LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Head Start kids, three and four years old in Baltimore. They’re singing now, but will they be singing when the much-ballyhooed sequestration fully kicks in? Come July this particular Head Start program will lose over 100 thousand dollars in government funding.

ERIC STEGMAN: It’s an enormous setback and I think a lot of what we’re seeing now is that sequestration is real.

SEVERSON: Eric Stegman is an analyst for the Center For American Progress and an expert on sequestration and poverty.

STEGMAN: You’ve got so many different cuts hitting families from so many different directions it’s going to be really hard for families to stay on their feet especially if they have trouble finding employment and other things they need to do to support their family.

SEVERSON: The sequestration is the law approved by Congress and the president to cut 85 billion dollars out of federal spending. The cuts will affect only discretionary spending, like defense, government agencies and a lot of programs that will impact low income families in particular. It’s the cities that will bear the brunt of the cuts and few big cities will be harder hit than Baltimore, Maryland.

MAYOR STEPHANIE ROLLINS BLAKE: All of the things that are put in place to hold up the families are, you know, slowly one by one being pulled out.

SEVERSON: This is Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rollins Blake.

MAYOR BLAKE: Every time we talk about a cut you’re talking about many people who don’t have an expensive lobby that is in Washington, DC. It’s an economic justice issue, a social justice issue, this is about what’s right for our country, and that we are a country that doesn’t just pretend to care about the vulnerable but that actually cares enough to do what’s right.

SEVERSON: Baltimore is by no means the poorest big city in the U.S. but it’s poorer than many. Bill McCarthy is the Executive Director of Catholic Charities in Maryland.

BILL McCARTHY: If you think about the city of Baltimore, 20 percent of our city lives in poverty. One of every four children in our city lives in poverty. We have an unemployment rate of about 11 percent. And if you go to segments of our city like West Baltimore the unemployment rate is 60 percent.

SEVERSON: There are a number of churches trying to help the poor in Maryland, but by far the largest aid organization is Catholic Charities with over 2000 employees and 15,000 volunteers like these working here at Our Daily Bread pantry that will serve over 300,000 meals this year. When paychecks run out, the line is a block long.

MAYOR BLAKE: Many of these people are the working poor. I mean coming out of the great recession has been tremendously difficult because you have people who had once been employed and many of those people found themselves out, you know trying to figure out what to do.

STEGMAN: Throughout the year, the average recipient of long term unemployment insurance is going to see their checks cut through the year by about $450 dollars and when you’re already living on very little and trying to find a job, you do end up going to the food banks and other places to get assistance.

McCARTHY: There’s a story behind every number, there’s a face behind every number. I see those faces everyday.

SEVERSON: The number of people in Baltimore waiting for public housing, which faces huge cuts, is already 35,000. Education for poor and disadvantaged kids will be cut several billion. Funding for public safety is on the chopping block.

MAYOR BLAKE: That would be devastating, you know, as we are finding the resources to become a safer city. We need more resources not less.

SEVERSON: Nationwide over 600,000 women and children will be cut from the special supplemental nutrition program. These are only a few of the hits on the poor. Cuts also for Meals on Wheels.

STEGMAN: For most of the recipients, this is the only food that they get. And I think another thing that people don’t understand is that Meals on Wheels is a program for very hungry low income seniors and people with disabilities.

SEVERSON: For people like Michelle Rositzky sequestration is like a train barreling down the track straight at her.

MICHELLE ROSITZKY: Ever since we heard about it, it’s been weighing on our mind and worried about it every single day, wake up and find out one day we won’t be able to bring our kids to Head Start and we have to worry about everything else.

SEVERSON: Each day she picks up her little girl Natalie from Head Start about 2 in the afternoon which allows both Michelle and her husband to work. Without Head Start, she would have to stay home. Funding for day care help for low income moms is also targeted.

ROSITZKY: Our bills are pretty big as everyone’s bills are. We won’t be able to pay our electric bill, we won’t be able to pay our water bill. It will be hard to make sure we have food in the house for the kids, and with four kids you know, it’s a lot.

MARY GUNNING: In the morning, when the children, some of the children when they come in, they’re very hungry. They will eat several bowls of cereal. I mean for a three-year old that’s fairly unusual. I mean they depend on us for the food.

SEVERSON: Mary Gunning is the director of St. Jerome’s Head Start program where Michelle brings Natalie. She’s already reduced her staff hours and other programs to meet the sequestration cuts.

GUNNING: I don’t think people understand already that, you know, you talk about being down to the bone, well we are, whatever is inside the marrow, that’s where we are. I mean we have made massive cuts in our program already while trying to still be able to retain services for families and children.

SEVERSON: Studies have shown that a greater percentage of kids who go through Head Start go on to college.

MAYOR BLAKE: The cuts that we’re making to the most vulnerable will have long term personal impact but they’ll have extremely long term economic impact if we don’t insure that someone graduates from high school then we should start to prepare for the likelihood of them being in the justice system and that’s far more expensive.

SEVERSON: When sequestration first became law, the intent was it could not be tampered with. That changed when air traffic controllers were forced to take a day off and there were flight delays, passenger complaints and Congress was just about to board airplanes to go home for recess. Suddenly, in a rare display of bipartisanship, Congress fixed the delays.

STEGMAN: It really says something about Congress’s priorities and I think a lot of struggling families in the country are asking Congress where are they in their priorities. Because air travelers are important but struggling families across the country are every bit as important.

MAYOR BLAKE: It seems almost trivial you know that that would rise to the level of requiring an emergency session while families in need, it seems like their voices go unheard.

McCARTHY: Our budget is a moral document, it sets those priorities in terms of what we value as a society as necessary and important. Whether it’s a project in the Defense Department or putting our airline traffic controllers back to work at the same schedule without considering the poor and those that are marginalized is frankly immoral and very concerning.

SEVERSON: Congress is now considering the possibility of tinkering with the defense budget so the sequestration won’t hurt critical Pentagon programs. There has been very little debate about easing the cuts on programs that are critical to the poor.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Baltimore.

BOB ABERNETHY: This commencement season, when graduates are encouraged to go out and change the world, we have a Belief and Practice segment on a man with a new graduate degree who wants to do nothing less than change the political climate of Washington, D.C. He is Mike McCurry, an old Washington hand, and we caught up with him last Monday as the Washington National Cathedral opened its doors for the commencement ceremony of the Wesley Theological Seminary.

Choir singing: “The glories of my God and King, the triumphs of his grace.”

ABERNETHY: Mike McCurry is a United Methodist who was press secretary for President Clinton at the White House in the 1990s. Later, he worked in public relations and also served on the board of the Wesley Theological Seminary.It was then that he decided to get a graduate degree, a Master of Arts, and try to change the way Washington works.

Commencement Ceremony Announcer: Michael D. McCurry, with honors.

MIKE McCURRY: i think the single biggest missing ingredient in our political system right now are real relationships of trust, you know, human relationships where people really think about and care about each other. And that’s right where the church has to be. To me, that’s what the church is about.

I’m a guy who comes out of the world of political communications and how we express things in the media. I think we have got to tone it down a lot.

I want to be very clear. We’re not talking about taking church dogma and putting that front and center in the way we do policy-making. We’re not saying there ought to be a theocracy here. But I think there are ways in which people who are guided by the spirit, and who have a deep respect and love for God, treat each other a little bit differently.

Part of the study of scripture is that business about loving your neighbor as yourself. Well, there’s not a whole lot of that kind of love in Washington. But we are a community, and I think there are ways and with various faith traditions—Christianity, obviously, in my case, but others as well can bring us to a point where there’s a little more spiritual bonding that can happen in this town.

ABERNETHY: I asked him whether he could imagine that happening in Congress.

McCURRY: It’s hard sometimes, you know, it would require a lot of prayer, probably.

ABERNETHY: Later, McCurry acknowledged his sense of mission.

McCURRY: I wanted to take courses at the seminary, first and frankly, out of intellectual curiosity. But the more I did it, the more I felt some sense of call, that God was putting on me a challenge to see if I could do something about this broken world of politics that I’ve worked in for so long, to do something to create a little more civil discourse in this country.

ABERNETHY: And that’s what you’re going to do?

McCURRY: That’s what I’m going to use my degree to do.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Amid the continuing investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing, President Obama this week spoke of the threat of self-radicalized individuals here in the US and the difficulty of identifying them. He said his counterterrorism team has discussed ways it can engage communities where such radicalization can occur. In recent years, American Muslim groups have launched their own efforts to combat extremism.

For more on this, I’m joined by our managing editor, Kim Lawton, and Haris Tarin. He directs the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Haris, welcome. The president referred to self-radicalizing. What—how does that work, and what can the Muslim community do to prevent it?

HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, the phenomenon of self-radicalization is where individuals who do not find a place in mainstream Muslim institutions, places like mosques and organizations, they don’t find a place for their fiery rhetoric, for their violent, extremist rhetoric, so they go online, and they listen to sermons, and they listen to individuals like Anwar al-Awlaki or Adam Gadahn or other folks who misinterpret the religion to give it a violent, violent ideology, and they fall prey to these individuals who are basically online predators, and they get influenced by these individuals to address their grievances through violence.

ABERNETHY: And then what can you do about it?

TARIN: I think what we can do, number one, is to ensure that there’s a counter-narrative, that there’s a narrative of life, of positivity, that even if you have a grievance or you have a disagreement on policy, whether domestic or international, you can address those policy grievances through civic and political engagement and change that— maybe not overnight, but eventually you have the power to change policy.

KIM LAWTON: I know the Muslim community has been trying to offer these kinds of counter-narratives. Has that just not worked, or what do you need to do differently in order to combat this online issue?

TARIN: Well, I think, you know, I said before, I think to overwhelming extent the American Muslim community has not fallen prey to this. It’s individuals who are radicalized online, but I think what needs to happen is that we need to ensure that we have a narrative that goes viral. A lot of these videos, they are very emotive. These sermons they use violence and gruesome images to tug at the emotion of young people. And so we also need to ensure that when we put out the counter-narrative it’s as savvy, it goes as viral and addresses the same issues and that we’re not afraid to address some of the same policy grievances that they address, but to make sure that the outcome is positive and not negative.

LAWTON: And how do you deal with the perception that many outsiders have that the more religious someone, a Muslim, gets, the more prone he or she is to being violent or being an extremist?

TARIN: Well, I think that notion, fortunately, is false. There’s a notion that the more religious you get it leads to acts of violence. The studies have shown that when people go through rigorous religious training and understanding, they’re less prone to violence, but that people who skip that religious understanding part and have an awakening and then go straight to politics, that’s where they become more prone to violence and twisted ideologies and perverted interpretations of the religion.

ABERNETHY: Is there a special role here for young people? I mean, the perpetrators are young. Does that invite, then, or say that the people who can best correct that are young people?

TARIN: The first thing you have to understand is a lot of young American Muslims, they deal with everything else that all young Americans are dealing with—college tuition, jobs, but there is a place for them to ensure that their peers on college campuses and youth groups are having a conversation that’s positive, that when they see a negative conversation that they step in, and they interfere and ensure that they move the conversation towards a more positive aspect.

ABERNETHY: O.K. Haris Tarin of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Kim Lawton, many thanks to you both.

TARIN: Thank you.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Now we have a conversation with Jim Wallis about his new book. It is called “On God’s Side,” and it’s an appeal to overcome the country’s problems by serving the common good. Wallis is a religious activist, preacher, and editor of Sojourners magazine. He joins us from New York. And our managing editor, Kim Lawton, is here with me in the studio. Jim, welcome.

JIM WALLIS (Sojourners): Welcome, Bob. Thank you.

ABERNETHY: What is your definition of the common good?

WALLIS: You know, people are asking me what the common good is and what it means to be on God’s side, and neither has certain answers, but I think they’re the right questions. Let me give you my favorite from the book. This is from Catholic social teaching. I’ll read it right from them: “The common good is the whole network of social conditions which enable humans and groups to flourish. All are responsible for all.” So I was taking a sabbatical to write this book and watching the news at night and saw we had forgot this idea of the common good, and yet that’s what our traditions tell us.

ABERNETHY: Jim, who says what the common good is?

WALLIS: Well, the common good is found in all of our faith traditions—definitions like the Catholic one there, the black churches. I found it back to John Chrysostom in the fourth century. So it’s deeply in all our traditions, and the moral foundation of it is to love your neighbor as yourself. Now, in secular democratic traditions, it’s also there in the Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. So it’s a fundamental principle of how you treat your neighbor, and then who your neighbor is.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Jim, one thing I’ve noticed is that different people will say they have different ways of reaching the common good. So, for example, in some of the budget debates that I know you were involved in, you had some people saying the common good is served this way, and other people still using that language but coming up with a very different policy position. How do you reconcile that?

WALLIS: Mike Gerson, who’s a Washington Post columnist and was a George Bush speech writer, has a comment on the book. He says, “Jim and I might disagree on some policy decisions, but his call for an active consideration of the common good is more timely and urgent than ever.” I’m saying let’s have that debate. On the principle of the budget that you raise, the principle from all our traditions is you have to protect the poor and vulnerable, so you can’t reduce a deficit by increasing poverty. People on both sides could make that pledge, and then we could find a way to reform the public sector and the private sector in ways that protect the poor and vulnerable.

ABERNETHY: Jim, within many of the churches there has been a kind of a split between those who emphasize salvation and, on the other hand, those who emphasize trying to build the kingdom on Earth now. Where are you on this? On both sides?

WALLIS: Well, I’m an evangelical, which means I want to take what the Bible says seriously. And then you look at the early chapters of Matthew, you see a kingdom breaking in that’s supposed to change the world and us with it. So in the book I’ve got a long conversation about your question. It says the kind of Jesus we believe in will determine the kind of Christians we’re going to be. So I’m critical of what I call the atonement-only Gospel, where there’s no kingdom, there’s no teaching, there’s no change of anything but ourselves. That’s not what the scriptures teach, but that’s certainly in the church I grew up in. So a balanced—the change as individuals, I want to be changed in my life, but also we’re supposed to change the world. Jesus came to change the world and us with it.

LAWTON: And Jim, along those lines, in your book you do talk a lot about that the common good is served not just through policies and politics, but also in individual decisions people make in their families, their lives. How does that—how does how I live my life, in my personal life, affect the common good?

WALLIS: I’m so glad you asked that question, because a lot of people say I can’t change Washington or Wall Street. I’m saying the choices we make about how we treat our neighbors, those around us, our poor neighbors, those we may have to reach out to, our immigrant neighbors, our Muslim neighbors, our gay neighbors—those choices will change the culture. We’re seeing the one place Washington’s getting it right is around immigration reform, and why? Because from the outside they’re hearing the faith community say this, for us, is a moral issue, it’s a Gospel issue, and it’s changing our politics. We’re going to get that. All we’re going to get this year, I think, is that, but it’s going to happen because of the common good being practiced outside of Washington. It comes last to Washington.

ABERNETHY: But is it a movement, Jim, that you’re trying to put together, a movement that essentially is a national lobby, or is it, as Kim was talking about, what people do in their own lives?

WALLIS: No, it’s what people do in their own lives. Like William Wilberforce led the abolishment movement, but it wasn’t the parliamentarians. It was the movement that swept the country. So what we do in our own lives, and so I mean households. I got whole chapters on being dads and moms and parents, and I’m a little league baseball coach. Those kind of life choices are what build social movements, and that’s the only thing that ever changes politics. What we do in our own lives is what the book is about, and how that can change politics and culture, and just the first sentence of the book says, “Our life together can be better,” and that’s the hunger I think people are feeling now.

LAWTON: And Jim, just very briefly, you’ve been talking about some of these ideas for a long time. Other people have been talking about the common good. What makes you think things are different now, that’s there a new receptivity now?

WALLIS: Well, first of all, watching the political narrative at night after being all day on the sabbatical I took—quiet and reflection and study and writing—the more I watched it at night, I wasn’t engaging it, the depressing—it was polarized, paralyzed, hate, fear, anger, and I saw we’ve lost something very fundamental. So I think this can take us back to this ancient idea that can bring us together and find common ground for the common good, and especially a new generation wants to give their lives for the common good. Our audiences are half under thirty everywhere I go, and they want to give their lives for this, and that’s what I think’s going to make a difference long term.

ABERNETHY: Jim, thank you very much.

WALLIS: My pleasure.

ABERNETHY: Jim Wallis. The book is “On God’s Side. “

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: In the battleground state of Ohio, volunteer Monette Richards is making calls for state and local Democratic candidates. She wants to encourage liberal voters, and especially those who support abortion rights, to get out to the polls next month.

MONETTE RICHARDS (Activist): We get the government that we deserve because we get the government that we vote for. And right now it’s not good enough for me.

LAWTON: Richards is part of a growing force on the political scene: the 46 million Americans who say they are not affiliated with a religion. Their numbers have been rising rapidly, and they are heavily Democratic.

PROF. JOHN GREEN (University of Akron): Something like a quarter of people who identify with the Democrats or lean towards the Democratic Party are in this unaffiliated category. That’s a lot of votes. That’s a major group.

LAWTON: Professor John Green directs the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron and has long studied the relationship between religion and politics.

GREEN: Religious affiliation has often been closely associated with the major party coalitions, with the Democrats and the Republicans each drawing on different religious communities, and sometimes fighting over religious communities that are pretty evenly divided between the two parties. Well, as people are less involved in organized religion, then those relationships change.

LAWTON: The religiously unaffiliated, often called “the nones,” are about twice as likely to describe themselves as political liberals than as conservatives, and they strongly support legal abortion and same-sex marriage. In a breakdown by faith group, the religiously unaffiliated are now the largest constituency for Democrats, outnumbering black Protestants, white mainline Protestants and white Catholics.

GREG SMITH (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life): In 2008 about three quarters of religiously unaffiliated voters voted for Barack Obama over John McCain. This group, the religiously unaffiliated, was as heavily supportive of Democrats and Barack Obama as evangelicals are of Republicans and as they were of John McCain.

LAWTON: Although people of faith all together still make up the majority of the Democratic coalition, for many years, the Democrats battled a perception that they were not as friendly toward religion as the Republicans. As director of faith outreach for the Democratic National Committee, Reverend Derrick Harkins has been working to change that perception.

REV. DERRICK HARKINS (Democratic National Committee): People of faith make up a significant and important and valuable part of who we are as Democrats and that’s across the spectrum of faith traditions.

LAWTON: Green says the growing number of religiously unaffiliated voters could complicate those efforts.

GREEN: How do they for instance get the black Protestant churches to mobilize voters and to be very enthusiastic about their platform and their candidate without turning off unaffiliated voters, and how do they appeal to those people and get them involved and excited about the candidate without alienating some of the religious communities that support the Democratic Party? It’s a really interesting problem.

LAWTON: Harkins asserts that the Democratic tent is wide enough to accommodate all.

HARKINS: In having respect for that broad spectrum of faith traditions, we also certainly have respect for people who may not practice. The president often says himself that we need to honor and respect those who certainly practice faith and indeed those who may not.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA (in inaugural speech): We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and nonbelievers.

LAWTON: The rising number of religiously unaffiliated may be posing new challenges for the Republicans as well. Although they still make up only about 11 percent of the GOP, a disproportionate number of them are young. About a third of all adults under the age of 30 are “nones.” At the University of Akron, these members of the College Republicans say they aren’t affiliated with any particular faith. They worry that their party’s close relationship with the Religious Right could weaken its viability in the future.

BRAD PHLIPOT (Student): With the Republican Party focusing so much on religion and getting the religious vote, I think it might kind of burn out the people in my age group who are like “well you know I’m not really that religious and if they’re focusing so much on religion, you know, maybe that’s just not me.”

MATTHEW MONEYPENNY (Student): It’s more about what they believe politically rather than religiously because that doesn’t really have an effect on society as much as it used to in my opinion.

LAWTON: According to our new survey with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, almost 70 percent of the religiously unaffiliated say that churches and other religious institutions are too involved in politics. Only 46 percent of the general public agreed with that.

SMITH: People who say they’re not religiously affiliated are much more likely than others to say that they think religious organizations are too political, they are much more likely to say that there’s been too much religious talk from politicians, they’re much more likely to say they think churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters.

RICHARDS: When you can’t get into office unless you profess your religion and talk about how religious you are, it’s a very big problem for us.

LAWTON: Like most religiously unaffiliated voters, Monette Richards doesn’t want to hear politicians quote from the Bible or make other overt religious appeals. She believes candidates can eliminate the God-talk without alienating faith-based voters.

RICHARDS: I don’t know that there should be any offending or marginalizing the religious just simply because they aren’t pandering to them anymore.

LAWTON: But most Americans still do see a role for religion in politics. About two-thirds of the general public say it’s important for a president to have strong religious beliefs. A majority also say it doesn’t make them uncomfortable when politicians talk about their faith. In today’s politics, Republicans can’t win without strong support from evangelicals. And in this election season, several groups have been waging an active campaign to mobilize religious conservatives through churches and other religious institutions. The Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Ralph Reed has been spearheading efforts to turnout the evangelical vote.

RALPH REED (Faith and Freedom Coalition): It’s one out of every four voters and if they turn out in huge numbers, they could really change the outcome of this election.

LAWTON: While both parties have projects to reach out to faith constituencies, many religiously unaffiliated voters say despite their growing numbers, they still feel neglected by politicians.

RICHARDS: We’ve been pretty much erased from any kind of election talk.

LAWTON: But how do you reach out to people who aren’t at the same place at the same time every week talking about their shared beliefs?

PHLIPOT: Religion it’s a great place for politics to find people is at church. So maybe that’s something we’ll have to figure out. You know in the future it’s going to be social media you know Facebook groups, stuff like that, Twitter handles. I think that’s something we should use more to utilize the people who are not church going.

BRIAN CRISAN (Student): Religions have a very, they have a structure to their communities and a support network and though I don’t agree with many religious beliefs, I do believe having a support network is important.

LAWTON: Brian Crisan is part of the University of Akron’s Secular Student Alliance, which tries to provide that support to nonbelievers. This spring, Crisan and several other alliance members came to Washington, D.C. for the Reason Rally, which organizers billed as the largest secular gathering ever in America. One of the goals was to demonstrate their potential clout.

BRYAN POOLE (Student): There are definite political movements growing for atheism or people who particularly do not have religious affiliations and those particular organizations can help people basically find identity.

LAWTON: Richards also attended the Reason Rally and says she came away more inspired than ever to be politically engaged. She says she gets frustrated that religious conservatives have co-opted the term “values voters.”

RICHARDS: It’s interesting that we still equate values sort of with piousness and piety and we need to change that association for us, so that we can move past that and know that values is just, you know, ethics and morals and just good people doing the right thing as opposed to, you know, reading the right book.

LAWTON: What values do you apply to your politics?

RICHARDS: Progressive, social justice. We’re all in this together kind of thing, it doesn’t have to be a me against you, Democrats vs. Republicans or anything. It’s, you know, move forward, help the people that need help.

LAWTON: Unaffiliated Republicans say they also want to be known as values voters.

NICK CASTRO (Student): There’s many people that are out there who I’m friends with who I know who do not believe in anything, who are not affiliated with any religion, but they believe in that strong economical growth, they believe in that strong values just they don’t take it from the values from God or from whoever, they take it from the values of themselves.

LAWTON: One challenge may be getting those religiously unaffiliated voters to the polls. In recent elections, the “nones” voted at lower rates than their religiously affiliated counterparts. But given their rising numbers, experts say a politically organized and active movement of the unaffiliated could play a key role in the political landscape for years to come. I’m Kim Lawton in Akron, Ohio.