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Tavis: Jon Meacham is the managing editor at "Newsweek" magazine and author of the 2003 best-seller 'Franklin and Winston.' Prior to that, he was editor of a terrific book about the civil rights movement called "Voices in Our Blood." His latest is "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation." He joins us from New York. Mr. Meacham, nice to have you on the program, sir.

Jon Meacham: Thank you, sir, appreciate your having me.

Tavis: Honored to have you. Let me start with what I sense is the essence, I guess, the centerpiece, the primary argument of the book. And that is that public religion is a good thing. Let's start, then, if you agree with that assessment, since you wrote the text, (laugh) with a definition of what public religion is before we go further.

Meacham: Absolutely. Public religion is a phrase Benjamin Franklin's. He used it in 1749 when he was writing the syllabus for what became the University Of Pennsylvania. And his argument was that public religion was essential to the morality of a people. And that history had taught us that religion, for all its faults, for all its sins and shortcomings, and for all of the ill uses it could be put to, had by and large been a force for good in the world.

And his idea was that we needed a broad religious foundation in the country that would enable people to have what was essentially a biblical view for the west of individual rights, of human rights. The same way that Jefferson grounded life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as the gift of nature's God and of the creator.

And what Franklin wanted, and what the founders wanted, I believe, was a general respect for religion without allowing it to become coercive or oppressive or compulsive in many way, compulsory, in many ways. And so, public religion manifests itself when we say in God we trust, one nation under God.

When we speak in terms of God's hope for the country. One of the great avatars of American public religion obviously is Dr. Martin Luther King, who said in his last Sunday sermon at the Washington National Cathedral, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And that we would one day have, no matter how many skyscrapers we built, no matter how much we conquered the Earth, if we did not do right, if we did not reach goals of justice, we would someday stand before the lord of history and have to answer for that.

Tavis: Before we go farther, let me ask, to your thinking, did Franklin and others ever even consider that that was a tight rope, a fine line to walk? Because when you have this conversation, as you well know, about public religion, the first thing people say, and I'm glad you got it out before I got to it, well, how do you justify or juxtapose in God we trust, etcetera, etcetera? So did they ever think that this might become a tricky line here to try to walk?

Meacham: They absolutely did. Franklin once said, in a slightly different context, that to speak against religion is like spitting against the wind or unleashing a tiger. Absolutely they understood this was gonna be the most delicate of balancing acts. It's interesting. Madison, in 'Federalist 10,' which is the great document about how we are a republic, not a democracy, that there are checks and balances, that we have to protect the rights of minorities against the tyranny of majorities, used religion as the great example.

That religion had to be one factor in the life of the nation, not the only factor. And they knew it would be a balancing act. It's the reason, I think, you have to read the Declaration of Independence, with its promise, long unfulfilled, but its promise of equal rights, that we are all made in the image and likeness of God.

And the Constitution, which is an almost entirely a secular document. It doesn't mention God. If anything, it has a ban on religious tests for public office. They saw that these two things went together, and they knew that it would always be a balancing act and that the work would never be done.

Tavis: I don't need to tell you, you wrote the book, but when you reference a name like Dr. King, what springs to mind immediately for me is that what made King so relevant, what made King not even relevant, what made him necessary, was this institution called slavery, which, as you well know, was justified by public religion. It was justified by God. Justified by Christianity. So talk to me about how that came to be.

Meacham: Well, scripture is a very dangerous weapon when we use it in the public sphere. There's a scriptural basis for abolition. There was a scriptural basis, absolutely, for slavery and for segregation. It was a critical mistake. I think our darkest chapter as a religious people. Also, the treatment of Native Americans.

We justified, Americans broadly defined, justified the elimination of those tribes as part of a kind of Christian mission. I think it's very dangerous for the bible to be used as a weapon in the political wars, in the temporal sphere. Shakespeare once said, "The Devil can cite scripture to his purpose." We all know that we could sit here all night and take an issue and play scriptural games with it.

So that is a case where both public religion and private religion, private religious faith, was a force for evil. And there's no doubt about that. But in the end, the sensible center, led by Lincoln, in many ways, who was a religious man. He was not a denominational man. He never belonged to a church. But he saw that in God's good time, that things had come to a point where we had to fulfill that promise at the founding, to use another image from Dr. King, the promissory note from the March on Washington.

And he talked about it in very religious terms, saying the will of God prevails. What I call the God of public religion is a God who created the world; this is what the founders thought. Created the world, works in the world through providence, is attentive to history, and will one day reward and punish based on what we do here.

And what Lincoln did when he summoned us to moral account from 1861 to his death on Good Friday, the anniversary was just a couple of days ago, what he was doing was saying we must fulfill and call on the better angels of our nature. And that was a religious impulse.

Tavis: Let me talk more about this notion of public religion, and specifically in the political sphere, domestically, if I might, first, and then internationally, 'cause I think there are a couple of connections here that we can make. On the domestic front, so, how might I put this? Tell me what happened, if public religion started out as a good thing in the context of our political discourse today, if you say public religion, which makes you a pretty bold brother to put this book out at a time like this.

When you say public religion now, you think immediately of the Christian right, and that ain't a good thing. So tell me what happened. How this thing got all twisted.

Meacham: Sure. I must say, I think that's the first time an Episcopalian from Chattanooga's been called a bold brother, so I thank you.

Tavis: Well, there you go. (Laugh)

Meacham: I thank you. I thank you for that. That's my Easter present. I love that. I think there's no question that what happened was, in the 1960s and 1970s, you had two things going on. One was African American ministers using the infrastructure available to them to fight for Civil Rights, to end segregation. Reverend John Louis, Dr. King, Reverend Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, everybody, using the churches to advance that cause; thankfully and blessedly so.

Jerry Falwell preached a sermon two weeks after Bloody Sunday in 1965 called Ministers and Marches, saying that as a minister of the gospel, he didn't have time to go out and work on political causes.

Tavis: That was Jerry Falwell?

Meacham: Uh huh.

Tavis: Wow.

Meacham: Nineteen sixty-five. Now, cut to eight years later, January 21, 1973, the Supreme Court hands down Roe vs. Wade. Jerry Falwell suddenly finds a whole lot of time to come out and be in the political arena. So between those two bookended events, I really think the line falls between the early school prayer decisions in '62 and '63, the success of the civil rights movement, where it was very rarely commented upon that religion and politics were mixing there.

It was just part of the air we breathed. Then comes Roe. And Roe is really the Pearl Harbor of the culture wars. And you have suddenly Jimmy Carter running for President, making the praise "born again" part of the national lexicon. And you have Pat Robertson; you have the moral majority helping elect President Reagan, ultimately, in 1980.

And what happens, I think, is because of the intense media and organized nature of what we now call the religious right, because of the success of their ability to dominate in many ways the national discussion when it comes to religion and politics, you're exactly right. You have people who just think that whenever you bring this up, you're really talking about Falwell and Robertson, and that they're a bunch of evangelicals and a Trojan horse trying to put a bible in every bedroom.

Now, you know evangelicals who don't wanna do that. I know evangelicals who don't wanna do that. But the leadership, and many, many people on the right, have gone too far and have allowed there to be the appearance, whether it's real or not, it's the appearance, and in politics appearance is often reality, of intolerance and almost, Kevin Phillips has this book out about an American theocracy.

I have many disagreements with that book. But he's onto something. That people do fear a kind of theocratic impulse. And they know what's been best about America is we're not like Iraq, and we're not like Iran. We don't have warring tribes. What we have is, blessedly, a land where religious people have long defended religious freedom because they believe in what I believe in, the theological argument for religious freedom.

Which is if God himself created us and didn't compel obedience, then who are men to try? Either through the polling place or the sword or the purse. So, we do have a particular sense of division at the moment, and I have a quick theory why. I think the reason the right, despite their numbers, feels beleaguered and besieged, is that they've been doing this almost 35, 40 years now.

And they haven't really won the victories they set out to win. So they feel frustrated. There is no pro-life amendment in the Constitution. There is no pro-school prayer amendment in the Constitution. And those were the beginning demands of that movement. And I think the reason that secular Americans, particularly, feel surrounded by believers is it's been 40 years since the high-water mark of post-war liberalism in 1965, when you had Medicare and the Voting Rights Act the year after Civil Rights Act.

The two Democrats who've been elected since that time have not particularly pleased, broadly put, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. So I think both sides, it's a bizarre situation in some ways, where both sides feel they're losing. And I think that, what I hope to do with this book is my idea, is that the American gospel, the great good news about the country, is that religion can shape us without strangling us.

And that not every political argument has to immediately take on a religious and theological tone. And that we can have a sensible center. We can go back to the sense and spirit of the founding, where religion was one thread in the tapestry, not the whole tapestry.

Tavis: You know what? You are an awfully good editor at "Newsweek," and I don't work for you, but I know that you're a good editor. Because you jumped so far ahead of me, (laugh) and you went from the domestic question I had and in the answer to that you also raised the international context, which I wanted go to about Iran and Iraq.

So you must do your job extremely well, 'cause you covered all of the bases that I wanted to cover in that one answer. Let me give you 30 seconds right quick, my time is up here. Thirty seconds to tell me, to put this thing on the right track, to redefine, to reformulate, if you will, the notion of public religion today. What's the one thing that we need to do first?

Meacham: I think we have to be aware that there is a public religion, and there are private religious considerations. And that what I would most like people to come away from this book and these conversations with is when they're watching your show, or "Meet The Press," or reading the "New York Times," or reading "Newsweek," as I'm sure they're doing, (laugh) I want them, when they see a policy argument, I would like folks to be able to say the people who are arguing X position might have a private religious concern.

The Southern Baptists have this position on gay marriage. Or the Catholic bishops have this position on abortion. That's a private religious concern. Let's give it the relative merit we wanna give it, and proceed and let the checks and balances of the system go forward. What I would like to see, too, at the same time, is for people's blood pressure to go down when President Bush mentions God, or any candidate talks about God.

Because that's been part of our history from the very beginning. So, public religion is a conversation that affirms an essential cultural reality that's true for 90 percent or so of the country. But when it comes to policy and it comes to politics, be able to name what is a private religious concern, make a decision on the relative weight it should have, and then speak out or vote accordingly.

Tavis: He's a "New York Times" bestselling author. His new book is "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation." He is the managing editor for "Newsweek" magazine. His name is Jon Meacham. Mr. Meacham, nice to have you on the program, sir.

Meacham: Well, thank you and congratulations on your fine book.

Tavis: Thank you, sir. I appreciate you coming on the program. Up next, a look at Cuba on this forty-fifth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Stay with us.