DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: In Los Angeles, a group of inner-city clergy, many of them inspired by veterans of the civil rights movement, are taking their ministries out of the pulpit and into the streets. Instead of only preaching to save souls, they are returning to activism: confronting homelessness, unemployment, and violence. Lucky Severson reports.

Speaker at Bryant Temple AME Church service: It’s time to break the silence. It’s time to draw a line saying “this far and no farther.”

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Bryant Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Central Los Angeles. The music will move you, but this is not a celebration. It’s a service dedicated to bringing an end to the needless deaths of all the boys who will never become men.

REV. EUGENE WILLIAMS (CEO and National Director, Regional Congregations and Neighborhood Organizations Training Center, speaking at service): Our young people have been dying in the streets day and night where we have hidden our light under a bushel.

SEVERSON: How many kids have been killed, say, in the last year?

REV. WILLIAMS: About a hundred.

SEVERSON: Pastor Eugene Williams managed to survive his inner-city childhood, but the odds are worse today. He says it’s partly because too many African-American churches have lost their way.

REV. WILLIAMS: And so we’ve gone from a period of ministers like Dr Cecil Murray and Dr. J. Alfred Smith, who taught that it was important to love your neighbor as yourself, to a place where ministers believed that it was important that the community love them.

SEVERSON: So that’s why Williams and other activist preachers started a program called Passing the Mantle, now in its fourth year at the University of Southern California.  It’s a nine-day course where pastors, now known as the Old Lions, teach younger pastors, African American and Latino, how to get civically engaged in the real-life drama of inner city Los Angeles.

(to Rev. Cecil Murray): Did you ever think that you would be called an Old Lion?

REV. CECIL “CHIP” MURRAY (Professor of Christian Ethics, USC School of Religion and Former Pastor, First African Methodist Episcopal Church, Los Angeles, Calif.): Bless the Lord, I knew I’d be called old, but not a lion.

SEVERSON: Cecil “Chip” Murray retired at 75 as the pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, which was the largest AME church in the country. He could preach hellfire and brimstone, but he was more concerned about social issues like homelessness, jobs, violence, and hunger.

REV. MURRAY: We must not only have life after death, but we must have life after birth, even as with the founder of Christianity. He would preach personal salvation, but he would also preach social salvation. He would reach out.  I have come that you may have life, not I have come to take you to heaven.

SEVERSON: Pastor Mark Whitlock is a co-director of Passing the Mantle. He says because of Rev. Murray he turned his life around, so he knows a pastor can make a difference, even with kids society deems beyond hope.

REV. MARK WHITLOCK (Director of Community Initiatives, USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture and Pastor, Christ Our Redeemer AME Church, Irvine, Calif.): I would probably be one of those people you would be afraid of in the community, yeah, sold some product that were illegal and did some things that I’m not very proud of.

SEVERSON: Now, as pastor of Christ Our Redeemer AME Church, he sees how much more difficult it is today for inner-city kids to break free of their environment. He was once one of those kids. The need for black churches to get involved, he says, is urgent.

REV. WHITLOCK: It’s immediate, and you look at the challenge of gang violence, the number of African Americans, Latinos that are locked up in this country, over a million, the absence of African Americans graduating, particularly African American men graduating from high schools and even elementary schools, the attention is necessary now, and it’s an immediate need to change.

REV. MURRAY: To say we are here to save souls and that’s all—you can’t save souls in isolation. It’s a totality of heart, soul, mind, strength, family, environment. It is essentially your environment.

SEVERSON: Pastor Murray earned his reputation as an Old Lion as a leader of the civil rights movement in California from the very beginning. Despite his quiet, humble demeanor, he has won many battles and concessions from the city and state, including one that the police would no longer hold suspects in choke-holds.

Pastor J. Alfred Smith is another Old Lion who led the civil rights movement in northern California. He is senior pastor emeritus of the Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland.

REV. J. ALFRED SMITH (Pastor Emeritus, Allen Temple Baptist Church, Oakland, Calif.): The church was the civil rights movement because the church understood the meaning of “go down, Moses, and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.” The church understood the meaning of saying “we shall overcome.”

SEVERSON: And after they led the struggle against segregation and police brutality and eventually forced Congress to pass civil rights legislation, it was black pastors who calmed the fury of the LA race riots in 1992. Then things changed. Many black churches began focusing less on social justice issues and more on saving souls and preaching the gospel of prosperity, which teaches that the faithful will be rewarded with material blessings.

REV. MURRAY: I would just admonish those who preach prosperity to remember that the one who founded the Christian church had one pair of shoes.

REV. WHITLOCK: We believe Christ came to set the captives free, to bring sight to the blind, to clothe the naked, to find housing for those who are looking for housing. That’s the work of the church. We must return back to the values that made the black church a true success.

REV. WILLIAMS (speaking at Bryant Temple AME Church service): And we came by here to tell you young people that we’re sorry. We’re sorry because we left you to fend for yourselves.

SEVERSON: Outside the chapel at the special healing service, there was an empty casket. No one needed to ask why. They all know someone.

Woman praying at service: Bring, Heavenly Father, what only you can give…

SEVERSON: A few days earlier, someone dumped the body of a young man who had been shot in the head just a few hundred yards from the church.

REV. WHITLOCK: It’s wonderful labels that we’ve given our children—gang members, Crips, Bloods. I’m sorry. Those are our sons, those are our daughters, those are our cousins, those are our nieces. So we must not be afraid of our own, and if they’re doing wrong, they’re doing wrong.  Selling drugs is wrong. Doing crime is wrong.  Not going to school is wrong.  So the church must speak to the moral—take a moral position on it, but after we take a moral position then we must wrap our arms around them and love them back to a place where they feel safe in the church.

SEVERSON: Most parents in South Central LA are as caring and loving as parents everywhere, but with far greater obstacles. There are few jobs, few public parks to get the kids off the streets, poor schools, and not enough role models. There are now twice as many Latinos as African Americans, but people of all races are starting to realize they’re in this together.

REV. MURRAY: If under the skin all people are kin, if all human beings have an area that can be approached, then we need to find what that area is and go to it, because the problems are not going to fix themselves.

SEVERSON: There are some signs of progress. Inner city pastors have managed to wrangle some new affordable housing. Some of the estimated 40,000 gang members have been persuaded to try to go straight. Pastors are getting more involved. And there’s one more change on the front lines: A majority of those asking to receive the mantle are women.

Woman pastor speaking to group: …that we have to make the difference. That’s what I learned today.

REV. WILLIAMS: People are dying in the streets. We’re saying that people are engaging in risky behavior. So you’ve got to come out behind your stained glass windows and come out here and help people, because if you don’t, all of those problems are going to end up, and they are ending up, on your doorstep.

SEVERSON: They’ve heard promises of help before, promises often not kept. Now it’s the most trusted men and women in the neighborhood who are offering hope.

REV. WILLIAMS (speaking at Bryant Temple AME Church service): If we lock arms, if we continue to move and work together, we will improve the communities where we live, work, and worship. I came by here to tell you to stand on your feet, because we gonna be more better. Let’s give God some praise….

SEVERSON: So far, the Old Lions have passed the mantle to about 400 younger pastors who seem determined to do what authorities have been unable to do without them.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in South Central Los Angeles.

KIM LAWTON, anchor: A tense national debate about racial profiling has continued since Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested in his Cambridge home for disorderly conduct. Gates, who is African-American, was arrested by Sergeant James Crowley, a white officer who had responded to a 9-11 call about a possible break-in. The controversy intensified when President Obama said the police “acted stupidly” when they arrested Gates. The president later said he regretted his choice of words and he hosted both Gates and Crowley at the White House Thursday for a conciliatory beer. The incident and the ensuing debate show how divisive racial issues can be in this country.  Even though America has elected its first black president, efforts toward racial integration are often still fraught with difficulties, not least in churches where it’s been said that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: If something seems odd or unusual about these worshippers, maybe it’s the diversity, all the different colors and nationalities of their faces. This is the Wilcrest Baptist Church in Houston, and Pastor Rodney Woo couldn’t be more proud of the cultural and racial mix of his congregation.

Pastor RODNEY WOO (Wilcrest Baptist Church, Houston, TX): I think my main passion is to get people ready for heaven. I think a lot of our people are going to go into culture shock when they get to heaven, and they get to sit next to somebody that they didn’t maybe sit with while they were here on earth. So we’re trying to get them acclimated a little bit.

SEVERSON: Assuming Pastor Woo is right, there are a lot of congregations that need to get acclimated. A recent study found that only 7 percent of churches in the US are integrated. This comes as no surprise to Ohio State sociology professor Korie Edwards, author of the book “The Elusive Dream.”

Professor KORIE EDWARDS (Sociology Department, Ohio State University and Author, “The Elusive Dream”): We’re segregated in housing. Even the job market is segregated, and we end up going to churches with people who look like us.

Professor Michael Emerson

Professor MICHAEL EMERSON (Sociology Department, Rice University): Sometimes,you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I want to — I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.”

SEVERSON: Rice University sociology professor Michael Emerson, who authored the study on the make-up of churches in the US, says racial separation inside most churches is even more pronounced than it is outside for a number of reasons.

Prof. EMERSON: What we found in the study is that churches are 10 times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in.

SEVERSON: Emerson also found that churches in the South were the least integrated, partly because African Americans are concerned about whites taking over their congregation.

Prof. EMERSON: That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate them. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power, so they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Prof. EDWARDS: And so what happens in these congregations where you have whites and blacks, even though they may be well intended, people coming together and wanting to do the Christian thing, wanting to serve God together, you’re going to find that these kinds of issues that occur outside of the church come into the church.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rufus Smith of the City of Refuge Church in Houston is one of very few African Americans who lead an interracial church. Smith says when he took over the evangelical Presbyterian congregation it was mostly white, bored, and dwindling. He said he would only agree to be pastor if members promised to integrate.

Pastor Rufus Smith

SEVERSON: Today the church is about 45 percent white, 45 percent black, and the rest Hispanic and Asian. But Pastor Smith says the “grand experience” hasn’t always been pleasant.

Pastor SMITH: You’re certainly up against the natural stereotypes. You’re up against ignorance. You’re up against some hard-heartedness and, you know, some outright evil with respect to some people.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rodney Woo, half Chinese, grew up in a black neighborhood, went to an all-white church, and married his Hispanic childhood sweetheart.

Pastor WOO (preaching): The poor rich. Let me tell you who they are. They are the people who have a lot of money and nothing else.

SEVERSON: When he came here, the church had only two black members out of 180. Today Wilcrest Baptist has 500 members divided almost equally among whites, blacks, and Hispanics, with the remainder made up of Asians. Woo says he didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be integrating his church.

Pastor Rodney Woo

Pastor WOO: When we started a lot of people were going, “Ah, this is making me feel uncomfortable.” Whether the kids were in the nursery together, or their kids were in the young group, a lot of parents were fearful that their kids might start dating somebody that was a different race.

Prof. EMERSON: In the beginning stages, there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion. A lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that, it becomes something that people just a lot of times will say, “I couldn’t live without it.”

Pastor SMITH (preaching): Ask me how I feel.

CONGREGATION (responding): How do you feel?

Pastor SMITH: If I was any better, I would have to be twins, and that’s the truth if I ever told it.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rufus Smith has succeeded in not only integrating his church racially. His congregation comes from all walks of life. When it grew, he deliberately located the church between affluent and low-income neighborhoods. Carol Vance, a former district attorney, was one of the founding members.

CAROL VANCE (Founding Member, City of Refuge Church): We picked Rufus because he’s a great pastor, not because he’s black. But I think it’s wonderful that he is, because we’re sitting right here on the edge, and I sort of like to think of our church as the “bridge over troubled waters.”

Pastor SMITH: To me, one of the true tests of the power of the Gospel is to unify people across socio-economic, racial lines, which is what the heart of Christianity is and was.

SEVERSON: Karen Giesen has a doctorate in theology. She says she grew up in a white church where people bowed their head, folded their hands, and worshipped quietly — very different from what she experiences at City of Refuge.

KAREN GIESEN (Congregation Member, City of Refugee Church): The worship style is an issue. None of us are right in probably our heart language style. We’re all making a sacrifice to be there. It’s a mix. A lot of people go looking for churches saying, “I am looking for the one that ministers to me,” and to go here we’ve obviously all made a choice that we want to serve there.

SEVERSON: Rebecca Miller wants to be a pastor. She says she searched to find a church that felt like a community.

REBECCA MILLER (Congregation Member, City of Refuge Church): People worship the way the spirit leads them to worship. I really don’t think that there is anybody saying you can’t shout, you can’t scream, you can’t say “hallelujah” or you can’t clap your hands. It’s not the typical Presbyterian “you can’t raise your hands” church.

Pastor WOO: Where we really changed, and we saw the growth, grow at exponentially, was when the church became less than 50 percent white, and so there was no majority group, and that just changed the entire mindset.

SEVERSON: Church guitarist Jim Kruse married a Hispanic and adopted a Hispanic child. He says he’s learning a few things about his own prejudice.

JIM KRUSE (Guitarist, Wilcrest Baptist Church): What we’re learning is that you may not come to it thinking you are prejudiced. You may be seriously trying not to be prejudiced. But then you find out the things you are doing come across as prejudiced. So I think a lot of our effort has been to learn to relax, to let people be people.

SEVERSON: It would be difficult to find a more graphic example of religion bridging a racial divide than Dwight Pryor and Rick Taylor. Taylor describes himself as a reformed “redneck.”

RICK TAYLOR (Congregation Member, Wilcrest Baptist Church): From where I come from, to be honest, I was taught to hate people like Dwight and to not have anything to do with them and that they were less than I was, and I believed that most of my life. I truly did. But the Lord has a way of showing you your prejudices in your life.

Dwight Pryor and Rick Taylor

DWIGHT PRYOR (Congregation Member, Wilcrest Baptist Church): I grew up in North Mississippi. As a little kid on those school buses, watching those people would shout racist names at me, and some of them were deacons and pastors in our community. It left a cold chill in my heart — a hatred.

SEVERSON: Dwight is a control systems designer, and Rick is a retired general contractor. The bond that has grown between them is plain to see.

Mr. TAYLOR: Racism colors the truth. It makes people not look at other people as if they were human. It goes that deep. It truly does, and Christ teaches us that we are all the same.

SEVERSON (to Prof. Emerson): Are churches that integrate richer because they did it?

Prof. EMERSON: Yeah. I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, “It’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion.”

SEVERSON: And they will say, if they’re like Dwight and Rick, that church integration may not always come easy, but it comes with rich rewards and improbable friendships. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Houston.

Professor Michael Emerson

Q: Fewer than ten percent of churches in America are integrated.

A: Yeah, that comes from our research here, actually.

Q: The number is that low?

A: Yeah, seven percent. That’s what it is.

Q: Were you surprised at that?

A: Yes. Well, yes and no. But yeah, that’s pretty low.

Q: Why? What are the reasons for its being so low?

A: There are three things, and it depends on the group that we’re talking about, but there’s history, there’s culture, and then there’s social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.

Q: They worshipped together before the Civil War?

A: Absolutely. In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: “You’re going to worship with us.” Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they’d even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together. So we didn’t get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What’s happened then, of course, is now that we’ve had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship? We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you’re immigrants, you’re not part of that history. So it’s a little bit different experience. So it may be a language that separates you — again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.

Q: Are churches a reflection of our society? We live in different neighborhoods. We work in different jobs.

A: They are. But what we found in the study is that churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in. So there’s something more going on than just reflecting the neighborhood, yeah.

Q: What is going on? Is it cultural — that it is difficult to accept an outsider? Is a black church accepting whites, or the other way around?

A: I’ve been in both settings and observed, and I think when non-blacks visit a black church they will feel, they always talk about feeling so welcomed and warmly greeted but being surprised or shocked or whatever by the length of the service, by the different worship style. If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn’t feel that warmly received. But so — and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.

Q: Generally white services are more calm and by the book and a lot more emotion in black services. Is that difficult for whites when they go into a black church?

A: Right, right. Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn’t happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they’re quite a bit different.

Q: The congregation saying “Amen”?

A: Call-and-response style, yes, exactly. So whenever different groups get together then there has to be this long period of negotiation. How will we worship? What’s acceptable? What’s not? If I want to say “Amen” can I? It’s one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say “Amen,” maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.

Q: What is most likely, a black church that’s integrated with whites or vice versa?

A: We rarely see that. Almost never.

Q: Why is that?

A: Because I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, “People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?” I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, “I’m going to do that.” Now there are whites in African-American churches. They’re interracially married. They’re highly committed. Maybe there’s a professor or two, or a student. Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it’s a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they’re overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

Q: If the pastor is black, are whites going to be less likely to go to that church because the pastor is black and in charge?

A: Yup. It’s the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.

Q: But a white church doesn’t feel very welcoming to African Americans, right?

A: That’s right, that’s right. So you can see what is the difficulty. I mean, how do you make these things happen? We’ve done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there’s a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it’s out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race. So they actually put it into their mission statement, and they start changing things as a result. They may change how worship works. They may actively recruit folks and try and get them to come and help them to feel comfortable and get them involved in leadership, and there’s a variety of ways.

Q: Are they glad they did it? Does the church end up being richer for it?

A: I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, it’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you’re trying to go across cultures, and you don’t understand, you didn’t mean to offend somebody but you’ve offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something. They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.

Q: Would our society be a better society if we had more integrated churches?

A: I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don’t have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we’re doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality. I spent a lot of time developing in books why worshipping separately actually impacts inequality, economic, social, on and on. So I really do believe there are huge advantages to being together even though it’s difficult, even though we have a lot to learn.

Q: Is this integration happening more in one part of the country than in another part?

A: It happens a little bit more in the West, where there’s more fluid — where everybody’s originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it’s a bigger social cost. One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they’re doing that. Sometimes they’re questions about selling out on their race or “Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?” So there are costs to it, and I think they’re a little bit higher in the South because of its history.

Q: I guess a pastor really sometimes has to walk a tightrope as well as really be an amazing politician, too.

A: Absolutely. Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they’re African American they’ll say, “I’m not black enough for African Americans. I’m not white enough for the whites. I’m not Hispanic enough.” There’s always that sense of because we’re so racially defined, if you’re trying to cross the boundaries you don’t fit into any particular space. We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There’s something different. They are somebody who — they don’t exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other. So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

Q: There is an impression that in many ways church has meant more to the black community over the years than any other particular section of America.

A: Absolutely. It may be changing, but still it’s the one place, that total control of an institution, that African Americans have. So sometimes, you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.” It’s also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.

Q: And hearing liberation theology. Is that fairly common, as in Jeremiah Wright’s church?

A: Yeah, there are variations of it. He says that very strongly, and you’ll find congregations that do that and others that would not say it as strongly. But it is a very common strain. Yeah, absolutely.

Q: Do African Americans worry that if whites come to my church, they’re going to take over?

A: Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate then. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power. So they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Q: I imagine there are phrases in the Bible they have to be very careful how they use.

A: Absolutely. There’s a lot of terminology, like “washes whiter than snow,” and these things which when they’re said in a uniracial congregation, they just go fine. But when they’re said in a mixed congregation, some people will get offended and wonder, “Why are you saying that? What are you saying?” And sometimes the clergy are blindsided by that. Other times they realize that ahead of time and say they’re not going to use those terms. So it gets complicated for sure.

Q: Is there a trend? Even though it may be slow, are we seeing more integrated churches?

A: We’re going to see more, and we are seeing more, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Not because white and black are more likely to get together. Only a third of the seven percent of congregations that are interracial are black and white. What’s happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures. We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it’s] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture. If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I’ll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I’m in somebody else’s homeland. So I’m going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean. But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, “I have the right to hold onto my culture,” and that’s what makes it difficult.

Q: If you have a white church and Asians move in and Hispanics move in, is it less of a problem than if African Americans –

A: Yeah, I think it’s still a problem, but I think it’s easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that’s why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

Q: But if you have a white church, and you have a mix of Asians and Hispanics, it makes it easier for African Americans to come?

A: Yes and no, because what happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they’re mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it’s still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.

Q: Music is very, very important in a black church.

A: Absolutely, although every congregation will say, you know, every worship leader will say it’s vital. It’s very important, but again these are, you know, these are different cultural styles. So the tradition from Europe is that you’re supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don’t sing that way. But, you know, on the average.

Q: I was recently in South Philly in a neighborhood that has a lot of violence. If the churches there were more integrated, do you think that would work more toward healing the wounds that are there?

A: It would because, you know, think about it. I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you’re an integrated congregation? It doesn’t happen. But I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people — when they’re in mixed company, we speak differently. So one of the profound things we found when studying these congregations, the mixed ones, is just how much overlap and interracial ties that develop not only with the people in the congregation, but they start meeting each other’s families, and their friends, and they go to each other’s neighborhoods if they live in different neighborhoods, and at work they meet people they wouldn’t otherwise met, and so it creates a whole new definition of what the group is. So I think it’s a lot harder then to have racial violence against each other.

Q: Are you familiar with the City of Refuge Church and Reverend Rufus Smith?

A: I think they’re doing an amazing thing in that they have all groups. But they have large segments of white and black, and so I think it’s the most difficult of these kinds of congregations to have, and it takes a very deft leader, and him being African American, I mean I’m sure it’ll be interesting when you talk with him. He’ll have to be very knowledgeable of white culture, black culture, and walk these fine lines.

Q: His is more multiracial than, say, Pastor Woo’s –

A: Oh, Pastor [Rodney] Woo would be more multiracial and more groups, right. I think they have people from 40-some different countries. International church is what I would call it. They’re immigrants from all over the world, be they black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern.

Q: I assume that Pastor Woo’s church is the way it is either because the congregation wanted it, or because he wanted it. How did it end up being that way?

A: It was an all-white church. It was starting to decline. They had to hire a new pastor, and they hired him. But he came under the condition that “I want and I’m called to make this a multiethnic church.” So they knew. He’s interesting because he’s part-Asian, part-white. He’s married to a Hispanic woman, so that’s their family and that’s their vision.

Q: What’s it feel like in one of his services? I’m sure you’ve been there.

A: I think it’s pretty dynamic. There’s a lot of energy there and life, and you’ll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they’re listening in Spanish.

Q: So it’s a rich cultural experience.

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: And Pastor Rufus Smith and the City of Refuge. Tell me a little bit about that.

A: Same thing. There’s a lot of life there, but it’s a different sort, because there’s a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I’ve actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can’t comment wisely on it. I can say that I’ve talked to people in both congregations, and there are both positives and negatives. I mean, so if I’ve talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they’ll wonder, “Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?” And what’s happening is they’re falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It’s not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That’s certainly common in mixed churches.

Q: So there are downsides, but the downsides are outweighed by the upsides?

A: Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start — they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just — a lot of times they’ll say, “I couldn’t live without it. I just have to be there.”

Q: You see it manifest in any other ways, for instance, in the neighborhood? Do they socialize together if they go to church together?

A: They do, and that’s what really surprised us, because it was such strong effects. They’re more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods after they start being in these kinds of congregations. They are much more likely to say that their two very best friends are of a different race, that their circle of friends, their friends in the church, but also in their whole social network, absolutely. We’ve had people say, “Now when I go to work, I don’t feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn’t have done otherwise.” And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe’s connected to a whole network of people I don’t know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son’s birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.

Q: Will the election of Barack Obama have an impact on interracial churches? Will we see more of them?

A: Oh, yeah. I think with President Obama there’s going to be a discussion, because he himself is multiracial, because we have for the first time a non-white president. There’s going to be talk about what does this mean? What is it? Are we in a new era? And I think it’s going to open up a wider place for a discussion about we ought to come together in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our clubs and our networks. I think it’ll be more acceptable to talk about it. We’ll see what happens. It’ll take some time. But I think it will.

Q: But generally you think it will be positive.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you talk a little bit more about why it is difficult to integrate churches?

A: What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let’s tell jokes with each other. Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they’ll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn’t mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time. Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don’t. So I ask the clergy why don’t I see myself represented in leadership? And I’m told, and this happens quite a bit, “We don’t think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job.” So then I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that’s difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who’s there to give me an afterlife? And different traditions stress different — so then there’s that. I talked to an African American who says before she goes into an interracial church, she sits in her car and she listens to gospel music to get her fill, and she goes into an interracial church where they don’t do gospel music, and she’s ready to accept the other sorts of ways of worshipping. So there’s that. There’s always the question of time. Does time at 10:00 mean 10:00 sharp? Or does it mean give or take a few minutes? And a few minutes, is that plus or minus two minutes? Or plus or minus ten, or maybe a half an hour each way? So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we’re going to work through these.

Q: Are you looking at Protestant churches, Catholic churches?

A: Protestant, Catholic, even Muslim. We studied a mosque, and this is when we were at Notre Dame, and in this mosque they had people from a variety of countries, most of them immigrants. In some of the countries, when you go into a mosque you remove your shoes. To not do so could be punishable even by death in that nation. In other countries, it would be a great offense to remove their shoes when they come into the mosque, a sign of disrespect. So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn’t remove your shoes and someone’s taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship. And then they would have the shoe removers on one side, and the non-shoe removers on the other side until they could work through coming to understand why we might both be trying to worship authentically, and because of our cultural background we have these different ideas. But it took a while.

Q: Any particular denominations that you’ve seen the most progress?

A: You find the most in not any particular denomination specifically. It’s the style of worship. So if we have what we call a charismatic worship style, that means upbeat music and a more lively style of preaching usually, people are allowed to clap, say “Amen,” whether they’re mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, and Catholics, whatever, they’re much more likely to be integrated. There’s one denomination in particular, though, that has pushed very hard to be multiracial in its denomination — not only its denomination but, I mean, in its congregations, and it’s called the Evangelical Covenant Church, http://www.covchurch.org/ which is headquartered in Chicago. Their whole goal is that’s the kind of churches they start, multiracial, and I think they say now 20 percent of their churches are that.

Q: Is there particular Christian scripture that points to interracial acceptance?

A: Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we’ve broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That’s when they were called Christians. So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they’re stressing. They’re talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together. But you know, interestingly enough, those things were not talked about much at all for a few hundred years at least.

Q: But it’s there. It’s a fundamental part of Christianity that you should welcome people of all races.

A: That’s right.

BOB ABERNETHY (Anchor): We have a story today about a remarkable man in California.  He is a Catholic priest from Ireland who has ministered for 37 years to both African Americans and Latinos in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Saul Gonzalez reports.

SAUL GONZALEZ (Contributing Correspondent): The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts has long been synonymous with inner-city desperation and despair. It’s the neighborhood that exploded in urban unrest, after all, in 1965, and then again during LA’s 1992 riots.

Today, Watts is still home to some of the meanest streets in the city, but they’re streets walked regularly by Father Peter Banks, a Catholic priest who, dressed in his robes, rope belt, and straw hat, looks like a fish very much out of water.

Born and raised in rural Ireland, Banks arrived as a young priest in Watts in 1973, assigned to the Saint Lawrence of Brindisi Church.

FATHER PETER BANKS: My picture of America before I came was Hollywood, Disneyland, and the beach. So I got into the car, we drove up Century and we crossed Vermont, and I began to realize this is a very different world. It was all black, and the very first Sunday I stood up on the altar and I said what am I doing here? How will I ever understand the people? Will they understand me?

GONZALEZ: In the decades since, though, this Irish priest and the people of Watts have come to know each other very well, and Father Banks has become a beloved figure both in his church and the wider community. Father Banks says his taking an active role in the day-to-day life of the community has been key to being accepted by the residents of Watts.

(Speaking to Father Banks): How important is it for you to do what we are doing now, to get out and to walk the streets?

FATHER BANKS: Oh, I feel part of the flesh and blood and soul of Watts.

GONZALEZ: As he walks through the community, Banks meets and ministers to the casualties of drugs, poverty, and violence in Watts. One of them goes by the name “Red Man.”

FATHER BANKS: Now, he never minds me saying this, but this man was shot thirteen times and survived.

RED MAN: I love this man. Really, he is the only white man who can walk Watts with no gun, just walking by faith, and walk here and know everybody. Everybody knows Father Peter. He is the true father of Watts. He is a real servant of God.

GONZALEZ: Red Man and a friend then ask Father Banks to lead them in an impromptu street corner prayer.

Central to the story of Watts and Father Banks’s church is the incredible demographic shift that has occurred in this community in recent years. Once synonymous with the African-American community, Watts is increasingly Latino. With that change has come tension.

FATHER BANKS: They call it the black and brown conflict. How do we get black and brown to come together?

GONZALEZ: That conflict sometimes expresses itself in violence, but often its face is a soft, unofficial form of segregation. Latinos largely stick to themselves, African Americans as well.

(Speaking to African American girl): You wouldn’t go out of your way to hang out with Hispanic kids?

AFRICAN-AMERICAN GIRL: Definitely no, I really wouldn’t because, I know it might sound racist, but if I see a Mexican girl or a Latino girl I’m just, like, not hanging out with her because she is just not my people. I know that’s wrong, but that’s just, like, the way it is in our society and our community.

GONZALEZ: It’s such feelings that Father Banks has tried to battle in Watts, making both African Americans and Latinos feel welcome in his congregation and breaking down walls of mutual suspicion and hostility. He’s done that by learning Spanish, slowly integrating some church services, and developing sensitivity to the problems of both Latinos and African Americans.

GONZALEZ: Father Banks says being Irish can actually be an advantage in his work in Watts.

FATHER BANKS: I feel it is. One time I was talking to the black kids, that’s when I came first, and they were saying something about the whites, and I held up my arm and said, “Look at me,” and this little girl said to me, “Father Peter, you aren’t white, you’re Irish.”

I can relate very much to the black in the sense of the Irish being persecuted. It used to say in the States, I think, “No black or Irish need apply.” So I feel I do identify a lot with the African-American people and their pain and their suffering. I’m able to relate to the Latinos and say I am an immigrant, and I tell the Latino people, I say, I am an immigrant, too. I came here and, I said, I am far away from my own land. I know what you go through, too.

GONZALEZ: Members of Father Banks’s congregation say they appreciate his efforts to build bridges of understanding between African Americans and Latinos.

MARIAN ANTUCHA (Latino parishioner speaking in Spanish with English translation): He helps all the people, African Americans, Latinos, the entire community. To us, Father Peter doesn’t recognize borders. He’s a person who helps everybody, and that’s why we’re here.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN PARISHIONER: If PR and public relationships, communications was a gift from God, poof, he got it ten times, you know, because he can get out there and talk to different people, and they just feel his love, and he will tell them to come here, and then they feel the love. It’s just a relationship that blossoms.

GONZALEZ: As he’s gotten older, Banks says he’s increasingly focused his ministry on the education and safety of Watts’ youngest, at the elementary and middle school operated by his church.

FATHER BANKS: They know more about pain than I do in my lifetime, and they are only six, seven, eight, nine years old. You saw them this morning there, dying for affection. If I don’t feel optimistic and I feel tired, I come over to the school. I get energy from the school, energy from these children.

Hope is to be able to sing in the middle of the darkness, and I think that’s what hope is for me. I can still sing in the middle of the darkness.

GONZALEZ: However, after serving the spiritual and material needs of this community for much of his adult life, Father Peter Banks will soon depart Watts. He’s been asked to take a job as a church recruiter in a rural area of California. Although he says he feels duty-bound to fill this position, Banks acknowledges he feels conflicted about leaving this community.

FATHER BANKS: That’s an emotional issue for me. It’s going to be a big struggle to leave here. It’s going to be—I’m at peace with God. That’s all I can say. I am at peace with God. I feel it is God’s will that I continue his work, and we need priests for the church and brothers and…

GONZALEZ: But it hurts?

FATHER BANKS: Oh, it hurts deeply. I have put so much of my life in here. I have invested so much in children. It is the biggest change of my life. I feel I am leaving home twice. I left Ireland 37 years ago, and I feel like I am leaving home again, too. But I’ve come to terms with it, and I know that I am doing it for a higher cause, a higher power.

GONZALEZ: The people whose lives Father Banks has touched in Watts hope his example will inspire others to continue his work of cultivating peace and understanding in a community that so needs them.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a Lucky Severson report now on the divisions in one of the most prominent places of worship in the country—Riverside Church in New York. It’s affiliated with both the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ and was built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in the late 1920s for its first and much admired senior pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick. Riverside became widely known for its great preaching, liberal theology, interracial congregation, and commitment to social justice. But now it’s also known for a bitter controversy surrounding its new senior minister, Brad Braxton.

Unidentified minister performing a blessing: Dear God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, we now bring this servant of God, this man of God before you.

LUCKY SEVERSON: It has become an occasion worthy of note when the Riverside Church installs a new senior pastor. His name is Brad Braxton, and he has come a long way from his humble beginnings as the son of a Baptist preacher in rural Virginia.

Rev. BRAXTON: Pastoral ministry is a wonderful vocation. The opportunity to guide a community of faith amid its joys and sorrows is a significant and high calling.

SEVERSON: Riverside spans the blocks between the ivy-covered walls of Columbia University and the largely African-American Harlem neighborhood. Jennifer Hoult discovered Riverside when she was attending nearby Barnard College and has been coming to services for over 20 years.

Jennifer Hoult

JENNIFER HOULT (Member, Riverside Church): We have had some of the most extraordinary preachers leading this church. I mean Fosdick, Bill Coffin, Jim Forbes — these are extraordinary gentlemen in the clergy, and brilliant theologians and brilliant preachers, I can add.

SEVERSON: Dr. Braxton seems well prepared for the job. He’s a Rhodes Scholar, has a PhD in New Testament studies, and was a religion professor at Vanderbilt. Betty Davis says it’s the kind of resume that stood out among the 200 applicants for the job. She has been a member here for 19 years and was on the selection committee.

BETTY DAVIS (Member, Riverside Church): And what impressed me most about Dr. Braxton was, first of all, his deep spirituality combined with his masterful knowledge. So he really stood out. His energy stood out. He came prepared.

SEVERSON: It seems like a perfect fit. So why, on the day of his installation, did the new senior pastor speak about fear within the congregation?

Rev. BRAXTON (preaching to congregation): Fear not. Fear not. I’m going to preach it until the Holy Ghost tells me to stop.

SEVERSON: He is speaking of the fear some in the congregation have about their new senior minister. His selection has proved controversial, and division within the church is an issue he has not shied away from.

Rev. BRAXTON (speaking to congregation): Move the mountain of distrust and animosity in this congregation by speaking the truth in love.

Ms. DAVIS: As soon as his name was announced, the attacks started. One of the things that some people are afraid of is that the church will turn black. And, you know, I really resent that.

SEVERSON: Betty Davis says Dr. Braxton’s predecessor, Dr. James Forbes, a world-class preacher, also black, also suffered congregational harping, and that the elephant in the room people aren’t talking about is racism. Lois and David Carey have attended Riverside for over 35 years and have seen the church’s membership shift from predominately white to predominately black.

Lois and David Carey

DAVID CAREY (Member, Riverside Church): I feel that Dr. Braxton is getting a holdover from Dr. Forbes, who went through the same thing he’s going through. Only he was there taking it for 20 years.

SEVERSON: Racism have anything to do with it?

Mr. CAREY: I think so, yeah. I’m sad to say it but I think so, you know.

Rev. BRAXTON: I’m obviously dealing with, as did Dr. Forbes, some of the issues of what it means to guide an institution of this magnitude when this institution, like the United States of America, is still wrestling with the great hold that racism has on this country.

SEVERSON: But Jennifer Hoult says her problem with Dr. Braxton is not about color.

Ms. HOULT: My concerns about Dr. Braxton had nothing to do with his race or his personal history. They had to do with his theology.

Rev. BRAXTON (preaching to congregation): Listen again to a portion of James, chapter 3.

Ms. HOULT: What he says consistently in sermons is talking about the only way to God is through a particular fundamentalist path, which is to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and that’s a huge change in our theology. It’s a huge change in our openness and our inclusiveness.

SEVERSON: Braxton denies that he is changing the theology and says he has written articles critical of fundamentalism.

Rev. BRAXTON: I must say as a theologian it is laughable to me that someone would consider me a fundamentalist. My thinking on Scripture, my support of gay marriage, I mean, you roll it out, there is no way, shape, or form that I am a fundamentalist.

SEVERSON: But Braxton’s evangelical preaching, his focus on Scripture, and his leadership style has made some of the congregation ill at ease.

DIANA SOLOMON-GLOVER (Member, Riverside Church): What troubles me the most is that I feel the direction of the church with the new leadership is — has strayed or is straying from the mission of the church, which is open, affirming, and inclusive, interracial, interdenominational, and international.

SEVERSON: Diana Solomon-Glover is in the Riverside choir, has a master’s degree in voice, and works with children with special needs. She’s been a member over 20 years and says Riverside is no stranger to controversy and contentiousness.

Diana Solomon-Glover

Ms. SOLOMON-GLOVER: I look at it as a laboratory experiment. This is the place where we find out if people of varying backgrounds and faiths can actually come together and figure out how to be one people.

SEVERSON: But, she says, the experiment does not seem to be working very well. Riverside has long been known for its concern with diversity and social justice. Braxton agrees he may bring a new take on those issues, but pushes back at critics who think he is not committed to the church’s longstanding mission.

Rev. BRAXTON: I just think that’s patently false, and I think as a pastor, though, it’s born, again, out of fear. What I believe we are actually trying to do in our best moments is to suggest that if in fact we are going to be who we are — that is, a Christian congregation — we must take seriously Jesus and Scripture. Those are non-negotiables for Christian congregations.

SEVERSON: It’s not just theological concerns that Braxton faces. Solomon-Glover was among four church members who filed suit over what they alleged was a violation of Riverside’s bylaws. Among their claims was that Braxton’s compensation package included a $250,000 salary, a housing allowance, and other benefits totaling over $600,000. The church says in reality that package is actually closer to $460,000 and is comparable to that of other leaders of large churches in New York City.

Ms. HOULT: The argument has been made by the council that the reason we’re paying so much is because this is what everyone else does, and what I would say is Riverside has never been about doing what everyone else does.

Rev. BRAXTON: What my family and I were simply trying to do was to respond to a significant calling and one that had significant burdens and liabilities associated with it, and I think it was sensationalized in a way that’s very unfortunate.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN (handing Rev. Braxton a bouquet of flowers): We love you so much. We appreciate you.

SEVERSON: There’s no doubt that many members are quite fond of the new senior pastor, and he of them. But the congenial atmosphere apparently does not extend throughout the congregation, and his critics argue there is a substantial voice of dissent.

Ms. SOLOMON-GLOVER: Those who look at us as dissenters would like to believe that we are small in number. But there are a lot of people who have left the church because of what’s going on in the church, and there are a lot of people who have watched others of us be marginalized and who are sort of in the shadows.

Ms. HOULT: What’s happening right now at Riverside is contentious, hateful. You know, not only do we go and get called names, but we get screamed at by groups of people out of control. There’s no effort by Dr. Braxton to rein it in.

SEVERSON: In a recent Sunday sermon entitled “Speaking in Tongues,” Dr. Braxton appeared to be calling out his detractors on what he called fearful and mean tongues.

Rev. BRAXTON (preaching to congregation): Some days we speak in merciful tongues, other days in mean tongues. We all speak in tongues, and we all one day will have to give an account to God for the kind of tongues we used when dealing with other people.

SEVERSON: The one area of agreement we found among most everyone we spoke with is there is still a lot of healing to be done on both sides. Dr. Braxton says he is hopeful.

Rev. BRAXTON: Amid all of the rancor, much of which has been directed to me, I think unfairly, you keep loving, you keep preaching, you keep teaching, you keep serving, and after awhile maybe some of that fear will dissipate.

SEVERSON: While Dr. Braxton keeps preaching, it is still unclear where Riverside will go from here. Both he and his divided congregation share a hope that the church will continue to stand out, not just as the tallest church in the US, but as a beacon for mainline Protestants everywhere.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in New York.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: In inner cities across the US high numbers of African-American men are caught up in the criminal justice system. It’s costly to keep them in prison. It’s also costly to the communities they leave behind — and return to. Phil Jones reports.

PHIL JONES: Welcome to Brownsville — a pocket of poverty inside Brooklyn, New York, a place where crime and prison often are a way of life.

RONALD HERRON: Both my parents were drug addicts. My father wasn’t at home.

Ronald Herron

DEJUAN SMITH: I went to prison for murder in the second degree.

NATHANEL RICE: The first time for robbery — two years; second time for robbery —12 years; third time for drug possession.

VINCE MATTOS (Community Activist): I was out hustling narcotics. What I would have to tell Mom is, “Look, I found a whole bunch of money!” I would see Mom crying because she was behind on bills or something like that. I would come in and say, “Mom, look I found x, y and z.” You know, she was like, oh, you know, “God is good” — this and that.

JONES: But Vincent Mattos’s mother is proud of her 42-year-old son.

Mr. MATTOS (speaking to men): Hey brothers. How you doing?

JONES: He now roams these troubled streets as a community activist. He knows the turf.

Mr. MATTOS: Young men that’s out on the corner from sun-up to sundown, falling back to do what they know to do to earn a living because there’s no jobs for them. There’s no helpful reentry program that’s in place right now. Whatever you want, you can get it on this strip. Drugs, sex, and guns, that’s what’s major out here.

JONES: What else is major — the pervasive presence of police with the task of arresting the bad guys and putting them behind bars. There is no doubt that police activity decreases crime. But is there a tipping point, when legitimate law enforcement, designed to protect the public, may have unintended consequences: promotion poverty, even more crime?

ERIC CADORA (Director, Justice Mapping Center): The current overuse and overdependence on criminal justice is a complete failure. It’s having no impact on these issues of public safety and crime. That’s not to say there isn’t a need for a level of criminal justice. But this radical overuse is not accomplishing those goals.

Eric Cadora

JONES: In the 1970s, there were about 200,000 inmates in US prisons. Today there are about two million. For years law enforcement used crime mapping to target places where the crimes were being committed. Eric Cadora, director of an organization called the Justice Mapping Center, is an advocate for sentencing reform and prison alternatives. He proposed another use for mapping.

Mr. CADORA: I said, “Well, what if we don’t do crime mapping? What if, instead, we mapped where people lived who are going into jail and prison every year?” When we started doing maps of where people lived, we found hugely concentrated neighborhoods where vast majorities of people were going to prison and jail and coming back, and other neighborhoods where nearly none were.

This is New York City. The brightest red show the highest rate per thousand adults, male adults, admitted to prison for a single year. Let’s say there are about 100,000 people living in Brownsville — about half of them are male, that’s about 50,000. About — between 10 and 13 percent are going to prison and jail every year.

JONES: This increased prison population has come at a staggering cost to taxpayers.

Mr. CADORA: We can now calculate, block by block, how much we’re spending to remove and return people en masse from and back to that block.

JONES: This cluster of housing projects is what Caldora calls a “Million Dollar Block.”

Mr. CADORA: We found about 150 individual blocks in New York City for which we were spending more than $1 million a year to remove and return people to prison and jail.

Vince Mattos

JONES: Cadora uses dark red to show the concentrations in other states. They are maps that call for new directions.

Mr. CADORA: What these maps have done is accumulate the effect over the course of a year of a criminal justice and imprisonment system. What’s heated up here is a mass migration with the costs of having to move back and forth from this neighborhood to prisons upstate and back. So what we’re seeing here is constant grappling with resettlement, with disruption, cost of split families, tough health care.

JONES: Greg Jackson, another civic activist and a life-long resident of Brownsville, doesn’t need a map. He’s seen his own community imprisoned.

GREG JACKSON (Community Activist): Incarceration is not just the individual going to jail, but it’s the whole family going to jail, for Brownsville. Everybody’s suffering from it.

JONES: How’s that?

Mr. JACKSON: Because when this individual comes out of jail he still can’t find employment. And that person, the kids he left behind, the parents he left behind, the wife he left behind, they all suffer in the interim. So, when he comes out you think, “Wow, it’s a good time, my father’s coming out of jail, my mother’s coming out of jail.” There’s nothing good about it.

JONES: For one thing, felons aren’t allowed to live in these public housing projects, although some do. Others end up homeless, and most are jobless. Ask Dejaun Smith, still struggling eight years after his release.

Mr. SMITH: I’ve done odd jobs like — I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many. I went to an interview several months ago, and once they learned about my conviction they looked at me like, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

JONES: After decades of hard-line policies on crime — tough justice — more and more communities are looking into what is called Justice Reinvestment.

Mr. CADORA: Let us take the investments that had been built up over the years from criminal justice, redirect them to investments in civil institutions in those neighborhoods — better schools, better health care, better mental health support, and so on. In many of the states where the Justice Reinvestment initiative has taken root, prison populations are either dropping or the trend line in growth has been radically reduced, and that’s from Connecticut to Kansas — liberal to conservative.

Matoka Belton

JONES: Most of the crimes are connected to violence, drugs, and alcohol. But researchers found another culprit for the increased prison populations.

Mr. CALDORA: We found states where 60 to 65 percent of everyone entering prison each year were entering as a result of a revocation of parole and probation.

JONES: That was the case in Kansas, so legislators passed a new law — a new direction —committing taxpayer dollars to cities and communities that change parole and probation regulations that’ll reduce the prison population by 20 percent.

Mr. CALDORA: That’s kind of what the reinvestment project is about. It’s about saying, “Look, if you can reduce it, we’ll give you the money to keep reducing it.”

JONES: According to Caldora, states are being forced to rethink their hard line throw-the-criminals-in-jail attitude because, especially in these hard economic times, the criminal justice system is too costly, both financially and psychologically.

Mr. CALDORA: They realize that this overwhelming overuse of criminal justice is one of the greatest threats to sort of civil society.

JONES: This threat to society, this impact on communities in prison, can be felt on the streets and inside the crowded housing projects. We met Matoka Belton. She didn’t want us to see her three children. Their father went to prison.

(to Ms. Belton): What was he in prison for?

MATOKA BELTON: A number of things, and it was due to survival.

JONES: What was impact on the children of him being away?

Mr. MATOKA: It’s hard because they’re like, you know, what “school” is this, because you try not to say he’s in prison. “What school is this that they don’t come home? College?” But then it comes to the point where they’re a certain age and you can’t lie anymore. I was once an inmate myself. I know what it was like for my children to feel like, “Wow, my mother’s not here. Why can’t mommy come home with us?” It’s hard to leave a visit.

JONES: It’s a cruel cycle — poverty, crime, prison — passed from one generation to the next. A child whose parent went to prison is likely to end up behind bars too.

Mr. MATTOS: When you look at a kid and you say, “How could that kid, you know, have done such a crime like that?” Because he was never really told that was something wrong to do. He never celebrated Christmas with the family or sat down at the dinner table with the family.

JONES: About 700,000 inmates come back home every year. Most are unprepared for re-entry, and their communities are unprepared for their return. As the US government is making huge investments in industries and businesses, it is now being forced to also address a broken justice system, a system in desperate need of a stimulus package of sorts — justice reinvestment.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Phil Jones in Brooklyn, New York.

KIM LAWTON: As they prepared for inaugural festivities, President-elect Barack Obama and his family visited the Lincoln Memorial this week, evoking more memories of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Reverend MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr.:  I have a dream…

LAWTON: It was on the 45th anniversary of that speech that Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president. He noted that, given the situation in 1963, the crowd could have expected to hear King speak in anger, with the frustration of dreams deferred.

President-elect BARACK OBAMA (in speech): But what the people heard instead, people of every creed and color, from every walk of life, is that in America our destiny is inextricably linked, that together our dreams can be one.

LAWTON: In this historic week, connections between Obama and King are inevitable. Many Americans across racial and religious lines see Obama’s inauguration as one key fulfillment of King’s dream.

Reverend Donna Jones

Reverend DONNA JONES (Senior Pastor, Cookman United Methodist Church): For this bi-racial guy with an immigrant father, with roots in community organizing, with an African American wife and two black kids to move into the White House — what kind of country we have today that that can happen is such a testament of hope and a testament to the sacrifice of Martin Luther King.

LAWTON: Philadelphia United Methodist pastor Donna Jones says Obama’s election has ignited a new sense of optimism in her community and in communities across the country.

Rev. JONES: What this campaign has done in its entirety, and this is beyond Barack Obama, is it let us know that the process can work to effect change, but it didn’t necessarily change anything.

LAWTON: And, indeed, amid all the talk of hope, some religious leaders are also cautioning that much work still needs to be done before King’s full social vision may be realized.

Professor HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR (Howard University Divinity School and President, GLOBE Community Ministries): We don’t want to come to the conclusion that because Obama is now the president we’re going to have this sort of panacea-existence both in the United States and with respect to our position in the world.

LAWTON: Dreams aren’t always easy in this North Philadelphia neighborhood, where Jones is senior pastor at Cookman United Methodist Church. It’s an area plagued by drugs, prostitution, and economic distress. Cookman has developed a host of social programs to try to deal with the problems. The church has a special focus on at-risk youth. They run an after-school program and teen lounge where kids can hang out, take refuge from the streets, and get counseling and homework help, and Cookman also has a school for chronically truant youth that uses a home-school curriculum. The students meet at the church every day for classes.

Professor Harold Dean Trulear

Rev. JONES: I believe that Jesus was involved in social service. He went around healing. He healed a lot of people. He healed before he went out with the gospel message. So it’s an expression of Christ’s love, and whether people even accept Jesus Christ or not, his love should be offered.

LAWTON: She also believes the programs fit into Martin Luther King’s vision of what he called “the beloved community,” a term he learned from earlier theologians. It’s an inclusive vision of brotherhood and sisterhood, where all people share in the wealth of the nation, and justice and peace prevail. A place, Jones says, where all God’s children have enough, and nobody has too little.

Rev. JONES: That’s the legacy of King, first putting out the reality of the beloved community, again, all of that’s very biblical, but also putting out the hope and the encouragement to say you know what, you can do something to help create that, whatever the something is.

LAWTON: Students at Cookman got excited about Obama’s campaign, and several were part of a get-out-the vote project. His election means a lot to them.

ZULEIKA SILVERA (Student): I ain’t going to lie, I didn’t think he was going to win. But I’m like, wow, we really did it. It really felt like we made a change, like we got people to go out there and vote, and I’m, like, we made a change. We really did.

KHAREEM COLEY: You could do anything if you put your mind to it. That’s what that message really gave me.

Prof. TRULEAR: They have the sense that they too can become president. I mean, part of the thing with Obama is that it’s not just that he’s an African American, but he’s also common. He cut his teeth, even as a Harvard-trained lawyer he cut his teeth working in neighborhoods like this in the South Side of Chicago.

“What kind of country we have today… is such a testament of hope and a testament to the sacrifice of Martin Luther King.”

LAWTON: Howard University theology professor Harold Dean Trulear is president of GLOBE Community Ministries, a faith-based group that offers support to youth programs, including those at Cookman. He says Obama’s election will have a profound impact on coming generations.

Prof. TRULEAR: My daughter sends me a text message next morning, it says, “Dad, I have a black president.” That won’t be an unusual thing for her. Those kinds of things, I think, give my generation a lot of hope, and the only nagging thing is we just don’t want to lose sight of where we’ve come from.

LAWTON: It’s easy to forget, he says, that King’s vision was about more than race.

Prof. TRULEAR: Most people, when they refer to King’s dream for America, they go back to 1963, and they refer to the “I Have a Dream” speech, which of course is about racial justice and racial equality. But five years, later when King is assassinated, his dream is more about economic injustice and working with poor people. He talked about economic justice, he talked about militarism, war and peace, and he talked about racial justice.

LAWTON: Just as King led his grassroots movement from churches, Trulear says congregations of today still have the responsibility to lobby for broad social change no matter who is president.

Prof. TRULEAR: A lot of our religion, whether it’s the television prosperity gospel or whether it’s what you hear in a regular mainline church, has more to do with affirming who we are than challenging us at our root. I think we’ve lost sight of the prophetic dimension of the faith tradition.

President-elect BARACK OBAMA (in speech):  What we have already achieved gives us hope — the audacity to hope — for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

LAWTON: Pastor Jones says seeing the success of Obama’s grassroots effort gives veteran activists like herself renewed motivation to keep working toward King’s vision.

Rev. JONES: For our generation, I believe it was a sense of confirmation that this stuff of democratic renewal and public policy advocacy and community organizing really does work.  And I think that we needed to see that, because we were getting really cynical.

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep… I promise you, we as a people will get there.”

LAWTON: She says many faith-based activists had begun to feel like the children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness in the 40 years since King’s death. Obama’s election changed that.

Rev. JONES: I would have said “not my lifetime.” Now I don’t have anything that I will say “not in my lifetime.” So that means beloved community could happen in my lifetime. For King to hear that in heaven he’s probably, like, “All right. They’re coming out of the wilderness.”

President-elect BARACK OBAMA (in victory speech):  The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.

LAWTON: Ultimately, Trulear believes, there is a spiritual message that Martin Luther King preached as well — the true meaning of hope.

Prof. TRULEAR: We say I hope it doesn’t rain. I hope the Eagles win the football game. I hope I hit the lottery. It’s more like a wish that’s not grounded in any kind of reality — it may happen, it may not, I have no control over it. In the biblical sense of the term, hope is a very, very fixed reality. It means that I have an expectation that something is going to be different than the way it is now.

LAWTON: Obama’s election, he says, has tapped into that deep place of hope.

Prof. TRULEAR: There really is an expectation in this country that things are going to be different. There really is an expectation around the planet that things are going to be different. Whether those hopes are materialized or not is a different issue and nobody really wants to even think about that right now. But there’s a real sense that there is going to be a change, and a real sense that people are going to be disappointed if there’s not a real, concrete change.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in North Philadelphia.

Q: Tell me a little bit about the ministries you have here, especially aimed at kids.

A: Well, our overall ministries are called Beloved Community Coalition, and within that the purpose is really taken from Isaiah, where you find the—there’s a famous painting of the beloved community that has the lion and the lamb together, and the little child leading them and the whole thing. The beloved community is a place where all God’s children has enough, and nobody has too little, and based on that our ministries with children actually started because we had some older members here who have since passed on who were concerned about the young people who were actually the children of women who were engaged in prostitution. And what they found was a lot of the kids weren’t really eating healthy meals. So we did an after-school program—we were the first Kid’s Café. We did an after-school program that included full dinner, and then we got to know more of the moms and their friends, and along the way we got involved, because of that, with welfare reform. From welfare reform we started doing adult education, adult basic education, because the literacy rates were so low. As we did that with welfare reform, in time the ages got lower and lower and lower. We started with 40-year-olds, 30s, 20s, and then we started to see 18, 19, 20s coming in with literacy issues. And then the older women started to bring their teenage children with them, because they were home and couldn’t get work. So we started to see a real need around young people who are teenagers who weren’t going to school for all kinds of reasons. Not because they didn’t want to go to school, but because of family problems and other things going on. So we started to add 17,18s, and then we applied for a grant with the Department of Human Services truancy to do a program that would allow us to offer a diploma, and we based it off of Urban Promise, which is done in Camden, [New Jersey], founded by Tony Campolo, and we use a home school company and a home school curriculum, but we educate everybody here every day, 9 to 3, and they get a high school diploma, and it’s working really well. We get referrals, from the Department of Human Services and the courts, of young people who’ve been chronically truant, and they can come and work on their diplomas, and we’ve had two graduations.

Q: Two graduations with how many?

A: We’ve graduated 15 so far.

Q: Does it have a name, the school?

A: It’s the Cookman United Methodist Church Alternative Learning Community for Youth. We also have a teen center, and we are the only open teen center in, I think, a mile radius of this area, and what “open” means is that anybody can come, and we really specialize in older teens and young adults, so 19, 20, 21s, and we don’t screen the teens or anything like that. So those are the two things.

Q: Why do you feel it’s important that the church in particular be involved in these kinds of social service operations?

A: I believe that Jesus was involved in social service. He went around healing; he healed a lot of people. He healed before he went out with the gospel message. Because if people are suffering that should be our first, you know, our main thing as Methodists: do no harm and do good are like the two cool things that we talk about a lot. So it’s an expression of Christ’s love, and whether people even accept Jesus Christ or not, his love should be offered.

Q: You mentioned the beloved community. That’s a concept Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. What did it mean for him, and what does it means for you and for this church?

A: The beloved community concept, that really gets fleshed out in all of the Bible, but especially in Isaiah, where there’s so many texts that talk about—when I think about Isaiah 61, for instance. That was Jesus’ kind of first sermon: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, release the captives, set at liberty those who are oppressed, declare the year of the Lord’s favor.” To talk about the fact that these things aren’t things we have to wait for after we die, they’re things that should be available to people right now. So people should be able to build houses and live in them, people should be able to raise up devastated cities, people should be able to deal with health care and education, and this is all very biblical. And the beloved community is, like I said, that place where all of God’s children have enough education and health care and food and fun and, you know, just everything that is necessary for that abundant life that Jesus talks about. And so for Martin Luther King there’s civil rights, but I think the better term, which is a quote from a very dear friend of ours, Dr. Vincent Harding,  says it was more than civil rights. It was a pro-democracy movement. So King’s movement that led us into considering whether everybody was being able to live that abundant life was a movement that said we have the power as people to create the world, with God’s help, that everybody is entitled to. And [King] had that great gift of being able to mobilize with others large groups of people to really know that it’s possible and to say, you know what? We can do something about this. We don’t have to live in poverty. Right now as it relates to Cookman, when we became concerned around truancy and around young people not going to school, and we met the young people realizing that they wanted to learn but that there were so many barriers to them learning, we could have just kind of grumbled and complained about the Philadelphia public school system. But what we decided to do was, well, this is a big city. There are probably opportunities for people who can design good programs. So we can all do something, and I think that’s the legacy of King. First putting out the reality of the beloved community, again all of that’s very biblical, but also putting out the hope and the encouragement to say you know what? You can do something to help create that, whatever the something is. And so for us that’s it. The legacy of Dr. King was he set out the vision of the beloved community based on Isaiah, based on his background as a minister. He was able to mobilize the people around the vision, and in mobilizing the people he gave the people hope that the vision could be accomplished, and it was that hope that caused so many people to work together, to know that it’s not nothing you can do; there’s something that you can do.

Q: For a lot of people it’s a point that just gets lost, especially today, to think back to the fact that King’s movement wasn’t just about civil rights or voting rights or segregation.

A: I mentioned Dr. Vincent Harding and the Veterans of Hope Project.  They’re veterans of the civil rights movement, and what they are encouraging people to realize is beyond civil rights, that’s one specific thing, but the movement was a pro-democracy movement. It was really about the way this country operates: by the people, for the people, of the people—that the people have the power to make a change and affect public policy. So if you look at the King movement, a lot of it really was radical, dangerous public policy advocacy, but back in those days advocacy meant they would come after you. Today, you know, we make a lobby day, we all get on a bus, we go to Washington, we have lunch. You know, everybody’s opening doors for us; nobody’s got dogs out there to bother us. But in King’s day, the same thing that we take for granted was done in great costs. But it was about teaching democracy in rural communities and poor communities with garbage workers and sanitation workers and immigrants and migrant workers and saying this is the way this country works and if we practice democracy and we practice democratic, nonviolent advocacy, then a renewal will happen in this country. And what renewal means is you go back to the old landmark to find out what was it supposed to be like, and then you build from there. Well, same thing with beloved community. Beloved community was about what was it supposed to be like? So when God created the heavens and the earth and placed everybody in the garden, that was beloved community. That’s what it was supposed to be like. So we don’t have to look at what it was supposed to be like and say it can’t happen. It’s our responsibility to figure out how to make it happen.

Q: To what extent was the election of Barack Obama a fulfillment of King’s vision, a fulfillment of the dream we talk about?

A: To a major, major, major extent. I think we are all still excited about it, because in the legacy of what we talked about, about a pro-democracy movement—I grew up in a family that was very active in the civil rights movement. We were making placards to go down South to protest. My mom was part of a citizens organizing group. So there was a lot of protest work being done in my household. The FBI had a file on my mother, and there were bomb threats and all kinds of things back then, and to even believe, having grown up in that era, that it was still possible for the citizens of the United States to elect the president is just amazing to me. It’s sad that it has to be amazing, but especially after the last, the election of about four years ago, where many people felt, you know, that there’s nothing that we can do, this democracy thing—it really doesn’t work. And that’s what made Barack Obama’s campaign so exciting, and we give credit to not just Barack Obama but all the people, and that’s what makes it so exciting. There are people in this community that worked on the presidential election. There are students in this school that worked on the presidential election. So the beauty of it was that it took the concepts that were forged with the civil rights movement and the pro-democracy movement and said you know what? These things still happen. So Barack Obama basically was a community organizer, and he used the things that my mother used and that my father used and that Martin King used and that Fanny Lou Hamer used. He used the same tools, but without the dogs, which is kind of cool, because it meant that we could mobilize with joy as opposed to mobilizing in fear, and it ended up being a spark and a different kind of spark and very important to the generation of students that are here, because they saw that ordinary citizens in ordinary time could make a huge difference just by doing ordinary things like voting and making sure people knew how to register to vote and blogging and emailing and texting, and to see even the use of technology that caused an increase in consciousness that just made it possible for people to actually vote and then to see that happen—beyond Barack Obama. No matter who this person would have been, it was critical for our country to see that the people could elect a president.

Q: Did you grow up here in Philadelphia?

A: Yes

Q: Are your parents still living?

A: No, my parents are both gone.

Q: You mentioned having that memory of fear. Is the election message different, do you think, for the generations? Is it different for you or people older than you who were really part of that movement and for the kids you deal with? What are those different messages the election gives?

A: For the generation that I’m in, or for me, I can’t speak for my whole generation, but I’m a boomer, and we do speak for our whole generation. That’s part of what we do. But for me there’s a message of hope, and then there’s a message of closure, in a way, and for our generation, especially those of us who work with young people, year after year after year we would see people look at us as if that was then and this is now. And it was almost a look, for Vietnam-era people as well, and it was almost a look of failure, you know. “You guys did all of that, and at great risk, and what has it gotten us?” So for our generation I believe it was a sense of confirmation that this stuff of democratic renewal and public policy advocacy and community organizing really does work. And I think that we needed to see that, because we were getting really cynical. For the young people who are our children and our grandchildren, they would see that cynicism and so they wouldn’t grow up with a sense of what it means to live in a democratic country or what it means to make a difference. And so that cynicism for them could turn into nihilism, which says nothing matters. So for these generations that experienced the movement, and generations that grew up with the cynicism of having experienced the movement and still seeing all of these, if you look at the triplets of evil that King talked about in the Riverside [Church] speech: racism, materialism, and militarism. For these kids to see these things continuing 50 years, 40 years, 30 years in and you can’t do anything about it, for Barack Obama to be elected by the people in a grassroots kind of way says that, okay, it definitely hit racism in a big way, materialism in a big way. Just to see how $25, $5— you know, I went on line and it was the first time I’ve ever contributed to a campaign, and I hit the PayPal, $25 Barack Obama. First time. To see how even collective economics—my $25 made a difference. And militarism for us here especially deals with nonviolence and gun violence and things like that. To think that, you know what? We can step up our efforts in changing gun laws and gun control and other things like that. For the kids today to see that it’s possible means that the issues that have been around for these 50 years, 40, 100 years, we can actually make a difference.

Q: You’ve talked about how this fulfilled a vision, but in fact maybe a lot of people want to think well good, we’ve solved that problem. We’ve solved the problem of racism. Clearly, we have a black president now. We don’t have to worry about that. What are the parts of King’s vision that still have to be worked on?

A: All of them. What this campaign has done in its entirety, and this is beyond Barack Obama, is it let us know that the process can work to effect change. But it didn’t necessarily change anything. So racism is still alive and well in America. But things were so bad in America that across, you know, white males—when I saw the number of white males that voted for Barack Obama I was, like, either the country is in really bad shape or  we’ve come this far, and it’s probably a mixture. There are probably people who are racist that voted that way because they are concerned about the country. But it says that I can overcome racism for the sake of the country. That says a lot. I can overcome sexism for the sake of the country, you know, if we look at Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton. I can overcome religious intolerance for the sake of the country. So it gives us a starting place, and the hard thing for us right now is, that the election did, was just gave us a place that we as Americans can start. So when Barack Obama four years ago said, you know, it’s not a black America, its not a white America, we’re Americans, I believe that for the first time since I’ve been American I feel like an American, and that feeling spread out throughout the country means that we finally in this country, I believe, have a place to start. And with a place to start, if we come back to the beloved community, what are we going to work on? Well, let’s work on eliminating racism. Let’s work on eliminating gun violence and other acts of violence. Let’s work on not living for money, which with the economy right now it means that we have to. So that even as bad as the economy is, we have to start, so we’re not going to be doing predatory lending, we’re not going to be doing some of the things that were hurtful. His election as the first African American and the first family of African Americans going into the White House says something about where we’re starting with racism. His historic dialogues on race mean that there are dialogues coming out of that, coming out on a deeper, deeper level. The same thing about militarism: we’re going to be looking at what’s going on in the Middle East and what’s going on domestically, because you’re talking about somebody who came out of Chicago but also somebody with Indonesian and Hawaiian and other backgrounds, and somebody whose father was Muslim and mother was Christian. That’s going to say something about militarism. And then again on materialism: his campaign was run in such a way that said your $5 makes a difference, and therefore pay attention, and in the economic crisis we’ve got to pay attention. And so we’re at a wonderful place to—Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and I’m not saying the kingdom of heaven like, you know, Jesus is going to come back tomorrow, which would be fine with me, but the concept of beloved community is within our reach and has been within our reach. What happened now is that we have the hope. We’re at a starting place. The election of Barack Obama ended up confirming something that many of us had stopped believing, so there were activists and community organizers that were doing what we have to do but not necessarily believing 100 percent that this beloved community we would see in our life time. So this election said something to us, especially the generation of organizers that said, you know, what all the organizing we’ve done for 40 years has contributed not only the nation being at this place but also been contributing to this 40-something-year-old growing up to believe that these activities make such a huge difference. I mean, can you imagine an organizer saying I can be president? I mean, that’s like you must be insane is what one would think. So all of it—the hope that we saw that he had to have and actualize, the hope that we’ve had we actualized. So hope actualized is where we are right now, and we can see that hope, just acting on the hope, means that change can happen. And even the dialogue around change was, I think, encouraging, because the campaign didn’t necessarily always clearly define what was going to change, but what changed was the hope that there could be change. And so as we come back to the concept of beloved community, it can be a nebulous concept. You know, what does it mean for all God’s children to have enough and nobody to have too little? We have to live into that. But the hope says we can live into that. The hope says this is a beginning. This is a time that we know that the things we think, the things we dream of, this world that we envisioned and that’s in our hearts can be tangibly achieved by certain methods over time. And so that’s it.

Q: What is the role of the church in particular in helping to realize that? What is the responsibility?

A: I think that the responsibility is—and I’m going to change it from church to faith community—mainly because we have a responsibility to realize we’re in a global world, that God created a whole universe and we are not, and this is going to really—I am a Christian, I say the Apostles Creed and I believe in Jesus Christ, the Bible, I believe that Jesus is coming back, I’m a very conservative Christian. However, I believe that in God’s wisdom that God can work with all people of faith to achieve that place where all God’s children have enough and nobody has too little, that beloved community, that God allows the sun to shine on the just and the unjust alike. And so the first thing that needs to happen is that we’ve got to work interfaith. We’ve got to work intercultural. We’ve got to start understanding a little more about the Jewish community, the Muslim community, the Hindu, the Bahai, the Buddhist, all of these ways of looking at the universe and the world. We’ve got to come to a place where we can just like—not one black America, not one white America, there’s America. I think right now—not to say that Christianity doesn’t make a difference or that belief in Jesus Christ doesn’t make a difference or isn’t important for salvation, that isn’t what I’m saying. But what I am saying is that we have to come out of—the church is always 50 years behind everybody else. How do we stand as one?  That’s something we’re going to be seeing the president-elect doing with the Congress. How do we stand as one? You’re a Republican, and you feel this way, and I’m not taking away what you feel about fiscal responsibility. But how do we feel as one? I’m a Democrat, and I just used the term fiscal responsibility. How do we stand as one means that I understand what you saying when you talk about it and now how do we stand as one to create this community that we can fight about still leads to one place? And that’s the place where all of God’s children have enough and nobody has too little. And then we can fight over who God is and how God is and in the end God will let us know, but in the in-between time, as people of faith can we look at what can happen when diverse people come together and make a change in such a way that their differences are not deal breakers? As a community of faith, how can demonstrate the love of Christ strongly enough to work at Al-Aqsa [Mosque] down the road, or to work with Mosque No. 9, or to work with Temple Beth Shalom? How do we do that? And then secondly as clergy, I have to really think about, what’s my prophetic voice? We just started here a series on Isaiah so that we can understand a little bit more the biblical concept of beloved community. As clergy, how do I preach hope? That means that clergy, we need to think about issues. What do we preach most? What’s morality? That dialogue started before Barack Obama, where we started to think about, well, wait a minute, we’re not happy about some things, but is it more immoral that somebody just stole a television or is it more immoral that we had an unjust war? And so what are we going to be talking about from our pulpits? And also how do we encourage community, and that has to do with—there’s individual salvation. I’m saved, baptized, sanctified, Holy Ghost, nine yards, all of that. But if it’s just me then we’ve got a problem. So how do we look at social holiness that says my individual holiness means nothing if the world is falling apart? Because individual holiness without social holiness—you know, if I’m only looking after myself, even if it’s my relationship with Jesus Christ, if I’m only looking after myself and the world is falling apart, when I stand before Jesus Christ and he says when did you, you know, I was poor and you didn’t feed me, or I was hungry and—you know the scripture I’m talking about. When I stand before the Master and I say to him, well, when did I see you like that, and he says, well, I was the Muslim kid in Iraq, and I say but wait, wait, Iraq is the enemy of Israel, and it’s, like, that Muslim kid is a friend of mine. You know, how do we start to preach differently so that we can become one people, even though we might worship in many ways and we might have different images of God? So I think there is a lot for the church to do, because I think we have a prophetic voice that has been silent on the beloved community. The church itself, but all communities of faith—we have to revision, because we’ve been 50 years behind, and how we preach, how we teach, and how we unify across faiths and still maintain our integrity with our faith. The fact that I’m saved, my own personal journey, my own personal holiness is critical to me. However, what’s critical to God right now is the universe, is the world, is everybody in it, and so the most important thing we have to do is make sure the child in Iraq, the child in Israel, the child in America, the child in Sudan are whole and have a whole planet to live on and a whole universe to grow up in that is a place where they’re not begging for food and they’re not worried about the next shoe to drop. So take it back specifically to the church, and specifically to the Christian church’s tradition of Sunday morning declarations and Communion and baptism is to link that personal call to holiness to God’s call to social holiness, so that together we can with integrity achieve beloved community with not only ourselves but with the whole world.

Q: On January 19 we’re going to have a day when we remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and everything he did and stood for, and the next day we’re going to be inaugurating Barack Obama. What are your reflections given this confluence of events?

A: It’s amazing. For the inauguration to happen on the weekend that also includes Dr. Martin King’s birthday that includes what we do in Philadelphia, the Martin Luther King Day of Service—not being a day but a way of life. The Beloved Community Coalition, one of our key events that we did last year was we honored, on April 4, the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination—the interesting thing about that was that it was 40 years, and so many people were talking about this 40 years in the wilderness and this whole experience of us finding ourselves together for 40 years trying to figure out how to work together or even be together. And this is before we even knew the name Barack Obama. And I remember we were standing in the park, holding hands around the water fountain for the candlelight 40-year vigil, and we had asked the mayor to say that Philadelphia, right now our motto is we’re the city of brotherly love and they tack on “of sisterly affection,” which I think is kind of sexist, personally—that we would look at the city motto this year as not so much being city of brotherly love but city of beloved community, which is a deeper thought. And then to have this year also be the year that Barack Obama is elected and to have the inauguration coming in the wake of celebrating the life and legacy of King, and what it says for our country, for this biracial guy with an immigrant father, with roots in community organizing, with an African American wife and two black kids to move into the White House. And all that—not only what that means individually, but also socially, what kind of country do we have today that that can happen is such a testament of hope, and a testament to the sacrifice of Martin Luther King, and a testament of the sacrifice of all those who stood, named and unnamed, to work for true democratic renewal in America, and to work for the consciousness of Americans, that we would set aside differences. There are people who voted for Barack Obama who can’t stand black people. There are people who voted for Obama who can’t stand immigrants. There are people who voted for Obama who can’t stand all kinds of things. There are people who voted for him who can’t stand Democrats. But they voted because they were voting for a change in our country that they felt we could achieve together, and they felt that his message was critical for our survival and achievement of better things for our children.

Q: And for you what are the spiritual messages?

A: The spiritual message is, number one, I believe that God doesn’t give up, praise God. Number two: God’s vision of beloved community. I believe God inspired—that Dr. King was inspired by God through an understanding of the scriptures, especially an understanding of Isaiah and an understanding of the Beatitudes in Matthew—that even the young King couldn’t get away from the prophetic voice of God saying that this must be done differently, and I believe that voice and that message of the preacher—something was inspired by the Holy Spirit for such a time as this. And it spurred on my parents and it spurred on people like me and it spurred on Barack Obama. So that spirit-inspired message to be strong enough to go through lynchings and burnings and murder, to go through Vietnam, to take a critical and honest look at Vietnam, to help us take a critical and honest look at Iraq, to help us take a critical and honest look at our economy. Basically, the message of Jesus was a very simple message of look at this stuff and then behave differently toward each other and toward God. You know, love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and love your neighbor as your self is something that Jesus said he came to fulfill, is something that Martin King gave his life for, is something that Barack Obama and his family have already given their lives for, because you don’t run for president without giving up some of your life. It’s something that all the people who worked on his campaign have in some ways given their lives for. And it’s something that they now stand, as we sometimes says in preaching, something like they stand in the shoes of the fisherman, stand in the shoes of Peter. What you will give your life for? The real message is something that we reaffirm each Sunday with Communion. What are you willing to give your life for? We’re willing to give ourselves for something that we have hope in, and hope is something—and faith is the substance of things hoped for. So faith is the substance of hope. So I have hope. As a Christian I have hope. My hope is affirmed by my faith, and my faith tells me Abraham had faith and it caused him to be righteous before God. In other words, he could live right and he could live peacefully and he could create peace for others and he could do the right things for the right reasons, based on his faith. So if faith is the substance of hope, then my faith, my Christian faith makes my hope substantive, and it allows me and my congregation and others that we can influence—it makes the beloved community a tangible possibility, so that it’s possible. That’s the neat thing about this election. I would have said “not in my lifetime.” Now I don’t have anything that I will say “not in my lifetime.” So that means beloved community could happen in my lifetime. Even if Jesus doesn’t come back in my lifetime, it’s possible for us to achieve beloved community in my lifetime. For King to hear that in heaven, he’s probably, like, all right! They’re coming out of the wilderness.

Q: Give us a very brief description of what GLOBE does.

A: GLOBE Community Ministries works with congregations and other agencies helping them to strengthen their work with youth and families. We usually attach ourselves to one congregation and use that as a laboratory to develop youth programs for that church, and then we also do consulting work with other congregations and government agencies, school systems, helping them develop partnerships with congregations to deliver social services.

Q: How long have you been working with this church [Cookman United Methodist Church]?

A: With this church, almost a year. We came here last spring.

Q: Tell me a little bit about the context of this church and especially what the youth face and therefore what the church faces when it wants to do youth ministry.

A: This is a very unusual congregation in that the United Methodists have allowed it to engage in a lot of partnership building with secular agencies, with government, and so the programmatic life of this congregation far outweighs the actual membership. You may come here on a Sunday and see 40 or 50 people, but we’ll serve two or three times that many people in a day through various programs. It’s a very, very economically distressed neighborhood. We’re about one block from one of the major crack-cocaine centers in the city of Philadelphia, so children and youth in this neighborhood are all at risk. It’s just a matter of how much at risk you are when you’re living in a neighborhood that’s on this level of economic distress.

Q: What do you think of the talk we keep hearing, with some people saying that Barack Obama’s election did indeed fulfill Martin Luther King’s dream for America?

A: Well, it’s interesting that most people when they refer to King’s dream for America they go back to 1963, and they refer to the “I have a dream” speech, of course, is about racial justice and racial equality. But five years later when King is assassinated, his dream is more about economic injustice and working with poor people. He dies fighting for the rights of garbage men in Memphis, Tennessee, and so now he is working on economic issues that we tend to forget about in the contemporary setting. So maybe he [Obama] fulfils the 1963 dream, but whether or not he fulfils the 1968 dream with respect to economic justice remains to be seen. Now for reasons that were strategic he had to pitch his campaign towards the middle class. It was all about the self-interests of the middle class. He and McCain fought back and forth over the heart of Middle America and a lot of prosperity language. Well, down here where we’re sitting there’s a disconnect. I mean there may be some dreams about that, but it’s not the kind of sense of entitlement and the sense that that’s the norm. You know, keeping your tax money and those kinds of battles about the middle class are not the kinds of conversations that energize a neighborhood like this. And so whether or not [Obama] fulfils the 1968 Martin Luther King dream is something we still have to see.

Q: To what extent did the election bring a message of hope to the kids in this neighborhood?

A: I think it gave them an incredible amount of hope. They have the sense that they too can become president. I mean part of the thing with Obama is that it’s not just that he’s an African American, but he’s also common. I mean we live in a nation of royalty now. We have royal families on both sides of the aisle now. We’ve got the Bushes on one side, we’ve got the Kennedys on the other, a certain amount of entitlement to both sets of royalty, and Caroline’s going to become a senator, and my son Jeb can become president. Obama doesn’t come from that, and he cut his teeth, even as a Harvard-trained lawyer he cut his teeth working in neighborhoods like this in the South Side of Chicago. There’s a certain availability that he has to the young people in this area that the other candidates simply couldn’t bring.

Q:  What message did Obama’s election send to older people—and I want to get at some of these generational differences—to folks who were around in ’63 and ’68, or people who were younger and saw their parents working in ’63 and ’68? What message does Obama’s election send to them?

A: There was kind of a shock-and-awe to it, because a lot of us, and I’m in that generation, I’m a boomer, and I remember sitting around the house in the ’60s saying that—know what I said? I said there’ll be a black president in 2000, and the reason I said that was that if you remember back in the ’60s we were still in that period where every 20 years whoever the president was died in office. You know, 1840, 1860, so I figured, well, by the time we get a black president, probably 2000, they’ll kill him, and to be honest with you I wasn’t the only person looking at the acceptance speech waiting for the gunshot and taking even a sigh of relief when it was over, because this just seems so unlikely, and I think after you’ve moved beyond the sense of “it really happened,” then comes the euphoria, then comes the joy, then comes the sense that this is a real opportunity for change, and when we look not only at the excitement in our generation but then how our kids have been energized—my daughter sends me a text message next morning. It says, “Dad, I have a black president.” That won’t be an unusual thing for her. Those kinds of things, I think, give my generation a lot of hope, and the only nagging thing is we just don’t want to lose sight of where we’ve come from, and we don’t want to come to the conclusion that because Obama is now the president we’re going to have this sort of panacea existence both in the United States and with respect to our position in the world.

Q: Is there a danger for all communities, for all different racial groups, that people do think something is over now? We’ve ended a chapter and so the work is all done?

A: I think that’s right, and what I tell people is not so much that when we get a black president things will be different, but when I don’t have to teach my sons as a part of their driving lesson how to be pulled over by the police, when I don’t have to warn them about the dangers of driving while black, then I think we’ll be somewhere. But the presidency is—it’s in a big place, it’s in a high place, it’s in a somewhat distant place. There are still places in this country where the nuts and bolts are still fundamentally racist, where the warp and roof of the lifestyle is still exclusivist and supremacist, and those parts of this country, quite frankly, in some cases seem totally untouched by this movement, or they see it as dangerous: oh, my gosh, what is this country coming to, and what’s going to happen to us now, we’re all going to hell in a hand basket. There’s enough of that in this country on the eve of this historic occasion for me to still give pause.

Q: Martin Luther King Jr. talked a lot about the beloved community, and there were a lot of parts to the vision that he created. How is America doing with regard to that vision, and where do you see the big work?

A: I think that King’s vision for the beloved community, and he talked about this himself in terms of three different areas. He talked about economic justice, he talked about militarism, war and peace, and he talked about racial justice. King was not at the forefront of gender bias and gender equity issues, but those were the three—military, poverty, and racism. And I think if King were looking at contemporary America he would give us points for making real progress on racial justice. I think that he would see some seeds of hope with respect to the way in which economic issues have hit us. There is more prosperity now, though there are certainly people who are being left out in contemporary America, and I think King would be aghast at the extent to which we’ve relied on military presence and military might to enforce our role as a leader in the world. I think King saw America’s role as a world leader as being a world leader in peace and in diplomacy and in what—he would say brotherhood, he would say brotherhood and sisterhood, in learning how to communicate with one another and understand one another and bringing people together, not in the type of militarism and type of displays of brute force and power that have come to symbolize what it means to be a leader on this planet.

Q: What is the role of the church—King worked out of the churches, clearly—but of the faith community more generally in helping to realize these parts of the vision that seem to be unfulfilled?

A: I think there’s a real problem in the contemporary church in that we’ve come through an era of prosperity that we have baptized, that we have adopted. A lot of our religion, whether it’s the television prosperity gospel or whether it’s what you hear in a regular mainline church, has more to do with affirming who we are than challenging us at our root. I think we’ve lost sight of the prophetic dimension of the faith tradition and part of what you see kind of crawling around the edges of this is some people who are still prepared to say we haven’t come far enough, we need to make some challenges, we need to make some changes. I think one of the tragedies of the Obama campaign, to be very honest with you, is the fact that he felt compelled to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright. I don’t agree with everything Jeremiah Wright says, but I think that Jeremiah Wright is right on point with trying to call the nation, trying to call the church to account, and if this was going to be a new style of politics with a much larger tent, it really saddens me that this candidate was not able to find a way to include him in the tent or to include the more disaffected votes and the disaffected voices that he represents. The campaign still had to be run strategically towards the center, and the faith community can never allow itself to be comfortable in the center.

Q: So what is the agenda for the faith community, then, in helping to achieve the vision that Martin Luther King set out?

A: I can get up and preach a sermon about working with the poor, and my congregation won’t move. But if I begin to get them to interact with people who are poor or if they begin to discover the poor in their own midst, what happens is they begin to become motivated, because they are fundamentally good people that want to help what’s right there in front of them, what in ethics we call the doctrine of proximity. There’s the problem right in front of me, I’ve got to do something about that, and churches like the one where we are now, Cookman [United Methodist Church], which has a good number of commuters who come in to worship or people like myself and others who come in here to work, we don’t live in this neighborhood but the proximity keeps driving us. There’s something else that’s got to be done in this neighborhood; there are more connections that need to be made in this neighborhood. There are more changes that need to be made in this neighborhood, and we want to be part of that process and bring to bear the resources that we have, and more congregations are going to have to continue to engage poor communities. They’re going to have to stay the course. Some of them are beginning to leave the inner cities, African American as well as white congregations. We need more congregations to stay the course, to identify in solidarity with those voices that are being left out, and help to develop a ministry of advocacy on their behalf.

Q: What, for you, are the spiritual lessons or messages of this moment, especially reflecting on where we are—remember King, celebrating Obama?  What are the spiritual insights that seem particularly relevant at this moment?

A: At the risk of stating the obvious, I think you have to start with the concept of hope, and the reason that I would do that is because in our popular usage of the term we’ve watered it down in a way that it’s not intended to be in a religious or spiritual context. We say I hope it doesn’t rain. I hope the Eagles win the football game. I hope I win the lottery. It’s more like a wish that’s not grounded in any kind of reality—it may happen, it may not, I have no control over it. In the biblical sense of the term hope is a very, very fixed reality. It means that I have an expectation that something is going to be different than the way it is now, and so when you talk about hope in a spiritual sense and you talk about hope that’s been engendered, there really is an expectation in this country that things are going to be different. There really is an expectation around the planet that things are going to be different. Whether those hopes are materialized or not is a different issue, and nobody really wants to even think about that right now. But there’s a real sense that there is going to be a change and a real sense that people are going to be disappointed if there’s not a real, concrete change. I think the other spiritual lesson for me is the power of the little person, and the reason that’s a spiritual lesson is that my voice as, you know, part of the faceless masses counts. I matter. And you know we sing a song in church, “Jesus love the little children,” and trying to talk about how important even the smallest child is to God, and this was an election where small people mattered. Obama was not anointed by big business; he was not anointed by a political machine. He was anointed by people from small towns like Jacksonville, North Carolina and East St. Louis, Illinois and Camden, New Jersey. He was swept up in rural areas and in inner cities. There was a real sense on the part of people who for years had felt like they didn’t matter, that I do matter. And that’s spiritually empowering, to know that my voice counts. In the Christian tradition we talk about the imago dei, that humanity is created in image of God, and part of being created in the image of God is having some of the creative energy and attributes of God—that we can create, that we can make things. And making things is not just about making material things, it’s also about making worldviews and making ideas and making change. We don’t just sit back and let the world go and allow fate to happen. We can make a difference. That’s a spiritual reality.

Q: Do you hear echoes of King in Obama, or is that comparison over-inflated?

A: Well, for me, in my naturally cynical manner, all comparisons like that are over-inflated. But you can’t ignore the similarities. You can’t ignore this trio of days we’re getting ready to go through, that we’re going through now, with today being Martin Luther King Sunday, tomorrow being the MLK holiday, and then the following day being the inauguration. You can’t ignore the well educated African American male who reconnects with the dispossessed and learns the lessons of what it means to walk with those who don’t have what he’s had access to, and then tries to bring those lessons to bear when he ascends to a position of power. I think it’s difficult to overestimate the power of oratory and the way both of these men have been able to use words, to use phrases, use images to create a sense of hope and a sense that things can be different, and to do that with the spoken word and to do that with the spoken word not just in term of a matter of fact “this is my platform,” and people criticized Obama incessantly early on because where are his specifics? Where are his specifics? And I think that his strategy was let’s work with the big picture, let’s give people a sense that the specifics actually matter, and then once we have the sense that, you know, there can be something different, then he can lay some things out that maybe would have been more difficult to hear had we not been prepared with this gifted oratory and with our sights being set higher than we were accustomed to setting them. And both King and Obama had that gift of being able to lift our sights above the ordinary, a vision that they can believe in and a vision that uses language with which they’re familiar, and that’s a gift that these two educated men had. They don’t talk over our heads. They don’t put their polysyllabic vocabularies on display to impress. The ideas are lofty, the concepts are noble, but the language is plain yet inspirational.

Q: I know you are a man of prayer.  How are you praying for Obama?

A: Well, I’m still that kid in the 1960s who wondered are they going to shoot him. So I’ll be honest with you: I pray for his safety. And I also pray for his family, because I don’t think that the family being together was an act, and one of the things that I know in the African American community has been really important has been looking at the family pictures and really having a sense not just that we have the first black president, but that there is a black family occupying the White House. I think, secondly, I pray that he will have a sense of the transcendence and the power and the providence of God … and that he will, in the best sense of the term, attempt to have a moral presidency and not have a presidency that’s based on expediency or that is so constrained by unilateral American self-interest that we forget that the rest of the world matters.

Q: Is there a special challenge for him, given these huge expectations and hopes that have been sparked by his election?

A: I think so, and I think that he’s taking advantage of that by trying to move, even in his status as president-elect, trying to get some things done, because the honeymoon will be over. I like the thing that Jeremiah Wright said when people talked about his role as a prophet. He said people need to realize that if [Obama] is elected on November 4, I’m coming after him, too, because prophets come after whoever is in power. So the honeymoon will be over. He will not be beloved all four years as he is right now, and so he’s got to move swiftly and he’s got to move decisively. He also has to move as quickly as possible because the modern American presidency is not set up for presidents to make decisions. Checks and balances are such now that, to be honest, it’s very difficult for any president no matter how popular to get his or her agenda through a Congress, to get them through the Senate, to move through all of the different hurdles of the checks and balances of the American system. They’re weighted very heavily against the presidential authority and decision-making, and so our very system constrains him in a manner that even with the best of intentions will be problematic.

Q: What role do you want to see the faith community play in his administration? How should that relationship play out?

A: There’s a very good transition team in place that represents a variety of the faith community. It’s not so heavily weighted with one brand of Christianity that this transition team will lean in a particular direction that tends to favor its own position. It’s a much more pluralistic, much more socially progressive and socially sensitive than the transition team that I worked with eight years ago, and what the faith community is going to have to do, I think, is two things, and this goes for all the traditions that are at the table. The first thing is to remember that their primary allegiance is to their faith tradition and not to the presidency and not to the nation and not to any one particular ideology. It’s very easy when the faith community gets a seat at the table to forget that none of us planted churches or mosques or synagogues in order to get a seat at the White House. We did it because we believe that God had called us to have a particular spiritual witness to a particular group of people in a particular place, and that’s what every faith community has to major in. The second thing is to not let the government—not just the presidency— off the hook and to continue to have a prophetic witness, to say there is more change needed. We can never afford to be co-opted by any political agenda left, right, or center. And then the final thing is to have a healthy sense of what can be done in partnership with other institutions—that we cannot be the final or we cannot be the sole institution that brings about change. There’s a role for a variety of institutions in a pluralistic society, and we need to, as the saying goes now, we need to stay in our lane. We need to know what we do well and then find other people who can do other things well and develop some partnerships. We’re seeing some excellent examples of that across the country. The transition team is building on that tradition. If you look at the faith-based vision for Obama in his campaign, you can see that it was very carefully thought through on how faith functions in a pluralistic context, and that’s why this Republican voted for him, because I have a real sense of hope, and I think it’s one that is shared by a lot of people who might not normally vote for someone who has all of the different ideas that he has, but a real sense that change is possible through this presidency, through this administration and the people he’s able to bring together around making America a better place.

Q: Anything else you want to add?

A: One strategic difference between Martin Luther King and Barack Obama was that one was a clergyman and one was not, and what we’re seeing is a diversification of leadership within the African American community. There was a time when there was a fairly singular view of the pastor as the community leader, as the national leader, as the regional leader, and now we’re seeing a proliferation of leadership in business, in industry, in politics, in education, and that’s a good thing, because what it does is it spreads the leadership out in ways that we can have our specialists that befit a nation that has a lot of things that require specialized knowledge. So I’m not saying that the black preacher is less important. What I am saying is I think we’ve done a good job in raising up another generation of people like a Barack or like some of the people we see in industry or some of the people we see in the educational world who can do the things that we could not do as pastors because of the specialized knowledge they require. And that makes for a whole new stratum of leadership in the African American community, and a stratum of leadership that now is carrying over from just being a black leader to an African American who is a leader of the entire nation, or in the case of business or industry, of an entire corporation.