Rick Warren on Religious Freedom - A Conversation

Rick Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, a non-denominational California megachurch, and is a leading evangelical author of the best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life (2002). Warren has staked out positions and supported programs that address a range of public policy issues, including poverty, education, and HIV/AIDS, both nationally and internationally. During the 2008 presidential election, he hosted candidates Senators Barack Obama and John McCain at a public forum at Saddleback Church; he subsequently gave the invocation at President Obama's inauguration in January 2009. Time and U.S. News & World Report have recognized Warren as one of the most influential Christian leaders in the United States.

Timothy Samuel Shah is Associate Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center For Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Government Department, Georgetown University. He is a political scientist specializing in the relationship between religion and political freedom in theory, history, and contemporary practice. Shah is author, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott, of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (W.W. Norton, 2011) and is editor of an Oxford University Press series on “Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South” that has so far generated three volumes. His articles on religion and global politics have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Democracy, the Review of Politics, and elsewhere.