Tony Blair: Faith-Based Politics.(International Edition)(Interview)

Tony Blair, Britain's -longest-serving Labour prime minister, left office in 2007 as a relatively young man of 54. He's kept busy: making speeches (at roughly $150,000 a pop); serving as Middle East envoy for the Quartet of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia; and setting up several charities, including the Faith Foundation. At his office in London, Blair spoke to NEWSWEEK's Stryker McGuire. Excerpts:

You've said religious faith will be at least as significant in the 21st century as political ideology was in the 20th. why is that?

Left-versus-right issues still -matter--you can see that in the economic crisis--but they matter less today than the issue of what I would call open versus closed. There are two competing dimensions in most faiths. One is exclusionary: "my faith as opposed to yours." The other, which is inclusionary, sees faith as reaching out to others. Religion motivates and galvanizes very large numbers of people. Indeed the theory that religious faith would die out in a process of "enlightenment" has turned out to be a completely false prophecy.

There's so much evidence that religious beliefs have been a force for evil in the world. How do you persuade people to put faith in faith?

Many people do see faith as a source of division and conflict. There is another side that the world of faith isn't often good enough at putting forward--which is about compassion, solidarity, social justice.

How do you think president Barack Obama is doing as a leader and healer on theworld scene?

He's created a situation [where] there is a possibility of a completely different form of engagement with the world of Islam and with the outside world. The single most important thing for him is that his decision to reach out is answered by the rest of the world by a decision to reach back. As I keep saying to people, he doesn't want cheerleaders; he wants partners. You know, he doesn't want people to tell him how great he is; he's ...