properly directed toward somebody running a church, which I happily don’t have the responsibility to do, but I will say that I agree with your point about the church’s obligation to family. Rick Warren, when he started, before he started Saddleback Church, went through his neighborhood and asked why people didn’t go to church.

If people went to church, he said, “God bless you,” and moved on to the next house. If they didn’t, he asked why, and there were four reasons. If I remember them right, one was they talk too much about raising money, the second was the parish was not friendly, the third was the sermons weren’t good enough, and the fourth was there wasn’t enough being done for parents and children. And as Rick Warren likes to say, in his Rick Warren way, those folks had nothing against God; they just didn’t like the churches we’re running.

And I do think that the most successful churches are the ones that have engaged the family in the way that you’re talking about, and it’s one of the reasons why the megachurch is such a phenomenon, it’s that the megachurch spends a lot of time addressing the problems and the possibilities of families.

Now I think there are different vocations for different churches, and every church is not necessarily built to do that particular ministry. In my father’s house there are many mansions. And s