Ken Burns UNUM

- Hi, it's Ken Burns with another Unum Chat, and I have been for a long, long time a huge fan of our next guest, Krista Tippett, the founder and host of On Being, the extraordinary podcast that explores, among other things, how our internal lives, including faith and religion, impact the world we live in and our own wellbeing.

I've listened to so many of Krista's conversations and have admired her interview skills.

You know, as filmmakers, we sort of hide ourselves.

We don't record our questions.

Krista is actively engaged in her conversation, sharing her thoughts, and helping direct the discussion while providing space for her guests to share their work and their stories, often deeply personal stories.

There's an intimacy to these interviews.

We feel like we are part of them, though we are listening, and that is a great tribute to our guests.

I think that stems from a sense of the universal we experience in Krista's conversations, a quest to understand who we are and the human condition today and throughout our history.

So, thank you, Krista, for being here.

- Oh, such an honor to be here.

- I wanna start our conversation with a year in American history, 1832, when Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favorite, favorite people in all of American history, left the Unitarian Church.

In some ways, Emerson stepped out of the Unitarian Church and into the Church of Nature, capital N. Americans were inventing something new.

We were going to be able to worship God, not in cathedrals made by man, but in cathedrals made by God, and that there was a kind of perfection in nature.

Everything in nature was perfect.

Everything in the man-built world was imperfect in some ways, imperfectly in perfect ways.

And that seems to be at the heart.

That study of nature would be also the subject and title of his famous 1836 book.

He left with some trepidation, he left his church with some trepidation because he was stepping away from the institution.

He was trying, nevertheless, to maintain community.

He wrote, "I rejoice to believe my ceasing to exercise the pastoral office among you does not make any real change in our spiritual relation to each other."

So my question is, how can we as a community, as a country now maintain the spiritual bonds that can unite us as human beings when we lack shared experience or a vocabulary that we share that we associate more formally with religion?

Did Emerson's departure from the church start something that has become a defining part of American life, really our modern life, our modern existence?

- Hmm, such an interesting thing to think about.

And I don't know where Emerson fits on this trajectory, but we are certainly at another evolutionary inflection point.

I mean, I marvel at how, in the period of time these, you know, 20 years, or let's say the span of this young century that I've been, you know, paying attention to, asking questions of this aspect of human life and our life together, we have undergone a transition in the United States.

You know, this is not uniformly true of the globe, but there's something happening that is significant that, across the history of our species, for the most part, in every place, in every culture, human beings have inherited religious identity, an institutional religious identity that was absolutely defining.

And really just in a handful of generations, that is no longer true, as you're saying.

So what that means, and I think you're getting at the implications of this, that we barely, there's so much going on in the world.

I mean, this is actually seismic, but there's a lot that is seismic.

So we barely step back to ponder the fact that, in a handful of generations, it's not just that the institutions, the forms of the institutions, like the forms of a lot of our institutions, are going to have to be redesigned, reimagined, remade.

But these have been the containers by which we had moral formation, and as you say, and inherited a moral vocabulary.

And there's an irony and a tension right now that so much of what is before us, call them crises, call them challenges, call them reckonings.

I like to call them, I like to say these are our callings, ecological, racial, economic, political, they demand of us moral imagination.

And that is precisely what has fallen away, the kind of the building blocks of that, that, you know, were good, bad, and different, but people worked with them.

And so there is this way in which we have to craft that, right?

We have to pull those together again, but they're not necessarily going to come from the institutions.

So yes, that narrative from Emerson kind of pulls through in a more dramatic way in our time.

- Well, you know, let me back up even further.

I think 56 years, if my math is right, to 1776, in which we have a country founded and will eventually establish a constitution in which they're looking to make sure that the state itself does not sanction any political, any religious organization per se.

The separation of church and state, which is obviously under contesting, and then we'll talk about it in a second, sort of the ways in which that been hijacked or misunderstood, many of our founders were deus.

They thought that God had created the world and was permeating everything, but was indifferent to whether we- - They spoke of nature's God, they spoke of nature's God.

- And nature's laws.

This was something that transcended any particular sect.

And they were mindful of the fact, when the British colonies were there, that the salaries of the Anglican ministers were paid, but not the Presbyterian or the Methodist or the Baptist or others that were there.

And so they were looking really to have a separation.

And so if we go up to Emerson, it seems logical that you would then do that.

So the progress that you're suggesting has led to the lack of this common vocabulary, and at the same time, it seems to be very much part of this independent American spirit.

- Jacob Needleman said to me in a film on the Shakers that America's the land of zero, we start from nothing.

We start from our own longing, our own reason, our own search.

And so somehow 1776 was a press to reset.

Somehow 1832 was a press to reset, and we've done this over and over again.

And as you use the term correctly, ironically, we also find us now struggling to find a common vocabulary, struggling to find things that we share in common.

- We forget that the impulse also on behalf in Christian churches was that they wanted this boundary between church and state.

So I think in our time we kind of interpret it as the state not being tainted by religion.

But for those, and it was mostly Christians, right?

Different kinds of Christians.

It was about keeping the church untainted by governance.

- Yeah, this is a hugely important point.

I'm glad you said it.

Everyone pay attention, exclamation point.

That is hugely important part of our dynamic that we've somehow just conveniently forgotten.

As many people make an argument that the re-christianizing of America will be the answer to everything, when in fact, America is not founded on that in any way, shape, or form.

In some ways, I think, you followed Emerson when you changed the title of your show from Speaking of Faith, and I'm an old enough listener to have gone back that far, to On Being, going from something that, at least in name, was wrapped in religion, or at least the context or the contexts of religion, to something that is more focused on what it means to be human.

And yet you begin each interview with a very personal question, asking your guests about their religious upbringing.

So why is that so often your first question, is that to return to common vocabulary or find at least that portal of entry to that other person's psyche being emotional, you know, resonance?

- I would say in changing the name from Speaking of Faith to On Being, we were having to reckon with the fact truly every day, every week of every year, that that was what the show was called with the fact that the word faith is a very fraught, lightning-rod word.

Now, it's very deeply meaningful for many people, and for others it is freighted with, you know, being proselytizing, exclusionary.

I hoped in the beginning to be able to just fill it with new connotations, and I think we did as much as we could, but we needed a more spacious entry to match the spaciousness of how this part of life, right?

That's what I wanna say.

How this part of life actually functions, and the richness and variety that it has, you know, person to person, life to life.

And yet I did this question of the spiritual background of one's childhood continued to be an anchor for the interviews.

And that, you know, that is because it is a very powerful, kind of magic question.

What I find about this question works against somewhat this stereotype that if you're talking about faith, it's going to be narrow, it's gonna be dogmatic, it's going to be about my answers against yours.

What I find is that when you ask someone about the spiritual background of their life, of their childhood, they go to a place, a place in us that I, you know, truly, almost universally I found to be true.

It's really important that you ask about the childhood rather than, are you religious now?

That takes us into a cerebral, guarded place, but the spiritual background of our childhood, our earliest memories is a place that is full of softness and searching and full of questions, not answers.

- Yes, yes.

- And I also, as an interviewer, you know, the function of the question for me as an interviewer is that it plants the conversation, and therefore everything that follows, in a soft, searching place of questions, you know, of inhabiting and enjoying the questions that live alongside our answers.

- Yeah, that's so beautifully said, Krista.

You know, I've had my own, you know, quite circuitous spiritual faith journey, and I've become to understand that part of the problem is the way in which faith becomes a kind of cudgel, or it's used or adopted or appropriated for kind of dialectic ends.

You know, there's nothing binary in Europe, in nature, everything is non-binary.

And yet we try to set these kind of good, bad, male, female, yes, no, whatever it might be.

And so there is a sense that doubt is the opposite of faith.

And I'm saying, no, doubt is actually central, you just called it search, but doubt is central to faith.

And the opposite of faith is actually certainty.

That is the death of search.

Because it says, I've already arrived, I already know, and you are wrong.

And that leaves no space for the other to exist, but more importantly, no leaves no space for you to exist either because you've completely circumscribed your own process of growth and your own possibilities moving from this moment into the next moment.

- And you know, all the words around this part of life get complicated.

Spirituality is also complicated.

It's very squishy for some people.

- So early in the last century, the writer Leo Tolstoy at the end of his life wrote a book called The Calendar of Wisdom, Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul.

For the last 10 years, completely stumbled into it, I've been part of a group that shares, via our digital devices, a photograph copy of that day's wisdom from Tolstoy that includes his comments if they're unsigned, classical writers, mystics, you know, quoting from the Talmud or the Quran or the Hagavito or whatever it might be.

A really, Emerson, all of these sorts of things to sort of support a kind of unified theme, which is somewhere in that page in italics, either signed by someone that isn't Tolstoy, or if unsigned meaning it's Tolstoy who wrote it.

And some deal openly with God and faith, and some just with common sense, though all's infused with a sense of what it means to be human.

It's become, for me, literally my daily practice, it's my, I don't know the opposite of vespers are, but my morning prayer is, the first thing I do each morning is to read that page and to try to summon from whatever imperatives I've already entered my brain to tell me what I have to get done and what the problem is and what the anxiety is.

Summon something that is free of those things and willing to share, reveal to everyone else what what it is.

It's amazing.

And, you know, then I go for a walk with my dog, which has another Emersonian natural immersion that does something.

What's your daily practice?

- My daily practice has evolved across time.

It's had many different chapters and passages.

At this point, it's really as simple as making sure I get some little slice of time in the morning for, and maybe I get more than a little slice of time, but at least a small portion of silence.

You know, when we talk about spirituality, which is a complicated word for some people, what we're really talking about is our interior life.

And in our time with these busy, noisy lives we lead, crowded lives we lead, it is actually such a piece of discipline to just claim some time that is there in silence for me.

I interviewed this wonderful acoustic ecologist years ago who's out to preserve the endangered species of silence.

And he says, he had this great line, "Silence is the jukebox of the soul."

So turning on the jukebox of the soul, and for me, that can take, in the mornings, the form of meditation.

I also realized, I started meditating 'cause I have been very influenced by some wonderful Buddhist teachers in my time, life, and conversation.

But I also realized that my spiritual homeland and mother tongue has prayer in it, and at some point I needed to be praying as well.

I also, you know, reading and books and ideas from my very earliest life had a really immersive, religious, very structured, immersive, religious upbringing.

Books were a way that my mind and heart expanded, and writers felt like friends across time and space.

And you might, I could even use this Christian language of cloud of witnesses, right?

- Yes.

- And so I've also done something in recent years sometimes that I've started to call contemplative reading, and it's just, and it might be poetry or it might be a book that is, you know, I'm reading a book now by a German biologist that's just reimagining biology in such a thrilling new way about, you know, and to encompass the wholeness of vitality in life.

And just reading very short portions of something like that contemplatively, and really, so then really absorbing it differently than I read more purposefully and writing about it.

And you know, journaling also is a way of getting into conversation with ourselves, with our interior conversation.

And all of that just kind of lays this foundation for the rest of the day that is small, but I can't really imagine how the days would unfold without it.

- We celebrate the United States as this place of political freedom.

We feel so happy to talk about our founding, I'm working now and have been working for years on a mammoth series on the history of the American Revolution.

And it's so interesting that people essentially default to the political side, not realizing the extent to which this is the first time in human history there's a country that has not got a state religion behind it.

And that the story of religion and faith and spiritual pursuit that weaves in and out of it is much harder for people to grasp.

And you know, we've done a lot of films about this.

The Shakers are perhaps the most obviously and noticeably about it, but every moment in our history has been infused with religion.

And so many movements in American life, abolitionism, suffragism, civil rights, the anti-war movement, national parks were led by religious leaders or leaders steeped in a kind of vocabulary of faith, a vocabulary of spiritualism, a vocabulary of an inherited, an acquired, a shed, in Emerson's case, religious faith.

And yet today there's a sense that the religious right with their Christian nationalism are driving any kind of conversation that we're having nationally.

So you know, the big $64,000 question is how do we reclaim the spiritual high ground when so many of us are outside of a formal religious experience, and so sort of lack that the armies of God that are sometimes evoked or mobilized in the service of something that seems neither Christian nor national, given at least our origin.

- So one of the things that I was profoundly aware of when I started looking at the world as I do and asking the questions I ask in my work is, the tragedy that, the thing is that religion, as it has lived in most lives, you know, as it is lived, it engenders qualities like humility and compassion and attention, presence to the world right in front of one's eyes.

And so the people who are living the best of our traditions, and I believe there are many, many, many of them, including evangelical and evangelical Christianity, but those people are the last people in our world who will throw themselves in front of microphones and cameras and proclaim on behalf of God, the Bible, and everyone.

And so I don't know how we, I think we have a long road to figuring out, to summoning a kind of common moral vocabulary, not just for being religious, but for being alive, being human beings in this century.

I will say that I have never in my lifetime felt that overtly theological language, or let's say spiritual technologies that our great traditions have carried forward like contemplation, that those things have never been more relevant than they are before.

Just language, like language which has practices attached, which is true of our, you know, lamentation, confession, repentance, redemption.

Those are words and actions that come to us from this part of the human enterprise, nowhere else, and I see people reaching for those.

I see young people reaching for what those things represent for, you know, being drawn to that language, being drawn to communities of service for example.

Even without this upbringing, I think a lot, I have thought a lot in these recent years about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian.

Bonhoeffer's situation was that, in Nazi Germany, the church had been absolutely co-opted by fascism.

It had fallen away completely.

And he began to speak of something called religionist Christianity.

And what he was saying is that Christianity had brought truths into the world which would survive even if the institutions failed.

And he said the institutions will always fail.

I don't think you can make a one to one comparison of Bonhoeffer's Germany and 21st century America, but this notion of religionless Christianity or religionless religion feels resonant to me.

And not just in the fact that we are religionless, you know, compared to previous generations, but what that means is that we are inside this project of looking again at what those truths are that we need, and those, really, those moral muscles, and again, those spiritual technologies.

And I think that also will eventually mean reaching back to the traditions for what is worthy in them, but probably not in the forms in which we have known them before.

And I do see new generations making that move with a lot of depth, a lot of searching, a lot of seriousness and integrity.

- You know, I've got a dear friend, Jeff Rosen, who is a constitutional scholar, and he runs the non-partisan National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Really a wonderful, wonderful scholar.

He has been going back and trying to understand what the pursuit of happiness is.

He has a new book out called that.

And he's gone back all the way to classical writers to look at virtues and the values of people.

And he finds himself now waking early and reading these early Roman and Greek writers, and kind of beginning to hear in his constitutional work, the echoes or the origins of the echoes that he sees in this experiment of the United States.

And he's begun, as a result of his morning discipline, to write sonnets and even to write songs.

And if you met him, you would go, this is not a guy who is writing songs, and he's doing it, and his life is coming alive in a way.

And I think what you are saying and what Jeffrey's saying is that our civic engagement does not preclude a spiritual dimension to it.

And that too often when we push our religion into a kind of common political thing, it becomes minus the religion, as you're suggesting, that we have Christianity without any Christianity.

Where is the humility?

Where is the doubt?

Where is the listening?

Where is that?

It's just thou shall, and there's no difference between the harshness that we see happening in other religions too, you know, cutting off a person's hand, you know, all of these sorts of draconian things in the name of some law and order that isn't.

It seems to me so interesting that we're struggling, that we are looking for some form that we can adhere to.

And I actually think, because these things always repeat, Franklin, Benjamin Franklin himself began, listed out 12 virtues that he had to have, you know, temperance and moderation and all of this sort of stuff.

And then somebody said, "Haven't you forgotten one?"

And it had to do with, you know, modesty, or you know, something that suggested that ego was also involved.

And he had to shamefacedly admit that, yes, that was what was missing too.

But he kept a log, and every day saw the extent to which he was not living up to these virtues, these ancient inherited virtues that are human.

They're across the board, every single religion shares them in the same message.

They're just different circumstances of their founding, different times of their founding.

They're all tributaries that flow into the same sea.

They're the exact same thing.

They just, you know, if you and I were born in Saudi Arabia, we would be a certain, you know, Sunni Muslim, right?

Maybe find something else, but probably not.

So I think that we're, I am agreeing with you, I think that we're wrestling, and I wonder how we continue to promote this at a time of great division and partisanship and Christian nationalism and certainty.

How do we begin to promote a kind of civil discourse that includes not just the political dynamics, but these deep-seated human core values and virtues, the ancients would call them.

- That language, the language of virtues is also very magnetic to young generations.

And it's something deeper than good behavior, right?

It is a spiritual discipline.

It is a commitment.

There's rigor to it.

When I look at the last 60 years, you know, I think the way we did separation of church and state to some extent got religion out of state, but we kind of threw the baby out of the bathwater because we also took away.

So you know, the world I grew up in, kind of, you know, starting in the '60s and '70s, I think there was this new virtue of tolerance, which actually is a negative virtue, right?

That it was really the civic virtue with which we were gonna navigate difference and diversity that we were finally acknowledging.

And, but you know, in medicine, tolerance is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment, It's like, how much can you tolerate?

We started, you know, we privatized religion, which was not true for all of our history, right?

It was just, it was everywhere as you say, it was embedded in everything.

It was embedded in these organizations we think of as civic organizations now.

They were suffused with religious virtue and values and motivation.

And then in the late 20th century, you know, we compartmentalize this out.

You kind of checked, and so you checked at the door of a workplace or a civic space or a school, right?

You checked really these deep value systems that come along with faith, with these traditions.

And so you could make an argument now today that religion is inserting itself in new ways in our public life, but I would say our public life is absolutely devoid of spiritual content.

And I don't, and you know, and I even hear, I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that the American soul is in distress, right?

And I think that the distress is bringing us back to be able to name something that we haven't been able to name.

So this is a real growth edge for us.

And you know, somehow I think this, in terms of what is the work or the obligation of, you know, any individual.

I mean, look, something I also know through my work is that spiritual life does not go away in the absence of a belief in God.

And I've talked to plenty of scientists across the year, you know, physicists across the years, physicists who are not religious in any traditional way but have spiritual lives and are asking spiritual questions and want to be part of moral deliberation in our life together.

Yeah, so it's an interesting and complex time.

And I think perhaps there may be an interesting calling for 21st century humans to get, because we are detached from the institutions, to get articulate about what this spiritual aspect of life and even of being a citizen or of just being part of public life, which means being present to suffering and being present to inequity, to get articulate about what this spiritual dimension is and what it calls us to.

- I think that's really well said.

I think everybody has felt, those of us who've experienced sort of the pulling out of religious from the civic sphere.

It's only been the Christian nationalists and others who have sort of rushed to fill that gap with a thou shall, and this is how it is, and whatever, and it becomes incumbent for us to realize that their yearning is the same, which is how do you bring that?

It's just, there's a misguided aspect to it.

And our problem is that, lacking this organization, the armies that that attend it, how do we as individuals bring this back to the fore?

It seems incredibly important that we figure out a way to do this.

- I have had an experience since the pandemic around dinner tables, for example, where, five years ago, the same people around the same dinner table would not go anywhere near a conversation that was overtly or implicitly spiritual.

And I find now somehow, the pandemic, which I think brought us in touch with our mortality and our frailty and our need for each other, has opened this new space for this to be brought out into, you know, public life, expansively understood.

And that is really interesting and I think quite promising.

But then maybe, I don't know, you're making me think about what, you know, what does any of us call to?

I mean, I think that it's something that needs to be nourished and cultivated and encouraged and drawn, called forth.

- Well, we live in a society now where we think that everything can be STEM, and forget the commandments, which includes the study of religion and civics and ethics and comparative religions and all of the things that are involved.

And instead we're producing automatons that are actually even further removed from that thing that you remember.

I mean, I went to first grade and we get pledge of allegiance, but we said the Lord's prayer, and then the next year we didn't do that.

I'm not saying you need to do this.

I'm saying onward, spiritual soldiers, not onward, Christian soldiers.

But we actually need to find a way to remind people that, central to our success as a society but also as individuals, is to engage these humanistic ideas that speak to the deepest sense.

And that you're absolutely right.

COVID and its existential threat made us all sort of set up and go, who am I?

What is my purpose here?

If at any moment my life could disappear, what have I done?

What have I left, what have I nourished, you know?

And this is, you know, we're a species with 100% mortality, and we, you know.

- Being alive is a fatal condition.

- It is a fatal condition, and we spend almost every waking moment trying to pretend to ourselves and each other that that's not the case.

And so I think that it becomes incumbent upon us to make sure that we don't cede this larger discussion of religion to those who are certain rather than those who are searching.

- I also believe that there's a fascinating paradox of our time now that AI is disabusing us, finally, from this enlightenment idea that the most interesting and in fact the most intelligent thing about us is our brains, our computational power.

I think, and we are learning this on our scientific frontiers, that there is such incredible intelligence all the way through our bodies.

And I believe that AI is going to call us back to delve again, to know what it is to be human in a much more profound way than the enlightenment called us to.

I don't think, therefore I am.

And you know, it kind of, I believe it is gonna take us full circle back to these questions of what it means to be human and how we want to live.

And in fact, those are the original animating questions behind all of the religious and spiritual traditions.

They're the universal human questions.

They're the root religious question, religious impulses.

- Indeed, well, with regard to AI, from your lips to God's ears, that's what I would add.

Krista, it has been such a joy and a pleasure to see you again, more importantly to talk with you again, more importantly to listen to you again, to your wise, wise, wise counsel and observations.

Thank you so much.

- Oh, thank you.