KIM LAWTON, correspondent: On Sunday mornings at New Orleans’ Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, Pastor Fred Luter Jr.’s outgoing personality is on full display. At worship services such as this one that begins at 7:30 am, Luter greets almost everyone in the congregation. And with some 5,000 people attending every week, there’s a lot of greeting.

REV. FRED LUTER, JR, Franklin Avenue Baptist Church: I love what I do. I love pastoring. I love pastoring. I love pastoring this church.

LAWTON: Luter, who is 55, has been the pastor here more than 25 years. Under his leadership, Franklin Avenue has become one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in the state. That takes many people by surprise, because Franklin Avenue is predominantly African-American, and the Southern Baptist Convention is about 80 percent white. The fact that Luter is likely to be elected the next president of the SBC is even more surprising.

LUTER: It’s a new day in the Southern Baptist Convention. Our doors are open to each and everybody: African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, no matter the color, no matter the creed, no matter the background, this convention doors are open and our churches are open to whosoever will, let them come.

LAWTON: At one time, Franklin Avenue was an all-white Southern Baptist church. But in the 1970s, whites moved out of the neighborhood, and the congregation changed. A New Orleans native, Luter grew up in a black Baptist denomination. When he arrived at this church in 1986, there was some debate about leaving the SBC. He convinced the congregation to stay.

LUTER: I knew this convention had a heart for evangelism, had a heart for discipleship and had a heart for reaching people in, in difficult times, and I felt this is the right place for us. Not even knowing what would happen years later.

LAWTON: The SBC was formed in 1845 after a north-south split over slavery, and the SBC long supported slaveholders and segregationists. In recent years, the convention has adopted resolutions of apology for those stands.

LUTER: I have a past, you have a past, everybody has a past. This convention unfortunately has a past that we’re trying to move forward from and, and that’s how I look at it. There was apology made, and so it’s now time to move on and that’s why I’m excited about this opportunity.

LAWTON: Still, Luter acknowledges that racism is an ongoing issue that needs to be addressed, in the denomination and across the nation. For example, he says while he doesn’t agree with all of President Obama’s policies, he has been troubled by what he sees as a lack of respect for the president in many quarters.

LUTER: A lot of the things that this president has faced has not necessarily been because of his politics or his decisions, but unfortunately it’s just only been because of the color of his skin. And that’s what lets me know that we have a long, long way to go in America as far as racial reconciliation.

LAWTON: Ongoing tensions over race, he says, can’t be ignored.

LUTER: As long as those kind of things keep happening and the Trayvon Martin thing in the Florida situation like that, we have to deal with it. Even some things maybe within the convention that we need to talk about and address.

REV. DAVID CROSBY, First Baptist Church, New Orleans: I’m not pretending like Fred’s election to the convention now is going to do away with all racial tensions in the Southern Baptist Convention or anywhere else. That’s not going to happen. But it is going to be a step, and I think a major step, in the right direction.

LAWTON: At the SBC annual meeting next month, Rev. David Crosby will be the one to officially nominate Luter as president. Crosby is pastor of a predominantly white Southern Baptist Church in New Orleans, First Baptist, and has become close friends with Luter.

CROSBY: I trust him. His presidency is not going to be about him. It’s going to be about the health of our convention. And we need his help. We need his perspective. We need his wisdom.

LAWTON: The two pastors’ friendship was forged in the difficult days after Hurricane Katrina. Franklin Avenue Baptist Church had been devastated by the storm. Months after Katrina struck, volunteers in protective suits were still trying to clean out the sanctuary.

LUTER: To come here and see this, this church that God allowed me to pastor, we built this church and—beautiful–and then coming here, and we see pews thrown all over, the mud thick, the smell, the stench, it just, I just, I cried like a baby.

LAWTON: The church had to be completely gutted and rebuilt. Most of the 7,000 congregation members had fled from New Orleans, but the remaining 50 or 60 needed a place to worship. First Baptist, which had sustained much less damage, opened its doors, and the two congregations shared the space for nearly three years. The two pastors, who didn’t know each other well before that, ended up partnering on several projects, such as a 2006 visit to New Orleans by Billy and Franklin Graham.

CROSBY: It broadened our perspective of our own faith, broadened our perspective of the church of Jesus Christ and how we can work together, helped us understand across ethnic and cultural lines who we are together as brothers and sisters.

LAWTON: After years of construction, Franklin Avenue moved back into its rebuilt church in 2008. But the relationships between the pastors and the congregations continue, such as a recent joint mission trip to Africa. Crosby says while Luter’s preaching skills are lauded across the SBC, working so closely together showed him that his friend’s gifts extend beyond preaching.

CROSBY: He’s able to articulate a vision and present it to the congregation or to people in such a way that they buy in. In every aspect imaginable, Fred Luter is qualified to be president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

LAWTON: If he indeed becomes president, Luter says in addition to encouraging the establishment of new churches, one of his goals will be to support local congregations that are struggling to survive.

LUTER: We really have to work with a lot of the churches who are already existing but are hurting. They haven’t baptized in a while. They’re not reaching people, and we need to go into these churches and find out what can we do as a convention to help you get back on your feet?

LAWTON: As president, Luter would also help give voice to the SBC’s often-conservative stance on public policy issues, such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage. He says that’s something he doesn’t shy away from.

LUTER: We’ve always been out there on the front lines and we don’t mind that. We don’t mind because we believe in standing up for what we believe in and so there’s some things out there that’s going to have to be addressed. My mindset and my lifestyle is driven by what the Word of God says. If God says it’s wrong, then it’s wrong.

LAWTON: He’s aware that as the first African-American up for the SBC presidency, he’s disproportionately in the spotlight.

LUTER: You know whenever you’re the first at something you’re going to be scrutinized more. It comes with the territory. My wife tells me, ‘Watch what you say. Watch what you do. Watch where you go.’

LAWTON: He says it’s Elizabeth, his wife of 31 years, who helps keep him spiritually grounded.

LUTER: I call her the love of my life, the apple of my eye, my prime rib, my good thing, that’s how I introduce her. She has a very unique relationship with God that I envy and admire, and she is one that keeps me level headed, she keeps me from getting a big head, but also she keeps me connected to God. She’s, she’s my accountability partner. And there are people that I maybe can fool and get over on, but I can’t with her.

LAWTON: As the convention meeting approaches, Luter says he’s praying more than ever for wisdom.

LUTER: Cause I’ll be speaking on behalf of a denomination of 15 million members. 15 million people of over 45,000 churches, and so I want to make sure that I represent not only them well, but most of all I want to represent God well.

LAWTON: He says what he wants people to know him for is helping the SBC live out the teachings of Jesus.

LUTER: My number one hope is that they, when this is all said and done, that they can look at the fact that here was somebody that brought this convention closer, not necessarily just whites and blacks, Asians, Hispanics, but, but the young and the old, the yuppies and the buppies, that we can all come together and say let’s get back to making the main thing the main thing.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in New Orleans.

Voiceover in video: Now we know, an unborn baby is a person. Mississipians! Vote Yes on 26…

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: Proponents insist Mississippi’s Amendment 26 is not so much about abortion as it is about the sanctity of human life.

BRAD PREWITT (“Yes on 26” Executive Director): We’re fighting for the preservation of the unborn in the state of Mississippi…

O’BRIEN: But if passed, the Amendment could make any abortion in the state murder, drawing the wrath of abortion rights advocates like Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

NANCY NORTHUP (Center for Reproductive Rights): This measure is blatantly unconstitutional and we’ll be looking to stop it with the constitutional protections of the court.

O’BRIEN: Most birth control would still be allowed, but the Amendment could criminalize using the so-called “morning after pill” and put an end to embryonic stem cell research in the state.

PREWITT: And we’ve stated unequivocally all along that if you’re intending to prevent a pregnancy, there is no problem with defining the personhood of the unborn. If you’re trying to end a pregnancy, then that’s another story.

O’BRIEN: Prewitt insists fertility treatment—in vitro fertilization—would not necessarily be banned, even though fertilized eggs are often discarded in the process.

PREWITT: That hit particularly close to home because I’m an IVF parent. And there’s nothing I would do as a leader of this campaign, uh, coalition, that would in any way seek to deny the joy that my wife, who’s a physician, and myself have had in our children.

O’BRIEN: It’s also unclear how the Amendment might be applied to ectopic or other dangerous pregnancies. There are, however, no exceptions for rape or incest. Without minimizing the horror of rape, supporters, including this rape victim, say abortion is not the answer.

Woman at podium: As a person who was raped and as a person who has had an abortion, I’m telling you that I’m am tired of using rape as an excuse. Who do we believe creates life? Did my rapist create the life inside of me? No. God Almighty created that life. (Applause) Do doctors and nurses in petri dishes create life? No! Jesus Christ creates life.

O’BRIEN: Amendment 26 has broad bi-partisan support in Mississippi and is expected to pass. Both the Democrat and Republican candidates for governor support it.

The Republican candidate, Phil Bryant—now the state’s lieutenant governor—is also a co-chairman of “Vote Yes on 26.”

LT. GOVERNOR PHIL BRYANT: (Speaking in recorded video) The Founding Fathers said that every American has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On November the 8^th, we’re going to give that right to every child in America, beginning in Mississippi. We’ll see ya at the polls.

Now what we say in the law is for convenience sake, without due process, you can take that child’s life. I don’t believe that’s right. I think this is going to be a point for us to establish a concept, and the concept will be the rights of all human beings, including the unborn.

O’BRIEN: There’s no question the objective of Amendment 26 is to stop abortion. Campaign literature says as much, calling Tuesday’s election an “…opportunity to cast the vote the U.S. Supreme Court did not [in Roe vs. Wade.] We can stop abortion by declaring the unborn “persons” from the moment of conception.”

NORTHUP: This is an alarming and extreme measure that should be taken seriously. What it does is reveal how extreme the anti-choice movement is in the United States. They would like to see the “personhood” of a fertilized egg in every single one of the fifty states.

O’BRIEN: This Amendment would appear to be squarely at odds with everything the Supreme Court has said about abortion. The Amendment itself may have a very short life. And what worries abortion opponents even more is that any resulting Court fight could possibly end up expanding the right to choose abortion, rather than restricting it.

That might be one reason the staunchly pro-life Catholic Church in Mississippi, is standing on the sidelines in this case. Bishop Joseph Latino of the Jackson diocese said in a statement, “The Roman Catholic Church and her bishops are unequivocally pro-life; however, we do not always publicly support every initiative that comes before us in the name of pro-life.“

The National Right to Life Movement, which has launched some of the country’s biggest anti-abortion demonstrations, is also withholding support. It’s legal counsel, Jim Bopp, shares the objective of Amendment 26 but says the measure is doomed in the courts and could do more harm than good.

JIM BOPP (National Right to Life): The immediate harm from the adoption of the Amendment is that we have people who are spending time, money and effort pursuing what we think is a futile strategy.

O’BRIEN: And there is uncertainty about how the Supreme Court might rule. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a supporter of abortion rights, is among the critics of Roe versus Wade, believing abortion should be protected under the right to equality, which is broadly identified in the Constitution, rather than under the right to privacy, which is ambiguous.

What if Ginsburg were to have the votes for a broad ruling finding abortion laws discriminate against women?

BOPP: If the right to abortion was reformulated in that way, it would mean that all the current restrictions on abortions that are saving perhaps a hundred thousand or more lives a year—parental notification, abortion funding restrictions, informed consent, waiting periods and all—would be struck down. So, losing is not risk-free.

O’BRIEN: This has raised a philosophical conundrum for at least some abortion opponents: Do you stand up for what you believe is right, even if it means a step back for the cause you passionately embrace?

LT. GOV. BRYANT: We believe that it may not be perfect, but don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good, and we believe this is a good place to start.

PREWITT: I think we have to have a long view of history. I’m a history major, I think long. And I think that it may be that we don’t taste success with these endeavors in our lifetimes. But perhaps the next generation will.

O’BRIEN: Prewitt and other supporters of the “Personhood Amendment” say the ultimate goal would be a federal constitutional amendment and see a victory at the polls here Tuesday as a possible first step.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Jackson, Mississippi.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Minutes after delivering a slightly premature infant by C section, Dr. Nayna Patel was back in her office and on the phone to the parents.

Dr. Nayna Patel: Congratulations, it’s a baby girl. Where are you, in Mumbai right now?

DE SAM LAZARO: They were en route from their home in England and didn’t reach the small town of Anand, India in time to watch a surrogate mother give birth to their child.

Dr. Patel: Surrogate is also fine. The baby is also fine. We have taken the picture.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel has delivered some 400 surrogate babies since 2004. Her clinic implants embryos in surrogates she recruits from the area and pays around $7,000 for a pregnancy carried to term. Biological parents come from across India and around the world. Kirshner Ross-Vaden came here from Colorado to pick up her baby girl named Serenity. She was born four weeks premature, but after a week in neonatal intensive care she was ready to be discharged. Serenity’s 46-year-old mother traveled here with her nine-year-old son. She had tried unsuccessfully in recent years to conceive. Surrogacy was her last hope and India her first choice. The cost—$10,000 to $15,000 all told—is a fraction of what it is in the United States, and in America, she added, surrogacy contracts are not always air-tight.

KIRSHNER ROSS-VADEN: You can sign a hundred documents. It doesn’t matter. If that surrogate changes her mind she can sue you for that child, and oftentimes she will win, and coming here to India, these women, they don’t want my child. It’s very cut and dry. They do not want my child. They want my money, and that is just fine with me.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s not fine with everyone.

DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN (University of Pennsylvania): The contracts usually are written, to be blunt, to protect the wealthy people who are commissioning the baby, so that if the woman suffers an injury, if the woman has a health problem due to childbirth, if there’s a long-term chronic condition, then what?

DE SAM LAZARO: University of Pennsylvania ethicist Arthur Caplan worries the relationship is inherently lopsided between poor, minimally literate women and well-heeled couples who commission them to have their children. For example, surrogates in India are routinely implanted with up to five embryos to improve the chances of a pregnancy. In the US, clinics usually implant no more than two, sometimes three.

DR. CAPLAN: Why would you use three, four, five embryos in India? Because you don’t want the couple to have to come back. It’s expensive, even for a rich person so you’re trying to maximize the chance of pregnancy, even if it might compromise the interests of the babies.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel concedes that implanting five embryos heightens the risk for infants and mother and says she is now lowering the number to three or four. But she says the downside of fewer embryos is a lower pregnancy success rate. When multiple embryos develop into viable pregnancies, Dr. Patel’s policy is to reduce them by selective abortion. Aside from possible religious concerns, this process could present medical risk to the surviving fetuses.

DR. PATEL: Parents—yes, there are some who say right from the beginning, “Doctor, put less embryos because we are not for reduction, and we don’t this to happen.” So in those cases we definitely never transfer more than two. But there are certain parents who don’t have any objection to this, and surrogates—we don’t allow them to carry more than two.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel insists that her facility protects the interests of surrogates as much as the clients of her commercial surrogacy program and the infants she delivers.

DR. PATEL: We do a lot of psychological counseling for the surrogate and the family before we recruit them. We explain to them the procedure of IVF, what all they’ll have to undergo. If she has had any complications during her previous pregnancy, we will ask her not to become a surrogate, because the same can repeat this time, to make it very sure and safe for her.

DE SAM LAZARO: The moment their pregnancies are confirmed, surrogates are required to move into this home run by Dr. Patel. They’re offered skills training in things like tailoring, but mostly it’s a quiet, sedentary life. The women who spend nine months in this surrogate hostel have all experienced childbirth with their own biological children. It’s a prerequisite for becoming a surrogate. What very few of them have experienced with those previous pregnancies is any kind of prenatal care. That’s in sharp contrast to the pampering they get here: meals provided and medical attention, should they need it, round the clock. Dr. Patel acknowledges the irony but says it is part of a thorough surveillance to ensure smooth pregnancies, for both surrogate and parents’ sake.

DR. PATEL: We have a fetal medicine specialist who checks all the surrogates every three weeks. We have been able to detect minor congenital malformations which we inform the couple can be treated post-delivery without any impact on the baby. We have had patients whose surrogates had babies with Down syndrome, which was detected, which was confirmed with amniocentesis, and we have aborted those babies after the consent of the couple.

DE SAM LAZARO: Well in advance, she says, parents are consulted on decisions like pregnancy termination. Similarly, parents must accept their babies, once born, whether healthy or not. Surrogates we spoke to talked about building a new home and using their money for their children’s education. The money—$7,000-$8000—would otherwise take them decades to earn. Most say they were happy to have helped infertile couples. The woman who bore baby Serenity who we met earlier, admitted to some sorrow at her separation.

DHANA: You can’t help it when you’ve carried a baby for nine months. I’d like to see how she does in the future.

ROSS-VADEN: I do have her address, so I can get a hold of her. And I hopefully will be able to maintain some kind of a relationship with her.

DE SAM LAZARO: We caught up with Serenity’s mother in Mumbai, about 500 miles from Dr. Patel’s clinic. She and son Brandon were holed up in a hotel awaiting DNA test results and myriad documents to satisfy the Indian and US governments that the infant could leave the country.

ROSS-VADEN: Am I living happily ever after now? I certainly hope so. I hope that I can get her home, and I hope that she is a happy, healthy little baby, and that is what I will have—a healthy, happy little girl.

DE SAM LAZARO: But will every surrogacy story end happily? Right now, India has only voluntary guidelines, and it’s not clear whether future laws would be adequately enforced, and standards vary widely. For example, Dr. Patel says she only serves infertile patients. But some clinics offer surrogates to healthy parents who, for career or convenience, want to avoid pregnancy. Ethicist Caplan worries about where all this is leading.

DR. CAPLAN: We may get into situations where people start to say, as genetic knowledge improves, you know, I’m not infertile but I’d like to make a baby with traits or properties that I want to avoid or that I desire. That day is coming. I think it’s important to keep in mind, as we watch the evolution of surrogacy as an international activity, what is really something that a tiny handful of people use who suffer from infertility tomorrow can be what more people are interested in because they have a more eugenic, more perfectionist interest in making their children.

DE SAM LAZARO: For her part, Dr. Patel plans a major expansion of her one-stop surrogacy shop, a leader in what’s now a half-billion-dollar industry in India. She makes no apologies for making a lucrative living and insists that she, the surrogates, and the new parents all come out winners.

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

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: The protesters are here each weekday morning—not a lot of them, but they are not alone. What began in Sierra Vista, a town about 80 miles southeast of Tucson, as a quiet merger between the Sierra Vista Regional Health Center and the Catholic Carondelet Health Network has turned into a religious and ethical standoff over patients’ rights.

THERESE ERICKSON (Cochise Citizens for Patients Rights): The moral issue for me is that they wish to take my moral choice away. I think I’m very capable of making my moral choices, and I’ve done pretty good for 67 years.

SEVERSON: What the merger means is that Sierra Vista, a rural, secular hospital, must now abide by the Catholic ethical and religious directives which prohibit certain procedures. So physicians can no longer do abortions, even when the mother’s life is in danger, and they can no longer perform sterilizations or provide contraception.

DOTTI WELLMAN (Cochise Citizens for Patients Rights): This county has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, not just the county. Immediately when this arrangement went in there would be no talk of birth control. If we had two hospitals, we would not be here, because there would be a choice.

SEVERSON: One doctor has quit, and others who work at Sierra Vista, like Dr. Robert Holder, an ob-gyn, are very upset. .

DR. ROBERT HOLDER (Sierra Vista Regional Health Center): I would say that the majority of the medical staff is not really happy with the fact that this is occurring and the way it came about. It was hard for us, thinking long term, how this was going to work out practically.

SEVERSON: Dr. Bruce Silva, another ob-gyn at Sierra Vista, says Catholic directives often go against health care decisions he and his patient think are best.

DR. BRUCE SILVA (Sierra Vista Regional Health Center): The person who makes that decision is not me and the woman. We can make that decision, but then it has to be okay’d by someone else who puts their belief systems and their ethics on me and on my patients, which I just don’t think is right.

SEVERSON: Right or wrong, the Catholic Church takes its directives very seriously. Last year, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix cracked down on this hospital, St. Joseph’s, after a doctor terminated the pregnancy of a mother who had developed pulmonary hypertension, which has a high mortality rate among pregnant women.

DR. HOLDER: It was not an either-or case. That baby was not going to survive because the mother was not going to survive, so the decision is that you let both die or you terminate the pregnancy so the mother can live, and to me that’s a no-brainer.

SEVERSON: But Bishop Olmsted disagreed with the doctors.

BISHOP THOMAS OLMSTED (speaking at Catholic Diocese of Phoenix December 21, 2010 Press Conference): In this case, the baby was healthy and there were no problems with the pregnancy. Rather, the mother had a disease that needed to be treated. But instead of treating the disease, St. Joseph’s medical staff and ethics committee decided that the healthy eleven-week-old baby should be directly killed.

SEVERSON: Bishop Olmsted stripped St., Joseph’s of its 116-year-long Catholic affiliation and excommunicated Sister Margaret McBride, the nun who had approved the abortion.

SEVERSON: Rev. Thomas Weinandy is the executive director for the Secretariat of Doctrine at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. He and Richard Doerflinger, who handles bioethics issues for the conference, defended the church’s ethical and religious directives which, they say, are based on Gospel teachings about the dignity of life.

SEVERSON: So you support the Bishop Olmsted’s ruling with St. Joseph’s in Phoenix?

RICHARD DOERFLINGER (Associate Director, Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, US Conference of Catholic Bishops): Bishop Olmsted has the authority to make the right decision. Personally, I support it.

REVEREND THOMAS WEINANDY (US Conference of Catholic Bishops): If you directly said the mother could not live unless we aborted the child then that would be contrary to Gospel values and the teaching of the church.

SEVERSON: So you would not perform an abortion on a child even if it meant saving the life of the mother?

DOERFLINGER: You would try everything else to save her life except directly kill someone else. There are times when the mother needs treatment to save her life or prevent some other terrible injury that is going to lead as a side effect to risking the child’s life, maybe ending the child’s life, and that’s acceptable in Catholic teaching, because you’re intent is not to take the child’s life. It’s to treat the woman’s life.

SEVERSON: You have a child that is conceived because of incest or rape. Same?

REV. WEINANDY: Well, sure. You don’t just kill somebody because of their—how it happened. That doesn’t make their life any less worthy of living.

SEVERSON: Dr. Holder tells of a mother who had miscarried one of her twins and was about to lose the other.

DR. HOLDER: We were advised to send that person 80 miles away to another hospital because there was a heartbeat, and that was a very difficult situation for me to manage.

DR. SILVA: Some people will define abortion if a baby has a heart rate, and you terminate that pregnancy—it’s an abortion. But there are times, for instance, with a pregnancy in the fallopian tube, where babies will have heart rates but that baby can’t survive there. It’s impossible. So there are some places where they do not allow you to terminate that baby. This is the real problem is that it’s defined differently by different bishops, who are the ones that decide how your hospital is going to run.

SEVERSON: Officials at the Sierra Vista Regional Health Center declined to be interviewed, but the circumstances here are not unique. Catholic hospitals have become the largest nonprofit health care provider in the US, with over 600 hospitals. This year, one in six patients will be cared for in a Catholic hospital.

DR. SILVA: I have worked at Catholic hospitals before, and I have no problems with that. I think Catholic hospitals do great care. But it was in a larger city where there was another hospital there, so women had a choice. Here we are very rural.

JESSICA GRAHAM: I’m Jessica Graham to see Dr. Silva, okay?

SEVERSON: Sierra Vista’s new directives posed a very real problem for Jessica Graham, who was going to have her second baby by c-section at Sierra Vista and then get a tubal ligation, or have her tubes tied. She and her husband didn’t want any more children.

GRAHAM: So I said, can you tie my tubes while I’m in surgery for a c-section? And when I got pregnant that was the option and that was the plan. Then it changed during my pregnancy when they did the merger here.

DR. SILVA: When I do a cesarean section, the woman is open already, and so if I do the tubal ligation it adds nothing to the risk that she has. But I can’t do them here.

SEVERSON: So Jessica was forced to have a second surgery in another city, which could have created problems.

DR. SILVA: People get infected, people can get bowel injuries. You can have a reaction to the anesthetic that can kill people. People die from tubal ligations every year—now very, very, very rarely, but why undergo that risk?

REV. WEINANDY: The fact that they can’t get, receive sterilization or abortions at a Catholic health care facility is not a form of suffering at all. It’s a matter of fact that we are protecting them from evil things that could happen to them.

SEVERSON: Doctor Silva says his Sierra Vista patients can’t get the standard of care they deserve and that some simply can’t afford a second operation at another hospital. He says when he worked at a Catholic Hospital 20 years ago, tubal ligations were permitted.

DR. SILVA: But politically things change. You get someone who is a little more conservative in, and they now stop you from doing that.

DOERFLINGER: I don’t think it has anything to do with politics. It has to do with the language of the directives, which are a reflection of Catholic teaching and the bishops’ theological understanding of what that requires.

SEVERSON: Another concern for the protesters outside Sierra Vista is what happens with their end-of-life wishes if the Catholic Church doesn’t agree with them.

CHARLES GORDON (Cochise Citizens for Patients Rights): If I’m in a bad place I want to be able to direct them, “Hey pull those tubes.” They won’t kill me, I know that.

DR. SILVA: They talk about the fact that all of your end-of-life wishes will be observed unless they go against Catholic teaching. The problem is what does that last line mean?

DOERFLINGER: They are not going to stand back and watch if you are doing something they think is basically just trying to make yourself dead, but they are also going to respect your decisions about how burdensome a treatment to accept, how far to go in terms of prolonging your life when you know that you are on a course toward the dying process.

SEVERSON: Dr. Holder says in these hard economic times he understands the need for smaller hospitals like Sierra Vista to hook up with a larger health care service. But he thinks there are more suitable non-Catholic partners out there, and he’s hopeful that one will come along.

DR. HOLDER: I don’t think they quite expected the push-back from the community, and I think it’s at least opened their eyes to think that maybe we need to re-look at this and look at some alternatives.

SEVERSON: The merger process is not completed and won’t be for months. Doctors hope for a compromise, but they realize that the Catholic Church won’t be changing its directives.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Sierra Vista, Arizona.

Editor’s Note: According to local media, on March 29, 2010 the president of Sierra Vista Regional Health Center announced that its agreement with the Catholic Carondelet Health Network is expected to be canceled in early April.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: And now we look at the election results and what they mean with David Gibson, religion writer for PoliticsDaily.com, and with Kim Lawton, our managing editor. Kim, you’ve looked at the patterns. What did you see?

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, not surprisingly Republicans made gains among all religious groups, but there were some pretty significant gains. White Protestants voted Republican overwhelmingly. They’ve done that, they usually do that in elections, but even more so this time. The interesting thing for me was around Catholics. In the last two congressional elections, overall Catholics have favored the Democratic candidates. But this time around they went Republican and by significant margins. Catholics have really become in some ways a swing voting bloc. Obviously there are some who always vote Republican, some who always vote Democratic, but there’s this group who keeps swinging, and this time around they really swung Republican.

ABERNETHY: David, why did so many Catholics switch so much from Democrats to Republicans?

DAVID GIBSON (Religion Writer, PoliticsDaily.com): Well, Bob, I think you, know, the governing issues here driving the election were the bread and butter, kitchen table issues of economics and the size of the federal government, and Catholics were swayed by those as well. But I think also there was, you know, a real degree of moral issues going on here—the debate over abortion funding in health care reform A lot of the things that the Christian right were hammering the Obama administration on for a long time—those also came into play. There was a sense that the Obama administration had been pushed over to the cultural left, and that really made a lot of Catholics very anxious and uneasy.

LAWTON: You know, a lot of people say, well, of course these religious groups went Republican because the whole electorate went Republican more so this time around, but I’ve been talking to some strategists who crunch the numbers, and they said, well, yes, that was a pattern throughout the electorate. Religious voters, especially Protestants and Catholics, voted more Republican at much bigger rates and margins than the general electorate.

ABERNETHY: And why?

LAWTON: Well, you know, David said there’s a lot of different issues why. People also say that the Republicans were doing a lot more outreach and specifically targeting some of these faith communities, and there was criticism this time around that the Democrats didn’t do that as much.

ABERNETHY: David, why do you think that was? Two years ago we were all, you all were talking a lot about Democratic outreach to religious voters and how well they were doing. Why not this time?

GIBSON: Good question, Bob. I think it’s really puzzling in many respects why the administration and the Democratic Party apparatus kind of punted on that religious outreach that had been so successful, that was really, I think, to a degree shifting the political culture where you had religious voters. The biggest predictor of how you’ll vote is church-going. Regular church-goers are going to go Republican more than they are going to go Democratic. In 2006, and certainly in 2008, Democrats had begun to shift that. They really, in the last two years, kind of gave up on that. I don’t know if they got complacent or whatever. But there’s some grumbling certainly on the religious left about the lack of Democratic outreach to religious voters, and you saw the results on Tuesday.

ABERNETHY: What about the Tea Party?

LAWTON: Well, clearly there was a big religious base in the Tea Party. Depending on who asked the question and what question they asked, almost half of people who consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement are religious conservatives, so that was a big factor in helping the Tea Party push some of the Republican candidates to victory. Not all of them did win, but it certainly has energized people on the religious right.

ABERNETHY: David, let me turn your attention now to the lame duck session of Congress coming up and particularly to the new Congress coming in, in January. What do you see them doing or failing to do that would be of particular interest to the religious community?

GIBSON: Well, I think two things in the lame duck Congress could possibly come up. One is immigration reform. Harry Reid on the eve of his election said that he was contemplating bringing that up. He said he would bring comprehensive immigration reform up for a vote during the lame duck session. Again, how is that going to work out? How would that play politically? One thing, referring to the Catholic vote that you have to break out, is that Latinos went very strongly for the Democratic Party this time, so you’ve really got, in a sense, two Catholic votes emerging and two votes overall—the white Catholic vote and the Latino Catholic vote. The other issue that could come up in the lame duck is the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, and the Democrats may try and formally rescind that. Those could be two hot-button issues that would get some immediate push back from the right, but also could be supported by the religious left.

LAWTON: And I’m fascinated by some of the battles that could be shaping up in that, because while religious conservatives certainly are concerned about “don’t ask don’t tell,” they don’t want to see that policy changed, but on the other hand when we are talking about immigration, some evangelicals have, although they are fiscally conservative, some evangelicals have been supportive of some immigration reform. And so while the Tea Party really wants to focus on fiscal issues, and on those issues a lot of evangelicals and other religious conservatives are right on board with that conservative fiscal outlook, when it comes to these social issues or things like immigration, some evangelicals might want to support that, and so there are some complexities there.

ABERNETHY: Do you see anything coming up regarding right to life?

LAWTON: Well, I think that that’s always an issue that’s important to religious conservatives. Certainly on the health care bill, that played a role in terms of is there going to be funding for abortion? Or even the Catholic bishops were concerned about possible funding for birth control. So those issues came into play there and are likely to continue as those debates come up again.

ABERNETHY: David, how do you see that?

GIBSON: I think Kim’s exactly right, and I think there’s going to be a big Republican push to repeal health care reform, or to de-fund certain aspects of it, to undermine it in some way, shape, or form. On the other hand, we could have a couple of court cases in the pipeline that could provide a definitive answer to this question of whether there is funding for abortion in the health care reform bill, which experts say there isn’t but folks on the religious right believe that there is. If there’s a definitive answer one way or another that could really be a game-changer as well on that issue.

ABERNETHY: So many people looking at the election returns see a demand for civility, a demand that the Republicans and the Democrats start trying to work together better. To what extent do you see any of that coming?

LAWTON: Well, I hear that. I hear, especially in the religious community, people hoping that there might be some civility. But when you talk to some of the activists and people who were involved in the campaigns, you know, to me what I hear from them is common ground means you vote like I want you to vote, or you vote like I think, and not let’s find a compromise. I don’t hear people in a mood for compromise. I do also hear in the religious moderates and left sort of a renewed commitment to working for their social justice agenda, and so there’s still going to be some political battling ahead.

GIBSON: Kim’s exactly right. I think that the folks on the religious right and the real strong religious right lobby organizations have basically said that the next two years is going to be about 2012. So they are positioning for the next election, because they see that they can only really get their agenda across if they win the Senate and the White House as well. We are in a real winner-takes-all kind of political culture here.

ABERNETHY: David Gibson, religion writer for PoliticsDaily.com, Kim Lawton—many thanks.

Republicans gave the public the impression that the party was ignoring social issues in this election cycle because they knew that they could win without relying on the so-called “wedge issues” that are popular with a component of their base but that have the potential to alienate a broader electorate. Nearly 40 percent of Republican voters are conservative evangelicals who can be mobilized on cultural issues, but the GOP risks alienating moderates and independents by emphasizing the Christian right’s positions on gay rights and abortion. John McCain, for instance, increased his support among Christian right activists by choosing the conservative evangelical Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, but the choice cost him support among moderates.

The safest strategy for the GOP is to focus its message on the economy or other issues that are not culturally polarizing. The party has generally emphasized social issues only as a last resort in years when party leaders do not think they can win by talking about economics. In 1972, when the Republican Party experimented with a strategy of cultural conservatism, President Richard Nixon’s White House aide H.R. Haldeman admitted that the Republicans were emphasizing “patriotism, morality, religion, not the material issues of taxes and prices” in the president’s reelection campaign mainly because “if those [economic matters] were the issues, the people would be for McGovern.” Similarly, the Republicans acquiesced to the Christian right’s push to emphasize social issues in 1992, and again in 2004, because they could not win on their economic record in those years. But in 2010, Republicans saw an opportunity to win an election by appealing to popular economic discontent.

The Republican Party’s decision to emphasize the economy more than social morality does not mean that the GOP’s victory on Tuesday meant nothing to social conservatives. On the contrary, they realize that Tea Party Republican candidates, who are ostensibly libertarian, share the Christian right’s positions on social issues. Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY), who opposes abortion rights, courted Christian right support during the campaign with an endorsement from James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. The Tea Party’s unofficial national leaders, including Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), likewise oppose abortion rights and same-sex marriage. The Christian right may not have been in the limelight on Tuesday night, but its causes were advanced just as much as if it had been.

When John Boehner (R-OH) takes the speakership of the House, conservative evangelicals can quietly celebrate their victory. They may not have been the focus of media coverage during the campaign, but they know the Republican victories on Tuesday were a victory for their cause as well.

Daniel K. Williams is an assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia and the author of “God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right” (Oxford University Press, 2010).

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The Tea Party movement has been on the march this election season with its message of reclaiming America through limited government, fiscal responsibility, and a free market. At rallies across the country, Tea Party activists reverently invoke the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. The focus is firmly on economics, with no mention of hot-button social issues like abortion or gay marriage. Yet the Tea Party has had great appeal for religious conservatives.

REV C.L. BRYANT (Adjunct Fellow, FreedomWorks): It is the people in our congregations who pay the taxes. That’s what makes it religious.

LAWTON: Rev. C.L. Bryant is a Baptist pastor from Louisiana and an adjunct fellow with FreedomWorks, one of the leading Tea Party grassroots groups. Before the Tea Party march in Washington, DC last month, Bryant led an optional nondenominational prayer service on the Mall.

BRYANT: Our rights don’t come from Republicans. Our rights don’t come from Democrats. Our rights come from our Creator. That’s where God comes in, and God has always been in the mix when we talk about America.

LAWTON: There have been longstanding tensions in American politics between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Tea Party leaders emphasize that theirs is a secular grassroots conservative movement. But significant involvement from religious right activists has raised new questions about whether those tensions have been overcome and what agenda will take priority after the election.

PROFESSOR MARK ROZELL (George Mason University): There are a lot of Tea Party activists who I would characterize as much more libertarian in bent than socially conservative. They’re really concerned about big government and reducing government size and scope in our society more than they’re interested in the social issues agenda. But there are other Tea Party activists who combine both fiscal and social conservatism.

REV. RICHARD CIZIK (New Evangelical Partnership): The Tea Party leadership that’s libertarian and the conservative Republican evangelicals who don’t like Obama—they have an agreement here. But what I would say to the evangelicals who have joined this movement: be careful, you will be used.

LAWTON: According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, 11 percent of Americans consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, and 47 percent of them are Christian conservatives.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-Minnesota, speaking at Values Voter Summit): As for me, I prefer tea parties, just so you know.

LAWTON: The Tea Party had a highly visible role at the Values Voter Summit in Washington last month, an annual gathering of religious conservatives that always gives strong emphasis to social issues like abortion and gay marriage. One of the most popular speakers was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a favorite at many Tea Party rallies.

SEN. JIM DEMINT (R-South Carolina): The fact is you cannot be a real fiscal conservative if you do not understand the value of having a culture that’s based on values.

LAWTON: During one panel discussion, several local Tea Party activists said it was their Christian faith that compelled them to get involved with the movement.

KATY ABRAM (Tea Party Activist): For about two weeks, I woke up about 3:00 in the morning every morning, and I’m really convinced that it was God speaking to me every single night.

LAWTON: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a sponsor of the Values Voter Summit, says there is a natural overlap between his movement and the Tea Party.

TONY PERKINS (President, Family Research Council): I’m not trying to turn the Tea Party into, you know, what we do, and they are not trying to turn us into what they do. We complement one another, and we work together because we have a common vision of responsible government, individual responsibility, and a stable society.

LAWTON: Perkins says social conservatives who are part of the Tea Party haven’t abandoned their core issues. It’s just that in this election, concerns about the economy have taken center stage.

PERKINS: When you look at government spending, rising debt, government expansion, takeovers, I mean, people they’re frightened, they’re scared, they’re frustrated, they’re angry. But there’s also the underlying values issues, the moral issues. For values voters it may be on the screen about the economy, but running in the back is where do these candidates, where do these parties stand on life, on marriage, on family?

LAWTON: Still, some evangelical leaders are uncomfortable with the current emphasis on economics.

REV. RUSSELL MOORE (Dean, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary): I think there are some issues that are transcendent and are more important than other issues. The right to life for the unborn is infinitely more important than the question of how high one’s taxes should be.

CIZIK: I’m opposed to deficits, too, but that’s not what primarily drives me as an evangelical Christian. Limited government? Not really. What I want is a society and a government and its policies to reflect the values I find in Scripture—religious freedom, caring for the poor, caring about justice for all, caring about the least of these. But that’s not what you hear from Tea Party leadership.

LAWTON: Rev. Richard Cizik says he believes religious conservatives are in danger of being exploited by Tea Party leaders who have no intention of ever supporting their social causes.

CIZIK: They’ll take those evangelical votes, and then they will walk away from those people as quickly as a bat of an eye.

LAWTON: George Mason University professor Mark Rozell says similar things have happened before.

ROZELL: Very often in the past religious conservatives have felt burned that they have supported these Republican candidates who focused on the fiscal agenda hoping that those same candidates once elected would support the social issues agenda, and then when those individuals did not the religious conservatives became very discontented, and this has happened time and time again.

LAWTON: There appear to be disagreements within the Tea Party over exactly how to approach social issues and religion. Former congressman Dick Armey, who is chairman of FreedomWorks, has repeatedly said that conservatives are not successful when they focus on what he calls “the wedge issues.” And while several national Tea Party leaders want to avoid God-talk, many in the rank and file don’t shy away from it.

BILLIE TUCKER (Tea Party Activist): And some people say don’t you put God into the Tea Party, Billie, because the minute you do you are going to run a bunch of people off. And I’m saying I’m putting God back into the United States of America again.

LAWTON: Some, like Indiana Republican congressman Mike Pence, tailor their message to their particular audience. At the Values Voter Summit, his speech was laced with references to religion and social issues, but at the Tea Party rally the same week he avoided even a direct reference to the Bible.

REP. MIKE PENCE (R-Indiana, speaking at Tea Party rally): Engraved on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia are words from an ancient text. Those words read, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

LAWTON: Another complicating factor is conservative talk show host and Tea Party icon Glenn Beck, who is rallying for a national revival of faith, honor, and values. He, too, has support from conservative evangelicals who like his open discussion of religion and morality. But Beck is a Mormon, which has also generated controversy among evangelicals.

MOORE: You have a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which evangelical Christianity does not recognize as Christianity at all, who is being presented not just as a political leader but a religious leader, and not just as a religious leader but as the leader of a call to revival, and you have evangelical Christians cheering this and supporting this. That tells me that there is at least a significant segment of evangelical Christianity that has become defined politically rather than theologically and spiritually.

LAWTON: Despite the internal debates, Rozell says in these midterm elections the political bottom line is clear.

ROZELL: Most of these people, even if they disagree with each other as to whether the focus should be social or economic policy, they’re conservatives, and they’re going to vote against the Democratic Party, and that’s ultimately what’s going to count.

LAWTON: The bigger question, he says, is what happens if Tea Party-backed candidates do indeed win.

ROZELL: We learned from the 1994 so-called Republican revolution that it’s easier to be against something than it is to govern.

LAWTON: And agreeing on a post-election political agenda could be the biggest challenge of all.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Welcome. I am Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. We take our look ahead now to the stories we expect to cover in the new year with the help of Jason Byassee of the Duke University Divinity School, where he directs its Faith and Leadership Project; E. J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University; and with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program. Welcome to you all. Jason, we have a recession. What’s going to happen to it, do you think, and what effect has it had and will it have on the churches, the denominations, the charities—all those people that you cover?

JAYSON BYASSEE, Duke Divinity School: I am struck by how you can’t have a conversation with a religious leader now without talking about what the financial downturn means for their organizations. This is across the board, from left to right, whatever position one has. What this means is that people are laying people off. They are cutting back on ministries. I wonder if this isn’t the story upcoming. Lots of our denominational infrastructures were built at a time when you could assume money would keep coming in. Well, it’s not now, and how do you do more with less? Nobody is quite sure how to do that.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly: Talking about doing more with less, the recession is also having a terrible impact on the people in the pews of all of these religious congregations, the people that these ministries serve. These people are hurting more than ever. They need help. They need resources. They go to the religious institutions, who are struggling. So it’s a real problem.

E.J. DIONNE, Brookings Institution: The entire not-for-profit sector has been hurt. Now, there is some hopeful evidence that sometimes some people actually step up and give a little more when they can to groups helping the very poor, because they have an even better sense than usual about “there but for the grace of God go I”—that possibility. The economy is going to be critical to so much of what happens this year. It’s going to be crucial politically to what happens in the 2010 elections. You can almost predict on a straight line if the economy feels like it’s getting substantially better by the midyear, President Obama and the Democrats are probably going to do better; if it feels like it’s not getting better it will be a large problem for them. That’ll have an effect on how we discuss all kinds of questions, including moral and religious questions, in the course of the year.

ABERNETHY: Jason, do you see people going into the ministry, or not going into the ministry, because of the recession? Do you see seminaries closing, churches closing?

Jayson Byassee

BYASSEE: The standard assumption is that when the economy is bad people go to school, because work is not good. The problem with that is, if you can’t sell your house then it’s pretty hard to move across the country and go to school. Lots of seminaries are trying to do more online education. I expect more of that to come. But there is enormous pressure, especially on small seminaries that aren’t connected to a big university, and dire predictions about how many of those may close in the coming years. That might not seem like a big thing until you realize, okay, where my minister was trained means everything for what I’m going to hear about God. This has an outsize ripple effect on institutions across the board and religion in this country, I think.

ABERNETHY: E.J., it is an election year again. What do you see as a result of that that will be of particular importance to believers?

DIONNE: I think, first of all, we may have the discussion on morality and the economy that was, I think, a little bit delayed, that people were trying to come to terms with what the downturn meant. I think there is going to be now a real look back and look forward as to why did we get into this mess—how much of it were practical problems, how much of it were about people not taking responsibilities seriously that they should have—the stewards of our economy, the people with a strong position in our economy. I think that debate will very much affect the elections. I also think we’re going to have a kind of after-effect of our big health care debate. I think what you saw among religious groups, particularly Christian religious groups, were a real difference between those who laid the heaviest stress on the moral imperative to getting everyone, or as many people as possible, covered through insurance, versus those who felt that the major emphasis on whether abortion is or is not funded and how in this health care debate. I think that’s going to have a continuing effect, because I think there is this running dialogue, certainly in the Catholic Church that I’m part of, but I think in all of our traditions, between those who believe the central emphasis of our religious group should be on a certain relatively narrow—though they would say very important—list of moral questions: abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research versus those who say that the emphasis should be on a much broader agenda having to do with social justice and how we organize our lives together in the economy. I think that discussion is going to very alive, made all the more so by the controversy of an election year.

LAWTON: It’s going to be interesting to see how involved faith-based activists get in these midterm elections. Certainly Barack Obama mobilized a very active campaign effort among especially moderate and liberal faith-based individuals. There was activity on the religious right as well against him. But will a Democratic candidate at the state level be able to get that same sense of energy? Will they come out? Meanwhile, the religious right is still really trying to figure out who they are, who’s going to lead them, and what they’re going to do. The Republicans are trying to figure out what do we do with this core of our party? So it will be fascinating to watch all of that unfold in the coming months.

DIONNE: Although I do think there’s one interesting thing that’s happened on the right, at least in the last year, which is I think the religious conservative voice has been less powerful than the voice of, whatever you want to call it, this Tea Party movement. There seems to have been a shift within the right from an emphasis on moral questions that the religious conservatives were focused on to this very strong anti-government strain. Now, obviously, there are overlaps on the conservative side, but I think this is a different sort of direction that we’ve seen on the right side of politics.

LAWTON: But we’ve seen, especially with the health care debate last year and the role abortion played within that debate, those social issues are still very important to a lot of people and will still come up, I think, in the midterm elections.

BYASSEE: Much more quietly, along with that I am struck by how many dozens of churches in my area can’t afford a minister any more because of health care being so expensive, and yet the left has somehow not managed to have the kind of energy in favor of expanding health coverage by any stretch that the right has managed to have against it, it seems to me, because of this confluence of leadership in opposition.

ABERNETHY: Kim, what do you see coming about the all the issues around gay marriage and what jobs homosexuals can have in the churches?

Kim Lawton

LAWTON: This is going to be a very important year within the worldwide Anglican Communion. The US Episcopal Church, which is the branch here of the worldwide Anglican Communion, has moved forward. The Los Angeles diocese has elected an assistant bishop who is a lesbian. The worldwide community had asked the US church please don‘t move forward on this. She would be the second one. Her election needs to be confirmed within the next few months before she would be officially installed in May, so that’s still coming up. But the world is watching in the Anglican Communion, and many people are not happy about this, so this is going to be really important. We’ve been talking for years about is the Anglican Communion going to hold together? I think this year could be very crucial on that question.

BYASSEE: It seems like the first election, you could make space for it being a naïve move, or a misstep move, if you were in opposition. A second one, you can’t make that claim any more. The striking thing to me about this election is not so much that Mary Glasspool is a lesbian, but do you really need three Episcopal bishops in Los Angeles? Again, is it a structure set up for a time when the money was flush, and now does it make sense any more?

DIONNE: I’ve thought about this the last couple of years, where we have focused so much of the debate on the issue of gays and lesbians. It strikes me that, within the Christian Church for 100-150 years there have been episodes of modernity confronting tradition and that, right now, the center of that debate is around issues related to gay rights. But when you listen to some of the conversation—why people are for or against gay rights—it’s really part of this much deeper struggle that’s been going on within Christianity for a long time of how much its task is to resist modernity versus how much of its task is to respond to modernity, if you will, in a more dialectical way, with some opposition but also embracing some of what modernity has to give us. I think this episode is just—there is a particular passion behind this, because this is obviously a major step in this long argument.

LAWTON: Another interesting aspect to this particular debate, when you are talking about the Anglican Communion, is the demographic changes of Christianity around the world. So you have Christians in Africa and Asia who have the numbers. There’s millions of Christians in Uganda and Rwanda and Sudan. These tend to be more conservative on some of these issues—much more conservative, especially on the issue of homosexuality, and where their place is in the international Christian family is very much up for grabs in this particular debate.

DIONNE: Indeed, Christianity is growing. I think it’s a great shock for people to realize that there are many more Anglicans in Africa than there are Episcopalians in the United States.

BYASSEE: There’s twice as many Anglicans in Sudan as there are in the United States—just one big country in Africa. I don’t think we’re anywhere near catching up with what this means, not only on social issues but on doctrine, worship life, and all the rest. What’s it going to mean, not very long from now, that Christianity is essentially an African religion and not a Western one, not a North American or European one?

DIONNE: You’re seeing that, to some degree, in the debate about global warming. I do think the environment is another area where we’re going to see continuing activism and debate within the churches. The presence of a very strong group of Third World Christians in all of the denominations is going to put the focus not simply on the issue of reducing carbon in the atmosphere, but also on what kind of compensation Third World countries will get, which became a very critical issue in the discussions in Copenhagen.

ABERNETHY: Let me move to another point, Kim especially. There is an investigation going on, or a review, or whatever is the right term for it, of Catholic nuns in this country by the Vatican. Where is that going, and when will we know what comes of it?

LAWTON: The Vatican says that it wants to look into the quality of life for US sisters. That has created a huge amount of consternation here in the US, as there are questionnaires that have been sent to different communities of sisters with a lot of questions. Many of them feel like we’re not going to answer some of these. So that’s going to be moving forward throughout this year, as that sort of give-and-take moves forward. Do they answer these questions? What do they say? How do they say it? What’s really behind all of these questions in the first place? That’s what a lot of people, not just among nuns but across the Catholic community, want to know. What’s really behind this study, this investigation?

E. J. Dionne

DIONNE: There’s a great danger here. I think this could prove a very, very divisive move inside the church. There is enormous affection toward nuns among people who are Catholics. Many of us owe enormous debts to them for our educations and for so many other things they did. They are among the most activist—that’s a bad term in the eyes of some conservatives—as in giving comfort to the poor, helping the sick, doing all the things the Gospel says we should do. And so they risk, I think, a real backlash, if they don’t handle this very carefully. I think they are already confronting it, to some degree. They’ve got to be very careful with the nuns. I’ve got some nuns that sent that message.

BYASSEE: It is an interesting question. If you have an enormously radical form of life, based on what Jesus said we should do, can you be liberal doctrinally? It sounds like the answer may be no, right? That’s a very risky answer…

DIONNE: The answer from the Vatican may be no. It’s not clear to me that there is, first of all, any consistent sort of liberal doctrinal positions, and to the extent that they are somewhat more liberal—for example, in asserting that perhaps there is a bigger role for women to play in the authority structure of the church—it shouldn’t surprise that perhaps that the nuns, who have taken so much responsibility for helping run the church, just might have a view like that.

BYASSEE: My wife, who is a pastor, would “Amen” your claim. I think that’s right.

ABERNETHY: Jason, you study and help identify future leaders in the churches. What do you see? Some of the familiar old names are no longer so familiar. Oral Roberts died. Where is it going? Who do you see out there who’s going to succeed the people we used to hear about so intensively with the religious right?

BYASSEE: One thing that interests me is that there’s less of an emphasis, if you’re a younger evangelical leader, on starting a parachurch ministry like Billy Graham did, and more of an emphasis on being a pastor. I’m not exactly sure why this shift has happened, but if you’re a young pastor, you’re charismatic, what you want to do is plant a church usually and grow it big and have that be where your ministry is. So I see a lot of pastors of enormous churches—in places like Seattle and Grand Rapids—who have churches of 20-30,000 people. You don’t hear about them in the national news yet. You don’t hear Rob Bell’s name. You don’t hear Mark Driscoll’s name. You’re hearing Tim Keller’s name in Manhattan more because he’s writing books that have gotten attention. Same with Rob Bell. But these are pastors who are sort of a half-generation after Rick Warren, or Bill Hybels at Willow Creek, who are going to have an enormous impact, because if you want anyone to catch a religious allusion in politics in 20-30 years, it’s likely to be because one of these pastors helped teach a congregation to hear the Scriptures, right? If people are going to be serving the poor, it’s going to be because churches like this—like Adam Hamilton’s church in Kansas City, Church of the Resurrection—encourage people to do that and made space and structure for them to do it. So I think that’s an enormous shift.

LAWTON: One thing I’m watching is, with some of the folks you just referred to that already have these big megachurches, what happens when those leaders—people like Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, people like Bill Hybels in Willow Creek, built these giant congregations—what happens when they retire, though? What happens to those congregations? It’s really hard to step in to a congregation that’s already in process. That’s something I’m really going to be looking at.

ABERNETHY: I want to hear, Jason, what you have to say, and E.J.—each of you—about kind of the state of religious life and of organized religion in this country today. How is it going? Is secularism pushing it aside? What’s happening?

BYASSEE: It does seem to me that the new atheist books gave a certain permission to people to claim that they are not religious, that you don’t have to have the default be, oh yeah, I’m a Christian, even though I don’t do anything. Now it can be no, I’m not religious, and that seems to be more socially okay. Of course, being biased people in religious institutions—I spend all my time with religious leaders for whom things are very vibrant, right—but I think we shouldn’t overlook the fact that there are a whole lot of people who aren’t engaged by the church and its ministries and would much rather they go away, especially at election time.

ABERNETHY: Sixteen percent, I think, identify themselves as having no affiliation. E.J., what do you see? How is the tide running?

DIONNE: I wrote a column some years ago that ran under the headline, which I openly took from The New Republic. The headline was “God Bless Atheists.” I think one of the things about this atheist challenge that’s actually good for believers and good for Christians is that it has created a debate on the fundamentals. I don’t mean by that fundamentalists; I just mean the fundamental tenets of does God exist? How do you know God exists? What is the relationship between God and humankind? These debates have gone on for centuries. A lot of what the new atheists say are new versions of very old arguments that have been taking place. I think it’s far better to surface these arguments than to have people either pretend to believe when they don’t, or have believers not have to confront really core challenges to belief itself. And so, at bottom, if you can say this whole debate may be providential.

LAWTON: I think we need to be careful, too, when you look at some of these numbers. A lot of those people who are unaffiliated—it doesn’t mean that they’re not religious or spiritual in some way. They’re just not necessarily associating themselves with a particular organization or institution.

BYASSEE: It does seem important that these numbers bump when there is an election that people are unhappy about. It seems like there’s been some behavior from religious people that they’re displeased by, so it seems like the 2004 election, in particular, got a bunch of people book contracts to write about how bad God is.

ABERNETHY: Kim, there are some Supreme Court decisions coming down of some interest.

LAWTON: I think this coming year will see some interesting decisions about the conflict between religion and the public square. One is the Mojave cross. Can there be giant crosses in public property? Another one that I find particularly interesting is that the Supreme Court will be looking at a case with the Christian Legal Society and whether a law school can—the Christian Legal Society has a student club and they also believe that gays should not be in their leadership or their voting members, because that’s part of their religious belief. Well, the law school where they were operating said, well, if you believe that, you can’t be part of an official student group, because we don’t discriminate based on sexual orientation. So you have this clash of religious values. On the one hand, you have people who want to exercise their religious beliefs. And then you have people who say this is a matter of human rights or civil rights. Then those start clashing. Who trumps whom? So that’ll be interesting.

DIONNE: That’s a hugely important and really fascinating case, because you’re dealing with, in a sense, two conceptions of liberty, two conceptions of whether people should be free to be gay, and no organization on the campus should discriminate against them, and one can see how one gets to that conclusion, versus the right of the Christian Legal Society to constitute themselves as a group that has a very particular view on homosexuality. I think it could be a very bitter argument, precisely because each side is going to claim—they’re going to have competing goods, as each side will claim competing notions of freedom.

ABERNETHY: E.J., quickly, what are you going to be looking forward to particularly in the coming year? What stories?

DIONNE: I am going to be looking forward to a continuing moral debate about how we should organize this economy and what got us into the mess we’re in, in the first place. I think it’s going to be a real test of whether Barack Obama’s efforts to tamp down the culture wars have us get along a little better, whether that will succeed. Like everybody else, I’m going to be looking at how the test of these last two years—how the last two years are judged by the voters in November.

ABERNETHY: I’m sorry, but our time is almost up. Many thanks to Kim Lawton, to E.J. Dionne, and to Jason Byassee. Happy New Year to each of you and to our viewers.