Senator Chris Coons On Faith And Politics
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It's Live in the Bream with the host of Fox News Sunday, Shannon Bream. This week on Live in the Bream, I am so excited to have somebody that you probably see on our airwaves and have heard him all over the Senate floor and important moments in history. And he joins us today to talk about things that are a little bit more personal in nature and about faith. And we're so excited to have him. Senator Chris Coons, welcome to Live in the Bream.

Thank you, Shannon. It's great to be on with you. I'm so interested to get a chance to talk to you about things other than what we normally talk about. We love when you join us on Fox News Sunday and other Fox programs to talk about tough votes and nominations and judges and foreign policy. But behind all of that is the idea of faith. And you've been vocal about that, that your faith guides so much of what you do and how you live your life. Did it guide your initial decision to get into public service?

Well, I believe so. I believe it guided a number of my important choices in life. My wife, Annie, was a central part of deciding as young parents to

that I would leave my job in the private sector and run for a county office back home. And it was partly because she was so passionate about public service. My wife worked in county government for a decade while I was working for a manufacturing company. And I got asked to run and decided not to several times. And for a variety of reasons, we both thought that there was a

a crisis in our county government and someone needed to step up. I just did not think it was going to be me. And that's often how the life goes. I think whether, you know, God is opening or closing doors for us or showing us this is the moment I need you to step into this particular thing. But as you started out then, did you ever think you would end up

Doing all of these different positions of service that you've done and now in the U.S. Senate and being such a strong voice on everything from foreign policy to, you know, the rule of law and all of these other things. Did you have an inkling in those early years that this is where you would end up?

No, I mean, look, I think for a young person to say, I'm going to be a senator someday is like a high school football player saying, I'm going to play in the NFL. I mean, the odds are incredibly small that anyone who's engaged or elected in local office will end up there. There's only 100 U.S. senators. And so I'm clear that there's got to be some luck or some providence in the path that brings you here. My first couple of years, I was...

more often called the accidental senator than anything else because my 2010 election was, let's just say generously, was considered unlikely. But, you know, there were certainly some hints throughout my life. I had a second grade teacher whose nickname for me was Senator. Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

I my wife and I brought our kids here at her suggestion to to watch a debate on the Senate floor when my boys were just eight. And after sitting in the gallery for a few minutes, we went out and my son, Jack, looked at me and said, Dad, someday that'll be you.

And I sat him down and I said, no, honey, it won't. That's never gonna happen. That's not the way these things work. And he just looked at me with those big eyes of his and said, dad, you gotta believe. But I also, and I don't know if he'd like me sharing this, but I remember one moment when we were praying together at night when I was first running county wide for county executive. And my son was praying, you know,

God, please let daddy win this election. And I said, or that your will be done and that what you choose happens and that dad be able to accept whatever your judgment and outcome is. And then my son goes, or that dad would win. Yeah.

Out of the mouths of babes. I love that he had such faith and excitement. And sometimes people say we don't boldly enough pray about things that we need or that we want or that we hope for. And God has concern for every area of our life that we have a concern about. But I love the faith of a child to say like, "Or let's get this done."

You know, you have written about and talked about, do you think Democrats should be out there talking more about faith? You know, there's been an interesting conversation the last few years about Republicans and how faith and politics and churches have mixed together and whether that's a good thing or not and whether they kind of have owned the conversation with a lot of people of faith when it comes to cultural issues, those kinds of things. How do

think Democrats enter this conversation more publicly? So first, a lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable with public religiosity, with talking in public and being publicly religious. And a number of my Democratic colleagues in particular have

said to me that they don't want to be seen as being sort of performative. And I have wrestled with that and I work through it. I try to make it clear when I'm at home in Delaware and speaking at events and doing events that I feel a special obligation to make sure that the way I'm conducting myself

As an elected official who represents a million people of a wide range of backgrounds, that I am thoughtful about the concerns of those who are not from a religious background or who happen to be, you know, Muslim or Jewish or from the very broad Christian family background.

and to respect their traditions and their holidays and their values. But I think it's a mistake to hide the fact that most of the Democrats I serve with were moved to get into public service by their childhood experiences in a faith community. A number of my colleagues, as I have started a Lenten reflection series, have come up to me and said, boy, I'd love to join you in that. And you would be surprised, people who...

do not ever publicly talk about their faith, shared with me that they'd been raised listening to Billy Graham or they'd been raised in an evangelical church. For many Democrats, the thing that moves them is the thing that was really at the heart of Christ's first sermon in his home synagogue in Nazareth, which was,

to bring good news to the oppressed, to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to help the widow and the orphan, the foreigner in our midst, and to do justice in a way that addresses inequality and helps lift up those at the margins of our society. And as I spent time reflecting on my own childhood and what brought me into service, my church youth group played a huge part

My Boy Scout troop did, but frankly, the example of my parents is,

My dad was a Republican suburban businessman, ran a small manufacturing company, but he volunteered in a prison ministry and took real risks to make sure that he was being faithful in his journey with a guy who was sentenced to life in prison, who I got to meet many times. My dad took me with him when I was probably 12 or 13 to the state prison several times.

And it had a huge impact on me. And he later in life jokingly said, well, I wish you'd paid attention to what I was doing Monday to Friday every bit as much as what I was doing on Sunday. And my mom, with some of the other women in our church, volunteered regularly at church.

a place that in downtown Wilmington provides meals and hospitality and comfort for homeless people. And with a small group of women in our church was very active in welcoming a refugee family from South Vietnam. The head of the family had fought for the South Vietnamese military alongside our troops and was in a reeducation camp after the fall of South Vietnam.

ultimately escaped, walked all the way to Thailand where he met up with his family in a refugee camp. And they were resettled in Wilmington, Delaware. And the courage and the determination of that family, and then the support that this group and our church provided, helping them find an apartment and get a car and learn English,

And neither of my parents ever really sat me down and said, this is what faith is about. They just did it. They were just sort of quietly, persistently engaged in service to others. And they would say, if they had the chance, that this was just them showing that they understood faith.

the call of our faith to define as neighbor, not just our literal physical neighbors, not just those who may look like us or speak like us or act like us, but as broad a range as possible. And that Christ calls us to see as neighbor people outside our community. And if you read the gospels,

Over and over and over, Jesus spends time with people who were not popular, who were tax collectors or prostitutes, who were foreigners. It's often lost today, but Samaritans were probably the most despised ethnic group amongst the ancient Hebrew people. And so for Christ to give this parable, where the hero of the parable is,

isn't a Pharisee, isn't a religious Jew, but is a Samaritan in his time and his context was shocking. And so my best guess is that what my parents were trying to show me and not just talk about, but to do was to go spend time with people who are homeless and to spend time with people who were in prison and spend time with people who were strangers in our land, refugees,

and in a quiet way to demonstrate their faith. And so I, to your question, Shannon, have not often spoken about this in my first decade in public service, but in recent years, I have pushed myself to be more comfortable with it. We'll have more Live in the Bream in a moment.

Start preparing for your future at Liberty University and join thousands of LU alumni like Shannon Bream. From a flexible K-12 online academy to doctoral level programs, Liberty University has a range of educational opportunities to match your needs. If you're looking for an accredited K-12 school, Liberty University Online Academy provides a flexible,

biblically-based curriculum. For a college degree at the undergraduate or graduate level, choose from Liberty University's 700-plus programs online and on campus with scholarships and financial assistance available. Whether you choose to study residentially on Liberty's beautiful Lynchburg, Virginia campus, or

That's liberty.edu forward slash Shannon.

Check out Liberty University today. Yeah, it's such a beautiful legacy from your parents. And I feel blessed that I had a very similar situation where there was always somebody at the dinner table or had moved in with us or something else happening.

That my parents had collected along the way that needed some love and some help and a place to stay and a meal to eat. And so what a blessing to have families that model that for you and kind of just it becomes ingrained in your own life, in your heart, in your mind. I'm told that one of your favorite verses is Micah 6, 8.

He has shown you what is good and what does the Lord require of you to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. It just so happens my pastor has been doing a series on Micah,

And just spent the whole last sermon talking about that verse and what it really means in practical ways to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God, to be meeting out justice and help and mercy to all people, regardless of, as you pointed out,

where they came from, what their status is. And as you talked with Jesus, I mean, he was all about breaking down the status barriers. It was the most affluent and most religious that usually were on the receiving end of some of his wise correction. But he did go to people who were, and I love the story of the Samaritan woman, because what an outcast she was, even within her own Samaritan community, right?

And for him to say to her, you know, like, I don't condemn you. I'm here to redeem you is such a beautiful, beautiful story. So that along with this verse in Micah, it makes me think that I've interviewed a lot of your colleagues, both sides of the aisle. They talk about, as you mentioned, your Lenten reflections about doing Bible studies together across the aisle or having conversations about faith, different faiths and meeting together. So,

I tend to view people, I try to give the best possible assumptions about people. I see everybody made in the image of God. And I do think that your colleagues on both sides of the aisle are trying to get to what Micah is about, to act justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly. So why do you think it is? And is there a way to bridge this? And I'm sure at times you have, but

that even though you may agree on those principles, the solutions or the political solutions or the votes that you take may be very different. Exactly. James Langford has become a dear friend of mine through our weekly prayer breakfast.

James and I, we sometimes laugh about this. We discovered that we have in common, we're both redheads, although it's harder to tell with me. We'll take your word for it. And we both have fathers who were married four times and we both had the experience of being literally redheaded stepchildren.

That is actually really good. And his wife, Cheryl, and my wife, Annie, have gotten to be close. And he's come to Delaware at my invitation to preach at our annual leadership prayer breakfast in Delaware. And he invited me to Tulsa for a recognition of the centennial of the race massacre that happened there. And we've done a lot of other things together. We co-chaired the prayer breakfast one year.

And James and I have been challenged to lead the ethics committee here in the Senate. I was the chair, he was ranking in the last Congress, he's chair and I'm ranking now. And

It pushes us to be nonpartisan in how we do justice here in this chamber. And that's not always easy because it's a committee that doesn't publicly release details of what we do, but we handle some of the most difficult and sensitive issues. And it is a committee that can only function in a bipartisan way.

We do sometimes laugh about the fact that almost every Monday we walk onto the floor and I'll vote one way and he'll vote the opposite way. And then we'll talk about our families. I do think it's important to remember that the gospel is not a religious document. It is neither Republican nor Democrat. It does not say, you know, thou shalt prioritize tax cuts over feeding the hungry. It does not say, you know, thou shalt put at the top of your list

this concern or that concern.

Communities of faith have had for centuries to try and discern which are the most important of the calls to us from Scripture, both Old Testament and New Testament. And I choose to, or I believe that I am correctly prioritizing a focus on economic justice. There's 2,000 references directly in Scripture to the poor and to the widow and the orphan and the refugee population.

And it is what Christ focused on in reading a passage from Isaiah 61 in his first sermon. But there are others, and James is one of them, who really prioritize other central areas and who think that the protection of life and the protection of life from conception is the most important expression of his faith. And we've talked about that difference. At the end of the day,

there is a critical leap in judgment that we both are making, but in different directions. And it's the question of when is it justified to use the power of government to implement our priorities or our understanding of our priorities?

He would like to use the power of government to ensure that life as he understands it is protected from conception to natural death. I would like to use the power of government as I understand it, to ensure that a very small percent, less than 1% of our budget is being used to feed the poor and the hungry, to help advance access to clean water and public health here at home and around the world.

And unfortunately, there isn't a party that champions both of those at the same time. And there are there are issues that I think have been used to divide us when, in fact, an awful lot of what we want to do together crosses that. And so some of my colleagues I have worked the best with.

We spend a lot of time working on what we can agree on, not on the few issues that we deeply disagree on. My friend Johnny Isaacson, who served here for many years, a conservative Republican from Georgia, was fond of saying life is about friends and future friends.

In his view, there were no enemies, only people who you hadn't yet won over to be your friend. And I try to embrace that third part of Micah 6a to walk humbly by recognizing that I may be wrong about my judgments about others.

what the gospel calls us to. And I regularly pray for discernment, for God to correct me if I'm wrong in how I'm prioritizing things, and to keep my ears open to what my constituents call on me to do and do differently, and to recognize that none of us is perfect in our judgment because none of us are perfect.

And so if we begin by embracing forgiveness, the forgiveness that we've received, and then as we pray in the Lord's Prayer to extend that forgiveness to others, that we're then on our way towards better discerning what mercy and justice may mean. And Shannon, as you pointed out, we have different understandings of what it means to do justice.

Well, and I love the emphasis on walking humbly and being open to the idea that any one of us may be wrong about our interpretations or our ideas. And I mean, God promises if we ask for wisdom, if we ask for discernment, He will give it to us. And so I can't think of a better posture for any of us to be in than to be in that place of receiving. Before we go, I want to ask you, faith and practicality, whether it's personal,

whether it's professional, when you're in a difficult time, how does faith comfort or guide you?

So it is important and helpful for me to be reminded that our human lives are lived over a long time, a number of decades, hopefully, but that it is just a blink of the eye in God's time. I'm going this weekend with my wife and with a bipartisan group of members of Congress to Alabama for the Faith and Politics Pilgrimage that I went on a number of times with John Lewis and many others.

And it's helpful to me to be reminded in Martin Luther King's church or in the place in Selma where John led that famous March 60 years ago this weekend, and where leaders from the Catholic community, the Jewish community, Protestant community, people from all over America came to join him in that March, that there was no reason for him to believe

at the time as they were being beaten and bloodied, that things would turn around and that things would get better. I'm 61, that Selma March happened just a year before I was born. And today things are very different. We've made, in my view, a lot of progress.

in this country, but there's a lot to be concerned about. And our division, in my view, is our single biggest risk as a country, the ways in which we struggle to respect each other and to hear each other. I have a particular view about what justice means. And part of what got me into public service was the struggle for racial justice in Delaware, a sharply segregated state when I was growing up.

And so I find hope and I find courage in looking at things, not from the brief human perspective that dominates our days, but from the longer perspective that inspired John Lewis and that has inspired many who have a sense of change is going to come someday. But for today, we just have to keep marching forward.

Well, we really appreciate you stopping in on Live in the Bream to talk about things that matter in the eternal. And we know a lot of that translates into the work that we all do in the lives that we live here. But just always so interesting to hear that.

what faith means to individuals and how it impacts the way that they live out, see the world and tackle the work in front of them. So Senator Chris Coons, great to see you. We'll see you again, I think, I hope, on Fox News Sunday. I hope so, too. Thanks, Shannon. Listen ad-free with the Fox News Podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

I'm Dana Perino. This week on Perino on Politics, I'm joined by former GOP strategist and host of The Rich Zioli Show, Rich Zioli. Available now on FoxNewsPodcast.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Must listen to podcasts from Fox News Audio.