E-mail a friendSally Quinn
airdate December 12, 2007
Career print and TV journalist and Washington insider Sally Quinn is the founder and co-moderator of The Washington Post- and Newsweek-sponsored blog, On Faith—the first worldwide, interactive discussion about religion and its impact on global life. Quinn began her journalism career as a Post reporter and became known for her talent of drawing out her interview subjects. She's also written four books, including two novels and a memoir, We're Going to Make You a Star, an account of her stint as co-anchor for CBS Morning News.
Sally Quinn
Tavis: Tonight, I'm pleased to welcome Sally Quinn to this program. The veteran journalist at "The Washington Post" and bestselling author co-moderates a web series on religion in America called On Faith. The interactive conversation can be found at WashingtonPost.com and Newsweek.com. She joins us tonight from Washington.com. (Laughs) Sally, nice to have you on the program.
Sally Quinn: Thank you.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. Let me start by asking where this idea - a fascinating idea and some good stuff on there - but where did the idea for this On Faith series come from?
Quinn: Well, I felt that after 9/11, people got much more interested in religion. There just seemed to be a search for meaning that I hadn't felt in this country for a long time, and it just seemed that we weren't getting as much religion coverage and print as we should.
And so I actually - I'd never done anything with the web at all, but I went to Donald Graham, who's the owner of "The Washington Post" company and I said, "We should do a website on religion." And he said, "Well, you go ahead and do it." And I said, "But I don't know anything about religion and I don't know anything about the web." And he said, (laughter) "Well, never mind, go ahead and do it."
So I called John Meacham, who was the editor of "Newsweek" and who is a religion scholar himself and also the author of "American Gospel," which was a bestseller and I asked him if he would be the co-moderator of this site, and he agreed to do it. And so we started it as a dialogue. We got about 70 or 80 wonderful panelists - leading scholars and academicians, religion scholars, theologians, thinkers, atheists, every possible religion you can imagine, we have represented.
And we just started a conversation, because the whole idea, I think, of religion should be that we all admire and respect each other's religious views and no one condemns anyone else's religious views as long as it doesn't impose itself on other people. And I'm a great pluralist. I really believe in separation of church and state and I also believe that everybody has the right to believe or not to believe what he or she wants.
And what I was hoping and what John and I are both hoping - and I think this has really happened - is that so many people have come on the website with really made up their minds that they have one religion and their religious view is right and everyone else is wrong, and we have changed a lot of people's minds and a lot of people's attitudes and perspectives.
I think one of the big problems in this country is that people don't understand very much about religion. It's shocking how little people know even about their own religion, much less the religions of other people. And I think when you hear another perspective and another point of view from someone who is a decent, moral, upstanding citizen, you kind of think, "Well, oh, well, they're really like me."
So I think one of the things that I've discovered is that most religions basically have the same tenets. It's just that their rituals and their practices and their cultures are different.
Tavis: A couple things about this I find fascinating. As I have read your work over the years and the work of your co-moderator over the years, at least your co-moderator is a person of faith. I've read that in his work over the years. As I read your work, unless I missed something, you have or certainly at one point said that you were an atheist, which is really fascinating considering you were the one that went to Mr. Graham and said, "We ought to have more religion coverage and we ought to do a website." And here you are, an atheist. Now explain that to me.
Quinn: Well, I sort of backed into my interest in religion because I became interested in it years ago as a journalist because I just felt that religion has such an enormous impact on every aspect of our lives, not only in this country but around the world.
If you're interested in foreign policy, you have to know about religion. If you're interested in American politics, you have to know about it. If you're interested in stem cell research or abortion or gay rights or the environment or whatever, religion really does touch everything. And so as a journalist, I felt that we needed to cover it more.
John Meacham and I had been having conversations about this over the years, and I remember having a lunch with John at a restaurant in New York and I said to him, "I'm an atheist," and he said, "No you're not." And we sort of had this back and forth and finally he said, "You really don't want to define yourself negatively, and by saying you're an atheist, you are doing just that. And if you are going to be an atheist, then you really ought to know something about religion. You ought to know what it is that you're against."
And he gave me a reading list, and he was absolutely right because I began reading about religion and the more I began to read about various religions around the world, the more I understood them, the more empathetic I became, the more respectful I became of religions, and the more open-minded. Because I was really an angry, militant atheist for a long time.
Tavis: And your father, though, ironically, a staunch Episcopalian, yes?
Quinn: My father was a very religious Episcopalian, my mother was a Presbyterian, and oddly - my father was in the military. He was a general in the Army and he was a World War II hero and he fought in Germany and World War II, and he actually liberated Dachau. And he was there the day they walked in; he had his staff photographer take pictures of all of the dead people in the concentration camps, and the survivors.
And he had a scrapbook made up, and when he came back from the war I was about four or five, and I remember just looking at those scrapbooks. And here I was, someone who prayed every night on my knees next to my bed, and I looked at those scrapbooks and I thought there cannot be a god, because no god could ever allow this to happen.
And that really was when I became an atheist, when I was about six. I didn't know the words, I didn't know what it meant, but I could just never believe that. And then when we went to Japan, my father was sent over to Korea and fought on the front lines there. And I got very sick and I was in Tokyo General Hospital, where they were bringing all the casualties from Korea.
And there were all these young soldiers dying and wounded and calling for their mothers, and I was in the hospital for almost a year and even flew back on a hospital plane with a lot of the soldiers who actually died on the plane on the way back. And that only reinforced my notion that how could a good god, a decent god, exist who would allow this to happen?
And I really only saw the bad parts of religion. When I actually started studying some religion in college, it just seemed to me that so many atrocities and so much evil had been committed in this world by people who were religious in the name of religion, and I didn't see the good side of it, I only saw the bad side of it.
And so when I began to study and read about religion, it became clear to me that there were certainly as many good things done in the name of religion as there were bad.
Tavis: As you continue to work on this web series, which I want to go back to in just a second very quickly, but as you continue to work on the web series - I don't know how to phrase this. Tell me about the journey that you're on now. Are you becoming more open to it? Are you moving from atheist to agnostic and maybe to a believer one day? Tell me about your personal journey right now.
Quinn: Well, I've tried out a number of descriptions as I keep making - I'm a work in progress, I guess you'd have to say. I'm not an atheist; I'm really not an agnostic, because I think that means you don't know, and I think all of us are really agnostics, because nobody really knows. I tried out seeker, and that didn't work.
And Karen Armstrong, who is one of my great heroines, talks about how she is a sort of a monotheist - a freelance monotheist. Well, I tried out freelance polytheist and that didn't work, either. Actually, Tavis, today or yesterday I went to a Christmas pageant. I was listening to Christmas carols and I thought maybe I'm a Christian, because I've been doing a lot of reading in the last couple of weeks, I'm writing a piece for "The Washington Post" on religion.
But a Christian in the generic sense, because when you look at the stories about Jesus Christ and you see what Christ stood for, there's been a whole sort of a reevaluation of what Christianity means among free-thinking Christians. I interviewed Peter Gomes; I gather you did, too.
Tavis: Absolutely.
Quinn: The chaplain at Harvard, who's wonderful and who talks about Christianity, and Rick Warren has basically changed his views, too. It's not all fire and brimstone and if you don't accept Jesus as your savoir you're going to Hell. It's much more about what Jesus' message was, which was that he was a radical.
As Peter Gomes said, he was sort of more of a Communist and a revolutionary than anything else, but his whole view was that you take care of the people who can't take care of themselves.
Tavis: Peter Gomes is a guest here on this program, I should mention, this Friday night.
Let me ask you right quick before we run what you made, right quick, of the attempt, at least, by Mr. Romney to contextualize his faith?
Quinn: Well, I was really appalled by his speech, and actually the more I read it over the more surprised I was. I was stunned because it was so exclusive. It was not an inclusive speech; it was a speech that was geared toward the evangelical Christians in Iowa and not toward your average American. When he said that you can't have freedom with our religion or religion without freedom, I thought that was so shocking because that is so un-American, that is so not what - it's sort of the antithesis of everything that we stand for in our whole view of separation of church and state.
And when you go back to Jack Kennedy's speech that was almost 50 years ago, he even talked about people being able to go to church or not as they will, and Barack Obama made an absolutely fabulous speech last summer that I thought was the most well-thought-out, beautifully, gracefully written speech that I've read on religion by anybody.
Tavis: At the Sojourner's Convention, the (unintelligible)?
Quinn: The Sojourner's Convention, that's right. It called for renewal.
Tavis: Yeah, I saw that.
Quinn: And he basically talked about we're not a nation of Christians anymore, or Muslims, or Jews, or Catholics, or non-believers. We're a pluralistic country. And I think he absolutely was tone perfect in that speech.
Tavis: Well, I am out of time. I could do this for another hour or two if I had the time. I will pray for you as you continue your journey, how about that?
Quinn: Thank you.
Tavis: (Laughs) Her name, of course, Sally Quinn. She is a wonderful columnist for "The Washington Post" and the co-moderator of a series called On Faith, found again at WashingtonPost.com or Newsweek.com. Sally Quinn, nice to have you on the program, all the best to you.
Quinn: Thank you.
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