Transcript of the conversation:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Adam Phillips: Hi there. My name’s Adam Phillips and I’m Chief Strategy Officer and Chief of Staff at Interfaith America, the nation’s largest bridge-building organization. And I’m joined today by two great friends, friends of the organization, but also just friends in general across our various areas of difference. And that is Reverend Fred Davie, who’s a senior executive at Union Theological Seminary. He’s also a senior fellow here at Interfaith America, as well as Josh Good, who’s the director of Religion and Society programming at the Aspen Institute. He’s also a board member of Interfaith America. I’m really delighted to be joined by Josh and Fred as we lean in together around the election. Certainly mindful of the horrific events that happened in Pennsylvania this past weekend, the assassination attempt on former President Trump, and the tragic loss of life of an attendee, a man that has been described as a family man and integral member of his own community, very service-oriented, a man named Corey, thinking about him and his family. 

We’re thinking about all of those traumatized by the events that unfolded on Saturday. We want to lean in because it’s important that we lean in together as bridge builders, as folks that truly are seeking the America that we all believe we can be part of. And that is a place of a diverse and rich democracy full of debate for sure, but also free and fair and safe, a place where violence is deescalated and we get back to rigorous debate rather than supercharged rhetoric. And unfortunately, actions. We’re also mindful that it’s the week of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, so we’re going to lean in here together. We may disagree here and there, and that’s fantastic. That’s what makes a truly strong and rich, diverse and inclusive democracy, a light for others in the world here in the United States. So without further ado, I’d love to just kind of go to both you gentlemen, Fred and Josh. Can you maybe just start by introducing yourselves, sharing a bit about your work and providing insight into why as people of faith you feel called to engage in the public square? 

Josh Good: I can go first by saying that we all have our start in life. And my start was working for Fred Davie when he was running this national ex-prisoner reentry program out of Philadelphia, out of Public Private Ventures, and just cultivated a level of energy amongst staff members, program officers, research staff that were part of this $27 million project to work with 17 cities and a lot of urban churches and businesses. So, I am indebted to Fred for my professional start and a big fan of his work with the commission and his work at Union and his work with Interfaith America. And I run a small program at the Aspen Institute that’s aimed at sort of discovering the promise of religious pluralism. Love to say a little bit more about that later on. But we do that through dialogue and creative engagement and action in partnership with a lot of leaders in the faith space as well as public policy world. 

Fred Davie: Great, great. And let me just say how pleased I am to be able to join Adam, both you and Josh on this for this conversation today, and to say what a joy, it was almost, what was it, Josh? Now 20 some odd years, more than 20 years ago or about 20 years ago that we met and you came to work with us at Public Private Ventures on that initiative. I knew then that you would assume a prominent role in both civic and religious life of America and you have. And so it does my hard good to see someone that I worked with who was just beginning his professional career sort of ascend to the place you are now and do the great work that you have been doing over the years and that you are beginning to do now at Aspen. So that’s a real joy and to have had time with you, Adam. Now for the last what, decade or more on a variety of different things, engaging faith in the public square and all sharing, I think the fundamental value of compassion and care for people who are most in need is a good place for us to start and then we figure out how to work that out from there. 

Adam Phillips: And I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind elaborating a little bit more on your own political convictions. I know we all share deep commitments as people of faith, as folks pursuing that e pluribus unum, this diverse democracy that we so cherish. But I’ll go ahead and put my cards on the table. I’m a former Biden Harris administration official. I don’t vote straight party line, but I certainly am a registered Democrat and I lean significantly Democrat and I’m a supporter of the president in this election, but I’m also deeply concerned about the tone. I’m deeply concerned about ways in which we can work together across difference, political difference for sure. I’m wondering if maybe Josh, you can go first and then Fred, if you can share a little bit about how you’re kind of navigating this out of your own sense of conviction and identity. 

Josh Goode: Yeah, I grew up as an evangelical Christian from a relatively intellectual family, which sometimes people think is a bit of a conundrum, a bit of backwards there. But that was my story. And I grew up in the era near DC of support for people on the right and as a center right advocate of markets and opportunity and enterprise and aggressive, engaging American foreign policy thinking that that was fundamentally right. And the truth is, if I’m transparent, I’ve voted only for Republican candidates for president until 2016. And so my own leaning is that way. But I just have discovered that unlike we’re inclined to think in our media silos and in places that sort of reinforce our beliefs, that they’re actually incredibly interesting, thoughtful, compelling people all across the political spectrum. And Reverend Davie was certainly a great example of that to me in 2003. But throughout the years you just learn that there are some amazing people who love this country on both sides of the aisle and friendship that transcends political difference, especially when it’s honest is fun. 

Fred Davie: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. That friendship when it sends difference as long as it’s honest, is fun and has a lot of integrity to it. And I’ve appreciated that over the years. I grew up in North Carolina right at the kind of middle of the civil rights movement when I came of consciousness about faith and civic engagement in my little Presbyterian church in Belmont, North Carolina. There was very little separation between our faith walk in, our engagement in issues related to our community. In fact, faith sort of mandated that for us. And I just took it as a given that if I was going to be a faithful Christian, I had to do something about the world around me, starting with my own community there. Over the years coming to New York, starting to work in the nonprofit and political space here a little bit in philanthropy, I had the opportunity to engage people across the political spectrum.  

I am a Democrat, have voted I think only for democratic candidates for president in my life. But I did start working across the aisle, if you will, as early as the early nineties, I guess when the first Bush was still president, I had an opportunity to engage through the organization. I was working with New York City Mission Society with Barbara Bush. She and the chair of our board were close, and Barbara Bush at that time was working on issues related to children. And we had a big sort of childhood initiative related to this organization. And actually in conversation with her about her initiatives, we decided that it would be good to have her come to New York and see some of ours. So sometime in the early nineties, I guess before 1992, so it could have been late eighties, early nineties, Barbara Bush came to New York and I have all these old photos of me and her and our facility in the South Bronx. 

But prior to that, I’d done as a college student work on the Carter campaign, both ‘76 and ‘80. And then I engaged with the Clinton administration and then the Bush two administration, which is how Josh and I met around this national prisoner reentry initiative. Obama too, did a lot of work with him, served on his faith council and really appreciated that. And then when I went to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which is a bipartisan commission by law, I engaged a lot with my Republican appointed counterparts on that commission, but even ended up at the Trump White House for a national security briefing on some of the work we were doing. And then of course the engagement with the Biden administration.  

So, I’ve had this opportunity and I’ve appreciated to work across the aisle for a long time to work with Republicans for a long time. And I mean I just cherish the time that Josh and Brent and any number of us were working together on this prisoner reentry program, a lot of evangelical Republicans within the Bush administration at that time. That was one of the most energizing experiences that I’ve had, and it helped deepen my appreciation and understanding for the value of the kind of bipartisan, nonpartisan, faith generated corporation that you can have in the public square. 

Adam Phillips: Thanks for that both. So I want to shift a little bit into just getting into the meat of the matter here about how do we live out and model, how do we take action in our personal lives as well as in our communal, just the ways we show up in community in the public square to be plurals. And when I talk about being a plural list, I really talk about one of the bedrock foundational principles of what the United States is about. E Pluribus Unum out of many one, or as Danielle Allen, a tremendous thought leader out of Harvard, talks about “out of many a whole, a new whole” I just was at the National Governor’s Association last week in Salt Lake City where Governor Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah was handing over the baton after his time chairing the NGA and his leading issue while he led the NGA. And they’re going to announce some more work around this in the coming days. But his leading issue was a disagree better campaign. Maybe some of you have seen Governor Cox and Governor Wes Moore, the Democratic governor out of Maryland speak recently this past year even at the National Cathedral on this.  

So this idea of disagreeing better is also just a tremendous sort of, I think, guiding principle when it comes to being a plural civic plural list being an American. So for both of you, how are you thinking we might respond to both political violence, both in our public discourse, the violent rhetoric, but also acts of violence like we saw unfold this past weekend in Pennsylvania? How are you thinking about this in this given moment? 

Josh Good: Yeah, I don’t remember if it was a friend of Fred’s or Brent’s or someone else who said that every time there’s real trouble, there’s real disruption. What we ought to probably do is try to disrupt the dominant paradigm or subvert the dominant paradigm. You see what’s sort of happening and increasingly popular and we got to find something different to do and do it with conviction and do it for the common good. And in this case, it does seem like for a decade or so, our smartphones are now ubiquitous. We all have them and we’re increasingly retreating into small silos where we like to distrust the other. The More In Common foundation came up with this wonderful report five years ago, and it said, Republicans think that the views of Democrats are roughly 27% more extreme than they actually are, and they board out with the data and they said, Democrats are thinking that the views of Republicans are actually 19% more extreme than they actually are.  

I mean, if that’s really true, if we are inclined to do that and to think lower of our political opponents than is true, we have to do things to be practical against that. We really do. We have to have friends, we probably have to have friends who voted for Trump, and we have to have friends. If you’re a Trump voter who voted for Biden, we have to figure out a way to cross the aisle and listen and deeply listen and not just every time you hear something get all mad and fight it out and fight back. We have to disagree better, which means we have to listen deeply, it seems to me. And that’s a huge part of what’s in play.  

The other thing I think is true is that religion is still much more of a force in the United States and probably in the world than we tend to think it is. 20 years ago they say roughly 71% of us were going to church every Sunday engaged with an institution of religious authority every week, mosque, synagogue, so forth. And now that number is about 48.5%. That’s a huge change in our lifetime. So there is a big impulse, especially amongst Gen Zs and millennials to be none, no religion when you get asked by a pollster, atheist, agnostic or spiritual but not religious as they say. So that’s a big thing that’s sort of churning and in play. And yet even still, even still in the country, roughly 21% are evangelical, roughly 18% are Catholic, roughly 12% are mainline Protestant, roughly 11% are African-American Christian, roughly 2% are Jewish, roughly 1% is Muslim. We’re a very religious country still, and that’s true of course in the world as well. 1.9 billion Muslims in the world, 2.3 billion Christians in the world, we’re a very religious place still. And is there some way to work with the grain of that? 

Fred Davie: Yeah, Josh, and I think that’s crucially important to recognize the religious diversity of America. And to your point, how we work with that. I think what has happened is of late, and I’m glad President Trump, former President Trump survived that assassination attempt. It was horrific. Things like that should never happen in this democracy of anywhere. Violence should never be present in our communities, but neither should violent rhetoric. As we condemn violence, we need to also be equally as condemnatory of violent rhetoric. And sadly, we have leaders and sadly like former President Trump who have not called us to our better angels when it comes to our plurality and diversity, but who’s actually tried to create discord and discontent based on diversity of America from his efforts to ban Muslims and the rhetoric that went on there to his condemnation of certain immigrants, especially Mexicans, that has not been helpful at all to appreciating and cultivating and indeed mining the kind of richness that comes from the diversity that Josh has so clearly and eloquently outlined in his comments. 

So we need to understand the connection between violent language and acts of violence, and we need leaders across the board, both parties and other parties across the ideological and theological spectrum to call us beyond that kind of rhetoric. Now, I’m hoping that what we will see coming out of the Republican National Convention that’s meeting in Milwaukee as we speak or that will convene tonight is a more unifying message for the country and an appreciation for this diversity. I have read reports today and heard reports that the former president who’s the presumptive nominee is changing his speech to do actually that, that would be a great thing, whether he becomes president or not. It would be a great thing if he did that and kept it going throughout this campaign. It would be a great thing if President Biden throughout this campaign did the same thing as other leaders. 

Let me just say one more thing, and that is there are people that I have engaged, particularly in my time on the US Commission on international religious freedom on the Hill who work at bipartisanship. I’ve been really impressed with people like Richie Torres and the congressman from Wisconsin, Michael Gallagher. They chaired jointly a committee on China and security, and they worked really well together. And sadly, Congressman Gallagher is not going to continue in Congress because his bipartisan approach is not always appreciated. But we need to lift people like him and others, both of them and others up who are working hard to promote a community, even though one tax center right and the other tax center left, we need to do the same thing in our faith communities. It’s a shame that certain faith expressions are aligned with one party or the other. 

They should transcend party. In the Judeo-Christian faith, we talk about the Beloved Community. Obviously within other traditions, there are ways to discuss and understand the need for building community and understanding the importance of having human dignity as a place where we start. So we need leaders who are going to lift those things up, who are going to promote those things. And I’m hoping that former President Trump has had a moment of conversion, such a tragic and horrific way to have that happen. But he says he’s going to change his approach to this, and I strongly endorse it prayers and go out to all those people who were injured and affected by what happened the other day. And then we hope and expect the same from President Biden for the remainder of this campaign. I think it will do the nation good regardless of how this election turns out. 

Adam Phillips: Very well put. Thank you both of you for sharing what you just shared. At Interfaith America, we often talk about diversity being a treasure, that faith is a bridge, and out of those, the uniquenesses of our identities and our convictions, we can cooperate across difference. And Josh, earlier you mentioned something about foreign policy. I served in the Biden Harris administration at USAID, the Agency for International Development, and was incredibly proud to spearhead an effort to develop the US government’s first ever policy on strategic religious engagement. It was literally called “Building Bridges”. And the idea was that we co-wrote that with partner groups with former Trump, Obama, Bush officials on the importance of working across areas of difference, but working with faith communities to tackle the issues of our day, whether they be HIV AIDS, whether they be children in adversity, whether it be trafficking, whether it be other climate matters et cetera. And so that idea of cooperating across difference at a global scale to meet the moment, I think is a real opportunity to reflect on how Americans are looking do things despite our differences for the greater good. So on a more micro level, when we think about democracy as a common ground, how can we cooperate across difference to detangle ourselves from the harshness of our partisan politics? How can we find common ground that transcends party lines? 

Josh Good: Appreciate that. Yeah, I mean if faith is a bridge as you name, Adam, and as I’ve learned so much from reading Eboo [Patel] on some of this as well, him talking about how you can leave your hotel lobby and you go to a conference that’s two blocks away in Chicago and you probably pass 23 or 24 different faith-based or community organizations if you count the insurance and the soup kitchen and the support that’s coming after people get home from work for wraparound reinforcement and evangelical engagement, all kinds of things. So it seems to me that, and like Tim Alberta has charted how bad things have gotten with particularly evangelical tribe, not seeing diversity as something beautiful, but seeing diversity as a threat, not seeing faith as a bridge, but seeing faith as a bit of a weapon to repel those. We don’t want to host anymore here or be like to make sort of cudgel for enemies, which is so antithetical to the Gospel as I understand it. 

And I don’t understand all the aspects of what’s in play there, but it certainly seems to be a trend that is taking place throughout Western liberal democracy. We have Orban in Hungary. We have what’s underway in Italy. We have Maureen Le Pen in France. We have this trend Putin, certainly Trump. We have this trend toward making the immigrant the other, making the other a different culture than my own bad and wanting to make mine great again. And it’s a strange trend and it seems to me that religious leaders ought not compromise or give away the goods as it were. We ought not say, okay, we will talk when you come to our church about our views of Trump or Biden. Instead, we should talk about our views of the Eucharist. We shouldn’t say, okay, we’ll talk about how to play out abortion policy in a way that is othering those who plagued by the reality of their dynamic. 

We otherize people and we ought not do that. And it seems to me that pluralism is partly about different faith communities, but pluralism is also partly about different institutions that sort of through norm realization or pluralistic reinforcing and checking each other make democracy possible and better again. And there are too many places in the Evangelical and Catholic community today it feels like to me that have made their faith subversive to politics. And that’s really what gathers people together is the community, but it’s also the sort of political club. And that’s not good. That’s not good for the rising generation who may or may not embrace faith. And it’s not good for people who don’t look like them. And it’s not good for people with different traditions other than them. It’s not good. 

And so it seems to me one thing that religious leaders can do, I think a lot about that. What can they do is to look at the tradition of the majority group and see how that tradition treats the minority. And if that includes letting people mine your fields for leftover food, great. If it involves treating the stranger a certain way, great. If it involves other things, fine. But figuring out how to see how the faith of the majority community can actually be a contribution to the minority constituents among us because quite soon and almost now we’re all going to be minorities. 

Fred Davie: And I think, Josh, that’s what scares way too many people in power and who are used to having power to death, even people and sometimes especially people of faith. I think we have not as people of faith reckoned with the internal spiritual and emotional destabilization that comes with this notion of America becoming a majority-minority nation where everybody is a minority.  

And I think what’s happening here to some degree is a couple of things. One is this over-identification of faith with an ideology, some in my circle might call it white nationalist ideology, white Christian, white nationalist ideology, where there’s this effort to really strongly hold on to this notion of the US as primarily a white Christian nation and that talk of a majority-minority nation, which we are becoming and will become. I don’t think there’s any way to reverse this. It is so destabilizing the folks that they’re willing to take their faith and align it with an ideology that they think will help them maintain this notion of white Christian America and being sort of the controlling frame from which and how we both rule and relate to each other. 

But the other thing I think is happening here is at least one other thing. There are many is the decline of the mainline Protestant church such that there is no counter-religious perspective stance that has kind of equal strength and standing with the evangelical movement at the moment. And as one scholar has pointed out where the increase is on what could be considered more progressive or more progressive values, an alternative approach to what we see now coming out of many evangelical circles is atheism. But atheism is awfully devoid of the kind of spiritual, well it is by definition devoid of at least the faith and religious traditions that we have in common, and that we can call to and perhaps some of the spiritual richness of the faith walk as well. And I don’t want to get quote David Brooks wrong, but I read his column the other day where he said one solution to this could very well be the rise of a new progressive faith expression that engages, if not challenges, the predominance of the more kind of evangelical faith expression that’s more political in its both manifestation and rhetoric these days than it is spiritual and religious. 

In fact, there’s some data out there that suggests that we’re getting close to half of evangelicals who question the divinity of Christ. And that wouldn’t have been, that’s apostasy. But it just speaks to the fact that being evangelical probably is getting close to more of a political identity than a religious one. But yet there isn’t a strong religious practice on the other side anymore to challenge that and give us sort of what results from the whole old Hegelian notion of a thesis and antithesis and then some kind of synthesis coming out of that. We don’t have an antithesis to that yet. I think David Brooks was calling us to one and maybe some progressive new faith tradition that emerges might be a good counter to that. And out of that, we find more common ground, but we need people who are going to promote that, and I pray and hope, and we’ll work toward our faith traditions helping to produce those people. 

Adam Phillips: You both are leading me into the final question I have for us, and I want it to be a bit of a lightning round if we can, around signs of hope. But before I ask that question, I just want to point people back to the website, interfaithamerica.org where we have a robust array of articles, and ways in which you can lean in if you’re looking to get involved in the election but may not be inclined to pick a side. We have a meaningful tool in the program called the Faith in Elections Playbook that you can access and share with others in your community, a number of partners across the country that have faith in elections, if you will, and are leaning in nonpartisan ways. And so again, just check out interfaithamerica.org and look at our online Magazine as well. You’ll see some ways in which you can join in with us. 

Just final question, out of my own Christian spirituality, the creed, if you will, it calls for me to search for signs of resurrection. And I often interpret that as signs of hope, signs of light, signs of life. And I hear that hope in both of your voices. So coming from various your different viewpoints, I’m wondering if you could leave us with a sign of hope that you see in the world, not just about the election day, but the day after as we lean into this living in this country as neighbors in these United States of America. What are some signs of hope that you have? 

Josh Good: Well, I could say even this horrific weekend, you see Instagram, a presence of Secret Service and people helping people and a doctor giving CPR to a man in need. The movie “Love, Actually,” there’s hope, actually. It’s all around us if we just open our eyes to see it. And I do think one of the things that’s so marvelous about Interfaith America is the interplay between writing and theorizing and philosophizing and putting down public, intellectual, rigorous principles that we can actually hold onto that are helpful on the one hand and face-to-face interaction and relationships on the other. And goodness knows right now we need the latter as well. And there are lots of opportunities, whether it’s on your college campus or in supporting the rigor of an election that’s upcoming that Interfaith America has worked on or otherwise to be engaged in face-to-face friendships, I hope even like this one that make us better for the thick views of our friends. 

Fred Davie: And I’m going to start where you ended, Josh, close to home. You two, two heterosexual white men who could very easily choose to walk a different path and probably benefit greatly from it. And yet you are choosing or have been chosen to walk this path. And that is important. It gives me a great deal of hope. It’s inspiring and I’m always excited when I get to sit down across the table from one or both of you just for a meal in a conversation. And that in itself is leaven for the moment. I will say both institutions that I’m associated with Interfaith America as Josh again has so compellingly presented and portrayed in its interfaith engagement work around the country and the various ways in which it does that. And then Union Theological Seminary, which now says it is an interreligious seminary rooted in the Christian tradition or founded in the Christian tradition, but very much interfaith. 

So we have degrees in Buddhism and social engagement or interreligious engagement, Islam and interreligious engagement in various forms. We have a majority of our students who come who probably are spiritual but not religious, don’t come from religious traditions, but yet looking for and searching for something deeper. Signs of hope with the ways in which both of these institutions are able to engage with others around the country and around the world. The Team Up work that Interfaith America is doing with Habitat for Humanity and the YMCAs around the country and various Jewish groups around the country as well. And then Josh, the work you’re doing at Aspen on religion and engaging in various sectors of American society. So I would agree, there are signs of hope, there are actual actions of hope all around us. We just have to be able to break through the din and the noise of the rhetoric and maybe what will come from the tragedy of this weekend. 

Maybe it’s a watershed moment and maybe, and I pray that we will have leadership, religious, political, and otherwise across the board, across ideologies and theological perspectives who will say, “We keep this up and we’re going to get more people killed.” But there’s an alternative and that alternative is to help more people flourish and have hope and opportunity and to create a community where all people of goodwill can actually live and flourish and have good and successful and rich lives. So I see signs of hope in you guys. I see signs of hope in these organizations, and I hope I’m seeing signs of hope come out of this tragedy, this awful tragedy that happened this past weekend. 

Adam Phillips: Josh, Fred, thank you. Thank you for this conversation and thank you all for tuning in. This has been an Interfaith America conversation on our divisive politics and how we can lean in regardless of our political persuasions and be bridgebuilders to seek that more perfect union that we all hope to live out in real time. Please visit interfaithamerica.org and share this with your friends and your communities. Until next time, peace and every good.