BILL MOYERS: I'm still wrestling with this abrupt change in your subject matter. I mean, isn't the story of Dominique Green, one individual executed for a crime way off your beaten path?

THOMAS CAHILL: Yes, it is different from what I've been doing for sure. But I don't think that ...well, why am I doing the Hinges of History? What I'm really interested in is what makes for civilization and what does not. So, the people that I'm looking for in the series asks the question, how did we become the people that we are? And why do we think the way we do and feel the way we do and perceive the way we do?

But underneath that, what I'm really interested in, is what's good about us. What do we do that's good? I started with HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION which is not the beginning of western history by any means for a reason. It was the simplest book-- simplest story that I had to tell. And it was about this guy named Patrick who had been a Roman citizen on the Island of Britain who was kidnapped at the age of 16 and taken to Ireland and made into a slave for six years after which he escaped. Then in middle age he returned to Ireland which was a rough, rough place, not a place anybody would willingly return to. And he came back, at that point, with the gospels. And he became the evangelist of the Irish.

And what he did in doing that which was a great act of generosity because he spent the last 30 years of his life in Ireland-- among these very crazy people who practiced human sacrifice, who had no problem with slavery in its most awful form, who believed in really dark gods. This was quite a group to come and be-- decide to spend your life with willingly. In that great act of generosity he also realized that though he was never going to make them Romans or Athenians, he had to teach them to read and write.

And so he taught them to read and write from these simple little lives of the saints of the period which are really lives of the martyrs. It was the early Roman martyrs. And it was all the terrible things that the Romans had done to the early Christians, you know. They were eaten by lions. They had their eyes plucked out. They had-- you know, they were slowly eviscerated. They were all these different things that had been done to them. Saint Lawrence was burned on a griddle, you know, on one side and then on the other side, all that kind of stuff.

The Irish loved these stories. They thought they were dandy. And the only thing that made them sad was that Christianity came into Ireland without any martyrs. Because the Irish just kind of rolled over and accepted it and said, "Yeah, well this really does...this makes more sense than what we were doing." It was so much more-- it was so superior. But what Patrick also did in teaching them to read and write was they ended up setting themselves the task in the sixth, seventh and eighth century of copying out all of western literature, the whole of the western library which was in danger of extinction at that time because the Germanic barbarians had invaded the Roman Empire and within a century almost no one could read or write. Literacy itself was gone.

BILL MOYERS: So, civilization can be taken away.

THOMAS CAHILL: If there are no books there's no civilization. That's for sure. And that of course, the Germanic barbarians thought that the only thing books were good for was as kindling. They had no other use for it. So, at this period you have these very simple people who had been great warriors and crazy kidnappers and all that sort of stuff sitting down and deciding what they would do is copy out Plato, which, of course, they couldn't understand. But they thought it was important. And they had learned the alphabet. And damn it they were going to do this. It was difficult. And that was one thing that the Irish did like. They liked things that were difficult.

So, they copied out all of Latin and Greek literature. And they added to it in the margins. Because they couldn't understand the Plato very well. And it was kind of hard for the scribe to copy page after page of Plato without understanding it very well. He started doodling in the margins. And that's the beginning of the great books like the Book of Kells, the great decorated books. And you have all these funny little medieval people peeping through in the margins. And then he would sometimes put in little comments or jokes or a little poem that had been part of the repertoire of the wandering bards. And so, that Irish becomes the first vernacular literature to be copied out and written down.

BILL MOYERS: You start that book on the Irish with a chapter on the fall of Rome. What do you think about these analogies between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fall of America? Do you think there's anything to that from your wide sweep of studying history?

THOMAS CAHILL: I would say in some ways yes and in some ways no. You know, there's-- history never repeats itself. That's one thing you can say about it. It never happens again exactly the same way. So, there are tremendous differences. But we can look into the past and learn things. I think, for instance, why did Rome fall? Because of things interior and exterior. The interior part was less and less just taxation. More and more it was the poor and the middle class that bore the burden of taxation. And the wealthy and very wealthy pretended to pay but didn't actually.

And I think we are in a very similar situation with regard to that. Then the other thing was-- the external thing was that you had all of these Germanic barbarians who we think of as marauders and all that. They just wanted in. They were on the wrong side of the river. And they knew it. They wanted to have farms and vineyards like the Romans had. They thought it looked great. They wanted to cross the river. You know, what they were? They were immigrants. That's who they were not at all unlike the situation today at the borders of our country and the borders of Europe.

THOMAS CAHILL: And what happened was despite the unjust taxation or despite-- taxation in any form, the Romans could not pay to keep them out. No matter what they did they couldn't make that border guard and those walls high enough and strong enough to keep out the barbarians. If people really want to get in they're going to find a way in.

BILL MOYERS: How did Christians learn tolerance over time?

THOMAS CAHILL: I think it all has to do with Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries where both sides, both Protestants and Catholics, eliminated one another to their heart's content. I mean, they couldn't have been-- they liked nothing better than a bonfire and putting somebody in the middle of it. And that was happening on both sides. You know, the-- as somebody said at one point, in Papal Rome, there were more heads on the bridge that led out of the Vatican than there were melons in the market. And that was-- but you could have said that about Geneva. You could have said that about London. You could have gone on and on with all of them.

What finally happened with people like Voltaire who were-- at least expressly sort of outside religious circles, they began to say, "Do we really have to keep doing this? Do we really-- is this the only way? You know-- does the religion of the monarch have to be the religion of all his subjects? Is that really necessary?" And the answer they gave was no. And you begin to have enlightened monarchs who say no. You know, we're going to get rid of a few of these disabilities here, you know. But that's the beginning of steps being taken in a new direction until you get the United States of America, the first country on earth in which the-- the-- that is built on tolerance. It starts with tolerance.

BILL MOYERS: Well, unless you were an indigenous American or--

THOMAS CAHILL: You bet.

BILL MOYERS: --Native American or a slave-- or an African brought over-- four million-- several million --

THOMAS CAHILL: Or unless you were even, you know, late 19th century Irish immigrant. So, there are plenty of exceptions. Plenty of things were-- plenty of times where it doesn't work. And yet it's a new idea.

BILL MOYERS: You once said that Christianity's dark history of crusades, inquisitions and pogroms lies not as far in the past as we might prefer to think. Because, going back to the Constitution, you said a country's finally emerged, our own, that officially refused to play the old game of whose religion was true. That America fostered a generously agnostic view of religious truth. You may believe what you like, Tom Cahill. And I may believe as I want. And we don't impose our beliefs on each other. Is that changing?

THOMAS CAHILL: It may be changing somewhat in the face of militant Islam. I think we are going to have to find a way of dealing with Islam that is better than the way that we have constructed so far.

BILL MOYERS: And they with us.

THOMAS CAHILL: Absolutely, absolutely, but we already have gone through that process. It was called the Enlightenment. And the result of the Enlightenment was the American Constitution. We-- that was the process by which we said, "Do we really have to keep killing one another?" No, now the Muslims have not gone through that. And the Sunnis and the Shiites still think that they have to keep killing one another. And God knows that the Wahabis and any number of other sects have-- you know, hate one another with far greater ferocity than they hate us.

Religious history shows you over and over again that you hate most of all the people that are closest to you but just a little bit different. Protestants and Catholics throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, you know, if you were a Martian coming you would have said, "Well, what are they arguing about? What-- they seem to believe the same things more or less. What's the problem here? Why do millions of people have to die?"

You know and as Jonathan Swift said, it was really about how you set an egg on the table, you know, with how you got at the meat of the egg. You know-- some people did it one way and some people did it another. And that was enough reason to kill. And it more or less does come down to that. You know, I mean, there's still plenty of people who feel that way. But we have essentially gotten beyond that. It would be a dreadful tragedy if we fell back into that.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that what's going on now between the Shiites and the Sunnis in Iraq is comparable to what went on between the Catholics and the Protestants in 16th century--

THOMAS CAHILL: It's so parallel it's amazing.

BILL MOYERS: In what sense?

THOMAS CAHILL: Because from our point of view, not being Muslims, we look at them. And we say, "What are they arguing about? What's the big difference between--" you know, well, I can tell you what some of the differences are. And you would begin to lose interest. Anyone would if they weren't Muslim. And the same thing about the differences between Catholics and Protestants. I remember once giving a talk in a church. And a guy stood up and said "Do you believe we are saved by faith alone?" And I said, "Well, I believe we're saved by faith. But I believe with Paul the apostle that we're saved by faith, hope and charity and the greatest of these is love or charity." And he walked out. And he's not going to pay attention -And once I gave the wrong answer-- he was leaving. And he wanted me to know that he-- I had nothing more to say to him.

BILL MOYERS: -- suppose Thomas Cahill is incarnated 1,000 years from now and decides to pick up writing The Hinges of History. What would be the, as of now, the defining characteristic of the American society you would write about in the 20th and 21st century?

THOMAS CAHILL: That all societies have a dream and a nightmare. And our nightmare has been, I think, our racism. We practically committed genocide on the people who were here, the Native Americans. We enslaved another race of people, the Africans. And then we dropped the atom bomb on Asians. We would have never dropped that bomb in Europe in my view. And I think that's what proves the racism of it. That's the nightmare of America.

The dream of America is enunciated by the great speech by Martin Luther King I Have a Dream. The dream is that there is no country on earth that has tried to actually embrace all the people that we have tried to embrace. All you have to do is walk through New York City to see that or any of our cities and not a few of our country sides at this point. We could be called the most racist. Or we could be called the least. We are both. And it always remains a tension and a question as to which side of us, the good side or the bad side, will win out in the end. And I think that's true for every society.

BILL MOYERS: Let me come back to Dominique Green's story…Did you find Dominique Green to have turned that prison cell and death row into a zone of peace?

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, you see in somebody's body and their face and their eyes, in the way they move what they're about. This was somebody who was deeply at peace with himself. Who was perfectly happy to go out toward another person and be in communication, who embraced you with his language if not with his body since he couldn't get through the glass partition.

BILL MOYERS: You've got to help me understand that. Because I'm imagining you seeing him through that glass partition. This is a man everybody down there thinks has killed another man. And something communicates itself to you through that glass partition.

BILL MOYERS: So, what struck you?

THOMAS CAHILL: Instead of talking about himself and --what the poor conditions he had to live in and all the things that I already knew about, he wanted desperately to talk about books and writing. And he had become a great reader in the 11 years that he had been in prison. The book that he had read most recently that he really cared deeply about was Desmond Tutu's book NO FUTURE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS, which is Archbishop Tutu's book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But what also came out was that even though they're all in solitary confinement and you would think they can't communicate with one another, they manage. Because human beings are incredibly resourceful in situations like this. And Dominique was able to send that book after he had read it, up and down that death row.

BILL MOYERS: Tutu's book?

THOMAS CAHILL: Yeah. And most of the inmates on death row agreed that they had to forgive all the people who had hurt them and ask for forgiveness from all the people that they had hurt if they could, insofar as they could. So, there was this tremendous-- I think you'd have to call it a conversion. That's certainly what it sounds like to me, all these guys on death row that nobody cares about and everybody wants to execute offering forgiveness and asking forgiveness on the basis of a book.

BILL MOYERS: How did that play out practically? I mean, did Dominique Green ever get to communicate that to the families of the victim in that crime?

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, the victim was a man named Andrew Lastrapes, who was I think he was still in his 30s when it happened. And he had two small children — two sons — who became intimate friends of Dominique in his last days. Dominique, of course, you don't have an awful lot of things to give away on death row. Dominique gave Tutu's book to one of the sons of Andrew Lastrapes. And the other son received a rosary that Dominique kept around his neck. And each bead on that rosary was a reminder of one of the people on death row who had been executed before Dominique and who had helped Dominique to become the person he became.

BILL MOYERS: But he was a different man after 11 years from--

THOMAS CAHILL: Well--

BILL MOYERS: --the 19-year-old who was arrested for the killing, right? THOMAS CAHILL You know that was his -- That cell in that prison became the means of his transformation.

BILL MOYERS: Thomas Cahill, thank you for joining me on THE JOURNAL.

THOMAS CAHILL: Thank you, Bill.