Public Moral Leadership | Michael Lindsay | Talks at Google

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And get started now. Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's Authors at Google event. It's my pleasure to have Michael Lindsey with us today. Michael is an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University, where he's also assistant director of the center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life, the co author of two previous books, and a former consultant on religion and culture to the Gallup International Institute. Lindsay's here today to speak about his new book, Faith in the Halls of Power, which chronicles the ascendancy of members of the evangelical movement in the US to positions of power in business and government. Publishers Weekly called it, quote, an important work that should be read, that should be required reading for anyone who wants to opine publicly on what American evangelicals are really up to. Michael will be speaking today for about 30 to 40 minutes and then taking questions from the audience. If anyone has questions during the Q and A session, I'd like to ask you to queue up behind the microphone in the back there by the pillar. And after the event's over, Michael will be signing books. For anyone who wants to stick around with our logistics out of the way, I would like to have everyone join me in welcoming Michael Lindsey to Google.

Thanks very much, Rick. It's great to be here with you all. And I'm excited to tell you a little about the work I did with Faith in the Halls of Power. I've been working on that book for five years. I was working in the late 90s for the Gallup Poll. Anyone here been part of a Gallup poll before? Been called by Gallup? Okay. My mom's always asking, who are those folks they call? And can I get my name on the list? Because I want to add my opinion. One of the things that I did at Gallup was answer media inquiries about religion in America in the run up to the 2000 election. A lot of producers from CNN or writers from places like the Wall Street Journal would call and say, I know that there are a lot more evangelicals in America today than there were back in 76 when Jimmy Carter ran for office. And I need to get the hard numbers. Interestingly enough, when you look at the data, you see that the number of evangelicals in this country actually hasn't grown over the last 30 years. The same percentage of Americans today say they're evangelical as they did in the late 70s. There's different ways to define evangelicals, but most of us who study it think it's between a quarter and a third of the adult population. So if There hasn't been this dramatic growth in the numbers. That gets us kind of scratching our head thinking, what's going on here? How have evangelicals become so prominent? My book Faith in the Halls of Power, tries to get an answer at that. What I've tried to do is look at who are those prominent leaders in different parts of American society who identifies as religiously evangelical, evangelical, Christian, and what role has it made a difference in their professional lives? I started off thinking I might be able to get interviews with 60 of them. In the end, I was able to get a whole lot more than that. Interviewed 360 leaders, including leaders in government, business, and culture. In government, I interviewed former Presidents Carter and Bush, about 50 cabinet secretaries, heads of federal bureaus and agencies, and senior White House officials from every administration from the 1970s to today. So President Carter's administration, that of Reagan, George H.W. bush, Clinton, and the current administration. I also interviewed about 101 senior executives at different firms, public and private. So President, CEOs of large companies like PepsiCo, Johnson and Johnson, Ritz Carlton, Intel, a wide variety of different organizations. I also interviewed Hollywood icons, directors, writers, producers, entertainers, as well as those folks in professional athletics. So folks like Kurt Warner, the NFL quarterback, to David Robinson, the NBA player, as well as folks in the visual and performing arts. So the dean of the Juilliard School, for example, Stephen Clapper. The thing that united all these different people that I interviewed, three hundred and sixty in all, was that they were all folks who identified as being evangelical Christian. Maybe they didn't like that term. About a quarter of the people I interviewed actually did not like that term because they said it has political and cultural baggage that I don't agree with. So I asked them a couple of basic definitions and if they could affirm that. I counted them evangelical, even if they didn't like that particular phrase for their own spiritual lives. The book chronicles how evangelicals have gotten active in American society in four different areas that I think are particularly government and politics, higher education, arts, entertainment and media, and then finally business and corporate life. The process of looking at these different books, these different leaders, was fantastic. I basically spent about three to four years traveling the country. I was living in Princeton, New Jersey, at the time, and I made 28 transcontinental trips, logged about 300,000 miles. I'm still enjoying those frequent flyer miles today. And in the end, I was able to go through all of the interview transcripts and the data, and it's about 5,000 pages worth of data. And what I tried to do in the book is sort of paint the narrative. Looking at these different sectors. People often ask me, well, how did you get the interviews? You know, that's some interesting people. And they don't always talk about their faith. I think part of it is that I took the nerve and was willing to ask people. One of my favorite stories actually occurred here in the area. I was doing interviews in Silicon Valley and had some time to kill. So I went over to the Stanford bookstore. I was just sort of milling around there in the bookstore. I've been in the store for about five minutes and I look over to the side and I notice there is a woman who looks exactly like Karen Hughes. Now, Karen Hughes had been serving in the Bush administration as counselor to the president. Probably the highest ranking woman in recent White House history, at least. And I knew that she was serious about her faith. But she had moved back to Austin. I wasn't positive it was Karen Hughes because she was wearing jeans and she didn't have, you know, a whole army of people around her. So I thought, I'm going to go see if I can hear her talk. Got close to her and I heard her say something to her son. And I recognized that raspy Texan voice immediately and said, this is Karen Hughes. And I thought, this is my big break. I've been waiting to get an interview with Karen Hughes. So I get closer to her and the closer I get to her to actually asking for the interview, my palms start sweating and my heart starts racing, going crazy. And I finally thought, you know, this is so stressful. I don't think I can take this stress. So I walk out of the store. I thought, this is crazy. I don't need this. It's a large plaza area outside the Stanford bookstore. And I'm just sort of walking around there. Lots of people around, got to thinking, you know, what is that all about? Why was I so intimidated by Karen Hughes? Why can't I, you know, just go and ask her for an interview? So I said, okay, I'm going to go back into the store. I've now got my courage up. So I walk back into the store and I can't find her. I thought, this is divine judgment. I didn't have faith earlier to go and approach her and now I'm going to miss out. Walk around the store for about five minutes and finally notice she's upstairs in the coffee bar area. So I start to walk up the stairs. And as I'm walking up the stairs, I start thinking, now how should I address her? Because her title had been Counselor to the President. So do I say Madam Counselor? Do I say Madam Counselor Hughes? Do I say, hello, Mrs. Hughes, or hey, Karen? What do I actually say to her? And my brain is still trying to sort out this conversation, but my feet reach her first, and so I haven't quite figured it out. So I don't know what to say. So I just tap her on the shoulder. She turns around, and whenever I get nervous, I have this habit of getting these red splotches on my neck and they sort of climb up my face and my ears turn red. And as I start to talk to her, I can feel the blood just sort of coming up my face. I told her what I was doing and that I'd like to try and do the interview. And she said, well, I can't do the interview right now. I'm working on the campaign. This was back in April of 2004, but if you'd be willing to talk to me after November, I'd be happy to sit down with you. And so I called her a couple of weeks after the election and was able to do the interview actually the day after the second inaugural in, in Washington. And it was a fantastic interview because here's a woman who has risen to dramatic prominence, perhaps, you know, breaking through many glass ceilings along the way. And yet she sort of left it all behind in part because she wanted to spend more time with her family and her faith. She said it was just very difficult to sort of navigate the boundaries between faith and work and family. And that's actually the case for a lot of the leaders that I interviewed. Different people that I talked with said that, you know, they wanted their faith to be important, but there were constant struggles along the process. A lot of people assume that evangelicals have been active in politics because they're united. They get, you know, united behind a few public policy issues like the pro life movement or the federal marriage amendment or faith based initiatives. Actually, that's not the case at all. There's really wide diversity within the evangelical community. In fact, you can have fights within the same White House. I interviewed a guy named C. Everett Koop. You may remember him. He was Surgeon General under President Reagan. He's an evangelical. And when I sat down to do the interview with him, we talked about his years in the White House. For the first five years when he was in the White House, he was very popular with the evangelical community. But in 1986, he decided that he wanted to speak out about what was becoming known as the AIDS pandemic Now, this was a very controversial move, especially especially within the evangelical community, because a lot of evangelicals saw AIDS as God's punishment against the homosexual lifestyle. So when Coop said he wanted to make this a public health issue, other evangelicals began to speak out against it. One of whom was Gary Bauer. Gary Bauer was President Reagan's domestic policy adviser. So he's in a really powerful position. So you have two evangelicals in the same White House, and they come to very different conclusions on the same issue, and they begin to battle and really have some real struggles there. In the end, you know, Coop was successful, was successful, and he was able to talk about how AIDS ought to be a public health crisis and advocating condom use. But it was one of those moments when there was really deep division between some very powerful evangelical leaders. So the idea that evangelicals are united doesn't play out even in the same Republican Party or the same White House administration. So, so then how have evangelicals been able to sort of exert influence in different ways? Quite simply, evangelicals have been successful because of one major thing. They all say that they think something is not right in the world, the world is not quite as it ought to be, and they want to get involved, to set it a right. And that gives them a fire in their belly to sort of get motivated to try and do something. And they've been active in a whole range of things in politics. You know, a lot of people have paid attention to domestic politics. That's actually not the interesting story. The amazing story has been the ways in which evangelicals have gotten active on international affairs. So I mentioned the story about C. Everett Koop in 1986, how evangelicals said, you know, AIDS is God's scourge and we shouldn't get behind a public health crisis. Fast forward 20 years, there's another evangelical in the White House now. It's in the Bush administration. It's a guy named Michael Gerson, the President's speechwriter and a person who had become known as sort of the in house guardian for the President's agenda for compassionate conservatism. He and Joshua Bolton begin to work together because they say that they really want to do something significant on the AIDS pandemic in Africa. And so they start to lobby the President and a number of other advisors to allocate a really large sum to help alleviate some of the suffering going on in Africa because of aids. They end up being successful in the largest expenditure the federal government has ever had for this kind of an initiative, $15 billion. Now, you can argue about how that money is being spent or where it's going, but you can't miss. It was a very significant development. And the most astonishing thing is that some of the very evangelical leaders who had condemned C. Everett Koop for speaking out about AIDS in 1986 praised the move by 2003, saying, It's a bold and courageous. It's the right thing to do. Evangelicals can change their mind pretty dramatically in a short span of time. And on international affairs is one of the big bits of news. Another area where we've seen some real developments happens on elite college campuses. There are more evangelicals on Harvard's campus today than there have been in 200 years. And I don't make that claim. A guy named Peter Gomes makes that claim. Peter Gomes is the chaplain at Harvard. He runs Memorial Church, and he's been there for the last 40 of those 200 years. So he can at least authoritatively comment on how things have been for the last 40 years. Why are there so many evangelicals at places like Harvard and Stanford, Berkeley and Yale? Why do we have that kind of dramatic growth? It's quite astonishing. Over the last 30 years, elite college campuses have sought to create a really diverse student body. It started off as an initiative for racial and ethnic diversity and expanded into geographical diversity. So now colleges like Harvard recruit as heavily in America's heartland in the south and the Midwest as they do on the two coasts. They look to try and have a racially diverse student body from lots of different ethnic populations. One of the unintended consequences, something they never expected, is that this sort of push for diversity has created another kind of diversity, religious diversity. And so now you have more evangelicals on these elite college campuses. Here's an interesting side note. At Yale, there's a campus ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ. Twenty years ago, that particular student group was 100% white. Today it's 90% Asian American. The Asian American influence on these elite college campuses has many times brought increasing Christian fervor. The evangelical campus group at Yale has grown five fold over the last 20 years. And you've seen that same kind of growth at places like Brown, Harvard and Princeton. Quite dramatic. So you have these new kinds of students that are coming to these campuses. But the, you know, the typical behavior is that if you have a teenager who goes to church while they're at home, they go off to college and they sleep in on Sunday mornings, they no longer go to church. And then they become young professionals and they're not as active in their religious lives, but they get married and some of them come back to church, and then they have kids and a whole lot more of them come back to church. Here's the interesting thing. If you compare evangelical young people with other religious traditions, with Roman Catholics or with Jews or with mainline Protestants, they are the least likely to give up their church commitments when they go off to college. So you have two really interesting dynamics. One is that you have more evangelicals being recruited to elite college campuses. And secondly, they get there and they don't give up their faith. And so you've had this upsurge of sort of evangelical influence on major college campuses and there's no signs of it abating. So that's one of the key ways in which evangelicals have joined the corridors of power. Third, there's a lot of activity going on in places like Hollywood. The real turning point was in 2004 with the release of Mel Gibson's film, the Passion of the Christ. Why was that so significant? Because it was one of the highest all time grossing films in U.S. history. And because it turned such a significant profit, all the Hollywood studios paid attention and they said, gosh, there's a whole faith audience out there that we want to try and reach out to. The interesting things about this particular film is that it's not really an evangelical type of film. In fact, the content of it is very, very Catholic. It's Catholic theology. It's kind of a Catholic orientation. And yet you have all these evangelical megachurches and pastors buying out entire studio, entire movie theaters for their congregations to attend on opening night or the opening weekend. So the Passion opened up the door and now Hollywood has sort of responded. In Hollywood, every major studio now has a division that sort of caters to creating entertainment that will appeal to faith friendly audiences. Another film that was in the top 25 all time grossing films was a movie that came out last year, the Chronicles of Narnia. It's based on a book series published by C.S. lewis, an Oxford professor who died back in the 1960s, but has been incredibly popular, especially with evangelical audiences. Waldemedia, who owns the rights to this whole series, has the next installment of this film series coming out in May called Prince Caspian. So Hollywood has sort of picked up this whole God talk and is using different kinds of media to make more room for faith kind of friendly entertainment. You also see some interesting developments going on in American corporate life. I interviewed all types of business leaders in different industries and the thing I was trying to figure out is how does your faith actually influence the way in which you run your company. Lots of interesting stories that come along the way. One is that there are a number of corporations that have sponsored affinity groups. Meetings that occur after hours, during lunch times, where different kinds of employees can get together with for all kinds of things. It started off actually in the 1990s with members of the gay and lesbian community saying that they wanted to have a place where they could meet fellow gay and lesbian workers and build some friendships. Shortly thereafter, evangelicals became really interested in this kind of development and wanted to try and see if they can also launch their own kind of affinity groups. And so they launched Bible studies and prayer groups. It's interesting because as I was doing the research over the course of the last couple of years, I was surprised how very often evangelicals were following sort of the strategies and tactics of the gay and lesbian community. One of the things that they have been particularly interested in is how the gay and lesbian movement has been able to use sympathetic characters on TV shows, for example, to try and create more openness to the gay lifestyle. Can I borrow your book for a second? There's an interesting vignette. I interviewed a woman named Barbara Nicolosi who runs an organization in Hollywood called Act One. It's a very impressive operation. It trains young, aspiring screenwriters how to do really good work. But the thing that you have to prove to get into it is that your faith is important to you. So you want to create entertainment that in some way resonates with your faith. Not in an artificial or simplistic way. It's actually quite complex. But it's an effort to try and help people of faith get into more powerful positions in Hollywood. It's been around for a couple of years, and Nicolosi was asked to talk about it. She was interviewed on a TV show about it, which I found to be quite interesting. I closed one of my chapters with this vignette, which I'll share with you. Nicolosi told me there's been in recent years a trend where you have to have a gay character in every TV show. You have to have a gay theme. Given a recent shift in the entertainment world, Nicolosi believes that this same sensitivity quote may be shown to Christians as well. She and other evangelicals I interviewed would applaud such a development. I'd rather have them pandering to us for a change instead of ignoring us. In 2005, Nicolosi was invited to appear on the tabloid television show Inside Edition. She was there to talk about Act 1. This particular group she's involved with and Christian's rising prominence in Hollywood. So when she said to one of the show's staffers, I never thought in my wildest dreams I would be on Inside Edition, his response did not completely surprise her. Didn't you know? He retorted, christian is the new gay. Kind of interesting to see. Thank you. How evangelicals are sort of following some of the same kind of strategies of using mainstream media to get some of their message across. And I found that this was occurring not just in Hollywood, but in corporate America. So these affinity groups have sort of come up over the last few years, and it doesn't just serve evangelicals. All types of religious groups are doing it. So now on Wall street, major firms have Torah classes. There are separate spaces reserved for Buddhist meditation or for Muslim employees to be able to pray. You have all types of different ways in which spirituality is sort of creeping into corporate America. Another thing that I found is that some business executives very much want their corporate image to reflect some of their faith commitments. One of the interesting ones that I interviewed was Deborah Waller, the CEO of Jockey Underwear. It was a great interview because we did it in their Manhattan showroom. This is where all of the buyers from Macy's or Neiman Marcus that will come in and they'll say, okay, I'll take 10,000 of those boxer briefs or something like that. And the room is plastered with larger than life pictures of their advertisements. So there's all these underwear models surrounding the room. I told her I'd never talked about God surrounded by so much flesh in all my life. Anyway, she was. As we were talking, I asked her, how does your faith actually influence the public image of Jockey? And she said, well, we made a decision a number of years ago that if we ever have a man and a woman in the same advertisement, they're going to be wearing wedding bands. She said, there's a whole lot of underwear industry that sort of wants to promote promiscuity or suggest all types of things, but we want to create a more wholesome image. And so when we have a man and a woman in the photo shoot, we want to suggest that they're husband and wife. And I said, well, you know, do you do this worldwide? And in fact, they do. I had a colleague I was telling at Princeton about this. He visited Germany and happened to notice there was a Jockey ad. He went up to look really carefully, and sure enough, even in Germany, they were wearing wedding bands. So this is just a small little way in which one particular business executive was trying to sort of signal the importance of her faith. I found this kind of signaling behavior happened all over the place. Once I knew to look for it, I could find it in lots of different settings. I interviewed Brad Rex, who was the head of Epcot at Disney World. On his desk he had this really large rock. And I said to him, well, what is that rock about? He said, oh, that's my conversation launcher. I said, okay, that sounds interesting. Tell me about it. He said, well, I went on a spiritual retreat a couple of years ago, and it was a really special moment for me in my spiritual life. And so I wanted to take a memento back. And I picked up this rock and I brought it to the office to sort of remind me of this significant spiritual decision. But over time, I realized that people would ask me about that rock. It would sort of launch a conversation. It gave me an opportunity to sort of talk about the importance of faith in my life. And that particular weekend retreat that I went on, I found this kind of thing happening all over corporate America. People would decide to have objects on their desk, or they would choose to display certain books on the bookshelf behind their desk or. Or they would choose to have certain artifacts, certain things that they would wear, all types of ways in which they signal their faith. This wasn't taking out their bible and beating it over people's heads, but once you knew to look for it, the signals were all around us. I found this kind of activity going on over the last 30 years in lots of different areas. And it actually reflects sort of a different way of thinking about evangelicals. In the book, I talk about the difference between one group of evangelicals, which get a whole lot of media attention. These are the people who say that, you know, we're going to take back the country for Jesus and they want to convert the country to be a Christian nation or help recover the nation of recover the notion of a Christian nation. They march on Washington. There'll be a person who'll get on the radio and say, you need to call your congressman about this particular piece of legislation. And so they'll flood the phone lines on Capitol Hill one afternoon. This is what I call populist evangelicalism. And it's been around for a while and been a really important part of the evangelical movement. But most of the leaders that I interviewed don't actually like those strategies. It's too off putting. It's too offensive. It just doesn't jive with their own sensibilities. Instead, they have what I call a more cosmopolitan faith. These cosmopolitan evangelicals they oftentimes rub shoulders at work with people of different faith or have no faith at all. And so they're not interested in sort of trying to take back the country. They're just simply trying to create an environment where their faith is seen as more authentic, legitimate, and, they hope, attractive. They share with these populist evangelicals the same kind of basic ideas about God or the Bible, heaven or hell, but they're a little bit softer in their rhetoric. They are more winsome in sort of the way in which they present their faith. And I have to say, on the whole, they've been more effective. So these are the people that were sort of driving the efforts in the late 1990s. They were leading the vanguard of evangelicals that were trying to lead for the passage of the International Religious freedom Act of 1998. This was a really significant. In my opinion, it's the most significant piece of legislation that deals with religion of the last 25 years. Why is it so significant? Because it made religious freedom a principal understanding of human rights, and they made that a bedrock of American foreign policy. But evangelicals couldn't do this if they were just trying to protect Christian missionaries in Southeast Asia. They had to appeal to a much broader spectrum. And so one of the things that they tried to do is build alliances with all kinds of religious groups. A couple of weeks ago, I was speaking at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and one of my conversation partners was a guy named David Saperstein, who's a Jewish leader in Washington. He worked hand in hand with evangelical leaders to kind of lead for this passage in the late 1990s. And he said, those kind of evangelicals, we can do all kinds of things together with. The cosmopolitan. Evangelicals are actually expanding their influence. They've moved into powerful positions. And I think that they are the kind of the leading edge of evangelical influence in ways that don't just serve sectarian aims, but actually reach out in ways that really help the common good. So I did a whole lot of different interviews with many different people, and in the process got a chance to visit with some fantastic people, people that you've heard about and other people that maybe you haven't, but have done some really significant developments. I close with one interesting story. I interviewed Secretary James Baker. Now, James Baker has probably been one of the most powerful political figures of our generation. He served not only as Deputy Secretary of Commerce, but also as Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State under two different administrations. He served as White House Chief of Staff. In addition, he's led five presidential campaigns. So he's done more senior things than most people ever think about in Washington. I asked Secretary Baker about his faith and how did it actually figure into his public life. And he said, well, you know, there came a time when I had to realize that the power that I had was. Was quite fleeting. He told about a poignant moment. He was walking along. He was actually driving along Pennsylvania Avenue on his way to the White House for an early morning meeting. He was in a car and he looked off to the side and there was another. There was a man who was walking along the sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue. Secretary Baker said, I instantly recognized this man because he had been a former White House chief of staff. And I realized that man had been in the very same seat I was sitting in at this moment about five years earlier. He had been in the very same office I was going to and had been in the very same car. And there was no staff surrounding him, There was no pomp and circumstance, just a single man walking alone with his thoughts. He said, it hit me that the power that we have is quite fleeting. And you have to think about how. How are you using it. Some of the evangelical leaders that I interviewed had been using their power and influence in really helpful ways, doing some very positive things that not just serve their own interest, but actually serve the interest of the common good. At the same time. There are some folks who have sort of used it to advance their own kind of claim and in the process tried to push down some other people. So it's a mixed bag. The book is neither a defense of evangelicals nor is it a polemic. It's designed to be sort of an authoritative, definitive account of how evangelicals have come to exert influence and what it means for America and for the evangelical movement. Well, I hope that at least whets your appetite on some of the things that I learned over the last five years while working on the book. What questions do you have? Things that I could answer that you're curious about or things you'd like to hear more about? Yes, sir. I think they want you to go back to the microphone, if you don't mind, so that they can pick it up. So do you see any threat to the separation of church and state from the increased presence of evangelicals in the corridors of power? Yeah, this is often a really kind of tension point for the evangelical community. And, you know, the front line of this has been the debate about the faith based initiatives. Here's the interesting story that we don't often Hear. So there's been all this debate since 2001 and really since 1996, with the charitable choice legislation being passed of the government sort of supporting faith based organizations to deliver social services. But here's the amazing thing. The federal government has been doing that not just for five years, they've been doing it for 50 years, but they've been doing it on the international front. Half of the world's food that's supplied to folks who are hungry is provided by the United States government. Almost all of that is channeled through faith based organizations. World Vision is one of the organizations I profile in the book. It's based in Seattle and it's an evangelical relief and development agency. And they are the world's largest supplier of food. They distribute more food than any other entity in the world. Most of that comes from the federal government. So the idea that, you know, the faith based initiatives in the US Is sort of blurring the line of separation of church and state. Well, perhaps that's the case, but it's been going on for a really, really long time. I asked individual political leaders about sort of, how do you maintain that separation of church and state? Because all of them said, yes, that's very important. It's an ideal that I believe in. It's part of the American fabric. They come to different conclusions. Some of them say, you know, I'll choose not to talk about my faith when I'm in political office, or I won't do that. Really, most politicians do talk about God, so you can't say that. It's interesting because back in 1976, Jimmy Carter came out and said that he was an evangelical or born again Christian in the campaign. Three weeks later, his opponent, Gerald Ford made the same claim. And you know, tons of presidential candidates have done it since then. So it's become kind of part and parcel to sort of talk about your faith. What I found to be very interesting though is the ways in which different leaders sort of adjudicate the tension between church and state. President Carter, I interviewed him and one of the things I asked him about is did you ever sort of talk about your faith? This is witnessing, as evangelicals call it, about your faith with other world leaders. Because I thought this is kind of the key thing. This is actually what evangelicals are hoping and praying for. They want a fellow evangelical in the corridors of power, inner chamber of political power, serious about his or her faith. And he said, yeah, I did, but one of the things that I decided is that I didn't feel comfortable doing it. On the home turf. So I never actually talked about my faith with a world leader on American soil. When I did foreign travels, different leaders would ask me about it. So the Chinese premier asked him about it. The head of South Korea and the premier in Poland asked him about it. And so he would talk about his faith. And in the book, I sort of recount some of those stories for him. That was a way of sort of drawing that church, state, division. It's also interesting because if you compare the Carter administration to the present administration, and you say, you know, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, comparatively speaking, they share a whole lot of basic Christian beliefs. I mean, if you compare them to the rest of the population, they certainly do. They believe same things about heaven, about hell, about Jesus, about God, and yet their administrations look pretty different. Why is that? One of the key ways in which there's a difference between those two administrations is in who they appointed. Whereas Jimmy Carter got into office and did not appoint, really, anyone else who shared his religious convictions to senior White House officials, no one was in his inner circle that shared that kind of conviction. George W. Bush has appointed many people who shared his basic kind of religious orientation, and that explains some of the significant differences between the two. It's a great question. Thank you.

I have two questions. One is the relationship between the evangelical movement and the environmental movement, and I'm wondering if you see any change or motion there. The second is the relationship between the evangelicals and the Republican Party, because it would seem to me that evangelicals might be feeling they've been played for chumps. Certainly they were an avenue to power. And yet their agenda, while some of us might think it has been advanced, I think it looks nothing like they would have hoped it would have been. So if you could comment on that and how that relationship might be evolving currently and how it might evolve in the future.

Yeah, exactly. Can I borrow your book for a second? There's a great story that I relate in the book that I'll just mention to the first question about sort of environmentalism. This is probably one of the most interesting developments of recent years is how evangelicals have sort of become more engaged on the issue about climate change or what they call creation care. One of the leading evangelical leaders who sort of at the forefront of this is a guy named Richard Cizik. He's the chief lobbyist for the national association of Evangelicals based in Washington. And he's been increasingly speaking out about saying that environmental concerns really are something that people of faith ought to be leading the forefront not chasing behind. There was a group of conservative evangelical leaders who issued a letter to the board of the NAE about six months ago and said, we want you to do one of two things. Either we want you to sign silence Richard Cizik, because he's distracting us away from issues around the family or homosexuality or abortion. So it's going to, you know, we're going to lose our power because we're going to become too divided on different issues. Or if you won't silence him, fire him. This is not what you should be doing. One of the leading signatories of this letter was James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, a very prominent voice within the conservative evangelical ranks. It's interesting to see how the NAU board responded. They decided not to silence Richard Cizik. They didn't fire him. In fact, they endorsed his agenda. There was a document that had been produced a couple years earlier called for the Health of the Nation, which is sort of a statement about what evangelicals believe about public policy. And in that, it says that environmental concerns should be at the forefront of an evangelical political agenda. So this has been a real radical shift from, say, the 1970s, and I think that that number is actually growing. You're seeing increasing number of evangelical leaders sort of speaking out about issues of creation, care or environmental concerns. And I think that the older camp, many of whom are sort of dying off, who are opposed to it, are becoming less and less prominent on that particular issue. One of the things about sort of the tension about the Republican Party and our evangelicals being used came up time and again. A lot of people ask me, you know, do these evangelical pastors or megachurch leaders, do they realize that the White House is just using them for political gain? The answer is, of course they do. They're actually quite smart and savvy, and they also are using the White House. So they're taking the bully pulpit of these powerful institutions and saying, this gives me credibility. Here's an interesting story. Jerry Falwell says that he knew that he had arrived on the national stage stage only when he got a phone call from Ronald Reagan. It happened in 1981. Reagan had nominated Sandra Day O' Connor to the Supreme Court, and he didn't want Falwell to speak out against it. And so the president called Jerry Falwell and said, jerry, would you please not speak out against this issue, at least until you get a chance to know Sandra Day o'. Connor. And Falwell got off the phone and said, I know I've made it The White House is interested in my opinion, and I have access. Now, a lot of the leaders that I interviewed, particularly Republican leaders, talked about deep tension that they feel with some of these movement leaders. One of the more colorful stories comes from Majority Leader Dick Armey. He was leader of the Congressional Republicans back in the late 1990s, and he told me it was very common for a group of evangelical movement leaders like Chuck Colson or Jim Dobson to come and have a regular meeting with the Republican leaders leadership. And he said, I finally had just had enough of it. They would come and they would beat us up, and I just couldn't stand it. And so here's a quote from my interview with Majority Leader Army. I said to James Dobson, you don't know how the legislative process works. All you want to do is come up whining and complaining about the failures we've experienced, and you ought to mind your own business. Then he turns to me and says, you know, there's a song by The Poynter sisters, Mr. Big Shot, who do you think you are? It wasn't his business to come up here and tell us that we weren't serving the Lord because we didn't succeed. I was so deeply offended by his audacity. And then there was this little wimpy guy that ran for president, Gary Bauer. And he's one of these arrogant guys that tell me how he made me the majority. As Shania Twain says, that don't impress me much. Very interesting to kind of see the tension between sort of Republican leaders and some of these evangelical leaders. And just yesterday, James Dobson issued an op ed in the New York Times that ran where he was basically talking about how they would not support Rudy Giuliani if he becomes the Republican nominee and threatened to support a third party candidate. I don't think in the end they'll actually do that because evangelicals are pretty politically savvy. Third party candidates won't succeed. But I think it's a warning shot that they fired over the Republican leadership to say, we really want a candidate who we can get behind and mobilize. Great question. Yes, sir.

Hi, thanks for coming here to speak to us. It's not just Christianity that has this problem. It's most religions that allow those in power to manipulate us. If I'm someone in power, I can say, well, look, if you're a good evangelical, you'll paint your car blue. And it might be convenient for me because I've got a blue paint company that I want to put forward. So how is this done? You've seen enough, and you've had a survey of enough of this. How is it that someone with an idea can use the pulpit of Christianity or of Islam or Judaism or whatever to invest themselves with enough power to carry out what actually turns out to be a personal point of interest?

Yeah, well, I would say that, you know, all the people who sort of get involved in politics are complicated and sort of this is an ongoing issue. It's not just a unique thing to religion. It's, you know, where you can see all types of kind of personal perspectives that fit into the mix. The thing that sort of struck me about evangelicals was how in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, they were, on the large part, sort of not engaged in the political process. And then something happened that really mobilized them and got them engaged in this vision. And part of it is exactly what you're saying. They began to sort of talk about how a notion of an idea sort of compelled them to be involved. There's a very significant difference that oftentimes is lost in national media between fundamentalists and. And evangelicals. Fundamentalists come into contact with secular society, and they say, this is not what we want. And they repel from it, they withdraw from it. They're no longer engaged. Evangelicals, on the other hand, come into contact with secular society. And they said, actually, I want to really be engaged in this issue. I want to be really a part of it. The development that we've seen over the last 30 years of sort of using faith to be culturally engaged is not just something about politics. In fact, I say that the kind of evangelical influence in America is a whole lot more than we think, and it's a whole lot less. At the same time, it's a whole lot more. Because you make a mistake. If you understand evangelicalism or religious expression as principally about politics, it's not, as I chronicle in the book, there's as much activity in, you know, higher education, corporate life and in Hollywood as there is in Washington. But it's a whole lot less than we think. Because if you think it's a united conspiracy to sort of take over the country, when you look at the data, you actually see there's not that kind of unity. They can't even agree in the same White House about a particular course of action, much less sort of a vision for enacting kind of their own vision and forcing it out on the rest of American society. So the ways in which I think faith has sort of become tapped in the political process reflects sort of a long Standing tradition. Alex de Tocqueville came in the 19th century and talked about this was unique about the American context where faith and patriotism kind of went hand in hand, and that piety was not divorced from the patriotic sentiment. And I think what we saw is that in the last two or three decades, it's just become more engaged, it's become more relevant, and the media gives a lot more attention to it than it was, let's say, in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. It's a really important question. Thank you. Yes, sir.

I guess that separation between, I don't know what you were calling it, sort of the soft evangelical and the more combative one seems very relevant because, I mean, if you go back a couple hundred years and go to England or something, you know, everybody's Church of England, and, you know, it's just not an issue whether you, you know, are sort of more in favor of, you know, showing your religion or promoting it. But when you take the value stance that, you know, America must be a Christian nation, as opposed to the value stance, there is a separation between church and state, and the state, you know, is happy. If you're a Hindu or a Buddhist or whatever, and that a Christian nation, the state doesn't want you to be a Hindu or Buddhist, that's a very different thing and a very new thing.

I think that's right. One of the interesting things that I learned while doing this research is that 70% of evangelicals don't identify with a religious right. And that was surprising to me, so that there is kind of a wide spectrum of beliefs. In fact, you know, I will not be surprised if we see a whole lot more evangelicals sort of voting for a leading Democratic candidate in the 2008 election than a leading Republican candidate. There's certainly more outreach occurring among the Clinton and Obama campaigns to the evangelical community than you see, for example, in the McCain or the Giuliani campaigns. So things don't always kind of match as you expect. The notion of America being a Christian nation depends on what you mean by that. 80% of Americans self identify as Christian. So if you mean, you know, what does the majority of the population identify with, yeah, sure, clearly it has that kind of sensibility. But if you mean sort of the establishment of faith that rubs completely against the way in which the country was founded and sort of the principal cardinal virtues of what American society wants, which is why those populist evangelicals, I think, have sort of reached the end of their limit. I don't actually see that their message is catching on. I think it's actually sort of dying off the language of saying, you know, we're part of a moral majority. It's very effective for mobilizing people within that community to feel like we're part of something significant. We're not alone. But the unintended other side of that is that it feels very dismissive or even offensive to people, people who don't identify with that, who don't see that you're representing my particular views. And that's the story that a lot of evangelical leaders were sort of slow to recognize. But I think more of these cosmopolitan evangelical leaders that I interviewed, more of them are sort of aware of that and particularly concerned about it. And they show a lot more sensitivity, also kind of reflecting the kind of increasing political diversity across the evangelical spectrum. Think about this. Last year, there was one. One event where Barack Obama and Sam Brownback, two different senators from very different parties, very different orientations. But there was one event where they both came together. It was an event called World AIDS Day that was sponsored at Saddleback Church by an evangelical pastor, Rick Warren. He's able to sort of bring together these two different sides in very intriguing ways. I see those kind of developments happening all across the country. Well, thank you all very much. It's been great to be here with you all. I hope you have a chance to read the book. If you're interested in me signing. I'd be glad to do that. Thanks very much.