God & the Commons

Moderator:
I'll leave that up to you all.

Male:
I think it's more important that we stay away ftom this approach. (laughs)

Moderator:
Can you say a little more about that?

Male:
Not everybody here is of Judeo-Christian heritage. Not everybody here may be that well in tune with it. It may have been taught those religions, understand those religions, as well as many other religions they've studied along the years. But their actual heritage, no. That may be something that many, I don't know if I would say most, founding fathers and those that help create the nation and the laws had in mind. This makes me think back to first approach though. That staying that course right there, we may be trying to get there. I don't think we ever have had separation of church and state.

Male:
I think this phrase, Judeo-Christian itself, is kind of an odd one, because there are profound differences between Judaism and Christianity. It's not a single religious tradition. I find that teaching "Introduction to World Religion" is that a lot of people think that Judaism is just another Protestant denomination. Jews and Christians believe in Jesus and Muslims don't, which is ironic because Muslims do believe in Jesus as a prophet and Jews don't. I think Jews somehow got incorporated probably sometime after World War II.

The problem with that approach No. 2 is first of all, that Judeo-Christian concept is very recent. They talked about a Christian concept. The Ku Klux Klan didn't say that the Judeo-Christian heritage is at stake. It said that Protestantism is what made America, and they had a very narrow view. Judeo-Christian isn't broad enough. We have had Muslims in this country, probably for 500 years. They came with the Spanish. We've had American Indians well before we were here. We've had Hindus and Daoists and Buddhists for a long time. We've had Aftican religious practitioners whose religions were suppressed in the 16th and 17th century but continued to practice them. It's way too narrow.

The other problem is I don't want any politician or any government telling me what I'm supposed to believe. I don't want the government to decide which religion is the one that should be dominating the public square. Most of us fled precisely that tradition in Europe, where religious affiliation and political affiliation were seen as the same.

Male:
It is too narrow, and I agree absolutely, what are the criteria that determine it's too narrow?

Male:
The fact that it excludes many people in this country, and even, I would say, if it was just Christian, there's no agreement on what is Christian. How many denominations of Baptist do we have? How many denominations of Lutheran? How many denominations of Methodist? We have all these different denominations. Who's gonna choose? I have mends who were very unhappy with religious leaders in their own denominations. Do we look at the church hierarchy? Do we look at the church grassroots? As soon as government, which is involved in practical things and power, starts arbitrating what is about absolute truths in religion, we've got a problem. I don't want people doing things that are expedient about religion as they do in the political realm of expediency about drug policy or foreign policy or AIDS education.

Male:
Do we have any contents or do we have any procedures that would permit us to resolve these issues that you raise, important issues, other than some recourse to violence or might makes right?

Male:
Well, I think people can bring their ethics, the ethics that are informed by their religions, into the public square discussion, but to establish a particular church or claim this artificial historical construct of the Judeo-Christian heritage, I think it establishes something that is ultimately hollow. It is dangerous, because it interferes with religious fteedom and the freedom of conscience.

Lambeth:
Not too long ago, a group of Jewish and Christian scholars got together, and they produced a book called Christianity in Jewish Terms. It's a book that very precisely, using a variety of criteria that I'm not learned enough to articulate all of them, but I read that book, and it set forth in very crisp terms, differences between Judaism and Christianity as these theologians saw it. Some of them were religious studies professors. I got the distinct impression that they both walked away ftom the experience helped, enabled. They were able to see their own faith in a crisper, sharper context, and I think that that can not be anything but helpful if it's done with the kind of respect that I saw radiating off the pages when I read it. It can be a clarifying experience in the sense of what I think XXXX is talking about.

Moderator:
Let me ask you all to feel like you don't have to raise your hand. Go ahead and jump in and just be mindful of how long you speak, because it sort of slows the conversation and you have to wait for someone to recognize you. So, I say you go for it.

Male:
It occurs to me that in the continent of North America and in area that has become the USA, there was a strong push in the beginning of this country that it would be a place where people would be free to practice their particular religions. They came primarily from in that area, Europe, where Christianity had been a predominant force. Therefore they were interested in avoiding the kind of sectarian violence that had occurred in historic Europe.

So anyway, they created this as a "free country," among other bywords. It seems to me that people have continued to flow to this country. There is something attractive about it, and I'm not sure what that is. I'm not sure that people come only for freedom to practice religion, but they're clearly wanting to come here much more than their wanting to go, apparently, anywhere else. And interestingly in the last few decades, there's been a secularizing tendency to somehow ignore some of those original ideas and specifically, to prohibit public arena display of symbols of those religions.

As a Christian, I feel sort of on the defensive, that things have been happening to erode what I see as a long-established tradition in this country. I'm not sure. There may be instances where other kinds of symbols have been stricken from the marketplace or the public place, that sort of thing. But it seems to me that the appropriate American approach would be to allow diversity and to allow those other symbols to be displayed. Responding to the lady across here, I feel that when we are forced not to display our symbols, then there's a certain inhibition of learning who one might be interested in fellowshipping with.

Female:
Right, and as long we can wear our pentacles and as long as we can when we're buried . . . there's a big campaign right now within my religious community of the earth-based religions to incorporate the ability to choose a pentacle pentagram on your headstone if you're going to be buried in the veterans cemetery. There is a movement towards that. That's what I think people want, and that's why I hate it when the conservative Christian radio establishment bashes multiculturalism because I think that that makes us all stronger. I think we need to have our symbols, and I think we need to have our morals and our ethics. I think people need to learn about us, need to know that Wicca has earth-based values and ethics that are useful to society in adding stewardship and how we treat our resources, that we harm none and have these values and aren't something to be feared.

If we can't talk about it, if we're completely repressed from this thing like we were talking about in France, then we lose that ability to learn about each other. What I want to see is a movement more towards multiculturalism, more towards true inner faith, towards a society . . . .it's like approach No. 2. We're talking about faith-based. Faith-based does not mean Judeo-Christian, but it does when you read it in the political context of this country. It's been given that definition. But everybody has faith, and there's a lot of faith-based moral activities going on that we can benefit from as a society by knowing more about.

Male:
I think a lot of the attractiveness of the United States right now is that they do have a lot more religious freedoms than most countries. However, there are a lot of religions that have spoken very quietly or hushed themselves under the collar, just because even in the early days, if you wanted to do trade with somebody, if you wanted to get along with somebody, you might have gone with the common feeling around there, something you felt safe with. But there's a lot of cultures from the old world that brought old religions with them, and they are here too.

Male:
I think it's important to put in a note of historical clarification, if you'll indulge me here. If you look at the Constitution, the part of the First Amendment that deals with religion has two sections to it, and nowhere is the phrase "wall of separation" used. That comes a generation later in some correspondence of Jefferson. It talks about Congress, the new federal government, shall make no law concerning an establishment of religion. It did not disestablish the official religion in states like Massachusetts, which until the 1830s was using tax dollars to support Harvard Divinity School. It simply says the government will not take any position to establish or disestablish.

The second clause is the free exercise clause which many people have spoken to here. People want to be able to express their faith, and that's one of the things that government should facilitate but not at the expense of any one group. The Constitutional issue here, I think, is one of prohibiting monopoly by any one religion. That's what they had their fill of from European experience, and I would say, most of the colonies. Let's not read back too much religious freedom. You look at Pennsylvania. You look at Rhode Island. Those were pioneers. The others came along later.

Female:
The Spanish conquistadors came here way before them, and the Norse were here in 1000. So, let's be broad about our perspectives on the history. It's not all northeast.

Female:
I was just gonna say, don't forget . . . speaking ethnically, I love all parts of American culture. The parts that are Anglo-Saxon - us, heathen. Just don't ignore the fact that the Judeo-Christian mirror overlying British civilizations resting on a heathen and Welsh­pagan framework. Don't forget that. We had a lot of important concepts . . . I wish XXXX XXXXXX was here, because he's got Anglo-Saxon common law at his fingertips being a heathen and a lawyer. A lot of important concepts in our law system come from the heathen times. They were not invented by the Romans.

Male:
I think when we look at this perspective, when we look at the language being used, is when we see just how difficult this discourse and this dialogue is, as we're seeing this evening, because there is no clear definition for what is the separation between church and state, just like there's not a real clear definition of what is this Judeo-Christian heritage. If you look at the rhetoric of the 2004 election, you have John Kerry saying that Bush, in supporting his faith-based initiatives, is violating a historical separation of church and state. If you look at Bush's speeches though, he talks about how he honors and adheres to the principles of the separation of church and state. You find these terms completely different, and I think that this is one of the biggest problems. We're not even speaking the same language.

People within the first approach and the second approach might be using the same terms.
Tomorrow, in Danbury, Conn., there's going to be a big rally by people in the second approach, and they picked Danbury because it was the Danbury Baptists that Jefferson wrote to when he coined the phrase, "separation of church and state." They're going there to say that it's been . . . they're for separation of church and state, but not how the secularists and the current system that they're arguing against have defined it. They say that this isn't how Jefferson meant it. He didn't establish this permanent wall, this impregnable wall, but that it was to keep the federal government out of it. They think the state government should be allowed to be a part of it.

That was Gore's argument in Alabama. There's not even a consistent set of definitions and terms, and so, if we can't even speak the same language, I don't know how approach 1 and approach 2 are supposed to come to some consensus as to what's going on here. I think that kind of helps us capture some of the complexities of this.

Moderator:
Let me put something out here for just a second. Let me just ask you to think for a second. What might be important about taking this direction? Does anybody see anything important about taking this kind of direction?

Participant:
I would be very interested to see, if you did stick to approach No. 2, how diplomatic your international relationships would be. It would just segregate everything, because you lose the power to approach the Middle East or Far East Asia with that.

Moderator:
So you're saying there would be significant costs to this approach?

Participant:
I would say yes, there would be massively significant costs.

Female:
I think the costs would be the alienation of others; just the term, "recover our Judeo­Christian heritage." I work very closely with Native American students in research. My Native American students would just . . . it would be a slap in the face for them for us to say that, "recover our Judeo-Christian heritage." This is not what America's all about. As many of you pointed out, many of us came to the United States as immigrants, because we can practice our own faith freely. We're able to do that without persecution by the government or by others. So, it's almost anti-American, I feel, to have that. That's what I believe in, the ability ofthis country to sustain itself because people can practice freely.

Male:
One of the questions I think about is this, that so many people value, is carried-on tradition. What is the tradition that carries that? Is that tradition in jeopardy now? Is there something to be recovered, or is there only something yet to be discovered? If there is some tradition that values diversity, human life, that has as one of its fundamental tenets, whatever else the word God means, it's not me. If there is some tradition that carries that, is that a valuable tradition, and is it in jeopardy?

Female:
It's only in jeopardy if we try to limit it.

Male:
Part of the problem is that there's always . . . pointing us back to the First Amendment I think is useful, but the problem becomes one if we want to control the government for our purpose, whatever it happens to be. We need the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need the other traditions as part of the public discourse. The great danger in the United States today has nothing to do with any of this. The god who is destroying freedom in the United States today is money and the control of our political system by money. We have made it so expensive to be a candidate for public office that you sell your soul to whomever to get the money to be a candidate. Those of us who have concerns based on our faith . . . there's no danger of us controlling. The money is in control.

What we need to be is not letting the people with money manipulate us by dangling religious symbols here and there to make us think they're our friends, and they're buying our votes. We need to be critical. We need to be willing to hold our public officials accountable. What we desperately need . . . instead of worrying about how to control it, how can we critique it? How can we criticize it? How can we work together to challenge the authority that's really running the system?

Moderator:
Let me ask another question. Is there anybody with a different perspective that, other than that we don't have a Judeo-Christian tradition right now? Is there anybody that has a different perspective on this that perhaps we might or is heading in this direction? From what I'm hearing in the group, there seems to be, it sounds like to me, there's some agreement in the room that this may not be the approach that you all want to take. Is there anybody here that has a different perspective that this may exist?

Lambeth:
I guess I have a question for XXXX that I think speaks to that. Were you trying to suggest XXXX that the Judeo-Christian heritage in its main outline was in fact carrying this tradition of freedom of religion in both the same senses of the First Amendment, or were you trying to suggest something else?

Male:
No, personally Judeo-Christian is offensive to me precisely first of all because of what it does to Judaism. So, I'm not suggesting that. I am open to the possibility, and I'm eager to discover if there is a normative tradition that needs to be preserved and built upon. Can we live successfully as a people without some normative traditions that we depend upon, that offer us orientation and direction. As far as I am aware, the big religious traditions are so internally divided, there's such diversity within them that I don't know how to speak about a single tradition, but it's something that's working itself out through time. I don't understand it, but I'd like to help it along if possible, but I have to understand what the tradition is

Lambeth:
I think you're saying something important that we can work on, maybe not here but later. Thank you.

Moderator:
Is there anybody that would like to say something that hasn't spoken yet?

Participant:
You mean in this approach?

Moderator:
Yes.

Participant:
Yes, I was waiting.

Moderator:
Well, why don't you go ahead, because we're going to have to move on to the next approach. So, I just wanted to give people a chance who haven't had a comment or would like to say something to please feel free to take this opportunity.

Female:
I was going to say something about this approach, briefly. I do believe we have a Judeo­Christian heritage, and I think it's probably served us pretty well. What I'm thinking maybe is what's underneath . . . maybe what's bothering everybody and certainly what's bothering me is that in our society today, I'm afraid of a fundamentalist takeover. I trust everybody in this room, but I don't trust the fundamentalists to recover . . . I can't quite say what I'm saying here, because I'm scared. I don't have a problem with our Judeo­Christian heritage. I have a problem with the fundamentalist bent that this is taking, and that may be what is empowered by this approach.

Participant:
I guess the interesting thing to me is, in order to even have an approach, there has to be some goal. There has to be something that if you want to recover something, if you want to stay the course, if you want approach 1, 2 and 3, there has to be some goal. Again, it's interesting looking at it as an American instead oflooking at it as a human.

I would say looking at this about the Judeo-Christian heritage, I guess what we're talking about when we're even talking about religion is the age of prophecy. We've have Krishna, Zoroaster, Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed. I guess with each of these things comes a set of values. Not only values with how you conduct yourself religiously but also socially, different things, different regions. It's kind of interesting that when you talk about Judeo-Christian, that you look at the words of each of these beings, and when you look at the promises of each of these beings and the things that they brought forth, the civilizations that they brought forth, that we, as human beings, try to control.

I guess that the step after the age of prophecy, from what I know, is the age of fulfillment. I think from these approaches is everyone is trying to get a certain level of fulfillment.
What I've found with all of these different beings is they're in the same family. Now, I don't know what you research, but I've found that they're all in the same family. When you look at Isaac and Ishmael, when you look at Christianity came from one branch and Islam came from one branch and they're all within the same family through our time.

So, it's really interesting to see how human beings with free will try to control things, I guess things not really in their control but are given to them to try to reach a certain level of fulfillment. So, it's interesting seeing that and seeing the different approaches, but I guess that I would say that we have to kind of realize, and I thank XXXXX for taking us back to the beginning to know where it is we're going futuristically, because we seem to forget. Also, as my friend down there said, the language is very interesting. If you don't know what the definition of secular is, or if you don't have a definition of cultural or some of these things, you can be arguing about what you're talking about.

Male:
The faith-based initiative, I think, is misplaced in approach No. 2. It actually belongs in approach No. 3. I'll get to that, but let me agree with XXXX that there is no Judeo-Christian heritage. That was mostly, I think, an attempt by Christians or a certain group of Christians, not all Christians by any means, to broaden their appeal for support. So, they used Judeo-Christian. But it indeed does do violence to Judaism. I think, in a rough cut, if we did have a religious tradition in America, and I have to, because of some useful interventions from the row down from me . . . you're right, we have to define what we mean by American.

So, by American I simply mean that republic which came out of the English colonies. So, putting aside the Spanish colonies and the French up in Canada having made their way down to Louisiana, and of course, putting aside Native Americans and their religious tradition. Out of the English colonies, which were Protestant throughout, everyone was Protestant, there was much Protestant evidence, although not an established church, even in Pennsylvania, and never an established in Rhode Island, but nonetheless, a thoroughgoing Protestant people.

Male:
Wasn't Maryland Catholic?

Male (same as above):
Maryland was established as a Catholic haven, but they encouraged the Protestants and Catholics to come, and then, due to military action, English Church of England established the Church of England there around 1640s. So, there was a Church of England in Maryland that had to be disestablished around 1775, 1776.

So, this is a definition of America which I'm ... so out that comes a variety of Protestant groups. Now, I don't mean to say that there weren't Jewish peoples. There were, but they were very few. There were some Catholic people, but very, very few. So, out of this you get a variety of Protestant groups, and then you get a new nation. Protestantism in the new nation, 1789 to the 1830s, Protestantism just exploded. It's called the Second Great Awakening. Methodists and Baptists in particular, Presbyterians to a large extent as well, and other Protestant groups. Then there was an attempt, which was quasi-successful, to have kind of a sense of, some called it disparagingly, a least-common denominator of Protestant hegemony. Proponents said there's sort of a broad Protestant stream of commonality. There again, recognizing that there are Jews and Catholics and many nonbelievers as well. As a very rough-cut, some said hegemony which is bad, some said a positive Protestant ethic. It was probably a little bit of both.

You take that on through the Civil War, and then it begins to feather out even more. You get more and more Catholic immigration. Catholics are ruthlessly discriminated against. The Know Nothing Party, etc. and so on, but many Catholics nonetheless though they're discriminated against. Then you get into the 20th century, still a fairly sharp division between Protestants and Catholics, but still a Protestant culture. It was called, disparagingly, the WASP, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant kind of culture, but it was nonetheless roughly there or you couldn't even name it, the WASP. And again, there's good and bad in that, but some of those Protestants were separationists. Some of those Protestants were not, and so to talk about approach number two, being Judeo-Christian, it's sort of wrong in eight different ways.

So to fear a Judeo-Christian heritage is to fear something that never was. That's different than saying, maybe there's some Protestant fundamentalists that I'm really aftaid of. That's different. That's much more precise and, I think, constructive, than this rendition of approach No. 2.

Then last point, the faith-based initiative is different. It's really approach No. 3. Maybe this is your segue.

Moderator:
That's a great segue.

Male (same as above):
With the faith-based initiative, it said that No. 1, there are a lot of charities out there that do good things. Some of them are not religious. I won't use the word secular, but they're not religious. They're everything ftom American Red Cross to . . . Girl Scouts is a youth building . . . Four H . . they're not religious.

Then you have religiously affiliated and thorough-goingly religious groups as well. So, what the faith-based initiative said is it's not who you are that disqualifies you from government social-services grants. It's not your nature that should disqualify you, and to disqualify you by your nature, is to discriminate you on the basis of religion. Instead, what matters is, what do you do with the government funds after you get them? You have to do the delivery of services that the government has contracted for. Not go teach catechism or pray or have a devotional Bible study. You've got to deliver the social services.

That's all the faith-based initiative is. So, it is saying, religion has civic value. It does charity, and in some cases, it says it does charity extremely well, because it also brings love of human kind. I care about you, because maybe you'd say you're one of God's creatures or however that faith might express it. But it's still delivering the service that the government bargained for. It's not delivering an explicit religious observance or proselytizing you. That's all it is.

Moderator:
Well, that's a great segue. You're right. So, we now move into our third approach, and this is "many of our nation's problems stem in part, proponents of this approach say, from our secular culture which has come to undermine our religious and spiritual sensibilities. Advocates remain adamant about church-state separation as a means to keeping religious and spiritual values out of the public arena, but want to ensure that spiritual values retain their vital and distinct character, uncompromised by an all anthro­political power. So, what attracts you about this approach?

Male:
I question automatically whether there has ever been a separation between religion and politics. I don't think it's ever existed, and I don't think it can.

Male:
I agree. Maybe I'm an optimist about this approach, or maybe I'm seeing this approach through my own lenses. You cannot separate religion and public life. It would take an authoritarian police state to do that, and that's not America. So, you're absolutely right if that's what separation means. So, surely it can't mean that.

Something that begins to approach it is an institutional . . . it takes government as an institution. The government's very, very different than civil society. Government's just a small part ofthe larger civil society. So, it's the government that should be separated from organized religion, but even that doesn't work, for reasons that people have said. You cannot make law, you cannot legislate without values. I mean, a law is a value statement of the common people through their elected representatives. So, every law, except the most rudimentary, regulatory laws, laws like you stop on red and go on green, could be the opposite. We drive on the right, but in England we drive on the left. That kind of stuf. I guess doesn't have values as long as everybody's doing the same thing.

But most laws have values, if we're not a religious person, and we have a worldview of some sort. It's pretty hard to be a nothing, even to be a nihilist or just a materialist. So separation of government from religion can't mean that governmental laws can't have embedded in them values which some people derive from their religious faith.

Male:
One respect that you think of a group of people making a decision to pass a law not to impose, for example, a specific prayer of a specific religion upon everyone. Those are values that are not necessarily coming from a religious perspective but from just a perspective the belief in the fact that everyone's individuality should be respected and one particular thing should not be imposed upon them. Some religions might believe that. Others may not. I think you can come to that value from a religious or a nonreligious perspective, but then, I think you're basically saying you don't want that imposition on people.

Female:
Well, there will be some that are absolute, because they'll be shared by the vast majority of all your faith traditions. No murder, stealing, rape, assault. They're almost what you would call natural laws, because you can't have a civilized society, you can't live without those. But then there are other laws that are a matter of choice, like supporting stem-cell research, euthanasia. That's accepted as a religious principle by some but not others.

Male:
So a society can legislate on euthanasia, either for or against or some interim position, because it can be simply a moral position which may be informed by your religion or it might not.

Female:
I think it takes public deliberation for that. In the case of euthanasia, in the case of the Netherlands, it took them 10 years to deliberate as a society whether they would allow euthanasia in the Netherlands. Ten years of deliberations like this, in groups, in cities, in small towns. And at the end, they finally agreed that that would be a part of what it means to be Dutch. It is really important that these types of issues are not to be taken lightly. As a society, I think that we have the responsibility and even the obligation to hear each other out, to be able to see the other point of view and to think and to be able to deliberate together as a society. It's not an easy matter. Your value system is very important to me to understand as it is, I hope, that you can understand from my perspective.

Female:
And they came up with a system that had a lot of checks and balances. It protected those who did not believe in it. There's nothing coercive about it. If you don't believe in it, you simply don't do it. It went to vast lengths to make sure that the patients are informed and making a free choice and are not being pressured into it by religious leaders or economic leaders

Male:
The two of you aren't saying though, that if a society makes unlawful use of euthanasia that somehow that violates the separation of church and state? Is that what you're saying?

Female:
If a society, come again please. If a society . . .

Male (same as above):
If a society makes euthanasia unlawful, you're not saying, are you that that somehow violates the separation of church and state?

Female (same as above):
If it makes euthanasia unlawful, does that violate the separation of church and state? No, I think the public together should come to that conclusion together.

Male (same as above):
Then I agree. I completely agree.

Male:
Can I come back to this faith-based initiative? I think there are four fundamental problems with it. First of all, it ignores the fact that we give massive subsidies to faith­based charities already through tax-exempt status. If I give money to the Salvation Army or to Catholic Relief Services or any religious organization that's doing good works, I can get a tax deduction from my taxes. So, instead of giving it to Uncle Sam, I give it to a religious organization. That supportive of religious, faith-based initiatives is already there.

Secondly, if government gives money directly to religious groups for specific ends, if that has the right to dictate how that money is spent, and it's the open foot. What people forget is when government goes into something, it starts telling you how to do it, and it's the end of religious liberty if government becomes a major source of funding for religious organizations and activities.

Thirdly, at least in the present administration, and I don't want to be partisan about this, the vast majority of these grants have gone to religious organizations that are coming out of the Protestant tradition. Some of the president's strongest supporters were horrified to hear that perhaps Louis Farrakhan would be eligible to receive a grant. So, it's faith-based initiatives, but they want to make sure that the range isn't too far.

Fourth is that it starves nonsectarian charitable groups and public agencies of funds. So the social worker that represents a minority religious tradition or no religion at all or has a "unorthodox lifestyle," maybe he's gay or maybe she's gay, can't get work because the government is now funding organizations that has as part of their faith teachings that those are inappropriate lifestyles. So you then force minority groups and minority lifestyles out of certain fields of activity because you've tied up government funds in groups that are either claiming that they have a right to discriminate. I many concerns about faith-based initiatives, and I strongly suspect that the motivation of the government and the people who propose it.

I actually don't have a problem with bring people's spirituality to life. The most profoundly religious president in my lifetime was Jimmy Carter, and I have an infinite respect for the way he let his faith inform his political decisions. I don't have a problem with that. He never did it in a divisive way. He never tried to exclude people in that basis. So I don't have a problem with the phrase in that way, but I do have a problem with the way it's being used politically now, and I think the faith-based initiative is exactly the kind of subterfuge which is a way to undermine various activities that are going on in this country that have historically been through secular agencies.

Moderator:
Are there other thoughts?

Participant:
To look at this approach from a different perspective, a lot of our talk has been about the governmental side which is important, and I'm not sure if governmentally the third approach is really that practical because of the pull from the people in approach 1 and those from approach 2. Both kind of pull in opposite directions. From a religious side, I'm really drawn to the third approach particularly in the yellow packets and the comments of Rabbi Lerner and others that have advocated this kind of third way. As a Baptist minister, Baptists have been very tom lately on the issue. There's some that want to go approach 2.

What we have is this idea that the church is pushing itself towards political purposes, trying to build alliances with political power, and when that happens, it scares me somewhat the government side, but it really saddens me with the church with religious people when we lose our calling. We lose that prophetic voice, we lose that position as the conscience of society, and we lose that ability, I think, to really benefit society, like churches, like religious people really could, because we're now concerned about winning offices, codifying our beliefs, getting more money, more political power. When that happens, then I think society has lost, because we've lost the religious beliefs, we've lost the churches, we've lost the synagogues, we've lost the temples out there trying to make our communities a better place. That's what really draws me to approach 3.

Male:
Perhaps I'm just a huge cynic, but I don't really see religion as existing in a vacuum, or religious belief existing in a vacuum such that religious people and religious organizations are out to do good and better the community and that's it. Take people to a higher power, and that's the end all, be all of religion. I don't see that at all. I think that from the religion that I've studied and all the different kinds of religions that I've studied, it's always about power and money and who's in control, where do we want things to go and who's steering the ship.

And so, to say religions are losing their freedom and are being sucked into political organizations, the political steamboat that you can't get yourself out of and oh no, religions have been perverted. No, it's always been that way. I don't think religion has ever had this pure essence to it, because it's something that is generated and perpetuated by human beings. Human beings are based on wanting power, wanting to be in control, and you go about these through different channels. Some are politics, some are war, some are religion. In my opinion, it's one in the same.

Female:
I'm hearing you say religion. You're not talking about direct, ecstatic experience on the part of the individual. You're talking about the organization, right?

Male:
Well, yes. We're talking about religion. You can talk about individual beliefs, but that doesn't play as much of a role in the public sphere.

Participant:
It's kind of interesting to hear a lot of these viewpoints, and just on my cultural background, me specifically, with my belief system, you actually can't run for office. You can't take part in partisan politics. It's really interesting. You can't see a difference in the prophets of different religions, and if you see a difference, it's almost like you're negating the whole effect of God yourself. So, it's really interesting. Like I said, I don't know your cultural backgrounds. I'm really not going to go too deep into mine, but it's really interesting from my perspective seeing it from a different viewpoint. I actually live in that age of fulfillment that I was talking about. So, I don't really see any problems.

Moderator:
With this approach?

Participant:
With any of them. They're all band-aids.

Moderator:
Say a little more about that.

Participant:
I tried to talk earlier. When you have the adherence of humanity as a whole, no matter what your religious belief is, whether you are pagan, Wiccan, whether you are a Hindu, whether you're a Christian, Muslim. Most of these people, most of this humanity, they're all looking for a promised one. Hindus are looking for the 10th Avatar. Christians are looking for the spirit of truth to return, the glory of the father. Muslims are looking for the return of Jesus and also the Imam Iti. I think that's correct. I don't know. And the Lord of Hosts for the Jewish. So, everyone is waiting, looking and trying to get to a certain level of fulfillment, and everything that we're going to have . . . Like I said, if you forget the goal, it's really hard to . . . if you forget where you're trying to go, you get sidetracked.

Earlier, they said that humanity really wasn't mature enough. I think that finally getting to a point, to reach a level of maturity, to actually have a certain level of peace . . . if we think that we're the only ones in this universe, and we think that our social structure is a perfect thing, then we reach a certain level of pride and vain-glory. I think that if you step back and just see the unity and the diversity would help out a lot. But anything that is a barrier, anything that is a prejudice, whether it be religion, whether it be politics, whether it be whatever, social, class, if it's a barrier to unity, then it's not really a part. It's man. It's not the work of God. That's just my personal opinion.

Male:
I very much align myself with the third alternative, and I'm very glad to see reference to the writers, religious leaders, Lerner and Wallis. They get together with theologians like Cornell West, the African-American tradition, Arun Gandhi and others whose names don't come to me, are having a conference in a couple months to bring together people of faith to address serious issues in the public order. So, this isn't just theoretical. It's a movement that's coming out, and as Jim Wallis says, "the political right wing no longer has a monopoly on claiming religious value and motivation."

One thing I like about this which is jeopardized by a certain aspect of No. 2 is that it enhances what I call that other part of the First Amendment guarantee, namely, the free exercise of religion, freedom to be prophetic. I'm using maybe code words here, but the prophetic impulse in the Judeo and Christian tradition, and for me, they come together, is to be able to point the finger of God's judgment at social institutions, political and economic institutions and say, "This is wrong. That's gotta be changed. If you don't change it, all hell's gonna break loose."

So, to be able to challenge the gods of materialism, I would say nationalism, militarism, things which people sort of take as their existential postulace. It doesn't really matter where they go to church on Sunday. What they really believe is the flag or that the president should always be given the benefit of the doubt or that the president knows best or whatever that is.

I think that the values inherent in the third alternative are willing to contend with the powers that be, and to me, that is the height of religion. It brings a transcendent principle, on which I learned a lot from studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Third Reich, when the official church, the official state - one in the same. German Christianity, which was abominable, and Bonhoeffer says, that's not what the Gospel is about. So people that joined with him in what became an underground seminary, and some parts of it were a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, were willing to challenge social evil out of a religious motivation. I don't think any of us are called to engage in political assassination, but I do think we need to be able to call a spade a spade and point out that, as Jim Wallis says, budgets are moral documents. What does it say when we're giving tax breaks to the rich and cutting programs for the poor? So that's all encompassed in the approach of No. 3.

Moderator:
We're gonna need to wrap up, but I'll take one more comment.

Female:
I have two questions so maybe there will be an answer, so maybe we will have to have another comment. One question is about approach 3. It seems like it's elusive, because I cannot understand how somebody is going to make sure that the religion and the spiritual values . . . I don't want to use the word religion, because to me, somebody who doesn't believe in a religion, doesn't want to be in a religion, all the religions, atheism is
a religion, so, I'm including everything . . . how are we going to keep the vital, distinctive character uncompromised by an alliance of political power? How are we going to stop a religion from having an alliance with political power? Unless you can be sure that it can happen, then I'm all for approach 3. Who's going to stop them from having one
religion over another, from having an alliance with a political power?

Moderator:
I think it's a great question for another forum. I'm not sure we're going to answer it in the next seven minutes. What I would like to do, if we could, let's just reflect for a minute because we do only have seven more minutes. Think about what was said tonight, and did any of you hear what might be some common areas of interest or some common ground that you all might have agreed upon? Just throw some things out.

Male:
I think the most common thing I've heard is there's a difference between individual practice, and I think you use the term on the individual level, and then, how religion manifests itself. So you should have respect for different symbols and manifestations of people's religions. And then, looking at religion also as institution and religion as an institution involved in government, making policies or state institution or religion in school, that there seems to be a little bit of a difference in the way that people look at our individual religion and then religions become institutionalized. There seemed to be a common theme of concern and respect for those two areas.

Female:
I think he had something about the brewing, to come up with the idea of America, and the world for that matter, has grown for so long, perhaps this as a country or a society, not the Judeo-Christian heritage, but as a country has probably grown with a lot of traditions, and perhaps you were trying to find, I thought, something that was a common tradition, some kind of freedom to grow naturally and otherwise. Sometimes, some sort of a common tradition, so that everybody can feel that they are part of it and have a name to it which doesn't automatically eliminate everybody else, a huge section of people.

Moderator:
And if you reflect back on the three approaches, because remember what we were talking about tonight was God & the Commons and the role of religion in public life. Did you all hear any common ground on any of the approaches in terms of either adopting some of the approaches?

Participant:
From the discussion it seems that approach 2 was not a full-blown approach to a complete looking towards our government following a specific tradition. I don't know if there was any agreement on whether there should be none, a little bit or some mixing of church and state. We did, at least, seem to agree that we should stay away from a full-blown concept.

Moderator:
Would everybody say that that was common agreement?

Male:
I think there seems to be a consensus that religion has a vital role to play in forming people's ethical decisions and how people discuss issues in the public arena without privileging anyone in particular. I think there seems to be a broad consensus on that.

Male:
There's a procedural consensus, that to me is perhaps most important, that is we have these two procedures of fight or flight and those are not followed. There's a civility procedure of conversation that . . . I'm rarely in a room where there's so many different perspectives represented and people speaking rather reasonably and civily I thought.

Lambeth:
Although not everyone articulated it, I think there's a sense that we can all learn better the language of other traditions, and we could have something to learn factually, just in the matter of knowledge of traditions. There's an impulse to religious literacy, though broadly conceived, and that somehow this is an era in which we can't afford to be ignorant. We need to have more dialogue so that we in fact practice the five freedoms that we have in the First Amendment and understand how they work and what you have to do to get them to work.

Participant:
I think I saw a commonality in that people know what they don't want. I saw a lot of people that when it was something that would seem as excessive or seem as all the way on one side or another, I just felt a certain commonality that people knew what they did not want. So, hopefully, if we know that, then we know exactly what we're trying to build.

Moderator:
So let me ask you all, did any of your thinking change about this issue by participating tonight? Anything shift for you tonight?

Female:
I was sort of somewhere between 1 and 3 and I shifted a little bit more towards 3.

Female:
I found it very helpful. Like she said, I felt myself shifting from 1 to 3 because I was feeling like it was safe, and there was a lot of maturity in this room to accept other paths and to listen. I've been in places where I didn't feel that way, and it's really nice to be with this group.

Female:
I think what's interesting, what you said. I feel that 3 is rather like too utopian perhaps. It's not something that . . . I wish it could happen, but I'm not quite sure how we're going to organize that society such that it really does adhere to approach 3. But I think after the conversation we had here, I am hopeful that we can approach that, that we are on that trajectory. It's probably the most . . . as far as something that reconciles all the different approaches in a way that is pragmatic for society to be a peaceful society.

Male:
I'll share a belief with you. I believe that still waters run deep, but there's a couple of people in this group that haven't shared their opinion with us or what they thought about it and I'd really love to hear from the people that have so far...

Female:
I'm one of the people that hasn't said anything. I have not studied religion. I'm not religious. I love it that in this country my kids can walk into any church, any synagogue, any building and not be shot for trying to learn. Fundamentalism does scare me. I agree strongly with you that organized religion can be really scary. I guess that's all I have to say.

Participant:
Actually, with his comment, I'd like to hear from XXXXX, if you don't mind.

Male:
The reason why I was quiet is because what was on my mind was said pretty much by a lot of the other people, but my understanding of religion is that religion is a person's way of life and one thing that really struck me . . . if this is possible, part of the teachings of my religion per se, either where you're ruling or you're being ruled . . . when this issue was brought in election and John Kerry was asked regarding abortion, said that it's against his own personal belief, but as a ruler, he can't make that a law so everybody has to abide by it because in some people's religion, maybe abortion is permissible. In mine, it isn't, but
just because it's not OK in mine, doesn't mean I have to make it unlawful for everybody.

It's difficult to find that common ground, because the reason why we all have different religions is because we all have differences. I think the idea of unity through diversity was thrown in, and I think that's the . . . it can be achieved. There's nothing impossible in this world. I think if we all try to go for it, there's no reason why we can't get it.

[Mention of where the approaches were developed. Lambeth with brief concluding statement. Thank you to Sandy.]

Moderator:
I think everybody's spoken so let me again thank all of you very much.