This week we bring you a conversation between Eric Cohen, president and CEO of Tikvah, and the former vice-president of the United States, Mike Pence. The conversation was recorded before a live audience at the Fund for American Studies, and we are grateful to our friends at TFAS for the invitation and for the work they do: forming young leaders in the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and honorable leadership, and sending them out to advance the cause of a free society in their communities and around the world.
The conversation opens where so much American reflection on these questions begins, with George Washington’s letters to the Jews of Newport and Savannah—the promise of religious liberty on the one hand, and the vision of America as a providential, almost-chosen nation on the other. Those two ideas do not sit together easily, and Cohen and the vice-president think together about what they mean and how they relate: the biblical sources of the founding, the place of Scripture in American education, the case for school choice and the renewal of the universities, and the meaning of federalism in the conservative project.
At the heart of this conversation is a fascinating discussion about American expressions of Christianity. Cohen, speaking as a religious Jew, believes that the strengthening of American Christianity is the surest hope for American renewal, and he also warns that a strain of anti-Semitism now gathering strength on the political right would turn that Christianity to perverse ends. To these comments Vice-President Pence adds his reflections about religious culture, and together, Cohen and Pence arrive at a description of a Hebraic Christianity and a Hebraic America—a country that understands the Hebrew Bible not as an atavistic relic, but as the foundation it has in fact always been.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jessica and PJ Heyer. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.