MTP Transcript for Dec. 24

DR. WARREN: Well, in that same war, of course, Churchill and Roosevelt sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” on a, on a battleship, where they played and met.  So, yeah, things have changed, there’s no doubt about that. People don’t really realize how—that even under the basis of so much of, of what’s happened over history, there has been a spiritual basis. A couple of years ago, Tim, I was at the Aspen Institute speaking, and the great historian, Dr.  Arthur Schlesinger, got up, and he, he made this statement that George Bush, our president, current president, was the most religious president in history.  And I was up next and I said, “Well, I admire Dr. Schlesinger, but I have to disagree. The most religious president of history was Lincoln.” You go and read his second inaugural address, it’s a sermon, it’s just flat—no—Bush or Clinton could have never gotten away with what, what Lincoln said at the second inauguration. It was just a flat out Christian sermon.

MR. RUSSERT: The original oath of office for the president did not contain the words “So help me God,” correct, Jon?

MR. MEACHAM: That’s right. George Washington is reported to have improvised them at Federal Hall in April of 1789 right before he went to St. Paul’s Chapel and went to services after the service—after the inauguration. The intertwining of, of religion and politics in ceremonial occasions is, is fascinating, I think. I think it’s best described by a phrase of Benjamin Franklin’s, as is so much, he used a phrase called “public religion” when he was laying out his syllabus with the—what became the University of Pennsylvania in 1749, and he said that “history had shown the utility of a public religion in maintaining the morality of a people.”

DR. WARREN: Mm-hmm.

MR. MEACHAM: And remember, the, the founders were working in an intellectual context in which republican, again, lowercase R, virtue was essential, that is you could have a republican democracy if the virtue of the people was such that it built a good society. And we were working with the reverse of centuries and centuries of thought from the divine right of kings down to the divine right of the governed. Part of the American experiment was flipping that around.

And religion was a key engine in that, because in theological terms, we’re all created in the image and likeness of God. The early part of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson while he was being eaten by blue bottle flies coming in from a stable in Philadelphia, talked about—grounded our fundamental human rights in the laws of nature and of nature’s God. I think it’s very important, particularly on a holiday, a Christian holiday, to emphasize that the founders had many opportunities to use sectarian, Christian, Judeo-Christian language, and they almost always resisted.

DR. WARREN: Right. The Constitution.

MR. MEACHAM: It is the—it’s the language of providence, it’s the language of the holy author of our religion, it’s the language of the supreme governor of the universe, it’s a kind of deism, the idea that there is a creator God who, who works in the world through providence, who answers prayers, who’s attentive to history and to the United States. As Jefferson said, “He led us as Israel of old across the seas.” But it was—they were very careful not to say Jesus, you know, created America. What would Jesus do? is not an amendment to the Constitution.

MR. RUSSERT: But when you say attentive to the United States...

MR. MEACHAM: Yep.

MR. RUSSERT: ...do you believe we, too often as Americans, invoke the notion that God is on our side?

MR. MEACHAM: Yes.

DR. WARREN: Oh, without a doubt. And, and, and I tell people all the time, I’m not called to save America, I’m called to save Americans. Jesus didn’t die for a country, he died for individuals. But, you know, what Jon was just saying—I debated some leaders in China about this just a few years ago. We actually had a dinner in People’s Hall, and some of the Cabinet members had invited me to this dinner, and as we talked, I was—and you know the problem with China is you want to have the economic freedom of the West without the moral underpinnings of it. And I said, it isn’t going to happen, because there are three freedoms you have to have to have the success of the West.  Number one is freedom of religion. It’s the First Amendment, OK, and the—freedom of religion. The second is the freedom of information and freedom of speech. And the third is freedom of markets. And what you’re trying to do is put freedom of markets into China without freedom of religion and freedom of information, and it isn’t going to work, because capitalism without either Judaism or Christianity or moral basis is pure greed. It is the moral basis beneath it that says, “Oh, I need to take care of my employees. I don’t just become a robber baron.” And when you take capitalism, as for instance, and put it into Russia without the moral basis, you get oligarches. You get a bunch of thugs who rip off the country as much as the communists did.

MR. RUSSERT: Can you have a moral basis without organized religion?

DR. WARREN: Of course you can.

MR. MEACHAM: Absolutely.

DR. WARREN: Yeah.

MR. MEACHAM: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: There’s an interesting evolution in the evangelical movement here in the United States.

DR. WARREN: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: And Jon’s magazine, Newsweek, wrote about it in November. Now, I want to get your reaction to it. It’s headlined “An Evangelical Identity Crisis.” And it says: “More than three decades after Roe v. Wade propelled religious conservatives fully into the arena, a new generation of evangelical believers is pressing beyond the religious right of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, trying to broaden the movement’s focus from the familiar wars about sex to include issues of social and economic justice. ... Can they move beyond the apparent confines of the religious right as popularly understood, or are they destined to seem harsh and intolerant—the opposite of what their own faith would have them be? ... Some Christians, exhausted by divisive wedge politics, are going back to the Bible and embracing a wider-ranging agenda, one that emphasizes reaching out to the poor and disenfranchised.  Almost unanimously, these evangelicals cite as a model Rick Warren.”

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