KIM LAWTON, guest anchor and managing editor: Religious groups had mixed reactions to President Obama’s new plan for the war in Afghanistan. Some expressed hope that the additional 30,000 American troops will indeed bring stability by 2011, when Obama said the US will start to withdraw. But others were disappointed by the military escalation. A coalition of moderate and progressive Christians had pushed for a “humanitarian” surge, rather than a military one. In his speech to the nation, Obama said America began the war, in part, to defend what he called “the values we hold dear”:

President Obama (speaking at West Point): “America, we are passing through a time of great trial. And the message that we send in the midst of these storms must be clear: that our cause is just, our resolve unwavering. We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might.”

Joining me now is John Carlson, associate director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. He’s joining us from San Diego. John, did President Obama make the moral case for his plans for the Afghanistan war?

JOHN CARLSON (Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Arizona State University): I think he gives us a good framework for thinking about the moral implications of that war. He started his speech by taking us back to the events of September 11th, the slaughter of innocents, and reminding us of the tremendous moral legitimacy and consensus about that legitimacy that we enjoyed at that time. He reminded us of the oppressive regime of the Taliban that supported them, and then he closed his speech, as we just saw, again reminding us of the moral source of America’s authority. So I think those are good moral bookends to a political argument for thinking about the moral implications there.

LAWTON: Well, in fact, it seems like a lot of the public discussion that we’ve been hearing has been based on the military strategy, political implications, expediency. There really hasn’t been a lot of moral discussion about the implications of this war, has there?

CARLSON: I quite agree with that. It’s been there, here and there, but not as much as it could be or should be or certainly was in—surrounding the deliberation about the initial invasion of Afghanistan.

LAWTON: But what’s not being discussed? What are some of the moral implications that you’re not hearing and you think we need to be examining?

CARLSON: Well, I think there are two in particular that need to be lifted up here. The first is to remember the plight of the Afghan people under the Taliban prior to September 11th, and also what the plight of the Afghan people would be should the Taliban return to power, and that’s particularly significant if one thinks about the treatment of women and girls, and so we really can’t afford to ignore that at all. The second is that there is a moral responsibility on the part of the United States. When you invade a country and overthrow its government and occupy it and put in a new government you incur responsibilities. We may have been there for eight years, but we have never put forward the resources needed to succeed or even to be able to say we’ve done all that we can do, we have earned the right to withdraw.

LAWTON: What about the moral responsibility to the troops, to the American people who are concerned about the cost of this and allocating those resources which people say could be used for other things as well?

CARLSON: There are clear moral implications there, and it is important to keep those in mind, and the president stressed in his speech that there’s this concept of a balancing act, so recognizing the moral implications of those features is very important as well, particularly the human cost of war, both for American lives but also for Afghan lives.

LAWTON: And I know that you are concerned about the long-term ethical implications. What do you mean by that?

CARLSON: Well, I talk about what we might consider the moral legacies of war, and that involves thinking about how the moral outcomes in many cases outweigh, in some cases outlast even, the original reasons for waging a war. So World War II was not waged to end the Holocaust, nor was the Civil War waged to end slavery, but those were important outcomes of those wars, so we need to keep those long-term moral legacies in mind, particularly if you’re thinking here about the liberation of the Afghan people from the oppressive regime of the Taliban.

LAWTON: And, very briefly, there’s been a movement stressing a humanitarian surge. Is that also something that should be incorporated into these plans?

CARLSON: I think the importance of civilian groups and building the infrastructure of society cannot be underestimated, so one has to support that, I agree. One also has to remember, of course, that those groups require security. It doesn’t help to build a school and staff it with teachers if it’s going to be bombed the next day, so security is crucial, and the military piece of  that has to be kept in mind.

LAWTON: All right. John Carlson, thank you very much for being with us today.

CARLSON: Thanks for having me on the show.

When it began eight years ago, the war in Afghanistan was the right war, the good war, the moral war.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the effort to capture Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders and to drive from power their Taliban protectors had the moral and ethical support of most Americans, as well as much of the international community. President George W. Bush laid out the rationale to Congress: “The leadership of al-Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al-Qaeda’s vision for the world.”

It was a widely shared view. Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and one of the foremost experts on just and unjust wars, called Afghanistan a “classic” case of the just war. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral statement arguing for “the right and duty of a nation and the international community to use force if necessary to defend the common good by protecting the innocent against mass terrorism.”

“Afghanistan has been the West’s ‘good war’ until now,’’ wrote Michael Daxner, president emeritus of the University of Oldenburg in Germany, this summer in the World Policy Journal.  “In recent history, there has rarely been another intervention with so much institutional legitimacy and so little questioning of strategy and perspective as there has been with Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF].” Daxner also served as special counselor to the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.

The initial military campaign in Afghanistan appeared to be a resounding success. A small band of American forces overthrew the Taliban in less than three months, drove them out of Kabul, and apparently had both the Afghan Taliban force and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda on the run.

Photo: US Air Force

But somewhere along the way Afghanistan got lost, its moral rationale muddied as the Bush administration quickly turned its focus to the unnecessary war, the morally unjustifiable war, the war against Iraq. The Afghanistan effort went astray, starved of resources and attention. It became, first, America’s forgotten war, and then a conflict beset with its own strategic and policy complexities as well as moral ambiguities.

Over the years, “as the mission has changed and become larger and more complex, these initial judgments have been subject to further consideration,” David Cortright, director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, told an audience there on Sept. 1.  As RAND Corporation political scientist Seth Jones has written in his recent book on the American experience in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires (Norton, 2009), “Despite the idealism of the initial campaign and the success of military operations, the United States squandered this extraordinary moment. … And by 2006, tensions in Afghanistan had “escalated dramatically and Afghanistan was leveled by a perfect storm of political upheaval in which several crises came together.”

Jones argues, and most experts seem to agree, that as US policy in Afghanistan drifted, Pakistan emerged as a sanctuary for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, allowing them to regroup and mount renewed and more widespread attacks. Afghan governance became “unhinged” with corruption, and “the international presence, hamstrung by the US focus on Iraq, was too small to deal with the escalating violence.”

Now US and coalition casualties continue to mount. The United States had lost more than 900 troops, and October was the deadliest month so far, with 59 American soldiers killed. British combat losses have crossed the 200 mark, and the battlefield situation is worsening as the Taliban and its insurgent allies are not only waging fierce resistance to the ISAF but also extending their control over increasingly large swaths of Afghanistan territory. The top US military officer, Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Boston Globe in late August that the Taliban and its alliance with the al-Qaeda terrorist network are stronger than ever, and in other interviews he has characterized the military situation in Afghanistan as “deteriorating.”

Public opinion has also been turning against Obama’s “war we must win,” According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 52 percent of respondents see the war in Afghanistan as not worth its costs, although 55 percent say they have confidence the president will choose a strategy that will work. In a Quinnipiac University poll released on November 18, American voters say 48 – 41 percent that fighting the war in Afghanistan is the right thing to do, down from 52 – 37 percent last month.

British public opinion is more skeptical. A poll published in the Aug. 29 Daily Telegraph found that 62 percent oppose British troops staying in Afghanistan. Only 26 percent favor remaining, and this month the Catholic bishop who heads the military diocese of Great Britain, speaking in a homily at a requiem mass for the fallen, urged resolution in Afghanistan “as speedily as possible.”

While conservatives and Republicans generally continue to support the war and call for more US troops for the effort—the Quinnipiac poll found 68 percent of Republicans think the United States is doing the right thing fighting in Afghanistan—some conservative pundits are beginning to turn against the effort. The columnist George Will, in a widely circulated Sept. 1 column, called on the US to begin “rapidly reversing the trajectory of America’s involvement in Afghanistan” and fight the war in such a way as to end US combat fatalities, suggesting US lives have been “squandered.” Will faulted both the goals and the strategy being pursued.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the antiwar movement that mounted a large but ultimately futile effort against the US invasion of Iraq is regrouping to challenge Obama, somewhat reluctantly, on Afghanistan. A wide variety of groups, including veterans’ organizations and coalitions of grass roots groups, such as Win without War and United for Peace and Justice, plan teach-ins, demonstrations, and lobbying at aimed raising questions about the cost of the war.

Photo: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith

Religious voices and ethical questions are also being raised. This month, a group of 77 United Methodist bishops signed a letter to the president calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of all forces and saying there is no path to military victory in Afghanistan. An open letter from a range of progressive religious leaders led by evangelical Christian activist and Sojourners magazine editor Jim Wallis called for a “humanitarian and development surge” in Afghanistan and exhorted the president to “let the nonmilitary strategies lead the way.” Last month, the US Catholic bishops sent a letter to the president’s national security advisor, General James. L. Jones, urging the administration to review its use of military force “to insure that it is proportionate and discriminate” and to “develop criteria for when it is appropriate to end military action in Afghanistan.”

In a recent issue of Commonweal, the independent and lay-edited Catholic review of religion, politics, and culture, Boston University history and international relations professor Andrew Bacevich wrote in a piece entitled “The War We Can’t Win: Afghanistan and the Limits of American Power” that “fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible.” As for what the US should do, Bacevich suggests that “a sense of realism and a sense of proportion should oblige us to take a minimalist approach,” adding that “we can’t eliminate every last armed militant harboring a grudge against the West. Nor do we need to.”

The mainline Protestant journal Christian Century editorialized in its Sept. 8 issue that “it is time to ask: What is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and how does it serve peace in the region and the American interests?” America, the national Catholic weekly magazine published by the Jesuits, asked earlier this month about Afghanistan, “What are we achieving there? Do we have the ruthlessness and patience to stay in this fight? With our nation printing money to pay its bills, can we really afford to maintain this long war?” “Nothing about the mission in Afghanistan is clear,” concluded a Sept. 25 Commonweal editorial, “least of all its connection to American security. All wars, including necessary wars, involve difficult choices. If President Obama chooses to keep us in Afghanistan, he must do a better job of explaining his reasons and expectations to the American people—especially to the families of soldiers serving there. He can no longer ask Americans to assume that saving Afghanistan from the Taliban is the same thing as saving American from Al Qaeda.”

The Rev. John Langan, SJ, a professor of philosophy and Catholic social thought at Georgetown University, first posed the question of “whether we’re making real progress toward morally important goals” eight years ago in a 2001 interview with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, just one month after the US bombing of Afghanistan had begun. Today he says the answer to that question is no. Even when explicit consideration of just war ethics seems absent from current strategic debate, says Langan, “a lot of ethical issues are present in policy planning,” especially questions about whether our goals are attainable and worth pursuing. “I wish,” says Langan, “I was seeing a debate about what is worthwhile versus are we meeting the demands of the generals.” On this point, he says, he sees parallels with Vietnam and what he calls “a deeply ingrained tendency in the military that if a problem resists us, bring more resources to bear and we will prevail.” In Afghanistan, he observes, “we are forced to fight in cautious and disagreeable ways,” and “we never get very far from the possibility of tragedy.”

Howard Rhodes, a religious studies professor at the University of Iowa, teaches a course every fall on war and peace in Western religious thought. The lack of informed public debate about Afghanistan in just war terms, he suggests, is because “Christian churches and their representatives are largely incapable of articulating how those debates might look,” and “ordinary people in churches are not well prepared to be engaged” in them. Our weakened just war discourse, he adds, “reflects the pressure of pacifism” and an “erosion in ordinary citizens’ ability to engage in any discourse other than protest.”

Yet moral issues remain inextricably bound up with our broad strategic and political debates, says Rhodes. For him, the most disturbing characteristic of the current moment is that the US is “profoundly unclear” about the kind of world it is using its power to bring about and “extremely unclear about what war is for.”

DoD photo by Sgt. 1st Class Leonardo Torres, U.S. Army

Duke University ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, a Christian pacifist, has spoken about Afghanistan in similar terms. In an interview earlier this month, he told Religion News Service that “it’s still not clear what we’re fighting for. It’s so deeply ambiguous that it’s hard to fit into just war criteria. The very idea that you begin to assess the justness of a war after the war is already going to happen, I’m sorry, it’s already too late.”

Rhodes says he expects President Obama to go some distance to meet his military advisors’ requests. “All the options are bad,” says Rhodes, “and for the next year the least bad option” is to give General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of US troops in Afghanistan, “as much of what he’s asking for as is tolerable.” McChrystal has made clear again and again that the United States and its allies, facing a serious and deteriorating military situation on the ground, must essentially start over. This will involve not only a new strategy but also a new effort to make the moral and political case for what President Obama has called “the necessary war’’ to the American people, the people of the allied nations in the NATO coalition and, not least, the Afghan civilian population.

“The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,’’ McChrystal said in an Aug. 31 statement as he sent up the chain of command a confidential assessment of the nearly eight-year-old war asked for by Obama when he put McChrystal in charge of the faltering effort in Afghanistan. Three weeks later, the assessment was leaked to the Washington Post, including its warning that without more forces the conflict “will likely result in failure.” Throughout much of the fall, Obama has convened his national security and military advisors for a series of strategy sessions about means and ends and whether to add more US combat forces to the battle. At the end of this year there will be some 68,000 US forces in Afghanistan and another 40,000 NATO troops from US allies such as Great Britain, Germany, and Canada.

At the September event at Notre Dame (and again in the October 19 issue of America in an article reassessing US engagement in Afghanistan), David Cortright argued that as presently constituted the Afghanistan effort, even if originally a just cause, fails under the just war criteria of last resort and probability of success, and he made a two-point challenge to current policy, even as refined and redefined by Obama and McChrystal.

“I would argue, and many did even at the beginning of the US military mission, that war is an inappropriate means of countering al-Qaeda so that the fundamental strategic assumption [of U.S. policy] … is subject to debate,” he said. “War is not an instrument that can be used to counter non-state terrorist networks,” he suggested. “It also has many detrimental, unintended harmful consequences.” He cited as an example that war treats “mass murderers as if they were soldiers, thus inadvertently raising the credibility and moral stature of these criminals.”

In his second challenge, Cortright asked why we are at war with the Taliban and argued, as do others, that the strategic assumption lumping together the Taliban and al-Qaeda as inseparable and indistinguishable is wrong. Furthermore, al-Qaeda’s influence in Afghanistan is waning while the Taliban’s is gaining. He suggested, following the argument of Fotini Christia and Michael Semple in their article “Flipping the Taliban” in the July/August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, that US policy must have a “political ‘surge,’ a committed effort to persuade large groups of Taliban fighters to put down their arms and give up the fight.”

Christia and Semple say Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy, as announced in his March 27 speech and a six-page White House white paper,  acknowledged that integrating reconcilable insurgents will be a key component of US policy. “Yet US policy makers have not adequately developed a vision of how to achieve reconciliation,” they write. “Admitting their lack of knowledge about the precise character of the insurgency, they equate reconciliation with merely cajoling Taliban foot soldiers into crossing over to the US side.”

It is an argument that has won the support of the Christian Century, whose editors have concluded that “working to reconcile the Taliban with the broader interests of the Afghan nation calls for respecting the interests of local Taliban leaders. They are not a monolithic group.”

As the Obama administration seeks to devise a means to implement the McChrystal recommendations—or not, it comes under close scrutiny from politicians and other observers. Noting the failed efforts of past powers, from Alexander the Great to Great Britain and, most recently, the Soviet Union, to subdue Afghanistan, the Christian Century editorial put it bluntly: “To avoid another catastrophe, the president must be held to a clear strategy and a short timeline.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religion News Service. He wrote last year for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on “God and Empire.”

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: St. Nikolai Evangelical Lutheran Church hasn’t changed much since the sixteenth century. Bach once played the organ here, and the music is still a draw. But on this day the tourists have come to hear about the church’s more recent history from the man who led it through a difficult time. Christian Fuhrer became pastor here in 1980, when the world outside the church was divided by the Cold War and Germany was split in two, most visibly by the wall the East German government built in Berlin in 1961. The Communist state was determined to keep more of its people from escaping to the free West. In the German Democratic Republic—the GDR—atheism was the norm. Churches like St. Nikolai were spied on, but stayed open.

PASTOR CHRISTIAN FUHRER (in translation): In the GDR, the church provided the only free space. 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 which people were free.

Pastor Christian Fuhrer

POTTER: In the early eighties, Fuhrer began holding weekly prayers for peace. Every Monday, they recited the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Few people came. But in the late eighties, as the Soviet Union opened up to the West, more East Germans began to demand change, including the right to leave, and in Leipzig they gathered at St. Nikolai, which proclaimed itself “open for all.”

PR. FUHRER (in translation): 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.

POTTER: As a college student, Sylke Schumann was one of the hundreds and then thousands who joined the vigils in the sanctuary and marched in the streets holding candles.

SYLKE SCHUMANN: Seeing all these people gather in this place and then from week to week and more and more people gathering, you had the feeling this time really the government had to listen to you.

POTTER: In October 1989, on the 40th anniversary of the GDR, the government cracked down. Protestors in Leipzig were beaten and arrested. Two days later, St. Nikolai Church was full to overflowing for the weekly vigil. When it was over, 70,000 people marched through the city as armed soldiers looked on and did nothing.

PR. FUHRER (in translation): In church people had learned to turn fear into courage, to overcome the fear and to hope, to have strength. They came to church and then started walking, and since they did not do anything violent, the police were not allowed to take action. They said, “We were ready for anything, except for candles and prayer.”

SCHUMANN: I remember it was a cold evening, but you didn’t feel cold, not just because you saw all the lights but also because you saw all these people, and it was, you know, it was really amazing to be a part of that, and you felt so full of energy and hope. For me, it still gives me the shivers thinking of that night. It was great.

POTTER: Just one month after that massive demonstration, the wall between East and West here in Berlin came down. The church had sent a powerful message: the East German government no longer controlled its people.

The joy and relief on that day 20 years ago became reality thanks in part to the effort of one tenacious pastor and what he describes as his firm faith in this teaching of Jesus:  “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

PR. FUHRER (in translation): If any event ever merited the description of “miracle” that was it—a revolution that succeeded, a revolution that grew out of the church. It is astonishing that God let us succeed with this revolution.

POTTER: Fuhrer, who retired last year at age 65 as required by his church, has written a book about those historic days. St. Nikolai itself has gone back to being a parish church, its congregation not much larger than before. But Fuhrer says he didn’t do what he did back then to draw people to the church. In his words, “We did it because the church has to do it.”

For Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Leipzig.

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.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: Almost 90 percent of the students at Rainbow Elementary School in Berlin are from immigrant families, most of them Muslim. Fitting in can be tough, because a lot of them can’t speak German—even though many of their families have been here for decades.

HEIDRUN BOEHMER (School Principal): When I started being a teacher more than thirty years ago I thought that problem we won’t have in ten years. They all will speak German. But they don’t.

POTTER: Heidrun Boehmer has watched her students struggle to succeed. About 75 percent never finish high school—more than double the national rate. In school and the outside world, their chances are limited by a complicated mix of social and economic issues, religion, and history.

Muslim immigrants, mainly from Turkey, first came here in large numbers in the 1960s, when Germany was facing a severe labor shortage. They were called “guest workers,” but most of them never went home. Instead, they brought their families and settled in neighborhoods like Neukolln in Berlin, where shop signs are in Turkish and Arabic, and satellite dishes bring in programs from back home. Storefront mosques are tucked behind fruit stands. Until ten years ago, immigrants could not become German citizens, and they still don’t have a chance at most government jobs. Integration just hasn’t happened.

RIEM SPIELHAUS (Humboldt University): People who live here since forty, fifty years, were born here in the third generation, are understood as foreigners, are understood as immigrants while they are not. They just have a different faith. So this debate leads to people thinking about their neighbors as problematic because they do have a different faith.

POTTER: Today, Germany has about four million Muslims—five percent of the population, making Islam the second largest religion. Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon and twice as many mosques as the United States. Young Muslims here describe themselves as more religious than their parents, in a country where few Christians go to church. Berlin is sometimes called the atheist capital of Europe. But while religious freedom is enshrined in the German constitution, public schools are required to offer Christian religious instruction. Leaders of Muslim organizations are now demanding Islamic religious instruction as well, and tensions are growing.

SPIELHAUS: The number of people that don’t want to live together with Muslims, that don’t want to have a mosque in their neighborhood—this number is rising.

POTTER: According to public opinion polls, the vast majority of Germans associate Islam with violence and terrorism, and they resent what they see as too many Muslims sponging off the German welfare system. But the country’s strong social safety net may be one reason why Germany has not seen the kind of violence that scorched Muslim neighborhoods in France a few years ago. Young Muslims there took to the streets, angry about unemployment and police brutality. Nothing like that has happened in Germany, even though the jobless rate in some Muslim neighborhoods hovers near 50 percent.

BARBARA JOHN (Office Against Discrimination): If there is no easy opportunity, or if they can’t make as much money as they get from the state as welfare money, they don’t work, of course. It’s not that they don’t want to work, it’s just reasoning, and they are rational people.

POTTER: Barbara John has spent 30 years dealing with integration issues, a task complicated by the fact that Germany has never had a policy of limiting immigration.

JOHN: It’s part of our history of Nazi times. We were guilty, and we still feel guilty, especially when it comes to minorities and to accepting people who are persecuted, and once we were, ourselves, able to give it, we could hardly say no, and now immigrants come, and they want to live in Germany, they want to be proud of this country, and the Germans themselves are not. So integration is difficult for these minorities.

POTTER: The government is now trying to help, offering subsidized language and culture classes for adults at a cost of about $200 million a year. But those who sign up don’t always come.

NADINE HASKE (German Language Teacher): Some of them, they’re not interested. But some of them, also, they have many problems here with immigration, problems that we can’t understand—problems with job, to find a job.

POTTER: The problems are all too apparent to Ender Cetin, who says Muslims want more than equal job opportunities. They want to feel truly accepted.

ENDER CETIN (Turkish-Islamic Union): We feel many, many attacks, not violence but in words, feel many, many kind of discrimination. This makes us also afraid a little bit. There’s a distance. That’s not so good for integration.

POTTER: Cetin was born in Germany but chose to retain his parents’ Turkish citizenship rather than give it up, as required by law, to become a German citizen. As a spokesman for the biggest mosque in Berlin, he now gives tours to school groups, hoping to make Islam seem less threatening.

CETIN: We have many, many questions also in these years and the questions are always the same. The question is—terrorism and Islam, can it be together?

ERDINC SINAC: Not every Muslim are terrorist, something like that, yeah? Sometimes in the TV it looks like that. Every Muslim looks like terrorist. It’s not true.

POTTER: Erdinc Sinac came here from Turkey at age five and recently became a German citizen.

SINAC: I go to school, learn very good German. For me it’s okay, and I have not problems.

POTTER: In the long term, Germany needs immigrants. The country’s birth rate is one of the lowest in Europe, the cost of its social programs among the highest.

JOHN: We have to consider these people as our future, too. They are—their children, the children of the immigrants, are our children, are the children in Germany, they are the children of everybody, and we have to care for them and look after them and give them a better education, give them a good education, so why shouldn’t they be successful? It’s everything in human nature that can make them successful, and we are a country that has money, and we have educators, so we should improve our system.

POTTER: But there’s a long way to go. Other Western democracies have similar problems, but a new study by an international economic group says Germany does about the worst job of providing equal opportunities for immigrants and their children.

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

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The Nobel citation praised what it called President Obama’s “extraordinary efforts” to strengthen international cooperation between peoples. It said his vision is founded in hope and the concept that “those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values that are shared by the majority of the world’s populations.” At the White House Friday (October 9), Obama called the award “a call to action.”

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (speaking at the White House): These challenges can’t be met by any one leader or any one nation, and that’s why my administration’s worked to establish a new era of engagement in which all nations must take responsibility for the world we seek.

Obama at the United Nations

LAWTON: Obama began sounding those themes during the 2008 presidential campaign. He captured global attention with a speech in Berlin.

PRESIDENT OBAMA (speaking in Berlin): In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help us make it right, has become all too common. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together.

LAWTON: After Obama’s election, he began changing the tone of American rhetoric on the world stage, emphasizing cooperation rather than confrontation, and then in June, his dramatic speech seeking a new relationship with the Muslim world:

PRESIDENT OBAMA (speaking in Cairo): One based on mutual interest and mutual respect and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap and share common principles, principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

LAWTON: And just last month at the United Nations, Obama invited the world community to join in helping him to make his vision a reality.

PRESIDENT OBAMA (speaking at the UN): For the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the hope of human beings…the belief that the future belongs to those who would build and not destroy; the confidence that conflicts can end and a new day can begin.

ABERNETHY: Kim, and the reaction from the religious community?

LAWTON: There’s been a lot of reaction from religious groups, really across the spectrum, many of them praising Obama but also noting that a lot of work still needs to be done to achieve this vision that he was awarded for. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop, himself a Nobel winner, said that it shows that Obama has really changed the temperature of the world, and everybody, he said, is more hopeful. The Vatican also praised Obama, noting his commitment to peace in the Middle East and also his fight against nuclear weapons.

ABERNETHY: And that is becoming more and more favored by a lot of people in the religious community, isn’t it?

LAWTON: There seems to be a lot of momentum in the religious world around that issue. Obama has been talking a lot about ridding the world of nuclear weapons, and we’ve seen movements—Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams—but interesting to me even in the evangelical community. Evangelicals are calling this a pro-life issue, and so there is a movement for their campaigning against nuclear weapons as well.

ABERNETHY: And a lot of people have been saying, haven’t they, that this is an award not only for what—for the tone that has been created so far, but also and particularly for what might be ahead.

LAWTON: Exactly, and it’s interesting to me that Obama has really included the religious community in that work, and every single one of his speeches on the international stage, where he talks about creating this vision of a new world, he explicitly mentions religion and the fact that he wants to see religion not be a force for division and violence, but for peace, for bringing people together and for sharing common values for the good of the world.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: This past week in Washington, the administration’s top political, military, and diplomatic leaders gathered to think through US options in Afghanistan. On October 7, the US will have been involved militarily in Afghanistan for eight years. What’s our mission there? Can it be achieved, and what are the moral dimensions of the debate? William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He brings to the discussion a strong grounding in the just war tradition. Bill, welcome.

WILLIAM GALSTON (Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution): Good to be here.

ABERNETHY: What can we say about what the mission in Afghanistan should be?

GALSTON: Well, we have to understand the mission in light of 9/11. The attack on the United States, which killed thousands of civilians, was conceived and launched by Al-Quaeda using Afghanistan as a base, with the Taliban government sheltering them, and the piece of the mission on which everyone agrees is the importance, the urgency, and the moral justification, the defensive justification, of making sure that Afghanistan cannot again serve as a base for terrorist attacks on the United States.

ABERNETHY: Okay, so what are the means to that end? How do we do it?

GALSTON: That’s one of the questions that’s being debated in Washington right now, and there are two basic options. Option number one is to try to create an Afghan government that is legitimate, enjoys the consent of the people, and has the capacity to prevent Al-Quaeda and other terrorist groups from acting on its territory. The other possibility is to abandon the hope of creating such a government on the grounds that we don’t have the capacity to do it, and focus instead on direct attacks on Al-Quaeda and other terrorists, using drones, using bombs…

ABERNETHY: In Pakistan as well as …

GALSTON: …and special forces, in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, absolutely.

ABERNETHY: And so can we do either of those?

GALSTON: That is a very important question, as we learned so painfully decades ago in Vietnam. It is wrong not to ask the question at the threshold, can we do what we want to do? It is immoral to send young people, young American men and women, to die in pursuit of an end that cannot be attained, and it is even worse if political leaders have good reason in advance to believe that the end that they are publicly declaring is unobtainable, and the worst of all is to use American troops for the immediate political advantage of the party of the administration in power.

ABERNETHY: One of the issues here is whether we can create the trust of the Afghan people in our ability to stay and do what’s necessary. Can they trust us to see it through?

GALSTON: That is a critical question, because by having anything to do with us in these remote villages they are risking their lives, and it would be wrong of us to send a signal that we’re in for the long haul and then leave our local allies in the lurch. Unfortunately, we have done that from time to time since the Second World War, and the results are never pretty, and the policy is never justified. If we tell people that they can depend on us, we’ve given a solemn promise on which they are wagering their lives, and we better honor that promise.

ABERNETHY: And so how do you come out, quickly? How do you come out on it?

GALSTON: I think that we have to go forward, and I have reluctantly concluded that an investment of additional troops represents the best way forward. Others that I respect differ with that conclusion.

ABERNETHY: William Galston of the Brookings Institution, many thanks.

GALSTON: My pleasure.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Jakarta looks like any other modern Asian capital, but here, alongside the glittering office towers, you’ll also find imposing houses of worship. At the Istiqlal mosque recently, about 10,000 worshipers gathered for Friday noon prayer. It’s part of a religious revival that’s been taking place alongside a booming economy in recent decades. It is visible in mosques—and in malls. At this crowded shopping center, the most popular garment seems to be the head scarf.

INDONESIAN WOMAN: I’m here because Islam tells women to wear the scarf.

Dewi Fortuna Anwar

DE SAM LAZARO: This 40-year-old accountant began covering her hair three years ago.

INDONESIAN WOMAN: I feel ashamed, because I should have been wearing it since I was young, but at least I am wearing it now.

DE SAM LAZARO: Islam is making a comeback in Indonesia along with democracy that began 10 years ago. For years after independence from the Dutch in 1945, and then under decades of Suharto’s dictatorship, religion was officially tolerated at best.

DR. DEWI FORTUNA ANWAR (Indonesian Institute of Sciences): Islam and the traditional, customary laws were regarded as being backward and primarily blamed for, you know, the defeat for many Muslim countries under European rule, so that many of the earlier nationalist leaders, many of the educated elite, in fact, turned their back on religion, and among the younger generation there seems to be a greater willingness both to be openly religious and to be modern and educated at same times. I think maybe this is not just a search for greater spiritual anchor, but also I think it’s greater self-confidence.

DE SAM LAZARO: She and others say this growth of religious expression is spawned by the new democratic freedoms. It’s neither fundamentalist nor militant, notwithstanding recent terrorist incidents. Bombings in two Jakarta hotels killed nine people last July, and a 2002 attack in the tourist haven of Bali killed more than 200. But religion scholar Ulil Abdalla, with the liberal Islamic Youth Association, says such extremism is not widespread.

ULIL ABDALLA (Islamic Youth Association): For some people, Islam as practiced in this country is corrupted. Movies and food and, you know, lifestyle and so forth, it’s pretty much influenced by the American cultures. So when radical Islamic ideologies was introduced by some activists to Indonesia, it appealed to young people, but that’s, you know, the appeal is limited to a fringe in the society. It’s not a predominant trend.

Ulil Abdalla

DE SAM LAZARO: The more accurate gauge, he says, is Indonesia’s recent election, in which secular incumbent [president] Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won easily. Islamist parties, which had surged to 40 percent of the vote in 2004, lost ground, to less than 30 percent.

ULIL ABDALLA: Some people feared that if democracy, if the democratic space is opened it will allow Islamist party to dominate the arena. That is not true.

DE SAM LAZARO: Significantly, the reaction of the Islamist and other parties after the election indicates a commitment to democracy, says Anies Baswedan, a scholar of political Islam.

ANIES BASWEDAN (Paramadina University): We have around 40 parties. Only nine were able to gain seats in the house, yet we do not see significant problems from supporters who are not having their parties in the house. Acceptance to political result, democratic result, is very important.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says Indonesians, especially the 14 percent who survive on less than a dollar a day, have much more pragmatic concerns—food prices, the economy in general, and corruption—even voters who’d like to impose stricter Islamic law or sharia.

MARTA: From what I understand about Islamic states, the people live in prosperity, and the law is enforced very strictly. Those who steal, those who are corrupt, they cut off their hand, rather than here, where people who can bribe judges and police get away with things.

DE SAM LAZARO: Yet Marta, who like many Indonesians uses just one name, voted for the secular president. So did his neighbor, Samsuddin, who praises a government initiative that’s helped the poor.

SAMSUDDIN: Number one is cash for poor families, and the second is cheap rice. We get $10 a month in cash and 15 kilos of rice. We are a Muslim family, but we are not that strict. I voted for the party that is already helping people. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Islamic or not.

Anies Baswedan

DE SAM LAZARO: That kind of sentiment has moved Islamist parties to the center.

ANIES BASWEDAN: People understand now, campaigning, that “we are Muslims, we are an Islamic party, this is a sharia platform” does not sell. People ask, “Tell me what else, tell me in reality, what will you deliver beyond the slogans?”

FAHRI HAMZAH (Member of Parliament): We don’t name it sharia, because if you name it sharia people then from beginning suspicious to see.

DE SAM LAZARO: Fahri Hamzah is a Member of Parliament with the most successful Islamist party, called Prosperity and Justice, which joined the ruling coalition government. Although it once campaigned for Islamic law and more conservative women’s attire, Hamzah says they are happy to govern by consensus in a liberal democratic framework.

FAHRI HAMZAH: We are an Islamic party, but what we talk about Islam is Islam as the universal value, because we believe every religion, you know, inspired by God. We follow this direction that anti-corruption is Islamic agenda, clean government is Islamic agenda, you know, welfare, manage our economy, open economy, you know, liberalize our economy is one of the, you know, good agenda.

DE SAM LAZARO: That interpretation might well have its roots in the history of Islam in this vast, diverse archipelago.

DR. DEWI FORTUNA ANWAR: We are used to living in differences. Indonesia is composed of islands, over 17,000 islands and over 700 different ethnic groups with different languages, different cultural traditions. Islam came to Indonesia fairly late, from 12th century up, mostly through traders and Sufi teachers. They found Indonesia already very rich layers of cultures, and to be accepted a new belief, a new religion would have to adapt to local circumstances from the beginning. I think that was the case when Hinduism came here and when Buddhism came here and then when Islam came here, when Christianity also came here.

Fahri Hamzah

DE SAM LAZARO: So even though it’s 85 percent Muslim today, Islam here reflects Indonesia’s polyglot culture, readily evident in architecture, language, even in the mall scarf shops.

YUDI TOZA (Shop Owner): We believe in Indonesia that Islam is more modern, more moderate. People who wear the plain dress, it’s not our way.

ROSA LESTARI (Shop Clerk): It will look strange if an Indonesian woman wore that kind of plain clothes, especially nowadays. They probably think you are a terrorist’s wife.

DE SAM LAZARO: Shop owner, saleswoman, and customer told us there’s no contradiction between Islam and fashion, that the notion of a plainly dressed, fully covered woman is—foreign. Shopping here was Nur Inani, who was buying for customers in her own clothing business in the island of Sumatra.

NUR INANI: Mostly they are looking for clothes this long and this long, which is basically covering the butt and the arms. I look for the dress first, and then I will find the matching scarf, the color, the style.

DE SAM LAZARO: Terrorist incidents aside, Indonesia is enjoying a period of stability rarely seen in its independent history. Indonesians are free to choose their government, and they are free to pursue religion, and they’ve made it clear in elections that they want to pursue each separately, that is, to keep religion out of government.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Jakarta.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: In Jerusalem’s Old City, the Spafford Children’s Center is a welcome oasis from the turbulence that is all too present here. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital, and the ongoing conflict can take a heavy toll on the city’s children. Located in the Arab section of Jerusalem, the Spafford Children’s Center tries to help Muslim and Christian Palestinian kids deal with the trauma.

DR. JANTIEN DAJANI (Spafford Children’s Center CEO): I always say there is hardly anyone in the Palestinian society that is not traumatized.

LAWTON: The center is run by Dr. Jantien Dajani, a Dutch pediatrician who came here 35 years ago. Back then, the center provided medical services for East Jerusalem’s children, as it had since the 1920’s. But center leaders realized they were dealing with problems that went beyond the physical. David duPlantier, dean of Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral in New Orleans, is on the Spafford Children’s Center board.

REV. DAVID DUPLANTIER (Spafford Children’s Center Board Member): So it was a chance to really strengthen the health of the children, not just in the medical sense, but in the psychological and social sense.

LAWTON: About 400 children up to age 18 come through the center every week for after-school activities and Friday sessions. The center also sponsors summer camps and special cultural programs. The children learn skills to help them in future jobs, things like computer and English. Everything has an educational component, even the most uproarious game. There’s play therapy, art therapy, and drama therapy, all designed to help the children deal with trauma and stress they may not even realize they have. A psychologist comes in several times a week for one-on-one sessions, and there is also group counseling.

Dr. DAJANI: And what we try to do is to create in the center several safe areas, safe rooms where they can say anything, and it will not come back to them.

LAWTON: Dajani’s philosophy is to keep the kids busy with positive activities so they won’t get pulled into drug abuse or violence, common problems among Palestinian youths. She tries to teach them to make the best of their circumstances, no matter how difficult those circumstances are.

Dr. DAJANI: I always say I cannot change for you the situation we are living in. That’s impossible. That needs political solutions from high up. But at least what I can try is to change a bit your perception of the situation.

LAWTON: The center itself has a colorful past, tracing its roots to Horatio and Anna Spafford, an evangelical couple from Chicago. After suffering heavy losses in that city’s Great Fire of 1871, Horatio sent Anna and their four daughters to Europe. While en route their steamship, the Ville du Havre, sank after colliding with another ship.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: Before the Titanic, I think it was the most significant cruise ship disaster, and the daughters all perished.

LAWTON: Anna sent Horatio a telegram which said, “Saved alone. What shall I do?”

Rev. DUPLANTIER: He’s heartbroken to find out his daughters have perished, and so he takes a boat over to meet Anna, and when the captain shows him roughly the place where the shipwreck had taken place, he was inspired to write a poem that later became the hymn “It Is Well With My Soul.”

WINTLEY PHIPPS (singing): “When sorrows like sea billows roll…”

LAWTON: “It is Well” remains one of the most popular Christian hymns, sung in churches around the world and recorded by multiple gospel artists.

Mr. PHIPPS (singng):  “…it is well with my soul.”

LAWTON: After their tragedies, the Spaffords decided to move to the Holy Land. They believed the end of the world was near and that Jesus would soon come back to Earth on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. The Spaffords and a small group of fellow believers called the Overcomers wanted to be close by when that happened. As they waited, they established a commune in East Jerusalem that became known as the American Colony.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: They weren’t there to try to convert people. That was one of the unique things about them. They didn’t proselytize. They said their prayers, they welcomed people, they offered food when they had it. But they were not there to try to convert other people, which was very different than especially evangelical Christianity in that period.

LAWTON: The American Colony eventually moved to the former palace of an Arab pasha. Jews, Christians and Muslims were all welcome there.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: From the absolute beginning they were generous, they were known to share their food. They really were thought to be a place of hospitality and, you know, Christianity at its core, it really is a faith of hospitality.

LAWTON: But there was also controversy. After Horatio died in 1888, Anna took over leadership of the colony. Her style was authoritarian, and she imposed a rigid set of rules.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: She kind of dictated how life would be. Certainly they were unique and different than mainline Christianity of today in how they lived. They were very disciplined. There was a period of time where men and women, even if they were married, apparently lived separately.

LAWTON: DuPlantier says after Anna died in 1923 the religious zeal of the colony changed.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: In any kind of community like that it’s always going to be a challenge to sustain that over a period of time. So I think partly that’s why the religious fervor fell away in the next generation, because you know it was very much based around the personal faith of Anna and Horatio.

LAWTON: But the charitable work of the colony continued. Anna’s daughter Bertha focused on caring for children.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: That began kind of the ministry that evolved, from taking in orphans to helping with health care and, you know, over a period of time turned into a hospital and then evolved over time into the Spafford Center as it is now.

LAWTON: The Spaffords’ compound has become the famous American Colony Hotel, which has been named one of the leading small hotels of the world. The hotel provides key support to the children’s center. The Spafford Children’s Center is just inside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City near the Damascus Gate. It’s in the house where Horatio and Anna Spafford settled after they arrived here from Chicago in 1881. The house eventually became the headquarters for the Spafford family’s charitable works. Today, the center is not explicitly religious, although it has many faith-based connections. Dr. Dajani says, like their predecessors, they serve people of all faiths, and they try to teach the children religious tolerance.

Dr. DAJANI: We want them to be tolerant for each other and for different opinions. We take them to the mosque, we take them to the Holy Sepulcher and to other holy places. They are always amazed at each other’s beauty.

LAWTON: For duPlantier, the lasting legacy of the colony is the joy he sees in the children who come to the center, a testament of hope, he says, that turmoil and tragedy need not prevail.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: To see the joy that is just prevalent in the folks really has renewed and continues to renew my knowledge that God finds a way. No matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, God finds a way to redeem them if we look.

LAWTON: And that, he says, makes things well with his soul.

I’m Kim Lawton in Jerusalem.