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.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: As Congress assembles a health care reform package, a longtime expert on medical ethics writes in a recent issue of Commonweal magazine that there has been an important idea missing from the debate—the concept of the common good. The expert is Daniel Callahan, founder and now president emeritus of the Hastings Center. His new book is Taming the Beloved Beast.  He joins us from New York.

Mr. Callahan, welcome. How do you define the common good?

DANIEL CALLAHAN (Senior Researcher and President Emeritus, The Hastings Center): I mean by the common good our life together, the stranger and the neighbor, the friend we know and the person—people we don’t know. The common good I think of as essentially a social concept. Aristotle said human beings are social animals, and I think that is true, and it seems to me that as we think about our own life, either in politics or health reform, we have to think not only of ourselves and our family but also of the neighbor, the stranger, the person we don’t know, and somehow knit that together into some meaningful whole.

ABERNETHY: And was there a time in this country’s history when the idea of the common good was very strong, very prevalent?

CALLAHAN: Well, in a curious sense, its not like—Europe has a much stronger sense of the common good, in great part because of their wars and other terrors they have gone through. In this country I think there has been ambivalence and uncertainty about the common good. We really—freedom has been our main catchword, the main value we have gone by, justice a little bit less so. But the idea of working together for the common good is something—it certainly is come at in times of warfare, but it’s sporadic. It often doesn’t mark our common life together, and a great number of people really, I think, are just enormously ambivalent. They want to help the poor, but of course they don’t want to raise their taxes. They’d like health care reform and they see the need for cutting costs, but they don’t want to give up anything themselves. So we are very torn on the common good, I think.

ABERNETHY: Is that why it has been so difficult to put together health care reform, because nobody wants to give up anything?

CALLAHAN: That’s a very powerful part of it. Now some of it is different politics. Republicans and Democrats differ on the role of government. But it is very striking that even the Democrats, who started out talking about cost control, immediately backed down and said of course we can’t take anything away from people. But, of course, we can’t control costs unless we do, unfortunately, take some things away from people.

ABERNETHY: And that’s the idea in your new book, Taming the Beloved Beast, isn’t it, that technology, medical technology, has become so important, but also so expensive, that there have got to be some kind of limits, some kind of controls. Is that right?

CALLAHAN: Exactly right. Technology is probably the main thing that drives up health care costs in this country. Everybody loves it. Doctors love it, patients love it, and it’s part of American culture, and it’s done wonderful things. It keeps us alive longer, it keeps us healthier. Yet, at the same time, the cost of it all is beginning to really corrode, even destroy, the heath care system. It’s one of those wonderful cases of when is enough enough, and when does a good thing turn into a bad thing?

ABERNETHY: And, very quickly, are we going to get a good, in your judgment, a good health care reform?

CALLAHAN: I think we’ll get a good reform in the sense that we’ll probably see a much enlarged coverage of the uninsured, and we’ll see certain changes, improvements in health care for children and Medicaid. At the same time, we will not be able to control costs under the present bill, and I think that’s going to create enormous problems in the very immediate future.

ABERNETHY: Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Center, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, a special report on the rebuilding of Salt Lake City. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, are building an enormous new downtown development—high end shops, condos, and offices. Is that emphasis on wealth and consumerism compatible with Mormon values of modesty and thrift? Does it leave any room for the poor, or for the variety that helps make up vibrant city life? Lucky Severson reports from Salt Lake City.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: By the looks of things, downtown Salt Lake City has found the pot of gold at the end of the stimulus rainbow. Where else would you find 1600 construction workers on a project so immense it will transform the core of a city? But this is not stimulus money, not even one cent of local taxpayers’ money. This project, known as City Creek Center, is funded entirely by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, and their development partners. Stephen Goldsmith was the city planning director during the Salt Lake Olympics.

STEPHEN GOLDSMITH (Associate Professor of Architecture and Planning, University of Utah): This is unprecedented. This is the single largest private development project going on in the United States today.

SEVERSON: When it’s completed in 2012, the new city center, directly across the street from the church’s temple, will include millions of square feet of retail and office space. Only the church knows the price tag, and they declined to be interviewed for our story, but the project’s cost is expected to top $1.5 billion, a price they’re willing to pay to transform Salt Lake City. Natalie Gochnour is chief operating officer of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce.

NATALIE GOCHNOUR (Chief Operating Officer, Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce): We have the headquarters of an international religion. We’ve hosted the world in the Olympics. So we want to build a world city.

SEVERSON: Outsiders often don’t know that, in the city itself, a majority of residents are not Mormon, and some locals are concerned that the diversity of a vibrant downtown will give way to a squeaky-clean Mormon enclave in City Creek Center. Daniel Darger owns the Blue Iguana Restaurant not far from Temple Square.

DANIEL DARGER (Attorney and Owner, Blue Iguana Restaurant): There’s no question in my mind it’s going to fundamentally change the nature and the whole culture of that part of downtown. I think primarily their goal is to get a lot of their members here and to gain control of not only the politics, which they already have, and the economy, which they already have, but the atmosphere of the whole downtown.

SEVERSON: Before the City Creek project got underway, not many would have thought of Salt Lake as a world city. It was losing its population to the burbs. Downtown was becoming a ghost town, and that wasn’t good for business or the church’s image. Elbert Peck is the former editor of Sunstone magazine, an independent journal for Mormon intellectuals.

ELBERT PECK (Former Editor, Sunstone Magazine): When I was a child, I remember coming downtown with my grandmother, and she’d walk all of Main Street stopping off at every little shop and every little boutique. It was a wonderful, vibrant downtown.

SEVERSON: But in the late ’60s, Salt Lake began to face the suburban flight that was sweeping the nation. In an effort to reverse the trend, the church developed two downtown malls on land across from Temple Square. [CORRECTION: While the church did develop the ZCMI Center, Crossroads Plaza was developed by Crossroads Plaza Associates, an investor group not affiliated with the church. The church acquired Crossroads Plaza in 2003.] Rather than revitalizing the street life, though, the enclosed malls drew shoppers into the parking garage and then sent them right back to the suburbs, leaving the rest of downtown in bad shape.

PECK: Salt Lake City was dying, and the city was becoming seedy, and image and promotion is very important to the missionary work of the church.

SEVERSON: The church is again trying to revive the streets around Temple Square, and now to get people out of their cars they’ve got TRAX, an increasingly popular light rail system that was built ten years ago. Ryan McFarland is the economic development manager for the city’s mass transit system.

RYAN MCFARLAND (Transit and Economic Development Manager, UTA): A transit-oriented development is just this. It is a walkable community that’s typically higher density and that provides for all of your needs.

SEVERSON: Strongly opposed at first, TRAX up and running is now warmly embraced, and the transit system is expanding with 70 miles of new track, some of which is federally funded. The church strongly encourages its downtown employees to use mass transit, and the new development will be serviced by two TRAX stations.

MCFARLAND: This is the core of downtown. This is the City Center station. This will be the central business district where people don’t necessarily need their car. You can walk to the supermarket. You can walk to the restaurant you want to go to.

SEVERSON: From the beginning, Mormons have been pioneers in the field of city planning. Even before Joseph Smith was assassinated, they planned and built the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, which at the time rivaled the metropolis of Chicago, only Nauvoo was designed around the church’s temple, which is center to Mormon theology. Salt Lake City was designed in the same fashion. The new plan, though, is a little different. It incorporates the church’s values and old-fashioned capitalism. Jason Mathis is the executive director of the Downtown Alliance.

JASON MATHIS (Executive Director, Downtown Alliance): My sense is that right now people are pretty enthusiastic about this, and even some of the critics in the past have said, “Well, we recognize this is going to be a really good thing for our community.”

SEVERSON: It’s unlikely that a development of this magnitude would be possible in any other US city, because no one organization owns so much downtown property, and that will include satellite campuses for two church schools. As the church’s influence expands in Salt Lake City, the interests of the non-Mormon community often conflict with those of the church, creating what Stephen Goldsmith calls a “we-they” divide.

GOLDSMITH: The community needs to understand that we do have a certain Vaticanization, if you will, of this end of town. The changing demographics of Salt Lake City, just Salt Lake City by itself, really does create a “we-they.” There’s more of a “we-they” in this community than I’ve seen in my lifetime.

SEVERSON: The “we-they” divide became more pronounced a few years ago, when the church purchased property adjacent to Temple Square and converted it into a private park known as the Main Street Plaza. That controversy grew to a full boil earlier this year when two men were found kissing in the plaza and were evicted by church security guards.

GOLDSMITH: When we privatize the public way, which is the single most important thing in the city is that democratic space of streets and sidewalks—when we lose that, we begin to lose some of that democracy. Remember, this is now private property. City Creek Center will basically control time, place, and manner of anything that happens interior to that project. So if a couple who happens to be same-sex is kissing each other after buying a wedding ring, that could be a problem.

SEVERSON: Critics worry that the church’s social policies, such as abstention from alcohol, will dictate the city’s culture. Jason Mathis says Salt Lake is not Las Vegas and doesn’t want to be, but that people here genuinely want to welcome other people.

MATHIS: It’s something that we’re really paying attention to, really trying to break down those barriers. I want people who might come downtown and go to a bar to also feel perfectly comfortable experiencing Temple Square, in the way that Parisians might experience the Cathedral of Notre Dame whether they’re Catholic or not.

SEVERSON: Even though the city has a non-Mormon mayor, and non-members outnumber members, Salt Lake is surrounded by suburbs and towns that are heavily Mormon—people who will come to the new downtown and who rarely oppose what the church proposes, even when it hurts. That includes Janice Heilner.

JANICE HEILNER (Store Owner): When we go to the temple, everyone takes their street clothes off. They have locker rooms and you can change into a white outfit.

SEVERSON: Janice operated a successful store across from Temple Square called Dressed In White until the church moved her to another location to make room for the City Creek project.

HEILNER: I was disappointed, but I could see the greater good in the whole thing. I know we were a casualty of the whole downtown redevelopment, but I realize that downtown needed a face lift. The only reservation is, will I be able to go back? I mean, you know, a new mall is going to cost a lot of money. I might not be able to afford the rent.

SEVERSON: Her reservation is probably realistic. City Creek, after all, is a for-profit, private development which favors national chains and allows it to bypass the affordable housing requirements of public developments. Higher end condos overlooking Temple Square could go for as high as $2 million.

PECK: They’re trying to make it pay for itself, first of all, because the church doesn’t like to put in money that it’s going to lose. You can’t fault them for that. But it’s going to be a high-end mall, and it’s going to be high-end apartments. But there needs to be addressed low-income housing in the city, that’s for sure.

SEVERSON: Stephen Goldsmith, the former director of city planning, is now an associate professor at the University of Utah who teaches a class about the ethics of shaping communities. He says he sees a disconnect between the business side of the church, which is constructing 900,000 square feet of retail space, and the values the church constantly preaches.

GOLDSMITH: Some of those values are frugality, modesty, humility, and it’s interesting to see how a temple to consumerism somehow is aligned with those values. What church do you know of that’s building retail space any place else in the world?

PECK: Within the church, within the scriptures, there’s a strong river of theology that is very anti-materialistic, and so there’s a conflict there. It’s the same conflict that Christians have from the New Testament, and Mormonism has pretty well made its peace with the modern consumer, capitalistic, materialistic society, and Mormons have to deal with that individually.

SEVERSON: There are parts of the development that almost everyone can agree on. City Creek is a green project, with green buildings, recyclable water, and even though the recession has hurt most of the country, the City Creek project has sheltered Salt Lake from the worst of it.

GOUCHNOUR: You know, people say there’s no safe harbor from this recession, but in downtown Salt Lake City there is. We’re on high ground here.

MATHIS: I think, though, the church doesn’t want to lose money on this, but I think that their motives have much more to do with being good community stewards, with creating a community that is going to last for the next hundred years.

SEVERSON: As for those who have concerns—

GOLDSMITH: God grant me the strength to know the things I can change and the things I can’t. I think this is a time for the community to say let’s develop the kind of city that we want. Let them develop the kind of city that they want, and maybe we can shake hands some place along the way.

SEVERSON: The church has said that the money for City Creek will come from investments and not from members’ tithes. Funding for the project was reportedly set aside before construction began.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Salt Lake City.

ABERNETHY: That story was a collaboration between this program and public broadcasting’s Blueprint America project.

Major support for Blueprint America is provided by:

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Another gay rights issue that has divided people of faith is hate crime legislation. President Obama signed an expansion of the hate crime law that makes it a federal offense to attack people because of their sexual orientation. Some faith leaders welcomed the hate crime expansion, calling it a human rights victory. But others fear it would inhibit religious speech, even though the law explicitly says no one will be prosecuted for their beliefs or speech.

Here to examine the issue is David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times who has covered religious liberty questions. David, welcome. Why do what appear to be a fair number of religious conservatives think this new law or this extension of the law is wrong?

DAVID KIRKPATRICK (New York Times Staff Writer): Well, if you believe yourself to be engaged in a culture war, a part of which is about the nature of sexuality and homosexuality, then you want to convey to your children, you want to teach your children that homosexuality is a sin. It’s something to be avoided. It’s not a natural kind of behavior. And now comes along a statute that is going to say homosexuals are a kind of person worthy of not only special respect but special protection. You’re going to see that as a defeat.

ABERNETHY: But what about seeing it as a threat to free speech, even to what a pastor might say in the pulpit? Some people have said pastors could be prosecuted for preaching the biblical view of homosexuality and other things like that. What about that?

KIRKPATRICK: That’s overblown. Okay, I mean, clearly this does not suspend the First Amendment, and there’s nobody, I think, on either side of the US Senate or House of Representatives that intends to see preachers locked in jail. But we get overblown rhetoric on the left and the right, and the reason why this particular overblown rhetoric finds some purchase in the minds of people out there is because there is an element of thought involved. You know, what a hate crime does is it adds to the penalty to an aggressive or criminal act if the person who perpetrated it was motivated by a special disdain for the person they’re hitting. You know, if someone is standing outside of a bar saying “I hate gay people” and then slugs a gay person, that’s a hate crime, and it does have something to do with their reasoning and their thinking, so it’s not ludicrous to think that a kind of thought is being penalized here.

ABERNETHY: And even that it might apply to a sermon?

KIRKPATRICK: Well, that goes a little bit far, but, you know, suppose a pastor gave a sermon about how terrible sodomy is, and then later that day he happened to get into a fight with a gay man. Well, he could be in trouble.

ABERNETHY: But what about just a parishioner who heard a sermon and then went out and did something? Would that, then—would the pastor then be held responsible for that?

KIRKPATRICK: I’m not a lawyer, but that seems pretty far-fetched to me. However, on the other hand, you know, if you’re an active participant in a congregation that spends a lot of time talking about what a sin sodomy is, and then you happen to get in an altercation with a gay man, I think that that could plausibly raise questions, and if you want to, you know, if we’re going to try to be as sympathetic as we can to the people who are concerned about this, let’s look at college campuses. You know, that’s a place where, within the context of the campus, people do regulate free speech, and they do regulate hate speech, and I think that there are some people who think, well, goodness, I don’t want my son or daughter to end up at a secular college where by reading certain passages of the Bible they’re going to trigger, you know, speech codes. So they’re not—it’s not completely irrational to feel like there’s something at stake here.

ABERNETHY: David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times. Many thanks.

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.”

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.