My name is Mark Easton. I'm indeed the home editor of the BBC, and I'm delighted to be here to chat with my former boss both at Channel 4 and then at the BBC, now of course at CNN, Mark Thompson.
Now, you know the advice: avoid talk about money, politics, or religion. Well, we're going to absolutely do the opposite of that right now in a session provocatively entitled 'Religion, Politics, and the Media in Trump's America.'
So before I start with Mark, I want to give you sort of three quotes from the American president which might help set the scene a bit for our discussion.
Quote one, at his inauguration in January, Donald Trump reflected on the attempt to assassinate him in Butler, Pennsylvania during the campaign and he said this: 'I was saved by God to make America great again.' That's quote number one.
Quote two, during a Rose Garden event celebrating the National Day of Prayer last month, the president pondered on the longstanding separation of church and state in America. 'Separation, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not sure,' before adding, 'We're bringing back religion in our country.'
And quote three, announcing the creation of a task force to eradicate what he describes as anti-Christian bias in America, Donald Trump said it was necessary to end the anti-Christian weaponization of government and unlawful targeting of Christians.
He also said, 'I'd like to be pope.' But anyway, we'll leave that where it is. Last month he established a presidential commission on religious liberty which for our purposes could be said to be at the very center of a Venn diagram made up of religion, politics, and media.
Lots of media on the presidential commission chaired by a Texan podcaster. Its members include a controversial TV psychologist, a Trump-supporting former Miss California, an author who likens homosexuality to alcoholism, and a shock jock radio presenter who claims Islam is a death cult.
So, well, before we get into all of that, I want to start first actually with you, if I may, a personal question. Now, you are a Roman Catholic and I know you had an audience with Pope Francis shortly before he died this year and also were back in Rome when Pope Leo was introduced to the world. So, how does your faith influence your work?
Well, that's not a straightforward matter. I mean, I think you know from the tradition of my faith, the Christian faith, that line of Jesus of Nazareth: 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's.' He has an idea of appropriate responsibility to the powers and interests of this world, and we're meant to believe a primary duty and responsibility to the kingdom of heaven.
But look, I don't want to say any more than I think it does two things. I'm interested in religion. I mean, I kind of put my money where my mouth is in terms of trotting off to church and the rest of it. So I'm really genuinely interested.
And I want to say, and I think thanks to the women and men who educated me and my parents and indeed my wife, I'm interested in religion in the sense that I'm interested in all religion and not just, as it were, interested in my own religion. I find the entire topic and its culture and its history and its beautiful music and literature and all of that intriguing and fascinating, which is not true of everyone in our business by any means. In fact, I think it's probably uncommon.
Secondly, and I don't want to overclaim here, and I put myself very definitely in the category of being a poor sinner, but you hope that the moral dimension of Christianity in my case, but frankly all of the world's great religions, would provide you with some kind of ethical compass for navigating through the stormy...
And I speak as someone who once, when I was at the BBC, there was an attempt to prosecute me for blasphemous libel over Jerry Springer: The Opera, if you remember that piece. So not everyone has agreed with this, but in a sense of, with some humility, trying to do the right thing, trying to think through what the right thing might be, I'm hoping that it has some influence there as well.
Interesting. So, I scoured CNN's excellent website. I really do recommend it. It's a terrific place to go and find out about the world. And it's got all these tabs. I mean, loads and loads of tabs. You can click on a lot of stuff: mindfulness, relationships, beauty, pets, but you can't click on religion.
There's no tab. I know you've got Christopher Lamb, I think, somewhere in the room, who is CNN's religious affairs correspondent based in Rome. But you haven't got a religion tab, Mark. So why not?
Yeah, the answer is, you know, if we don't, perhaps we should, I don't know. I mean, we do cover religion a lot, and I would say that actually of the great news organizations I've worked for, at least four of them, and I've been involved in several others actually as a non-executive director, CNN is I think the one which is most focused on covering religion with, I would say, a particular focus.
You'll understand why on very big events like the death of one pope and the choosing of another one. That will be a very, you know, we're a global broadcaster. It's an amazing spectacle. The whole thing over weeks is one of those things that, weirdly, you can, I think, an audience who would not be generally interested in religious subjects might be fascinated by just that process.
But in all seriousness, I mean, religion plays a much bigger part in American life than in British life, as it were, for the population at large. Minorities obviously here as well, often very focused on religion. It more often is woven into political discussion, that being an example. It's very hard to imagine a British prime minister of any party, in a sense, speaking of religion in quite that way.
Well, Alastair Campbell famously said 'We don't do God' referring to Tony Blair, didn't he? So it's a difficult bit of territory. But I think it's more that there's just a big cultural difference and it does mean that religion is taken somewhat more seriously journalistically on that side of the Atlantic.
We got an American pope. You may have noticed, you were there. Conclaves like to spring surprises. But I wondered how you thought that would play out in Trump America.
I should tell you the scene, by the way. I was at the CNN camera position in the piazza, and Chris Lamb, I don't see him here actually, but oh there he is. Chris is, you know, I'm sort of squatting on a camera box and Chris is dressed up in a proper suit and is being interviewed by one of our big anchors, Erin Burnett.
Anyway, the smoke comes, electrifying moment, and then, I mean, completely electrifying, very emotional moment actually, unexpectedly for me. But then, you know, some minutes later, a gendarme comes out to the window to say, 'We have a pope, our famous papa.' And Chris has done this before and is smart enough to hear the surname Post in the Latin, boom.
And that is the most terrifying moment for anybody covering any pope. Who the hell is it? And I could see in his face, you know, we've got a story. This is one of the... and then the name, and I mean, I know enough about these things as well. Leo the 14th, and you know, within half a second if you are a certain kind of Catholic, you're, you know, Rerum Novarum and Catholic social teaching and what signal is that?
And it was a very interesting moment, and by the way, I would say of consternation to quite a few of the American representatives of the church there gathered, because it was when you thought about an American pope in the era of Donald Trump that, you know, Leo's particular story, Peru, a pope of as much of the global south as of the global north.
And he has, I mean, before he was pope, he did, I think, retweet some other social media posts which were critical of Trump, you know, and a lot of people have made... and Leo is, I believe, I mean, if you want an expert there's one lounging at the back of the hall, but even I know that Leo has shared one of Francis's main concerns, which is for the particular plight of the world's displaced and dispossessed.
So, where does this go then? I mean, do you... Trump, you know, famously tweeted a picture of himself dressed as the Pope. You know, we've seen what's just happened in the last week in relation to Elon Musk. He's welcomed the new Pope. Can that relationship survive?
Well, look, I mean, you're asking me to do something I can't do, which is predict the future. Look, I would say that the conclave, the College of Cardinals, has made an interesting choice, a somewhat surprising choice. Those of us of Catholic faith believe that the Holy Spirit has a role in this as well. So in this case the Holy Spirit is thickening the plot a bit, and let's see what unfolds.
But I think you have a very interesting choice of a pope who does seem to have a concern for the whole planet, who looks like both a serious man and a man of considerable personal holiness or religious conviction and spiritual depth. Let's see what happens.
Let's talk a bit more broadly about the sort of the Trump presidency and religion. As I said in my introduction, a lot's happened even in the last month and it seems clear to me that he is determined to cast sort of secular liberalism as a threat to religious orthodoxy. Do you think he's serious when he says we're bringing back religion to this country?
You're going to have to ask him that. I don't know whether he's... but I think there's two things. Firstly, I think his target is narrower than a kind of general secularity. He certainly has in his sights, as part of the culture wars, a frankly often caricatured by the right, a kind of extremely politically correct version of all of this.
It's complicated because actually it's not obvious to me that the politically correct wing is necessarily anti-religious, particularly actually. I think you've got an old-fashioned, somewhat old-fashioned humanistic belief, agnostic or atheistic belief in humanism, which I don't think is his target particularly. I've never heard him talking about that.
But I think the idea that you've got liberal elite professors who are contemptuous, quite possibly in his view, guilty of being hostile to religion. Some people on the right have also judged that some of the utterances by professors as well as students at some US universities felt like anti-Jewish racism and anti-semitism.
And so I think he's got a number of targets and wants to broadly present himself as on the side of religion. But he's not straightforwardly, Mr. Trump himself, someone who is obviously a man of faith. He seems to be respectful of faith but he's not obviously a man of faith himself.
And I think, you know, one of... he's not, you know, a politician who necessarily fully falls into the trap of consistency. No, it's not obvious that this adds up to a sort of plank of public policy at all.
But we've seen in the last month two commissions to eradicate things. One to eradicate anti-Christian bias as I said, another to eradicate anti-semitism. Eradicate's a strong word. I'm wondering, you know, it must be some concern for journalists that it becomes much harder to have really free discussions around moral and ethical questions, whether it was about abortion, homosexuality, gender fluidity and so on.
I think the eradication of anti-semitism is a desire. And by the way, I would say the same about Islamophobia and other forms of racism. I think probably will be a desirable outcome, actually, whether his commission will achieve it. But your point about anti-semitism was the way he was using it as a way of getting at, say, Harvard or other educational institutions. In other words, it turned into a political weapon.
That's right. And in ways which some American Jews themselves feel very uncomfortable with, at the sense of what's been done, as it were, in the name of protecting them. Even though I would say that anti-semitism is, as it is in the United Kingdom as well, a real and serious form of racism and is something which is a real concern and which CNN has done a great deal of reporting on.
But we report also on Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice which is either associated with religion or identity or both of those things. So I mean, America is a complex society. It's a very divided society and one of the axes of division is around religious identity.
And you know, part... there's also a broader thing which is a feeling, might be shared by some Christians here as well, that public policy concern for minorities and for minority religions has to some extent happened with the effect of minimizing respect and support for larger faith communities.
As if... I mean, I'm personally just as a citizen resistant to the idea that you've got to choose and that respect for religion can't simply be respectful religion, you know, big religions, small religions, ones which feel native and ones which feel as if they've come with immigrant communities into the country.
But there is definitely this feeling that there's some kind of zero-sum game and if special concern is given to this group maybe it means that we're being ignored and there may be some truth in that. So I think that you've got, just as you would with other forms of attention, privilege, subsidy, a battle between different groups. Religion is one of the fronts where that's playing out in the states.
We have seen in very recent times some really horrific anti-semitic attacks in America and some of the language around that has become much more divisive, more aggressive. And you talk about that polarization. Do you think journalists are religiously literate enough to be able to report in a truly informative way around that territory?
Well, I think in many news organizations, you have the following really, and Chris Lamb will be an example. You have some beat journalists, journalists who are following religion, covering religion is what it says on the tin, that's their job, who are as expert as any journalists are in any category of coverage.
The question everywhere, and I'd say it's a question inside CNN, it's certainly a question in the BBC, ITN, the New York Times, is do editors, do the people who make broad decisions about coverage, do they also have this expertise? Do they have sufficient knowledge or interest and commitment?
And I would say that although I'd hope that some of us do, I would say that generally in my industry, I would say often you end up with a broader editorial culture which is not particularly interested in, and because it's not particularly interested in, is not particularly curious about or knowledgeable about religion as a field.
And I think honestly, I want to say, I think part of that... I mean, I'm in my 60s, and I think I grew up, as it happens, partly because I had an immigrant Irish mother, as a Catholic in a country which felt like it was moving rapidly away from organized religion towards a purely secular society.
And where most of my contemporaries literally knew almost nothing about religion, to the point of not having read any of the Bible or not having an elementary grasp of the Bible, or indeed of the Hebrew Testament, the Christian New Testament, or of the religion doctrine of the world's other great religions. Just simply didn't know, didn't think it would come up much.
And actually, I always think the kind of Satanic Verses was a kind of watershed moment where suddenly the sharp edge of religion, the fact that we live in a world where the overwhelming majority of human beings have got some level of commitment to religion, 84% of the world's population, probably something like that, and that religion to this day still motivates people to many things including conflicts and wars sometimes.
You touched on this just now. We've seen Trump courting certain religious groups. I mean, clearly evangelicals in America. He's very keen to court them. In fact, I think he was brought up a Presbyterian, but now says he's a non-denominational Christian in order to cover all bases. Very good. Perhaps you could just help our audience a little bit in explaining... you said it's a very different kind of society from here in relation to people's religious faith and their identity. To what extent is that?
A country of 340 million people. It is immensely diverse. Its diversity is geographical, and in America geography also to some extent reflects culture and values. The southern states have a different history than the northern states. It's a much less unified country, even historically, in terms of homogeneity than the UK.
And religion plays out in many different ways in different parts of the country. And politicians in federal politics in America are always trying to gather coalitions, you know, it's competitive coalition building, and the presidential candidate or indeed the party in Congress which is the most successful at pulling coalitions together is the one that succeeds.
And so Donald Trump has wanted to get disaffected white voters to support him. He's also done actually a very arguably successful job in reaching out to African-American men in particular and Latino men. And his focus on heartland, in particular white evangelicals, is also combined with a lot of activity to try and focus Catholic interests and Catholic leaders and the religious right.
So there's a lot of filigree in that, but the broad sense of trying to, for example, energize both community leaders and also voters whose, as it were, religiously based conservative values on, for example, gender could potentially be mobilized in an attack line across from the Republicans to the Democrats about the world's gone mad in terms of transsexuals and the extreme focus on that.
And you know, in the military, the argument about bathrooms and toilets, I should say, and all... so there's an attempt to try and siphon off from broadly the more religiously inclined those people whose religion leads them down a path of conservatism about these kinds of issues as opposed to a path of liberal tolerance.
Some people would argue that religion would take you in the other direction, but there are obviously a lot of socially conservative religious people in America and Donald Trump wanted their votes. He does.
I suppose I was asking this question in a slightly different way earlier. Is this notion of liberalism and religious orthodoxy and the extent to which, in this complicated society that you describe, Trump is using people's faiths and creeds to say liberalism is an attack on you. And that's what all these commissions are about. And that actually there's a lot going on there. And the commissions are as much about demonstrating that his administration is, in quotes, doing something about it.
I mean, given the very strong protections on civil liberties that the constitution has in place and which I think even a conservative Supreme Court will probably support, how much will actually change, you could debate. But there are some areas, I think transsexual rights will be an example, where we're seeing real changes. Immigration, we are seeing real changes to administrative practice already, we may see changes to the law and so on. So there is real change in some of these areas.
But what I'm trying to get at is, in a way, he's reaching at a cultural thing. Social conservatives, people who are conservative about marriage and about gender, and may also have a view about status in society and different groups and their positions in society. And one of the ways of getting to those people, you can get to them because many of them are religious. Actually, it's the social group he's trying to reach and mobilize.
I don't think Donald Trump is very interested actually in doctrine. And when you talk about orthodox religion, I don't think he's interested in distinguishing between more orthodox definitions of Christian or Jewish orthodoxy than lesser. He's interested in mobilizing a social coalition and then using that to gain and retain power.
Are we all right just to keep you for another five minutes or so? I'd like to take some questions from the floor. I'm sure there are plenty. Do we have microphones prepared to rove? We do. There's a microphone roving beautifully.
