Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS IS GOD ON THEIR SIDE? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Andrew Brown Producer: Simon Coates Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC Room 1210 White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS (020) 8752 7279 Broadcast date: 29.12.05 2030-2100 Repeat date: 01.01.06 2130-2200 CD number: PLN551/05VT1052 Duration: 27.36 Taking part in order of appearance: James Q. Wilson Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy, Pepperdine University, California James Morone Professor of Political Science, Brown University & Author of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History Harriet Baber Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego, California The Rev. Richard Cizik Vice-President for Government Affairs, National Association of Evangelicals, Washington, DC The Rev. Judith Maltby Fellow & Chaplin of Corpus Christi College, Oxford & Reader in Church History, University of Oxford Jimmy Carter President of the United States, 1977-1981 & Author of Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis Joseph Bottum Editor, First Things, New York Nicholas Boyle Professor of German Literary & Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge & Fellow, Magdalene College & Author of Where Are We Now? The Rev. Gordon Atkinson Pastor of Covenant Baptist Church, San Antonio, Texas, contributor to Christian Century, The Wittenberg Door & author of Real Life Preacher weblog WILSON: America, through its culture, its values and its constitution occupies a special place in the world— and I think this reflects some degree of concordance with God’s preferences. MORONE: If you see the society as one that’s constantly trying to determine who’s us and who’s them, religion becomes a very handy tool. It’s really meant to be a form of identity. BABER: Quite a few Americans, to paraphrase Santyana, believe that there is no God and He is on our side. It’s the secular, socio-political agenda that drives religious commitment rather than vice versa. CIZIK: I think that—and this may surprise some folks to hear an Evangelical say—the civil religion reading of American history, with its emphasis on special providence and the chosen nation, has done some untold mischief. BROWN: Many—perhaps most— Americans believe that they, and their country, have a special relationship with God. What this relationship is—and what it ought to be—are questions that are vivid and real, and full of political importance. Does God have a plan for America? Has He left fingerprints on the constitution? Would America make any sense without Him? The last election may have been decided by the evangelical vote—the people who believe that what matters most about a presidential candidate is his relationship with God. We, in Europe, may be mystified by George W. Bush’s talk of his foreign policy in terms of good and evil, but it seems quite obvious to Americans that there is good in the world, and that America should be on that side. The Reverend Judith Maltby, born and raised in Illinois, is now chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. MALTBY: I was in the States on 9/11 and I was very struck by the rhetoric of special-ness and the overwhelming feeling about: “How could this happen to us, us the United States? We are Israel; we are in a special covenant with God.” And a few days later there was a civic service organised by the city of Portland—a very liberal place, the sort of San Francisco of the Pacific North-West, really—and the closing Benediction was given by a minister who prayed that God would spread American values throughout the world. Not for us to make our values God’s values, but clearly American values and God’s values were the same thing. BROWN: It’s not just conservatives, then, who can feel this when America is attacked. It’s open to everyone to believe that God loves America. In the small Georgia town of Plains, there are only six hundred and forty-five people— souls, they’d say. They have a choice of eight churches to go to. And on Sundays, that’s what they do. This is the home of former President Jimmy Carter; now eighty-one. He has a new book on top of the secular best-seller lists called Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis—even though it deals largely with Baptist Christianity. He spoke to me on the ’phone from Plains where the question is not whether God loves America but whether he loves it specially, in a way different from every other nation. CARTER: I don’t see that America is singled out as a special favour from the hand of God. I do believe that all of our lives are affected by our relationship with God. I happen to be a Christian, but I think that one of the key premisses of my own Christian faith is that all people are created equally and that includes, as St. Paul said, masters and slaves, Greeks and Jews, men and women and so forth. BROWN: It’s hard to imagine Jimmy Carter, then, praying for the spread of American values as if they were God’s. As president from 1977 to 1981, he was the first nationally successful politician to refer to himself as born-again. Until then it had seemed that Christianity might be on the way out. In the Sixties, Time magazine had even run a cover proclaiming the death of God; and when Jimmy Carter first ran for office, the national news magazines had to explain to their urban and Northern readership what “born again” meant. Judith Maltby remembers the change. MALTBY: Jimmy Carter, that mildly left-of- centre Southern Democrat, awoke this giant of the evangelical vote. And. of course. it then defeated him. He’s Dr. Frankenstein a little bit, isn’t he, in that sense? I can remember clearly that before Carter, you talked about the Jewish vote; you talked about the Catholic vote; you talked about the black vote. You didn’t talk about the evangelical vote. CARTER: I deliberately tried not to do that. In fact, I was a very strict adherent to the principle that was established by our Founding Fathers, expressed by Thomas Jefferson when he said, “Build a wall between church and state.” I was very hesitant to inject any sort of religious aspects into my campaign and was very strict about not letting this happen when I was President. BROWN: Since then the religious vote has become enormously important—and self-conscious; the process perhaps started when President Reagan, who defeated Jimmy Carter, told the National Association of Evangelicals that: “You can’t endorse me. But I endorse you.” They couldn’t endorse him because of the constitutional separation between Church and State, something which has almost Biblical force for patriotic and devout Americans. This separation doesn’t mean that the State should be separate from Christianity. In fact, certain political symbols become almost sacred—the flag, the constitution. Deface them at your peril. But complete separation of the state from holiness is a prospect to be regarded with horror. Joseph Bottum is the editor of First Things magazine in New York, one of the intellectual powerhouses of religious conservatism. BOTTUM: Liberalism needs someone in the culture, a good chunk of the culture, that believes that human existence has a purpose; human history has a goal. Without that, liberalism, it seems to me, naturally kind of decays. BROWN: But what does liberalism decay into in your scheme? BOTTUM: Well, France, I think! It decays, in some sense, into a country that cannot bring itself even to reproduce and have children; it decays into a country that no longer is certain about its own identity or why it should believe in its own identity. BROWN: There are less dramatic explanations for the link between patriotism and piety. Harriet Baber is professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego in California; an Anglican teaching at a Catholic college. BABER: American religion was very minimalist, very stripped down, very low church Protestantism— no saints’ days, no holidays. Now what got sucked in to fill that gap? Well, there was no liturgical year, so we developed our own and it consisted largely of patriotic events—4th July, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and now Super Bowl Sunday. So that’s why, to a great extent, the whole nationalist ethos became religious and the religious ethos became patriotic. BROWN: So America appears nationalist not because it’s exceptionally religious, but because it isn’t? BABER: Exactly. Patriotism is our religion, or at least it’s the cultic side of our religion—the warm, emotional side of our religion. Without it, there were just bare meeting houses and doctrine. BROWN: But the link isn’t just emotional. There’s a doctrine, a theory, about God’s interest in America that has been there right from the nation’s Puritan beginnings. The belief that God has a chosen people comes naturally to anyone who reads the Bible; and it wasn’t the Americans who invented the belief that God’s chosen people speak English. Pilgrim Fathers carried it across the Atlantic. To this day it can be hard to tell whether a church in the English countryside is a monument to God or to Englishness. Perhaps we can’t see the hand of God in history any more, but it’s always been visible across the Atlantic. James Morone is the author of one of the leading histories of religion in the US, Hellfire Nation, and professor of political science at Brown University. MORONE: It is not just a notion that providence moves across American history, but that we are its agent. This is something that you can read back into the original sermon of John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts in 1630, and it’s repeated again and again, “We shall be as a city on a hill, the eyes of all people upon us.” That original sermon suggests that God’s place in the world will be diminished if America fails. And this has been a marvellous belief system for amassing an empire. Even the defence of the original American constitution in the very first Federalist Papers, one of the most secular moments in American history, still call on this as essentially providential and as a test of democracy itself. BROWN: This theory can still appear as an historical truth to modern evangelicals. The Reverend Richard Cizik is one of the most important lobbyists in Washington. As Vice-President for Government Affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, he represents the concerns of a well-organized twenty-five per cent of US voters. So does he believe that America is a chosen nation? CIZIK: Yes, in some sense I do believe that we are: namely, we have opportunities given us, privileges as a result of our natural resources and wealth, not because God has singled us out to say Americans are better than anybody else in the world, but because we have been endowed, you see, with political freedoms. BROWN: Who endowed you? Who gave them? CIZIK: Obviously the Creator. It says so in our Declaration of Independence. BROWN: And that Creator is the same as the God of the Bible? CIZIK: I believe so, yes. Does that mean that the beliefs of American civil religion are those of evangelical Christianity? No. In fact, civil religion, which just ascribes, you see, to America all these traits, comes dangerously close in my mind to blasphemy. Why? Because it identifies God with our national destiny. In essence, it reduces the universal God of the Bible to a tribal God of America. That is not evangelicalism. BROWN: But if it’s not evangelicalism, what is it? It’s certainly very deep-rooted. It may seem that there’s a contrast between secular Britain and religious America. But, in fact, there’s a religious dimension at the heart of the British constitution. The monarch is crowned in Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who calls down God’s blessing in exchange for promises of good behaviour. That is a sacramental moment. But to the public it’s just fustian; it’s not something that keeps anyone awake at night. So what needs explaining is not the fact that God is present in the politics of the USA, but that He plays such an active role there. Professor Nicholas Boyle of Magdalene College, Cambridge is the author of Where Are We Now?, a study of identity in a shifting world. BOYLE: American liberty is said in the founding document to come from God, who has given us these unalienable rights. The principal formulator of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was a man who believed profoundly in private enterprise and almost equally profoundly disbelieved in the power of the state. And Jefferson wasn’t only responsible for the Declaration of Independence with its reference to unalienable rights. He was also one of the principle movers behind the 1791 Bill of Rights. If we ask where these rights come from that figure so prominently in constitutional discussions in the United States, we have only the Declaration of Independence to go on, which tells us that they come from God. BROWN: If God is the foundation of American rights, then He’s also the foundation of the American understanding of what it is to be a person, someone who has inalienable rights. Remember that the deep political disputes of American history—whether over race or capitalism or even abortion—aren’t usually solved by elections and never by elections alone. They all come up before the Supreme Court, sooner or later, which reaches its judgment by interpreting constitutional rights. But do these God-given rights, which underlie all politics, entail a corresponding duty to believe in God? Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things magazine. BOTTUM: In America we have this view, handed down from George Washington’s Farewell Address on, that there is something in the nation that requires that the bulk of its citizens be religious. Not that the government is going to affirm that religion, but the government, in order to do the things that a modern liberal democracy needs to do, has to assume a certain level of virtue in its citizens. And whether that virtue can be obtained in the absence of religion in the bulk of its citizens, that’s a real question and I think the answer is becoming increasingly clear that it cannot. BROWN: Is it really true that you can only have a decent society, and a functioning state if most of its citizens are Christians? We seem to have twisted the sceptical rationalism of the Enlightenment through one hundred and eighty degrees. Writing at about the time of the American Revolution, Gibbon regarded all religions as equally true for the masses, equally useful to their rulers, and equally false to the philosopher. Conservative Americans like Joseph Bottum now take the same attitude to secularism: that it may be necessary for government, but it’s not actually true. Richard Cizik goes further. Christians aren’t simply essential to good government. They’re more important than any single party. CIZIK: There is somebody in our society who needs to stand for the transcendent, for the fact that there are higher authorities than simply that of the government. And who but Christians of all people to do that? Who else will? BROWN: I’m tempted to reply that surely that’s the job of the voters in a democracy? CIZIK: Well, the voters as well—but the voters don’t always acknowledge a higher authority. And there are some conservatives who deify the democracy and deify the state in ways which I don’t think they fully understand, and no state can endure God-like devotion without degenerating into demonic corruption. And thus when you give too much power, you see these cycles that go back and forth and currently we’re in one in which the Republicans are reaping the consequences of their corruption. BROWN: In his willingness to regard even Republicans as possible victims of demonic corruption, Richard Cizik seems to be getting ahead of the largest and most powerful evangelical denomination in America, the Southern Baptist Convention; its twenty-five million members have moved steadily towards a disciplined political engagement since the election of a president, who was then one of their number, Jimmy Carter. CARTER: Southern Baptists, including me throughout the early part of my life, always believed that the scriptures would only be interpreted by Jesus Christ whom we worship. In the year 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention leaders eliminated that aspect of our expression of belief and, in effect, substituted their ability to interpret the scriptures. Another factor was the Baptists have always inherently and historically been averse to any kind of creed being imposed on individual believers. The Southern Baptist Convention has now adopted a creed which is being imposed and required much more strictly than any other Christian denomination, including perhaps the Catholic Church. Another particular belief that’s in that creed is a requirement that women must be subservient to their husbands and excluded from any church position of leadership. And the other aspect of the Southern Baptist Convention which I deplore is their overt desire to merge their denomination and their beliefs with the right wing of the Republican party. BROWN: To former President Carter, then, it seems that the Southern Baptist Convention has acquired some of the features that once made Roman Catholicism appear to Baptists such an enemy of liberty. It still has no priests, but it acts as if it would like an inquisition. Perhaps it’s turning into that most un-American of bodies, an established church. Gordon Atkinson is the pastor of a small Baptist congregation in Texas. Like Jimmy Carter, he’s a southerner, and a Baptist; but not a Southern Baptist. ATKINSON: The Republican party curries favour with the religious right by using certain buzzwords, and the perception has happened that this is God’s party. And some ministers help foster this idea by standing in pulpits before large crowds of people and speaking to several select issues that their congregation will wholeheartedly support—we’re against homosexuality, whatever that means; certainly for capital punishment; very much against abortion; and very, very patriotic. And these four simple ideas have formed a core belief of something that I would call just American cultural theism—and that frightens me deeply. Just months ago, I saw a church here in my town. They had a gigantic flag plastered across the front of their church. I mean, this was not a flag you could buy at any store; it must have been special ordered. It was like something you’d see in a car dealership. It was, you know, a huge flag! And it was covering up the windows. I wondered if there were any Christian symbols behind the flag anywhere! BROWN: But how does the world look from inside these flag-shrouded churches? What, for the Reverend Richard Cizik, are the Christian symbols that conservative evangelicals see when they ask what divides them from the world? CIZIK: Primarily a firm commitment to the absolute inerrancy of the scriptures. For us, it’s the Bible, the word of God objective—the voice to us not just of God himself but to our role in the world. BROWN: So, to sharpen the question a little, these are people who believe that the earth is ten thousand years old or less? CIZIK: (Laughs) No, not at all! Some do, but it’s not young earth theory that distinguishes us. Nor, for that matter, a literal interpretation of the first Book of Genesis, but rather an understanding that it is authoritative both for faith and practice. BROWN: The three key issues for this voting bloc are abortion, evolution and homosexuality. Hostility to abortion and homosexuality is at the core of the family values agenda—though divorce is as common among evangelicals as it is in the fallen society around them. Creationism, even when it’s called Intelligent Design, is important because it tramples all over the otherwise sacrosanct wall between church and state; most recently defended by a judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, just before Christmas. It would be very wrong and misleading, though, to suggest that abortion, homosexuality and evolution are the only issues that concern American churches. There is a powerful tradition of political Christianity in the US that has nothing to do with right-wing politics. Political scientist, James Morone. MORONE: Religion, in fact, has been on both sides of the political spectrum. There is a left-wing faith—I call it the social gospel—and it does harken back to another Puritan principle that the entire community will be elevated or punished depending on how the community itself—not individuals—but the community thrives. BROWN: And it is God who will do the elevation or the punishment, right? MORONE: In the original Puritan vision. In later versions, God drops out, particularly of left-wing religion. But the notion that the community has to be judged as a community remains and remains very strong. In the 1960s, it was all social gospel —Martin Luther King preaching across the country, constantly saying, “I’m my brother’s keeper inevitably because I’m my brother’s brother. Anything that enriches the poor, enriches the rich.” BROWN: Some think these times may return and they’re not all liberal optimists. James Q. Wilson is one of America’s leading conservative intellectuals. He’s been a Harvard professor and has chaired government task forces on crime and drugs. He’s currently the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, California. WILSON: Politics may change. The great importance that people attach to such controversial questions now decided largely by the courts, such as school prayer and abortion and many other matters, those views may change as the Court changes its mind. A second possibility is that people may decide to accept the decisions on abortion and learn to adjust to them; I think that’s somewhat less likely. And, thirdly, there may be a continued growth among seculars, such that religion becomes less important. Seculars, people who do not believe in God or certainly do not believe in an active God, are now very much a minority in this country but their proportions are growing. They’ve probably doubled in number in the last twenty years. BROWN: At most one-in-eight Americans would identify themselves as non-believers. The threat of rising secularism is one of the things that evangelicals pray over together; it lies behind their worries over such questions as whether Christmas is being attacked by liberals. But at the same time there’s been tremendous growth in a new style of evangelical Christianity, one which is often racially integrated. The suburban or exurban megachurches, with their giant parking lots, appear to be the future of American religion. They’re like nothing else on Earth, outside, perhaps, South Korea. The Reverend Gordon Atkinson, in San Antonio, Texas: ATKINSON: It’s not at all unusual to have a church with two, three thousand members in a metropolitan area. There are some of these churches that rank, swell up to five and ten thousand—and then there’s a church in Houston that has thirty thousand members. They meet in the old basketball stadium that the Rockets used to play in. What’s disturbing about this for me is it’s really more in keeping with what I would call the WalMart-ization of America than anything Christian. We tend to flock to whoever can offer us the glitziest, biggest show and most of these people are coming not new to the church but coming from other churches which they have decided don’t have a choir that’s fancy enough or don’t have a video screen. I do not like this trend, but it’s clearly one that takes place, and I think there is a real temptation for these churches to preach strongly against sins that their congregation doesn’t feel that they are in danger of. Homosexuality’s an easy target because even if there are homosexuals in the congregation, they’re in the closet, and everyone can agree on that. They may speak about a lot of things, but they might not speak about Christ’s call for us to live simply. The temptation, of course, is: if you want to keep your clientele, you don’t want to preach on a subject that might offend them. BABER: What’s fascinating is that when the rituals conflict with the secular agenda, we back down. BROWN: Harriet Baber, professor of philosophy at San Diego University. BABER: A number of megachurches, including Willow Creek, the mother of all megachurches that draws twenty thousand people on the average Sunday, is closed for Christmas; and because Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, their ordinary Sunday services will be suspended for that Sunday so that people can do family time. Now to me this seems absolutely bizarre because one of the days of the year you’re definitely supposed to go to church is Christmas—that’s a religious obligation—but the take that members of Willow Creek have is that what matters is family and religion is good because it supports family. Christmas is family time so, in order to support family time and family values, of course churches close. BROWN: So is American Christianity on the verge of another great change? We’ve heard how it’s turned to the left and to the right, receded in times of prosperity and risen again in new, more prosperous forms. The great churches of nineteenth century America have no more survived than the great railways did, yet their twenty-first century successors seem just as essential to the nation as the Internet. Even the great exurban churches with their congregations of tens of thousands may pass away in time. They may discover that in their marriage of God and Mammon, it was God who brought the dowry and Mammon who will end up with the property. But should that happen, there’ll always be other marriages, so long as America remains attractive. Nicholas Boyle at Magdalene College, Cambridge. BOYLE: Religion is inevitably an important factor in a nation that is built up out of immigrants. It becomes part of the definition of any of the many American subnations—Italian, Irish, Armenian, whatever it may be—that they not only have a language, a cuisine, a particular relation with their homeland, but they also have a religion of their own. And, of course, all of these elements of the subculture are consciously subordinated to the overall, single, overriding unity that is America and the culture of liberty. Everybody therefore has a religion. It doesn’t matter what it is. BROWN: Whether God has a plan for America turns out not to be the kind of thing you can answer by investigating the facts about God. The answer emerges from the facts about America and from the language that Americans use when they try to understand their country and to decide what its place in the world should be. This place will change. Global warming, energy crises, the rise of Asian economies, will all profoundly affect America along with the rest of the world. But they won’t be understood as purely worldly crises. Like it or not, God is going to play a big role in the coming century because America will; and America without God is almost inconceivable. 13