Busted: Andrew Sullivan

Faith, doubt and the midterm elections. A conversation with the author of The Conservative Soul.

Introduction and interview by Bill McGarvey

I was a Catholic in a Protestant country.

I was a gay boy in the Catholic church.

I'm now an immigrant English person who came and made his life in America.

I'm a conservative at war with the Republican party.

Ahhh...and you thought your life was complicated?

As the quote above makes clear, Andrew Sullivan resists easy categorization. Ever since rising to prominence in the early 90s as the outspoken editor of The New Republic, the author/pundit/blogger/public intellectual has been a provocative voice in the rough and tumble arena of political, cultural and religious thought.

In his essays for Time or the constant commentary he publishes on his enormously popular blog "The Daily Dish" or even on his frequent appearances on NBC's "Chris Matthews' Show" or HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher, " Sullivan's analysis of any number of issues in the public square is typically rigorous and highly intelligent. In a soundbite society, his wit and self-deprecation have made him a rare figure who manages to be equally comfortable—and credible—on CNN as he is on "The Colbert Report."

But where Sullivan differs most from his colleagues in our ever-expanding punditocracy is in his ability to openly doubt his own judgements and actions. (Try imagining Pat Buchanan doing the same...Ok, you can stop now. I know, it hurts.)

While Sullivan has no problem passionately stating his opinons—usually conservative—the Harvard PhD is disarmingly revealing in his new book The Conservative Soul: Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. In it he speaks candidly about the the frightening fundamentalist tone that characterizes the decision making, policies and governing philosophy of the Bush administration and his own misguided support for the President during much of his first term. Though some critics have made the case that Sullivan uses the term "fundamentalist" indiscriminately, The Conservative Soul makes a compelling case that this administration—with it's huge deficits and interventionist foreign policies—is the antithesis of true conservatism.

But Sullivan's focus is not simply on politics. He fixes a skeptical eye on himself as well as the Catholic Church he has loved, and struggled to find a home in, all his life. Ultimately, The Conservative Soul's greatest achievement is its ability to speak about conscience, truth, faith...soul in a way that makes sense wherever one stands on the political spectrum. Perhaps that is why Sullivan—who we've long wanted to speak with—is such an appropriate interview subject for BustedHalo.

BustedHalo: In addition to articulating what true conservatism actually means, your new book, The Conservative Soul also focuses on your own mistakes and misjudgments regarding the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. There’s almost a confessional quality to it. Was it difficult to scrutinize yourself so publicly?

Andrew Sullivan: You can tell I’m a Catholic. (laughter) Well the decisions that a pundit or blogger makes, the arguments he makes, as long as they are made in good faith, and mine were, can be subsequently understood as errors as long as you acknowledge the errors.  But in this case the errors have led to horrible deaths in ways that I never foresaw but should have foreseen.  And I'm not just talking about the terrible deaths and casualties and wounds, which we are also forgetting with these casualty numbers of American soldiers coming back with these terrible injuries.  But I also mean the Iraqi civilians who trusted us to secure their country and whom we betrayed again.  We betrayed them in ’91 and we’ve betrayed them now.  And all I can say is that I generally feel remorse for having played any part in that decision.  And I feel it incumbent upon myself to explain where I screwed up, what I misunderstood, and also not to drop it all onto Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.  Yes, I think a lot of it is their fault and I didn’t have my own CIA and I believe they are probably in the argument.  But, in retrospect, I should have been more skeptical of what kind of people they were.  So I’m desperately trying to learn the right lessons from it.

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BH: What has it been like to talk about these issues to live audiences on your book tour?

AS: Well it’s very painful.  But, I must say, I came back from the tour feeling extraordinarily uplifted by the response of people.  Americans are a forgiving people and I think we all can forgive one another for mistakes we made as long as we take responsibility for them and acknowledge them and as long as one opens a dialogue up with sincerity.  To tell you the truth, I think the blog, as a form, helps that because by it’s very nature it is provisional and constantly changing.  So it actually facilitates the kind of discourse we are talking about in a way that a column that pronounces the truth once a week can't do.  Secondly, I have to also say, I think my own struggle with my faith for 20 to 30 years now around the question of my sexual orientation and also around the general question of where the church has been going in my life time.  I was a child of Vatican II.  I was born the same year as Vatican II, 1963.  So in some ways, my whole life is lived within the post-second council Church.  And I think we’ve also seen that these councils happen but the Church is an amorphous and dynamic entity and it also has evolved and it needs to be more honest about the terrible crimes that have been committed.  I think ordinary Catholics as well, need to reexamine its doctrines and politics.  I see a lot of lay Catholics doing this in their lives but the hierarchy has tried to squelch that journey the people need to take.  And as you know, I don’t think doubt is an impediment to faith.  I think it can be a part of a faith journey.

BH: One of the insights that I like best in the book is how doubt is not an impediment in the least, but an organic and integral part of faith. As you describe it, the way fundamentalists try to expunge any sense of doubt is not really faith or belief at all.

AS: It’s funny, on the tour I actually came back to the fact that on the cross itself Jesus’ last words were almost, because we are told that his last words are ‘it is accomplished’ or ‘it is finished’ depending on the translation, but even Jesus, at the very end, doubts, ‘My God, my God.  Why have you forsaken me?’  And even He, at the moment of greatest power and sacrifice in a way doubted that His father had abandoned him.  So to think of Christianity as a religion that knows no doubt, that doesn’t find strength in doubt when we see our Lord Himself doubting all along.  That’s His humanity.  That’s what makes the Gospel so gripping.  We’re not reading a story of God as such.  We are reading a story of God made man which is what gives it tension.  And that’s why the tension between faith and doubt in one’s own faith is itself the faith. The book is multi-layered.  In a way, it’s a political book.  But really, deep down, it’s a religious book. But at the same time I think the two are connected because I do think our politics have become connected with religion in the wrong way.  

BH: It seems to me that your book is finding a lot of common ground. I’ve been seeing a lot of people on your blog lately saying, ‘I’m a liberal but I had no idea I would agree with you so much.’

AS: Well I think what we used to fight about was big government/small government, high taxes/low taxes, those kind of things.  I reminded people on those issues, I still am a conservative.  But on the fundamental issues of freedom of conscience and of not abusing faith in a political context, I think we can all agree on that.  And we can all agree, for example, that torture is a moral evil and that this is not something that we can avoid debating.  This is something that we have to confront as Christians in our culture done in our name by our governments.  I can’t believe we even have to discuss this but we do.

BH: This passionate engagement with doubt that is at the core of both your politics and faith is a provocative concept but I imagine it’s also a difficult sell.

AS: It is a difficult sell. When I actually explain what I’m talking about people get it.  But it’s not a soundbite and the book is not…I mean my favorite review so far is someone saying, ‘If you like books by Anne Coulter, you are not going to like this book.’  Because it’s not a book where I know the truth.  It’s a book where none of us know the truth but the desire to find it is where we come together.  If we had not been chastened by the last few years of the country and if our church has not been chastened by the [sex abuse] revelations of the last few years then there is something wrong with us.  We have not listened to the stories of the people who were abused by this church.  We have not listened to or observed events that have unraveled in Iraq.  We are not listening to the world as it is and we cannot move forward until we have addressed these questions and done so with painful honesty.  And the painful truth about my church is that it has been complicit with some terrible things over the last couple of generations as far as we know.  But heaven knows just how far back it went.  I mean the abuse of power.  And I say this as someone who, myself, has had nothing but truly wonderful experiences with priests and the Church and my own experience growing up in the Church was a very positive one.  And I’m very sensitive to the fact that a lot of good people may be smeared in this process that had nothing to do with it.  Nevertheless, we have to hold the Church accountable for its crimes and its sins.  The fact is, I don’t think that even now we have done so.

BH: But how would this sense of doubt translate into the political and religious spheres? What would it look like?

AS: Well, pastorally, we as Catholics have this fantastic advantage of the sacraments.  The sacraments we can perform and speak and engage in.  And they themselves transform us.  There are many times, I’m sure, that many Catholics have gone to mass and have felt nothing.  There have been many times when we have gone through the motions and wondered why we are there.  And there have been other times when we have been overwhelmed with how wonderful it is and how calming [communion] can be and everything in between.  But as Catholics, we just do it. 

The ritual and the sacraments we can come back to and repeat and repeat, even when we don’t quite understand them.  So for us, this theological certitude at all moments is not necessary to keep going as Catholics.  We can continue on our faith journey knowing that it is always a struggle, and knowing that we are going to fail but not give in.  And by that, I don’t just mean moral failure in what we do, but spiritual failure in belief.  I mean, do we really believe?  When we say the creed each Sunday, do we really believe all that or have we become numb to it now?  What does it mean to believe these things?  It’s easy to say things, it’s hard to internalize them.  And the process of actually examining our consciences and our faith, and seeing whether or not it is reasonable in certain contexts…Some of it will never be reasonable.  It is not reasonable that a man would rise from the dead.  That’s where our acceptance of mystery must come in. 

But there are other doctrines that the Church teaches on a variety of questions—whether it be capital punishment or abortion or the end of life issues which I deal with in the book—they can be and must be subject to reasoned arguments and inspection.  An unexamined faith is not worth having it seems to me.  That is not something that we should be afraid of.  I fear that the hierarchy has become afraid of it because I think they got panicked by the Second Council and what happened afterwards, and the thought that they were losing authority and losing control.  And one can understand that.  But, at the same time, I think there comes a point where one would have to say, ‘Maybe they need a little more humility in letting go a bit and opening a respectful dialogue within the Church about some of these questions, which are open to legitimate faithful discussions. 

In my book, when I write about, for example, what sexuality is about, I don’t think I’m dismissing what the Church is saying.  I’m asking really whether it fully makes sense on its own terms and how the Church itself has changed.  It changed on end of life issues.  It became much more rigid than it once was.  As I point out in the book, it has changed on even the abortion issue and it’s become much more rigid than it once was.  Actually, on the sexual orientation issue, it has changed and changed back.  In 1975, it seemed to be genuinely wrestling with the question here and the way in which our new understanding of who gay people are should inform what we teach about them.  And yet now, I really grapple with that question of sexual orientation and I do so within the context of the Church and its arguments.  I’m not coming at it from outside.  I’m actually saying, ‘O.K. let’s take natural law and let’s think it through.’  And that is what the book tries to do as well.

BH: One of the things that is intriguing about your approach is that—whether it's conservativism or the Catholic Church—you are constantly trying to change institutions or movements from within.

AS: I don't think there is anywhere except from within.  I don't think, for example, we would have a doctrine at all if the Church as a human institution had not survived through the centuries of time.  And even our Bible, even our New Testament, we get it because some Irish monks copied it down at some point.  We are all culturally embedded and historically embedded as human beings.  So, therefore, everything is from within.  These arguments are constantly within us, within our own traditions, which is why, for example, I've been very clear that I'm not sure that Catholicism has within its own resources the ability to say how the sacrament of marriage for gay couples. I think that may be completely beyond its current resources.  It may have to come up with some other way of understanding gay people but it can't do that.  The way it has constructed its own theology makes that impossible.  But that is a different argument, a civil argument.  But yes, I don't know any other way to be.  I think it might a little bit about my biography because I've been slightly displaced from where I am.  I mean I was a Catholic in a Protestant country.  I was a gay boy in a Catholic church.  I'm now an immigrant English person who came and made his life in America.  I'm a conservative at war with the Republican party.

BH: Did you ever think you might actually enjoy this sense of displacement?

AS: I think you could put it this way: I don't know whether I like it or dislike it. It has given me a lot of pain and a lot of strife in my life, but why not turn it into good ends? Why not use my own experience of being forced to think things through? I had no choice, why not turn it into something that other people can relate to? That is what I really feel. I feel that really we all have ministries in different ways. And we all have different talents and we all are thrown into situations. What matters is what we make of them. My mother very much insisted on the parable of the talents. What you have been given, you have a moral obligation to use for good as best you can. And if you haven't, if you fail to do that, or if you make mistakes in doing that—which you will—all you can do is try and be honest and self-correct. No one is going to come out of the blue to give you everything. Peoples' lives have to change from within.

BH: The self-correction sounds like it would be a great lesson for many people in Washington if they could do it in their own right.

AS: Well yeah, but there are also a lot of decent people in Washington and I think lots of good people.  Unfortunately, few of them are in politics.

BH: You have been encouraging people to vote for Democrats on your blog. You've also been out and about on the talk-show circuit with the elections coming up, what is your feeling of the mood of the country?

AS: I've been asking for people to vote for Democrats or abstain unless they have a Republican senator or congressman whom they really think is terrific.  This is not a national election in that sense. I really think we need to send a message that what is going on has to stop and it has to be corrected because I think they have completely lost perspective and they have abused the powers that they have been granted by the public.

BH: Do you think those folks who doggedly supported President Bush in 2004—despite the revelations about the mistakes in Iraq—have changed their minds about the Republicans?

AS: My sense is yes.  On the tour, I sense a huge shift but I don't know whether or not that is a dillusion because my audience is self-selecting. One of the things about the conservativism of doubt is realizing that you may only be seeing part of the reality. Part of the reality that I've seen suggests that we are going to have a landslide against the Republicans, but, that's just a partial reality I see. But we'll see, I may be wrong. I may not know that they have this brilliant turnout.  I may be wrong that some of these people will still follow this man into the abyss if need be.  So I have to say that provisionally.

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Bill McGarvey is the editor-in-chief of BustedHalo.com

Comments to: editor@bustedhalo.com