Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good Morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. Our guest today knows something about living with diversity. He’s an Irishman, resident in America, born in China, schooled in England.

Os Guinness has lived with diversity and pluralism just about all his life. Finding a way to address the challenges of diversity has been something of a lifelong passion and concern of his. He’s written about many things in a series of books with titles such as The Call, Long Journey Home, Unspeakable, and The American Hour.

He does, yes, come from a famous line of beer brewers, a great claim to fame. Os Guinness has spent his time also at places like Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the Brookings Institution and the Trinity Forum, which he helped create. He currently hangs his hat at the East West Institute where he is a fellow. Os’s latest book is called The Case for Civility and Why Our Future Depends on It. He’s going to make the case for civility with us this morning. Os, welcome, great to have you with us.

Os Guinness: Thank you very much.

Lloyd: Let’s start with the obvious. It’s a world of terrorist threats, of economic recessions, of political infighting that seems to get worse and worse in this country. Why does our future depend on civility, do you think?

Guinness: Well I think they’re two issues. One is international. If you look at the big picture, one of the great issues for the world is, what will be the shape of global governments, without a world government? And to achieve that, we’ve got to know how to live with our differences, and that’s today one of the greatest questions of our world.

If you look at the United States, which is another way of looking at it, your motto, E Pluribus Unum, is not only a motto, an ideal, it is America’s greatest achievement. And yet, at the very moment the world is now interested in the issue, and Madison called the American way, the “true remedy,” the world is beginning to look at the U.S, and the U.S. is not doing so well, We’ve had forty years of culture warring, and religion—

Lloyd: Culture warring?

Guinness: Yes, culture wars…and religion, clearly, is the holy war front of much of the culture wars. So the U.S. is not what Pericles called “the school to the world,” let alone what the Framers called “the city on a hill.”

Lloyd: Why do you think we’ve lost our way? If this is one of the distinctive gifts we have to give to the world, why is it that for forty years we’ve been stumbling away from our heritage?

Guinness: Many factors, but two above all interacting. One by itself wouldn’t have been a problem, an explosion of pluralism. America has always, as you know, been deeply diverse. In the eighteenth century, probably, Pennsylvania and the middle colonies were the most diverse place on the whole earth. But it’s increased enormously after World War II and especially after the sixties. So you could say, probably every religion the world’s ever known is somewhere in America, probably in California. [laughter]

Now that, in itself wouldn’t have caused the problem. The other part, which has bedeviled it, is the rise of a new notion of the separation of church and state.

The Framers clearly separated church and state, institutionally. But the institutional separation of church and state did not mean the exclusion of faith from public life. But when you come to the 1940s and the Everson case, you have the triumph of what’s called, strict separatism. So religion is inviolably private, and the public world should be inviolably secular. That’s new, and today it forms one of the extremes of the culture wars over religion and public life.

Lloyd: Now why has that itself contributed to incivility or to less tolerance? Guinness: Well, because you’ve got two extremes, The so called sacred public square advocates who, say, want school prayer, and they have strong activist organizations, and they have batteries of lawyers. And then the so called naked public square side, Americans United, ACLU, they equally have strong activist organizations and strong batteries of lawyers, and now almost anything is up for litigation and a lawsuit.

And civility’s broken down. So when Tocqueville comes here, he describes America’s “habits of the heart,” things that are not expressed in law,

Lloyd: Back in the 1700s.

Guinness: Exactly. But things are a matter of education and families and schools, and they become “habits of the heart,” second nature. And that’s gone. Now, everything’s litigation.

Lloyd: What do we do about it?

Guinness: I think you need a number of things. The first is leadership. Someone’s got to say at some point, just as Lincoln stood above the fray, in essence, “a plague on both your houses.”

And then articulate the vision of a civil public square. Let me explain what I mean, because a lot of people think of civility as niceness or squeamishness about differences, or something people are tea party manners, or whatever.

Civility is actually is a tough, republican virtue with a small r and a prime, democratic necessity with a small d, because it helps you negotiate differences.

So by a civil public square, I mean a vision of public life, in which everyone of all faiths, every last faith in this country are free to enter and engage public life on the basis of their faith: that’s freedom of conscience.

But—here’s the big “but”—within a framework of what is just and free for everybody else too. So a right for a Christian, automatically, a right for a Jew or an atheist or a Muslim or a Scientologist.

And the test of religious liberty is always when the smallest group and the most unpopular community knows that their rights are respected by everyone else. Now there are a lot of things assumed in that vision of a civil public square, but that’s got to be put on the map. But the vital part is education of the “habits of the heart,” in other words, religious liberty, civility, respect for freedom of conscience has got to come back to fifth graders, twelfth graders, and over the generations taught from parents to children until it becomes again, a habit of the American heart.

Lloyd: Do you think that’s dropped out of the formation of our children and out of the education process?

Guinness: With due respect, it’s no secret that American public education is massively mediocre, and sadly, in all of that, one of the worst things is the collapse of civic education.

Now it used to be understood by everyone who loved freedom, that in a free society, everybody’s born free. But not everyone is equal to freedom or worthy of it, so you have to have liberal education, or education for liberty. And America’s lost its civic education.

Lloyd: It’s just not being taught much at all in the schools.

Guinness: Now you move to Europe, they don’t have a First Amendment. They don’t have a notion like “the melting pot.” And so with the new immigration in Europe, they’re floundering around, and they’re trying to think of how you introduce immigrants, but floundering. You remember the Dutch, when all the wave of Muslim immigrants came in, they gave them a video of Dutch life which included—imagine this—topless bathing on Dutch beaches. And naturally it didn’t go over too well with the Muslim immigrants. That was their floundering way to introduce them to Dutch life.

Now America used to have civic education. Public schools weren’t just free universal education. They were also giving the American Unum, E Pluribus Unum, teaching one of the American first things, so you can have incredible diversity, if people know what it is to be American.

Lloyd: You’re not so high on the notion of tolerance or at least as much as your respect for diversity.

Guinness: Well, let me be perfectly clear. I’m not intolerant.

Lloyd: No.

Guinness: But anyone who knows the history of religious—

Lloyd: But you think it’s an inadequate word for what you’re striving for?

Guinness: Inadequate. Tolerance was the seventeenth century word and it’s always better to be tolerant than intolerant. But tolerance, even in say John Locke and others, was always, the strong to the weak, the majority to the minority, the government to the people. In other words, tolerant was patronizing, condescending. I will tolerate you.

That’s not religious liberty. Madison, when he was twenty-three, in the Virginia Declaration, struck out the word “tolerance,” which George Mason had put in, one of our great Anglicans. He changed it to “free exercise,” and that was light years forward jump to figure out how people have freedom to believe, to hold their faith, to change faiths if they want—that’s a stumbling block to our Muslims friends. That’s very different from tolerance, free exercise.

Lloyd: How would this vision, Os, have an effect on the polarization we see around us today? If everyone agrees that, not just now, but maybe over the last fifteen years, there’s been very little bipartisanship, much partisan rancor on either side. We’ve seen, in this case, two political parties unable, unwilling to work with each other over the past year. We have tea party revolts on one side. There are accusations that neither side is listening to the other. How would your vision of civility help us if we were as a country living better into this?

Guinness: Well, let me start by saying how sad and appalled I am to watch this. And I was struck in the recent health care debate, the town hall meetings, that appalling placard, “It’s time to refresh the Tree of Liberty.”

And as you know, Sam, that is an abbreviation of Jefferson, his rash and dangerous idea, that the blood of tyrants is the manure of liberty, and it’s a coded call for assassination. And Timothy McVeigh was wearing the full Jefferson quote on his tee shirt when he blew up the buildings in Oklahoma City.

So you can see an incredible polarization. Now when you have all out attack and nothing but attack on the other side, one side’s all wrong and one side’s all right, the result is always an escalation of extremism.

And the danger is at a certain point, well, at a low level, it is a deficit of democracy. And the appalling thing that happened at a town hall meeting, which is the seedbed of Americans knowing how to debate the issues of public life. But at a higher level, that sort of extremism often mounts until you have a scapegoating of an innocent victim. Pray God there is not a murder that comes out of this in public life with a deep profound bitterness.

Now how does civility come in? Everyone has the right to his opinion. That’s freedom of conscience. You respect that right. But that means, you don’t have to agree with them.

You can then debate them, because I may consider their social policy out to lunch, whatever it is, or socially disastrous, even profoundly evil, but I will debate them with civility, respecting their right to believe it and having to be persuasive.

In other words, the First Amendment shifted American discourse, historians say, from coercion in the churches in Europe, take the French—from coercion to persuasion.

And America today is losing its persuasion. There are all sorts of factors. You can take television, sound bites. How can you have a persuasive democratic debate? I knew a little of the wonderful late Peter Jennings, and he grieved deeply at the loss of democratic debate because of the imperators of television.

Now we’ve got the blogs. And for all the Democratic access they represent to popular opinion, often they’re just unedited venting of prejudice, and rumor, and hatred and so on. They don’t help, so we’ve got to identify…

Take direct mail, take ten letters from any activist organization, politically or otherwise, just underline the words, or look at the words they underline, red or green. They’re usually appealing to fear, insecurity or hatred. Someone’s got to identify all these things and say, “We can do better. We have done better, and for the world’s sake we better model a way that is better.” And American needs to show the way forward in a constructive way.

Lloyd: The problem is, those things work.

Guinness: Absolutely. A lot of things work.

Lloyd: And so, we can certainly ask, are we going to expect competing political parties to stop doing things that clearly succeed in winning elections? (Not to be too gloomy about this.)

Guinness: There’s a long debate, back to Machiavelli, as you know Machiavelli mocks the Greeks, who talked about what should be. He says “All we care about, what is.” Says the Prince, if he wants to be good because virtue works, be good and appear to be good. If you want to play evil, be evil, because evil works.

Well, you’ve got that strain, ever since Machiavelli and clearly that’s working itself out in a part of American culture today, and you can see the American Framers were very realistic. And the whole separation of powers partly goes back to the Christian doctrine of sin.

At the same time they had a place for virtue. I call it the Golden Triangle Of Freedom. Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith of some sort, and faith of any sort requires freedom, and like the recycling triangle, goes on and on.

Today we’ve abandoned that. We’ve only got the Machiavellian dark side. Well, let me put it bluntly.

Going forward like that will bring down the American republic within the next fifty years.

Make no mistake. We’re talking today about what you might call standing or falling articles, things which, if believed and persevering with will mean to renewal and sustained freedom, and if abandoned will spell the end of the republic. Make no mistake.

Lloyd: So can you imagine a disarmament conference with Fox News and MSNBC sitting across the table deciding they’re going to ratchet down the arms race? Can we dream of such things?

Guinness: Take issues like Nuclear proliferation, HIV AIDS, all these sort of things. They all have powerful global leadership, strong activist organizations. This issue, living with our deep differences, has nothing like that. I remember when I was with The Williamsburg Charter, to make that effective, it was a bicentennial celebration of the First Amendment. To make it effective we needed to roll out for the schools. I had an engagement with a cabinet secretary whom I will not name. He said, “You will get to Ronald Reagan over my dead body.”

And I said, “Why?”

He said, “Because the culture wars favor our party.”

I said to him, “Mr. Secretary, they do not. Today they favor Republicans, tomorrow they favor Democrats, who knows who they’re going to favor? They don’t favor America in the long run.”

And much of what you’re saying, quite rightly, is out there, but people are thinking only short term and pragmatically and winning the next election and so on.

America is consumed by the near future. You go to China and they talk literally of seven or eight thousand years, and they’re talking two hundred years down the line. Why don’t Americans think, “What sustains the freedom of the Republic?” The course on which American politicians are set today will doom this Republic in the long run, and there’d better be a rethinking, or else.

Lloyd: Do you see some leaders on the horizon, from both sides, who are interested in this sort of thing?

Guinness: A few, but not yet at the level at which we need it. I personally think that if a leader stood up above the fray and truly took this as his issue, articulated as a moral vision what it would mean, he would do it at a cost. As we know what the cost Lincoln paid. It might not be that cost, but it would be a great cost to break with the last fifty years.

Lloyd: Let’s shift now to the international scene for a minute and talk about, as nations are dealing with each other who don’t share a common ethos such as America has, a tradition of civility and public respectfulness and discussion… How in the councils of the nations can we approach this notion of civility of discourse and civility of relationship?

Guinness: Well if we think it’s tough here, where a nation has two hundred years of magnificent political resources, including lessons from the failures and there have been some much, much tougher elsewhere.

But I would take the parallel of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What you have is a declaration, which is a matter of moral suasion, by itself ineffective.

Then it was followed up with legal implementation, many, many nations, making it their law. It has not yet been followed up broadly enough with what you might call a third stage, which is education and transmission.

So, the Universal Declaration has coexisted and failed to prevent Srebrenica, Rwanda, the killing fields of Pol Pot, but it has made a huge advance in the world for human rights.

Now sadly—one of the thirty-one articles of the Universal Declaration is Article 18 on Religious Liberty, and that is increasingly ignored. And I would like to see a global declaration on freedom of conscience alone, expanding what it means, politically, socially, et cetera, with people advancing that in the world because it’s the key about how we live with our differences.

Now, I am a realist like you obviously are. It would be relatively easy, compared with the rest of the world, achieving it here. Europe and say countries like Australia and New Zealand, they have the first principles, but they’ve got no record like America has of working them out. So the French and the British and the Dutch have all floundered. The French are strict separationists, saying, Keep it all out. And they’re butting heads with the Muslims over headscarves. The British and Dutch went the tolerant way, multiculturalism, and it spread enclaves that bombers grew up in and they realized that they were doing it wrong. Now of course if we see it working out there, we’ve got to move, say in fifty or sixty years, it won’t be over night, to the tough areas of the world like the Middle East. So I am not a Pollyannaist, but it’s an issue worth pursuing.

Lloyd: Coming back now for a moment to this country, we’ve talked some, about the involvement of the faith community in public life and you and I have had an interesting conversation about your view of faith-based initiatives, both from the Bush administration and the current administration, and you’re saying there’s something unwise about going down that path. Tell us something about that.

Guinness: I understand the motivation. If you look at American history, it was precisely when the faith communities were a matter of voluntary choice, not dependent on the sword or the purse of the government as in state churches, that they flourished. You had an equal playing field, you had a kind of entrepreneurial situation.

Lloyd: In contrast to Europe where they shriveled as established churches.

Guinness: Exactly. And so you look at American faith communities, they’re behind the explosion of education in the nineteenth century, the explosion of charitable care, and the explosion of reforms. It was precisely as they were made independent that they flourished. Now we want the effect of that today and we’re all talking about civil society and social capital.

But if we bring the faith communities back and make them dependent on government money, for instance one of the Catholic charities, ninety percent of their money is government money. You actually undercut the entrepreneurial initiative that comes from faith, and so on. So I think a lot of the things we’ve done in the last ten years were laudable in their intention but unfortunate in their outcome. We’ve got to watch how they go.

Lloyd: And that goes for the newest incarnation of that in the current administration, taking and building on that.

Guinness: Yes.

Lloyd: Let’s pause for a minute and go back. Often in these conversations, we want our guests to tell us a little about how they got to where they are, and why their passion is what it is. So could you tell us a little bit about… I don’t know whether you start with your first cup of stout many years ago, or however you want to begin the story, but what brings you to this country and to this passion and to this professional life of writing books, often about what America is about really.

Guinness: Well, I am, as you know, an unashamed follower of Christ. Now it does happen my family were not only brewers—and last year was the 250th anniversary of the founding of the brewery—they were also strong Christians And long before Cadbury’s or even Fry’s, our family did an immense amount for their workers, and for the poor and the homeless, and so on.

In other words, their faith was deeply Christian, but it was also very practical in outreach. On my side of the family, my grandfather went as a doctor and founded one of the first Western hospitals in China. He treated the last emperor, the empress dowager, lived through the Boxer Riots, and so on. My mother was a surgeon.

And so I was born in China in the midst of the cataclysm of World War II and the Japanese invasion. My two brothers died there. We lived through a famine in which five million died in three months.

When my parents were arrested by the Communists after the Revolution, they were able to entrust me to a Princeton professor who took me to Hong Kong and I flew back to England.

So actually all my teenage years I didn’t have my parents close. Obviously they prayed and loved me, and their witness when I was smaller was incredible. But my own road to faith was actually partly watching a Christian friend at school, and partly a serious intellectual argument.

On the one hand, nature, Camus, who was a great hero of mine when I was growing up, Sartre, all of that side, represented by Bertrand Russell and the new atheists today and on the other side Pascal, Dostoevsky, G. K. Chesterton, and C. S. Lewis.

And I finally came to the conclusion the Christian faith was true. And that was the decisive thing in leading me to faith. You know I came to faith in the sixties. You couldn’t take anything for granted. You had to think back to square one and make it your own or it was second hand and being challenged by someone.

So I was in a maelstrom with all sorts of people with all sorts of objections and different alternatives.

And it was a wonderful place to think through faith, and ever since then, I’m glad that I’ve had a thoughtful faith that was always pushed back to the foundations, because we’re in something of the same today in the post-modern world.

Lloyd: And you’ve seen your faith continue to inform your scholarly career?

Guinness: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there was a time I went out to study Hinduism under a guru, and that was one of the two really two profound challenges to faith. But when I came to that breakthrough moment, I loved the statement by George Whitfield, “I am never better than when I am on the full stretch for God.” When you’re really challenged then you break through. You come back with a deeper faith and a stronger worship.

And the other was when I was at Oxford, because my area of studies in the social sciences is the sociology of knowledge, If any of you know that, it’s kind of mind spinning worlds. You kind of don’t know what’s true. It’s upside down, or whatever. When I broke through that, again I began to realize how it related to my faith, I came out with a stronger, richer faith.

Lloyd: And that continues to shape your scholarly work, is a part of your thinking in books like this?

Guinness: Absolutely. Take the issue we’re talking about. America is awash with people, angry about the extreme on the other side. America’s equally, and Washington too—take, say, the think tanks—is awash with academic analyses. But here’s a place where I actually admire Marx—not generally, but his little saying, “Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.” And I think Christians should be in the vanguard of creative solutions for the world of tomorrow.

And that’s why what I am writing on now is civility in the global public square. And I think we shouldn’t be critiquing constantly, let alone complaining constantly, but really asking God to give us constructive, positive visions of what might be, so they’re Christians in the vanguard of leading us forward.

Lloyd: We want to take questions from the audience. Questions about the role of diversity and civility and how in these very difficult times we can actually keep a conversation going. Deryl, do you want to start us off?

Deryl Davis: We’ve got a couple of questions here and then I’ll ask you in the audience, if you have questions, you would pass those to the center aisle for collection. First question is, “Does your idea of civility require radical change in how we conceive of our political parties in America and especially the two-party system?

Guinness: No. No. It just means that they compete with civility. I often use the illustration of the Queensbury Rules in boxing. Before the 19th century, boxing was a drawn-out form of mugging. You had bare-knuckle fights that would go on for a hundred rounds and often one or other would die. It was brutal.

And you may know, the Romans, who loved gladiatorial games, banned boxing. Well, the Marquis of Queensbury tried to civilize it and lent his name to what are now the Queensbury Rules and they put boxing in a ring within rules under a referee. But, here’s the point, they still competed, they fought. They don’t touch below the belt, they touch gloves at the beginning then they fight, and there are winners and losers. So of course, you have a Republican victory, a Democratic victory, but the question is, how do they compete, within rules, with civility?

So a vision of civility is not a great ecumenical love-in. I personally am not enormously in favor of ecumenical interfaith dialogue as a means to go forward for a very simple reason. It is always limited. Always limited to certain religions. For instance, the common word, if you read all about that now, is between Muslims and people of the book, not Secularists. We’ve got to bring in everyone. But more importantly, there are deep differences religiously that will never be bridged and a faithful Muslim cannot and will not say that Jesus is Lord. Equally a faithful follower of Jesus, as we see in the early church, who would rather die than say that Caesar was Lord on a level with Jesus. A faithful follower of Jesus will never say that Muslims fully understand who Jesus is.

There are differences—let alone when you come to say Hinduism and atheism and so on—there are differences that are ultimate and irreducible. So a civil public square is a framework in which people are free to be different but know how to negotiate those differences civilly, persuasively, not violently.

Davis: Here’s a question that follows on that, I think. This questioner is asking, “How do you remind, and or teach adults civility? And especially when it comes to religious conversation?”

Guinness: That’s why I say you’ve got to teach it in public school curriculum, at the earliest age, with stories that go back and show us what these founders meant, and early people that Roger Williams wrestled with and so on. We’ve got to teach this in a thousand ways to children and then of course children have got to see their own parents and their political leaders model such civility.

Now even since I’ve been here and my wife and I, Jenny and I have lived here for twenty-five years now, the Congress has occasional convulsions about civility and heads up to Hershey to talk about and nothing happens, and the incivility goes on and on. Someone has got to really challenge this and say frankly, this won’t do, ’cause it’s going to lead us in ways that will be the undermining of America. But I would certainly start with education at the very simplest level.

Davis: We have one questioner here asking about Quaker methods of education, or that of the Society of Friends, thinking about the conversant aspect of that.

Guinness: Clearly, if we go back to the rise of freedom of conscience, religious liberty, the Quakers have a great part. Think only of William Penn and setting up Pennsylvania as a refuge for people who wanted religious liberty.

Equally Roger Williams is quite extraordinary, and he long precedes Enlightenment thinkers on this. And he talks about freedom of conscience for infidels, what we call today secularists or Atheists. He talks about freedom of conscience for Mohammedans and so on, what today we understand as Muslims. And the radical notion of freedom of conscience, it is for everybody, including people we’re different from and maybe disagree with radically.

You can see with the Quakers and some of the independents like the Baptists, although dear Roger Williams wasn’t even a Baptist very long. He tended to leave every church in which he was a member. They were never quite good enough for him, or whatever. But they were radical in their understanding of freedom of conscience, so we owe a great deal to our Quaker friends.

Davis: A lot of people are asking about this pragmatic or practical aspect of putting these principles into action. This questioner asks, this person teaches in public high schools and is asking, “What civic principles should be incorporated into curriculum, both civic classes and religion classes if there are some in public high schools?”

Guinness: My concern was freedom of conscience, religious liberty, how we know the differences. And someone who has taken this up since the Women’s Boat Charter is Dr. Charles Hanes at the Freedom Forum, which is housed in the Newseum. And anyone interested, could get in touch with him, because he’s done a lot of work in bringing that in.

Who am I as an Englishman to tell you what the first things of the American experiment are?: But they are such things as the rule of law, the quality of opportunity, separation of church and state, and all sorts of things. You probably think of ten things which are fundamental and foundational to the American republic and they need to be taught from generation to generation.

America requires a double transmission, constantly, from the older generation to the younger generation. That’s public education. but equally from the people who have been here longer, not natives, to the newcomers, i.e., immigrants, that is equally important.

And if you look at the immigration debate, one of the missing things is when immigrants come in, are they given American civic education? And as many scholars have pointed out, it’s relatively easy today to become an American, to get your naturalization papers.

But such is the abysmal state of civic education, it’s increasingly difficult to know what it is to be American. And that is what we are talking about, those fundamental first things that are common to all Americans, or whatever ethnic or religious background, which are the Unum that balances the Pluribus.

Davis: We’re talking about how we have these open conversations across differences, this question asks, “What do you say to people who believe they or their party or their group have sole possession of the Truth with a capitol T?”

Guinness: That’s a very, very important issue, because our secularist friends say that anyone who believes in Truth, and especially absolute or exclusive truth, is dangerous and should be excluded from the public square.

A vision of a civil public square, you can have all sorts of people who believe what they believe is true. On the atheist side, read Richard Dawkins. He’s asking the government to stop parents teaching religion to their children. Now if that’s not absolute and exclusive, I don’t know what is. So you’ve got atheist exclusivists. You’ve got Christians who believe their faith is true in that way, Muslims, many others.

The civil public square can have them all, because in the civil public square, that’s where we’re debating matters of our common interest, social policies. We’re not debating our faiths.

Now, things are rooted in faith, but when we enter the civil public square and need to be persuasive, we can’t as Christians say, “The Bible says so, ” because that may be our authority, certainly for Protestants, but it’s not for Jews, the New Testament, it’s not for Muslims, it’s not for atheists, and so on.

You have to make arguments that are publicly persuasive based on civic reason.

And so you can have a lot of groups that all believe their way is the truth, but they too are forced to be persuasive and to make that argument among other people who have competing ideas. So the fact that people believe in exclusive truth is not itself a barrier to enter the public square, because you have the constitutional framework in which they do, of rights and responsibilities.

Lloyd: Let me take another question entirely. You spent some time in China in the last few years. I’d be interested to hear your sense of… I gather you had some encounter with the burgeoning Christian world there, so your insight about that, but also about how to carry on this kind of conversation with cultures as drastically different as the Chinese culture from the American, so both the civility conversation, but also some window into what you’re learning about the Christian movement in China as well.

Guinness: Well at one level you have Hu Jintao and the party statesman, and they constantly talk about harmonious society with diversity and I say quite bluntly to the Chinese leaders I meet and in the Academy of Social Sciences, that’s not good enough.

The challenge in our world is to balance three things, not two: integrity for each faith, diversity of all the faiths, liberty for each faith and then the harmony of the public order.

So Hu Jintao has harmony and diversity, with coercion. That’s not good enough. I challenge that.

Now at the academy level, they have a very open discussion. I remember once, the question of the day was this: “Which faith will replace Marxism, the party, in China?” And they openly discussed, would it be Authoritarianism, would it be Confucianism, would it be Buddhism, or would it be that in twenty years time, the Christian faith will be the majority faith?

Because even the Marxists, the party, admits today, there are twice as many Christians in China as there are party members and the growth is phenomenal. But here’s the sting, we all know the explosion of the Church in the global south. China, Uganda, Nigeria, et cetera, etcetera. But the trouble with that is the Global South, for all the wonderful things that are happening, is pre-modern.

What’s done in the church in Europe and increasingly in America is, we are captive to the advanced modern world we’ve helped to create. So that becomes practical in China as people, say, move from the country. Where I was born is the epicenter of the explosive church growth. It’s the fastest growth of the church in two thousand years. But when they move from the country, which takes a simple, courageous, dogged faith to stand against vicious persecution, then they move to Shanghai, Beijing or whatever, it’s a different challenge negotiating modern mobile city worlds, and sadly some are falling away.

Davis: This person is quoting de Tocqueville as saying, “If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” Do believe one of the pitfalls of American education is that it fails to teach what “good” truly is?”

Guinness: I do believe that but I would ask the person to show me where Tocqueville said that. I’ve heard that quoted a thousand times. No one has ever shown me the source. I’m not saying it’s not there. But I’d love to find it. I’ve never found it. It’s a convenient quote, which is trotted out a lot. I suspect it’s actually fictitious. But there’s no question the Framers believed, and so did Tocqueville, that America needed virtue for the reasons I said to the dean.

Freedom requires virtue. In other words if you understand freedom, take say Isaiah Berlin, the great philosopher, Jewish philosopher at Oxford on freedom. There’s a negative freedom, which is freedom from, but there’s a positive freedom: freedom for.

The highest freedom, as Lord Moulton said, is obedience to the unenforceable. Now when you see those two sides, America is awash with negative freedom. Everything’s freedom from, whatever, the government, teachers, whatever, parents, you name it.

There’s no freedom for in America. American freedom is going to seed. That’s why, to much of the world it looks like decadent freedom. Freedom from will undermine American republic.

Let me again be blunt. There are certain things you can see with a near mathematical certainty if you understand the Framers’ view of what they set up.

Lloyd: It sounds like you’re in a number of ways describing a perception beyond our borders that is a nation that is in decline and I don’t mean so much economically but in its, sort of its, moral infrastructure, in its sustaining values, that it is not succeeding in hanging on and remaining as viable in the ways they are living their life. Is that true?

Guinness: “Declinism” is, as you know, Sam, one of the obscene words in America. And I don’t use it much, because America has the capacity for renewal, but you only need to see that we are in danger of decline to ask, how can we be renewed? And there is a lot one can say about that. So I’m not a pessimist at all, because nothing America is facing today that could not be turned around with an understanding of how the country was set up, its first principles, and so on. So I m not a pessimist, but yes, I would agree, America on the course she is now will soon be clearly in decline.

Lloyd: One more question.

Davis: This question, we may have already touched on this in some ways, but this questioner asks, “What countries have more robust democracies than the U.S., regarding the concept of civility, and why, and what about the United Kingdom?”

Guinness: Ah, England is floundering, in all sorts of ways. On this issue, this very month there’s an Equality Bill, which has been framed, largely by atheists, largely in reaction to what they see as the weak Church of England and the dangers of Islam rising.

It’s a terrible bill, because it has no place for freedom of conscience and religious liberty. England is floundering badly.

As I began, the tragedy for America, Madison I think was right, the American way, if properly understood, is the true remedy. It is certainly the most nearly perfect so far, which is tragic that Americans are discarding it, partly out of ignorance and partly out of neglect.

But there’s much more hope of restoring genuine civility that could be a model for the whole world, with lessons for the world here, than anywhere else. There’s nowhere else that has done it well. I’m sure there are little pockets here and there, but nothing like the possibility of the American way.

Lloyd: We need to move toward wrapping up. Is there anything else that you would like to say to us today before we close?

Guinness: Probably a lot, Sam. But one tiny thing I would just say this in conclusion.

Tocqueville’s been mentioned by Deryl. You’ve probably all read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and you know he was a great admirer of American democracy.

But you know, he says that he wrote his book for France and for Frenchmen, not for Americans. Because at the end of the day, he was a great admirer of the American Revolution and he was a disappointed lover of the French Revolution.

But towards the end of his life he made this little remark which brings it back to this country, he said this. “With a revolution, as with a novel, the hardest part to invent is the ending.”

Now, if you think of the American Republic like that, your Framers wrote a brilliant first chapter: terrible evils over race, over women, but they got religious liberty almost nearly right from the beginning. Brilliant first chapter, and there have been many stirring chapters written since then, including the Greatest Generation.

But America today is facing a whole lot of issues, in the drift or repudiation of the Framers, which call into question the very sustainability of the American republic.

And I am always amazed that people talk about sustainable development and sustainable environment, sustainable capitalism, sustainable everything today. The Framers discussed sustainable freedom, and modern Americans don’t.

So there are issues, and the one we’ve looked at this morning is just one. How do we live with our deep differences? Unless America gets this right in the next generation, not only will she not be a model for the world, she will actually undermine things which are crucial to the sustainability of the American Republic.

And so I say, candidly to you, passionately to you, pleadingly to you, the choice is yours, in this generation, and the consequences will be your children and grandchildren’s.

Lloyd: This has been a very helpful conversation. Come back next week and we will get to hear the faith journey of a young Congressman, Tom Perriello, who represents Virginia’s Fifth District, and has been involved in religious causes and international conflict resolution.

As always we hope you will join us just following this conversation at 11:15 for the morning service and if you would like to, you have a chance to come back in the back and meet Os Guinness. He’s going to be back in the West End of the Cathedral and will be signing some of his books. Please join me in thanking him for this very rich conversation. [Applause]