this week on "moyers & company" -- >> the grace vision of a great society was built on an of-upstanding pie. once the pie started shrinking in 1970 because of largely economic reasons. then we started fighting over the spoil. >> i am a supporter of capitalism. as a christian, not always a supporter of capitalists. funding provided by -- celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and committed to goi doing good in the world. the kolbert foundation. support from the partridge foundation, a charitable fund. the clamense foundation. critical issues. the herb albert foundation, supporting organizations whose issue promoteses compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audrey rappaport

foundation, committed to building a more just and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischmann, and by our sole corporate sponsor mutual of america designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. welcome. imagine if you turned on your tv set some day soon and were greeted by this -- >> hi. welcome to "sesame street." >> hola. [ laughter ] >> but first, this message. >> this time romney's firing his mind at rick santorum. starring barack obama as president flexible. >> "sesame street," brought to you by the letter c, for creeping campaign cash corruption.

okay. perhaps we're exaggerating a bit, but as the late william f. buckley jr. used to say the poet survives the exaggeration, because a startling decision from the ninth u.s. circuit court of appeals recently struck down the federal ban against political and issue advertising on public tv and radio. this means potentially that super pacs, special interests and the rich who want to influence elections could buy ad time on your favorite public television or radio station. the public broadcasting act was signed into law in 1967. it uses the term "non-commercial" 16 times to describe what public television and radio should be. it specifically says, and i quote, "no non-commercial educational broadcasting station may support or oppose any candidate for political office." we've taken that seriously all of these years, and most of us who have labored in this

vineyard still think public broadcasting should be a refuge from the fraying distortions and outright lies that characterize politics today. in its majority decision, the circuit court did uphold the rule that forbids public stations from carrying ads for commercial products and services, but it said it seemed logical to the judges that the decision on political advertisers wouldn't cause stations to dilute their non-commercial programming. logical? sorry, your honors, this is the same so-called logic that led the supreme court to issue its notorious citizens united decision. that's the one that opened all spigots to flood the political landscape with cash and the airwaves with trash. to be truthful, one pbs board member said of this decision, it scares me to death. us, too. with our stations always in a

financial pickle, frantically hanging on by their fingertips, it won't be easy to turn down those quick bucks from super pacs and others, but if i may, hang in there, my brothers and sisters in the local trenches. if of there was a time for solidarity and spunk, this is it. stations kpbs in san diego and ksfr, public radio in santa fe have already said they won't take these ads. if enough of you say, no, this invasion might be repelled. and viewers, our stations need to know you're behind them. this message was paid for by our -- and restoring the future on our terms only through people like you. i'm b.ill moyers and i both approve and disapprove this message. this week, two important new books. two fine writers, one on the left, one on the right, each an independent thinker. together they make the case for old school faith and politics.

first, the cause. the fight for american liberalism from franklin roosevelt to barack obama. eric alterman superbly tells the story how fdr lost its hold on the american imagination and is struggling now to regain it. and historian journalist eric alterman writes for the daily beast among others and published eight previous books and a distinguished professor of english and journalism at brooklyn college and the graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york. welcome to the show, eric. >> thanks for having me. >> so have you written the eulogy for liberalism? >> i certainly didn't intend to write the eulogy. no, i haven't written the eulogy for lib ratherism. i fear i may have for a certain kind of system. an economic-based -- a liberalism that sees, that uses a strong central government on behalf of the people who need tos protected, but a government

who needs to -- who needs some force in the world to protect them from corporations and economic forces that are beyond their control. >> certainly cultural lib ratherism is flrished. social liberalism is as healthy as it's of been. >> what do you mean by that? >> well, marriage equality, however you want to define it, is clearly the way of the futch. but when i was young, the idea that being gay is something that -- you would talk about with your children and they would have teachers and friends and openly gay, unimaginable. one of the worst things you could talk about in those days, yet today we've had a revolution in that area. much quicker i think than most expected. when gay marriage first came on the agenda, i don't think any of us expected it could be legal so quickly. civil rights took much, much longer than that. again, women's rights, civil rights, gay rights. other kinds of rights for

people, anything that doesn't cost money, really. >> this is why i ask if you've written the eulogy. taking criticism from the other side, david brooks, the conservative writer wrote this should be a golden age of liberalism. wall street debacle undermined faith in capitalism, worker wages are flat, corporate profits are soaring. the republican party is unpopular and sometimes, says brooks, embarrassing, and yet the percentage of americans who either flat or in decline. there are now, says brooks, two conservatives in america for every liberal. >> if a complicated phenomenon. in fact, if my friend david brooks looked carefully at the date taye, or more in deal, he would have seen most of the positions that people who reject the liberallabel never left embraced liberal positions. just about everyone who calls himself a moderate has liberal positions but they won't come to

the word liberal. that's in part because the word has been so abused. it's been -- there's been hundreds of millions of dollars spent by conservatives to maybe liberal an epithet and it's been successful. the other reason, it's not that people disagree with liberals on the issues. they don't. they don't like what they feel to be liberal condensation, telling them how to live their lives. >> wait. it's the conservatives, santorum and others telling people how to live their lives? >> for a long time when you and your friends were running the government, there was a sense that anyone who stood in the way of progress for black people and other minorities was immoral. or ignorant at that, and needed uplifted. and that was certainly -- i certainly would have felt that way, and -- but it didn't seem to have any end. so at some point, a bunch of people, maybe most people, decided enough is enough.

we've made up for all of the inequities that this country has been responsible for for a long time. made good on that check that martin luther king said needed to be cashed at the lincoln memorial in 1963. then the rest was liberals again telling them how to order their lives. >> what lib rams were saying, you can't keep people in servitude in second and third-class schools. >> that's what they began saying but they began saying we're going to take your job away, give it to other people. >> affirmative action? >> affirmative action. housing, you know, discriminatory housing patterns. if you look at all of the inequity in education and housing and jobs, in a place like chicago. well, it's all -- it all derives from housing patterns. the way, they were purposely built that way to separate white people who didn't want black people in their neighborhood. and every time you try to address that, you were met with

community-wide violence that was approved by and large by the community. fire bombings and horrible thing. so there was no, there were no good solutions to this. one mistake liberals made, even though i certainly sympathize with the call is they didn't have a plan for what to do when things didn't work out. when we had to integrate the country with all the speed, what was the plan if the people weren't going to go along with that? >> liberals couldn't have done what you would have liked them to have done, and reversed discrimination in this country? >> but the fact is, it's that we were asking for almost a revolution in everyday lives, in a lot of parts of this country, and the liberals who tried to bring it out from above -- >> but when the, the man for change came it didn't come from the top. it came from martin luther king and young men and women on freedom rides and pastors in the south standing up to -- jim

crow. that's where the movement. >> enormously inspirational story. the we shall overcome point in history. society is an organism. when you change things in one place things change all over the place. i think liberals were so, they were so committed to the rectitude of their cause that they didn't think hard enough about implementation and they didn't realize, the one thing conservatives are right about is that when you change things, particularly from the top down, they're never going to go as planned. you have to be adaptable. but that was franklin roosevelts great strength. he was always ready with another plan. >> a great improviser. >> yeah. >> you're right franklin roosevelt's great ins sprugs, the notion government might play a positive role in improving the lives of its citizens, but you also go on to say he never

defined the boundaries of benevolent intervention in either the economy or in individual lives, and isn't that still where liberals are wrestling today to define the boundaries of government in their intervention? >> i think they're wrestling with the consequences of having failed to define them. i think there were certain boundaries that people would have felt comfortable with, and liberals went beyond them and i do blame liberals particularly in the '70s for failing to understand that they were no longer acting liberally anymore. they were merely redistributing the spoils of the system amongst various groups. the political scientist ted lowi called it and liberals turned on one another. feminists turned onblacks, on gay, on white working powerful people and ended up being their own worst enemies because they couldn't agree on a common goal to lift up people.

the great division in post-war american liberalism is between roosevelt and truman and kennedy's notion that -- not certain about kennedy, certainly true of truman, that this was a majoritarian movement to help everyone, lift all boats, and-by-doing so you would help the people who needed help the most, and then beginning with the great society, it became much more about trying to help particular victims of past discrimination and past wrongs, and so forth. so people no longer saw themselves in this project, and that's when, i think, liberalism was seen to go too far. philosophically you could say it was the right thing to do. people needed help, but it's a political loser. again, society is very complicated. people are very complicated, and we have to be careful when we mess with these things. messing with people's lives, and they're not going to react like laboratory rats. >> daniel patrick moynihan,

united states senator from new york, said democrats are the party of the government. >> brooks said that's the problem. liberals still believe in government when most americans don't. he quotes one poem that reports only 10% of americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time. that makes it hard for liberals to call for more government. >> i agree liberal, the party of government. you -- look, an individual in society who is not well born, not born with all kinds of advantages, needs help to -- to be able to self-able chutize through the education system, through commune organizations to get through college it costs to go to a private college at $50,000 a year. with people who work hard just to -- to make a living, it's not easy, and they need a hand from somewhere, particularly since we now live in an age of global

capitalism when corporations have no, feel no sense of responsibility at all to local communities, or even the country themselves. so if you want to -- if you want to give people genuinely equal opportunity which is what disappointed liberalism, you need to give these people a hand somehow, and government is how we do that. the problem is, is, it's a problem for liberals. there's an awful lot of unfairness in the world. and there's only so much we can do about it. you know, as a society. there's only so much opportunity we can offer people. only so much equality that's of going to be available. so the first thing we need to do as liberals to become credible, to other 80% of americans who are, what's called liberals, is find a way to make the government protection of their lives, intervention on their behalf in their lives credible, and it's no easy task. >> you say that liberals have never gotten the right handle on the class issue. that democrats, can't handle

politically the issue of class. right? >> yeah. >> why? >> why can't they do it? >> yeah. >> i guess there's two reasons. that come to the top of my head. one is that because identity politics for so many groups is so strong in this country. in part because we're a nation of immigrants and a nation of minorities that those identifications seem to trump class. certainly race trumps class. >> what do you mean when you say race trumps class? >> most people of color think of themselves as people of color first. nopt at not as working people first and certainly their leaders do. an amazing thing when jim hightower from texas endorsed jesse jackson, because the idea that a white populist would endorse a black civil rights leader for president was seen as shocking. when, in fact, they were on the same side on just about all issues, but the division of race was seen as so much more powerful than the continuity in class. so the great question from

werner sombart, why there's no soeshi issocial because the people who would have been the soeshist isist socialists were fighting with each other, italians, blacks, jews. one reason. the other reason is conservatives have mastered the politics of class in a way liberals haven't. liberals are afraid of the politics of class. in part because they're funded by really rich people. they're funded -- you know, our liberal politic, funded by people who have to demand higher taxes on themselves, and whereas conservatives have a consistent message. and so they're able to -- they're libertarianism, even if it's only for show, it resonates with people. it's the response to liberals telling them how to live their lives. conservatives say, we're not telling you how to live your lives. >> the libertarians are. >> but not --

>> christian conservatives. >> no. >> from the latest historian arthur schlesinger jr. himself. a great liberal "the existence of franklin roosevelt relieved american liberals for a dozen years of the responsibility of thinking for themselves." how so? >> when franklin roosevelt was governor of new york he wasn't much of a liberal. he didn't become a strong liberal until his second term. elected on a balanced budget in 1932, then came out against economic loyalism and called him a militant liberal, but his policies were not ideologically driven at all. incredibly pragmatic. >> militant against the pollutecrats but dlinltly excluded black participation. farmers in particular. >> eleanor roosevelt used to be on his case but he would tell her this is the only way, to pull this coalition together. they're better off, and he was right.

none of those politicians would have gone along for the right, if that included blacks. that was where they got off the train. in fact, as you know, the labor movement never really made any progress, much progress in the south, and that was because it was insufficiently exclusionary to blacks. i mean, you can tell the story of the epitaph of liberalism. the pie stopped expanding. you know as well as anyone, the division, the great vision of the great society was built on an of-expanding pie that could be redistributed to more people. once that pie started shrinks in the 1970s because of largely economic reasons then we started fighting over the spoils. you can say that liberals have a tendency as daniel patrick moynihan said to overpromise and underperform but you can also say as lyndon johnson said, by signing the voting rights act and the civil rights act, and losing the south forever, he didn't just lose the south.

he turned the primary constituencies of the democratic party in the north against one another. and from that moment on, it became much, much harder to put together progressive coalitions. >> he knew this? he knew when he embraced the civil rights act, the voting rights act '64-65 he was taking it beyond franklin roosevelt. he was including embracing the cause of civil rights knowing it was going to alienate southern churches, southern baptists, and the white elites? >> it might have worked over time, if there had really been an expanding pie. but because he got so deeply involved in vietnam and vietnam became the sinkhole and also divided the country, it became impossible to move forward on the kinds of the we shall overcome agenda. so we'll never know. but the way it turned out was disastrous for the cause of liberalism and in many ways for the cause of the people he was trying to help. >> you also quote the liberal

economist and we both know, robert cutner. how did we make such stunning progress in three decades on issues involving tolerance and inclusiveness, as you have just talked about, and how is it that during the same period we have gone steadily backward on a whole set of economic issues? >> i mean, another reason that liberals did so badly in polling in terms of are you a liberal is most people don't think that politicians are going to deliver on any of their promises. so even if you, if some guy's promising to gut your medicare and social security, another guy promising to protect it, they're just promises. doesn't matter. vote for the guy that looks and sounds like you as much as possible. liberals have taken their eye off the ball i think since the '70s. it didn't happen by accident. they allowed this purchase of government to take place. spent their time fighting amongst themselves, arguing about thing, being on the

defense. it has a lot to do with the loss of self-confidence. liberalism suffer rnd and enormous blow from mccarthyism in the first place. >> mccarthyism condemning liberals as traitors? >> somehow in america, and suffered an enormous blow when their children in the 1960s told them there were worker mills, the way we treated the indians, vietnam, how blacks were treated. these were their children. the elite schools they worked so hard to send their children to, and they never -- then ronald reagan got elected president. seems like a joke. ronald reagan was -- got elected, nobody took the guy seriously. how can you elect a buffoon who thinks air pollution comes from plants and trees? those three events, those three punches in a row, robbed liberals of their self-confidence. of since then they haven't really been able to make their case in a full throated way. whenever a conservative says, a, a liberal says, maybe a, maybe

b, possibly a little c. it's hard for any politician, if you think the most conservative politicians in our society, you know, people like demint -- >> senator jim demint, south carolina. >> yeah. and rick santorum. compare them to the most liberal, people like barney frank, or george mcgovern, i admire barney frank and george. >> mike: govemcgovern, but thin modern people, not demagogic in any way. >> liberals don't have the instinct to fight? >> number one, they've lost their self-confidence and two, to a degree hampered by their own recognition of complexity. listen to limbaugh and buchanan, everything is simple. here's what we've got to do, but if you listen to a liberal, obama said this about himself and about jimmy carter and about bill clinton. he said, we're paralyzed by our wonkishness and makes it difficult to communicate a vision that we can march to as a -- >> a scale of 1 to 100 as a

measure of where someone stands where do you put obama as a liberal? >> with 100 being who? >> roosevelt. >> i put him at about 30. >> really? >> 35. yeah. and in today's society, i would put him at about 55. 50. >> why the difference? >> because as a society we've moved incredibly to the right since roosevelt 's time. there's something about our political system dominated by money and corporations and by the elite media, that beats down the liberalism in the democratic party lines. >> david brooks who is a critic says that liberals need to do what farmers do. they weed, and they get their ground clear, and then they replant. and he says, liberals, democrats, should weed out what's not working. >> absolutely true. what liberals have done instead because of their loss of self-confidence is they've played defense everywhere. one of the great victories of

liberalism, and it's true, when george bush tried to destroy social security. josh marshall of talking points memo, which barely existed at the time, got all of his readers to call up their representatives and say, did you want to abolish social security and got them to go on record. but nobody then came forth with a plan to make it whole. nobody has a good plan on the liberal side to ensure that i've heard, to ensure that medicare will survive. nobody's willing to take on corporate welfare, the agriculture lobby, all the tons of money that goes to all of these different organizations. that goes to the catholic church, for god's sakes. billions and billions -- >> no pun intended. >> right. all of these organized groups that are -- are sucking at the tit of government, that are considered to be sacred, and liberals need to fight this battle, because the resources are finite, and you can't,

obviously you can't win these battles when the very victories you won, like social security and medicare and medicaid in the great society have now become albatrosses around your neck. so they need to do what you and david brooks suggest. weed out the program, decide which are the ones to fight for and expanding, and then fight for them. >> why did you write this book? >> i was looking for people who i could admire. in history. looking to locate myself on the shoulders of others. but more than that, you know, i think liberalism just makes sense. liberalism is acting rationally and principally in the name of fairness. in the name of the greatest amount of equality possible. saying that being born rich shouldn't give you an impossible advantage over everybody else forever. that's just common sense to me. it's what this country was founded on. different priorities back then, but it's the same challenge that faced the founding fathers that faces every generation, and yet

it's held in such ill-repute. considered so outrageous. whenever i -- i've had the word liberal in a few of my books. whenever i go on the radio or on one of these cable shows it's like i'm defending child murder. so i'm really -- i'm a historian and needed to understand that process historically. >> in a word, as we say in television, what is the cause today? >> today the cause is greater equality. stewards. yeah. no way to say that in one word. today we're -- we're living in an a moral emergency. the combination of the supreme court opening up the system to unlimited amounts of money and so much money being accumulated by such a small part of our society has really threatened the future of this country as a democracy in any -- plutocracy is not, a hyperbole, actually a more accurate description of how

our politics worken and plutocracy means. >> the rule of the wealthy, the top of society. by the pollute -- poluticrats. all the causes are only gish gi meaning by the resources that are being right now sent entirely upward. unless we can find a way to equalize those resources to some degree, then things like integration are kind of meaningless. >> when the proverbial alien arrives from mars and said how will i know a liberal when i meet one, how will i answer? >> you know someone is a liberal because they believe in the enlightenment, in reason. it's because they follow their thoughts to thr logical conclusion and say, this is the right thing to do. now, exactly what policies that leads you to is always changing and always open to argument, but

they don't say, this is what god told me to do. they don't say, this is what the dialect of history told me to do. they say, this is the right thing to do for the greatest number of people. so if there's one challenge that faces liberals today it is to find a way to revive people's faith in the ability of government to improve their lives, and that, to me, would be the next chapter in this book. >> the book is "the cause: the fight for american liberalism from franklin roosevelt to barack obama." eric alterman, thanks for being with me. >> thank you. justice 50 years ago liberalism the center of politics our religious landscape then was dominated by mainline protestants and the catholic church becoming less roman and more american every year. one the most symbolic events occurred in 1958 when president

dwight d. eisenhower laid the cornerstone for the new headquarters of the national council of churches here in new york city. before a crowd of 30,000, eisenhower quoted george washington who described religion as the firm foundation of the country's moral life. that was the decade america put god on our paper money and in the pledge of allegiance and though the churchly dna often falls to racism, anti-semitism, dig bigotry, many felt religion in its various incarnations was the engine driving the american future. but then, says my next guest, american christianity went off the rails, and now threatens to take american society with it. furthermore, the snake in the garden is not atheism, nor secular humanism. our fall is the work of heresy, you see in the title of his latest book "bad relation: how we became a nation of heretics."

ross douthat has tasted widely and baptized apacific pailian attended pentecost's churches in his youth and converted to catholicism at age 17. now he's widely considered to be one of the country's most influential conservative voices. he's the youngest of op-ed columnist for the "new york times" and also has written privilege about the perils of a harvard education and co-authored grand new party, how republicans can win the working class and save the american dream. welcome. >> thank you so much for having me, bill. it's great to be here. >> i found your book fascinating, because you seem to me to be carrying on an argument with yourself, and i'm never sure until the last chapter which ross douthat is going to win out. am i right about this? >> well, tell me more. what kind of argument am i carrying out? >> well, there's the pious ross

douthat whose faith was delivered to the saints. historical grounded. a believer in the doing gma of essential christian experience and the political ross douthat who seems throughout this book to be unsure about making peace with a republican party and you are conservative, whose base embraces an absolutist theology. >> ah. i see. you're trying to tug me -- let me -- >> no. there is, the suspense where you'll come out is worth the price of the book. >> very kind of you to say. i do consider myself a political conservative, and i do identify you know, with religious conservatism broadly speaking and identify with, i think, the causes that animate religious conservatives. i'm pro-life and i think that

that cause is immensely important to american christianity, but i also do argue that what's happened on the religious right over the past 30 years is often a sort of captivity of religion to partisanship rather than a religious influencing politics, and i think that's happened, though, on the religious left as well. i think in part the story of what happened to american christianity after the '50s and '60s is sort of a captivity on both sides. you have billy graham, this evangelical preacher, martin luther king, a civil rights activist. both of those figures are religious figures who had political influence. and you know, both of them were sometimes more partisan. graham became more partisan in the nixon presidency. king late in life became somewhat more ideology, but never in general thought of as specifically partisan figures. flash forward to the 1980s a few decades two figures who could

have been their successor, jesse jackson, potential heir to martin luther king and pat ropa robertson. when they decide to get in politics what to they dough? they don't stand outside, they run for president. pat robertson and jesse jackson ran for president. imagine how different the history of the 1950s would be if billy graham and martin luther king had run for president? in that you can see the shift from a faith-i'm arguing christian faith always has to be in some sense political, because christians are engaged to be involved in the world but in a way that doesn't become an expression of a party line, and iy think that's happen and the left and the right alike. >> your quarrel is with what you call the heresies, joel osteens gospel of prosperity, god wants you to be rich. oprah winfrey's therapeutic religion. you can make yourself look better.

>> right. >> glenn beck messianic nationalism which sees god as the commander in chief, so to speak. your quarrel, you call those the heresies, right? >> i try and look at popular theology. right? where are ordinary americans actually getting their religious teachings from today? right? and i think the places that they're getting it from are places like the oprah winfrey show. writers like you know, elizabeth gilbert the author of "eat, pray love" which i think is -- actually a theologically fascinating book. writers like deepak chopra, eckhart tolle and so on. as you said, preachers are sort of a religion of prosperity, like joel osteen who argued that god wants you to have that big house on the corner, that you need -- if you aren't rich now it's because you aren't praying hard enough, and i think those aren't necessarily -- you could argue olesstein is sort of right wing and oprah left wing but they aren't really political figures. >> not jesse jackson?

>> not jesse jackson, but they are some of the, what i call in the book heretics and i use that word because i think what is religion in america like right now? are we a traditionally christian country? i don't think so. but are we a secular country? well, surely not. if you look at public opinion polls on belief in god experiences, miracles, people claiming personal encounters with the divine, we're probably just as religiouses of. so i think we occupy this interesting middle ground between sort of traditional christian orthodoxy and sort of secularism or something more post-christian where we're deeply influenced by christianity but flying off in all kinds of directions and i think heresy is obviously a loaded word but i think it's the right word. >> but the premise of your book to me is once upon a time, 50, 60 years ago, religion was the, it was a robust center? >> there was a christian -- that

there was a christian center, yes. >> and heresies can be even more robust, can they not? institutions of which they split off? >> absolutely. the book is very critical of a lot of the religious -- >> religion -- >> but it's also what i do try and do as well is take them, i think, more seriously. theologically seriously. you're right thp pe were be deeply robust and the prosperity of preaching. a lot of people, especially fellow journalists, turn on a prosperity preacher whether it's somebody smooth like olestein or the more ridiculous figgers in garish suits and say, this is absurd, something to be made fun of, but the point i make in the book is, no, there's actually a real core here toological appeal to that idea, and the same is true, same is true when i talk about sort of what i call the god within and sort of therapeutic religion and "eat, pray love." these are, these theologists have an appeal for a reason. they answer people's questions

about god and the universe. >> they're writering theology irrespective of what the faith of our fathers and the old-time religion might have believed. >> what's different about our era is not the presence of, as you say, people writing their own theology. there's nothing more american than that. what's different is the absence of a sort of institutional christian response. i think there's been this -- one of the points in the book is that we're used to thinking that orthodoxy without heresy is dangerous. right? ands that absolutely true. but the era we're living in now is a landscape where we have heresy without orthodoxy. that, you know, when emerson stands up in the 1830s and gives his famous harvard divinity school address and said, i can no longer agree with this, this and this christian doctrine. that's a fascinating and intellectually important moment because the people in his audience disagreed with him. there were people who did believe in the traditional doctrines and had you that clash. if an emersoned to up and said

that today, people would say, sure. you know, we don't believe in that either. it's that tension between orthodoxy and heresy i think that's been lost as the traditional mainline denominations declined, as my own catholic church that weakened as well. >> the charged word in the title of your book is not heresy, i think the faith is a long narrative of heresies and many -- the charged word is bad religion. >> bad religion. >> are you saying that fundamentalism along with the gospel of prosperity, the cult of therapy with oprah and the chauvinist, nationalist god-soaked pate trimmism of a glenn beck is bad religion? >> you've left out the yes we can utopiaism of barack obama which i throw in as well. >> seems to me that's political rhetoric. every president -- the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. maybe that's theology.

i think political. are you equating obama with olestein? >> i'm not equating obama himself with those figures. in some of the enthusiasm for obama in 2008, if you go back and look at some of the things that were written, there was this famous column in the "san francisco chronicle" a writer said, i think obama is the light bringer. this great soul. all the endless sort of religious iconography in magazine covers or go watch that famous will.i.am. video. everybody's singing about obama. there, yes, you do see a sort of, a liberal, a liberal form -- i think the investment of partisan causes with sort of religious enthusiasm is part of what i call heresy and, yeah, i think it happened with obama supporters too. there's a mirror -- >> you're too young to remember hue people sang for john f. kennedy and even lyndon johns

bjohnson before the fall. how did that differ from barack obama and ronald reagan in terms -- >> i talk about reagan a bit in the book, too. i think there are, there's a mirroring on the left and right where on both sides you've had this sort of, you know -- as institutional religion weakens, but people remain religious, right? they still have religious enthusiasm, because man is is naturally a religious animal, it becomes easier and easier to invest partisan causes with religious enthusiasm, and i agree. you see that in sort of the republican cult of reagan sometimes, sort of mourning in america, stit on the hill. i'll saying, i think you saw it in the 2008 campaign a little bit, too. but i haven't answered your question, about badness. i think the badness comes from the fact that they have the field to themselves. it's the absence of this creative tension between, between some of these heretical forms of faith and strong institutional churches.

you can draw a bright line between certain forms of prosperity theology and the house bubble. i think you can draw a bright line between some of the cult of the god within and the fact that americans seem to have harder and harder times living in community with one another. you know, we marry less. we have more children out of wedlock. our community organizations are waeshgenning and some of that i think has to do with the kind of narcissistic form of spirituality. so, yes. i will own up to the badness. i just want to emphasize that i, i'm a believer in that tension between heresy and orthodoxy. >> let me come back to what was going through my mind as i read this book. it seems to me you're just not all that comfortable with the conservative religious sanction of politics that has turned the republican party into a church of capitalism. is that right? >> i think it's -- it's, part of what makes me a political

conservative today is that i think that that -- that sen in sis of christianity in the welfare state isn't always as easy as people thought in the '40s and '50s. in part because people in those eras were over optimist thinking central planning could accomplish in an economy and also i think a little bit naive about the extent to which original sin, right, which works itself out in the marketplace all the time, can also work itself out in corrupt bureaucracies, administrations just as easily, and as the same tie, i mean, there has to be a distinction that christians have to be willing to draw between saying we as a society need to be open to caring for the poor, but we as a society don't necessarily need to feel a christian obligation to maintain, let's say, middle class entitlements as they are now indefinitely into the here'

testament passage where he says, you know, remember the middle class and their medicare now and federal reser forever, world without end. sort of having some sort of limiting factor on government. that being said, i think you're absolutely right to see in my writing a discomfort with sort of an easy valorization of sort of anything that capitalists want to do. >> jesus was hard on the money changers. right? >> yes. >> but conservative christians today seem quite at ease in the service of wealth and power. quite uncritical. quite unquestioning. in fact, i think if they read this book, they'll be harder on you for your judgments about the heresy of worshipping manna, but

those who think the free market was set up in genesis 1 rsh: 1 have a problem with you. >> i spend a lot of time i conservative christians. what you also have from a lot of them, younger evangelicals especially also catholics and so on, is a, i think an agreement with the point i make in the book and that you just expressed, that the new testament is very critical of great wealth and so on, but also a fear that if they -- if they -- if they spend too much time sort of rhetorically focused on those issues, that they will be essentially giving aid and comfort to a liberalism that they feel is to their basic beliefs. >> something you said elsewhere

"if you continue to think the government should be responsible for cutting great fortunes down to size that should only heighten your responsibility to issue a moral critique when rich people let greed and hubris get the better of them." where on the religious right do you find that moral critique of wealth today? >> i think that -- i mean, i think you sometimes find it from even conservative catholic bishops, and i think you do find it particularly among a lot of younger evangelicals who are still sort of identified as conservative. >> is a faith that's made its peace with law seay faire capitalism and theologically justifies the pursuit of wealth in your own frame of reference, is that truly christian? >> i would distinguish in a way between the two. i think that, laissez-faire

capitalism in for all its faults the system -- you know, it's what churchill said about democracy. the worst system except for all the others. in that sense, yes, i think christians have to make their peace with some form of capitalism. having made that peace, though, as in the quote you just read, i think it's important for christians not to then proceed to make theological justifications for everything that people within the capitalist system do. so that's a distinction i would draw. i am a supporter of capitalism, but as a christian, i'm not always a supporter of capitalists, if that distinction makes sense. >> should christian societies do everything in their power to make the largest possible provision for the poor? >> i think that christian societies have an obligation to do two things. they have an obligation to, one, make a provision for the poor, but they also have an obligation

to make sure that that provision doesn't create dependency and sort of rob the poor of their independence and ultimately their ability to rise, and that the state doesn't become a substitute for institutions that i think christianity is ultimately more in favor of. sort of the family private initiative and so on. jesus of nazareth, you said, incredibly hard on the money changers, incredibly hard on the rich, but his skortations are usually focused towards individuals. he doesn't have a specific political program. there's a danger if you're too political. the state is just going to be solely responsible for taking care of the poor, then they'll be no room left for genuine acts of clarity. that's the balancing act. i support a welfare state but it doesn't mean i support every expansion of the welfare state. >> who is closer to your sense of christian conservatism? rick santorum or mitt romney? >> now, that's a very good

question. and it's a hard one. on the sort of big picture question of how faith should relate to public policy, i have a lot of sympathy for the passion that santorum brings and the fact that, you know, he's -- there are a lot of nom neale pro-life politicians. rick santorum actually cares about that issue and spent a large part of his career in the senate working on that issue. by the same token, rick santorum has also been an example to some extent of the kind of thing we were talking about earlier, where you want your politicians to not -- christian politicians to not just be partisan. santorum as a senator was very conservative, but he also would reach across the aisle, particularly on issues related to poverty. he was -- >> to the left of -- progressive taxation. >> and he was attacked by romney for a bill allowing felons to vote and so on. there is a sort of secret left wing side of rick santorum that was created by his christian faith.

so in that sense, i say santorum, not romney. if you ask me on sort of, who -- you know, you aren't just voting for someone who's sort of overall premises you admire. you're voting for someone on policy positions and on those grounds i'm probably closer you know, closer to romney. >> what more do christian conservatives want from romney? i just made a list. he's already saying he's pro-life, pledged to defund planned parenthood, plans to appoint an attorney general who will defense the defensive marriage act and supports the constitution defining marriage as being between a man and woman. plans to repeal the health care overall saying americans are victims of unbounded government appetite, argues obama wants to repress the freedom of conservative christians -- right out of his statements. what do christian conservatives want? >> they want -- they want what americans always want from their politicians. they want to feel like he loves

them. identify with him. this is the thing. politics is not just about sort of reciting the right list of positions. people want to you support it. >> not on the right track. >> it's not even that, and mitt romney in their hearts conservative americans know, not just christian, just conservatives across the board no romney isn't really one of them. that he is what, you know, what gingrich called him. a massachusetts moderate. not in the sense of being really liberal in the sense of tech know creak businessman. it's that sense of identification that has been missing for romney, whereas, you know -- conservatives want to feel what liberals felt with barack obama. right? and what liberals felt for barack obama in 2008, again it wasn't just about the policy. it wasn't even about the policy. it was about this almost religious -- i said before, identification. that's where romney fuel falls short but might be why he would be a good president.

it's actually better sometimes when politicians don't inspire that kind of affection from us. >> i would challenge you on one point. i don't think the liberals i knew felt that way about obama. they thought his election would be the apotheosis of 300 years of racism, but i think they wished, they would like to feel the way they once felt and my father felt about franklin roosevelt, which is, i think, the same thing that ronald reagan made a certain generation feel. i think that's -- look, we have to close, but you quote in your book my friend bill mckibbon who says that american is "simultaneously the most professively christian of the developed nations, and the least christian in its behavior." right? >> well, but i quote limb to disagree with him slightly. in quoting him, i think that what -- i think that that argument does sometimes miss the good that conservative christians do not by voting for

government programs, but in their homes, in their charities, in their overseas missions and so on. if there was one thing i would say to liberal whose think that all conservative christians are sort of hypocrites and so on is that, look at the way a lot of american evangelicals in particular live their lives. someone like michele bachmann, right? kind of a hate figure on the american left. michele bachmann really did, you know, she really was a foster mother to a lot of children. and i think that kind of impressive personal behavior is present, i mean, it's present on the left and right alike, but i think it's a big part of what it means to are christian, and so as much as i'm critical of conservative religion, i think it does also get part of the christian story really right. >> can we continue and i'll put this on the web or -- >> yes. >> the book is "bad religion: how we became a nation of heretics." ross douthat, thanks for

spending this time with us. >> thank you so much, bill. it was a pleasure. you may recall that recently with talked how the media giants who owned your local commercial radio and television stations have been striking like startled rattlesnakes at a simple fcc proposal shedding light on who's bank rolling political attack ads by posting the information on line. the fcc is scheduled to vote april 27th and this past monday its chairman julius genachowski walked into the line. the annual get-together, the national association of broadcasters in his speech he cited a letter from the deans of several leading journalism schools who said, "broadcast news organizations depend on and consistently call for robust open record regimes for the

institutions they cover. it seems hypocritical for broadcasters to oppose applying the same principles to themselves." we'll link you to his entire remarks. in fact, we now have a special area on our website, campaign ad, dedicated to keeping the story of political advertising and all the big often secret money pours into it front and center. you can share your opinion on the idea of super pac ads on public television, what do you think? let me know. i'll be reading. that's it for now. see you next time. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com funding is provided by carnegie corporation of new york celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and doing good in the world. the coalberg foundation, independent production fund with support from the partridge foundation a john and holly guth charitable fund. the claments foundation, park

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