A Simple Government is on The New York Times bestseller list. Your Fox News show is the most popular news programme on weekend cable. In a recent Gallup poll, you had the most ‘positive intensity’ of any probable Republican presidential primary contender. You are clearly doing a great job of winning friends and influencing people. So please tell us about Dale Carnegie’s book – the granddaddy of all self-help books, which has sold an estimated 15 million copies since its publication in 1936. How has it influenced you and your views?

I read it when I was a teenager. The person who recommended it was my best friend from the third grade to this day. I think his dad had given it to him. And he gave it to me. It was really a life-changing book for me. Even though everything in it was common sense, and something I intuitively knew, it was the first time I’d seen anyone put it in a logical, applicable way. And I really started to apply those basic principles. It was a very, very important part of shaping me for the future.

How has it shaped your views of government?

Primarily to remind me that every person is important. There is no such thing as a person who is more important than another. In terms of how it effects simple government, it means you don’t govern according to what’s best for what some would call ‘the elite’. You don’t govern in a way that’s really good for Wall Street but busts Main Street. You don’t govern in a way that’s good for Washington, but bad for the folks that are paying Washington’s bills. You realise that every person has equal worth and value. That basic principle has shaped pretty much everything I’ve done.

Let’s move on to a very different author, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Like you, Bonhoeffer was a pastor. He was also one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. You cite The Cost of Discipleship, published in 1937. Please tell us about this book and how it shaped your faith, your life and your career.

This was a book that I read in college, and it influenced me in that I realised that faith that does not cost anything is what Bonhoeffer would call ‘cheap grace’. So much of American Christianity was cheap grace – fire insurance more than a call to true discipleship. It had a profound impact on me. Here was a person whose faith was not merely a belief system; rather, it was a way of life – to a point of even his own death.

He was so committed to what was right versus what was easy that he was willing to die. I think he, and Martin Luther King Jr and others, knew that, as James says in the New Testament, faith without works is dead. That was very evident in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life.

Bonheoffer is remembered as a modern martyr. He opposed Hitler and called on his church to do the same. As a result, he was imprisoned and executed in a concentration camp in the waning days of World War II.

He is a constant reminder to me, as a person of faith, that my faith is nothing more than a form of ‘cheap grace’ if I don’t put action to it. It is one thing to say I renounce racism, but if I don’t openly seek to bring various sides together, it is no more than faith without works.

I remember as a young pastor, the new pastor of an all-white church in a very segregated, Southern town, I talked to a young black teenager who wanted to join our church. I presented him for membership. I stood before the church and I said, ‘If this church does not welcome him, then you do not welcome me. If he goes, I go.’ Many of these people grew up under Jim Crow without having anyone confront them with how evil it was. I had death threats. I had people who told me that they would see to it that the church was broken financially. Some people left. But it was the best thing that could have happened to that church. An 80-year-old deacon came to me and said, ‘I always wondered what I would do if someone tried to integrate our church. Now I know. I’m glad this young man came, and I welcome him.’ And by the way, the next month the church had the most offerings it had had in its 87-year history.

That is a powerful story. But the title of the book is The Cost of Discipleship. I am wondering whether discipleship has been costly for you, personally or professionally?

Well, in two different political campaigns my wife and I pretty much sold everything that mattered to us and put everything we had on the line. The first one was the campaign for the United States Senate in 1992, which I lost. I walked away from a very good, comfortable job. We lived in a nice home, nice neighbourhood. I cashed in my life insurance, my annuity plan. I basically left a comfortable income to not have one. It was a pretty scary thing. And when the campaign was over, and I didn’t win, we had to start over. My wife was working the midnight shift at the hospital. I was doing whatever I could, even looking for offshore oil rig jobs – just to make sure we would never be late on any payment. We did without a lot of things, got rid of some stuff, cut our expenses down to the bone and recovered. But it was a very tough, tough time.

Let’s talk about The Problem of Pain, C S Lewis’s 1940 attempt to reconcile a belief in a just, beneficent God, with the fact that people suffer.