MR. TIM RUSSERT: Our issues this Easter Sunday, a special edition: Faith in America. With us, Sister Joan Chittister of the Order of St. Benedict and author, “Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir”; Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in California and author, “The Left Hand Of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right”; Jon Meacham, managing editor, Newsweek magazine, and author, “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation”; Sayyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic Studies, George Washington University and author, “The Heart of Islam:

Enduring Values for Humanity”; Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, editor, First Things, and author, “Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy and the Splendor of Truth”; and Joel Osteen, senior pastor, Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, and author, “Your Best Life Now; 7 Steps To Living At Your Full Potential.” And in our MEET THE PRESS Minute, almost 50 years ago, this program was examining this same topic with noted evangelist the Reverend Billy Graham.

(Videotape, June 9, 1957):

REV. BILLY GRAHAM: We have a great deal of church-going in America, but we’re not relating this church-going to our personal daily lives.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: And we welcome you all on this Easter Sunday morning to talk about Faith in America. Let me begin our discussion for our panel and our viewers by quoting Jon Meacham from your book, “American Gospel.” “As it was in the beginning, so it has been since: an American acknowledgement of God in the public sphere, with men of good will struggling to be reverent yet tolerant and ecumenical. That the Founding Fathers debated whether to open the American saga with prayer is wonderfully fitting, for their conflicts are our conflicts, their dilemmas our dilemmas. Largely faithful, they knew religious wars had long been a destructive force in the lives of nations, and they had no wish to repeat the mistakes of the world they were rebelling against. And yet they bowed their heads.

“More than two centuries on, as millions of Americans observe Passover and commemorate Easter, the role of faith in public life is a subject of particularly pitched debate. From stem cells and science to the Supreme Court, from foreign policy and the 2008 presidential campaign to evangelical “Justice Sundays,” the questions of God and politics generates much heat but little light. Some Americans think the country has strayed too far from God; others fear that religious zealots (from the White House to the school board) are waging holy war on American liberty; and many, if not most, seem to believe that we are a nation hopelessly divided between believers and secularists.

“History suggests, though, that there is hope, for we have been fighting these battles from our earliest days and yet the American experiment endures.”

Jon Meacham, were people more religious at the founding of our country and were we more divided on moral issues back then than we are now?

MR. JON MEACHAM: I don’t think so. I think there’s a continuum of both religiosity and division on important issues of the heart and the mind. What the founders wanted to do, I think, and what I think the American gospel is, the great good news about America, is that religion shapes us without strangling us, and that we are a religious people, by and large. Our public institutions tend to reflect that. While keeping church and state separate, in the sense of an established church which had come—brought no good to nations that had gone that way, we were able to preserve the connection between religion and politics because people’s faith is essential in politics because politics is about people. It’s about their values; it’s about what matters to them. It’s like economics or geography. It is simply a part of the air we breathe.

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MR. RUSSERT: Father Neuhaus, 90 percent of the people in our country say they believe in God.

REV. RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: Why is there so much anger, so much rancor between people—amongst people who believe in God over moral issues?

REV. NEUHAUS: Well, I’ll tell you, Tim, I’m not sure there’s nearly as much anger and rancor as one would get the impression by reading, if you’ll excuse the expression, the mainstream media. I think a lot of people are very exercised about the religious right, for example, the theocons, the theocrats, that term is being—now being kicked around. There’s a fairly—and here I’d agree with Jon Meacham—a fairly constant and, you might say, normal condition of America in terms of both the vitality of religious faith, overwhelmingly of that 90 percent, 80 percent or so think they’re Christian, and in some crazy, conflicted, confused way, it is a Christian society with small minorities of others always negotiating the relationship between that and what it means in terms of allegiances to a particular religious tradition and then a national experiment. But is there that much rancor? I don’t think nearly as much as people think. People are going about their lives trying to do, essentially—and here, again, I’ll agree with Jon Meacham—religion cultures, the air that they breathe, trying to make the connections as to how they ought to live their lives and how they ought to lives together.

Aristotle said politics is the deliberation of how we ought to order our life together. So it is, in its very nature, a moral enterprise. And, for the great majority of Americans, when they’re asked about the source of their deepest convictions, their moral convictions, the answer that they’ll give is, in one way or another, religious in character. They’ll say the Bible, the Christian tradition, the church, the Judeo-Christian ethic. In other words, these are inseparable. Therefore, the politics, culture, morality, religion connection is the norm, and, within this norm, we are, from the founding fathers up through great critical moments such as the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the past century, we are in a continuing conversation, which is not always a civil conversation, but we ought to work at it being a civil conversation about Aristotle’s question: How ought we to order our life together?

MR. RUSSERT: Professor Nasr, are you troubled that some use religion as an excuse to do things that aren’t right or even immoral?

PROF. SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR: Yes, I am, definitely, not only for Islam, but also for Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism; each has a great tradition in its own way. But there’s a deeper issue that is involved here that very few people pay attention to, namely that in Europe, and not the whole of Europe, just in Western Europe. In the 18^th century, in a sense, religion lost a public arena and so-called secularist philosophies became dominant in the field of politics, science, which is very important, but it talks about if you believe in God today. But many of them deal with a secularist science which brings about all these moral issues and economics and the like. Since the second half of the 20^th century, there is a revival which one might call the desecularization of the world, in contrast what everybody thought in the 19^th century and early 20^th century. Now, this desecularization of the world has brought with it the claim of religion again, to have something to say about those very domains from which it was cut off.

In the case of Islam, of course, Islam always believed that the domain of Caesar and domain of God were somehow related. In fact, I would agree with what Father said about Aristotle’s view about ethics, that politics has to do with ethics, ethics has to do with religion, and, therefore, politics is inseparable from religion.

But even in the Islamic world, there had been a drift towards not talking about religion directly in political matters. As in Israel, as in the United States, there is this very important issue of a struggle going on between people who had thought they’d already won the battle 200 years ago, and now, through the thrust of modern technology and science, believe that they hold sway over the minds of people, even if they believe in God in an abstract way, against their religion, which has now made a major comeback. And unfortunately, we live at a time when this cataclysmic, you might say, or archetectonic, if I can use a geological term, change that has taken place through the continents of religion and of secularism are undergoing very profound changes.

MR. RUSSERT: Sister Joan, you had warned of the emergence of a new Puritanism.

SISTER JOAN CHITTISTER: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: What did you mean by that?

CONTINUED

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