E-mail a friendE.J. Dionne. Jr.
airdate March 14, 2008
Award-winning journalist E.J. Dionne writes for The Washington Post and is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Georgetown University professor. His syndicated column appears in more than 90 newspapers, and his books include Why Americans Hate Politics, which Newsday called "a classic in American political history," and Souled Out. Dionne spent 14 years with The New York Times, including stints in Paris, Rome and Beirut. He earned his Ph.D. at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
E.J. Dionne. Jr.
Tavis: E.J. Dionne, Jr. is a widely-read syndicated columnist at "The Washington Post" whose many notable books include the bestseller, "Why Americans Hate Politics." His latest is called "Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics after the Religious Right." E.J. Dionne, Jr., nice to have you here.
E.J. Dionne: Great pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Tavis: Let me start by asking quickly whether or not Elliott Spitzer's travails earlier this week are another thing you add to your list of why Americans hate politics?
Dionne: It sure may be something why they don't understand what politicians do, I'll tell you that. What a bizarre - I don't get it, to be honest. I mean, this is a prosecutor who knew better than anybody how people are caught doing things. He'd done a lot of work against prostitution, against trafficking in people, so I don't get it.
On the other hand, you know, the new governor, David Patterson, is a fascinating man whom I've gotten to know over the years. He's a very interesting person because he's much more conciliatory than Spitzer, so he may be exactly the right kind of guy to take over after a catastrophe like this.
Tavis: Is it fair to say that the fallout had more to do with hypocrisy than with the act itself?
Dionne: I think it's all of it. I think that it's certainly hypocrisy, but we always hang these kinds of things on politicians, hypocrisy. I mean, it was breaking the law, you know. It's not like a consensual affair. This goes beyond that and they're looking into stuff like whether he moved money around. You know, it's a shame because he's a very able, smart guy who did extraordinarily good things earlier in his career.
Tavis: Let's go from a Democrat then to a Republican before I get to the book here, "Souled Out." Earlier this week, you wrote a fascinating piece about John McCain and the problem, the challenge, interestingly, you argue that the Democrats are going to have running against McCain. Why don't you unpack that for those who didn't see the piece?
Dionne: Well, I actually wrote it as I have a McCain problem. My McCain problem is, I'm a columnist and, over the years, I've written a lot of nice things about John McCain. You know, I approve of what he's done and admire what he's done on campaign finance reform. I respect him as a rebel. He's been pretty good on environmental issues. And when he was haggling with President Bush and the Bush machine was going at him, I felt he was treated unfairly.
On the other hand, you know, I'm a liberal. I don't mind using that term. I disagree with John McCain on a lot of things, so how can somebody like me who admires the rebel part of McCain, but fundamentally disagrees with where he stands on some things and also is unhappy that he switched sides on some things. He was against the Bush tax cuts and now he wants to make them permanent is a good example. How are we going to deal with him?
You know, what I conclude is that people who are in the center or on the left, you know, will have to judge McCain by how much is he rebellious maverick McCain that we admired and how much is he the conservative he always said he was and we didn't always want to believe him?
Tavis: To the book now, "Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics after the Religious Right." Is it just me or is it something in water? Because I was just thinking yesterday on both my radio and my television show, I have of late found myself interviewing and conversing with a lot of people writing books from this perspective.
Whether it's E.J. Dionne, Jr., whether it's Jim Wallis, whether it's Tony Campolo, there are a number of people on the left who are now starting to do what they can to reclaim this notion of faith and really arguing in any number of books that faith is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Christian right.
Dionne: Right; and it's probably long past time that this started. I mean, somebody like Jim Wallis, to his record, he's been doing this for a long time. So has Tony Campolo. But first of all, progressive Christians, progressive religious people, have always been out there. Sometimes I get a little cynical about this.
In the book, I note that some Democrats seem to have discovered God in the exit polls of 2004 (laughter) and they want to put themselves right with God so they wouldn't lost another election.
Tavis: Right.
Dionne: But you don't have to be cynical about it because I think that there are a lot of religious people, including conservative religious people, who are just tired of religion being used solely for the benefit of one side of the ideological argument and one political party.
I once debated Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition and I said, "You know, Ralph, I will always defend your right to base your political views on your religious beliefs because, in many ways, I became a liberal because I'm a Christian." But then I said, "You got to show me where in your New Testament Jesus calls for cutting the capital gains tax. I just can't find it."
In mine, and if you look at the Old Testament, prophets or what Jesus said, you know, the Jewish and Christian faiths in scriptures are not on the side of the status quo. These call us to a higher standard and the prophets or certainly what they did was criticized for the status quo. So I think these voices you're hearing are in fact true to the scriptures in reflecting a lot of people who have been out there all along and just didn't raise their voices.
Tavis: What do you mean to suggest by the title, "Souled Out," s-o-u-l-e-d?
Dionne: It's a title intended in two ways. One is souled out, the sense of exhaustion that we have. We're just sick of folks using religion in this narrow and partisan way in this spirit that's far too certain of itself all the time and always condemning the side you disagree with in politics as ungodly.
It's souled out in the other sense because I think it is a great sell-out of our religious traditions to say they have lots to say about abortion and gay marriage, but nothing to tell us about social justice, war and peace, equality and fairness and how we organize ourselves as a society.
The great traditions have always had a lot to say about the larger questions and we shouldn't narrow our sense of religion just to a few pre-picked issues.
Tavis: I don't mean to be naïve in asking this question, but everybody makes that same point that the Christian right, the religious right, really focuses on a very narrow construct of what we ought to be concerned about as Christians. Why do you think that is? Why is that their construct is narrow and why is it narrow around the two or three issues that come up all the time? Why?
Dionne: I think some of it is honest theological differences where, you know, when you talk to a conservative Christian, they tend to pick those parts of the New Testament that are mostly about personal conversion and those parts of the Old Testament that are mostly the law-giving books, Leviticus, for example.
When you talk to a progressive Christian, they tend to talk far more about the Sermon on the Mount and everything Jesus said about the poor and the Old Testament prophets, Isaiah, Mica, Amos and the like. You know, Martin Luther King quoted Isaiah, Mica and Amos all the time. So I think there is a difference in view of what Christianity really is. But I also think there's been some political manipulation here.
You know, when the moral majority started, the late Jerry Falwell, rest his soul. He had this idea, but really the idea came from some political operatives, one of whom said, "Evangelical Christians are virgin timber and we want to bring them over to the Republican Party, and it is convenient to use this narrow set of issues."
Lastly, in fairness to them, there were a lot of people with very passionate views on abortion, for example, on both sides of the aisle and, obviously, there will be voters who care about that.
Tavis: For one watching right now who happens not to be a Christian, what do you say to that viewer about how he or she should read the fact that there is a set of Christians who are both quoting from the same text, that is the Bible, but have two different views of it and find themselves going head to head in the public square?
Dionne: Well, I think people in all great traditions have had disagreements about politics and there's nothing wrong with disagreement. I'm very firm in the book that I don't think that the government should be under the control of any religious group.
In fact, I have a fight with some of my atheist friends, some of the neo-atheist writers, because I think they're as dogmatic about atheism as the dogmatists they condemn on the religious side. On the other hand, I also write admiringly of atheists because they take the question of belief as seriously, sometimes more seriously, than believers do.
I once wrote a column where I used a headline from "The New Republic." I quote "The New Republic." The headline was "God Bless Atheists" and I said, you know, "They're important to believers." I was defending them. I got the best email I ever got as a columnist. You get some nasty ones, as you know.
Tavis: Yeah, I know (laughter).
Dionne: But it was the sweetest one I got. It was from someone who said, "Dr. Mr. Dionne, I am an atheist and, if I may say so, God bless you." What I talk about in the book is the idea of intellectual solidarity. A Jesuit came up with that idea that we all have an obligation to give and receive help on the road to truth. I think if those of us believers or unbelievers sort of took that attitude, we might get farther and avoid at least some unnecessary fights.
Tavis: I guess the question is, and you take this on the book, whether or not the rumors of the death of the Christian right are premature.
Dionne: You know, that's a great question. You know, I'm very careful in the book to say, when I talk about the religious right dying, I'm not talking about conservative Evangelical Christianity dying. Evangelical Christianity is going strong. People like Rick Warren, Rich Cizik, whom I talk about as people who are not narrowly ideological. They're quite conservative, but not on everything they care passionately about, poverty, the environment. I'm talking about leaders of these particular organizations that were primarily political.
You look at the last Republican primaries, Republican election fight, and John McCain didn't have any support from these folks and he won. Mike Huckabee did not have support from these various leaders. He just got these votes himself because he's kind of got one foot in the old religious right and one foot in the new thing that's happening, which is talk more about justice, equality, health care and other kinds of issues.
Tavis: I guess the exit question for me, E.J., is, it's one thing to replace the language. It's one thing for those on the left to have a different idea or different ideals about what we ought to be fighting over, what the agenda ought to be.
It's another thing, though, altogether to create the infrastructure. So much of what made the religious right successful, as you know, was infrastructure, political infrastructure. So we can replace the language with E.J. Dionne or Jim Wallis or somebody else.
As articulate as you guys are, as well-meaning, as well thought out as your arguments are, you can replace the language, but can the left politically replace the success of the infrastructure that the Christian right has had for so long?
Dionne: Well, first of all, I think you ought to look back historically. In some ways, the Christian right was imitating what the African American church had done before.
Tavis: To be sure.
Dionne: The African American church really had a very strong political role particularly in the civil rights years, but it has continued. So there's always been - you know, I make a point in the book when you say Evangelical Christians are conservative. Well, people who say that have never been inside an African American church.
Secondly, I think you are seeing people try to construct this infrastructure. There are new organizations out there. A friend started a group called Catholics United for the Common Good. There are a lot of those kinds of groups out there.
I don't think at the moment it matches the infrastructure that the conservative Christians have built over twenty years. This is a relatively new undertaking, but I think it's starting. Then I think you're also seeing among some of the very traditional Evangelicals, they're just getting engaged in a broader set of issues.
Rick Warren, very engaged in poverty and AIDS in Africa, he invited Barack Obama and Sam Brown back to his church, a conservative Republican and a progressive Democrat. He got a lot of grief from the right for inviting Barack Obama. Rick Warren said, "No, I'm not right wing or left wing. I'm for the whole bird." I think there are a lot of whole bird Christians out there right now.
Tavis: I'll take that. The new book from best-selling author, E.J. Dionne, Jr., columnist for "The Washington Post," is called "Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics after the Religious Right." E.J., nice to have you here. Good to see you, my friend.
Dionne: It's great to be with you. Thank you.
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