MTP Transcript for Dec. 24

DR. WARREN: These problems are so big, Tim, that everybody’s failed at them.  The United Nations has failed, the United States has failed. And the reason why is because we have not worked together on these issues. Last year at Davos I kept hearing people talk about public and private partnerships. And what they meant was, we need government and businesses to work together on these big global problems. These are problems that affect billions of people, not millions. And when they said that, I said, “Well, you’re right, but you’re not quite there yet. You’re missing the third leg of the stool.” A one-legged stool will fall over, a two-legged stool will fall over, and business and government alone cannot solve these problems. They haven’t, or they would’ve. The third leg of the stool is the churches. There’s a, there’s a public sector role, there’s a private sector role and there’s a faith sector role.

Each of the three legs have something to bring to the table that the other doesn’t have. Government brings three things to the table on these issues.  First, they bring safety and security. That’s the primary job of the government and that is, keep me safe from terrorism or from war so that I can live in peace. Second role of government is to provide freedom so I can prosper. I can go out and I can start a business if I want to and give me freedom. And the third is, set laws and enforce them because somebody’s got to put up stop signs so we’re not in chaos. The church can’t do that and business can’t do it. There’s a legitimate role for government to do these things.

Now, when we talk about poverty, disease, illiteracy and things like that, businesses have a role that government can’t play. Business brings to the table expertise in technology, in health and all kinds of things. They bring capital to the table. Enormous investments. And then they bring, this one’s really important, management skills, because most governments, most businesses and most churches are poorly managed. But if we’re going to solve issues like poverty, disease, illiteracy, corruption, trafficking, all these other things, the church has to be invited to the table for three reasons.

First, we have universal distribution. I could take you to 10 million villages around the world that the only thing they’ve got in it’s a church.  In fact, in most of the world, the only civil service society is a church.  They don’t have a clinic, they don’t have a school, they don’t have a post office, they don’t have a bar. They’ve got a church. Millions and millions of—the church was global 200 years before anybody started talking about globalization. In fact, it’s the only global, truly global organization.  There are 2.3 billion people who claim to be followers of Christ. Now that means the church is bigger than China. It’s bigger than India and China put together. So universal distribution. Second thing it’s got is it’s got the greatest pool of manpower. One out of every three people in—on the planet claims to be a follower of Christ. If you mobilize just a billion of those people for these issues, you’d solve it pretty quick. The third thing is, local credibility. What I mean by that is on these issues like poverty, disease, illiteracy, you just can’t go into a village with a program and expect them to accept it. And you have to have credibility. Well, that priest, that pastor, that minister, or for that matter, in the Muslim world, the imam or a rabbi, they have credibility because they’re marrying, they’re burying, they’re with the people in the stages of life. And frankly, I trust them to know more about their community than any government or NGO would ever know.

MR. RUSSERT: But with more than five billion people in the world, the majority are non-Christian...

DR. WARREN: And I...

MR. RUSSERT: ...and is it fair to say that there’s a concern that religious groups, Christian groups going around the world, are as much interested in proselytizing the faith...

DR. WARREN: Yeah, yeah.

DR. WARREN: Well, it’s a good concern. That’s true, most of the world is non-Christian, two thirds is not, but the—most of the world has faith of some kind. For instance, there are 600,000 Buddhists in the world, there are 800,000 Hindus, there are 1.3 billion Muslims and 2.3 billion Christians. The actual number of true secularists is actually quite small outside of Manhattan or Europe. So most people have a faith. Now, if you say you have to put your faith on the shelf to do humanitarian aid, you’ve ruled out most of the world.  And, and so what I’m saying is, I honestly don’t care what your motivation is to do good, as long as you do good. You might have a political motivation.  Somebody comes and says to you, “It makes good sense—it’s good foreign policy for us to help people get well, like with AIDS.” I’ve noticed they tend to like your country when you help them out. It’s just flat out good foreign policy to do health care, OK? That’s not my motivation, but it’s fine. Then there might be a political—a profit motivation, make money and help people.  I wish more businesses did it.

MR. RUSSERT: Jon, you mentioned that the intellectual vitality now, it seems to be awakening in the atheist movement.

MR. MEACHAM: Hm.

MR. RUSSERT: Sam Harris has written two books; the latest, “A Letter to a Christian Nation.” And on his Web site he writes this as part of the atheist manifesto. “Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities - Christian, Muslims, Jew, Hindus, etc. - and these divisions have become a continuous source of human conflict. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Iran and Iraq, and the Caucasus are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.

“In a world riven by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the obvious:

Religious faith promotes human violence to an astonishing degree.”

MR. MEACHAM: We’re unclear where Sam stands. Yes. I don’t think there—yes, religious feeling has fueled conflict from time immemorial.  There’s no question about that. It has also brought people together.  Religion itself, the one derivation of the word is to tie back one to another and one to, if you believe in a God, in an order beyond time and space. My, my argument against the, the atheist position is, yes, that’s a very shrewd diagnosis. But, forgive the phrase, what the hell are you going to do about it? You’re not going to take religion out of people’s lives. You can manage it, you can marshal it, as Rick tries to do. Rick’s one of the great marshallers of religious fervor of, of, of our time, or perhaps of any time.  And the issue to me becomes one for the religious of humility. That is, you used a phrase a moment ago that pricked up my ears, millions of Christians on the march for good causes, what, what we can agree in a, in a civil conversation are good causes.

DR. WARREN: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

MR. MEACHAM: But, man, the phrase “millions of Christians on the march,” to so many people, it just makes them flinch, because millions of Christians on the march have done a great deal of harm throughout history. Crusades, pogroms, any number of things, the things that Sam was writing about. So how do we take something that is there, that we’re not going to get rid of, you can’t legislate religion out of human experience. You can try to legislate it out of politics and government—I don’t think it’s going to be very successful, but you could try—but if you accept that it’s going to be a factor in human affairs, then what you do about it at that point? I would submit that we should argue that the religious, particularly Christians, should acknowledge the centrality of humility in their faith, and have a sense of history about it.

Christians are—Jews and Christians are fundamentally taught that we don’t know everything.

DR. WARREN: Mm-hmm.

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