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Jon Meacham, author and Trinity vestryman, was the guest preacher and speaker for the kickoff of Trinity's 2011 stewardship campaign on October 24. Here, he shares his thoughts on stewardship, what he sees in the year ahead of us for the country, and how he navigates being a public figure and a person of faith.

Stewardship is a hard word for the Church and for Christians. What does stewardship mean to you?

It means acknowledging the very practical debt that, speaking quite personally, I have to institutions that have meant and mean a great deal to me. Many, many people in the past have made it possible for me to go to the schools I've gone to, and for you and me to attend the churches we have. It doesn't happen in a vacuum.

I don't like the word stewardship in ecclesiastical context. To be a steward means that you care for something owned by someone else. To take care of a parish, to take care of a school, to take care of a charity, isn't taking care of someone else's, it's taking care of our own things. I think we all know in our own lives, that when we give something, we feel more deeply committed to it, and so there's a selfish reason.

In American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, you wrote, “The great good news about America – the American Gospel, if you will – is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it.” Where do you think the life of our nation is headed, in the next year, in relation to this American Gospel?

I think that we're in a good place, actually. In the middle of the first decade of the century, we were not in as good a place. In the days of Terry Schiavo and Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, we were tending toward a kind of corrosive extremism that was making religion more of a divisive factor than a unifying one. That has been ameliorated in the past couple of years.

I think you have to believe in ongoing revelation and the capacity of people to apply what they say they mean to what they do and say politically. And I think that on both sides, the harsh secular side and the harsh religion right side, my sense is that the influence of both has waned. It hasn't gone away, but it's waned.

In many cases, the most extreme religious expressions in the public square in American politics are, in a way, almost redundant. Anyone who is going to oppose a certain president or a certain party on religious grounds, was probably not a swing voter. The fact that it happens to take religious expression is interesting but incidental. I think there's more of that, than of people genuinely finding religiously inspired reasons to oppose or to campaign for something that creates an unnecessary amount of division.

The whole point of the republic is to argue about things. So the question is, how do we do that? My sense is that religion is a subject of tension and of contradiction, but it's not playing an outsize role – for now.

You've spoken and written before about your three children. What do you most hope for in the world that they're going to be adults in?

I hope that the best parts of the country and the democratic experience are preserved and perpetuated. I hope there's more social mobility. I hope they know people who are not like them. I think that President Obama's election is hugely important in that – they will never grow up in a world without having had a black president. Senator Clinton and Governor Palin and the other remarkably successful female politicians have created an iconography of diversity that I think is important. So I hope that continues.

But mostly they just need to be happy.

What's the most positive thing that has happened in the past year, that you've seen?

Two things that didn't happen: there was not a domestic terror attack and we did not reach 1933 levels of economic distress. One of the reasons the incumbent party in power is having a hard time right now is that you do not get credit for what did not happen. It's one of the most centrally-frustrating elements, on a human level, for people in power.

Congratulations on your new job as executive editor at Random House. This is a new role for you, after being editor of Newsweek. What are you most looking forward to?

I'm looking forward to doing the kind of books that I love. I'm solely a product of books. There was never a moment in my decade and a half at Newsweek where I didn't, at some point in a given week, draw on something in my head that I'd read. Whenever journalism audiences say, what's the way to get to the top? How do you get a great job? I just say: read. And then read some more. And then read some more. Because if you don't do that on the front end, it's very had to replenish the intellectual capital as you go forward.

The question is how do you create something that is at once of enduring value and of relevance to what's happening right now? It's not unlike sermons.

Do you have a favorite book?

I guess it's Pride and Prejudice, but that wounds me to say because I love Trollope so much. But Trollope has to be read in chunks of six. Pride and Prejudice is probably the most intelligent novel – it's a great political novel and a great domestic novel.

Is it hard to be a person of faith and a public figure?

I've never found it hard. I think it's important because it's honest. I think people deserve to know from whence one is coming.

I think it is very frustrating to both extremes, frankly. It's flummoxing to conservative believers and it makes the hard secularists uncomfortable. If I write something, I hear from both sides. But you never hear from moderates – that's the problem with moderates.

The way I talk about these things is right for me. The main cause is just to have a historically-minded, informed debate about things that so quickly descend into caricature.

I don't believe all the polls on this, but I'd say we're 75% a nation full of people with nominal connections to Christianity. I think having someone associated with that tradition who talks about the traditions of religious liberty associated with that faith – it's not going to do any harm and it might do a little bit of good. And that's not a bad definition of anything.

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