CNN LARRY KING LIVE

Politics and Religion

Aired October 26, 2004 - 9 pm  ET
 

Note: This file only includes the dialogue between the panel members.  For the complete transcription of the show, follow the links at the bottom of this file.

LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, Bush versus Kerry. Born again versus Catholic. Does religion [matter] when picking a president? One week before the election we'll ask religious leaders Max Lucado, minister and bestselling author, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, twice a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Pastor John MacArthur, the nationally syndicated Christian broadcaster, Father David Hollenbach, professor of theology at Boston College. And Reverend Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and States.

KING: We have a terrific show tonight. Let's spin right into it. Let's deal with the obvious. Max Lucado in San Antonio. Should religion matter in an election campaign?

MAX LUCADO, EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN MINISTER: Well, genuine religion has to matter. We elect character. We elect a person's world view. Faith can define that world view. If that faith is genuine and sincere, then that needs to connect. American population says 85 percent of us say that religion matters to us. 72 percent of us say that the religion of a president matters to them. I think it's an important issue.

KING: Since everybody ever running for office talks about God, how do we know who has real faith and who has not, Reverend Jackson?

REV. JESSE JACKSON, RAINBOW PUSH COALITION: You tell a tree by the fruit it bears, by its behavior. People of the Christian faith and its mission is to preach good news to the poor and it is to heal the broken hearted and set the captive free but that would be against slavery and racial segregation. So in Dr. King's book "All Against Segregation in Alabama," the white right wing churches attacked him. The [blacks?] in Birmingham Jail were challenging the right white wing.

KING: So you know it by their deeds.

JACKSON: You know it by their deeds and so to that extent your faith should at least inform other priorities. So it seems to me, Larry, if you're a person of this faith, it has something to do with how you treat the least of these and how you treat those whose backs are against the wall.

KING: John MacArthur, if I'm Christian should I vote for someone because they are a Christian.

PASTOR JOHN MACARTHUR, EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN: I think there's a natural affinity to do that, if somebody is genuine Christian with a genuine relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ who takes the Bible as their absolute authority which is what true Christianity affirms, how could you not vote for your brother because you know his convictions will be faithful to the word of God, they're going to be faithful to the things that God has established for society, for the family, and for the individual.

KING: And you have to take that individual for his word.

MACARTHUR: I think you go beyond that. I think you take him at his word but you look at his life. If there is a genuine relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ in his life it's going to manifest itself not just in his attitude toward social issues, it will show up there, too, but it's going to manifest itself in morality, in virtue, in character that shows up in every aspect of his life, plus he's going to have a love for God, a love for scripture and a love for the true church.

KING: Father Hollenbach, if that be true, what does a Jew do with this dilemma?

FATHER DAVID HOLLENBACH, PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY, BOSTON COLLEGE: The Catholic view of the role of religion in politics is that religion should be a source of inspiration for people to commit themselves to the common good of our whole society. That means the good of everybody, the good of all. The good of those who have been left out, like the poor, the good of those who have lost their jobs and need to regain those jobs. Catholic views are strongly committed to building up the society, building up the community, and therefore, a Jew and a Catholic can join together in promoting the common good for all of us, especially for those who have been left out, those children who are uninsured, without health care and those who have been left out as poor or marginalized in our society.

KING: So you don't say vote for a Catholic because he or she is a Catholic?

HOLLENBACH: I vote for the person who can promote the common good of our society. That's what the Catholic position on voting is all about, how do we promote the well-being of our society. The political sphere is a sphere that concerns the well-being of everybody in that society, and Catholics support that well-being of everybody. Therefore, we vote for those who support the common good, especially the good of those who are left out or left behind.

KING: Reverend Lynn, you're an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ. You stand for the separation of Church and [States]. How separate? Should religion not be a part of politics?

REV. BARRY LYNN, EXEC. DIR., AMERICANS UNITED FOR SEPARATION OF CHURCH & STATE: Well, I think the first thing I hope we all agree on is that there is no state election official in any state that has God as a registered voter. Which means we don't know if God is a Republican, a Democrat or perhaps even a Naderite or a libertarian. I think Americans do want their candidates to have a moral center, they do want those candidates to have values and principles and be able to articulate those and tell us what kind of policies they would adopt and those kind of policies that they would have for the rest of the country.

However, I don't think it matters how many times a candidate goes to church, if he goes to church or how well versed he is in the Holy Scriptures or the Christian Bible or any other holy document. That's where I think we're making a terrible mistake this year. We're actually linking decisions to vote with very partisan political ideas and very clear religious ideas, merging religion and politics as if God in fact was clearly on one side of the political aisle and not the other. That's the danger.

KING: But Reverend Jackson, if I want to vote for someone because he represents my whatever values, it's my business isn't it?

JACKSON: Yes, but we live in our faith, we live on the law. And people of faith fight for just law. That's what the Moses/Pharaoh fight was about. That's what the Daniel/Nebuchadnezzar was about, fighting for just law. So how we manifest that today, one says that we must fight to raise the minimum wage for working people. If you can't work your way out of poverty, then what? A fight for overtime pay for overtime work, a fight that make seniors more secure.

KING: Can't you be a good person, a religious person and not agree with an increase for another economic reason in minimum pay? Must you be for minimum wage?

JACKSON: Not necessarily so. If you are a rich young ruler, you see life from the mansion down not the manger up. Therefore you tend to fight for that which favors the rich as opposed -- Christianity is driven by -- it's really kind of a poor person's religion, born in a manger, defining character, how you treat the least of these. In many ways with, our religion informs our public priorities.

KING: Max Lucado, isn't that a good point, shouldn't the good Christian be first for the poor?

LUCADO: God doesn't exist to bless America, America exists to bless God. Nations come and go and have since the beginning of time and if the Lord tarries [nations] will continue to come and go forever. The purpose of nations is to be a studio in which God can do his great work. So I would agree with the Reverend Jackson that the role of a government is to reflect the will of God. The danger is when we try to apply our government and our preferences to God and tell him what to do, where our questions should be as a government and as a people, God, what do you want us to do? That's the big question.

KING: John MacArthur, does God care who's elected?

MACARTHUR: I think not only does God care, but according to Romans 13, God ordains leadership, God ordains who those leaders are, God in his sovereign providential purposes is unfolding history his way. I really do believe that the powers that be, as Romans 13 says, are ordained by God. That not only is government, but that God lifts up and puts down leaders, and rulers and kings and he always has. He has an agenda however that's far greater than perhaps we would ever be able to comprehend. We can't always know what his invisible hand is achieving.

My concern is not that all the people in political office or all the people with social responsibility in this nation necessarily be Christians. But if I have the choice to choose someone that I know has Christian convictions that are consistent with the word of God, then I know that's going to best for the country because the Bible was written by the Maker and he knows what's best for his creatures.

KING: Father Hollenbach, should a church endorse from the pulpit?

HOLLENBACH: No. And the Catholic Church has said and the American Catholic bishops have said they don't endorse any candidates, they don't support one candidate or another. They stand for certain fundamental values. And those values are inclusion and the common good. They've said that the condition of the poor is a measure of how far we are from being a community at all. So building up a community means including the poor in. It means being committed to peace and reconciliation. The pope said two years ago that a war in Iraq would be unjustified. It was unjustified then, it's unjustified today. Commitment to support for peace and reconciliation means war only as a last resort. And therefore, that's the kind of values that Catholics stand for.

KING: Reverend Lynn, if Father Hollenbach were to say that conducting a mass, would he be in violation of what you stand for, in a sense quasi-disagreeing with the president on a major issue in the campaign?

LYNN: No, certainly not that alone. But one of the things, Larry, we've seen this election cycle is the Republican and the Democratic Party tending to try to lure churches into doing what is in fact illegal, and that is high-level campaigning right from the pulpit.

The Republicans, for example, tried to get the membership directories of Catholic and Protestant churches. They also tried to use churches as the site for distribution of Bush campaign literature. That's all wrong, that's illegal. On the other hand, in the last few weeks, the Democrats have seemed to orchestrate pep rallies instead of Sunday morning sermons in some places where John Kerry was appearing.

And I think all of this really needs to stop. I think we need to go back to a time when John Kennedy was running for president and said, no Catholic priest, no Protestant minister should tell his congregation for whom to vote, and at a time when Martin Luther King was of course talking about social justice, the concerns of the poor, each and every day of his adult life, mostly in churches, but never once endorsed a candidate for public office.

JACKSON: He endorsed Lyndon Baines Johnson. The white church has been in some sense  -- justified the culture. Justified the -- the black church...

KING: Wait a second. You get a tax deferment as a church, do you not?

JACKSON: We do.

KING: Therefore, when you stand up on Sunday morning and say, you or any leader, vote for Kerry, vote for Bush, aren't you then not entitled to a tax reduction by using your church?

JACKSON: However delicately one handles the politics of that, the black church had to be a church of liberation. It couldn't be passive and flow with the culture. We had to fight to get out of slavery, we had to fight to end legal segregation.

KING: Yeah, but right now, what?

JACKSON: Even right now, we have to fight to protect our vote from being stolen.

KING: So you're different than a white church?

JACKSON: Well, our mission is to defend the poor and deliver the needy, and that is not a passive -- we don't flow with the culture, we seek to transform the culture.

KING: Max, do you endorse in the pulpit, Max?

LUCADO: What I do is try to help our church understand what the Bible says on key issues. We've studied, for example, abortion. We've discussed at length gay marriage. I think a hot issue is stem cell research. I challenge our church to vote. We register voters. I don't have a bumper sticker on my car. I don't promote a certain candidate. But what we do is urge everybody to vote, and to weigh these very difficult issues against scripture, and trust their conscience and their God to lead them.

KING: John...

KING: Barry and then John, OK.

LYNN: OK, one of the problems with this idea is we try to apply scripture, is that in the American constitutional system, it is not right, it is not proper to simply turn one's religious beliefs into the public policy of the United States, particularly in those delicate, intimate issues, including human reproduction and religious freedom. So I feel very [un]comfortable with a lot of the religious rhetoric that is being uttered here. But we have to remember that in our constitutional system, we have no religious test for public office. It's unfortunate that the president in fact has declared that he would only appoint people to the courts who believe in God. That's a religion test for public office. People should complain about that.

Similarly, it's wrong to try to impose one's moral views on issues like stem cell research, same-gender marriage that are fundamentally theological beliefs on everyone in the community, and that goes for African-American churches, white churches, Republicans and Democrats.

KING: All right, John, how would you respond? And then Father Hollenbach -- John.

MACARTHUR: Well, first of all, I want to say, you know, we all want to help the poor. Everybody wants to help the poor. That is absolutely foundational in Christianity. But Barry can't say to a Christian it doesn't matter what your convictions are, it doesn't matter that you know abortion is murder and it's a sin. It doesn't matter that you know homosexuality is a sin. It doesn't matter that you know embryo harvesting is wrong and violates the word of God, and the blood of the innocents cries out of the ground against this nation for that. It doesn't matter that you're willing to sort of enlarge marriage to mean anything. It doesn't matter to you. This is a democracy. If that matters to me, then I will vote that way. It's conviction.

LYNN: I want you to be able to say that from the pulpit, and you have every right to make those moral arguments. My point is, is you believe that abortion is criticized in the Bible -- in fact, it's not even mentioned in the Bible, but you have interpreted certain passages in that way. You have a right to do it. But when you tell politicians that they should vote your way with your interpretation of scriptures, I think you're running inconsistently with the founding principles of this country.

KING: OK, I know Father Hollenbach wanted to get in. Hold it. Father.

HOLLENBACH: Yes, indeed. Let me just add, that I think that to be Catholic is to be pro-life. But we have to ask the question of effectiveness. What really is pro-life? In the Clinton administration, the number of abortions went down. In the early years of the Bush administration, the number of abortions has been going up. The question is why? It's because there are women in situations of desperation, with no economic resources, that are being pushed toward making choices that are tragic. And we need to find ways of making that less -- that happen less frequently. We need to find ways, in other words, of being effectively pro-life, effectively enabling women to bring their children to term. That calls for certain fundamental economic resources.

JACKSON: On the one (UNINTELLIGIBLE) appropriates itself to be the part of the righteous and those the sinners. And in the Republican Convention in New York, Mr. Bush was opposed to civil unions. Today's "New York Times" says his party -- he says his party (ph) is wrong to oppose gay civil unions. So, now he and Kerry have the same position. Then they attacked Mr. Kerry roundly for saying Mary Cheney was lesbian. But at the Republican prayer breakfast, January 21 -- 25, 2001, Mr. Simpson said that Mr. Cheney loves his daughter. Mary was here with her partner. He's very special (UNINTELLIGIBLE) very much. She was the liaison.

KING: Alan Simpson.

JACKSON: Yes, she was the lesbian, gay lesbian for Coors Beer Company which is all right, except the hypocrisy making one part of the party sinners, the other part of party of the righteous people. And that is not fair or and it's not accurate.

KING: No party is the party of either one.

JACKSON: All men and women have sinned and come short of the glory of God. We must make our public policy on issues broader than selective scripture here and there for ones own purposes.

KING: Max Lucado, do you totally believe in the separation of church and state?

LUCADO: Well, it's a great question. I believe that the government should never run the church. I believe the church should never run the government. But I do not believe in the separation of God and state. I do not believe that there is a neat dichotomy that we can make between the affairs of men and government and the affairs of God in the government.

KING: Why do you think -- why did the founding fathers, Max, then leave the word, "God" out of the Constitution?

LUCADO: My concern is not that what the founding fathers did, my concern is really what our Almighty God cares to do in our country. The direction I see us headed brings me concern. I feel like what we're trying to do is create a separation that not even our founding fathers intended to exist. And I know our heavenly father doesn't want to.

LYNN: Max, this is Barry -- this is Barry. Let me just say the founders of this country understood exactly what they were doing. They were in some cases very religious people, in other cases not religious people. But when Thomas Jefferson was asked to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday. He said he wouldn't do that as president because it was up to religious people to do that themselves. Throughout the course of this campaign, we have seen so much talk about religion. I think most Americans, Larry, believe John Kerry is a religious man, George Bush is a religious man. We know their hearts and down to seeing their capillaries. We don't need to know that. There were times in the last few months when I thought they would not have the last debate and instead have a round of bible Jeopardy between John Kerry and George Bush. That is not the way to have elections in this country.

KING: Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. We're in the final moments here. Jesse, do you believe of separation between church and state totally?

JACKSON: Well, not totally. Because (UNINTELLIGIBLE). For example, Dr. King said, I believe in non-violence. But he said, he would have joined and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) to overthrow Hitler. I thought he was the most -- the absolute tyrant of that time. So, his faith informed him to act. Today, our faith must question (ph). How do we have 100 containers in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti while people are starving in our church is silent. How can we be silent while we look for weapons of mass destruction...

KING: So, the church should speak out on political...

JACKSON: The church can't be silent on Iraq where people -- we're losing money, lives and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Our church, we must speak out morally.

KING: John MacArthur, do you believe totally in separation of church and state?

MACARTHUR: No. It's because I want to define church. I'm not talking about institutional religion. I'm not talking about the organized church. I'm not talking about the church that says, that ordains a homosexual bishop. That's not the church. When you talk about the church...

KING: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) that ordains a heterosexual bishop? What church are you talking about?

MACARTHUR: No, what I'm saying, I'm not talking about the structured organized church. You have the real true church of Jesus Christ in America. And they cannot be separated from their country, they cannot be separated from their convictions. They cannot be separated from those things that are precious to them that come to them from the authority of the word of God. And consequently, they're going to vote as true believers in the directions of their convictions. And that's not going to be separated.

KING: Unless they choose to be separated which they have the right to do in a free country?

MACARTHUR: Yes.

KING: Do you totally, Father Hollenbach, believe in the separation of church and state?

HOLLENBACH: The Catholic position is strongly committed to religious freedom for everyone, and we therefore support that 100 percent as both an implication of the gospel and the implication of human reason. The fundamental issue we face today is though what kind of values are going to guide us as we choose the next president of the United States? That's the real issue we're facing today. Whose values, what values are the -- is the next president going to embody?

It seems to me the Catholic view on this has long been that this is a judgment based on reason, about how the policies that are being pursued will protect the dignity of everybody in society. And how that dignity will be protected for the most vulnerable in our society, for the poor, for those who are not supported in economic terms, those without healthcare, those without jobs, those are the concerns that we ought to be shaping our election decisions.

KING: We're out of time. Thank you all. We're going to do more on this. Time goes fast.

JACKSON: We live under a Constitution, not under a bible, under the Constitution.

KING: OK, thank you all very much.
 

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

This transcript was edited from CNN's original "rushed" transcript of the show.  For the latest complete transcript of the entire Larry King Live show on October 26, 2004, go to:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/26/lkl.01.html   or

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/

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