On July 1, President Obama signed legislation imposing new unilateral sanctions on Iran that he promised would “strik[e] at the heart of the Iranian government’s ability to fund and develop its nuclear program.”

“We’re showing the Iranian government that its actions have consequences,’’ Obama said. “And if it persists, the pressure will continue to mount, and its isolation will continue to deepen. There should be no doubt—the United States and the international community are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.’’

At the same time, Obama suggested that the United States and the international community have learned something from the morally disastrous sanctions imposed on Iraq two decades ago, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe that left the civilian population devastated, the infrastructure in tatters, and hundreds of thousands of children dead.
The new Iranian sanctions, Obama said, would be targeted or “smart’’ sanctions, aimed at the elite and those “who commit serious human rights abuses,’’ while exempting technologies “that allow the Iranian people to access information and communicate freely.’’

Obama also insisted that “the door to diplomacy remains open.’’ But there is no new diplomatic initiative in the offing, according to Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative scholar and foreign policy commentator who attended a White House briefing on the Iran sanctions this summer. Kagan wrote in the Washington Post that the White House believes the new sanctions against Iran “would at least cause the regime significant pain,” but at the same time the president acknowledged “that the regime may be so ‘ideologically’ committed to getting a bomb that no amount of pain would make a difference.”

The sanctions bill passed Congress overwhelmingly, 99-0 in the Senate and 408-8 in the House, with not a lot of debate on Capitol Hill and little discussion outside the halls of Congress. It was welcomed by the roughly 50 members of the conservative group Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran, while a number of policy analysts voiced their misgivings. The unilateral US sanctions, accompanied by a similar set of unilateral measures from the European Union and Asian nations, followed a fourth round of United Nations-imposed punishments—its harshest sanctions yet against Iran—that were approved by the Security Council on June 9. Yet in early September the New York Times was reporting that, despite sanctions, Iran “has dug in its heels, refusing to provide inspectors with the information and access they need to determine whether the real purpose of Tehran’s program is to produce weapons.” So far, at least, sanctions have not forced Iran to change its direction.

The tough new measures on Iran coincide with the publication of “Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions” (Harvard University Press), a comprehensive and devastating look at the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 and kept in place until the 2003 invasion by the United States and its allies in what was called “the coalition of the willing.’’ The author is Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University and a prominent voice for many years in debates over the ethics and morality of using economic sanctions in international public policy.

“Invisible War” is a harsh moral and practical judgment on the role the US played in imposing sanctions on Iraq, and it sounds a timely ethical warning about the future use—and misuse—of sanctions. Gordon writes:

The sanctions regime on Iraq, as it was designed, interpreted, and enforced by the United States, evinced a willingness to see appalling things done in the name of security, and this requires us to consider that measures equally damaging and indiscriminate may be pursued in other circumstances, whether in the name of stopping aggression, drug trafficking, or terrorism. We must come to grips with the perversity of this. It is simply not good enough to say that atrocities committed for the right reasons, or by respected international organizations, are not really atrocities after all.

She states the case even more strongly in a recent post on one of the blogs of the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine:

It is hard to look at the current sanctions on Gaza and Iran without recalling the Iraq sanctions regime—both the structural damage and pettiness. It seems that what the US learned from Iraq was to claim that it now employs “smart sanctions,’’ which will never do the kind of broad damage as we saw in Iraq. … As we hear that Israel will now allow potato chips and juice into Gaza, it is hard to fathom how anyone can rationalize that these ever posed a threat to Israel’s security. But above all, what we should know from Iraq is this: causing destitution in distant lands does not make the world a better place, or make the United States, or anyone else, more secure.

In the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, as the Cold War ended and new forms of international conflict arose, sanctions emerged as a major tool of foreign policy and international governance, and one that has been employed especially by the United States, acting either with the United Nations or with allies or unilaterally. As Gordon and others have pointed out, more than two-thirds of the 60-plus sanctions cases since 1945 were initiated by the United States, and three-quarters of those involved unilateral US actions. Writing on ethical economic sanctions 10 years ago in the Jesuit magazine America, David Cortright and George A. Lopez of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame declared, “Sanctions have become the virtual 911 of international decision makers to enforce norms of justice and international peace.”

Sanctions are attractive to policy makers—and the public—for a number of reasons. They seem more substantial than diplomatic finger-wagging, less costly to impose than military action, and morally preferable to war. “They are often discussed as though they were a mild sort of punishment, not an act of aggression of the kind that has actual human costs,’’ Gordon wrote in a 1999 issue of CrossCurrents, the journal of Association for Religion and Intellectual Life.

Over the years, as the humanitarian consequences and punitive social impact of comprehensive economic sanctions imposed on Iraq and other countries such as Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Yugoslavia became apparent, ethicists began debating more urgently how this tool should be understood. Albert C. Pierce, professor of ethics and national security at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, writing in a 1996 issue of Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, argued that economic sanctions “are intended to inflict great human suffering, pain, harm, and even death and thus should be subject to the same kind of careful moral and ethical scrutiny given to the use of military force before it is chosen as a means to achieve national political objectives.’’ According to Gordon, “because sanctions are themselves a form of violence, they cannot legitimately be seen merely as a peacekeeping device, or as a tool for enforcing international law.…They require the same level of justification as other acts of warfare.’’

Pierce, Gordon, and others say sanctions should be evaluated in much the same way and with similar principles as force is evaluated, that is, with the just war doctrine. Gordon, for example, argues the sanctions imposed on Iraq violated both the criteria that must be met before going to war, such as just cause and the probability of success, and the criteria for how the war is conducted, employing such norms as proportionality and discrimination,’ which bars directly intended attacks on noncombatants and noncombatant targets.
Comprehensive economic sanctions as employed against nations such as Iraq in 1990, Haiti in 1991, and Cuba since the 1960s, have failed to achieve their goals while at the same imposing devastating hardships on the civilian population. Gordon cites studies that found the economic sanctions leveled against Iraq were responsible for the death of some 237,000 Iraqi children under age five. At best, sanctions have been successful in just a third of the cases where they have been employed. US sanctions in Iraq “systemically overrode many of the basic principles of international humanitarian law,” she writes, adding that “many have maintained that the magnitude of the suffering was such that the sanctions regime could properly be termed genocidal.”

Some experts, however, pointing to the cases of South Africa and Yugoslavia, suggest there have been at least modest successes with the use of the sanctions tool. “Even in Iraq,’’ according to Cortright and Lopez, “where the frustrations and humanitarian agony of sanctions are most acutely evident, sanctions initially had some impact in convincing Baghdad to make concessions to UN demands.’’ They argue that sanctions can be reformed, and smart sanctions can be used to deny decision-making elites access to financial resources while trying to avoid harm to civilian populations, thus meeting moral and ethical standards.

They have also written that “some degree of civilian pain is inevitable with the application of sanctions and does not make every use of the instrument unjust. International law professor Lori Fisler Damrosch argues that, although sanctions impose hardships on vulnerable populations, they may be ethically justifiable if carried out for a higher political and moral purpose such as halting aggression or preventing repression.”

Cortright and Lopez have suggested that “the use of targeted measures, if properly enforced, could be a means of enhancing the effectiveness of sanctions while reducing their adverse humanitarian consequences.’’ They caution that “substantial improvements in international compliance will be necessary, however, for financial sanctions, arms embargoes, and travel sanctions to have the kind of targeted impact reformers seek.”

In particular, they argue that “sanctions work best as instruments of persuasion, not punishment,” and concessions by a targeted regime “should be rewarded with an easing of coercive pressure.” Even the imposition of smart sanctions “should be limited by specific ethical standards of just cause, last resort, right authority, probability of success, proportionality, and civilian immunity.’’

Applying just war criteria allows for making some distinctions. Lopez, for example, has endorsed the most recent round of United Nations sanctions against Iran, arguing they have a reasonable chance of success. He has also noted they “capture the important policy subtlety that sanctions must pressure for compliance, not punish for capitulation,’’ are smart in that they “undermine real assets and capabilities that Iran might use for weapons production,” and make sanctions “the cornerstone rather than the entire edifice of a nuclear rollback policy.”

But Lopez has been critical of the unilateral US sanctions, testifying before Congress in December the proposed unilateral step by the US “will inflict economic pain in Iran, but produce no political gain on issues important to the United States.” They would have, he said, an adverse impact on the human rights situation in Iran, strengthen the ruling regime, and would undermine “the reasonably strong coalition of support condemning Iranian actions that has emerged over the past year, and which is the ultimate leverage against Iranian misbehavior.”

Looking at past examples of where sanctions-stimulated reversals have occurred—Ukraine, South Africa, Brazil, or Libya—Lopez said the lesson for the Iranian case is “we cannot punish them into a nuclear deal.’’

“Only an astute mix of narrow sanctions to focus their attention, continued engagement, and versatile incentives will provide this,” he told the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.

Meghan L. O’Sullivan, a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, gives the current sanctions regime “good marks in terms of being well-structured in relation to the goals,’’ and she praises the Obama administration for its effort to “standardize the message about the goal of sanctions: to coerce Iran back to meaningful negotiations—not to destabilize the regime.”

Yet as she has argued in an online interview with Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations, if the sanctions are to have “any hope of bringing Iran to the table in a meaningful way, they need to be perceived by Tehran as a serious threat to regime stability. And that would involve some real stress on the Iranian economy such as major inflation, growing unemployment, unrest over economic circumstances.”
But that pushes the situation toward the ethically questionable outcome of inflicting harm on civilians rather than regime leaders and raises inevitable questions about the relation between sanctions and force. For Gordon, sanctions themselves are “a form of violence—no less than guns and bombs—and it is ethically imperative that we see it as precisely that.” For Patrick Clawson, who directs the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “If there is no will to use force to back the sanctions, then the sanctions are morally dubious.”

In March, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and a member of Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran, called Iran “the most dangerous regime in the world” and said “the diplomatic virtues of patience must not be used to conceal the vices of inaction and appeasement.”

The conservative leaders, who include Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Bill Donohue of Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, among others, did not address any ethical issues but focused on the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran.

“We are running out of time to apply diplomatic pressures to this dangerous regime, and every day we delay, every moment we fail to show resolve, that regime comes closer to threatening the region and stability of the world with nuclear weapons,’’ the group said in June.

Nor have more liberal religious organizations broached the Iran sanctions issue with ethical analysis. In its most recent statement, the World Council of Churches warned in 2007 that “threats to begin another war in the Middle East defy the lessons of both history and ethics.” The council said it was referring to “the belligerent stance of the US toward Iran and of Iranian threats against the US and Israel. The region and its people must not suffer another war, let alone one that is unlawful, immoral, and ill-conceived once again.”

The lack of particular religious and ethical response to the latest round of sanctions against Iran may be due in part to the fact that so far the sanctions are targeted rather than comprehensive, aimed Revolutionary Guard-owned businesses, Iran’s shipping industry, and the country’s commercial and financial sector.

But the US sanctions also target Iran’s energy sector. The July unilateral sanctions penalize companies for selling refined gasoline to Iran or supplying equipment in a bid to increase its refining capacity. Despite being a major oil producer, Iran imports at least a third of the refined gasoline products it needs and, if tightly enforced, sanctions could bring about widespread disruption of the Iranian economy. Some policy experts worry, however, that such secondary sanctions—targeting firms that do business with Iran—inadvertently do more harm than good.

“They are sanctions against our allies, and the people that we need to get on board with us, to help us deal with them,’’ Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, said in an online interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Robert Einhorn, the State Department official who oversees US sanctions against Iran and North Korea, told National Public Radio on Sept. 1 the sanctions are beginning to work—at least to put pressure on the government if not to bring it to the bargaining table.

“It’s interesting to know that Iran’s imports of gasoline have dropped very substantially in recent months,” he said, “so that is putting pressure on Iran.’’

At the moment, however, nobody is raising moral and humanitarian concerns about either sanctions imposed by the United Nations with a general international consensus or the more stringent measures imposed unilaterally by the United States and the European Union. But sanctions create an ethical conundrum. If smart sanctions do not appear to be working, if they do not have the right combination of pain and incentives to induce a regime to come to the bargaining table, if they are seen, in just war terms, as unlikely to produce success, then the temptation for policymakers is either to abandon them for another alternative, usually armed force, or to ratchet up the penalties closer to the punishing comprehensive embargo imposed to such devastating effect—Gordon calls it “gratuitous harm”—on the Iraqi people.

Either move entails the risk of violating just war principles. But a choice in one direction or the other might at least generate a more robust public conversation about the ethical justifications and moral implications of economic measures designed as an alternative to war, and more vigorous debate about the proper policy toward Iran—a debate that has yet to take place.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has written most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on “Drones and the Ethics of War.”

BOB ABERNETHY, host: At a summit meeting in Washington convened by President Obama, leaders of 47 countries promised to take steps to stop the spread of nuclear materials and weapons. This followed agreement earlier by the US and Russia to cut back their deployed nuclear weapons by a third. Many religious groups are active in support of nuclear arms reduction and eventual elimination, and we want to talk about that with Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. Richard, welcome. There are lots of new organizations around that are trying to call attention to the problem of nuclear weapons. Why now?

RICHARD CIZIK (President, New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good): Among other reasons, Bob, not simply the outrage that this could happen, that is, detonation of a nuclear device in an American city. That would be enough to motivate anybody, it would seem. But the younger evangelicals and others their age, they grew up post-Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and frankly after 9/11. They know terrorism, but they don’t know nukes. But they are optimistic this can be done, the Global Zero movement, but it’s educating a whole new generation that has to be done, who didn’t grow up with it, hasn’t acquiesced to it.

ABERNETHY: How representative do you think you are in this position of evangelicals in general?

CIZIK: I think I’m very—I’ve changed my mind. I was part of the Cold War, part of the evil empire speech by Ronald Reagan, who by the way advocated the virtual elimination of nuclear weapons. So I have changed my views on these subjects due to both the Cold War and 9/11, but I think all evangelicals—

ABERNETHY: But there are evangelicals, aren’t there, who don’t agree with you.

CIZIK: Not everyone is there, but the younger evangelicals do. They know that this is real, and it’s their lives.

ABERNETHY: For a long time there’s been the theory that we needed a deterrent because that was the only way to prevent attack against us.

CIZIK: Mutually assured destruction was the nuclear paradigm.

ABERNETHY: Yes, yes. Well, don’t we still need a deterrent?

CIZIK: Well, yes, we do, but that’s not prohibitive of us virtually eliminating over time in a gradual process. We’re not for unilateral disarmament. None of us are. But we do know that the longer this goes on, the possession of these weapons without a lock-down, without reducing, the chances of a detonation in an American city go up.

Richard Cizik

ABERNETHY: From terrorism.

CIZIK: From terrorism.

ABERNETHY: Now what can nuclear weapons do about terrorism? Where does that fit together?

CIZIK: Well, frankly, we’re talking about reducing strategic weapons in this START treaty, but there’s also the lock-down of nuclear materials and the rest. That’s what has to happen, and frankly terrorists can get these weapons through nuclear materials from Russia and elsewhere, and we know it’s going to happen. The question is can we stop it?

ABERNETHY: Yeah, well, that’s my question. What is your recommendation about how to prevent that?

CIZIK: What most policy analysts in this town aren’t doing is talking about engaging with religious groups internationally—Muslim leaders where I’m going, to Morocco this week to do just that, for peace-making purposes. In other words, engaging with religious actors and communities is what’s absolutely necessary. In American foreign policy that has never been done, and it has to be to stop this from happening.

ABERNETHY: The Senate probably will be taking up the START treaty.

CIZIK: Sixty-seven votes are needed.

ABERNETHY: Sixty-seven votes are needed.

CIZIK: Eight Republicans.

ABERNETHY: Can you predict how that’s going to happen?

CIZIK: Well, I can say this. If younger evangelicals, who are disproportionately conservative, yes, get engaged on this issue they’ll change those Republicans who are resistant. Now some of this opposition is simply loo-loo, you know, looney tunes, the kind of talk that “we need peace through strength.” Now look it, strength is doing this—Global Zero. That is real strength.

ABERNETHY: Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical Partnership, many thanks.

CIZIK: Thank you.

For much of the past two decades, the issue of nuclear disarmament had faded from public view.

Sporadic progress had been made since Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), but as international relations professor Amitai Etzioni argued in a recent article in the World Policy Journal, “While there have been deals aplenty, recent action toward these goals (reduction and elimination of nuclear arms) has been wanting….The hope that nuclear abolition would follow the original Reagan-Gorbachev arrangement lost much of its appeal after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Etzioni noted that while some reductions in arsenals continued even during George W. Bush’s administration, “dealing with American and Russian weapons lost any sense of urgency.”

Last week’s announcement that the United States and Russia have reached agreements to reduce their nuclear arsenals and that President Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev will meet in Prague on April 8 to sign to a new treaty that cuts the number of deployed nuclear weapons by 25 percent may change all that. The date of the signing is close to the anniversary of President Obama’s April 5, 2009 address in Prague on nuclear disarmament  that has been described by John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, as “perhaps the most significant nuclear weapons speech since World War II” and “more important than President John F. Kennedy’s nuclear test ban speech back in the 1960s.”

In mid-January this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand of its famous Doomsday Clock from five minutes to six minutes away from midnight, declaring that “we are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons.”

“For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material,” the group said in a statement. “Indeed, we may be at a turning point, where major powers no longer see the value of nuclear weapons for war-fighting or even for deterrence.”

The scientists cited a number of factors, including the election of Barack Obama and a joint letter he and Medvedev issued on April 1, 2009, pledging nuclear weapons cuts and a readiness “to move beyond cold war mentalities”; the bipartisan disarmament drive led by former top US policy makers George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn (their efforts included the recent documentary film, “Nuclear Tipping Point,” produced by the Nuclear Security Project); and growing participation in the public debate by “a range of civic and religious leaders, including evangelicals, on the role of nuclear weapons in national security.”

Religious groups have been involved in the public conversation about nuclear arms since the first atomic bombs were dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. On August 20, 1945, just days after the bombings, Protestant leaders, most of whom were associated with the Federal Council of Churches, the precursor body of the National Council of Churches, issued a statement expressing their “unmitigated condemnation” of the horrific attacks.

Less than a year later, the Federal Council’s Calhoun Commission, including Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett, founders of the journal Christianity and Crisis, issued a more full-bodied report entitled “Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith” and declared that “we have sinned grievously against the laws of God’” in using nuclear weapons. The report called on the United States to end any further atomic weapons production.

But as David Cortright, director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has pointed out recently, a very real ambivalence marked the churches’ response to the bomb. “As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, some of those who had greeted the bomb with horror now came to accept it as a necessary deterrent against godless communism and the perceived threat of totalitarian aggression,” he wrote in “Transcending Ambivalence: A History of Enjoying the Bomb,” published in the Spring 2009 issue of Yale Divinity School’s journal “Reflections.”  The issue was dedicated to the subject of faith and the future of nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, however, there was a resurgence of both religious and secular efforts to mobilize in support of nuclear disarmament and to push for an end to the arms race. Most notable were the nuclear freeze movement and the Roman Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace.”  Evangelicals, too, were early opponents of the use of nuclear weapons, including Sojourners, the Christian social justice community, and, from the middle 1980s, the National Association of Evangelicals. More recently, evangelicals have organized the Two Futures Project, a movement of American Christians for the abolition of all nuclear weapons led by the Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson.

The Catholic bishops’ 1983 letter, the product of a special moment in church history created by Vatican II, was significant in a number of ways, not least because it put the nation’s largest religious community squarely in the midst of the public debate over the Reagan administration’s nuclear arms policies. It also challenged the church’s own deep-seated anti-communism and was widely praised for what many regarded as the bishops’ nuanced approach to the nuclear weapons issue. In the letter, the bishops endorsed a “no-first-use” declaration by the United States and voiced support for a comprehensive test ban treaty, both of which continue to be sticky issues in current arms control debates. But they also supported continuing the core policy of deterrence even while making their approval “strictly conditional” and “a step on the way to progressive disarmament.”

Protestant denominations in the United States and international church bodies such as the World Council of Churches, however, pushed beyond the Catholic bishops and the idea of deterrence to hold up an abolitionist vision of a world without nuclear weapons. In 1986, the bishops of the United Methodist Church, for example, published their own pastoral statement, “In Defense of Creation,” which forthrightly rejected deterrence and said the doctrine “must no longer receive the church’s blessing.” Branches of what is now the Presbyterian Church USA also have a long history of opposition to the nuclear arms race, stretching back to 1946. In the 1980s, they endorsed a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race” and backed “a mutual freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons.” Over the years, regular Presbyterian statements have continued to follow on arms control and disarmament issues.

As underscored by the Presbyterian statement, the renewed debate in the 1980s paralleled and supplemented developments in the secular arena, especially the nuclear freeze campaign led by the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (now known as Peace Action) and other hybrid secular-religious peace groups.

On the international level, both the World Council of Churches and the Vatican, under a succession of popes, have been outspoken opponents of the arms race and any use of nuclear weapons. Pope John Paul II edged the Catholic Church close to pacifism, declaring there are next to no conditions in a nuclear age that justify nations going to war with each other.

While there had been sporadic arms agreements before, notably the important Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970 and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) agreement between President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, it was the mounting secular and religious pressures of the 1980s that created the framework for an accord between Reagan and Gorbachev calling for deep reductions in both US and Russian strategic arms. Their agreement resulted in the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the subsequent Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), signed in 1991. A second arms reduction treaty, START II, was signed by George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin in 1992, but it never officially entered into force when the Russians said they would no longer be bound by it after George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002.

A proponent of nuclear disarmament since his days in the Senate, President Obama quickly made the issue of nuclear disarmament a very visible part of the administration’s agenda. This was most notable in the speech he gave in Prague on April 5, 2009, in which he stated “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” He insisted he was not being naïve in holding up such a vision and acknowledged that it “will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime,” but nevertheless with patience and persistence it was an achievable goal.

Obama followed the Prague speech with two other important acts. In July, he and Russian President Medvedev signed an agreement on the basic terms of a treaty to sharply reduce each country’s number of warheads and missiles. In September, he chaired a session of the United Nations Security Council that adopted a resolution to shore up the rules aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

On December 5, 2009, the START I treaty quietly expired without a successor agreement in place, and in January, in his State of the Union address, Obama said the US was completing negotiations on what would be “the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades.” Under the terms of what is now being called New START, Russia and the US will cut their warheads to 1,550 on each side within seven years of a new treaty being signed.

But the difficulties presented by both the international negotiations needed to implement and enforce the agreements and the domestic political realities in the United States are not likely to quietly wither in the face of Obama’s soaring rhetoric or aspirations.

Senate approval of New START is expected to present challenges, although the administration says it hopes the deal with Russia will be ratified by the end of this year. As the Washington Post editorialized, “It’s hard to see how new treaties will bring about the disarmament of North Korea or stop Tehran’s centrifuges.” Other skeptical and critical voices are being heard from, some of them asking, as former correspondent William Beecher recently put it, why Obama keeps “waving the flag” of a world without nuclear weapons. “He’s well aware that nations make strategic decisions based on their perceived national self-interest,” Beecher has written. “With so much mistrust in the world, no member of the nuclear club is about to disarm when to do so would make the cheaters the strongest bullies on the block.”

At the moment, the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a key statement drawn up by every US administration setting out its basic nuclear doctrine, including the reasoning for retaining nuclear weapons and the circumstances in which they might be used, represents another slipped deadline. The NPR was due to be submitted to Congress on March 1, but a draft version was reportedly rejected by Obama as being merely a “tweaked” version of the Bush administration’s stance, rather than something that would reflect Obama’s nuclear-free aspirations and move much closer to a declaration of “no first use,” making clear the United States would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation. The Boston Globe’s Bryan Bender wrote in January that the review “is shaping up to be a major showdown for Obama this year” and that the president was “taking on some of the most sacred cows of the nuclear program.”

“My understanding is that the president and vice president are unhappy with the draft that has been produced,’’ Joseph Cirincione, president of the Plowshares Fund, told the Guardian newspaper on February 28. “Nothing has been settled on the key issue: what is the use for nuclear weapons? This is an issue the president cares deeply about.”

As Obama himself said in his State of the Union address, “Even as we prosecute two wars, we’re also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people—the threat of nuclear weapons. I’ve embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons and seeks a world without them. And at April’s nuclear security summit, we will bring 44 nations together here in Washington, DC behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.”

The tug-of- war inside the administration over the critical NPR comes as nuclear arms issues take center stage in the coming months. Along with the April 12-13 global nuclear security summit Obama alluded to, in May the United Nations will hold a conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, perhaps the toughest of issues as both Iran and North Korea press ahead with programs for developing their nuclear capabilities, and the nuclear powers are unable so far to come together on a comprehensive negotiating stance for either effort.

Obama is also expected to seek Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the United States has signed but not ratified. The Senate briefly took up the treaty in 1999 but rejected ratification. The Obama-orchestrated UN Security Council resolution in September 2009 called on all states to refrain from conducting nuclear test explosions and to ratify the CTBT.

For the most part, observes John Isaacs, members of Congress have been very quiet in response to the president on nuclear weapons issues. “The predominant sound from Washington, DC, from Congress, to the president’s proposals has been silence,” Isaacs said in December at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.  “The sounds of silence are because nuclear weapons simply are not that popular, and that gives the president…a freer hand than he would have on some other issues.”

Popular or not, it is worth noting that according to a Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly-United Nations Foundation survey in October 2008, controlling nuclear weapons around the world was ranked as the most important US foreign policy priority by 80 percent of respondents. Among Catholics and white evangelicals the percentages were even higher at 82 percent and 86 percent, respectively.

Religious groups are continuing their pressure on Obama—and the rest of the globe—to move toward a nuclear-arms-free world. In February, the Catholic bishops from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in an open letter to President Obama and the government of Japan, urged world leaders to “take a courageous step toward the total abolition of nuclear weapons and the realization of a world without wars.” In remarks prepared for a recent public forum organized by Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center on “God and the Bomb: Deterrence, Disarmament, and Human Security,” international affairs professor Douglas Shaw observed that “for all the complexity of and disagreement about nuclear weapons, there are some things we know about them. We ought not to live comfortably behind the threat of killing millions of other human beings in an afternoon—because it is morally dubious at best and because it is an unreliable means to guarantee our security.” Woodstock will repeat the forum on April 13 at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City.

“The moral end is clear: a world free of the threat of nuclear weapons,” Archbishop Edwin O’Brien of Baltimore, a member of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops committee on international justice and peace, told the Global Zero Summit in Paris in February. “This goal should guide our efforts. Every nuclear weapons system and every nuclear weapons policy should be judged by the ultimate goal of protecting human life and dignity and the related goal of ridding the world of these weapons in a mutually verifiable way.”

“The path to zero will be long and treacherous,” he added. “But humanity must walk this path with both care and courage to build a future free of the nuclear threat.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service. He has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on the war in Afghanistan and on God and empire.

Q: You have, in the course of your life, participated in a good many great causes and have done so with a lot of passion. As you look around the country today, I wonder whether you see an absence of commitment to great causes with great passion.

A: I think we lack passion. We’re showing moral lassitude. In universities tolerance is very apparent, but often it feels like abdication. There’s not the kind of prophetic fire which also produces insight. Universities are very leery about passion. They think it’s poured on top of judgment. But passion produces also insight. Read the Bible. All the great prophets in the Bible were very passionate.

Q: Why do you think that is, in the country as a whole? Why aren’t people in the streets today the way they were in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement?

A: We’re prosperous. … And now, of course, fear has taken hold, and in life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions. Now we have an administration which sponsors fear — of immigrants, homosexuals, crime, terrorists particularly. And this fear-mongering, I’m afraid, is quite deliberate because the more you can make people fear, the more a government can control you. I’ve seen that in many countries, and now I see it in the United States, where the administration is engaging in fear-mongering. Everybody is fearful. The Congress is made up of practicing cowards, and people don’t feel a sense of accountability for what the nation should stand for — and money doesn’t help.

Q: What’s the role of churches in this?

A: Unfortunately the churches now are pretty much down to therapy and management. There’s very little prophetic fire in the churches. When I was growing up we had church leaders — Catholic Church leaders, Protestants, and wonderful rabbis like Abraham Joshua Heschel — who were full of passion, highly intelligent. They knew that love demands the utmost in clear-sightedness. And they were not lazy about doing homework. They were really present, you know? Now, we haven’t got quite as many. But that being said, we have wonderful individual ministers, I would say primarily women, and individual Catholic priests, but not quite the way it used to be.

Plato said once, “What’s honored in the country will be cultivated there.” When we started as a nation we had only, what, three million people? Less than Los Angeles County today? And yet we turned out statesmen (there were no women, unfortunately) named Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams. You can name a list as long as your arm. How many people on the public political stage can you name of the caliber of that first generation? “What’s honored in the country will be cultivated there.” We have fantastic athletes, and we deserve them, and we have rather mediocre politicians and clergy.

Q: Where does the rise of conservatism, especially on the religious Right among Protestant evangelicals, fit into this whole thing?

A: I think most people prefer certainty to truth, and when they feel insecure and want to secure themselves against a sense of insecurity, they engage in what psychiatrists call “premature closure.” They close off too early. I’m often asked what I think of the Christianity of President Bush. I think his God is too small. After all, it’s a profound Christian conviction that we all belong one to another, every one of us on the face of the Earth — from the pope to the loneliest wino, and that’s the way God made us. Christ died to keep us that way. Our sin is always that we’re putting asunder what God has joined together. For every serious believer the question arises: Who is big enough to love the whole world? How, for instance, can the president call Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the axis of evil when all of humanity suffers immeasurably more from environmental degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons? Our God is too small, and then our God is much too nationalistic. A good patriot is not a nationalist. What really puzzles me about the Christian Right is how they can applaud the messianic militarism of the president, a kind of divinely ordained cleansing fire of violence, all in the name of Jesus Christ, the mirror opposite of the Jesus we find in the four Gospels.

I would like to say that for the president to offer a constitutional amendment is very painful. He believes that all people are not created equal, not if they’re gays and lesbians. And he wants a constitutional amendment to reinforce the inequality. That’s a cruel, cruel thing to do. If he had any more feel for what the suffering of the gay and lesbian crowd is all about, if he’d just be available to the suffering, he’d understand that it’s not their outward expression, it’s the inner connection that really counts. And he ought to know that straights have not cornered the market on life-sustaining, deep-caring love. Gays can do that just as well as straights. It’s like Christians and Jews. They are different — not different up, not different down, just different. Gays and straights, they’re different. Not different up, not different down, just different. And what the world needs is a pluralistic vision of love, if we’re going to survive.

Q: Many, many religious conservatives read the same Scripture that you do and come out very differently on social issues. Why?

A: I think they read the Book of Revelation more than they do the gospel. This apocalyptic view which allows them to substitute fate for faith doesn’t make them feel accountable in the same way. Now, if you read the Gospels, you know Jesus was servant of the poor. So how can you say compassionate conservatism should be directed primarily at CEOs and unborn babies? Why doesn’t the Christian Right pay attention to hunger, homelessness, poor education, absent health benefits of babies already born? I’m not saying social justice is the same thing as the gospel; it isn’t, but social justice is at the heart of the gospel, not ancillary to it. And that seems to be an understanding that is, unfortunately, not very deeply appreciated here — not in Latin America, though.

Q: Many of us say, “Well, you know, I’ve got to work hard to support my family, I don’t have a lot of time,” or “I don’t want to seem radical,” or “I don’t want to cause my neighbors to suspect I’m not fully patriotic.” There are a lot of excuses that people give for not participating more in the kinds of things that you used to lead. What do you say to those people?

A: I understand that people want to be safe, polite, obedient, comfortable, but that’s not being alive. Irenaeus, the great early church father, said the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Now, if you back off from every little controversy in your life you’re not alive, and what’s more, you’re boring. It’s a terrible thing that we settle for so much less. Religion is the revelation of the love of God and of human possibility. Christ is a mirror to our humanity and tells us what it means to be alive and well. So it’s hard for me to think they are very good examples for the kind of Christianity I believe in.

Q: After September 11 there was a surge of patriotism. Sometimes it has seemed that patriotism blocked any kind of criticism, that we were afraid if we spoke out against going to war or the policies after the Iraq war, that it would be considered disloyal to the troops and our country. How do you separate patriotism from criticism?

A: In a democracy, dissent is not disloyal. But that’s hard for people to accept when they don’t like criticism. During the war against Vietnam, there was that bumper sticker: “America: Love it or leave it.” That bumper sticker really said, “America: Obey it or leave it.” Or maybe it said “America: Obey it or it will leave you in the cold.” You will be called unpatriotic. You will be told, “Go back to a communist country,” or something like that. It takes work to stay alive. It takes work to engage in dissent. But I would say the great trouble now is self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is the bane of all human relations — interpersonal, international, interfaith. Self-righteousness destroys our capacity for self-criticism. It makes it very hard to be humble, and it destroys the sense of oneness all human beings should have, one with another. I think the fact that we are, as a nation, rather self-righteous now is a terrible danger for us and very bad for other countries.

Q: It must make you terribly frustrated to see all the things you think are wrong and not being righted, and not be able to play the part in leading those movements that you once did.

A: Oh, no. With age, you should step aside. Let other people take over, you know, and maybe the next generation or the one after that will do something much better than we did. Besides, you know, the great Frenchman Albert Camus once said, “There is in the world beauty, and there are the humiliated. And we must strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful either to the one or to the other.” Well, blessed as I am living in Vermont, it’s easy to be loyal to beauty. If I get too down on our failure to deal with the humiliated, I can always say, “God was good; the creation hasn’t totally been corrupted yet.” Hope needs to be understood as a reflection of the state of your soul, not a reflection of the circumstances that surround your days. So I remain hopeful. The opposite of hope is despair — not pessimism. As a very convinced Christian, I say to myself, “Come on, Coffin, if Christ never allowed his soul to be cornered into despair, and his was the greatest miscarriage of justice, maybe, in the world, who the hell am I to say I’m going to despair a bit?” And besides, when I addressed people as I used to frequently in the peace movement, there would be, in the last ten years, always somebody saying, “I am so disillusioned.” Well, being old now, I can be forthright and say, “Who the hell gave you the right to have illusions in the first place?” We have no right to have illusions. So we have only ourselves to chastise when we feel disillusioned.

Q: What’s the essential connection for you between religious faith and justice?

A: Justice is at the heart of religious faith. It’s not something that is tacked on. And justice is not charity. Charity tries to alleviate the effects of injustice. Justice tries to eliminate the causes of injustice. Charity is a personal disposition. Justice is public policy. What this country needs, what I think God wants us to do, is not practice piecemeal charity but engage in wholesale justice. And that’s not only to erase or greatly reduce the wage gap and the living standards in America, but really to be committed to doing something about the horrible, really horrible poverty of at least one third of the people on the planet. If you want to do something good for national security, and every American should, take billions of dollars and wage war against world poverty. That would have a very sobering effect on terrorism. Terrorism now has a wonderful recruitment policy supplied by the United States foreign policy. If we were serious, with other nations, to engage the war on poverty around the world, that would stem the flow of recruits to the ranks of terrorists.

Q: Let me ask you to look back a little bit at some of the great movements you were part of. The civil rights movement: What do you remember with the greatest pleasure or what was the greatest lesson of it?

A: The greatest pleasure was being with black civil rights leaders and followers, because they were so alive. You can be more alive in pain than in complacency. These often very poor blacks in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia with whom I had the great pleasure of working, they were so wonderfully alive, so cheerful, so courageous. It was inspiring, really inspiring. I felt from the get-go that the so-called “black problem,” as it was called in those days, was the white man’s problem, and we were the ones discriminating against black folk. We were the ones being pressed not to give them their rights, but to restore rights that should never have been taken away. While it was right to have the civil rights movement led by leaders like Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, all the wonderful black leaders, whites were necessary — to bail them out of jail. The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund did that very well, and whites were very much necessary to raise money, and the Jewish community in New York City was generous to a fault. It was very moving to see that. The rest of us who weren’t lawyers and who didn’t have money — we could go to jail with our black brothers and sisters.

Q: How about the antiwar movement?

A: That was in many ways more painful than the civil rights movement. I think everybody knew discrimination was evil; no question about it. Integration was painful but necessary. I had great sympathy for Southern whites who, if they were against segregation, were like anti-Soviet Russians in communist Russia. Very difficult. The antiwar movement split the nation in a more acute, painful way. It wasn’t quite as clear that we had the Constitution behind us. I think, in retrospect, everybody agrees it was a terrible, terribly misconceived war. After all, the separation between North and South Vietnam was a temporary military line, not a permanent political one. The Geneva Accords in 1953 made that clear, and then Eisenhower admitted, in his autobiography, that we ignored the elections called for because Ho Chi Minh would have won hands down. So it was, in effect, a unilateral, massive intervention in a small Third World country’s civil war. And, of course, the slaughter was just heartbreaking — on both sides. Let’s not forget the other side. There was such a fuss made about missing-in-action Americans. There were about 39 to 45. We went over there; they helped us find them. Meantime, Americans forgot there were about 300,000 missing in action among the Vietnamese.

Q: The nuclear disarmament movement?

A: It’s a new world when you have weapons of mass destruction, and particularly nuclear weapons, which is why Kofi Annan at the UN said the abolition of all nuclear weapons is at the top of the UN agenda. Only God has the right to destroy all life on the planet. All we have is the power. We haven’t the authority; we only have the power. Therefore, to threaten to use nuclear weapons must be an abomination in the sight of God. As far as what we can do about it, it’s not hard. We have to recognize a single standard for all nuclear weapons: either universal permission or universal abolition. Now, there are retired admirals, retired generals, including the U.S. Strategic Air Commander George Leroy Butler, who have been calling for years for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. We don’t need them for our national defense. We are only lacking the political will to do it — obviously under stringent international inspection.

I think the danger of nuclear destruction grows every day. The terrorists will get a hold of it if we don’t police the storage points now. More nations will get a hold of it, because we can’t stop them. We’ve been practicing nuclear apartheid. The nuclear powers have arrogated to themselves the right to build, deploy, threaten to use nuclear weapons, while policing the rest of the world against their production. Now, we all know racial apartheid couldn’t succeed in South Africa. That was apparent from the beginning. Nuclear apartheid will fail, too. That’s why strenuous efforts must be made to abolish nuclear weapons. My personal sadness is, if Kofi Annan says the abolition of nuclear weapons is at the top of the agenda of the UN, why isn’t it at the top of the agenda of every church in this country, every synagogue and mosque?

Q: Are you a pacifist?

A: Fifty-one/forty-nine. I’m a nuclear pacifist, that’s for sure. But there is an irremediable stubbornness about evil. We have to recognize it, including our own complicity in it. St. Augustine said, “Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside of yourself.” We have to constrain it, but I doubt we’ll ever eradicate it. It’s incredibly naïve of President Bush to say that we’ll rid the world of evil. Come on. The pacifists I greatly admire are those who know that the mystery of evil is beyond their solutions. Nonviolence cannot eradicate violence, which means we have a dilemma, because violence is not working very well either. I keep coming back to the wonderful verse in the 33rd Psalm: “The war horse is the vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save.” In short, I’m looking forward to a day when universal police action will take the place of national armies. That would be a blessed day, if we got to that point. In the meantime, we have pacifists and nonpacifists and a terrible dilemma.

Q: As you look back on everything you’ve done in your wonderful life, what are you most proud of?

A: I never thought that was a question I should answer. It’s not so much a question of pride; it’s deep satisfaction. Joy in this world comes from self-fulfillment. Joy is a more profound experience than mere happiness. Happiness connotes pleasure. Joy can include, and not exclude, pain. The moments of great satisfaction in my life are many, for which I’m deeply grateful. Most of all because I’m a pastor and my pastoral relations have been some of the most satisfying experiences of my life. After all, when I was at Yale for 18 years, I spent almost every afternoon when I was in town — and that was most of the time — just counseling students, one on one. People who invite you into the garden of their soul are really wonderful people. They’re never boring. I don’t bear fools’ company gladly, but people who are deeply personal and willing to air their conflicts — that’s very satisfying. That was a part of my life that was very satisfying. And, I must say, when you feel a sense of undeserved integrity because you think you’re in the right fight — against segregation, against the war in Vietnam, against the stupid and cruel discrimination against gays and lesbians — these are the right fights, I feel very deeply. The sense of self-fulfillment which comes with being in the right fight is a very wonderful thing. And lastly, only because I’m mentioning it last, is my family. I was too busy when I was younger to really appreciate the incredible ties I have with the family, with my children and two stepchildren also, and with a wife without whom, I think, I would not be sitting here now. When you get older, friendship obviously runs deeper and deeper. And, I would add, nature gets more interesting the nearer you get to joining it, and also more beautiful. I can sit on the front porch here with a little bit of “mother’s milk,” which I learned to appreciate when I was a liaison officer with the Russian Army (they had lots of it), and just sit there and watch the sun coming in through the maple leaves. You know, God is good.

Q: How about regrets?

A: Regrets? Well, I mentioned one, the fact that — I don’t say this to excuse myself, but I think it’s basically a myth that people who are so devoted on public fronts have a wonderful relationship with their families. They’re kidding themselves. My regret is that when my children were growing up, I was there for them but not in the way that a father ought to be there for them.

Q: You preached that wonderful sermon after your son’s death, and there were some ideas in there about what is “God’s will.”

A: The part that most people most appreciated was that I said I have no comfort in thinking that it was the will of God that Alex die. My comfort lies in feeling that of all hearts to break, God’s was the first as the wave closed over the sinking car. God is not too hard to believe in; God is too good to believe in, we being such strangers to such goodness. The love of God is, to me, absolutely overwhelming. It was an awful tragedy, and you have to go into the depths of pain, and grief is experienced often as the absence of God: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” said Jesus from the cross. But that’s the first words of the 22nd Psalm, and the end of the psalm is in praise of God. It’s always in the depths of hell that heaven is found and affirmed and praised.

Q: How about your own death? Do you think about that?

A: Not very much. I’d just as soon live a little bit longer. But when you’re 80 you can’t complain. To quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inaugural address, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Fear of death is what is insidious, and once the fear is behind you, then it is only the physical death which is ahead of you. If we didn’t die we’d be immortal, like the Greek gods, and perhaps up to their same dumb tricks. It’s a very good thing we die. In fact, it’s death which brings us to life. But we need to be scared to life, not scared to death. I await death with no protest. “Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light”: I’m sorry, Dylan Thomas, but that’s not always the case. You can go gentle into that good night. Stop complaining. Remember that, as old Hamlet said, “The readiness is all.” Basically, when I said I don’t think much about death, I was really thinking, I don’t think much about what comes next because I believe our lives run from God, in God, to God again. And that’s enough. We might want to know more, but we don’t need to know more, and demanding that I know more about the afterlife somehow demeans my faith. I think, one world at a time. The second world will be in God’s hands, whereas we were lucky enough to live in this world.

Q: We’ve been talking about a lot of big problems. But you seem to be able to deal with these problems in a way that recalls some deep confidence. There’s something deep in there that involves joy and hope. How are you able to look at the world as it is and still have the capacity for feeling joyful?

A: First of all, it’s clear to me that almost every square inch of the Earth’s surface is soaked with the tears and blood of the innocent, and it’s not God’s doing, it’s our doing. That’s human malpractice. Don’t chalk it up to God. Every time people lift their eyes to heaven and say, when they see the innocent suffering, “God, how could you let this happen?” it is well to remember at that exact moment God is asking exactly that same question of us: “How could you let it happen?” You have to take responsibility, and then you have to say with the poet, “We’re always undefeated because we keep on trying.” You have to keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. You hang in there, and not to hang in there is to abdicate and to get bored and be boring, and it’s important to be engaged in the right way. For instance, I mentioned self-righteousness. It’s very hard for me to war against the self-righteousness of my beloved nation without engaging a little bit in self-righteousness. I have to watch that all the time, because the quality of the engagement is very important. Abraham Joshua Heschel always had a wonderful sense of humor about him. King wasn’t exactly a barrel of fun, but still he had a kind of ability to step back and not run himself into the ground. Humor is very important. Faith is important for the ultimate dilemmas of life; humor can take care of the immediate ones rather nicely. I have a wonderful son, David, who keeps me in good jokes, and a joke a day keeps the doctor away. I’m a great believer in that. And then you have to have moments when you let it go. Often I work with one crowd and drink with another, because the drinking crowd is a little bit more fun, but I wouldn’t want to work with them.

Q: Your faith and the nature of God and God’s love — what is the bedrock there for you?

A: The bedrock of my faith — mind you, I didn’t get to it easily. I think I have World War II to thank for it, because there are few things as irrelevant as an answer to an unasked question, and World War II asked all the important questions for me. When I went to college, I had the right questions. And as Rilke says, “Love the question, and live into the answer.” Very nicely put. My rock-solid belief is that we are loved by God. He loves us as we are, but too much to leave us that way. We are loved by God, and that’s what gives us value. We don’t achieve value. It’s not because we have value that we’re loved by God, but because we’re loved by God that we have value. Our value as human beings is not an achievement; it’s a gift. We don’t have to prove ourselves. All that is taken care of. What we have to do is express ourselves, return God’s love with our own. And what a world of difference there is between proving yourself and expressing yourself. That’s the core basis of my faith. And, of course, Jesus is primary. God is not confined to Christ, but to Christians God is most essentially defined by Christ. In other words, when we see Christ empowering the poor, scorning the powerful, healing the world’s hurt, we are seeing transparently the power of God at work. How do we know what to pray? “Through Jesus Christ our Lord” — that’s why all Christian prayers end that way. We are confident about the things we pray for through Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s not to say that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a great mentor in my life, didn’t see the same things about God from the perspective of the Talmud and the Torah and incredible Jewish literature throughout the ages.

I’m convinced that gratitude is the most important religious emotion. Duty calls only when gratitude fails to prompt. When you’re grateful for the undeserved beauty of a cloudless sky, you’re praying. You’re saying, “Thank you, Lord,” praying all the time about the beauty of nature, of a relationship with other people, the beauty of the deeds some people do. In World War II, occasionally a soldier fell on a grenade there was no time to throw back. Well, you could be absolutely appalled by their deaths, but you could be struck by the beauty of selfless courage. I feel grateful all the time, so my prayers of thanksgiving are very full. My prayers of petition — I don’t tell God what to do, but thinking about other people and trying to think what God would think about them is a way of directing my thoughts to other people. Praying for world peace — instead of saying, “Grant us peace in our time, O Lord,” God must say, “Oh, come off it. What are you going to do for peace, for heaven’s sake?” It’s not enough to pray for it; you have to think for it, you have to suffer for it, and you have to endure a lot for it. Don’t just pray about it. A lot of people think their prayers aren’t answered. They are answered; the answer is “No,” and they haven’t heard it. I don’t think you have to be self-conscious about your prayer life. If you can live in wonder and gratitude and with a sense of wanting to respond — responsible means “respond-able,” able to respond. … If you’re able to respond to the beauty of nature, you’ll be an environmentalist. If you’re able to respond to human beings’ basic right to peace, you’ll be a peacenik. It’s a matter of being full of wonder, thanksgiving, and praying for strength to respond to all the wonder and beauty there is in human life.

Q: I’m interested in the distinction between a speech and a sermon. What do you think it is?

A: A good sermon is like reading a whodunit: “That’s right. I get it.” It’s a discovery of inevitability. A good sermon should raise to a conscious level the knowledge inherent in people’s experience, so they recognize themselves as you do at the end of a whodunit: “Ah! Why didn’t I think of that?” That’s my idea of a good sermon. And you don’t preach at people; you preach for all of us. You show your own humanity as well as the divinity of Christ. Very few preachers do this, including myself. It’s not bad to end up with a question: “What do you think of that?” Let people go think about it, because a good sermon they will remember on Wednesday. If you leave them a question, they’ll wrestle with it.

Speech? It depends on what you mean. Really good conversation is about pretty deep things, and that’s not what Americans engage in very often. I remember asking a distinguished lawyer, “What did you do at the law firm when Martin Luther King was killed?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Didn’t you senior partners call a meeting to discuss what this means in your lives and what this means to the nation?” And he looked quite surprised. So I asked the next lawyer, “What did you do when King died?” “What do you mean?” he asked. And I realized I couldn’t find a lawyer whose law firm had the simple decency to call together a meeting and say, “Let’s talk about it.” Now that would be speech that would be very close to sermonic speech. It would come from the heart.

Q: What should we be mindful of when we make defense policy?

A: The art of defense is not to lose from within what you’re defending against from without. In defending against terrorism, it’s a great danger that we become like terrorists. We’ve become self-righteous. They certainly are self-righteous. We’ve become vengeful. “Vengeance is mine. I will repay,” saith the Lord. We forget that. With the present attorney general, I fear all the time that he’s going to lose from within the rights we’re trying to protect against terrorists. The idea that in the Patriot Act the government can go into our own library here, any library in the whole country to find out what books people are taking out — come off it. We have more things to do, better things to do than that. I fear desperately that if the terrorists attack again this summer, this fall before the election — if there’s a dirty bomb in the Holland Tunnel, the devastation will be heart-wrenching, and John Kerry will say, “I’m 100 percent behind the president.” And bye-bye to a lot of human values that have made this country really great. That’s following your fears, not being led by your values. That’s an awfully, awfully important thing and, of course, religiously it’s very important. The Scripture says, “Perfect love casts out fear.”