I grew up in an upper middle-class Catholic home.  I was not a particularly appealing boy; I was selfish, and dishonest when I had to be.  As a youngster, I was all about baseball, but I was better at music.  I was given the gift of musical ability, which, like sports, usually manifests itself in a public way.  Religion was a thing that you had to do, God was a man to be feared because He could see what you were doing even when you were alone, and Jesus, well, He seemed nicer, and besides, I always felt sorry for Him because of the terrible Thing that happened to Him.  I remember on Good Fridays (besides wondering why they called it "Good") trying to notice if it would actually get darker around the time that Jesus was supposed to have been crucified (and it always seemed like it did). Catholic Mass was always about screaming babies, old people who coughed a lot, priests who gave boring talks that echoed through the cavernous church, and endless standing, kneeling, and sitting.  Time slowed to a crawl during that hour on Sunday mornings that we were in church.
          I went to Catechism once a week, which is the closest thing a Catholic might get to Bible study, but we didn't study the Bible.  I don't really remember what we did, but it no doubt had something to do with being Catholic.  I do remember very well a time when I questioned my Catechism teacher about Africans in the jungle who may have never heard about Jesus.  The teacher had claimed that no one would get to Heaven who didn't claim Jesus as their Savior, whether they had heard of Him or not, and everybody else was going to Hell.  This didn't make sense to me.  How could someone who never heard of Jesus be condemned to Hell just because they happened to be born in a particular place? This teacher, who was a neighbor and friend of my parents, got angry with me and said that this was just the way it was, and some bushman in Africa or nomad in Mongolia would just have to find a way to hear about Jesus or else they would be eternally condemned.  I think I was ten or eleven years old at the time, and that marked my first serious break with Organized Religion.  I honestly think that my view on Jesus or God hasn't changed much since then–I still don't believe that the God of my understanding would condemn whole swaths of people to the Lake of Fire because they happened to be born in a place where they hadn't heard of or been taught about Jesus.
          My childhood was on balance a secular one.  The closest thing to religious music that we ever had in the house, outside of Christmastime, was The Singing Nun singing "Dominique."  I went to public schools in Morristown, New Jersey through the ninth grade.  Though being a Catholic was definitely a part of my life, and if asked I would have called my family "religious," the church that we attended did nothing that I can remember to promote a faith community.  In my experience, it is this, more than the doctrinal issues, that remains one of the main difference in the two faith traditions, Catholic and Protestant, that I have been a part of.  Overall, evangelical Protestant churches in general do a much better job at creating communities.  There's something going on every night of the week at these churches, and often multiple things.  Nonetheless, my parents were not just nominal Catholics; they were true believers, and they tried to make sure that God was a part of our lives. I remember both of my parents loved Billy Graham, and would watch him every time he was on TV.  I could never figure out what religion he was.  
          If you were a child in the Sixties, and a teenager in the Seventies, it would have been hard not to be aware of or influenced by the political and cultural upheaval that bordered on revolution in America.  Our household was not particularly political; my father did not become overtly conservative until he retired.  He was too busy working to spend much time thinking about politics.  I do remember the Goldwater bumper sticker on our 1964 Chevy, though.  My dad took me to see a President Nixon drive-by in 1968; he was standing up in the open limo giving that twin 'V' salute and grinning broadly.  I don't remember feeling anything special about that; I was much more impressed with meeting Whitey Ford in an elevator at a baseball banquet.  I was in my parent's bedroom saying goodnight to them when we saw Robert Kennedy get shot.  We all sat there in gloomy silence.  It was just before my tenth birthday.  
          I couldn't see much difference between Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.  Accents aside, they seemed like the same kind of person–remote, and not real.  Robert Kennedy, though, seemed different, and coming on top of Martin Luther King's assassination and the riots that followed, I knew, even at the age of almost ten, that we in America had lost something that we probably weren't going to get back. I clearly remember the imagery in my brain: one minute you had John Kennedy–young, handsome, and eloquent; the next minute it was Lyndon Johnson-- old, homely and awfully Texan. One minute you had Robert Kennedy–young, handsome, and articulate; the next minute you had Richard Nixon–older, homely, and hard to believe.  I remember seeing the brave speech Robert Kennedy gave to a black community in Indianapolis the night Martin Luther King was killed; it was an extraordinary moment I will never forget.  He had been scheduled on that evening to give a talk before a group of black supporters in a poor section of Indianapolis.  To many in black America in 1968, Robert Kennedy was the Great White Hope.  Given the tragic circumstances, and the raw racial emotions that Martin Luther King's assassination was surely going to bring up, Kennedy's 'handlers' tried to convince him to cancel the appearance. Instead, he gave the speech of his life, and it was largely improvised.  First of all, he told the crowd that King had been shot and killed–most of the people gathered there had not heard of it yet. And then he said this:

"Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of it. In this day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black–considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible–you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization–black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I ask you to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our country, which all of us love–a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
The vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people." 

          That speech, especially given the extraordinary circumstances, has to rank as one of the best ever given by a politician.  I still get a lump in my throat reading it, all the more for knowing that in almost exactly two months from that night, he too would be dead at the hands of an assassin.  
          I believe it was that speech more than any other event that led me to the place I am today politically.  I didn't know much about Robert Kennedy; only what a nine year-old boy would pick up in magazines or on TV.  But in the same way that someone can be forever changed by seeing a brilliant musical or dance performance, or an inspired sermon, or seeing the green grass in Yankee Stadium for the first time, this beautiful eloquence coming from a politician made a big impression on me and stayed with me as I grew up.  No politician since has touched me in the same way.  Indeed, only the filmed sermons of Martin Luther King have ever matched that moment for me in emotional eloquence.
          In the same way that a having a great history teacher in college informed my love of history, a few years later when we lived in Dallas, Texas, there was a Catholic priest whose gentle sermons focusing on Jesus's love gave me a perspective on my Savior that I carry with me to this day.  I would actually look forward to going to church if Father Fisher were saying mass.  This is no small thing; at a time in my teens when many of my friends were dropping out of religion, I had stuck my foot back in.  The love of almost anything can be obtained through a loving and inspired teacher.  The love of Jesus and Jesus's love for us, in particular, has been made more complicated by organized religion than it ever needed to be.  I feel that the legalism that Jesus fought so hard to abolish in His lifetime has, slowly but surely, come back to dominate many Christian denominations in direct proportion to the amount of time they don't spend talking about Jesus.  Father Fisher made it simple; in almost every sermon there was a direct link to the principles of Jesus and the love that surpasses all others.  His Jesus was all about the goodness that would come into your heart and your soul and your mind if you simply called on His name, rather than all of the evil that would happen to you if you didn't believe all of the peripheral doctrine.  For Father Fisher, doctrine boiled down to The Great Commandment.  Some would call this a version of the Church of Love, as opposed to the Church of Law.  I have always been partial to the Church of Love, and I have Father Fisher to thank for that.
          My development as a musician and songwriter was way ahead of my development as a positive human being when I headed out to Northern California with a group in 1976 to 'make it big'.  For the next eleven years, all I did was use up brain cells and take up space, while coasting ever so slowly downhill with the gifts that God had given me.  I pretty much abandoned organized religion during this time, although I never stopped believing in God.  As for politics, there wasn't much depth behind any of my feelings.  I was interested, I suppose, but more so because of my interest in history than anything else.  I can't really say that I was deeply interested in anything during those years other than climbing the ladder of success, and then shooting myself in the foot every chance I could.  I always read lot of history; that was one positive thing.  Religion lost its grip on me for a while, but History never did.  
          I voted for Jimmy Carter in my first election as a voter because I thought he was a breath of fresh air.  He seemed honest and candid.  Gerald Ford seemed honest, too, but he was too boring, in my opinion, to be the president.  By 1980, America seemed at its lowest point in my memory, and Ronald Reagan made even me feel better about my country's future.  I felt this from a place of almost complete political naivety, for almost everything I know about those years politically, I learned later.  So there it is; I voted for Ronald Reagan not only in 1980, but also in 1984, I believe.  A true measure of how much it really meant to me is that I'm not 100% sure about 1984.
          In June of 1987, with a child on the way, I surrendered to my inability to control the substances controlling me, and I entered a12-step program.  I had watched a good friend of mine go through the doors of 'the program' a year or so before me, and he now seemed like a completely different person.  He had also become a 'born again' Christian, and through him, I had my first exposure to what that was.  Until that point, I honestly hadn't given it much thought.  Before I had gotten sober, I had gone to my friend's church a few times for Christian concerts and for a couple of services.  The services were on Sunday mornings and for me Saturday nights were always the... most potent.  I distinctly remember showing up at church after having stayed up the whole night before, smelling like God only knows what (obviously there was a tug-of-war going on inside me)... and I was received with nothing but kindness.  The music was good, the pastor was humorous and made sense, and I was drawn to come back. When I got sober, it was as if I had never left church.  What I realized was God hadn't gone anywhere, I had.  I had put a cloud of guilt and shame between God and me that was lifted the day I got sober.  And there He was, where He had always been, patiently waiting for my return.
          There is a saying in 12-step programs that they are programs of attraction, not promotion.  It was, indeed, through attraction, not promotion, that I was led to Christ.  Being a selfish person, I wanted what other people had, and I wasn't shy about taking it.  I saw through my friend's story a life that had been in as bad, if not worse shape, than mine; and this life was transformed through knowing Jesus Christ.  His future looked very attractive to me.  I believe that many well-intentioned Christians convey evangelism through an array of promotional ideas, almost like they are marketing a product, rather than through the attraction of their lives in Christ.  Far be it for me to say that promotion doesn't work–I know personally of a Calvary Chapel pastor who was saved by a Christian tract–or pamphlet.  It is my personal opinion that the attraction of a person's life made whole in Jesus is more powerful than promotional materials with pleasant graphics and catchy slogans.  Any way a life can be saved, though, is the right way.