Thank you. It’s beautiful. Thank you very much. For those of you who cannot see it, this is basically a statement of a golden rule as manifested in all the faiths here listed, and I thank you very much. I will treasure this and honor it.

Georgette, thank you very much for your work, your commitment, and for giving me the opportunity to give the Tanenbaum Lecture. I thank Mayor Dinkins and by many other friends for coming here. My next-door neighbors, the San Filippos, Reverend Butts, other clergy members, thank you so much. I’m also delighted to be here with Judy Woodruff, for whom I have enormous admiration and who has been interested in this whole question of faith and its impact on the lives of public people and public policy for many years now.

When I was President, I had a consuming interest in the intersection of religion and politics, what it meant in America and what it might mean to the rest of the world, and whether the First Amendment required us to be secular in the sense of being anti-religious or to be secular in the sense of being open to the freedom of people in as many spaces as possible, to express their faith and the search for common ground. We had all these practical problems, like public schools where people believed that student religious groups couldn’t meet on the school grounds, even after school hours because it would be a violation of the First Amendment. So I had the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education put out a booklet, which clearly delineated what could and couldn’t be done, in an attempt to bring people together. And it not only ended several lawsuits, but it helped to promote a continuing dialogue in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

When we were trying to reach out to China, I asked Rabbi Arthur Schneier; Don Argue, who was then the head of the Association of Evangelicals; and the then-Bishop of Newark (now the Catholic Cardinal of Washington, DC) Theodore McCarrick to go to China and start a dialogue on religious liberty and what the state should and should not do in dealing with people of faith.

One of the most touching things that happened to me was near the end of my term as President, a law professor now at Virginia, named Rod Smith, who’s one of America’s premiere experts on the freedom of religion in the First Amendment said that he believed that our administration had done more to promote religious liberty than any since James Madison. I loved that and I was quite sure it would come as a great surprise to Reverend Falwell, Reverend Dobson, Reverend Robertson, the head of my own Southern Baptist Convention and others who thought I was always just one step away from hell.

We’re laughing about this, but more than 80% of the world’s population self-identify as religious people. For billions of people, the most important community ties are those of faith and family not nation or politics; and yet we know that while faith is personal and tends to be universal, religion is social and tends to the particular, and therefore, when anybody’s faith is manifested in a particular religious organization, it is vulnerable to the compromising, even polluting influence, of politics. No citizen who is religious can be a citizen and politically active without being influenced by his or her faith. But when we tend to say that politics and religion are the same and those who don’t agree are less human than we are, we get in real trouble and we become vulnerable to the crass manipulation of people who have neither political nor religious convictions, apart from wanting to maximize their power.

I have seen unbelievably good and horrible things done in the name of faith in my lifetime and in my presidency. You made clear, by highlighting the work of two courageous Nigerians, Iman Asaf and Pastor Wuye, two men who were sworn enemies at war, yet came to work for peace. How much good thing can be done? I guess the main thing I want to say is that for people in America who are a part of my political tradition, our great sin has often been ignoring religion or denying its power or refusing to engage it when it seemed hostile to us. For people who have built a political base on the so-called Christian right and its allies, their great sin has been believing they were in full possession of the truth and could use it to flail away at those who respectfully disagree. But anybody who ignores the power of faith in its role in the world can neither hope to reverse the problems or find solutions for all the things that divide us.

It is perfectly clear that there is something going on in the community of faith throughout the world, but I think, on balance, it is positive. I think that if you look at, for example, I’d like to say some nice things about the Christian Evangelicals, very few of whom voted for me. First, they were instrumental in the biggest debt relief initiative in history, in my last year as President because they believed in the admonition of the scripture to alleviate the burdens of the poor. And we had this massive debt relief initiative in 2000 that went to poor countries if they spent all the money on education, or healthcare, or development. Then not so long ago, 18 Evangelical leaders took out a full-page ad in The New York Times asking for the government to take more vigorous action on climate change. One of the reasons this was important goes way beyond the environment, which is that they were accommodating their political agenda to evidence in the real world, as opposed to saying that ideology must always triumph evidence.

So I think there is an opportunity here, both within the United States and throughout the world to have the mission of the Tanenbaum Center to be carried forward.

Last year, I convened in September, the first Clinton Global Initiative at the opening of the United Nations and we brought in all kinds of governmental, non-governmental organizations, philanthropies, non-governmental groups from developing countries and also business and religious executives to talk about what the world could do to alleviate extreme poverty; to improve governance in poor countries; to deal with the challenge of climate change in a way that promoted growth, instead of wrecked it; and finally, to overcome our profound religious differences. And we told everybody not to come unless they were prepared to make specific commitments. I didn’t know if anybody would show up, really. I said, the people would call me and say, “What’s the difference in what you’re doing and what they did at Davos?” I said, “Well, mine is cheaper, shorter. You don’t get to ski. There are only four things being discussed; and before you leave, you’ve got to do something in one of these four areas. If you don’t, you can’t come back next year. Otherwise, it’s about the same.” And I didn’t know what would happen.

Hundreds and hundreds of people made commitments in two days worth $2 1/2 billion dollars. And they’re busily implementing them, but that understates the true value of what was done. Because, for example, the religious reconciliation, the money’s not as important as the human contacts. Queen Rania established a partnership between Jordan and the Interfaith Youth Core by Eboo Patel out of Chicago, deciding on the spot to bring people between the two countries together, to cross a great divide. A program called Playing for Peace decided that if Muslims and Jews in the Middle East played basketball, they might be Israelis and Palestinians, but they might find common ground.

Nestle in Nigeria, in Search for a Common Ground, is developing a reality TV show to promote religious reconciliation in Nigeria. This, by the way, is really exciting. I might like to see one of these in America. Think about what it could be. If people actually could turn on television and see real people with whom they could identify actually having serious conversations about both their religious convictions and how they do or don’t translate into their daily lives. I think it’s very exciting. And one of my favorite groups, Vital Voices, which Hillary has done a lot to help spread throughout the world, began in Northern Ireland as a dialogue between Catholic and Protestant women. And those women played a major, major role in the ultimate success of the Irish peace process. They are now working with Israeli and Palestinian women to try to save conflict revolution strategies there. They have worked in the Balkans. They have worked in Africa. I have done everything I could to support them, but it has been fascinating to me to see.

Where is all this going? Well, first of all, those of you who support this Center should be encouraged that almost no one now is denying the role of faith in our public life and the need to deal with it in a positive, rather than destructive way. Madeleine Albright has just written an astonishing book. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, acknowledging that the professional diplomatic core in the United States, through both Republican and Democratic administrations alike, tended to downplay religion and not want to have religious people involved in the resolution of political issues. And she has concluded that it was an error because if you can reach across the religious divide in countries in regions where people’s religious identity is stronger than any other identity, you can actually accelerate the process of peace and reconciliation. That brief summary doesn’t do justice to her marvelous new book, but the point is we have a growing sense that we can’t, any of us, divide up into little bitty pieces what we believe and who we are.

On the other hand, it seems to me that there are some fundamental rules that have to be brought to bear. I’ve seen a lot of religious conflict. Everyone always immediately goes to the Middle East, but let me remind you, that the largest number of people killed in the last 30 years by terrorist incidents have been in Sri Lanka, by the minority Hindu Tamil Tigers against the majority Buddhists in Belize, with tiny groups of Muslims and Christians, mostly Catholics.

When I agreed first with former President Bush to work to raise money in the tsunami areas and then to take over the UN job, by the time I went to Sri Lanka the second time, I said, “Look. This is nuts. We’re not going to repair this country unless we do the Northern part where the Tamils live.” And a lot of the Muslims were feeling shut out. I said, “We have got to go to the people where they are. I don’t care how dangerous it is.” I said, “They’re not going to do anything to me. We’ll be fine. If they did, it would make millions of people happy.” But anyway, we’re just going to go.

So I went up to sort of like the Northeastern Coastal town, where I could sit and meet with the Buddhists in the Belize majority; the Tamils; the Hindus; the Muslims; and a tiny minority of Christians. Guess where we met? In the courtyard of the local Catholic school, and they were l% of the people, but everybody felt safe here. They felt not discriminated against and imbalanced there. And they had a thoroughly secular or practical conversation about what we could do in an atmosphere of real mutual respect. And I just mentioned this because I think it’s important not to see the Middle East as all that unique, even though virtually all the fanatics are extra regional terror groups, are Muslim today.

Don’t forget what has happened in Sri Lanka. Don’t forget the terrible things that have been done by the Hindus and the Muslims to each other in Western India in their fights. And what a violation it is of everything Gandhi lived for. Don’t forget that Gandhi was murdered by a young Hindu who thought he was a bad Hindu because he wanted India for people of all faiths. Don’t forget that Rabin was murdered a young Israeli Jew who thought he was a bad Jew and a bad Israeli because he wanted to give up the West Bank in return for peace and a decent future for Palestinian as well as Israeli children. Don’t forget that Anwar Sadat was murdered by a group of his fellow Muslims because they thought he was a bad Muslim because he made a peace with Israel. It is very important to realize that none of us come to this with clean hands and that all religions are vulnerable to a certain kind of political pollution and that very often, if you take the Balkans, for example, where I had a lot of personal experience with Slobodan Milosevic, we said that was an ethnic conflict or a religious conflict between the Orthodox Serbs and the Muslim Bosnians and the Catholic Croatians, but the truth is that from a biological point of view there was really no ethnic difference. That just happened to be the place, Sarajevo, where the Eastern Empire and the Holy Roman Empire in the west and the Ottoman Empire from the south met and stopped each other’s respective advances. And even the faith they adopted had more to do with the political control of the area than any indigenous efforts. And Milosevic was a central banker who I promise you was not a particularly religious man and he used faith to blind people to get power and justify killing, which brings me to the last point I really want to make.

I give a lot of talks now around the world and around America and I always tell people that whatever their politics, whatever their faith, if they truly want to understand and feel comfortable in this crazy new world we’re living in, they have to be able to ask and answer for themselves four simple questions: “What is the fundamental nature of the modern world? How would I like to change it? What steps are necessary to make those changes? And who’s supposed to do it? And particularly, what can I do?” The fundamental nature of the modern world is interdependence, which is good for most Americans, but unequal and unsustainable, because half the world’s people live on less than $2.00 a day, and because we share the common threats of terrors, weapons of mass destruction, the possible spread of disease, climate change, and oil depletion. How would you like it to change? I would like to live in integrated communities, where we share values, responsibilities and opportunities, locally, nationally, and globally.

How do you do that? You have to have a security policy, a policy to make more partners and fewer terrorists, because you can’t kill, jail, or occupy all your enemies and it must be a policy for home improvement, because unless we’re getting better in America, we can’t sustain support for our being the world’s leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity and reconciliation. And who’s supposed to do it? The government is supposed to do some of it, but so are we. Groups like yours and my foundation, we can do things more effectively, less expensively, and on a human level that can’t necessarily be done by government and it’s wrong for us to wait.

I give this little profile and I can see that when I say, “We want to build integrated communities, where we have shared responsibilities, shared opportunities and shared values,” the average sensible person says, “Okay; I can imagine how we could do a better job of having shared opportunities. I can certainly see how in a successful community everybody’s got to bear some responsibility for the success as a whole. But Bill Clinton has lost his mind since he left the White House. I mean, how could anybody be naïve enough to look at what has happened in the Middle East, look at what has happened in Sri Lanka, look at what’s happening all over the world and believe that with all the religious and ethnic and racial and other diversity in the world we could ever have communities encompassing all these people who have shared values, while we’re going in reverse?”

But I think we can. I think we can have values that are shared, if they’re sufficiently embracing and universal and don’t ask anybody to give up their ability to practice their faith without turning their religion into a political weapon. Every person has dignity and deserves a chance in life. Every person has a responsible role to play. Competition is fine, but we do better when we cooperate. Our differences are important; they make life more interesting; they aid the search for truth, but our common humanity matters more.

Now, what are the barriers to the embrace of those values? What are the barriers to the embrace of the golden rule? What is the central intellectual heresy in every faith that values death over life and allows really decent people of profound faith to be turned into salivating, unthinking, storming killers of those who are different? It’s the same in every faith. What it is? Is it the belief in the truth that there is such a thing as absolute truth, as opposed to just everything’s relative? No, it is not. That’s not the problem. Every single religion believes in the existence of Truth, right? They may define it in different ways, but every single faith believes there is such a thing as Truth. The heresy is not in the belief for the truth. The heresy is in believing that in this lifetime an imperfect human being can be in full possession of that truth, as opposed to on a continuous journey toward it. And that once having come into a full possession of the truth, you can turn it into a political program, which is fully true. Because if you believe those two things, then anybody who disagrees with you is less than human and doesn’t deserve to go on.

The most extreme example of that in the current political environment is the man who was just killed in Iraq, Mr. Zarqawi. I saw his handiwork when Hillary and Chelsea and I went to Israel for the 10th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s death, and then we went to Jordan where his people had blown up two hotels. And all the victims were Muslims. They actually sent a man and his wife in to a hotel, a big hotel ballroom to kill everybody at a wedding reception. And I walked around, I’ll never forget it as long as I live, Hillary and Chelsea and I walking around on the broken glass in the shattered remains of these little plastic beveled chandeliers and the little paper decorated napkins for the wedding reception that all of you have been part of. How many times have we all been to one of those? And we were just crunching around on it.

And then we went to the hospital. I saw a beautiful 4-year-old boy who hadn’t uttered a word since he’d gotten a piece of metal in his head. I saw a doctor holding hands with this beautiful little 4-month-old infant boy and I learned that he was the boy’s father. He was caring for his own son because on the faithful night he was working in the hospital, so his wife and her parents took their infant baby to the wedding reception and they were all killed. So he was left alone not only to care for, but to raise his own son, all in the name of Zarqawi jihadist religious faith. His was the ultimately absurd position, so extreme that I think even Mr. bin Laden was happy when he was off-ed because now he can use him as a martyr. But consider what Zarqawi’s position was. This is the ultimate absurdity. He said, “I am a Sunni and I think bin Laden is all wrong trying to kill all the Americans and Europeans. First we must purge our backyard of the enemy, the near enemy.” And who were the near enemies? The Israelis. All Shiite Muslims and any Sunni Muslims who didn’t agree with his interpretation and his politics. He basically said, “Join me and kill the world.” That is an absurd extreme, but it shows you the intellectual heresy that creeps into any faith if in any way you say, “I believe my faith best embodies the Truth.” Fine, but then if you say, “I have now fully understood and grasped and am in possession of that truth and therefore I could turn it into a political program that is absolutely true and therefore if you don’t buy it, you’re less than human and I can kill you without sin,” that is the problem.

All we have to do is to get along together, to work together, to follow the golden rule, is to realize that all of these rules apply to all people and not just our crowd. If you had fundamentalists here from any faith, they would come up here and say that this was fine, but they’re referring to our crowd. So do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbor as yourself. A lot of Christian fundamentalists would say yes. My neighbor is a fellow Christian. My neighbor reads the New Testament the same way I do. Never mind that I have to have rather strained interpretations of just a handful of verses to get to my politics and there are over 500 admonitions in the New Testament to take care of the poor. Leave me alone. I know what I’m doing.

Now I’m saying, the same thing could be applied to every other religion, which basically says all these golden rules in all their beautiful manifestations did not apply to the other. If you go back through all of human history, since people first stood up on the Africa Savanna, more or less 130,000 years ago, and formed themselves into families, and then into clans, and moved out of caves and moved to larger villages. If you think about it, the main drama of human history has been coming to terms with the other, and then finding out they weren’t so “other” after all. So I ask you all to remember that.

It’s a good thing to have faith. It’s a great thing to be religious, but religion is, by definition, a particular social institution and faith is, by definition, a personal and universal quest. Therefore religion may embrace the idea of truth but can never be in full possession of it, much less turn it into a political program. That’s why what the Tanenbaum Center does is important and that’s why I spend a fair amount of time of whatever time I’ve got left on this earth, trying to understand that fundamental insight. Once you accept that, we can love each other’s faiths and we can love each other. Thank you and God bless you.