Thank you for a most generous introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be with you and discuss vital issues with colleagues from around the world .To be part of such a distinguished conference is indeed an honor.

Who could have predicted that the twenty-first century would find religion one of the world’s most hotly contested issues? Mention religion and public policy in the same breath these days, and what will most likely spring to mind are specific controversies over abortion, school prayer, the death penalty and stem cell research. All are issues of public choice that arouse the religious conscience of many. They are also particular instances of a larger reality: the profound and unavoidable interaction between religious faith and government action and its reporting by media.

For most of American history, the subject of religion and public policy did not need much discussion. There was a widespread belief that a direct relationship existed between religious commitments and government’s public-policy choices. It was a given that the United States was a Christian nation. Those days are long past.

During much of the last century the dominant influences in American national culture—universities, media, literary elites and the entertainment industry—adopted secularization as their yardstick and mantra. Religion came to be regarded as a strictly private matter. Secularization held sway for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. This trend, however, changed in the last quarter. Religion re-engaged with political history and escaped the private ghetto to which it had been consigned. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, the role of the Catholic Church in communist Eastern Europe, and the growth of the religious Right in the United States are cogent examples.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, illustrated that modernization has not relegated religion to an isolated sphere of private belief. On the contrary, religious convictions can be churned up to justify terror as a weapon, as they can be utilized to comfort a nation and inspire beautiful acts of compassion and sacrifice.

Our ability to understand the wider ramifications of the present is impeded by the collapse of almost all established values while an ethos of consumerism masquerades as a substitute for ethical standards. While our material expectations are spiraling, our societal criteria of moral discernment have become increasingly vague.

Dominated by the rise of totalitarian movements, politics of the past hundred years can best be described as organized insanity that produced unparalleled bloodshed and horror. The failure of the totalitarian experiments coincided with the political awakening of mankind on a truly global scale. This may mean that the liberal democratic framework, now associated with the American and French Revolutions, is potentially applicable on a worldwide basis. However international terrorism and other disruptive forces undermine and inhibit global consensus and increase the dangers inherent in a deepening global cleavage.

The United States stands as the only truly global power. But it does so in a setting in which traditional international politics are being transformed into global politics. That is why there is great need for a wider, globally shared understanding of the purpose of political existence—that is, the condition of human interdependence. Media needs to urgently educate its practitioners to different belief systems and study how these beliefs shape and mould core values. Without such study any attempt to inform and educate on a global scale would be futile.

If traditional religion is absent from the public arena, humanity will evoke secular religions to satisfy its quest for meaning. Throughout the past century a succession of anti-democratic and anti-theist political ideologies exploited people’s yearning for meaning and social idealism. A godless faith in humanity as the creator of its own grandeur lay at the heart of communism, fascism and Maoism. Thinkers like C.S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Buber, to name a few, warned that humanity’s self-deification and attempts to build its own version of the New Jerusalem on earth would come to naught.

Religion in the public square stirs up deep and troublesome issues, yet it seems far healthier that our modern, policy-minded democracy should endure the disturbance rather than dismiss it, for the majority of us are theists. As sociologist Peter Berger so aptly notes, inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent are the most religious society in the world, while those in Sweden the most secularized. He then provocatively suggests that America could be thought of as an Indian society ruled by Swedish elites.

We are in a period that could be called a new world disorder. Conflict seems to be the order of the day. The task of media in its role as teacher calls for a commitment to the study of religion as a means to understanding more fully a changing world in its multiple facets and hues.

In a city brimming with think tanks that spew out fixed partisan viewpoints, the World Media Association deserves our admiration and support for providing a common ground where pressing issues of our times can be viewed through more than one prism and answers found through debate and reflection. I thank you.