Both international and domestic politics are incomprehensible today unless religious factors are taken into account. As secular elites have become increasingly aware of this truth, they have simultaneously recognized the limits of their own knowledge about serious religious communities and traditions. To help remedy this situation, the Center invited prominent members of the media to its conference "Toward an Understanding of Religion and American Public Life," held at the Pier House Resort in Key West, Florida, December 7–9.

Despite their numbers and influence on U.S. domestic and foreign affairs, evangelicals remain a mystery to most secular journalists. Historian Mark Noll of Wheaton Col-lege presented an overview of the history, beliefs, and concerns of evangelicals in America that corrected many common misrepresentations. Central to the diverse, informal network of American evangelicals is the belief in "the need for conversion" proclaimed in Scripture, he said. Classic hymns, such as "Rock of Ages," most clearly express the essence of evangelical Christianity, which is that "Jesus Christ saves sinners" through mercy, redemption, and reconciliation with God. While this belief embraces a "particularity" offensive to those who don’t accept the "good news" of the Gospel, Noll conceded, it also underscores evangelicals’ "desire to rescue the perishing." How such beliefs color evangelicals’ views on domestic and foreign policy questions is more complicated than the national media tend to reflect. If abortion and homosexual rights were not issues, he argued, white evangelicals would likely array themselves quite evenly across the general, populist political spectrum.

Respondent Jay Tolson of U.S. News & World Report emphasized that the four defining characteristics of evangelicals—the centrality of Christ, conversion, biblicism, and the requirement to evangelize—leave a lot of theological "wiggle room." The sophisticated thought of the pioneering evangelical theologian Jonathan Edwards long ago demonstrated that evangelicalism is not necessarily associated with an excessively literal interpretation of Scripture, he said, adding that similar "theological rigor" among evangelicals today might shed new light on contemporary moral issues. Tolson also commented on the links between the born-again experience and the "American ethos of the radical transformation of self." In conclusion, he called on evangelicals to be more "self-critical" regarding their "controversial" proselytizing activities abroad, which directly affect U.S. relations with the rest of the world.

Focusing specifically on foreign affairs in the next conference next session, Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations discussed two major themes: the powerful influence of sectarianism in the United States and the rise of apocalyptic sentiment around the world. Most Americans support the ideal of "the one standing against the many in the service of the right," he said, and hold that "special destiny trumps global togetherness." Even progressive Episcopalians who denounce the "unilateralism" of U.S. foreign policy, for example, have adopted unilateral tactics to impose their own views about homosexuality on the rest of their church. Turning to his second theme, Mead asserted that the world has largely abandoned its Enlightenment-inspired belief in progress and entered a new "apocalyptic age" more receptive to transcendent religious arguments. Unfortunately, extreme and dueling visions of the end times—when "the curtain comes down" on the whole human enterprise—encourage many people to think and behave in dangerous ways. Mead sounded a more positive note, however, when he suggested that the American model of government neutrality toward religion might well appeal to emerging Islamic democracies hostile to the European notion of confining religion entirely to the private sphere.

Respondent Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair criticized the contemporary use of religious rhetoric in support of U.S. foreign policy. With a few notable exceptions—such as our policy in the Philippines in 1898—religious considerations were invisible in America’s diplomatic calculations until the 1990s and the rescue of Muslims in Bosnia, he said. Government arguments against fascism, and even those supporting the creation of Israel, were not religious in character. This separation of church and state in U.S. foreign policy was "a good thing," Hitchens argued, and should be restored. Religious rhetoric serves no useful purpose and can alienate allies and potential allies. To defeat terrorism, Americans need to understand—and make others understand—that they are not at war with Islam but are "engaged in a civil war within Islam."

The final session returned to the domestic arena, with James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia defending the widely attacked proposition that American society is split by a "culture war" between hostile creeds. Those who dismiss this idea cite survey data showing few deep divisions on social issues among the majority of Americans, he said, but they fail to understand that culture "is much more than the sum total of those attitudes." While public opinion is not dramatically polarized, public discourse is. Proponents of competing moral visions struggle to expand their influence and establish their positions as the dominant moral authority within our institutions and laws, Hunter observed. Recent legal disputes, particularly those regarding gay marriage, underscore the significance of cultural authority and draw attention to the tension between "absolutists" who believe in transcendent moral standards and "relativists" who believe in situational standards. The former are clearly losing ground, but on neither side of the cultural divide are activists giving up, since they know that "the state itself cannot be neutral in matters pertaining to the public good" and "makes decisions affecting the whole of society."

Respondent Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic strongly endorsed Hunter’s contention that there "has been a culture war," but he declared the war now over: "the absolutists lost, and the relativists won." Supreme Court decisions regarding abortion and gay rights confirm this victory, Rosen said. "Adventurous decisions based on dubious principles," such as Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas, have upheld personal sexual authority and "outlawed moral disapproval." But he chastised conservatives as well as liberals for their judicial activism. The Court has failed to show "principled restraint" or to "resist the temptation to take sides when there is no consensus." Rosen predicted that biotechnology and the internationalization of criminal and liability law would fuel the next major cultural battles.

After the speakers’ and respondents’ formal presentations, each session continued with a wide-ranging discussion among all the conference participants. Center vice president Michael Cromartie moderated these exchanges. The participants were Kelli Arena of CNN; Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report; David Brooks, Elisabeth Bumiller, and Steven Weisman of the New York Times; Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post; Nina Easton of the Boston Globe; Franklin Foer of The New Republic; Barbara Bradley Hagerty of National Public Radio; James Harding of the Financial Times; Danna Harman of the Christian Science Monitor; Melinda Henneberger and Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek; Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard; Frank Langfitt of the Baltimore Sun; Jane Little of the BBC; John Parker of The Economist; David Shribman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; and Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times.