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Past Event

Brookings/Pew Forum Briefing

One Electorate Under God? A Dialogue on Religion and American Politics

U.S. Politics, Religion, Elections, Politics

Event Summary

This campaign season, experts are touting the "religion gap" as the most fundamental divide in the political landscape. Some pollsters have found that an individual's level of religious commitment is a more significant indicator of voting behavior than education, income level, or gender. What role should religion play in American politics? Although the question is among the most passionately debated in public life, it is often that passion that makes civil debate impossible and hinders understanding among people of different faiths and ideologies.

Event Information

When

Wednesday, July 21, 2004
10:30 AM to 12:00 PM

Where

State Room
The Mayflower Hotel
1127 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC
Map

Contact: Brookings Office of Communications

E-mail: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

By convening fifty distinguished religious leaders, intellectuals, politicians, and journalists, One Electorate Under God? demonstrates that passion and faith can be allies of reason and dialogue. This collection of essays is anchored in a conversation between two well-known public figures: former New York State governor Mario Cuomo, a liberal Catholic, and Indiana Congressman Mark Souder, a conservative, evangelical Christian. Each shows how his convictions and faith have been both shaped by and reflected in his career as a public servant.

This third volume in the Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and Public Life, published by the Brookings Institution Press, takes a broad view of religion and civic life and provides context for an election year in which voters are deeply divided along religious and ideological lines.

Moderator:
LUIS LUGO
Director, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

Panelists:
DAVID BROOKS
Columnist, New York Times

E.J. DIONNE, JR.
Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution;
Columnist, Washington Post Writers Group

REP. DAVID E. PRICE (D-N.C.)

REP. MARK SOUDER (R-Ind.)

RSVP:
Online at www.pewforum.org or call the Pew Forum at 202/955-5075.

Transcript

LUIS LUGO: Good morning, and thank you all for coming. My name is Luis Lugo and I am the director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The Forum, as most of you know, is a nonpartisan organization and we do not take positions on policy issues—never mind the upcoming election.

It is my pleasure to welcome you to what we believe will be a very thought-provoking discussion of faith and politics in a pluralistic society. This discussion is a follow-up to a book entitled One Electorate Under God? A Dialogue on Religion and American Politics. And we are privileged to have several contributors to that volume as panelists today. This volume is the third in the Pew Forum Dialogue Series, which seeks to address the moral and religious dimensions of important public questions. For you busy Washington types, we do have an executive summary of the book on the table out front. We also of course have plenty of copies of this volume for sale and order forms for the other volumes in the series. They make excellent beach reading.

The impetus for this particular volume was a public debate the Forum hosted back in the fall of 2002 between former New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Indiana Congressman Mark Souder, where they discussed how their respective faith traditions informed their careers as public servants. We found that discussion so interesting and provocative that with E.J.'s great help—and Jean Bethke Elshtain and Kayla Drogosz, the editors—we decided to invite a lot of other folks to get in on the conversation, and that's really what's reflected in this volume.

One of our recent polls at the Pew Forum highlights the public's great interest in, but also ambivalence about, politicians' religious beliefs and expressions. For every American, for instance, who told us there has been too much reference to religious faith and prayer by politicians, there were two who said there has been too little reference to religion by politicians. At the same time, many of those same respondents expressed considerable discomfort when we exposed them to actual religious statements by politicians. These conflicting attitudes highlight the ambivalence of the American public on these issues, and that is a theme that is explored from a variety of angles in One Electorate Under God.

Read the complete event transcript (PDF—148KB)

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