The Sunday Forum at Washington National Cathedral
“A Divided America: Can Religion Bring Us Together?”
with James A. Forbes, Jr.

November 25, 2007
The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith
Washington National Cathedral
Host: Cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III
Guest: James A. Forbes, Jr.


Lloyd: Welcome, everyone, to the Sunday Forum today. We have with us one of the liveliest minds and one of the most articulate preachers of our last generation, the Rev. Dr. James Forbes. Dr. Forbes was until recently the senior pastor at the Riverside Church in New York City, one of the flagship churches in our country, and was ranked by Newsweek magazine as one of the great preachers in the English-speaking world. We’re going to get a chance to hear some of that great preaching at our 11:15 service this morning as part of our celebration of American preaching. But for now we get to have a conversation with Dr. Forbes, who, no surprise, is intending to be just as busy in retirement as he was in his very busy ministry at Riverside Church.

He founded a new organization called the Healing of the Nations Foundation, and we want to hear a little bit about that. And his great passion is the spiritual renewal of America—no small undertaking, we might say.

So I would like to welcome you, Dr. Forbes. It’s great to have you with us today.


Forbes: It’s my joy to be with you here.


Lloyd: Let’s start with this new phase of your life. Fifty years of ministry, eighteen years at Riverside Church, all of a sudden you have a wide-open agenda in front of you. What are you imagining for these retirement years? Is it going to be a lot of football games and basketball games, or something a little more focused?


Forbes: I think a little more focused, though I’ve enjoyed not having to be present and leading every Sunday morning. So I think maybe it’s going to be a time when God will keep some promises made to me here in Washington, D.C. You may not remember, I came to Washington to go to Howard, to do a pre-med course, and was looking forward to being a medical doctor. When I accepted the call to the ministry of word and sacrament, I said, “But I wanted to be a doctor!” And I was assured, “You agreed to have a healing impact, but it will not be in the medical field.” Now—having been faithful and having served congregations for all those years since 1956 when I was called—now in retirement I get a chance to specialize in what was in my heart. And this is why I am talking about Healing of the Nations Foundation. So I get a chance to do some wholesale business encouraging other people to do what they can to be both conscientious about their health but to find some area in which they may serve as an instrument of healing, restoration, and perhaps maybe even a kind of a transformation of our society.


Lloyd: You tell a wonderful story about how you experienced a kind of calling when you were at Howard listening to Tchaikovsky, of all things. Tell us about that.


Forbes: Of course. You know, Howard University in those days, we used to speak of ourselves as “the capstone of Negro education.” At any rate, it was so fascinating that the night I was wrestling finally to make a decision, it was that Tchaikovsky Symphony #4 in F Minor was playing, and I like to tell the story how I heard the music saying, “da da da da, da da da da.” And I thought I heard Eugene Ormandy of the symphony orchestra joining Tchaikovsky, and I thought I heard, “Jim Forbes, don’t you know I have called you? Jim Forbes, don’t you know I have called you?” So I consider that, that’s a high-class call, isn’t it?


Lloyd: Trumpets and timpani and drums, all there for you? Well, tell us a little bit about this new enterprise and this notion of holistic renewal, body and spirit and society all together. How did you come to that vision of things?


Forbes: You know, when I finished my work—it was June 1st—I had started thinking, ok, so what’s next? And I had been in a period of discernment, and several things happened that I think led to the concept of Healing of the Nations Foundation. First of all, my goal was to always make sure what I was doing was a part of the spiritual renewal of the nation. That has been a long concern of mine. But how do you make that more specific? Spiritual renewal of the nation is so broad. Is there an image that can be attached to this concern? And during that time I was reading both from Ezekiel and Revelation the passage of restoration. In Ezekiel it says that where the river flows, there will be growth on either side of the tree, and there will be fruit for every month, and then the leaves will be for healing. Then I read in Revelation 22 that there is a river flowing through the middle of the street of the city with trees on either side, the Tree of Life, and there will be fruit every month. And then it said that the leaves of the tree will be for the healing of the nations. And something said, “That’s it!”

That is, God was concerned about our health, our wholeness, our well being, so much that the capacity to find health in times of need should not be a matter of whether you had insurance here or there, but God was so concerned about our health that all you had to do is to take a leaf from a tree so that it could minister to your wholeness. I thought, that’s a good image, but it requires a commitment in partnership from us, and that means that we are called upon to be the leaves of the tree, and that every human being has the capacity inside to be a source of healing to others.

First of all, we have our immune system. So that means healing is taking place inside of us all the time. But maybe each of us should be a part of the immune system of the body politic, of the larger community. And so what I thought I would do for the rest of my professional time is to go around free from the duties of my own congregation and ask people, “Be a leaf. Be a leaf.” To be a leaf is simply to make up your mind that the gift of life is so precious that we will do all that we can in regards to our own health, in terms of preventive possibilities, getting our check-ups, a life style that promotes health and well-being, for ourselves. But also to do so for others, to find, from the Spirit, who in this world stands in need of the healing touch, word, or institutional expression, but to try and shift the nation from simply being invested in “my health” and “my own family” to being inter-directed for health but outer-directed for concern for others. That’s how it all happened for me.


Lloyd: You use the term “spiritual renewal in America.” Say something about what kind of renewal you think our nation needs. What would be your diagnosis, Dr. Forbes, of where we are and what we need to go forward?”


Forbes: You know, during 9/11 a strange thing happened one Sunday morning. I’m not sure that I can find the reference to it, but they were digging out of the rubble, and after it was determined that there could be no life left any longer down in the rubble, one Sunday morning a white pigeon flew out from the midst of the rubble.

Other people thought it strange. I didn’t think it strange. I thought it was an answer to the prayer we had been praying, “God, bless America, land that we love. Stand beside her and guide her.” So what I thought was, this was God’s answer. Now of course it was a white pigeon, and you know more frequently spiritual imagery would involve a dove. But in a time of crisis, if you don’t have a dove, a pigeon will have to do. Somebody said the pigeon is the part of the species of the dove anyway. A turtle dove.

The reality is that America, well, you remember Luke talks about you can’t serve God and mammon. Well, on the basis of the early exit poll from these years of our experience, mammon has become the ruling power in America. Money. And then material things have more impact on the way we live than other things. So part of healing is to allow love, community, truth, responsibility for each other, responsibility for the grand earth we share together, recognition of others who are “other” by way of religion, ethnicity, previous conditions of servitude. If we could even sort of take a break—not everything is measured by the bottom line. There is spirit. There is community. There is meaning. There’s purpose, and money is not the measure of all things.

We need material resources, of course. But the material resources should be the means towards the realization of full life, a life in which we discern something of what the Creator had in mind and become partners in a world that Dr. King called “becoming the world house together.” If we could overcome the materialism we’d be well on the way.

Also, right now we are so motivated in most of our actions by our fear. Fear of terror from outside, fear of tyranny inside. Something has to teach us how to have courage in the face of the threat to our well being, or as Professor Tillich said, “the courage to be.” We’ve got to find the courage to be: to be whole, to be open, to be free, to be caring, to share. I think that’s important in America today.


Lloyd: We’re in sort of a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, you describe very well the materialism, the sense of fear and anxiety in our country; and yet on the other, religion has rarely had a more vocal place in our society than it has had in the last ten, fifteen, twenty years. Some people even say we’re in the midst of a fourth Great Awakening. There is a lot of religion, and a lot of religion in the public realm. But that doesn’t seem to have done much about the materialism and the fear on the other side. What can we do, what can churches do now to try and address this complex situation of a frightened, materialistic country, and a noisy religion these days that doesn’t seem to be addressing those fundamental problems very effectively?


Forbes: You know, when we start talking about religion, a major question is whether the religious impulse is primarily designed to find a way to use God to meet our need. Or whether our religion makes it possible for us to seek to discern the will of God for ourselves and for others? You know, I think it must have been Saint Augustine who lifts up this word concupiscence. When religion is primarily “thank God there’s somebody to care for me, somebody to love me, somebody to give me a sense of who I am, somebody to protect me.” You know, you may never move beyond God as being for me. Concupiscence. And Luther talked about how we bend in curvitas, we bend things into ourselves. Unless our religion meets us in our need, but meets our needs so well that we are able to move beyond ourselves, it’s possible to get stuck. Stuck in self-regarding, self-adoring, self-aggrandizing impact. But, if I get with God and I’m cozy with God, God says, “You feel good?” “Yeah, I feel good.” “You feel safe?” “Yeah, I feel safe.” “Good, now let’s go out and offer that same thing I brought you to others.” If it doesn’t get that far, we’re still in the first semester of religion. And maybe that’s it. We don’t get to the second semester where we join God in going out in terms of the Golden Rule. What we would wish for ourselves, moving out to offer for others, is a very significant issue.


Lloyd: But first-semester religion seems to fill coliseums and stadiums and we stragglers who are trying to make it into the second and third semester find ourselves fewer in number. There’s something very attractive about the “God for me” mode of religion. How can we build on what you are saying, that first semester, and get people into second semester and third?


Forbes: Well, you know, you start with a Head Start Program, as long as we’re using an educational image. You start way back there. I do a little verse every now and then and I’m working on a new song for children. And the song is about not allowing children to think that God is just for them, but that God is also for others. And the song—and I’m going to send it into Silver Burdett when I get it finished—it goes like this:

I made heaven so happy today; receiving God’s love and giving it away;
When I looked up heaven smiled at me;
Now I’m so happy, can’t you see?

Then it says:

Sharing makes me happy, makes heaven happy too;
Sharing this spirit and brings the best from you;
Sharing sends a ray of hope to places needing care;
Sharing says we’re neighbors, God’s children everywhere.

Religion has to begin with Head Start, that whatever you receive, pass it on. Whatever you wish for your children, make sure that others have it. Whatever health care policy the Congress has, make sure that the farmer in Mississippi and North Carolina, that they have it. We shouldn’t even start religion without this balance about in and out and going and coming, the stream of life flows from God and from God to my neighbors all around the world.

I think you start a Head Start. And any time you’ve got a religion that is based on “that will be glory for me, for me, that will be glory for me,” you should call in a tutor to say, “you’re missing something here.”


Lloyd: A key part of the curriculum is missing. A lot of your ministry at Riverside Church has been addressing the very public issues that you are known for, calling the nation to be a place of justice and compassion where no one gets left out. You talked a lot about civil rights, voter registration, the empowerment of minorities. What do you see to be the biggest social justice issue or issues we need to be looking at right now?


Forbes: That is, that is difficult. I don’t know where to begin. But since my work is in regards to healing, it occurred to me that it should no longer be a question in America as to whether or not there will be health care for every person who is considered a citizen, and then remembering you were strangers in Egypt, even for immigrants. Now that’s difficult. (Applause)

Because if we don’t have very good health or access, all of the other issues pale away into insignificancy anyway. So what I’m concerned about is that churches, mosques, synagogues, all of us who think we pay attention to the mind of God, are required this year. You and I were together four years ago in Boston. It was almost difficult to get the issue of poverty spoken about with either party really. This year, we should make it appear stupid, ludicrous, that anybody should want to be a leader in this nation who is not committed to finding effective ways to ensure that health care is no longer political football, or that pharmaceuticals, hospitals, medical institutions, research agencies, that they can mine the earth of its resources and then hoard the resources with one institution or another, and leave God’s children without health care.

I want to figure out how is it possible, I’m not a guy with banners all the time, I’m not always ready to start some kind of protest movement. Why not let’s frame it another way? It’s not even a question. Show cause. Show cause why you should put your hand on a Bible and take an oath of office when you have not committed yourself to all God’s children having access to basic health care. I mean, I’m not a radical. Something is wrong with you if you are not committed to health care for everybody! (Applause)


Lloyd: We are the outlier nation among the developed nations not providing this. So that’s a cause we could think a lot about in the next few months.


Forbes: And the second is like unto it. Obviously, poverty. Because as I have come to understand it, and I’ve said before I view when you measure the impact of poverty and you even add up how it reduces life expectancy, how it robs people of the capacity to develop their gifts to be contributing members to the society. When you add up all of the effects of it, poverty itself becomes a weapon of mass destruction. More people are killed by poverty than by war, or by drugs, or by the ravages in the tsunamis, even Katrina. Poverty kills. So then any of the other wedge issues have to get in line because, if poverty and health are not addressed, we show that we have particularly chosen an issue, but it is certainly not one that affects the totality of our culture and of our society.

So I put health care first because we got to live to do it. Then poverty, second, I think.


Lloyd: One of the things I remember from four years ago when you came to Boston you were talking about in that election campaign having a plumb line declaration, a list of measuring points for political candidates based on Scriptural principles. What is a Christian vision of society ought to be? It sounds like this is making of another plumb line. Things to measure candidates by to see if they are lining up with the Christian vision of what society and life is supposed to be about.

Tim

Forbes: Well, yes. I would hope, however, that whereas my congregation participated with me in developing the prophetic justice principles before, I think now, it’s got to be, if we can get the conversation between Christians and Jews and Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Native Americans, it feels to me we need to get an interfaith declaration of what I call “Basic Subsistence Necessities.” Out of our religious traditions, what would a basic platform that says, “this much means we are human”? If you ran on these things, at least we begin to approach humanity. We will not agree on Christology, and our cosmologies may often be different, but if we could agree on these basic subsistence issues, perhaps we could begin to think about ourselves as representatives of the deity who calls us into being.


Lloyd: So that’s a way for us and the different religious traditions to make common cause together beyond whatever our theological differences might be, a kind of bridge that draws us all into a common enterprise.


Forbes: Yes, I’ve been looking for that. Howard Thurman, in his last book, The Search for Common Ground, before his autobiography, spoke about this. Are there some things that are so common to us all that at least we could stop fighting each other long enough to acknowledge that this matters? For example, while we’re still worrying about oil in the Middle East, what are we going to do about water? Well, of course last year this was an academic issue, but I just came back from Atlanta, Georgia, last week. Can you imagine people worrying about Lake Lanier and whether they’re going to divert the water from their neighboring states, that we are actually discovering that good old plain water that we take for granted may be the next battle line, that just like we’re fighting and waging wars for oil, we may eventually be trying to figure out how we use nuclear power to guarantee that we have access to water. Is it too early for nations to begin to come together to talk about that? I think it’s a spiritual issue that requires immediate response. We’re already too late, I think. Or at least too late to make it easy. But we’ve got to deal with it anyway.


Lloyd: One more question and then I’d like to open up the floor for questions from our audience. Deryl Davis, our producer, will watch for hands going up, and there will be people with microphones. Why are we at this stage in a presidential election cycle, and these are not the issues we are talking about? Why has there not been a major discussion of poverty in America? They’re slowly and haltingly, some addressing of the health care issue that’s beginning to happen, but all across the board. Why is it that we keep our campaigns focused on, I guess, the voting middle class, that keeps us from addressing fundamental things? Poverty doesn’t have a constituency that has a large voice. But why is that so that people don’t listen to that voice, and what can be done to give poverty a voice in America?


Forbes: If we could figure out a way to use religious organizations to move beyond the restrictions that their 501c(3) status to develop a lobby for the poor, what would that look like? What would it look like to have walking the halls of Congress people who said, “Congressman, come we’re going to talk to you. We’ve got to do something about this issue. Now who do you represent? The pharmaceutical lobby?” “No, we’re the poverty lobby.”

Now that feels strange and clearly naive to me, and I never want to be considered naive, but I do want to be considered provocative of the fact that campaigns are luxury items in America. Folks with a whole lot of money pool their resources to purchase the luxury of owning the democratic society by their power of money. If that is the case, we need then to think about the fact that we have a sponsor for whom the cattle on the thousand hills are available, we would tap into our sponsor—by which I mean, God of the universe—and religious institutions and conscientious people who do not particularly claim a religion, and decide that because our sponsor provides water, air, sunshine, and a photosynthesis process that helps to produce food, that we will serve that sponsor, rather than to be manipulated by the millions of those who sponsor presidential campaigns in order that they might find ways to buttress their economic enterprises.

I wish I could keep on talking about this to a more sensible way of addressing it comes along, but in the meantime which sponsor will we serve? The one who made us, who sustains us, who calls us to community, who provides us a vision of what a true society of peace and love should look like? Or will we consider to bow down at the altar of the dollar bills that are spread around by moneyed interests?

You can’t serve God and mammon. We ought to do a campaign to see if we could get people to conscientiously commit to serving God, rather than mammon. You might have to help me work on how to make it sound, you know, sensible.


Lloyd: It will take a couple hours of planning, but I’m sure we can do it.

Let’s go to a question from the audience.


Q: Speaking of the Church getting involved in ending extreme poverty, I know the Episcopal Church is a member of the One Campaign, which does have lobbyists working to end extreme poverty, and the United States has committed to the Millennium Development Goals to cut poverty in half by 2015. Do you have any thoughts about there are mechanisms in place where people of religion to fight extreme poverty?


Forbes: Well, basically I’m just going around, I’m trying to be a champion of the cause. I’ve not developed a lot of wisdom, but up in New York City across at Columbia University, Professor Sachs constantly puts before us little steps that we could use. The one I remember is that you talk about, say, areas where malaria is around. He talks about how for just pennies, a few dollars, we could provide the mosquito netting, and now we find that there are now pharmaceutical resources that could actually stave off the epidemics of malaria in those regions. My thinking is, each of us can take the little steps, while our professors talk about micro-processes of staying off the extreme poverty. I go to the Clinton global initiatives, and all of the big leaders sit around and talk about what they are going to do for or against the issue of extreme poverty, making money available to entrepreneurs in the small community so that they are not the victims of continued oppression.

I was last week in Atlanta with a group called Project People Foundation, working on how we can manage to give cottage industries our support. Even such a little thing as many of the schools will not receive children unless they have uniforms. Well, this is a group that is working on raising money so there will be uniforms for schools. I think this issue of eliminating extreme poverty begins with the small steps, while we also urge our governments, not only to make a pledge for Millennium Goals, but to let that be reflected in the budget, so that the differential between war making potential as well as contributions for beginning to fulfill the Millennium Goals, are kept, we keep faith with that.

So my sense is, small steps, while others are on a macro-level looking at what we do with respect to poverty will be an important step.


Q: Thank you, Dr. Forbes, for all that you have said. And I really appreciate your emphasis on healing. President Carter has said about America that we are more divided now as a nation than any time in recent memory. I’d like to ask you what I can do as an individual church member to help to heal our country, which I feel is really divided over Christian churches, some more conservative and some more liberal?


Forbes: I think, in regards to what we can do, is this notion about becoming a leaf is really serious for me that—beginning with you and with myself—if I decide that I am going to really look out for my health as best I can, and then I’m open to the Spirit leading me to find an area where I can be an instrument of healing, whether it’s the Boys and Girls Club, whether it’s runaway children, or whether it is seniors who are without health care, that if each individual—and I know this is a big nation. I’ve traveled across it. My sense is often in congregations and in churches I ask people to experience the power of individuals, and the way I do it—and I’ll try it now—for those of you who are sitting here, just right now, would you lean to your right, everybody. Now, lean to the left. Okay? Now come back to center. That when we did our tilting, the earth registered that there’s a collectivity of people who are leaning, and this has nothing to do with right and left politically, I didn’t intend that. But a group of people, one by one, who are intending and leaning in the direction of a reconciling of a healing and a kind of transformative direction, individuals making up their minds will impact the earth on its axis far in excess of what feels like our power to bring about a change.

Also, in regard to our churches, I found—Thanksgiving, we had a big discussion at the Thanksgiving table with all the members of my family, and we discovered that we do not all have the same perspective with respect to reproductive health. I mean, I was surprised, that somebody mentioned, here we are, we are the Northeast liberals, but even at a table we don’t all have the same idea even about the issue of same-sex marriage. Some were here. Some were there. What we did is, we started talking without presumption that we know where other people are coming from. And I was very vigorous for my perspective, but I censored myself. It’s not about my trying to convince my other sister or my other cousin about this. It’s that we need to talk more. The ability to engage in conversation without the sense of necessity to convert the other. See, if you go for converting too soon, you don’t even know what needs converting.

We need to be able to have conversation with people who differ from us. Most conversations are in the cul-de-sac of those who have common approaches to things. For example, when Lent comes again, I’d like to see churches have conversations across the divide. If you find a major dividing issues, find a way to get people who are pro-life to talk to people who are pro-choice. Or find people who are hawks to talk to doves. Or to find people who are homophobic to talk to those who are completely committed a progressive agenda. Find those who are tithing to talk to those who are just for pledging. Find people, and make it kind of a badge of maturity that we’re having a conversation with some folks that I can’t stand. Learning how to have conversation with people we can’t stand, that may contribute to a new spirit of openness, at least to understand.

And I think what I have learned that in all of my arguments, I have come to understand that it was not the cogency of my argument, but it was creating an environment in which people recognized that they were respected even if they differed from me, that maybe that opened up just a little crack of growth. And I’ve also found when I’ve engaged in a conversation I’ve had a broadening of my understanding as well.

So I think that’s a good way. Let’s start one by one till the job is done. And leave no child behind.


Q: Thank you. That may have anticipated what I was going to ask you, which the vision of a spiritual renewal in the country is great, but if you listen to, if you turned on the TV and said “Where are the Christians in politics?” the association would be with candidates and movements that would take very different positions from what you’re outlining. I mean what you just answered probably guessed to this question about opening up dialogue with folks that disagree with you, but it is possible you think with the leaders of those Christian political movements that have very different views on outcomes, or is it more a matter of engaging the folks that support them, or just what’s your sense of that? Again, the view of Christianity in politics which I think makes some secular people think it shouldn’t be in there because the results seem so extreme. So how do we as Christians engage our brothers and sisters who differ very strongly from us on a lot of the issues you were just talking about? I mean you talked some about this in your last answer so you may not need to repeat it.


Forbes: You know, let me—I’ve got to give a speech pretty soon at a Planned Parenthood conference, and I’ve spoken before the national Planned Parenthood. But I find myself wondering if it’s possible—and it may not be possible since both groups tend to often to look for their funders based on how opposite their perspectives are—but what would it be like to imagine a serious conversation with the leaders of the pro-life movement and the leaders of the pro-choice movement?

My thinking is that, if there were some ground rules that the purpose was not to convert, actually the purpose is to have each group identify what there is in their group that they consider to be the crucial issue they must make sure gets promoted in the world. That’s one. And then second, what there is in the other group’s perspective that may actually strengthen what they are about such that we could come out of the meeting with a different bumper sticker.

For an example. And I know Planned Parenthood people are here. Will it be possible for me to talk about a position that actually claims to be committed to reverence for life and respect for choice? If we worked our way to that, would the result be a reduction of abortions, without an attempt to rob human beings of the capacity to make choice? Is that bumper sticker, if made in smaller print, possible for the bumpers of the cars we drive today? Is there any body here who thinks we can be moral if you don’t have choices? And is there anybody here who thinks that the morality contributes to the common good if it does not have respect for life?

And nobody is trying now to really talk about the fetus after the egg and sperm became a zygote, that that’s the human being. We will continue to debate where it comes. But in regards to our society, would we be better off if most of us had a better sense of reverence for life itself? And everybody also understood that what we really want is not the elimination of choice, but the introduction of better choice and a deeper sense of agency and a stronger commitment to dealing with the moral ambiguity, since anybody who eats on the food chain is grateful for life because life feeds on each other. And how you can’t be so heavily invested in the anti-abortion movement and not be against war. And we get all of this stuff confused.

Could we get that conference going? Where, will the Cathedral—since I don’t have a congregation I can—will the Cathedral convene—and it’s got to be safe space—and I know a foundation that will support it. There’s a foundation that has observed that the United States of America has a higher incidence of unwanted pregnancies than the other industrialized countries, and they have dedicated ten years of their money to do what they can to reduce that. Maybe, I’ll tell you the name of it, this foundation will want to convene the national conference of pro-lifers and pro-choicers.

That’s my answer to your question. (Applause).


Lloyd: You weren’t supposed to come giving us work to do here! What a wonderful idea. Another question.


Q: Thank you. I was reluctant to ask my question until the last question. When I looked at the subject the issue was too global for me, so I had to try and break it down. So I rephrased the question, and I prepared a paper which I passed on to you, and I’m certainly not going to cover it. But my question was: can religion bridge the political divide? Because it appears to me that everything we talked about says that the division of our nation is based upon our political positions and issues. And I come to the point that good issues come from good people. So I think I can bridge it, but I would like to say that it has to start with the clergy coming together at your level to decide on a set of principles that take those wedge issues out of what comes down to the people, and come up with a set of issues that allows us to force our politicians not to lie, cheat, and steal. And if we can hold all of them to those things, I believe that better things will come about.


Forbes: You know, I think that religion impacts politics and politics impact religion. I think the strongest impact of religion on politics is the deepening of religious commitment and the articulation of religious ideals and a humble attempt of people to live faithfully to the ideas they have. That that will probably will impact politics more than the discussion about how we can all come to a common agenda. And I’ve even proposed a common agenda. But the way I look at it, once I always worry when religion…and politicians and religionists get together, and by the way, I’ve had my share of my visits at the White House under a different administration than is present. I almost get the impression that, given the material orientation of the world, and our having a loss of the sense of transcendence, that in conversations between politicians and religionists, that I think the politics contaminated the religionists more than the religion sanctifies the politics. That’s been my impression.

So I basically think to decide that “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, and if it gets in your eyes, too bad,” is the way that goes. I think robust, courageous witness, commitment, based on articulation of values and reflected in action, will do more to get the attention of the politicians than having just a nice tea party with them either on the campaign trail or even later on in the White House.

I don’t know whether we preachers.... I’m scared of preachers getting together with powerful political leaders unless they get together to explain why they have taken an action that is disruptive. Say, I think Dr. King is the kind of religious leader who when he went in wasn’t going in to say, “Now let’s discuss this.” He was going in to talk about how we’re going to put another thousand people in jail if we don’t get some action here. I think, I think standing up for what we believe in at the point of peril to our health and well-being, will get more attention than polite conversation about, “Hey can’t we kind of work it this way?” I think we need more prophetic energy coming out of our congregations. And that includes our laity and our clergy together. Don’t put the clergy together. Don’t separate them from these lay people. Kind of put them together so they keep watch on each other, and hold each other’s feet to the fire. I think it’s that kind of thing.

We need to decide if we’re going to serve God or whether we’re going to serve our next paycheck. And I think it’s beginning to be clear ... You know I used to pray for things to be fuzzy because then I didn’t have to, you know, take a stand. But I think it’s coming to the place now where it’s going to be possible to say, “Here we stand. We can do no other.” It’s taking a stand that’s going to make it possible for religion to have a positive impact on the body politic. I think that’s where we are now. (Applause)


Lloyd: We have time for one other brief question. Must keep it brief.


Q: Dr. Forbes, your position obviously can unite religion with science, because science is concerned just as you have paradigmed, science is concerned with human health. Science is concerned with social health. And so it might seem to me that your point should be that we should, as religious people, be embracing science and the knowledge therein contained against an establishment that is for materials.


Forbes: Let me say that there is in New York at Columbia University a program that has to do with the study of science and religion. Bob Pollack, my friend, is the head of that program. And I do think that, for example, with the new stem cell conversation that it’s stupid for religious people to assume that there is no way that we can work our way through. How wonderful it is that the Lord has allowed the research to make the issue of abortion possibility or the cloning possibility, no longer the primary issue. So that science and religion can say, “Okay, if we have this technology, how are we able to see that it is aimed toward humanitarian ideals, and how there is a sharing of the resources and not just a hoarding of the benefits of the new technology.” Science and religion should not be enemies. It’s God’s world and the transcendental values and the concreteness of the particles of the earth can somehow work together to advance us towards the beloved community. So I share your view that we need to be friends rather than adversaries.


Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation and in the conversation next week we’re going to pick up on what Dr. Forbes was just raising concerns about, the relationship between preachers and the government. We have two very fine Time magazine journalists who’ve written a book about Billy Graham’s relationship with six presidents over some sixty years, and talks about what worked and didn’t work in that very complex relationship. So join us next week for that.

For now we hope you will stay and hear Dr. Forbes preaching at 11:15. Everyone is invited to be part of that. And in the meantime, coffee is served in the Churchill Porch in the west end of the Cathedral. Have some coffee and join us in just a few minutes.

But now let’s thank Dr. Forbes.