Should the American people harness their admiration for the military to revitalize the virtues of democratic engagement? Can we harness this admiration without undermining our ability to keep our militaristic overconfidence in check, especially in the face of increasing economic and military competition from China and beyond?

President Obama’s State of the Union address frames his understanding of the challenges and opportunities we face with the suggestion that emulating the virtues of America’s armed forces would enable us to become a more cohesive and mission-focused community. The challenges he notes are well-known—economic stagnation, declining standards of living, gross inequality, and decreasing confidence in our power both to improve our lot at home and maintain our influence abroad. For the president, however, America’s economic and geopolitical prospects are better than many believe. What we should really worry about is the increasingly prominent role that political cynicism and cultural and religious difference-mongering play in our political life. As the president rightly understands, cynicism about Washington rarely translates into energetic local efforts to address the inequalities in our midst or to put constructive pressure on our representatives for “nation building” here at home. With noteworthy understatement, the president suggests that our tendency to “obsess over [our] differences” is undermining our ability constructively to confront our challenges and opportunities. The problem is as much about our political culture as it is our political policies. The president suggests that the military provides the nation and its leaders a much-needed example of joining together in trust to accomplish a common mission.

What are we to make of this claim? To an extent, President Obama is simply calling for more cooperation in American politics. This is a valuable point, as far as it goes, but is uninteresting. If we take President Obama to suggest something bigger, then we may understand him as echoing ideas from the roots of American progressivism and replaying some of its dilemmas. John Dewey once argued that Americans were the inheritors of a democratic faith in our ability to redress social problems through conversation and cooperation. This faith, Dewey argued, is implicit in our very way of doing things, despite the still-powerful, obfuscating influences of superstition, moralism, and ideological rigidity. What we need, Dewey claimed, is to make this faith “explicit and militant,” to embrace it self-consciously as a source of our common resolve (John Dewey, A Common Faith (Yale University Press, 1934, p. 87)). Made militant, democratic faith can propel what William James once called “the moral equivalent of war”—the marshaling of civic passions for a cohesive social effort against the sorts of inequality, hopelessness, and degradation many Americans now face. For Dewey, however, democratic militancy was deeply distrustful of American militarism. War, Dewey recognized, can lead to forms of social and political discipline that are antithetical to democratic cooperation and exchange. For the democratic tradition descended from Dewey, therefore, the challenge of American life is to identify forms of democratic solidarity that do not feed off militarism abroad.

President Obama plays on these ideas—with a twist. For the president, the end of the war in Iraq, and our decreasing commitment in Afghanistan, provides more than a much-needed infusion of investment dollars that we could turn toward more productive purposes. It allows the nation to turn its militant energies from imperial policing abroad and refocus them at home. By nursing our admiration for our military’s virtues, he suggests, we can transform our beleaguered democracy into a more cohesive and mission-focused political community. Further, we can transform our admiration for the military vocation into a greater estimation of our own vocation as citizens.

The realism of this suggestion is immensely attractive. Rather than condemning the militaristic energies that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan, the president attempts to redirect those energies to more democratic purposes. William James would have been proud. Yet there are dangers here. The president’s vision of a militantly democratic community—a community characterized by at least some of the martial virtues—depends implicitly on the very militarism that the president was widely admired for criticizing. The mission-focused social cohesion that he seems to propose is fed on a diet of military exploits, of Navy SEALs working as a team to kill terrorists in far-off places.

Unless the president is merely cheerleading for more “teamwork” in American politics—an idea scarcely worth hearing—he is suggesting we buy an expanded sense of and passion for citizenship with the coin of militaristic enthusiasm. Instead of taking the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an opportunity to rethink the vice of militaristic overconfidence, President Obama proposes simply to reduce American military action to a minor drama that gives the larger drama of domestic democracy its energy. As long as the military drama remains minor—for example, with small special operations units engaging in targeted strikes—it provides the necessary thrill without provoking the more destructive forms of solidarity to which militarized societies are prone.

The problem with this view, as I see it, is that, once the bitter lessons of the Bush-era wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are old news, there will be little to prevent an American society fed by militaristic enthusiasm from giving in to the temptations of military power. Especially in future periods of uncertainty and threat, a political society that sustains itself through an embrace of martial valor will seek to discipline itself in ways more in keeping with war than democratic ideals.

Democratic citizenship undoubtedly requires courage, selflessness, and teamwork. It takes courage to make yourself vulnerable to viewpoints with which you seriously disagree. It takes selflessness to make the care and upkeep of the community a priority alongside the demands of earning a living for oneself and for a family. It takes teamwork to organize people effectively to make a difference in the life of a community, especially in the face of entrenched interests. But one may well question whether it is plausible or desirable to promote these virtues by harnessing the nation’s admiration for the military.

Howard Rhodes has taught at the University of Iowa and is currently is a J.D. candidate at Duke University School of Law. His research interests include the ethics of war, international humanitarian law, and religion and international relations.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: All week, financial experts in and out of Washington warned of the catastrophic consequences if Congress does not raise the country’s debt ceiling by August 2. After that deadline, the government would not be able to pay all its obligations for the first time in history. Officials warned that that could trigger financial chaos and vast hardship. By week’s end, there were signs of a temporary fix to the debt ceiling problem, but no agreement on a long-term deal on spending and taxes, which many had wanted, including the president.

President Obama: And I think it’s important for the American people that everybody in this town set politics aside, that everybody in this town sets our individual interests aside, and we try to do some tough stuff.

ABERNETHY: In the midst of the financial debate, where are the churches? Can religious leaders influence the politicians? Author and activist Reverend Jim Wallis is the editor of Sojourners magazine. His is a leading religious voice in political debate. Jim, welcome.

JIM WALLIS (President, Sojourners): Thanks, Bob.

ABERNETHY: There are two big questions that people have been arguing about in this town. One is the debt ceiling. The other is long-term. The debt ceiling is something has to be done now, but long term, how do we bring the country’s spending and taxes in line? You’ve been working very hard lobbying to protect government programs that help the poor. How are you doing?

WALLIS: Well, I think I’m happy with what we’ve seen so far. We started with a provocative question: What would Jesus cut? That got attention to the question. Then we fasted for almost a month in Lent. That brought more attention to it. Then we formed a “circle of protection”: Roman Catholic bishops, Salvation Army, National Association of Evangelicals, many people, not the religious left here, almost everyone saying that you can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poorest people. And I think that voice is now being heard. We’ve talked to Republicans, Democrats, and the White House right along on this.

ABERNETHY: You are trying, I think, to get a meeting with a lot of the players in this?

WALLIS: We have been meeting right along.

ABERNETHY: Well, what do you say to them?

WALLIS: We say, you know, there are principles here, that a budget is a moral document and must be evaluated by those from the bottom up. That’s our point of view. And the common good has to outweigh ideological political battles in this town. But we also ask them what their faith means. If they are people of faith, and many say they are, what their faith means, their moral compass, how they decide things.

ABERNETHY: You take that argument, what does your faith mean, to Republicans in the House who insist on no compromise?

WALLIS: We sure do. The Catholics, evangelicals, Republican side, Democratic side. Now we don’t get involved, Bob, in which bill we are going to support. We don’t lobby for bills. But we say there are principles here. You can’t just have the benefits all go to corporations and wealthy people and nothing for those who are most vulnerable.

ABERNETHY: But the common good. This idea of the common good, very important in religious and ethics. How do you define it, and who says what the common good is?

WALLIS: Well, this week we’ve organized 5,000 pastors to say let’s look at the real people in our congregations and our communities, what’s going to happen to them, as opposed to the Washington, D.C. question, who’s up, who’s down, who’s going to be the Speaker of the House next time, who’ll win the next election. The common good is about the real people, the people we have to always take into account. And pastors, I think, I wanted to talk to people whose job it is to have re-read the Bible to get to the focus on who the real people are here.

ABERNETHY: But this argument about how to cut spending, what could be cut, how to raise income, this is a very technical, very political argument. How do people, how do religious leaders feel? Do you feel that you have the ability to get in and be influential in something as technical as this debate?

WALLIS: You know, the details are technical and not difficult, really. Once you agree to some principles, the details can be worked out by the politicians. We say “let justice roll down like waters.” Let the politicians work out the plumbing here. You know, we don’t get into all the details. We’re saying there are principles here. If this is going to focus on targeting poor people, we say that’s wrong. It’s got to be shared sacrifice here. How you do it, this really isn’t rocket science. We could solve this if the principles were clear from the start.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine.

WALLIS: Thank you, Bob.

BOB ABERNETHY, host and correspondent: We have a report today on the moral choices involved in the intense negotiations underway in Washington over what to do about the country’s $14.3 trillion debt. If the debt ceiling is not raised by August 2, in just one month, the Treasury Department says for the first time in American history the government will not have enough money to meet all its obligations. The Administration wants Congress to raise the debt ceiling so the government can borrow more to pay those bills. But many members of Congress say they want, first, a believable long-term plan to reduce the deficit. So far, there’s no agreement on such a plan, so the debt limit remains, and so does the countdown to default.

All over Washington, from Congress to the White House, among the K Street lobbies, at the think tanks, and at scores of conferences and panels, experts are trying to solve the problem. One experienced voice has been that of retired Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming. He was the co-chair of last year’s special presidential commission on the debt.

ALAN SIMPSON: If we don’t get a plan out of this by August 2, then hang on tight.

ABERNETHY: And “hang on tight” implies what?

SIMPSON: Implies inflation. It implies the people who are going to loan us money want more interest for it. It will be a different lifestyle for Americans, and inflation will eat through the system, and the little guy will be the guys most hammered.

ALICE RIVLIN: If we don’t raise the debt limit, we would probably have a crash in the markets, and it would be very serious.

ABERNETHY: Brookings Institution economist Alice Rivlin headed the budget offices at both Congress and the White House.

RIVLIN: I think we are talking about a moral issue. We do not want to leave our children and our grandchildren with a worse economy and a much harder life than we are enjoying.

ABERNETHY: There’s no mystery about the cause of the debt problem. As the number of older Americans has gone up, so have the costs of the so-called entitlements—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. New medical technology drives up health care costs, and two wars have gone unpaid for. It’s estimated that the war in Afghanistan is costing nearly $120 billion dollars this year.

RIVLIN: To borrow without limit and without thinking how we are going to pay this back seems to me stupid and immoral.

ABERNETHY: For Simpson, there is also the problem of selfishness.

SIMPSON: Well, don’t blame it all on Congress. Blame it on the American people who sent people to Washington to bring home the bacon. And the way you got re-elected was you just went and got it for them, and now the pig is dead. There is no more bacon to bring home.

ABERNETHY: Solving the debt problem is not only an economic and political challenge. The crisis raises basic philosophical and moral questions about the kind of government and society Americans want. Last April, the conservative majority in the House of Representatives passed a budget for next year proposed by the chair of its budget committee, Paul Ryan. He outlined his plan to the American Enterprise Institute.

PAUL RYAN: This budget begins by lowering taxes, with the top individual and corporate tax rate capped at 25 percent, so we can get real growth and economic competition in America.

ABERNETHY: And then…

RYAN: …it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over just the next 10 years. It is not just a budget, it is a cause…

ABERNETHY: …the conservative cause of reducing the size of government. Michael Gerson, a former White House speech writer, is a columnist for the Washington Post.

MICHAEL GERSON: I think it is fair to say that conservatives are not just interested in a balanced budget. They want a limited government which is, you know, a smaller government, a less expansive government. That’s really a conservative argument here, that too much government undermines the independence and responsibility of citizens.

ABERNETHY: The Ryan budget drew sharp criticism from many in the religious communities, among them former congressman and ambassador Tony Hall.

TONY HALL: We need to get our fiscal house in order, but not on the backs of the poor and hungry. They didn’t get us into this current mess, and hurting them is not the way out of it.

ABERNETHY: Jim Wallis is the editor of Sojourners magazine.

JIM WALLIS: Those of us who are Christians are bound by Jesus’ command to protect the least of these the most, the most, so we ask what would Jesus cut?

ABERNETHY: The two chairmen of the Catholic bishops committees on domestic and international justice wrote Congress expressing their “serious concern.” So did 75 scholars, most of them at the Catholic University of America. Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice lobby Network, says she and others oppose the House budget because it doesn’t seem to reflect Catholic social teaching.

SISTER SIMONE CAMPBELL: The essence of Catholic social teaching is that it is based on the dignity of the human person, that we all hold dignity because we are created by God, that together in society we hold shared responsibility for each other. Government’s role then becomes to ensure that the least are cared for. That’s why it’s so chilling to us to watch what’s going on in Congress about the budget. It’s the very safety net programs that the current budget fight is targeting, and to me this is wrong. It, quite frankly, is immoral.

ABERNETHY: Congressman Ryan, too, is Catholic. He agrees that the poor and sick should not be hurt, but he insists the way to avoid that is to keep taxes low so private investors can create new jobs.

CAMPBELL: That’s just wrong. The wealthy have recovered to pre-recession levels. Are they investing in jobs? No.

ABERNETHY: And what about leaving massive debt to our children?

CAMPBELL: I think it’s not a good idea. But there is a simple fix. You can solve this issue in a very simple way. Raise revenue.

ABERNETHY: Not something easy to do. As the moral debate sharpened, Ryan wrote a letter to the president of the Catholic Bishops Conference, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, insisting that his budget does indeed respect Catholic social teaching. The archbishop replied that he was happy to hear that. In the midst of the arguments, there was a brief diversion over the ideas of Ayn Rand, the late atheist writer and philosopher whose book, The Fountainhead, and a movie based on it, were popular in the 1950s. Rand preached a radical, small government, everyone-for-himself libertarianism which some congressmen, among them Paul Ryan, said they had admired. A liberal blogger tried to discredit them with a film contrasting Rand’s selfish individualism with the teachings of Jesus.

In spite of all the claims and charges, many observers do see middle ground.

SIMPSON: You can’t tax your way out of this baby, and you can’t cut spending as your way out of this baby. It has to be a blend.

ABERNETHY: But all the moral debate has not made compromise easy.

GERSON: I think moral motivations in politics are very important. But when you claim that your own views somehow have a divine sanction, you’ve cut off all political argument. This should be an argument about outcomes, what is really best for the justice and decency of a society. I think a limited government is important to that, and I think a government that provides some of the most basic needs for the most vulnerable people in society is important to that as well. That’s where a lot of Americans are.

ABERNETHY: Alan Simpson thinks his former colleagues will head off a national crisis and that their constituents will accept the need for sacrifice.

SIMPSON: I think there are a lot more heroes in Congress than we recognize.

ABERNETHY: Gerson and Rivlin say they, too, are at least somewhat optimistic.

GERSON: You are going to have to have Republican and Democratic leaders come together around this. They’re very dug in, but there is no other choice.

RIVLIN: There will be a lot of posturing and a lot of difficulty, but we will raise the debt ceiling, and over the next several years we will bring our debt under control.

ABERNETHY: Alice Rivlin was the director of the budget offices at both Congress and the White House. She served on two budget commissions. She says last year there were unofficial focus groups in 26 cities that were asked to work on the debt problem. When they heard the facts, Rivlin says, each of them was able to work out a plan. Not all of them came up with the same solution, but no one failed to reach agreement on something. It seems to be quite different for Congress and the White House, raising the question whether the federal government can compromise and act on an issue as difficult as this one, with so much moral passion and partisan ideology.

More on this with our managing editor Kim Lawton. Kim?

KIM LAWTON: Bob, the religious community continues to be very involved in this debate, bringing some of that moral passion, and they are lobbying on both sides or all sides of this issue. This week we had 24 religious and charitable organizations writing a letter to the Administration and congressional leaders saying in all of your debt ceiling discussions don’t forgot about the poor, the vulnerable, the least of these, what they called them. And on the other side you had religious conservatives lobbying Congress, saying don’t accept any debt ceiling solution that doesn’t include dramatic spending cuts, and they also used moral language, saying it’s wrong to leave debt to our children, using a biblical passage to support that. So, again, energy on all sides on this moral question.

ABERNETHY: That’s right, and morally and ideologically it spills over into the whole idea of a smaller government, which of course is what the conservatives want very much.

LAWTON: And that’s a big issue on the campaign trail, too, which is really heightening all of the political rhetoric on Capitol Hill out on the campaign trail. So many of the GOP candidates are out there really appealing to the conservative base, talking about these issues. Michele Bachmann, the new GOP candidate, who is an evangelical Christian, very much reaching out to her base saying I’m not going to support, I’m not going to vote for any debt ceiling measure that doesn’t include dramatic spending [cuts]. And of course, you know, religious conservatives are so important for the GOP during this period because about forty percent of Republican primary voters are self-identified evangelicals, so everybody’s sort of reaching out to them, seeing it as a big stepping stone.

ABERNETHY: Do they have any favorites so far?

LAWTON: They seem to be pretty divided still. Michele Bachmann polled very well in Iowa this week, which surprised a lot of people. She’s very popular among those very conservative religious groups. But there are disagreements among evangelicals. Some take a more moderate point of view. Evangelical leaders in a recent poll liked Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota governor, but he’s not as well known nationally, so there still seems to be a lot of room for jockeying among evangelicals.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, there’s the whole issue of fourteen million people who can’t find jobs.

LAWTON: And that’s the big issue that’s really dominating everything, and people are jockeying for a solution, and no one seems to have a good solution. So, indeed, that’s really been overshadowing so many of the other issues that you often hear about early in a campaign, and that’s what you see the candidates talking about, and obviously that’s what you see members of Congress wrestling over with the Administration as well.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Analysis and discussion of some of the week’s news now with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service. Welcome to you both. Kevin, an obscure publicity-seeking pastor in Florida oversees the burning of a Quran, and there are deadly riots in Afghanistan.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Right. It’s a real challenge for this country because the more attention that people pay to him the more he’s sort of egged on to keep doing this kind of thing. But if we don’t pay attention to what he’s doing, the Muslim world thinks that we don’t care whether or not Qurans are being burned in the United States or that they think that maybe all Christians or all Americans are burning Qurans when that’s clearly not the case. But it’s a real pickle as to how much legitimacy you give this guy, because the more he gets, the more he’s going keep going.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And what actually happened was he had a mock trial where he put the Quran on trial, and he actually had an imam speak in defense of the Quran, but in the end the Quran was found guilty, and that’s when the burning occurred. That was put on the Facebook page, on his Facebook page. It was put on Youtube. But it happened on March 20. The riots happened quite awhile after that, in part because local leaders, Muslim leaders in Afghanistan, manipulated it. You know, people in the country there didn’t necessarily know about it. Most Americans didn’t know about it, except for the fact that people went through with loudspeakers in some of these towns, and there was also an allegation that hundreds of Qurans were burned here. So there was a lot of manipulation about what really happened as well, for a lot of different political purposes.

ABERNETHY: Another frustration: the ideological stand-off in Washington over the budget.

LAWTON: Well, Republicans this week unveiled—while Congress was talking about how are we going to fund the rest of this year, the Republicans also unveiled their blueprint for 2012 and beyond, and they proposed a very radical restructuring of Medicare/Medicaid, some of those other programs. The congressman who introduced it said it was a moral obligation to do something about Medicare/Medicaid, because it just is simply unsustainable in its current effect, and that has a lot of religious groups talking and debating.

ECKSTROM: Right, and right now we are talking about, you know, a hundred million for this, two hundred million for that. It’s relatively small potatoes. What’s important about this Republican plan is that it’s a big-picture, long-term ideological blueprint for how we should fund the government and fund the services, and the bottom line is that it proposes taking in less revenue through lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, at the same time cutting services to folks who really can’t afford to have those services cut. So a lot of religious groups say that it’s immoral budgeting to be able to try to balance the budget on the backs of the folks who can’t afford to.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, there was a Supreme Court decision this week that worried a lot of people interested in the separation of church and state.

LAWTON: Well, the justices in a very close decision rejected a challenge to a program in Arizona that gave tax credits that eventually got funneled to private schools, mostly religious schools in that particular case. Some taxpayers had challenged that, saying that’s an establishment of religion, and the court said those people didn’t have the standing or the legal right to bring forward that case, so it’s going to make these challenges to church-state cases more difficult in the future.

ECKSTROM: Right. Since 1968 Americans have had a right to challenge these sorts of cases when they think that the government is improperly funding religion. The Supreme Court has said that. And what’s happened in this case and then in a 2007 case, a challenge against the White House faith-based office, is the court is really tightening the screws on this, on making it harder for people to challenge these programs that they think are unconstitutional.

ABERNETHY: So looking around we have humanitarian crises all over the place, we have natural disasters, we have budget stand-offs.

LAWTON: Wars.

ABERNETHY: Wars.

LAWTON: And rumors of wars.

ABERNETHY: Maybe next week will be better.

ECKSTROM: Hopefully.

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KIM LAWTON, guest host: The House Committee on Homeland Security this week held the first in a series of controversial hearings examining what it called “radicalization in the American Muslim community,” and there was widespread religious reaction. The hearing was called by chair of the committee, New York Republican Peter King, who invoked the memory of the 9/11 attacks.

REP. PETER KING (R-NY): Today, we must be fully aware that homegrown radicalization is part of Al Qaeda’s strategy to continue attacking the United States. Al Qaeda is actively targeting the American Muslim community for recruitment. Today’s hearings will address this dangerous trend.

LAWTON: First up on the witness list was Congressman Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, and the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives.

REP. KEITH ELLISON (D-MN): It’s true that specific individuals, including some who are Muslims, are violent extremists. However, these are individuals, not entire communities. When you assign their violent actions to the entire community, you assign collective blame to a whole group. This is the very heart of stereotyping and scapegoating.

LAWTON: Ellison became emotional as he described a young Muslim paramedic who was killed on 9/11.

ELLISON: Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans. His life should not be identified as just a member of an ethnic group or just a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow Americans.

LAWTON: But several witnesses testified that the US Muslim community is not doing enough to counter radicalism in its midst. Family members described how two young American Muslims were recruited by extremists and persuaded to commit terrorist acts. The president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Zuhdi Jasser, said his faith is being hijacked by what he called a “theopolitical” movement that is promoting radicalization.

ZUHDI JASSER, M.D. (President, American Islamic Forum for Democracy): We have a problem internally. Where is that? It’s a minority, but there’s an ideology that exists in some mosques. Not all. Not a majority. But in some mosques. And it’s a significant number.

LAWTON: Throughout the week, religious groups mobilized around the hearing. In New York, interfaith supporters joined thousands of Muslims who rallied to show their support for America and their opposition to violence in the name of religion. A smaller counter-rally alleged that Muslims are linked to terrorism, and some in the faith community said Congress should be looking into this.

JORDAN SEKULOW (Director of International Operations, American Center for Law and Justice): Name another religion where there is an international coordinated effort today, where there can be an imam in Yemen talking to a member of our military in Texas to carry out an attack on troops, or young people recruited. It’s not happening. You can’t name another religion other than Islam.

LAWTON: US Islamic advocacy groups repeatedly accused Congress of unfairly singling out their community. On Capitol Hill, a coalition of prominent leaders from several faith traditions gathered to show their solidarity with American Muslims.

RABBI MARC SCHNEIER (President, Foundation for Ethnic Understanding): I feel Congressman Ellison’s pain. I share the pain. I share his concern that these hearings will only exacerbate anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia in our country.

LAWTON: The group acknowledged that Congress has a responsibility to examine violent extremism, but objected to how this hearing was framed.

REV. MICHAEL KINNAMON (General Secretary, National Council of Churches): I can imagine hearings that would come under the heading of the role of religion in promoting violent extremism that would be able to address the real problem, not a group of people the vast, vast majority of whom have nothing to do with the problem, but rather are part of the solution.

LAWTON: Muslims in the group were grateful for the support.

IMAM MOHAMED HAGMAGID ALI (President, Islamic Society of North America): I do believe that by isolating and singling out a community we’re really feeding into the stereotyping and discrimination against the community. But this is the America that I know that is standing with me here—the America that I love.

LAWTON: The leaders announced a new interfaith initiative called “Shoulder to Shoulder,” which they said would promote tolerance and fight anti-Muslim bigotry. Congressman King said he thought the hearing generated a productive and worthwhile conversation. He plans to move ahead with other hearings on the topic in the future.

Joining me now is Gustav Niebuhr, associate professor in religion and the media at Syracuse University and author of the book “Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America.” Gustav, welcome. There certainly was an extraordinary conversation around religion this week. What do you think it says about this particular moment in the American religious landscape?

GUSTAV NIEBUHR (Syracuse University): Well, it’s really an extraordinary moment and somewhat ironic, too, given that the dominant images of Muslims are people fighting for freedom and human rights in North Africa at this point. But in terms of the United States, it says that there’s a lingering suspicion of Muslims as a community. It also says, given the push-back against the hearings, that there are a great many people who are invested in supporting American Muslims as part of the American community and interfaith dialogue.

LAWTON: We did see a big mobilization in the religious community, prominent leaders standing behind Muslims. But at the congregation level, at the pew level there are these questions lingering about links between violence and Islam. How big of a challenge is that for interfaith relations?

NIEBUHR: Well, it’s a big challenge. For one thing, the dominant media image of Muslims, say between 9/11 and up to 2009, was one of people who were associated with terrorist groups abroad. It was of fighting in—between U.S. troops and terrorists in Iraq. But I think things have begun to change over the last two years. For one thing, you had a tremendous and ultimately unsuccessful uprising in Iran against the disputed elections there, and then, as I say, very recently you’ve had a popular revolution sweeping across North Africa giving us a completely different image of Muslims, and I hope that does filter down to the pew level—that people do see that there are Muslims abroad and certainly Muslims in the United States with whom they can agree with.

LAWTON: And we did see diversity within the American Muslim community this week. A lot of people think of it as a monolithic body, but it’s really not.

NIEBUHR: It’s anything but. It’s anything but. There are, what—50, 60 different ethnic groups. There are people who are wealthy. There are people who are white-collar. There are all sorts of professionals. There are blue-collar people. There are people who have been here since the 1960s, people who’ve recently arrived, and geographically the community is very widespread.

LAWTON: How do you think the hearings, the images of this hearing is playing overseas among some of those people you were talking about?

NIEBUHR: In some ways I am concerned about that, because at the very time that you’ve got people fighting for freedom and human rights in North Africa you have internationally televised hearings questioning the patriotism of at least some American Muslims. On the other hand, what’s hopeful is that people from the administration, the national administration all the way down to the pew level, have stood with Muslims and stood with Muslims as Americans in this country, and I hope that the latter is received more strongly than the former, at least for American interests abroad.

LAWTON: All right. Gustav Niebuhr, associate professor of religion and the media at Syracuse University, thanks a lot for being with us today.

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