KIM LAWTON, anchor: The Obama Administration launched a new initiative this week encouraging Americans to help fight hunger in their communities. The campaign is called  “United We Serve: Feed a Neighbor.” It urges people to donate money to local soup kitchens and food banks and also to volunteer their time and talents. The effort comes amid new government reports that hunger is on the rise in the US. Forty-nine million Americans struggled to put food on the table this past year—that’s an increase of 13 million—and a record number of Americans, 36 million, now receive food stamp assistance.

Joining me with more on all of this is Candy Hill, a senior vice president at Catholic Charities USA. Candy, it seems like this time of year, every year, we hear appeals from groups saying “Oh people are hungry, you need to give.” What makes this year different?

CANDY HILL, Catholic Charities: Well, we certainly are seeing such an increase, and new people that have never come to Catholic Charities for services before. Some of them are even our donors, and some of them are our former board members, so we see a real crisis in the number of people coming and who need assistance this year over the other years that we’ve been in business.

LAWTON: And there’s been some talk of food insecurity, I mean we’re not talking about starving in the streets, but we’re talking about people who are just having a harder time feeding their families?

Candy Hill, Catholic Charities USA

HILL: Yes, and I think when we talk about food insecurity we’re really talking about people not having food for three meals a day, so we find parents who are scrimping or not having a meal themselves in order to feed their children, and seniors who are making choices between whether they buy medicine or feed themselves, and in a country as great as this country we shouldn’t have people doing that.

LAWTON: And this is a function of the economy and all of the repercussions of that?

HILL: I think this is a perfect storm. We see the economy, and the people that we serve certainly were struggling before the collapse of Wall Street, but they were struggling first and will be the last to recover in this recovery.

LAWTON: And to what extent is it difficult in these tough economic times to make appeals for groups like yours, to say to people, give money to hungry people when individuals might be thinking, you know, I don’t know how I’m going to feed my own family?

HILL: Exactly. Well, what I would say as Americans we’ve always risen to the occasion, and this is one of these occasions. Our neighbors are suffering and we need to dig deep into our own pockets. The government has a role to play, all of us have a role to play, and we need to reach out and help each other during this really tough time.

LAWTON: Well, speaking of the government’s role, the U.S. government is urging people to give more in this new initiative, but is that enough? I mean, is it enough for individuals to give $20, a $100 or whatever, or do we need systematic changes in policy?

HILL: Well, I think long term we need systematic changes, but you know that’s a long term strategy and right now we have a short term problem, and so we need people to give and we also need the government to step up and do its part as well.

LAWTON: Are you pleased that the administration is having this initiative?

HILL: Absolutely, because I think it brings, it highlights always when the administration speaks on something and gives information, it helps connect to the things that we’re doing on the ground, and so this initiative, certainly, I think will highlight the need, but also the really creative things that are happening across America to try and meet the needs of individual people.

LAWTON: Yours is a faith-based organization. A lot of groups are trying to help the hungry. What is the specific role for religious groups and those from the faith community?

HILL: Well certainly we have a 2,000-year tradition that we’re supposed to feed the hungry and we take that very seriously and so we’ve been doing this for decades across the country and we see it as a moral issue, that people shouldn’t have to go hungry in a country as rich as ours, and we’re going to continue to try and meet the needs of people in local communities across this nation.

LAWTON: Again, we hear all the time people are hungry, people are hungry, the poor are always with us. Are there solutions? Is it possible to end hunger?

HILL: I absolutely believe it, and certainly the government is calling on that and Congress is as well. We have to think creatively. We have to think about 21st century solutions to 21st century problems, and the safety net in this country is badly torn and weakened, and we need to not just fix it. A repair is not sufficient. We really need to think about how do we eliminate the need for programs like food stamps, and like donations to feed the hungry through a food bank or a soup kitchen, and if we have the political will to do it in this country we can change this. You know, Bobby Kennedy forty years ago called attention in the Mississippi Delta to children being hungry, and yet today you and I are sitting here having the same conversation four decades later. We just need to rise to the occasion and have the political will to change it.

LAWTON: All right, Candy Hill, thank you very much.

HILL: Thank you as well.

In East Germany, the church provided the only free space in connection with the groups—people who wanted to discuss topics that were taboo, such as the refusal to serve in the army, military education. Everything that could not be discussed in public could be discussed in church, and in this way the church represented a unique spiritual and physical space in East Germany in which people were free.

Here [at St. Nikolai Church in Leipzig] we have said peace prayers since 1981 and every Monday since 1982. That was something very special in East Germany. Here a critical mass grew under the roof of the church—young people, Christians and non-Christians, and later those who wanted to leave [East Germany] joined us and sought refuge here.  The church became a very special place, and in particular the Nikolai Church, which we could describe like this: the church was finally on the side of the Lord, on Jesus’ side. In other words, it was on the side of the oppressed and not on that of the oppressors, with the people and not with those who had the power. The special experience we had here was that the people accepted Jesus’ message, especially the message of the Sermon on the Mount. We experienced in a very special way that everything that is written here is true. If you don’t believe, you won’t stay. The “comrades” did not believe, and they did not stay. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit.” “He pulls the powerful from their throne and lifts up the poor.” “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” We experienced it just like that—the church as a refuge and a place for change, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, no mention of paradise and redemption, but the daily bread in the reality of political hopelessness.

Pastor Christian Fuhrer

The special experience that we had during the years of peace prayers and then with this massive number of non-Christians in the church, which was exceptional, was that they accepted the message of Jesus. They grew up in two consecutive atheist dictatorships. They grew up with the Nazis who were preaching racism, the master race, prepared for war, and replaced God with Providence, as Hitler liked to say. They also grew up with the Socialists preaching class struggle and vilified the church by saying Jesus never existed, that’s all nonsense and fairy tales, legends, and your talk about nonviolence is dangerous idealism; what counts is politics, money, the army, the economy, the media. Everything else is nonsense. And the people who were brainwashed like this for years and grew up with that. The fact that they accepted Jesus’ message of the Sermon on the Mount, that they summarized it in two words—no violence—and the fact that they did not only think and say it, but also practiced it consistently in the street was an incredible development, an unprecedented development in German history. If any event ever merited the description of “miracle” that was it: a revolution that succeeded, a revolution that grew out of the church, remained nonviolent, no broken windows, no people beaten, no people killed—an unprecedented development in German history. A peaceful revolution, a revolution that came out of the church. It is astonishing that God let us succeed with this revolution. After all the violence that Germany brought to the world in the two wars during the last century, especially the violence against the people from whom Jesus was born, a horrible violence, and now this wonderful result, a unique, positive development in German history. That is why we are so happy that the church was able to play this role and enabled this peaceful revolution.

The most important thing for us was the power of prayer, which is still true today. We are not praying to the air or to the wall, but to a living God. We did not pray for the wall to come down. It was more comprehensive: [We were praying] for peace, justice, and the preservation of our creation. We addressed the very specific needs of human beings in our prayers, and God has blessed those prayers in such a way that nobody could have predicted. We went on, step by step. It got bigger and bigger, and in the end the prayers prevented us from drowning in fear and gave us the strength to face the opposition outside. In other words, more and more protests came from the church and spilled onto the street, combined with the strength that we got from our faith. The fear was very powerful, but our faith was more powerful than the fear, and the prayers gave us the strength to act. That is still the same today.

What motivated me was Jesus’ saying “You are the salt of the earth,” which means that you must get involved; you cannot stay in your church. You must get involved in this situation; the salt must be inserted in the wound, in the place that is not in order, that is sick. That’s where you must go. This thought to get involved in politics is a thought that Jesus already voiced in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Someone is beaten and lies there, those who beat him are gone, and now two people coming from temple are approaching, are looking the other way and walking away. Jesus says that they are guilty, not because—they did not do anything, they did not beat him, but they did not help him. If we just leave the world alone and do not get involved, we are just as guilty as those two, as Jesus said in that parable, who looked the other way and did not want to hear about it. You must get involved, because you are the salt of the earth.

St. Nikolai Church

[Dietrich] Bonhoeffer really impressed me with his philosophy in approaching the atheist, the non-Christian, with the Christian message in a way that is easy to understand. I first learned that from Jesus—the simple language. Jesus did not speak the language of the temple, but the language of the people. He talked about the mustard seed, the farmer, the worker in the vineyard, the jobless who are waiting in the marketplace, hoping to get hired. Those are all things that people can understand, and then he introduced the message of God’s love into this clear language. And Bonheffer said that we should apply Jesus’ language in such a way that it can be understood even if you were not born into the Christian tradition or into a Christian household. That was really impressive. In addition, the examples impressed me very much, the fact that people applied the Sermon on the Mount one-to-one. First, to put Christians to shame, it was a non-Christian and Hindu who did it: Mahatma Gandhi. Very much in the spirit of the Sermon of the Mount, he engaged in nonviolent resistance and freed his people from British colonialism, but gave his life for it, as did Jesus. He was shot in 1948. The second one was, thank God, a Christian: Martin Luther King. He prepared and executed this idea of nonviolence, peaceful resistance, in a wonderful way. It was a very tense situation, and the fact that it was possible for an African-American to become president of the United States today even exceeds Martin Luther King’s dream. Then it became our turn to apply the teachings of the Sermon of the Mount here in Leipzig. But you cannot forget to mention Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu. They have always impressed us. We felt that we were walking together with them to fulfill Jesus’ legacy.

The police were always very violent, especially on October 7th when they beat hundreds of people. With this violence they wanted to prevent people from gathering here, here in the church and on the plaza. They gradually increased the amount of violence, but achieved the opposite of what they expected. Especially on October 9th, they had created such a frightful scenario that they thought people would not dare show up here. Instead, even more people came. In church people had learned to turn fear into courage, to overcome the fear and to hope, to have strength, as I mentioned before. That was very important, and during those years and in particular during this frightful time, people overcame their fear. They did not bring their children, because you had to fear for your life. The children stayed at home. They came to church and then started walking, and since they did not do anything violent, the police were not allowed to take action. “We were ready for anything, except for candles and prayer,” they said. If the first group had attacked the police, the police would have known exactly what to do. You can see it on TV every night how police and armies react to demonstrators. That did not happen, and the officers and generals called Berlin and asked what they should do, but they did not get any instructions. Those in Berlin did not say anything, the officers here did not do anything, and thus the movement that did not result in any violence, as the people learned in church, began to spread, and that is when the following became clear in East Germany: This is the beginning of the end of East Germany. It cannot go on, the people got what they wanted. Peace prayers were held all over the country. When they saw the images from Leipzig on October 9th, they started demonstrations everywhere else. The crowds became larger and larger, and then [Erich] Honecker handed in his resignation, and on the 18th the politburo resigned. On November 9th, on this very important day, on this day the wall was overcome from the East. Those are experiences that you cannot learn in college, and I would like to summarize them as follows: the Nikolai Church was open to everyone. The church was open to all people, no matter if they were Christian or non-Christian. The next thing is that throne and altar do not belong together. That is a huge mistake that the church made during the past century. No, the street and the altar belong together, just as Jesus did not hide in the temple, but was mingling out in the street, in the houses and on the plazas. We as a church must go into the street and let the street come into the church. The church must be open to everyone. We can teach nonviolence as a practical application of the Sermon on the Mount, turn swords into ploughshares as in the Old Testament, open to all, as mentioned before, and we are the people. We have to learn to have a certain self-confidence, overcome fear, find our voice once again in church, approach bad situations with this self-confidence, be able to make changes within society, reject injustice, and refuse to go along, and I think what is important in all of that is the power of prayer. Without prayer we would not have changed anything, we would not have been able to overcome fear, we would not have had the strength to change things and to take the message of the Bible seriously, being able to interject yourself into a social reality, finding the message of Jesus and the Bible and applying it to the current situation, not uttering long sentences but finding the right word for the right situation, knowing how to act. For me the main criterion for action was: What would Jesus say in this situation? Then I came to the conclusion that we needed to do it the same way he would have done it.

The role of the church did not diminish, at least not here in the Nikolai Church. It continued. Huge protests against the war in Iraq, peace prayers involving many people to save jobs…It continued, but under different social circumstances. However, there are always certain peaks, unique times, such as October 9th. It was a peaceful revolution which was a unique process. You cannot expect that it will go on like that every day. What this revolution aimed to achieve was indeed achieved, and then people stepped back. The important thing to remember is that we did not do that to get people to join our church, but because it was necessary. That is what Jesus did as well. When he provided help, he never asked if that person went to the temple or if that person said all his prayers. He just realized that this human being needed help, so he helped. That is exactly how we did it. We never said “but you must return the favor,” the way it is done in politics and in the world. We created something, and the blessing continued for the people. The most important thing is that the church has to remain open. Whenever people need the church again, in everyday life or in very specific situations, they should find the church open. The church should be there for the people, the way Jesus intended. An inviting, open church without the expectation that people join; an inviting, open church offering unconditional love, just as Jesus did, and [we must] act in this spirit.

The procedural frustrations of the Democrats were obvious. Florida Senator Bill Nelson compared the US unfavorably to the African nation of Rwanda, where he said “forgiveness and reconciliation” overcame political differences and genocide. “Where do you observe reconciliation in American politics today?” Nelson asked.

“I don’t usually talk about moral issues, but you do,” Senator Barbara Boxer of California told reporters. “If ever the religious community should speak with one voice,” she suggested, it is now, as “great moral questions” dominate the legislative agenda. Boxer chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which holds hearings next week (October 27-29) on energy legislation introduced last month by Boxer and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Religious leaders will be among those who testify, said Boxer.

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, a pro-life Catholic, said “we’re working on it” when asked about abortion coverage in the Senate health reform bill and whether he would vote against reform if the final bill doesn’t explicitly prevent federal funds from being used for abortion. “The bill needs more work done,” he said. But Senator Stabenow told reporters Casey was “not going to have to make that choice” because “we don’t have public funding for abortion,” and the Democrats “have gone to great lengths to make it [the bill] abortion neutral.” Some abortion opponents, however, believe otherwise.  The US Catholic bishops, longtime advocates of universal health coverage, said last week they do not yet support the Senate bill because of their concerns about affordability, coverage for immigrants, and financing for abortion. As for Democratic outreach to the bishops, “we are communicating with them as we have been,” said Stabenow.

Stabenow asked faith groups to help legislators get “past the noise” and “beyond the rancor” and “call us to a higher moral authority.” If they don’t take up the cause of health care reform, said Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, religious communities will be called on to do more than they already do to meet the needs of the elderly, the poor, and the disabled. “I talk about this as a moral issue all the time,” said Cardin. “That is very much what this debate is all about.”

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Volunteers signed up by the thousands to lend a helping hand to people in need, and here in Portland, Oregon, where unemployment reached 12 percent this year, there are a lot of people in need. And with tax revenues down, the city needs help providing even basic services, like maintaining public schools, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Roosevelt High, for instance, might get a visit from a maintenance man once this year if it’s lucky. Devon Baker is an administrator at Roosevelt.

DEVON BAKER (School Administrator): It does something for you, in your heart, you know, if you’re one of the staff members and suddenly the building is clean, it’s ready to go. It’s a real partnership with a lot of folks that just really makes you feel like, wow, people really do care.

Kevin Palau

SEVERSON: What makes this effort so extraordinary is not that it’s church members doing the volunteering—there are about 500 churches involved this year, including Catholic and mainline Protestant. But the majority of the 26,000 volunteers are evangelicals intentionally not here to proselytize, but to show their faith by doing good deeds such as scrubbing windows and even working in harmony with one of the most liberal cities in the US and its openly gay mayor,  Sam Adams.

SAM ADAMS (Mayor of Portland): If I could have them do it every month in my city I would, so thank you.

SEVERSON: The organizer of Season of Service, which is now in its second year, is Kevin Palau.

KEVIN PALAU (Executive Vice President, Luis Palau Association): Portland is a very proudly liberal city. This is not the Bible belt, and so to have that kind of cooperation between churches and city leaders on a long-term basis, I think, is unprecedented.

SEVERSON: Palau is the son of Luis Palau, who has staged huge evangelism festivals around the world. His son chose a slightly different path, one he thinks will put Christ’s teachings into action and, perhaps, change the image in a secular city that some have of Christians. The purpose, he says, is not to preach or proselytize.

KEVIN PALAU: We’re not doing this so that we can preach the Gospel. We’re doing this to demonstrate the love of Christ, and absolutely we’re not hiding the fact that we want people to come into relationship with Christ, but realistically through this it’s going to happen more relationally and organically, and that’s okay.

SEVERSON: Wayne Abbott graduated from Roosevelt.

WAYNE ABBOTT (Volunteer): Season of Service works because Jesus told us that he was here to serve, not be served, and there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t just take a few minutes out of a busy day and our busy lives every once in a while and do exactly what he did.

SEVERSON: The extensive work done sprucing up Roosevelt High, outside and in, would have cost the city about $200,000. Deborah Peterson is the principal.

DEBORAH PETERSON (Roosevelt High School Principal): When good people of good will come together and honor one another and believe in hope, miracles happen, and that’s what’s happening today.

SEVERSON: The churches also raised $100,000 to help the increasing numbers of homeless. Then they sponsored what they call compassion clinics throughout the city, offering free medical and dental care. These clinics were overbooked within the first half-hour with mostly uninsured patients. These clinics cared for as many as 200 patients each day—grateful patients. Churches even sponsored the mobile medical truck.

KRISTINE SUMMER (Volunteer): For the church love has to be a verb, and this is what it looks like.

JEFF PALEN (Volunteer): This is love in action. This is what Christ did for all of those 5,000. He fed them, he preached to them, he shared with them, and he loved them.

SEVERSON: Love includes free veterinarian care for their pets and haircuts for their owners. Kevin Palau says loving thy neighbor is what Season of Service is all about.

KEVIN PALAU: So our hope is that, long-term, this does lead to a lifestyle of service and sharing the Gospel by how we live.

SEVERSON: Mayor Adams said the thousands of volunteers had made Portland and its suburbs a better place.

SAM ADAMS: Honestly, we had modest hopes. Well, our modest hopes were greatly exceeded.

SEVERSON: Season of Service was topped off with a carnival that may have been as important as any of the other events—an opportunity for families to simply have fun in hard times and experience what neighborly love can do when it’s put into practice.

For Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson reporting.

Audio from ad: “All five committees defeated amendments that would have stopped an abortion mandate…”

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Abortion opponents have already launched an aggressive lobbying campaign. This new ad is from the group Americans United for Life.

CHARMAINE YOEST (President, Americans United for Life): Polling shows over 70 percent of Americans don’t want to see their tax dollars going for it, so that’s what this debate is over, is not whether or not you agree or disagree with abortion, but whether or not at the federal level we’re going to pay for it.

LAWTON: Meanwhile, an interfaith group called the Religious Institute gathered signatures of more than a thousand clergy affirming access to abortion.

REV. DEBRA HAFFNER (Executive Director, Religious Institute): We believe that abortion should be safe, legal, rare, and accessible, and that a health care reform should not make it more difficult for women to get abortions in this country.

LAWTON: In his address to a joint session of Congress last month, President Obama made a clear promise.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (speaking to Congress): Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.

LAWTON: But working that out legislatively has been complicated. The current House and Senate proposals do not explicitly prohibit abortion coverage. Congressional leaders say the bills would comply with the so-called Hyde Amendment, which restricts most abortion funding in Medicaid. Abortion opponents say that’s not good enough.

YOEST: Unless there’s an explicit exclusion of abortion, abortion will be in health care reform.

LAWTON: Yoest and her fellow activists also object to proposed compromises that would require insurance plans offering abortion coverage to keep public and private funds separate and use only the private funds to pay for abortions.

YOEST: A lot of the solutions that we see involve a lot of really fancy accounting gimmicks, and that’s exactly what it is, is it’s just moving money around from pot to pot in order to try to promote this fiction that somehow we’re not paying for it just because the money is being funneled through a particular channel.

LAWTON: But pro-choice activists say, given the legal right to abortion, that compromise is the very least Congress owes women.

HAFFNER: There may be a lot of medical services that I might disagree with that I wouldn’t want a member of my family to have, but that’s not up to me. If we care about the very difficult situations that women and families find themselves in, then out of that compassion we would make sure that women would have access to all options.

LAWTON: Faith-based moderates and liberals have been actively pushing for health care reform as a moral issue. Many are worried that abortion debates will derail their efforts.

REV. ANDREW GENSZLER (Director of Advocacy, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America): We think that in some sense it’s a distraction. I mean, it’s an important issue, a very important issue, but in the context of a country where a growing number, millions and millions of people, don’t have insurance, health insurance, we feel that’s more the main issue for this particular debate.

LAWTON: The issue has already become a rallying point for religious conservatives.

REP. MIKE PENCE (R-IN): The American people will not stand for government-run insurance that uses taxpayer money to fund abortions in this country.

HAFFNER: I’m really disappointed that, once again, women’s lives, the desperate situation that so many women find themselves in, the desperate situation that so many poor women face is being used as a political football. I think it’s morally unconscionable that we are segregating some health services. Abortion’s a health service.

LAWTON: But abortion opponents say that’s precisely the view they’re fighting against.

YOEST: It’s really troubling to us that we face a future where we might not be able to make a fundamental difference between abortion and a tonsillectomy. For millions of Americans across this country, abortion is a morally objectionable activity, and so for us to lose the ability to differentiate with a tonsillectomy would be a real, real tragedy.

LAWTON: Activists on both sides of the abortion issue are mobilizing for some key battles in the next few weeks. Both the House and the Senate are expected to begin floor debates on health care reform by the end of the month, and the Obama administration hopes a final bill will be passed by the end of the year.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: It’s hard work on a warm day, but Bob Lewis never shirks.

BOB LEWIS (Garden Volunteer): I garden at home. On off days, I’m out here.

POTTER: “Here” is a vegetable patch in front of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in suburban Washington, tended by volunteers from the parish.

VOLUNTEER: We got a bumper crop and more coming in!

POTTER: Last year, this garden was just an idea—something the rector dreamed up.

REV. STEPHANIE NAGLEY (Rector, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland): I think “come eat, go serve” is becoming our slogan.

POTTER: For Reverend Stephanie Nagley, the garden as a way of living out what she sees as God’s call to give away what you’ve been given, especially in tough times. St. Luke’s is one of several churches across the country that planted vegetable gardens for the first time this spring, partly in response to the recession. Most of their food goes to local food banks, but what comes out of this garden goes right next door. All of the produce grown at the church is donated to St. Luke’s House, a mental health facility the parish helped to found almost 30 years ago.

VOLUNTEER (to class members): You want to help us get all this stuff rinsed?

POTTER: Cooking class is offered daily as part of a life skills program. The goal of the class is to help these adults with mental illness learn to live more independently.

(to class member): What are you learning?

CLASS MEMBER: How to cook different veggies.

POTTER:  The fact that those veggies come from the church next door isn’t lost on anyone at St. Luke’s House.

BETH WELCH (Client, St. Luke’s House): I think it’s really absolutely nice. We get a lot more veggies to eat.

MARK ROBBINS (Client, St. Luke’s House): I really appreciate it. I really should thank them sometime, I guess.

ERIC GORDON (Staff, St. Luke’s House) I think the clients get a real kick out of it. One guy in particular is always double-checking: Are you guys really using that in your cooking classes? Are you sure? Yes, we definitely are using this in our cooking classes.

POTTER: The clients and staff of St. Luke’s House benefit from the garden’s bounty, but that’s not its only value. Parishioner Anne Elsbree organized the 30 volunteers who tilled the ground, planted the seeds, and now harvest the crops.

ANNE ELSBREE (Garden Organizer) I think it’s produced good teamwork at church. We’ve all been working on a project together and getting results, so it’s been very satisfying.

REV. STEPHANIE NAGLEY: In some ways, I think a lot of this was just sort of an unconscious bubbling up of people’s faith, and now I think it’s sort of come to this next era, where it’s really now articulated, and we’re making it clear that this is what we’ve been about all along.

POTTER: Cara Gonzalez worships at St. Luke’s and has brought the local youth organization she works with to help out in the garden.

CARA GONZALEZ (Parishioner): There’s definitely something spiritual about working with the earth and feeling a relationship with all of God’s creation, and then taking that and making it into a human relationship with those who benefit in the cooking program and with the youth who benefit. I think it’s all about that connectedness, and that’s very spiritual.

POTTER: This year’s harvest was such a success that St. Luke’s plans to keep the garden going next year and make it bigger, so it can feed even more people, body and spirit.

CARA GONZALEZ (holding out fresh basil): Amazing. Here, take a sniff. Tell me that’s not spiritual right there. Amazing.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Bethesda, Maryland.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: John Green is director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. He says with the Democratic Congress and the new Obama administration, religious conservatives have been adjusting to their new lack of access to the political power structure.

JOHN GREEN (Director Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, University of Akron): Religious conservatives are not completely shut out because, of course, they still do have some Republican and even some of conservative Democratic office holders that pay attention to them. But, really, the access belongs to the other side, to the progressive religious activists, whether they’re Protestants or Catholics or Jews, who very much took advantage of the change in party control in Washington.

LAWTON: And are these moderate and liberal religious activists having an influence? Are they making an impact on policy?

GREEN: Iinfluence is always a difficult thing to judge while a process is under way. You know, we can look back ten years later and say, “Boy, that made a difference.” But it is certainly widely perceived by scholars, by journalists, by other observers that religious progressives are having an impact on the Obama White House, on the Democratic Congress, on the development of a wide range of policy proposals, from health care to climate change to poverty, and so forth. Exactly what that turns out to be we don’t know, because the process is not finished yet.

LAWTON: And what about the mood within these groups on the right and the left? How are they seeing themselves after the last election?

GREEN: The progressive side seems to be very excited right now. They really believe that they are in the ascendancy, that they’ve had some success, and, of course, people can point to some success—that they’re growing, that they’re reaching out to larger groups of people.

Right after the 2008 election there was some real discouragement among religious conservatives, although some of those individuals that I’ve interviewed noted that they were pretty discouraged before the election, because things were not really going the way that they had hoped. But there’s a renewed sense of hope on that side as well. There’s a sense that they have a way that they can now engage in the political process and that some of the things that President Obama wants to do are not very popular with some parts of the public, and religious activists see an opportunity on the right to mobilize some opposition. So they’ve really moved from being quite discouraged to being quite optimistic and quite active. But it’s a different role. It’s the role of being in opposition and not the role of having the insider connections. One of the things we know about religious conservatives, going all the way back to the days of the Moral Majority, is that they tend to prosper in opposition.

LAWTON: Green says one surprising issue that has been galvanizing religious conservatives is health care.

GREEN: You know, who would have thought a few years ago that religious conservatives would be organizing around health care? But, in fact, they are—in some ways to oppose President Obama, but in some ways to try and influence the debate and get whatever outcome actually occurs closer to their values. So it’ll be really kind of interesting to see what happens over the next year, because there might be a lack of access, but there’s no lack of activity among religious conservatives.