ANDREW SULLIVAN, AUTHOR, ”THE CONSERVATIVE SOUL”: Well because I’ve always thought of myself as a conservative and watching what’s happened to the Republicans and conservatives in the last few years I guess it made me ask some sort of first-order questions. What does it mean, why do I think of myself as a conservative, and how does religion and the role of religion play in changing what conservatism has been. And that meant a real examination of first principles, with that hence the soul. I think that when you strip everything away what makes a conservative a conservative deep down in his or her own soul?

And so I didn’t want to write a kind of superficial political book. I wanted to actually take time, take a deep breath and look at these things from first principles all over again.

LAMB: You tell a story in the book about your grandmother.

SULLIVAN: Yes, my grandmother was a wonderful lady. She was an Irish immigrant from Tralee in County Kerry actually. She immigrated to England – went the wrong way and worked as a cleaning lady for priests and a servant. She was the seventh of 13 children, could barely read or write. And I was – grew up with her because she actually lived with us as I was growing up.

But I was this precocious, nerdy, young intellectual, I was reading Chesterton and Belloc and Newman (ph) and all these Catholic writers and understanding my faith. And I found her a little bit of an embarrassment at times because when we would go to the quiet English church we would go to she would – she would always be a little louder than everybody else and she would always finish the Hail, Mary about three minutes before anybody else did and I felt embarrassed at lot of the time by that.

And then one day I just remember seeing her praying the Rosary and I noticed just an immense serenity and calm and grace about her of simple faith that was not dogmatic or intolerant or judgmental. She was a very accepting person. And I respected that and realized that maybe she understood faith better than I did.

And that was an early moment in my evolution and my understanding of what faith and God and in Jesus can mean and how it’s best expressed and how sometimes it is best expressed in ritual and devotion and acceptance of mystery rather than in a sort of dogmatic you must believe this, this, this and this or you are going to hell, which is another version of Christianity.

And I think that what my grandmother represented has been lost a little bit. I think Christian humility in the face of a God we cannot ever fully know is a virtue that we have forgotten. And I – when I think of that virtue I think very fondly of my grandmother.

LAMB: Well, you talk about being raised a Catholic in here and then you dedicate the book to your fiancι.

SULLIVAN: Yes, with one e.

LAMB: With one e. His name – his name is Aaron.

SULLIVAN: Yes.

LAMB: How is that working out with the church?

SULLIVAN: It isn’t working out with the church. The sadness is we’re going to get a civil marriage in Massachusetts next year and I hope a civil union in England at some point.

And my great sadness – but it’s not that I’m – didn’t expect it is that I won’t be able to have that within my Catholic faith. I will be able to go to mass and pray for my relationship and hope that my own church will understand that my love for him and my commitment to him is real and that it’s better for those of us who are gay to find someone we love and commit to them than to live a life of loneliness or of random sex or of – or the many ways in which people sublimate this and often end up acting out pathologically as well.

That I think for someone like Jim McGreevey who tried to (INAUDIBLE) living straight and that collapsed, and then you think of a case like Mark Foley, unfortunately, who also I think acted out in ways that we’re completely inappropriate and wrong. And I didn’t want to end up like that.

It hasn’t been easy and I haven’t – I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way and I’ve, you know – there’s lots of things that I’ve done that I’m not that proud of and so on but eventually when God’s help I think I found someone.

And we love each other and we want to be together and it’s been the best thing that happened to me in my life. And he was there for me writing this book and that’s why it’s dedicated to him with a great deal of love.

LAMB: Where did you meet Aaron and what’s he do?

SULLIVAN: Well, I’m sure he’s not – he’s a kind of private person who I feel I don’t want to quite drag into. But we met actually in New York by chance. And the whole love at first sight thing actually was true. And it was over three years ago and we lived together for a couple of years and I proposed last December. And our mothers are both dieting already to get ready for the wedding.

LAMB: Are you going to have a big wedding?

SULLIVAN: No, I hope not. I want a small wedding. You know what’s funny, the way we told our families this both our families were fine with us. But when we told them we were going to get married they suddenly got it. They had a language and a vocabulary and an architecture to talk about our relationship. I wasn’t this friend, I wasn’t his roommate, I wasn’t his boyfriend, which kind of trivializes it. I mean I’m a grown man.

And I don’t know, Christmas was different, I was part of the family. And when he came to visit my family to come to visit my family he is also different. And my parents and family, even though they always loved me, suddenly have a language and understanding of what this is. Oh, they’re serious. And we are serious and we are committed.

And I don’t – I consider that for me psychologically a big step forward. It hasn’t been easy but I actually – you know, I do believe at some level that with God’s help I got there.

LAMB: I don’t know quite how to ask this without sounding abrupt, but how can you then stay in the Catholic church and stay a conservative when both places are not terribly friendly?

SULLIVAN: Well, let me answer both sides of that question. In the Catholic church, not without a great deal of struggle and difficulty and pain. And, in fact, I spent – the last few years have been the loneliest. I have – I couldn’t go to mass for a while after the child abuse scandal and then the fact they blamed it on gays in general. I just – I felt dumbfounded by that and I felt too much anger when I went into the church to be able to be in any way in a state to witness the mass.

But in the last year I have gradually come back to mass. And I’ll tell you simply why, I love it. It’s my home. And the sacrament of the Eucharist is such a miracle to me. It’s been part of my life from the very beginning. It is a – I absolutely believe it is a unique way to encounter the Divine. And to be shut out of that for something I don’t think actually is integral to being a bad person. I really don’t. I don’t think my relationship is in God’s eye is a bad thing. I’ve searched my soul about that and I don’t think it is.

So it’s who I am. It’s my home. Why should I leave my home? Where would I go? And my fellow Catholics, lay Catholics, people who you don’t see on TV, people who aren’t in the hierarchy are much more understanding and compassionate about the subject than the hierarchy is allowed to be in public. And even the priests that I know, though they do not and cannot say it’s OK, are not going to throw me out of a church I desperately feel a part of and care about.

And the book is in part an analysis of how faith can exist under those circumstances.

LAMB: (INAUDIBLE)

SULLIVAN: And I think in some ways it was good for my faith to be told you don’t belong here because then I asked well why do I belong here. I’m forced to ask the question in a way that other sometimes may not be forced to ask, you know, they – because they’re never challenged quite that way.

And as a gay man in a loving relationship I’ve been challenged that way and I will not – this faith – the other thing I would say is I can’t help it. It’s not a choice for me being a Catholic.

LAMB: What about …

SULLIVAN: Just as not being a choice being gay.

LAMB: What about the other side of that, the conservative side of that? Are you welcomed at all in conservative circles?

SULLIVAN: Really not that much anymore. I don’t think I’m, you know, somehow black listed or anything and I have plenty of conservative friends and still have very civil relationships with – I mean just last week had very convivial chats with Pat Buchanan and David Brooks and various other conservatives, have friends in the White House.

But I do believe that the principles I believe in and have always believed in, and grew up believing in which is – which are limited government, low taxes but balanced budgets, controlling of spending and live and let live, and leave people alone. That whole idea of conservatism has been eclipsed in the last several years I think by a combination of forces. One, pure corruption, they got the money they want to give it to their constituents.

Power, it’s just power. It’s not unique to Republicans. The Democrats are as bad I think. Although, frankly, we’re getting to levels now where I mean the pork, for example, is beyond belief. But those are just the spending.

The number I always give to people is that when President Bush took office our unfunded liabilities like what the government had pledged to pay out in future that it didn’t have any way to pay for was $20 trillion dollars. That’s what we will landing the next generation with. And after four years it is $43 trillion.

Now if a Democrat had done that do you really think the Republicans would be taking it lying down? And yet they have been the ones spending this money.

And I also think the politicization of religion, using religion as a political tool, turning Christianity into a political ideology is terribly dangerous to both politics and to Christianity because Jesus was extremely adamant that His kingdom was not of this world. And the minute you become entangled in government power and you’re calling the shots you’ve lost it, it’s gone.

Evangelicals in this country – because one of the criticisms I’ve had of this was because you were attacking evangelicals, I’m really not. I mean those are people in this country I admire more, for example, than Billy Graham. And there are many evangelicals in America who are doing amazing work helping the sick, visiting prisoners, looking after children. But it is the politicization of that to say if you’re a Christian you must be a Republican, or the institutionalization of certain religious doctrines as part of the Republican platform, that deeply troubles me. Because I don’t think a political tradition should have a religious base, I think it should be based on secular political principles.

If religious people want to be part of that and their own religious and moral convictions lead them to that good, great. I don’t want to silence anybody. But when the actual platform is itself really about religious doctrine then I think we are in great danger.

LAMB: Let’s catch up for the audience that doesn’t know you well about the past, you grew up where?

SULLIVAN: I grew up in a small town in southern England called East Grinstead, strange little place, halfway between London and Brighton. And then I got a scholarship – I went to public high schools. My parents didn’t go to college but they gave me all I needed in terms of my values.

LAMB: What did they do?

SULLIVAN: My dad was an insurance – manager in an insurance company. My mom, unfortunately, had a history of illness and so she was unable to really work very much.

LAMB: Are they alive?

SULLIVAN: They’re both alive.

LAMB: How old are they?

SULLIVAN: They’re in their 70s. I hope they’ll forgive me for saying that and …

LAMB: Do you have brothers and sisters?

SULLIVAN: I have brother and a sister and just had a new nephew from my brother’s side. I have now five nieces and nephews. And they’re all still in England. I came over here on a scholarship to – first of all I got a scholarship to Oxford, then I got a full scholarship to Harvard Grad School where I studied political science and political philosophy. And then I lucked out and got an internship at the New Republic magazine in Washington. And because of the rash decision making of my boss I became editor when I was 27, did that for five years, quit, freelanced for awhile writing long pieces often for the New York Times magazine, and also constantly writing for the Sunday Times in London.

And in 2000 started a blog because I figured this was interesting. And now I think probably more people read me via my blogs than any other medium which is kind of strange.

LAMB: Where do you live?

SULLIVAN: I live in Washington, D.C. for nine months of the year and then when it becomes unbearable I go to – I have a little place in Provincetown where I go for a couple months in the summer.

LAMB: Do you – you do a little bit of this in the book but explain the world of specialty magazines. You talk about the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and of course, the New Republic, and the Nation and all that. For someone who hasn’t, you know, doesn’t know how they fit in, what do they stand for? What’s the New Republic today stand for and who owns it?

SULLIVAN: Well, that’s complicated actually because I think it’s ownership has been shifting a little bit. And it used to be owned entirely by one man, Marty Peretz, and now it’s I think shifting towards more people.

Basically, I think these magazine were founded not to make money because they certainly haven’t made money. They were founded in order to create, I think, a platform for really intelligent discussion of public affairs and politics and also the arts. The New Republic has a fantastic literary section which is edited by a separate person.

And for many decades they were the, you know, the nerve center. And certainly when I was editing the New Republic it was one of the key nerve centers of debate.

I think what’s happened in the last 10 years, as technology has altered everything, is that a lot of that debate has actually shifted online and – excuse me – and a lot of the kind of energy that used to be in the political magazines is now in the blogs and on the Internet. And many of those magazines have also tried to adapt by adding blogs and being part of that conversation.

I certainly think at this point the political conversation in Washington is being held primarily online, which is a very, very sharp distinction. I mean one of the things I say is that yesterday, for example, on my blog I had about a hundred thousand visits in a day. And when I was editing the New Republic we had a hundred thousand subscribers.

So I’m now reaching roughly speaking as many eyeballs on my own.

LAMB: How do you make your money?

SULLIVAN: Well, for five years I didn’t really and I actually begged the readers to send me donations to keep the thing going and maybe pay me a little bit of a salary. And it did keep it on the road and I never lost money. And I’ve very, very grateful for everybody who helped it.

But then I kind of did a deal, partly because it actually became quite a hassle to keep this whole thing going just mechanically because service would go down, you were constantly worried about technicalities. And Time.com came along and said we will rent your URL AndrewSullivan.com for a year and host you on our site and take care of all of that and pay you – pay you a stipend. And we won’t edit you.

Well, writers have been waiting a few centuries for an editor to say that to them. We’ll give you the – we’ll give you the, you know, the platform and we won’t shape your views and we’ll trust your judgment. And I must say to their enormous credit, they have – they have not tried in any way to affect the content of my blog.

LAMB: How do they get their money back?

SULLIVAN: They put advertising on it. And my blog brings in a huge bunch of new readers to their site and infuses new online energy into it. They get a lot of the blog readers are now reading Time.com and …

LAMB: How many other people like you exist in this blog world?

SULLIVAN: Well, in the general blog world millions I mean …

LAMB: But I’m talking about people that are making money from it like you that’s got a – that has a site that somebody wants to pay for?

SULLIVAN: Not many of us but it’s growing.

LAMB: Who are they?

SULLIVAN: Well, there’s groups of them. For example, there are independent blogs that have pooled the resources together and got an advertising company to try and finance them like Pajamas Media, or there’s another group of them who are more liberal who have got liberal advertising.

There are some advertising companies that just sort of package these blogs together and tried to sell them. And then there are a handful of us who have become sort of the mainstream media. We – this blogisphere on the MSM, as they call it, have I think touched …

LAMB: Who are some of the others?

SULLIVAN: I think of someone like Josh Marshall who writes his own on Talking Points Memo; my own magazine, Time, has someone like Mike Allen, the White House reporter now writing a blog; Ana Marie Cox now writes a blog for Time.com, she started out as an independent on Wonkette; the New York Times has its own blogs now.

LAMB: How about your old friend Mickey Kaus?

SULLIVAN: Oh, Mickey, of course, yes. He’s at Slate.com and was always blogging on an online magazine. So in some ways he always started – he started out independently and then went into an online magazine, an only-online magazine where as these other entities like Time has its own print magazine, too.

LAMB: Go back and put in perspective, though, the National Review today – I mean they still have readers and so does the Weekly Standard and so does The Nation. And there I’m leaving out some but where do they fit in the political spectrum?

SULLIVAN: Well, it’s all over the map at this point. But basically I would say The Nation is clearly part of the anti-Bush, anti-war left. The New Republic is a sort of – was a pro-war moderate Democrat kind of magazine, socially liberal, fiscally pretty moderate conservative, but – and foreign policy kind of hawkish in a way.

Then you have the Weekly Standard which is more of a – I would say – I mean I don’t want to put words in their mouths but basically I would say they are neo-conservatives fundamentally with support for the religious right and the war in Iraq, but have been actually very candid in criticizing the conduct of the war.

And National Review, whose magazine does very well but whose blog, The Corner, is one of the most read and vital conservative interactions on the Web.

LAMB: But from your standpoint, which one has the conservative point of view that you most embrace?

SULLIVAN: None. I’m sorry to say I find some voices at National Review congenial, I find a couple at the Weekly Standard congenial. But I don’t – I think they’re too beholden to the Bush administration to really call it like it is at this point which is they have I think fiscally betrayed conservatism. I think that in Iraq, even though I supported that war, I think the way they prepared for it, the lack of planning for the aftermath, and then the refusal to adjust to changing circumstances since 2003 is really inexcusable.

So I endorsed Kerry last time around, not because I supported many of Kerry’s positions but because I felt that the President had so bungled this war and revealed himself to be so incompetent that we had to – and fiscally irresponsible – that we had to ratchet it back and the only way to do that is to use the two-party system.

LAMB: Do you really think he’s incompetent? Is it – is he incompetent or is the whole team incompetent?

SULLIVAN: Well, we’re finding out more and more, aren’t we Brian, about – I think the team was obviously at war with one another, that much we are finding out. And …

LAMB: That hasn’t been unusual though over the years.

SULLIVAN: No, except when you are fighting a war of this magnitude to have fundamental decisions not resolved like how many troops we’re going to put in here, occupy; like how do we treat military captives; and to have this all done on the fly with various entities like the State Department, CIA and the Defense Department actually warring with one another in the process while this thing goes to hell, that – I mean not since Vietnam have we seen that kind of thing.

And that’s Bush’s responsibility. He’s supposed to ultimately as a manager make sure they were all on the same page and they have a strategy and they’re going in the right direction. And I think even those of us who were passionately in favor of the war have lost confidence in their ability to run it and see it to victory.

LAMB: Would it ever have been possible to really have a victory do you think?

SULLIVAN: Not by now probably. But I think it would be possible by now to know that we were headed in that direction …

LAMB: (INAUDIBLE)

SULLIVAN: … (INAUDIBLE) know we’re headed in the opposite direction.

LAMB: But for – look at the team, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Andy Card and others, and they’ve all had extensive experience in (INAUDIBLE).

SULLIVAN: I know, it’s astonishing. I mean one of the reasons we like – you know remember in 2000 we were prepared to gamble on Bush because these grownups were also in charge. Cheney and Rumsfeld, I mean these are people with immense government experience. Maybe that was the problem, they were all so good at bureaucratic infighting that when they turned on each other – and George Will made this point recently that the chaos was even worse and Bush was too weak, I think, I mean history will tell – to actually knock their heads together and say no. And the Powell/Rumsfeld fight, for example, I think crippled policy for the first term.

And now you have whole swaths of the CIA and the military in open revolt against Rumsfeld and Cheney, which is also a terrible thing to be happening in a war. That at some level has to be called incompetence. I mean you’re supposed to be running a tight ship.

I see the way Republicans run campaigns, they have everything nailed down, every detail fixed, every possible contingency prepared for and are able to respond on a dime to changing events. But a war, a war that we were told by this President was a war for our very survival and the survival of freedom in the West, and they did not have a plan for what to do once they got to Baghdad? I mean I don’t understand it. I really don’t understand it, Brian.

I don’t understand why they didn’t listen to the military, they didn’t sent in 500,000 troops. And if they didn’t have them wait until you get them. Let alone the intelligence failures that determined the rational for the war that led us into this impasse.

LAMB: What’s your reaction when you hear names like Dennis Hastert, Tom DeLay, Bill First, Mitch McConnell – I can go down the list farther – but the leaders in the House and the Senate, all of them conservative?

SULLIVAN: I don’t think they’re conservative in – if you judge by their actions. Conservatives would not have spent this amount of public money this irresponsibly. I mean let me give you a simple example. In 1985 Ronald Reagan, who was my inspiration along with Margaret Thatcher, as a conservative, he vetoed a transportation bill which had about 150 pork earmarks in it because he thought that was wasteful. President Bush signed one with over 3,000 and they were all put in there largely by Republicans and controlled by Republicans.

They have lost touch with their own principles and their own core beliefs. They have exploded the size of government in terms of the amount of money it’s spending. But they have also done something much more worrying which is extend its reach. I mean this debacle over the detainee bill and the rules of war has led us to situation where a president has the power without any check to name anybody anywhere in the world an enemy combatant and have them detained without charges indefinitely and not even have access to classic habeas corpus rights.

Now that to me, you know – conservatism was about fundamentally the freedom of the individual from government power. And what it has become is the ability of a president to pick anybody at will off the street, into a dark cell and even waterboard them. Now that’s what the American Revolution was designed to prevent.

When you read the Founding Fathers you realize they were most frightened by the king that used to be able to do this without a rule of law. And to me conservatism in the ’70s, which I – where I really was formed, was formed in opposition to the Soviet Union, was formed in opposition to big government, was based on individual rights and freedoms and civil liberties. And now it’s about bigger government, more invasive government, and an attack on people’s civil liberties.

Now that terrifies me. I don’t think it’s – I don’t think it’s a slight deviation from conservatism. I think it is a huge attack on it. And I’m not the only one. As you know, many – William Buckley, George Will, I mean these people are not liberals – Bruce Bartlett, Jeffrey Hart of National Review, this eminent conservative, are all saying the same thing.

LAMB: Well, so are the conservative fundamentalists.

SULLIVAN: Some of them are, yes, on the spending front. And they also disagree with some of the actual affects of the policies. But on clear policies the Bush administration is for the fundamentalist position.

I mean remember Terri Schiavo, I mean here was a really terrible and distressing human story, this awful accident, this woman and her husband – ex-husband at that point – in a coma, persistent vegetative state, for years and years and years. Now this is something that the family should deal with first, then maybe the state law should apply. There should be courts in the state. But no, the President of the United States got off vacation to go pass a law in the federal Congress for that. And the only reason was religious motivation. He wouldn’t break off his vacation to attend to a hurricane but he would for this.

And the idea also that the fundamental Republican position is not to say, as I would say, that I think abortion, for example, is very morally problematic and personally I could not be a party to any. I think it is the taking of human life.

But I also understand that other people sincerely disagree with that – morally disagree with that. And I also understand that a fetus in the very early stages of development it’s arguable – reasonable people can disagree about whether that’s really a human person or not up to a certain stage.

So in a society in which you have these disagreements fundamentally, I think the government should say let it be the choice of the woman and her doctor in the first trimester and then we can put restrictions on other things. Their position is that all abortions under any circumstances including rape and incest from the very moment a zygote exists with 48 chromosomes is murder.

I think that’s way too extreme. I think it’s – I think it’s – and yet not only that but the Republican Party itself supports amending the federal Constitution to make that a crime in all cases.

Now I’m sorry but that’s where I get off the bus, you know. I’m pro-life. I think of myself in terms of my personal beliefs but when it comes down to it I’m pro-choice in terms of that first trimester, which I think is a sensible compromise.

But these people – when you have a fundamentalist belief in your head – and I’m not saying these people are bad people at all. I think they’re sincere, and principled, and believe very clearly in what they are saying. And I treat their arguments in this book I hope very respectfully and seriously.

But their inability because of this conviction to compromise, or to live alongside people who disagree with them makes politics impossible. We – you know you can’t do that. We’ve got to live – we’ve got to get along with one another. This country does not only have born-again Christians, it has atheists, it has Jews, it has moderate Christians, it has liberal Christians, it has a variety of people and if we have to come to a consensus on political grounds not religious ones.

And fundamentalism – and I say this as someone who I think has experienced it myself in my own life, in my own faith journey – just can’t – if it’s God’s will, God’s will must be obeyed and we can have no compromise about that. When you’re in that situation and when God is brought on the table how do you – how do you negotiate, how do you talk? Once God is there you either believe it in or you don’t. You can’t have a discussion about it.

And that’s what’s happening in American I fear, that the one part, the Right, is becoming far too religiously based and the response on the Left has become much more secular and hostile to religion. And the conversation is becoming impossible and the poles are getting further apart. And elections are culture wars and the real problems we’re trying to address – abortion, how we – how gay people fit into society, how do we fight a war humanely and effectively – these are getting lost.

We’re spending, you know, days obsession about a Washington sex scandal because it’s about morals but we’re not talking about a failing strategy in Iraq. We’ve lost our bearings.

LAMB: Why?

SULLIVAN: I think fundamentally because religious faith when it becomes inseparable from politics fuels division because it makes compromise impossible. And I go back to in this book to the great architects of or civilization, our Western civilization, Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, the Founding Fathers, the people who set up constitutional government in the West.

Now they came out of a context which people forget often. Hobbs lived in the middle of a civil war in England which was fought in part over religion. The Founding Fathers knew what religious extremism was about, they had seen what happened in Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries where people were burned at the stake, where vast numbers of people were massacred in religious wars, where the fight to control between Catholicism and Protestantism had laid waste the families. And they said, stop, we can’t resolve this on earth. We have to let go of that. We are going to construct a government on the basis of limiting it’s power, of taking God out of government, separating church and state which is not an anti-religious move.

The paradox is the Americans who took God out of state have seen religion thrive for the next few hundred years. My homeland, England, which had an established religion, has seen Christianity die.

LAMB: How – give us an example how it’s died.

SULLIVAN: Well, if you look at church attendance in England it’s almost negligible. There are more Muslims going to mosques in England now than Anglicans go to the Church of England.

LAMB: Why did that happen?

SULLIVAN: I think partly because religion became too tied up in the establishment, became too much part of what you’re supposed to believe. It became integral to the monarchy, it became integral with the parliament. Remember, Catholics weren’t even allowed to be members of parliament in the last century.

As a Catholic growing up in England I felt this probably more powerfully than other people. But people don’t believe in God because of government, has nothing to do with government. You give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s and God what’s – to God what’s God’s.

And I think the Founding Fathers were absolutely right by making politics separate from religion. You not only make politics saner and calmer, and more moderate and more amenable, you actually allow religion its own zone, its own sphere to flourish and do what it does best, which is save souls not control lives.

See for me Christianity is not about controlling people. It’s not about telling people what to do. It’s about telling yourself what to do. It’s about what you – faith is what you believe when no one’s watching. And to me if God is God He is by definition beyond our total understanding, we’re humans, we’re limited. And if He is beyond our understanding then those people who claim to know everything about Him, not only what He is, and where He’s going, and what He means, but also the way you should cut your hair, the way you should – what clothes you should wear, what you eat, I mean all these minutia that fundamentals are obsessed with, they’re not real – they’ve mistook God.

They’re acting – the real blasphemy is that certainty. God is beyond that. And so it is hard enough for us to know what God wants us to do with our own lives let alone knowing what He wants us to do to other people’s lives.

So I’m interested – I’m interested in taking the beam out of my own eye before I start picking the motes out of other people’s eyes. And that’s I think what Jesus was saying. And when you have a political party that says we’re resting our politics and our laws on God then you’ve entered exactly the problem that Jesus criticized.

LAMB: You talk about many people in your book from the past and philosophers, but you go back and mention Michael Oakeshott on who you wrote your dissertation, Ph.D. dissertation, at what school?

SULLIVAN: At Harvard.

LAMB: At Harvard. Who was he, who is he, where is he? I mean …

SULLIVAN: He’s dead.

LAMB: … a lot – a lot of philosophers – I see him mentioned all the time but he doesn’t have as high a profile as some.

SULLIVAN: No, although he’s beginning to. I mean what’s fascinating is since his death there’s been this explosion in Oakeshott studies and – because he actually left behind a lot of unpublished work.

LAMB: Did you know him?

SULLIVAN: I met him once.

LAMB: When did he die?

SULLIVAN: I’m trying to think. I think he died in 1991 or ’92. And he was basically head of the London School of Economics for a long time, regarded as one of the most brilliant men of his time by liberals and conservatives, but was often dismissed as a conservative crank in the ’60s and ’70s when liberalism was ascendant.

And he – I wrote my dissertation on him. I was only third person to write on him and I actually wrote him a letter and said can I actually talk to you. And it’s really weird, you know, when you’ve actually spent days in a library reading everything this man has ever written and then you get to meet him.

I had the last chapter not written because I knew what I wanted to talk to him about which was religion actually. And I finally found him. He lived in a slate cottage on the edge of a cliff in Dorsett in England.

This is a man who turned down a knighthood from the queen, has no interest in worldly honors or fame. He was interested in thinking. He was a real philosopher.

And he took me inside and he made a fire and we sat down for one of the most wonderful afternoons of my life, and talked about God, and politics, and faith. And his work, undoubtedly, has profoundly affected me and I’ll tell you in so many different ways. But one of them, one fundamental one that he insisted upon was that – was that there was a distinction between what you know in theory and how the world works in practice. And that true wisdom lies in not trying to just simply apply your theoretical ideas, wham, onto a complicated, complex society. The first thing a conservative should do is listen to the empirical reality and then adjust depending upon what he hears, and that doubt is the central virtue.

I mean one reason conservatives, for example, support markets, free markets – give you something most people don’t dispute, most conservative support free market. Well why do they support free market? Well one answer will be because markets create lots of wealth.

But I don’t think that’s the conservative view really. I think we should support them regardless of whether they create wealth. Why, because what markets do is locate decision making, whether you want to buy this or sell this – to the people at the very bottom of the pile, the people who know what they’re talking about, the people who have something to risk and gain. And so, in fact, they – by devolving power to the local and the most minute level they’re wiser than some distant bureaucrat deciding the way the world should be.

And I think of that lesson I think of Iraq. And people walked in there with a blueprint and they were not aware enough and I wasn’t aware enough – and I made this error, too – and this book is an attempt to address my own mistakes as well. I’m not sitting here as some purist. I screwed up and made misjudgments and one of those misjudgments was in not listening hard enough to the empirical reality, having been too theoretical.

So Oakeshott criticized the Left in the ’50s and ’60s who thought they’d solved every problem: oh, we’re going to end poverty, we’re going to end war. And Oakeshott was like you’re kidding, you’re arrogant and you will come crumbling down.

The Soviet Union, he said, is an evil empire but it will fail because it has to fail because it’s a lie. And real human beings will operate eventually independent of this lie.

And what worries me is that what Oakeshott’s central argument was that you cannot run things – run human beings according to a book with instructions. We’re much more complicated than that. It was bad enough when the book was the Communist Manifesto, bad enough when it was, you know, Men of Kane’s (ph) Trevases (ph), bad enough when it was The Affluent Society by Galbraith, but when it’s the Koran or the Bible the mistakes and misjudgments can be even more cataclysmic.

And so what I’m trying to recover in this book is the conservatism of doubt, the conservatism that asks will it go wrong, what don’t we know, have we taken all contingencies, are we being prudent, are we being cautious enough, have we protected individual freedoms, because those are the things that lead to the best decisions. Have we empowered an executive government too much and will it, therefore, make to many mistakes?

This is the conservative tradition that comes from Burke who criticized the French Revolution for exactly these reasons …

LAMB: Edmund Burke.

SULLIVAN: Edmund Burke the British 18th Century Whig politician who was widely regarded as the philosophical father of conservatism.

All the way through, through (INAUDIBLE) and Oakeshott in the middle of the century, last century, and even to Buckley and the conservative thinkers of our current time, all of whom I think actually have expressed severe doubts about the policies that were currently being pursued.

So I wanted to get to the root of it, you see. I wanted to say you’ve got to replace absolute certainty with empirical doubt. And in fact, absolute certainty is not just not conservative it’s the nemesis of conservatism. And how that absolute certainty came in is through the power of religious fundamentalism politicized.

We have to not attack religion, not throw evangelicals out of the Republican Party at all, but to make sure that our arguments, even if they’re informed by our faith, are reasonable arguments that can appeal to all people whether they are atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims or Christians. That is what we’ve lost. That, I think, is the soul of conservatism, and that’s what I’m trying to re-describe and reaffirm because I am a believer in it. I’m a believer in doubt.

LAMB: When did you first vote in this country?

SULLIVAN: I can’t vote.

LAMB: But you said you voted for Kerry?

SULLIVAN: I said I endorsed Kerry.

LAMB: Oh, you endorsed Kerry.

SULLIVAN: It’s a terrible thing. I’m here on a recurring visa and unfortunately my HIV status bars me from becoming a citizen even though I qualify. So I am – that is the situation.

LAMB: Explain that.

SULLIVAN: It’s the law, unfortunately, and …

LAMB: You’re HI – what are you HIV positive?

SULLIVAN: Yes, and that bars you from becoming a citizen of the United States.

LAMB: Why?

SULLIVAN: Because they think it may spread disease within America if you allow people into the country with HIV even though I contracted it after living here eight years. But that’s the law and I wish I could become a citizen but under the current law I cannot I’m afraid.

LAMB: What does it mean to be HIV positive?

SULLIVAN: It means – it’s meant different things to be honest with you. I mean when I first found out it was an absolutely terrifying death sentence.

LAMB: How many years ago?

SULLIVAN: 13, over 13 years. It’s – I mean every night I take my bundle of pills so it’s there but it’s very different now. I mean obviously it – the –and I’ve written about this in the past, but the amazing miracle of medical technology that has revolutionized so many things, which was pioneered by a lot of the private sector as well. I mean pharmaceutical companies that are always being trashed and attacked, I owe them my life. So I always have a – I always say hold on a minute, yes, I’m sure there are problems with these companies and maybe they are making too many profits but they’ve also been an astonishing force for saving lives and improving the health of people.

LAMB: What’s it cost you a year?

SULLIVAN: Well, happily the New Republic insurance company has – I was covered by their insurance so it doesn’t – it costs my insurance company a lot more than it costs me.

LAMB: Any idea what it costs to stay healthy with HIV positive?

SULLIVAN: It varies a lot depending on the drugs you’re using because some of them are gone off patent and some of them are brand new. So there’s a spectrum. But it’s not cheap.

LAMB: Thousands and thousands of dollars.

SULLIVAN: In that range I would say depending if you’re on the latest cutting edge of new technology because you’re previous regime has failed then it may cost a lot more. But if you got a regular strain of the virus and you’ve got regular drugs a lot of those are coming down in price quite sharply. You know, this is how the process works. And in fact, some of the basic best medicines against HIV are actually not that expensive anymore.

LAMB: What does the doctor tell you about your future?

SULLIVAN: He tells me – well, first of all, I don’t – I don’t trust my doctors. I listen to them and then I double check the numbers and I do my own research. I mean one of the things you’ve got to – when you’re dealing with a serious illness you have to, I think you have to get your own up to speed. Doctors aren’t God. And I double check the numbers and I always researching new medications.

I have undetectable virus in my blood right now and have had for a long time, which means that they can’t find it. It’s there but it’s so effectively suppressed that it does not really affect my day-to-day living.

And the drugs have so improved. I mean in the mid ’90s when they were first trying the stuff out I would take 30 to 40 pills a day and they would, you know, render me almost incapable of functioning for at least two or three hours of that day. And I constantly felt nauseous and exhausted.

Now it’s like taking a small handful of M&Ms every night. I don’t have any side effects really to speak of and I carry on as normal. I will say this though, I’m not the same person. I mean anybody, and this doesn’t apply to just HIV, but anybody that’s actually really faced their own death and not only that but witnessed the death of the people that he loves all around him is a changed person.

You’re changed in terms of your relationship to God because there’s nothing like being told you’re going to die to come to grips with what do I believe, does God love me, will He save me, is He there. And there was a moment when I really, really despaired and I remember it very vividly and I remember somehow grace lifting me out of it and telling me I have things to do, God wants me to live a life that is rich and full, and there’s way too much work to do to despair and that ultimately behind the universe – and this is what I express in the book and which is why I get depressed when people say oh, you’re a secular liberal or whatever or they – because evangelicals think I’m – because I’m against the politicization of Christianity that I’m anti-Christian.

No, I actually think I was forced to really ask my self not whether God exists or not, because I actually find it hard, just impossible to think He doesn’t exist, but whether He’s good or evil. That to me is the big question.

When you look at the evil in the world, awful suffering – this Amish case for example, let alone what’s going on in Iraq, and when I saw bad things happening to really good people that was the question. And somehow I came to believe that God was good despite all this and that Jesus was the message and the messenger of that amazing, amazing truth. And that’s why I can’t leave my faith and I can’t leave my church and why at the same time I also understand that a lot of it is mysterious.

You know I can’t – I can’t tell you, it’s hard for me to explain where that feeling came from that God is good, where I felt that, how I felt God in those moments. I haven’t felt Him in those moments very often in my life. Words don’t explain it, which is why sometimes silence and reverence and ritual and the sacraments is the best way of expressing our love for God and God’s love for us because we’re not being arrogant enough to think we can put it into words.

Even the Scriptures, I think, have to be understood as fallible. They’re contradictory in many times. They must be taken in their own context and read critically, I think.

I wonder how many people realize that Thomas Jefferson, for example, went through the Gospels and he cut out of the book with a pair of 18th Century scissors those passages of Jesus’ words that he believed just by his own intuition were obviously what Jesus said and removed all the stuff he thought the Gospel writers were just putting in there for their own politics or agendas. And they used to hand that Bible to every member of Congress.

Now today the sort of fundamentalists would say oh, Jefferson is a cafeteria Christian. He just picks and chooses his faith, he’s not a real believer. This man founded the United States of America.

The majority of the Founding Fathers did not even believe Jesus was divine. That’s a different kind of Christianity. Now I don’t – I actually do believe Jesus was divine.

But I think we need to get more in touch with the humility and skepticism and wisdom of the Founding Fathers than some of the more hysterical religious zealots that currently have a real control of the Republican Party.

LAMB: One last HIV question, can you live a normal life for another 30-40 years?

SULLIVAN: Yes. But one thing I’ve learned is you don’t know what’s around the corner.

LAMB: But I mean you know people that have been on this medicine and …

SULLIVAN: No, we don’t know because I’m the cutting – I’m the first generation to have survived really. So it may be we’ll find out in 10 years that these drugs are actually going to kill me or have destroyed my liver. So far there’s no evidence of that. One thing I’ll …

LAMB: How old are you?

SULLIVAN: I’m 43. One think I’ve learned, Brian, is not to think like that, to realize that we have today alone. That’s what we – again, my grandmother, you know, her favorite hymn was ”Lord, for tomorrow and its needs I do not pray. Just keep me, love me, hold me, Lord, just for today.” And I learned that if you think you’ve got it all figured out, you’ve got your retirement planned, you’ve got your savings, you’re going to work for this long – you don’t know. Tomorrow your world could end and that is the beginning of wisdom.

And some who is HIV or anybody with cancer, or people who have had near death experiences, who have had terrible accidents, I mean this isn’t – this is a – they’re more in touch with what it is really to live as a human being than some of these people who have it all mapped out and all – know what’s going on and have their lives planned. And I’ve learned I don’t know. I really – when I sat down with you, you know, over 10 years ago to talk about ”Virtually Normal” and if you’d said you’ll be here with me in 10 years time about another book I would not have believed you.

LAMB: So you’d have had HIV for three years.

SULLIVAN: Yes, and the prognosis at the time was you’ve got 10 years.

LAMB: How old is your finance?

SULLIVAN: He’s 30.

LAMB: How does he deal with this?

SULLIVAN: He’s been great. He doesn’t have HIV and we make sure there’s no risk of him getting it. And I think he – for him it’s – you know, it’s one of the first things I told him because I always try and tell anybody. And for him and his generation I think it’s not such a big deal. They weren’t traumatized. He didn’t see these people dying. He didn’t see the absolute terror of HIV and AIDS at its height. He’s kind of lucky.

And so part of what he’ll never fully understand – sometimes when I’m with my older friends and we talk about the war we were in it’s like being a Vietnam vets, he doesn’t quite get it. But he’s completely – he loves someone for who they are not for what illnesses they have. And he’s a mentally supportive of it.

And I think, frankly, living in a – being in a committed relationship is also very healthy for people with HIV.

LAMB: The name of the book is ”The Conservative Soul, How We Lost It, How to Get It Back,” Andrew Sullivan, thank you very much.

SULLIVAN: Brian, it’s always a great pleasure. Thank you for having me.