This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 15, 2011 - In July, R. Marie Griffith, 43, will become director of Washington University's John C. Danforth Center for Religion & Politics. She brings to St. Louis varied academic and leadership experience at top schools.
Former three-term Sen. Jack Danforth, R-Mo., announced in December 2009 a $30 million endowment gift for the center from his family's Danforth Foundation. Danforth is also an Episcopal priest.
At spring semester's end, Griffith will leave Harvard Divinity School, where she and her husband Leigh Eric Schmidt, Harvard's Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America, have been on faculty for two years. Schmidt, formerly head of the Princeton religion department, will join the WU faculty as the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in July.
For four years at the turn of the century, Griffith was associate director of Princeton's Center for the Study of Religion. Danforth, coincidentally, majored in religion as a Princeton undergraduate. During her six years of teaching at Princeton she spent two years as director of its Program for the Study of Women and Gender. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of Virginia where she majored in political and social thought. Both her master's degree and doctorate in religion are from Harvard.
In 1997 her book "God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission" broke new ground in academe, which had been oblivious to contemporary evangelical women. She is completing a book due out next year titled "Christians, Sex and Politics: An American History."
Griffith grew up in Chattanooga, Tenn., where she attended a Southern Baptist church. She talked to the Beacon from her suburban Boston home keeping her sense of humor as a real estate agent stripped her house of its "personality" to make it "neutral" for potential buyers. By mid-summer, the couple, their two sons and one daughter, who range in age from 3 to 13, will move to a Washington University-owned house now under restoration.
Griffith succeeds the Danforth Center's founding interim director Wayne Fields who will return full time to the WU English department.
Beacon: Sen. Jack Danforth has often spoken and written about the lack of civility in politics and religion saying that few issues are more critical to the well being of a democracy than how religious beliefs -- or the denial of such beliefs -- co-exist with civic virtue. How will the center try to foster civility?
R. Marie Griffith: I read Jack's book ("Faith and Politics") in 2006 when it first came out and have been concerned about Americans' need to listen to those with conflicting opinions and beliefs. People now shout about other people's ideas. People chose the media outlets that reflect our own bias and prejudices. Less and less do we talk to people from other walks of life, people of other religious and people with other points of view.
At the Danforth Center, we intend to bring individuals of different religious, political, educational ideas together to really listen and understand where each is coming from. Instead of talk, talk, talk about me, me, me, we want them to listen to others, to understand others' values, political and civic divisions. Once we begin to understand other points of view, even if we don't agree with them on every policy issues, we can see the goodwill in others.
The center's public side is to bring in political and religious leaders, people on the ground doing this kind of work not just in the St. Louis community, but nationally to have a national conversation.
That is what the senator wants, what the university wants and what I want.
We will have some traditional lectures with responses from the audience, but we also want to have live dialogues with people on stage who don't agree on a particular issue. They will have to agree ahead of time to respectfully debate, as (journalists) David Brooks and E.J. Dionne do on NPR. They disagree and do it quite well, and always respectfully. They like each other.
We've already hired a tech whiz to put some of this on line to reach out nationally. Every (event) we do will be videotaped and put on our Danforth Center website. We will have a blog, a web magazine and more. All this wired technology is crucial to the younger generation; more and more to my generation.
Q. Do you have experience in robust dialogue between those with conflicting ideas?
Griffith: My own background is Southern Baptist. I was a child and teenager during bitter years when the fundamentalists took over (Louisville's Southern Baptist Theological) seminary and purged its more liberal professors. That was so different from the Southern Baptist Church that I was raised in. Our Chattanooga Church taught us to be independent, that each (Baptist) church was autonomous. Now, I watch (National Baptist Convention) leadership and see where they must call on wives to submit to their husbands.
I learned about civil dialogue at my family dinner table. I grew up in house with deep political differences; and our dinner table conversations could be quite heated. I am an only child, raised by a mother, who could be described as a liberal Democrat, a deeply devout Southern Baptist and feminist; and a father who was a Republican and an economic conservative.
They argued, but I knew that very good people can disagree about politics and it does not mean that one side is bad and the other side is good. I didn't see the world as bad or good.
Q. Were you ever the umpire in your parents' discussions?
Griffith: Probably not. I knew well enough stay away from that. The first campaign I really remember was in 1980, Carter vs. Reagan. Mother was very, very pro-Carter; and dad was pro-Reagan. They used to joke that their ballots canceled each other out. It was not always fun, but they always respected each other. Neither thought the other was stupid or evil. So I grew up in a home where everyone did not agree but where I was taught you really have to think for yourself.
These words flow out my heart, I care so much about this. I feel that this (job) is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something significant on this issue that matters greatly. I am so grateful for this opportunity. I am not just saying this.
Q. How will you fire up the mission of the fledging center?
Griffith: The Danforth Center has two paths. We have the public path and we have the scholarly mission of drawing on scholars and bringing in scholars to teach. We are going to hire new faculty. Four more faculty now. The plan is to grow eventually.
We are going to develop new courses. Students can take courses through the Danforth Center and get an undergraduate minor, at first -- maybe a major eventually -- in religion and politics. Graduate students in history, English, politics, the classics can take courses through the center.
We want to have deep historical perspective. While our eye is on the contemporary moment, I know that we can't understand the contemporary moment without understanding how we got here, without understanding ancient, medieval and modern history. This center will draw all those students of humanities and help them better frame and understand today.
As part of our scholarly mission every year I plan on developing a post-doctorate fellowship, probably for a junior scholar -- a pre-tenured scholar -- who will be chosen in a national competition. They would come to the center and pursue their own scholarly research. They might teach one class as they write their book. We want to support research at WU. Each year, the junior scholar will bring new energy, new face, constantly freshly engaging us with new ideas.
Among the four new faculty appointments, I want at least one of them to be doing some quantitative survey on an issue in these areas. Most of us aren't qualified to do that.
Q. Will all public dialogues feature issues that touch on both religion and politics? You led a program on gender issues at Princeton.
Griffith: Not sure. Religion has played such an important role in these divisions even when it is not the issue that divides. There are other issues I care about: issues of class, region and races and plenty other factors. Religion is uppermost in many of these issues, just not theology. It's much more contextualized.
Everyone knows the issues of gender and sexuality are some of most divisive issues of our time, some of the issues that have become so polarized. Questions about homosexually and gay marriage have come to a point where each side sees it as an all-or-nothing issue. It has become very, very difficult to have a middle-ground position, compromising by saying "maybe this, but maybe that, too."
In our health-care debate, I am thinking of abortion here, (President Barak) Obama was willing to compromise. He was trying to reach across the aisle. Those on the opposite side didn't want to, or didn't have the ability to or were completely unwilling to compromise. People seem to have so little trust now. We don't even talk to each other. We assume those on the other sides are hypocrites, morons or terrible characters. We stereotype people who hold opposite opinions from ours.
I have read that in Congress they no longer have lunch with members of the other party, even in the Capitol lunch rooms. It didn't used to be that way.
I would like people to start with an assumption of good faith in the other person and respect for the values that inspire others to think about an issue. Let us talk about what is behind those issues. Attempting some kind of empathy will get us a lot further.
Patricia Rice is a freelance journalist who has long written about religion.