How does the power of conversation bring out the best in us?

Eboo Patel, host: This is the Interfaith America podcast, and I’m Eboo Patel. 

[music] 

We are no longer a Judeo-Christian nation. That’s not a statement of opposition. It is an invitation to the next chapter. Judeo-Christians did good work for a century, and I actually mean that in a very concrete way. The term was not given to Moses on Sinai. It was not written by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It was essentially created in the 1930s. It was a civic creation, not one that was especially historically or theologically accurate. Its purpose was to engage with and defeat the antisemitism and anti-Catholicism of the times. 

It won. It was a lot easier to be a Jew or a Catholic in America in 1990 than in 1930, but the nation has changed. The demographics have changed. There are now twice as many Muslims and Buddhists in America as Episcopalians, just as many Muslims and Buddhists as there are ELCA Lutherans. Guess what? The median age of Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus is 20 years younger than white Christians. We live in an entirely new American religious landscape. 

So, we need a new title for this chapter in American religious history. We’re calling it interfaith America. We like that so much that we named the organization after it — of course, the podcast too. If I had to select the person most responsible for creating a conversation about the intersection of faith, meaning, social life, and the universe in our culture, it would be Krista Tippett. Her radio show On Being has for nearly 20 years been required listening for millions and millions of people. It has now moved fully to a podcast. 

I was first on the show over a decade ago when it was called Speaking of Faith. The way Krista interviewed me was different than any other journalist — it is as if she had actually read the book I had written, selected certain lines and ideas herself rather than have a producer hand her a list of questions, and wanted to push both of us to deeper places. Turns out that she had read the book. She really takes her guest seriously. That’s just one of many things that makes Krista special as a journalist and as a thought leader. 

Krista is also a friend. We talk about family issues, institution building, social healing, and of course, Deen and Dunya, faith and world. She’s an American treasure, author of numerous beautiful books, a remarkable speaker, a creator of spaces where people can be more fully human together, winner of a National Humanities Medal and a Peabody, and a dear friend. I hope you enjoy this conversation. 

Somewhere between a dozen and 10 million people have said to me, “I heard this on On Being, and it changed the way I approached X or I thought about Y.” For me, the obvious question to the person in the studio is, what have you heard in the studio on On Being that has changed the way you’ve approached your work, your life, the nation, the world, religion, whatever? What have you heard in the studio as the professional interviewer, trying to put that out into the world for other people that you’re like, “Oh man, I’m not sure if I’m ever going to be the same after that? 

Krista Tippett: That is an amazing question and it’s a daunting question. You know, here we are Eboo, you and I started our projects around the same time. We never would’ve been able to imagine where we would be right now in 2022. It’s a hard time in the life of the world. And I feel that. I feel that deeply. I think the accumulative effect of the conversations that I have is to see, and really honor the reality of what I call the generative landscape of our time. 

It’s a lifeline because what I get from the breaking news, it would break me. [laughter] If that were the narrative. And there’s truth there, and there’s truth that’s important that’s out there, but I always see this larger, wilder, more humane picture that is also as true, as serious, and it is what — I don’t want to use this language of “what can save us,” right?  It’s not that simple, but our human capacities to be generous, to be loving in muscular ways, to be socially creative, to be kind, to orient towards goodness and wholeness, those things are also fierce and alive. I feel like every conversation I have, including the conversations I’ve had with you over the years, reminds me that that is true and adds infinite variation to what that means, what that looks like in a particular life, in a particular place, in a particular field. And I’m really grateful that I have that now. 

Patel: Yes, thank you for that. I love this notion of the accumulative conversation and how different things make sense to us in different ways over time. If I had heard Vincent Harding say on your podcast when I was 20, “I live in a nation that does not yet exist,” I would’ve had a very different response than I did when I actually heard it when I was 35 or 38. I think that that’s part of the beauty of stories is they live in our bones and they come front of mind in different ways. 

Jeff Tweedy is one of my favorite musicians and is front man of Wilco. In a book that he wrote, he says, “Wilco’s not really a band anymore. It’s really an art collective.” It produces albums and it has shows, but it also has a music festival. It also has these variety of newsletters, which promote other people’s music. It has a studio where all kinds of bands meet and experiment musically, and they each have their own projects, musical and written. He’s like, “We’re really an art collective.” I’m curious, what’s On Being? It’s certainly not just a radio show. How would you describe what On Being is? 

Tippett: A couple of years ago, I started playing around with the descriptor “a media and public life initiative.” I’m not sure that that’s where we’re going to end, but I think that tells some of the story of the evolution. I was just speaking with somebody earlier today about — you’ll understand this. The conversation I was having was about On Being in the podcast-radio landscape, and I said, “When we think about who our kindred organizations are, our peers and colleagues, our ecosystem, it’s only tangentially other podcasts.”  

What I care about and what I feel like what On Being is about is a particular conversation, a set of questions, a quality of conversation speaking together differently that leads to living together differently, and podcasting is a form. It’s a place where we do that, but the important thing is the conversation.  

As we’ve evolved, it’s actually about us not creating more media, but really leaning in creatively to the impact that this conversation has and the ways people take it into their lives and into their communities, and how can we serve that? How can we serve? I think our content works at the intersection of inner life, outer presence to the world, and life together. 

Patel: Hold on. I just want to underscore that, because that is beautiful. 

Tippett: Yes. The evolution from Speaking of Faith to On Being, the realization I had, or the thing I was able to articulate is that one of the reasons Speaking of Faith wasn’t a good descriptor of what happened in this show is that part of the baggage that people brought to it is that people of faith have answers. That’s actually not the truth of this part of life. It’s so much about questions. 

What I started to realize eventually, and when we changed the name to On Being, is that what I’m pursuing, the lens we’re taking is on the animating questions behind our traditions and behind this whole part of life. And these are the ancient enduring human questions – What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And who will we be to each other? I think in the 21st century, that third question is absolutely inextricable from the basic question of what it means to be human. 

I feel like our show On Being has been moving into that inextricability. These are the words we’ve been playing with. The mission statement is “pursuing deep thinking and moral imagination, social courage, and joy to renew inner life, outer life and life together.” So I think that’s what it’s become for me. What is the human transformation that makes sustained long-term transformation, generative transformation, possible? That is what we need to be walking into as a country, as a species in this century. I don’t know if I answered your question, but … 

Patel: Yes, of course, you did. 

Tippett: I wouldn’t have said any of that 20 years ago. That’s all new or it’s all evolution. 

Patel: One of the things that strikes me is you could have said all of that in books and in interviews. The entity that is On Being is a staff and you are not saying to some other CEO, “You go figure this out. I am going to be the head and I’m going to write the stuff that I want to write and then you run the organization.” You are the CEO, [laughter] and I’m curious– 

Tippett: [laughs] It’s hard. 

Patel: Do you enjoy that? Do you enjoy the process of, “Okay, I’m going to figure out a mission statement for the organization, I’m going to figure out a staff structure?” Not that you’re alone in doing this but you are building, dare we say it, an institution that has these multiple initiatives and there are many people in your position who would just say, “I’m the writer and the thinker and the articulator.” Do you embrace the CEO role because you enjoy it, or you’re like, “Only I’m going to be able to do this the way that I want to do it?” 

Tippett: Well, a couple of things. One of the things I realized in the last couple of years is that if this is what the On Being project is about, what I just described, then we have to invest in the quality of our interior life as an organization. We have to actually be embodying as an organization, what we want to be helping curate and nourish in the world. We’ve actually done a lot of that investing actually for the last three to four years. 

Sure, I’m going to own this, that I don’t step back and let other people do the work. There’s also in me a 20th-century perfectionist person who works to the point of exhaustion, which you and I have talked about. I’m very much a product of our culture, a high-performing product of our culture, which values high performance. One of the things I’ve moved to is this can’t be a culture in which I’m an exhausted leader. Leading is hard, as you know, it’s hard, it’s lonely. 

We’ve moved to a distributed leadership model. I have two colleagues who really are my peers. There’s a vision that I hold and there’s a voice that I have that is distinct and uniquely authoritative and they also have authoritative voices. You said, “you’re not a radio show anymore,” and in fact, we’re going to end the radio show this summer. 

Patel: Yeow! 

Tippett: Yeah. For me, those questions that rose up in our world, in our society, in our world in March 2020, and April 2020, where we had to ask what is essential and what is non-essential, I am waiting for us to get back to those questions collectively because one of the things we understood when we posed those questions is that we have not organized our life around those caregiving — We don’t reward the professions that we actually need when everything else falls apart, that actually keep us together, body, mind, and soul. 

I feel like we had to ask as an organization, what is essential, and what is non-essential? One of the reasons we are ending the radio show and continuing with the podcast in seasons, which also will free up seasons of my life to be much more focused on presence to the world and on life together, is because I think that is the moment we are in and that’s also part of this evolution of becoming ever more true to what we’re about and always kind of asking how can we be most deeply of service? 

I think some of what we’re going to be doing in the future is going to be more quiet conversations and quiet convenings, but really deep relationship-building and hard conversations that can’t be had in public right now. I’m just sharing with you the newest evolutionary place we’re in, and I’m really happy. 

Patel: Wow. Thank you and I’m happy that you’re happy. It’s striking because you’re at the top of your game and the conversations that you think need to happen in the culture, we think happened because Krista facilitates that. 

Tippett: Yeah. I think first of all it’s hard for me to take in when you say things like that, that I facilitate the conversations you want to be hearing. I’m still going to be having those conversations. Eboo, I’ve been doing 52 weeks of radio a year for 20 years, and it is a deadline-driven life. There will be ways, and this kind of risky move forces us to step up with a lot of innovation and energy to be out there in different places, and people are spending their lives and spending their attention in different places now. 

Patel: It’s Dylan, right? It’s Dylan in the early ’60s who is ensconced in the folk music scene and it’s the “Blowin’ in the Wind” Dylan, playing the purest scene to the hilt, and then he starts listening to rock and roll and he thinks to himself, “What happens if I plug in?” There he is at the Newport folk festival in ’65 and he plugs in and he does Maggie’s Farm, and people boo him and he’s like, “You know what? I am an artist. You don’t own me. I am an artist. I’m hearing new things about music in my mind. You are perfectly free to do what you want, but it’s time for me to follow the soundscapes in my mind.” Maybe you’re hearing things in the universe and in your mind that you’re following. 

Tippett: Yes, I think that’s true. 

[music] 

Patel: By the way, if you’re enjoying this conversation, you ought to check out my new book, We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. It’s a guide for those who want to make positive social change and an invitation into the next chapter of American religion, a chapter I’m calling interfaith America. We Need to Build is published by Beacon Press and available wherever you buy books. Now, back to the podcast. 

Patel: So, 100 years from now, a great historian thinks to herself, “I want to get a read on American religion in the first quarter of the 21st century. To do that, I’m going to listen to Krista Tippett’s 52 shows a year for the 20 years she did this show.” What does that great historian conclude is happening in the world of American religion and spirituality, and inner life, outer presence, life together, from listening to your show for over 20 years, the way it’s changed, who you’ve had on that’s different? Really, what better cultural text is there than the repository of your interviews for 20 years? 

Tippett: Oh, that’s again so fascinating. 

Patel: See how much I’ve learned from you about asking questions? 

Tippett: [laughs] You have. You’ve been watching this along with me and participating along with me. It’s been a time of such fluidity and catharsis. What that historian would not experience in On Being are the phenomena that I was trying to balance out. The phenomena that maybe got the most attention in official places, the strident religiosity that burst into public life — Christianity in the late 20th century where you had a few voices, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, who didn’t just claim to speak for evangelical Christians, or fundamentalist Christians in Jerry Falwell’s case, but really were also given the microphone by journalists, were kind of taken to be how religious people sound, what they say, what they care about, what they advocate for. 

Then Islam had its own version of that scenario. The September 11th, 2001 attacks were a catastrophic introduction of an entire religion of billions of people to many Americans, for example, really thinking about Islam for the first time. One of the things I was very concerned with actually in the earliest years was drawing out the diversity, not just within Christianity, but within evangelical Christianity, and when we had an evangelical president in the White House, and also the diversity within Islam — the spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual dimensions and variety of traditions within these traditions. That was a place that we started and trying to untangle things done in the name of religion from the actual dimensionality and depth of religions, and also the way people live this part of their life.  

Another interesting chapter in this early 21st century was the rise of the new atheists, which I actually think was a reaction to the rise of the strident religious. There were a lot of books sold there for about a year. It was quick, but it was kind of this meteor rise of a few intellectuals who also made sweeping generalizations about religion from a very simplistic perspective and often pitting science against religion, which is an old trope in America. 

I think that something that has become possible in this century, this science-religion debate is not true to the history of science or the history of religion, and I see this conversation that has arisen between these parts of our society, between these parts of the human enterprise — not even necessarily that scientists or theologians are talking to each other — but that what neuroscience, what evolutionary biology, what social psychology, what they are shining a light on, they have now become partners on this frontier that used to be more consigned to theologians and philosophers of asking, of illuminating, what it means to be human. 

What we’re learning about our bodies, about our brains, about our species is very often in this amazing sync with intelligence that’s been inside the religious traditions and now it’s being taken inside the laboratory. 

Patel: The Dalai Lama and neuroscience. 

Tippett: Or the revision of evolutionary biology, which when I grew up was all about survival of the fittest and nature is red and tooth and claw. This new seeing that cooperation is a human superpower. That advance civilizationally has not come through competition alone or through survival alone. It’s something that wasn’t acknowledged that is now acknowledged in the most serious places. 

Patel: Part of what you’re doing in reviewing the past quarter century is you’re saying, “I have seen many ideas hit the big screen and then fall back down.” 

Tippett: Yeah, that’s interesting. 

Patel: There’s the religious right moment. There’s the Islamist violence moment. There’s the new atheist moment. There’s the science versus religion moment. Some of these have a long history. Atheism has a long history. This trope of “Islam is violent” has a long history, but they’re not always on the bestseller list. They’re not always on the nightly news, and this sense of you’re like, “I’m going to engage the topic of the day in a different way. I’m not going to ignore what people are seeing on television, but I’m going to show that there’s many rooms in the mansion,” so to speak. 

Tippett: I think the other one is the “spiritual but not religious,” which is another simplification. What is astonishing about the early 21st century in the whole history of humanity is that this is really all cultures and civilizations for the most part have had religious underpinnings and religious and faith identities that were as much inherited as chosen. We are the generation of our species in the West, but increasingly in other places, where that is loosening, but the equation that I was encountering when I was first creating the show was that as society grows more secular, these traditions will just wither. Our need for this superstition will just fall away. 

And it’s true that our religious institutions, like all of our institutions, the forms that came into the 21st century do not work. It is as true of medicine or school or politics as it is true of religion. That’s about a culture shift. But what I see and what I know you see, is that the human spiritual impulse is as vigorous as ever. I think theological curiosity, even if people don’t put those words to it, is alive in that “spiritual, but not religious” world. I think that the core impulses that drove our traditions, the desire to be of service, those things, if anything, are reviving, and that’s fascinating. 

Patel: Yes, I want to quick comment on the point about a culture choosing its narrative. There’s the great Alasdair MacIntyre line, “I cannot tell you who I am or what I am going to do until I tell you the story or stories that I’m part of.” There’s a sense there that that story or stories precede us. That the story of Christianity or of Islam or of America or whatever it is, that comes before and will last longer. We are a part of that river. That is that mindset. 

I’ll just share this. I remember being in India, I don’t know 2008 or 2010, and I had fully embraced my Ismaili Muslim identity at the time, but I was just getting better at telling the stories. I was writing my first book, Acts of Faith. I was saying to this person, Rafiq, who would hang around my grandmother’s house in India, “More and more I’m identifying as an Ismaili Muslim. I’m really proud of that.” 

I was saying this as if this was an achievement. And he looked at very quizzically, and he was like, “Your grandmother is an Ismaili, your father is an Ismaili, your mother is an Ismaili, your grandfather is an Ismaili.” He looked at me as if, “Did you not know what you were?” [laughs] In Muslim cultures in India, people have last names like Tobaccowala, Panwala, and Furniturewala. What is that? A wala is a merchant, somebody who sells things. 

Your profession is so much a part of your identity it becomes your last name and it’s passed down over the generations. You don’t have a choice. There’s no “identity as,” there is, “This is who your ancestors were.” I don’t want to make a judgment one way or another. This is not to be dismissive of choosing identities. It is only to say that is not the only way to have an identity. For most of human history, most human beings have inherited their identity and lived it out. 

Tippett: Yes. 

Patel: I’m curious, how new ways of identifying as individuals, but also as you’re pointing out as a culture. America is deciding new ideas of identity. We are simply being observers here. This is not judging. I so much appreciate that I had choice, that I could re-embrace my Ismaili Muslimness on my own terms, so to speak. But I think that there’s value in simply inheriting things and living them out. I’m curious how you’ve — 

Tippett: It’s exhausting to have to make this up. It’s unnatural. As you say, we’ve never had to do it before. One of the things that’s fascinating to me is — Again, there would be somebody like Peter Berger. Did you use to talk about Peter Burger? 

Patel: Peter Berger is my favorite. Yes. 

Tippett: We’re all talking about Peter Berger 20 years ago. I haven’t heard anybody even quote him lately, but he was so quotable, and he was one of these sociologists who had declared God dead and religion dead and it would privatize and then it would go away altogether. Then by the end of the century, he was observing that they had been very wrong about that. Just what’s been fascinating to me is that within one generation you have people who, sure, have no religious vocabulary like the ones that you and I just inhaled. They don’t have that kind of formal moral formation. 

They also have no baggage, and they have this very pure and searching curiosity. People are drawn back to take seriously this part of themselves and to look for communities, practices that speak to this part of themselves, and in many cases, you know, become religious again, maybe in their family’s lineage and maybe in another lineage. 

Patel: It’s certainly searching, but none of us are pure. What I mean by that is we are all laden with the cultural ideas of the time, which as you highlight, they come and go, which doesn’t mean that they’re not important, it’s just that they’re ephemeral. I realized that in this moment when I was like, “I identify as an Ismaili Muslim,” and then I was confronted with this other cultural idea of, “What are you talking about? You are what your parents are.” 

It is interesting to think that what cultural ideas of the moment are people laden with as they go about their search? Which actually brings me to something of a different kind of question, which is, I wonder what might be different about American religion in 10 or 15 years that is just impossible to predict from now. 

Tippett: I’m thinking of a conversation I had years ago, but that has also really shaped the way I look at all of this, with somebody named Nathan Schneider. I don’t know if you heard that, it was a long time ago, it was at Chautauqua. 

Patel: I did not. 

Tippett: He, at that point, was maybe in his early 20s and he was precisely one of these people who was raised by parents who kind of introduced him to all religions. They said, ”We don’t believe in anything, but we’re going to introduce you to all religions.” In the end, when he was 19, he converted to Catholicism and he became a really serious Catholic, and he got involved in Occupy Wall Street, and he’s now doing fascinating things kind of reclaiming a generative digital world.  

He talked about how the critique of people like him of the church, is that it doesn’t act enough like a church. He talked about after Hurricane Sandy in New York — this was also true in Minneapolis after George Floyd was murdered and there were buildings burned — where did people retreat to give care? Churches. 

Churches that aren’t full on Sunday mornings anymore, but suddenly were doing what churches were born to do, and it was very practical care for the whole human being. In my mind, what I think of as the analogy to this time in human history is actually the early monastic period, and that’s what I know best, and you know another geographic, cultural view of all of this. 

Patel: Different reference points, yes. 

Tippett: Different reference points. If I think about two millennia ago, there was one way to be religious and it was Christian and there was one way to be Christian. There wasn’t even this diversity of denomination. And the early monastics was a spiritual renewal movement that took itself outside the boundaries of that official church, that official religiosity, that also looked at the institution and said, ”You have betrayed your own highest values.” 

That recovered contemplative life. I mean, a thousand years after this thing started, that was just 10 people over here and 10 people there, you know St. Benedict — he’s one of the people who kicked off the official monastic movement — was not a big success story in his lifetime. One of the communities he moved in with, they tried to poison him. And what he started, that rule, has rippled through thousands of years of history. Its ripples are not just in religion, they’re in life. What I like about that it is a story about how change actually happens in our world, and it’s a story about how we — what looks most obvious is not necessarily the most important thing that’s happening or the most efficacious thing that’s happening. 

I also hear echoes of this in these unchurched, spiritual and not religious, unaffiliated — all of those names — nones — but who are also kind of giving themselves over to, “How can we be part of the healing of our world?” They are rediscovering interior life and contemplative life, and they are looking for ritual and they are creating new forms of community. A phenomenon that to me kind of pulls all this together is this little movement called Nuns & Nones. Have you heard of that?  

Patel: Katie Gordon is one of our alum at Interfaith America … 

Tippett: Okay. Of course, she — 

Patel: — helped to start this, yes. 

Tippett: This fascinating and beautiful coming together of N-O-N-E-S, young people who have not been religious in any traditional way, sitting at the feet of these monastic elders, these female monastics, who in the West, their communities are literally dying. They are aging and their communities are dying, and yet what these women know about living, about following the deepest truths, about being of service to the larger culture, and just about deep spiritual practice and the complex reality of spiritual community. 

You have these friendships and this exchange of knowledge and of questions that to me just kind of embodies this thing I’ve been watching, anyway, I think it’s happening in other places too, but it’s very literal there. 

Patel: Yes. My life, our lives, our world has been shaped by that concrete service and that example. I think to myself, I remember when I was deeply committed to very Dorothy Day-type service, like on the ground in the hardest places. I’d go to some of these places, and I realized a Catholic sister has already gotten there first and has built a preschool and a health clinic. She’s just been doing the work for 25 years, and when you show up, she’ll wave and she’ll welcome you. She will take no credit. She’s just there. That’s what inspired me about religion. That’s what inspired me about religion.  

Krista Tippett, you are my friend, you are a light in the world. I’m going to ask you one last question. Let’s get back to the historian for a moment who’s listened to 25 years or 20 years of your radio show. 

How does she describe who Krista Tippett is? And what category you’re in? I want to give you a couple of reference points for this. I suppose it’s accurate to say Jay-Z or Kanye West is a rapper, but it’s probably narrow. Or to say that Jane Addams was a social worker, but it’s probably narrow, or to say Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor. Somebody could describe you as a radio host or a journalist. It’s probably narrow, right? The historian a hundred years from now does this work on your show and your discourse and she says, “Krista Tippett was a blank.” 

Tippett: Has anybody asked you this question, Eboo? 

Patel: No. 

Tippett: This is a tough one. 

Patel: So much fun though, isn’t it? How am I going to ask you boring questions after you’ve been asking great questions for 20 years? 

Tippett: Okay. I tend to say “a listener,” but I actually think that’s actually too simple. Maybe, they would say something about me as a conversationalist, but that not just being about the transmission of words or even ideas, but a conversation that really honored the power of our words and our questions and the mystery of what happens when we freely exchange those with each other, as one of the most important capacities we possess as human beings.  

We walk around using words all the time. I would like to think that this conversation that I have conducted — and also tried, I think, to model and put out there alongside all of the other ways we do dialogue and speech — is elevating in some way or anchoring in some way. 

Patel: I kinda like that. Krista Tippett, conversation holder. 

Tippett: Thank you. 

Patel: Thank you. 

[music] 

Patel: Among the many things, I appreciate about Krista is her historical view from the time in which few, quote-unquote, ”serious” people seem to be taking religion seriously, namely the end of the Cold War through the 9/11 era when religion was everywhere discussed, but mostly understood as a bomb of destruction, to now. I love Krista’s insight that we live at a time in which our knowledge of ourselves and the known universe is expanding exponentially, and our spirits seem to be trying to keep up, but it’s that spirit that makes us human and we better tend to it. 

Our diverse religious traditions are like nutrients for the soul. If you’ll allow me to extend the metaphor, Krista is the one who’s been tending this garden and our culture for decades. I am grateful to her for our friendship and for the gift she has given to our culture. 

Interfaith America with Eboo Patel is a production by Interfaith America and Philo’s Future Media. 

I’m your host, Eboo Patel. 

Our Interfaith America team is, executive producer Silma Suba. Senior producer, Monique Parsons. Coordinating producer Teri Simon. Researcher, Neil Agarwal. With editorial support from Johanna Zorn. Production by Philo’s Future Media team, executive producer, Keisha “TK” Dutes. Producer and engineer, Manny Faces. Share the show with a friend and rate, follow, subscribe, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. 

Intro/outro music provided by Mysterylab Music and composed by Mott Jordan. 

Credit music provided by Die Hard Productions.