BOB ABERNETHY, host: Second-degree murder charges were filed this week against George Zimmerman, the volunteer neighborhood watchman who shot and killed unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin. The announcement came after weeks of protests demanding Zimmerman’s arrest. Several religious groups also called for an investigation into Martin’s death. Recent polls show that attitudes about the case vary dramatically by race.

Joining me with more on this are Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Harold Dean Trulear, associate professor of applied theology at Howard University in Washington, DC and national director of the Healing Communities Prisoner Reentry Initiative.

Professor, welcome, we’re glad to have you here again.

PROFESSOR HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR (Howard University Divinity School): Thank you. It’s my privilege.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Good to see you again.

ABERNETHY: The contrast in the way people saw this case in Florida just couldn’t have been more stark—overwhelming differences in the way whites and blacks saw it and what they saw in it. How did you see it?

TRULEAR: I identified with it. I have two sons. They’re grown. When they were teenagers, part of their training in learning how to drive was what to do when you’re pulled over by the police so you don’t end up being a statistic. And I think for a number of African Americans the facts of the case as they’ve come out and as some of the speculation has gone—it just fits so closely to a lot of our experience, even whether we’re poor, whether we’re middle class.

LAWTON: And that sense of continuing injustice. It seemed like this really pricked those feelings.

TRULEAR: Yeah, I think it did, and that’s why you see the level of emotion, I believe, that’s coming out. We recognize this. We’ve seen this before in some—various ways, shapes, or forms.

ABERNETHY: And beyond this, beyond the, what do you call it, the outrage about racial injustice, beyond that is something more that you see, that you’ve been working on—the question of violence.

TRULEAR: Absolutely. We live in a violent nation. We settle conflicts through violence. Things escalate. This case is a perfect example of an initial confrontation escalating into a violent conclusion. Those types of things happen all the time, and we’ve lost our ability to be civil about discussion and disagreement. The number one cause for homicides in this country is arguments. it’s not drugs on the street, it’s not other things like that. It’s conflict.

ABERNETHY: But is that racism or is it black on black?

TRULEAR: Most of it, in terms of homicide, is black on black. I think that both racism fits the mold, and then also the way in which African-American males have turned on each other. Trayvon Martin was fourteen times more likely to have been killed by Trayvon Martin than he was George Zimmerman.

LAWTON: But that’s a very provocative statement, and I am wondering what kind of reactions you get within the African American community when you say something like that.

TRULEAR: You get a negative reaction when you do it, by making it either one case or the other. What we’re trying to do, those of us that are working on this issue, is trying to say let’s expand the conversation. Both situations are unacceptable, being killed by another African American male or being killed by a non-black town watchman. They’re both unacceptable, and we need to be working on violence reduction in all cases.

LAWTON: And within the faith community, what resources do you see there to help in this?

TRULEAR: Well, there are a number of models that have been going around the country. The most important thing is getting out on the streets and building relationships, developing the kind of community where people get to know each other and begin to learn how to resolve conflict. You’ve seen it in Boston through the Ten Point Coalition over the years. This new program, well it’s not so new now, but Operation Ceasefire that’s come out of Chicago. It’s not a faith-based program but there are a number of people of faith who are involved in it, and they’re all focusing on resolving conflict through means that are other than violent.

ABERNETHY: But that’s something, I would guess, that is uniquely done by blacks in black neighborhoods. You don’t see a role there for whites, do you?

TRULEAR: Oh, absolutely.

ABERNETHY: Do you really?

TRULEAR: Oh, yeah. In fact, one of the top people who is doing violence reduction in Boston was a native Israeli who had fought in the Israeli army. What gets valued is not color, it’s the fact that you are real, and that you’re present, and I know that there are white people who have done successful work in anti-gang strategies, anti-violence initiatives. It can cross color lines.

ABERNETHY: But do you want people in churches to go out into the violent neighborhoods and build relationships?

TRULEAR: They already have those relationships. We are—those are our sons, those are our grandsons, those are our daughters. So for me, it’s not a matter of going into a neighborhood. We’re already located there. We already have connections there.

ABERNETHY: Well, thank you very much and good luck in all that work that you are doing.

TRULEAR: Thank you.

ABERNEHTY: Professor Harold Dean Trulear of Howard University in Washington, DC.

Rev. Fred Luter, Jr., pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, is expected to become the first African-American president of the Southern Baptist Convention this June. R & E managing editor and correspondent Kim Lawton will be doing a profile of him in the next few weeks. During her interview with him on March 24, she asked Rev. Luter, specifically in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case, how he assesses race relations in America. Here is an excerpt from their conversation:

KIM LAWTON: How do you look at the state of the racial situation in America?

REV. FRED LUTER: No, you wouldn’t have thought that when President Obama was elected as president of the United States of America, you would have thought that that would have ended the racial divide in our country. But unfortunately what it has shown is that in some cases it’s widened the racism in our country. There are a lot of situations just happened here not too long ago here in the Louisiana area of, there was an art project at a local school, and they have these pictures of hunting season, and there was a duck on one side, I think a deer on one side, and in the middle was a picture of President Obama with a hole in his head. And that was in a local high school. And stuff like that just shouldn’t happen. And you know I don’t agree with all the president’s politics, I don’t agree with all the decisions that he made, but one of the things that bothers me as Americans is that the disrespect that this president has had to deal with. It should not be. It should not be. You know, we’ve had presidents, you know, from Reagan to Clinton to Bush Sr. to Bush Jr., to Clinton, we don’t always agree with them. I mean, that’s just a given. But there has always been a respect for the office. This is the first time that I can remember a president was giving a speech, State of the Union speech, and someone shouts out from the gallery “you lie!” That has never happened, never with all the presidents, with all the lies that all of them have told. That has never happened. But it’s happened with this president, and so things like that reminds me that, you know, we’ve come a long way as a nation where there’s a racial issue, but we still have a long, long, long way to go. 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: And as far as non-African American people are concerned, I mean do you run into white people who want to think, well, it’s all done now? It’s over with? You know, whatever happened in the past is done and don’t really want to confront what might still be bubbling there?

LUTER: Sure, sure, and if that was true across the board then I say fine, let’s do it. But there’s so many instances that are coming up, like yesterday here in Louisiana one of the Republican candidates for president was at a shooting range shooting. I don’t know if you all saw this on the news like that, but as he’s shooting at these targets, someone yelled out from the gallery, “Look at one of them as President Obama.” Come on y’all. This is just, that shouldn’t be. Not in America. He’s our president. I don’t agree with everything he says, don’t agree with all his decisions, but respect the office. And so if we didn’t have those kind of instances, those kind of situations, I would say, yeah, come on, let that go, it’s time to move on. But 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.

Rev. Leslie Hunter: I don’t know about you.

School children: I don’t know about you!

Rev. Hunter: But I’m ready for chapel.

School children: I’m ready for chapel!

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: It may look like a pep rally, but at Holy Family Ministries they call this chapel—the Wednesday afternoon worship service. Outside these walls is one of the highest crime neighborhoods in Illinois. In here, the students are enthusiastic and well-behaved.

“God is good…”

VALENTE: Holy Family Ministries calls itself a new model for Christian education at a time when faith-based schools, especially those in the inner cities, struggle to stay alive.

DR. MARTIN MARTY: They have always struggled, I think you’d say, but the only time they didn’t is when they were tied to a single congregation, a single parish, where every parent had a child, and they automatically supported it.

VALENTE: As neighborhoods change and congregations shrink, there aren’t enough students, parents, or dollars to support faith-based schools. Susan Work is president of Holy Family Ministries.

SUSAN WORK (President, Holy Family Ministries): These schools are the jewels of their neighborhood, and we need to save them. But we can only save them if we have economic models that are more sustainable than one parish, one school.

VALENTE: Holy Family Ministries dispensed with the traditional model of a church school to pass on doctrine. Instead, it created an umbrella organization that offers a variety of social programs in addition to classroom instruction. The idea isn’t to proselytize, but to instill ethics and values.

VALENTE: Holy Family started in 1985 as a small Lutheran school. It raised $7 million in private funds to build this facility three years ago. Today, Holy Family is a nonprofit social services center and an Episcopal charity, as well as a Christian school.

WORK: We’ve had census workers training in here, we have wedding receptions, we’ve had a lot of baby showers, birthday parties, funeral repasts, just all kinds of things. By having a not-for-profit entity over everything we could access some other sources of funding that we would not otherwise be able to attract if we just stayed as Holy Family Lutheran School, a private school.

VALENTE: Only fifteen percent of Holy Family’s income comes from tuition. It gets the rest from private donors, grants, and government.

Voice on school intercom: “Good morning Holy Family….”

VALENTE: To tap into that broad donor base, Holy Family draws a careful line between its social programs, which receive funding from the government and other secular sources, and its faith-based school, where the day begins with prayer followed by a mission statement.

School children reciting mission statement: We, the students of Holy Family School, faithfully commit ourselves to spiritual growth and Christian values….

WORK: I love the mission statement because parents wrote it. The children pledge to listen to God, accomplish miracles, and be the best that they can be each and every day.

School children: … and to be the best we can be each and every day.

Classroom singing: “There are seven days, there are seven days, there are seven days in the week….”

VALENTE: This is part of Holy Family’s secular outreach: a preschool program funded by the Chicago public schools.

WORK: Chicago Public Schools doesn’t really care where the program is delivered. They’re interest is in seeing that at-risk children all have a preschool experience that will prepare them for later success.

VALENTE: The preschool program has its own director and budget and offers no religious instruction or activities.

WORK: There’s a lot of research out right now about preschool that shows a correlation with later life outcomes. For example, lower rates of incarceration, lower dropout rates for high school, increased entrance into college.

VALENTE: Holy Family’s after-school programs, which emphasize fitness, and its nine-week summer camp are also secular. Both are funded by the government.

WORK: They are subsidies provided to parents to enable them to be out in the workforce. It subsidizes their childcare so that the parents can work.

Student: And now we have to do our multiples…

VALENTE: But from 8 am to 4 pm, Holy Family is a faith-based school for 200 children, kindergarten through eighth grade.

WORK: Teachers do what they’re comfortable with. We don’t impose a certain amount of religious activity in any teacher’s classroom.

VALENTE: Formal religious instruction takes place on Wednesdays.

Teacher: We’ve already talked about the spiritual life and our prayer life…

WORK: Our goal with every child is that they would have a personal relationship with God by the time they leave this school.

VALENTE: But the emphasis is on academics. Holy Family has a 100 percent graduation rate, and in the past five years nearly 90 percent of its students have gone on to either private high schools—with scholarships—or charter schools.

WORK: We want to turn out children of faith, but we know that those kids have to have skills. Otherwise, we’ve turned out wonderful human beings who don’t have a job.

VALENTE: This is what the Wednesday chapel service looks like.

WORK: We’re not putting up any barriers that would keep people of various faiths from joining in the fun. We make faith development a very lively and attractive part of our program here, and we just try and keep it accessible to all the children, no matter what their background is.

VALENTE: For the parents, religion is not the most important thing here. Martin Marty:

MARTY: They simply want the best education for their child. Trust is the big thing. They trust them to affirm the best in the family values. The schools are usually small enough that the teachers get to know everyone.

VALENTE: Tuition is $7200, but the school pays more than half of that and must raise more than a million dollars a year to do it. At events like this it tries to broaden its donor base by touting Holy Family as an investment in the community.

CHERYL COLLINS (Principal, Holy Family School): It’s safe, it’s affordable, it’s faith-based, and Holy Family gets results. It’s not uncommon at 3:00 to hear sirens instead of school bells in our neighborhood, and the sirens are going to these schools because there are gang fights and gang activity that take place.

Malik: My name is Malik and I’m in fourth grade.

VALENTE: To reach more affluent people Holy Family put its development office 30 miles away in the prosperous suburbs of Chicago’s North Shore. Half its income comes from donors, and that includes more than thirty congregations in the Chicago area.

Malik: Teachers and tutors help us, and then we can make better grades. I know, because I have been on the honor roll many times.

VALENTE: Michael Berkowitz is a business leader who caught the Holy Family spirit.

MICHAEL BERKOWITZ: It’s not about the faith ofwhat I believe in or what the students believe in. It’s the fact of the goodness that’s being done here. It has nothing to do with the religion, as far as why I would contribute my time and money. It has to do with how well they are treating students.

VALENTE: Martin Marty thinks other faith-based schools, including those that are Catholic, would do well to emulate Holy Family’s approach.

MARTY: I think the model of the faith-based schools would be an excellent model for Catholicism. They are just seeing their parochial schools die by the hundreds across the nation every year. I’ve been spending enough of my life on campuses to know how conservative, structurally, educational institutions are. If we’ve always done it that way, it’s awfully hard to think of the new.

Singing at service: “Lean on me…”

WORK: Sure, we’re one school, but we’re turning out leaders for the community for tomorrow. We’re turning out the kids who are going to be able to finish college—not just get in, but finish—and have good careers.

Singing: “Lift every voice…”

WORK: Also, I think we’re affecting the community in a less measurable way by the symbol of hope and optimism that we have brought into this neighborhood.

VALENTE: Supporters of Holy Family believe that as long as it can keep the lights on and the books open it can transform this part of the city—one child at a time.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Judy Valente in Chicago.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is a scene more than a few Americans are familiar with: standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the DMV. This one is in Sumter, South Carolina.

Woman in DMV line: Oh, that’s your birth certificate?

SEVERSON: Amanda Wolf has been waiting over 6 months to get the proper papers so she can finally get a photo ID.

AMANDA WOLF: I was adopted in Georgia, and my name was different on my birth certificate, and plus my birth mother and birth father was on the birth certificate, so we had to go to Vital Check, and with Vital Check you have to have a major credit card, which I don’t have.

SEVERSON: And so it went, on and on. Amanda had a student photo ID when she lived in Florida and used it to vote when she moved here, but not anymore—not under the state’s controversial new voter ID law that was fashioned after an Indiana law the Supreme Court upheld in 2008. State Senator Chip Campsen sponsored the South Carolina law.

STATE SENATOR CHIP CAMPSEN: And the court has concluded that whatever those hurdles you have to clear to get the ID necessary to vote…

SEVERSON: …is worth it.

CAMPSEN: It is worth it, that is correct.

SEVERSON: It is those hurdles, critics say, that will keep some eligible people who lack the proper ID from voting. The South Carolina law requires a state-issued photo ID, a military ID, or a passport. Amanda finally qualified for a photo ID after she got some free help from a retired judge. Attorneys often charge as much as $1800 for the service.

WOLF: To get a photo ID in the state of South Carolina you have to have your birth certificate, a Social Security card. You have to have your marriage license if you’ve been married. You have to have a divorce decree if you’ve been divorced, and it’s just one thing after another after another, and a lot of the stuff is really difficult to get a hold of.

SEVERSON: Barbara Zia is the co-president of the South Carolina League of Women Voters.

BARBARA ZIA: The League submitted our comments, along with other organizations to the state, contending that the law was discriminatory and that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of eligible voters would be disenfranchised.

SEVERSON: State Representative David Mack:

STATE REPRESENTATIVE DAVID MACK: It’s horrible. It’s designed to suppress the vote of people of color. People of color and poor people, that’s exactly what it’s designed for. There’s no documentation of fraud as relates to voting, and there has been no problem with fraud as it relates to registering people to vote,

SEVERSON: You don’t think people are going to be disenfranchised?

CAMPSEN: No.

SEVERSON: At all?

CAMPSEN: No. The state has to assure that the folks that are casting votes at the polls are actually casting votes that are legitimate, and they are actually individuals who they say they are, who they are supposed to be.

ZIA: There are no documented cases of voter fraud by impersonating somebody else to vote for decades in South Carolina. We’ve talked with the state elections commission. They know of none, and they’ve gone on record saying that there is none. So we say it’s a solution in search of a problem.

MACK: If there were cases of fraud they would have been front page news throughout the state of South Carolina and other places, and it’s just not a problem.

SEVERSON: State Senator Campsen insists there have been cases of voter fraud, and there are some that are still under investigation. He says that it would be contrary to human nature if there wasn’t voter fraud.

CAMPSEN: And I know this: Human nature being what it is will steal. I lock my house. My house has never been broken into, but I lock it, and I don’t have to have a thief break into my house and steal something before I’m justified in locking my front door, and so human beings will steal my car, they’ll steal my money, and they’ll steal my vote, too.

SEVERSON: Braden Bunch owns Brick’s Place. He was the head of the Sumter County Republican Party until recently. He thinks requiring photo ID to vote is only common sense.

BRADEN BUNCH: It’s a pragmatic step in order to fix the possibility of irregularity or even just getting rid of these old wives’ tales out there, that all kinds of fraud and deceit is going on. If you have this in place those stories go away.

SEVERSON: What’s happening here is part of a national trend. Altogether 34 states have introduced photo ID legislation. Critics say nationwide it could keep millions from voting. South Carolina’s own study says African Americans are most likely to be impacted. That’s why the Justice Department has put it on hold while it investigates. Barbara Zia says the law will also make it more difficult for the elderly, the disabled, and students whose IDs no longer work to vote. But, she says, it will definitely impede minorities the most.

ZIA: And many South Carolinians, especially citizens of color, were born at home and lack birth certificates, and so to obtain those birth certificates is a very costly endeavor and also an administrative nightmare.

SEVERSON: South Carolina is one of several states, mostly in the South, that because of a history of discrimination is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to get clearances from the Justice Department whenever changes are make to voting laws. Dr. Brenda Williams has registered hundreds to vote. She says the new legislation is reminiscent of the Jim Crow laws that legalized discrimination against African Americans even at polling places until they were abolished by the Voting Rights Act.

DR. BRENDA WILLIAMS: There was a poll tax back during those days, and African Americans had to pay a tax. African Americans were penalized when they went to even register to vote at the courthouse. They were given literacy tests and had to guess how many marbles were in a jar and different things in order to deter and disenfranchise as many people as possible.

SEVERSON: Does this remind you of that?

WILLIAMS: Yes, this is just déjà vu.

DONNA SUGGS: I ain’t never had the opportunity to vote, and I wanted to vote, and I cried because I didn’t have the papers to vote.

SEVERSON: Donna Suggs has been a nurse’s aide all her life.

SUGGS: I had no birth certificate.

SEVERSON: Well, can’t you just go apply and get a birth certificate?

SUGGS: No. I was born by a midwife in Hartsville, South Carolina, and they didn’t report my birth.

SEVERSON: In the South in particular births among African American’s were not sometimes recorded in court houses. They were recorded in family Bibles, and often a midwife did not record them at all. Donna was finally able to get a photo ID after an attorney helped her get her birth certificate free of charge.

(to Donna Suggs): Now that you’ve got your photo ID…

SUGGS: You want to see it?

SEVERSON: Sure, I do want to see it.

SUGGS: Okay.

SEVERSON: So now she is officially Donna Suggs.

REV. JAMES WILLIAMS: Disenfranchising someone, yes, it is a moral issue.

SEVERSON: United Methodist minister James Williams pastors two churches and operates a funeral home. He says he knows that many of those in his congregation and those he buried never had a birth certificate. In his view voting is sacred, and depriving someone of that right is morally wrong.

REV. WILLIAMS: Jim Crow has changed. Jim Crow no longer wears a white sheet. Jim Crow no longer rides in a buggy. Jim Crow now is in a $3,000 suit driving a Mercedes Benz. The tactics to keep oppressed has changed. They no longer beat you over the head with a stick. They beat you over the head with legislation.

BUNCH: It is not harder for a black man to vote than it is for a white man to vote. We all can walk down to the polls together and cast our ballot. It’s that simple.

SEVERSON: If you all have a photo ID…

BUNCH: Well, and the point being is that it is an equal burden on a white man to get an ID than it is on a black man to get an ID.

SEVERSON: That may not be quite accurate, but there is little chance that the South Carolina legislature will amend the voter ID law unless the Justice Department finds that a significant number of South Carolinians will be deprived of the right to vote.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Columbia, South Carolina.

DEBORAH POTTER (Correspondent): At first glance, the Front Porch Cafe could be any neighborhood coffee shop. But the make-shift kitchen isn’t quite up to par, and those guys at the grill aren’t your typical cooks.

JON SCYOC (Former Inmate): I actually have a small felony on my record. Well, it’s still a felony. And I know how hard it was for myself to get jobs.

THOMAS JONES (Former Inmate):Since I had my felonies I been having real poor jobs. And I chose to do street life, and street life is nothing but trouble—death, jail, or, you know, both.

POTTER: Most of the workers here are ex-offenders. The cafe is run by South Street Ministries, a Christian fellowship that also offers Bible study for inmates.

Former Inmate: What are they doing for like housing for like ex-felons?

POTTER: A place to live, a job, even just a “welcome home” are hard to come by when you’ve been where some of these men have been.

MICHAEL STARKS (Former Inmate): I’ve been arrested 117 times. I’ve been shot four times. I’ve been convicted 12 times.

PERRY CLARK (Former Inmate): We want fast money, OK? So consequently I went to prison for ten years for aggravated robbery, OK? Behind the aggravated robbery was drugs.

POTTER: Perry Clark now runs a construction business. Michael Starks is a community organizer. Both former drug users say they went straight after finding faith behind bars but that when they were locked up the churches they knew were not on their side.

STARKS: The church was of the mindset that, hey, he did wrong, he’s being punished. They thought that if you did wrong, you went to prison and that was it, and they were going to throw away the key.

CLARK: I wrote three churches to let them know, not asking for anything, that I was reentering back into the community after ten years of incarceration. And I didn’t get a response back.

POTTER: Both men are now involved in active prison ministries, helping ex-offenders rejoin the community.

CLARK: I want them to know that they can live normal life once they out.

(Speaking with woman) It’s not easy, though, when the problem is enormous.

POTTER: More than two million Americans are now imprisoned, four times as many as 30 years ago. The major reason: mandatory sentencing for non-violent crimes and drug charges. But the war on drugs, declared in the 1980s, has not had the effect its backers predicted. Arkansas Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen has seen the results.

JUDGE WENDELL GRIFFEN (Arkansas Circuit Court): Drug use has not declined. All it has done has produced an explosion on our prison population. The whole mandatory sentencing guideline mantra was sort of like the Kool-Aid that we should never have drunk.

POTTER: Behind bars, the racial disparity is striking. Black men are six times more likely to be imprisoned than whites, especially for drug offenses, even though the rate of drug use is only slightly higher for blacks. Law professor Michelle Alexander, author of the book, “The New Jim Crow,” says the nation faces a human rights nightmare more than 40 years after the end of legal segregation.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER (Author, “The New Jim Crow“): In cities like Chicago, more than half of working-age African-American men now have criminal records, and they can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind in the Jim-Crow era are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon.

POTTER: In the 1960s, ministers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were in the forefront of the civil rights movement. There’s been no similar movement to end mass incarceration.

ALEXANDER: I think Dr. King would be just so deeply saddened and appalled by what we’ve allowed to happen in this country in the years since his death.

TOM NAVIN (Social Action/Prison Ministry, Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, Ark.): We’re told to visit the prisoner, and so that goes with what we do and who we are.

POTTER: Tom Navin oversees prison ministries for the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, but he says Jesus’ command to care for prisoners is not widely followed.

NAVIN: We’ve gotten people to be interested in prison ministry and contribute money to us and pat us on the back, but it’s really tough to get people to volunteer to go into the prison. That’s really a tough sell.

POTTER: As an ordained Baptist pastor, Judge Griffen believes churches should lead a national campaign against mass incarceration.

JUDGE GRIFFEN: We don’t recognize the God in our brothers and sisters who are in prison, and the biblical imperative is for us to see that our sisters and brothers in prison are our sisters and brothers. We owe it to God to get them out.

ALEXANDER: Just as in the days of slavery it wasn’t enough to shuttle a few to freedom, today we’ve  got to work for the abolition of the system of mass incarceration as a whole and that means, in my view, that the church has got to find its prophetic voice in the era of mass incarceration and really call on politicians and policymakers to undo the massive tragedy that has been done.

POTTER: Some legal reform is underway. States from Ohio to California have approved early release programs and lower penalties for lesser crimes, changes driven largely by the high cost of keeping so many people behind bars.

ALEXANDER: I think Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said we have to be careful of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If we can afford once again to lock people up en masse, nothing will prevent us from doing so if we don’t learn the most important lessons from this time, which is that none of us should be viewed as disposable. None of us should be treated as throwaway people, rounded up, locked up and then branded criminals and felons and ushered into a permanent second class status. That’s the lesson we have to learn from this time, and it’s not about saving money. It’s about saving lives, saving our own sense of humanity.

STARKS: If you got people in prison, they need to be loved, too, because if they cannot see the love of Christ, in spite of their circumstances, then they’ll never come to accept the fact that Christ cares about them at all. How can he care about me when no one from the church is in my life, no one from the church steps forward to give me an embrace?

JUDGE GRIFFEN: Talking about congregational involvement requires getting congregations to be about social change, and we in the American religious community have been very, very content to sing our way to heaven, but we have forgotten that in the Lord’s Prayer the word is “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

POTTER: Without more support from faith-based or community groups, many of these prisoners face a tough road. Within three years, national statistics say, more than a third of them will be back behind bars.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Akron, Ohio.

DR. BRENDA WILLIAMS: (singing) God is a good God, yes he is. God is a good God, yes he is. One more time.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the medium security pod at the detention center in Sumter, South Carolina, and this is Dr. Brenda Williams, all four feet, eleven inches of her.

DR. BRENDA: OK, now listen up. What were going to do is this. A couple of things, then we’re gonna go on, ’cause I am a very short-winded person.

SEVERSON: She says she was afraid to talk in public until the teacher made her give an oral report in 7th grade. Her husband, Dr. Joe Williams, says that was just the beginning.

DR. JOE WILLIAMS: She was talking when I first saw her and she’s continued to talk since then.

DR. BRENDA: (To inmates) Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. That’s all some folks do. We do more than talk. We back up our talk.

I called Mr. Mathews and said, “Hi, my name is Brenda Williams,” blah, blah, blah, and he said, “I know about you. You don’t have to give me an introduction.”

SEVERSON: Few in Sumter would deny that Dr. Brenda Williams is a force of nature, or that her husband Dr. Joe is the calm in the eye of the storm. She’s a general practitioner. He’s an internist and geriatrician. They’ve run a clinic in this city of 100,000 for 30 years. No one is turned away. Her latest project is called Do Right and the folks who agree to “do right” get on the list to get a free home. So far they’ve given away four.

PATRICIA DUNHAM: This is my dining room. I never had one of those before.

SEVERSON: (to Patricia Dunham) It’s a nice dining room.

It’s the first house Patricia Dunham has ever owned. For her and her husband and three kids, it’s a dream come true. It may be comfortable now but it wasn’t when the doctor found it.

DR. BRENDA: The house had a porch that was falling in. It had 59 broken window panes. All of the wiring was stripped of copper. The plumbing stuff was missing.

The houses are not just given, quote unquote, “given” to the families, they have to work for it. They have to earn it.

PATRICIA DUNHAM: I do community service, clean up paper, go to church, be active in my kid’s schooling, come to the meetings once a month, basically easy stuff that’s not hard to do to get a free home, and I thank you very much. (hugs her)

SEVERSON: The cost of fixing-up these fixer-uppers comes out of the Williams pockets. They receive no outside funding. But they’re not pushovers. People who don’t follow the rules don’t get a home.

DR. BRENDA: The Do Right families have to do at least 4 hours of community service a week. The Do Right families have to turn in a church program. The pastor or the leader of the religious organization has to sign that program and date it. I want a written report, not an oral report, it has to be in writing…

SEVERSON: You’re pretty tough.

DR. BRENDA: Yes, I know.

SEVERSON: Nick McCormac is a staff writer for Sumter’s newspaper The Item. He’s covered Dr. Williams.

NICK MCCORMAC (The Sumter Item): She doesn’t want people to take things for granted, basically. She wants them to earn it. It’s to give them that empowerment, to make them proud of themselves, to build themselves up so they can go on and own their house or be a voter and be engaged and have that pride that comes along with those kind of things.

DR. BRENDA: It’s demanded that the recipients of that free home go back to school and get a high school diploma if they haven’t graduated from high school. It’s mandatory.

SEVERSON: Patricia got her high school diploma. Now she’s attending college, and she has her own home.

PATRICIA: It feels so good when I go pay my taxes in January.

SEVERSON: Linda Prince earned her new home by following the rules, which includes cleaning up litter in the neighborhood.

DR. BRENDA: The neighborhood is improving and you know one thing, we ran the drug dealers away. OK, there might still be one or two hanging around somewhere, but there was a house not too far from here, by the way, that was all the time frequented by drug dealers, and they’re gone now.

DR. JOE WILLIAMS: I for one believe that this is the best country in the world. I believe that we all have to figure out a way to make it better.

SEVERSON: It’s a calling for them, making things better, a way to pay back for their good fortune. Both are deeply religious. He is a United Methodist. She belongs to an Apostolic church.

DR. BRENDA: (singing) And we all know that he loves us.

SEVERSON: She says she gets her inspiration from the good book, from scriptures like the 41st Psalm, verse one.

DR. BRENDA: “Blessed are ye who consider the poor for the Lord will deliver you in your days of trouble.”

DR. JOE: There’s a large portion of our community, the so-called underclass, that seem to be mired I poverty. And really, as I tell my wife all the time, those are the people I’m really concerned about.

SEVERSON: For them, the core of the problem facing the African-American community is the break up of the family.

DR. JOE: We have problems with men and women not getting together and getting married, or breaking apart in terms of the family, that we really feel very discouraged about.

SEVERSON: Makesha Kennedy is an exception. She and her husband were married ten years ago after the Williams prodded them and other couples to tie the knot.

Makesha has three children, getting good grades, with a father at home. She now works at the doctor’s office. So does Amanda Elizabeth Wolf. She met Dr. Brenda, as the staff calls her, when she was in jail a year ago.

AMANDA ELIZABETH WOLF: I mean, we’ve come a long ways, and you know, I have to give number one credit to God, but if it weren’t for Dr. Brenda and Dr. Joe, I wouldn’t be blessed with this house right now.

SEVERSON: Amanda is now a member of what is known as the Do Right Crew, mostly former inmates who meet with the Do Right Kids, youngsters Dr. Brenda has recruited, to do community service and talk about the problems of growing up.

AMANDA ELIZABETH WOLF: You know whenever I do, I guess, want to relapse or think about going back to my old ways, I think, you know, well I’m accountability to the Do Right kids, you know. And I don’t want to have to go to them and say, “Hey, listen, I screwed up, I’m back in jail.”

DR. BRENDA: I need you to sign up. Here’s lime-green paper, it says do right, do right, do right. If you’re part of the Do Right Crew, there’s so many benefits that come along with being part of the Do Right Crew.

SEVERSON: Even these prisoners are eligible for a free home, and she’ll help with a job too, if they “do right.”

DR. BRENDA: I’ll do everything I can to find you a job. I can’t promise you that job will come but I’ll sure do my doggone best to help you get a job.

SEVERSON: The director of the detention center says he had to turn the lights out late one night to get her to go home, but he’s glad she comes.

SIMON MAJOR (Sumter Lee Detention Center): She’s very encouraging, but not only that now, there’s another population that she talks to also, as she speaks with the inmates, our officers get to hear that same encouraging word.

SEVERSON: And then she gets to her most passionate cause right now, registering pre-trial inmates to vote.

DR. BRENDA: Your vote is just as powerful as Donald Trump’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as President Barack Obama’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as Oprah Winfrey’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as Bill Gate’s vote. They’re billionaires. You have power.

SEVERSON: Before she was done, most of the men signed up to register to vote. It’s not an easy process in South Carolina.

DR. BRENDA: (To inmate) I’ll bet your momma has your birth certificate.

(To inmates) You all come and give us a hug, we love you now..

The bible says that many are called but few are chosen. But I truly believe that he chooses certain individuals to do his tough stuff.

(singing) Thank you Jesus.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson at the Sumter Lee Regional Detention Center in South Carolina.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops gathered in Seattle this week for their annual spring meeting. A key part of the agenda was reviewing sex abuse prevention policies they adopted in 2002. The bishops passed minor revisions but said overall the guidelines have “served the church well.” Still, there are lingering questions about compliance and accountability.

Joining me now is Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program. Kim, are the bishops really following those 2002 guidelines?

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, they say the majority of bishops are following the guidelines, but there are a couple who are not, and that has lead to some pretty high-profile scandals—one in Philadelphia, another one most recently that, last couple weeks in Missouri, where the local bishop had to apologize for a priest that was arrested on child pornography charges.

ABERNETHY: And whether a bishop has to follow those 2002 guidelines is up to the bishop. There’s no way that the other bishops can make him do that, right?

LAWTON: Well, they are nonbinding, and the bishops say that they don’t have the authority to discipline or impose penalties, that only the pope can discipline a bishop. So therefore they say this has to be part of the “fraternal correction,” and it is sort of voluntary.

ABERNETHY: The Southern Baptists, Southern Baptist Convention, also gathered this week in Phoenix and took steps to make their denomination more diverse, more ethnic diversity. It elected an African American from New Orleans as a first vice-president, on track to become perhaps the president of the Southern Baptist Convention in a year.

LAWTON: Perhaps.

ABERNETHY: Perhaps. So there’s something going on there.

LAWTON: Well, they are trying to reach out, I think. There has been some apologies for racism in the past. But they are trying to reach out as well. There was some concern that they have been declining in baptisms and even a slight decline in membership. They’re still the largest Protestant denomination, of course.

ABERNETHY: Sixteen million, is it?

LAWTON: Sixteen million.

ABERNETHY: I was thinking about this Libya thing and the Congress putting pressure on the president. There’s a relationship, isn’t there, to a religious tradition?

LAWTON: Well, the political debate is whether or not the president has the authority to authorize and continue the military effort in Libya without congressional authorization, and the just war tradition also says that in order for military action to be just it has to have the sanction of the proper authorities, and so there is that moral connection that the political debate is also sort of tied to, and there’s been another debate in the religious community I’ve been watching as well. I’m seeing increasing numbers of religious conservatives raising concerns about the Libya action. Many of them had been supportive in other military efforts, but on this one raising concerns on moral issues, economic moral issues, raising questions about whether or not it’s moral to spend that much money—over $700 million dollars—on this effort.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s early morning at Washington Hospital Center and time for a quick prayer before Flavia Walton heads into surgery. For eight years, Flavia’s husband, Bill, has had severe kidney disease, and Flavia is donating a kidney. But her kidney isn’t going to Bill. They weren’t compatible enough—at least when it came to kidneys. So Bill had to be put on the transplant list.

BILL WALTON: You are placed on the list, and then the wait begins, and it goes on and on and on, and your only hope is you can check the list on the Internet and see if the numbers are getting any smaller. But they never do.

LAWTON: Then Bill and Flavia heard about a program known as a paired kidney exchange, where Flavia could donate her kidney to somebody else, and in exchange Bill would get a kidney from another donor who was a perfect match.

BILL WALTON: Bottom line here is you’ve got to give one to get one.

LAWTON: The Waltons were part of the world’s largest kidney swap to date, sponsored by Washington Hospital Center and Georgetown University Hospital. It involved a complex chain of 28 surgeries at four different hospitals. Most of the donors gave a kidney in order to benefit a friend or family member. But a couple of donors did it out of a sense of altruism, with no particular recipient in mind. In the end 14 patients who had been particularly hard to match received kidney transplants. The donors and recipients were introduced to each other at an emotional news conference.

RALPH WOLFE (kidney donor speaking at press conference): I love this guy. I don’t even know him, but I love him.

GARY JOHNSON (kidney recipient speaking at press conference): You can’t imagine how fortunate I feel that somebody from somewhere in the universe came and gave me a kidney.

FLAVIA WALTON (speaking at press conference): To see someone that you love most it the world deteriorate is a sense of helplessness and powerlessness that you just cannot comprehend unless you’ve been there. But to be able to do something is so empowering, but it is such a blessing.

LAWTON: More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the waiting list for an organ transplant, the vast majority of them waiting for a kidney. Over the last decade, an estimated 60,000 people died while still waiting for a transplant. Given those numbers, many experts say there is a moral obligation to encourage more people to become organ donors.

PROFESSOR ROBERT VEATCH (Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University): Just a little nudge would do enormous amounts of good in terms of saving lives and making sick people’s lives better.

LAWTON: The incentive for Flavia Walton to become an organ donor was clearly to benefit her husband of 42 years.

FLAVIA WALTON: If God could give his son for me, or for us, I could certainly give a kidney to keep someone else alive. And I certainly want to keep him around as long as possible. I don’t know if he wants to keep me around that much longer.

BILL WALTON: No, I got no complaints.

FLAVIA: Okay, okay. But no, it was not a hard decision at all.

LAWTON: Living donors are screened psychologically to ensure they are not being unduly pressured into the surgery. It is major surgery, but because of medical advances the risks to the donors are quite low. Because of these factors, Professor Veatch at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics says there are few ethical problems with kidney swaps such as the one the Waltons were part of.

VEATCH: If we can get a living donor we get a better kidney, a more viable kidney, and it shows up in the survival-rate statistics.

LAWTON: His main ethical concern with the swaps is making sure that kidney patients without a loved one willing to donate are not pushed lower on the waiting list, particularly those with hard-to-match blood types.

VEATCH: We at least want to be fair with the people on the wait list who don’t have a family member available. Being fair might mean waiting a trivial extra amount of time, but we certainly don’t want to make those people wait years extra just because of the swap arrangements.

LAWTON: While the swap program has been successful, some other strategies to encourage organ donation have run into roadblocks because of the National Organ Transplant Act, which forbids any monetary compensation for organ donation. Twenty-five years ago, Veatch testified in support of that law, but he’s now urging that it be revisited. He’s calling for experimentation with some token financial incentives. For example, he would support a modest discount on driver’s license renewals for people who sign up to be organ donors. Or, he says, there could be a question on income tax returns asking people to be donors, and even offering a tax deduction for those who say yes.

VEATCH: It sort of taints the altruism of organ donation. On the other hand, real human lives are at stake here, and I would be willing to compromise the altruism at the margins if we can really save some lives.

LAWTON: Veatch also says the religious community should do more to promote organ donation.

VEATCH: It’s considered an altruistic, charitable act, and all the major religions look favorably upon that behavior.

LAWTON: Veatch tries to counter one theological concern he hears among some conservative Christians, especially in the black church, who believe individuals will be bodily resurrected in the end times, and therefore they worry about the implications of organ donation.

VEATCH: The doctrine is when you are resurrected you will be resurrected to look like you, but with all the bad stuff fixed. So if you had cancer, the cancer won’t be there, and if organs had been procured, or consumed by fire, you will get a new version of the body.

LAWTON: Flavia Walton, who is a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, says she tries to address that theological issue in her community as well.

FLAVIA WALTON: I think that there’s some notion or some belief among many that feel that when we meet our maker, we have to meet our maker all in one piece. For me, it means I just want to meet the maker. I don’t think the maker cares whether I’m all in one piece or not. I don’t think that’s the issue.

LAWTON: The Waltons say organ donation is of particular concern to African Americans because more than 60 percent of patients who need transplants are non-white. At the same time, African Americans have a disproportionately low rate of organ donation. The Waltons hope their story can help change that.

BILL WALTON: Exposure is key, and the more we can expose to that population that it works and we’re examples of that, the more emphasis we can get out there that spread the word and let’s proceed.

LAWTON: After two years on dialysis, Bill says he can’t believe how great he feels now. He says the gift of someone else’s kidney has meant everything to him.

BILL WALTON: Life, basically. You can’t get any more basic than that—life with a little ginger thrown in, because it’s a life that is much more comfortable than what I had.

LAWTON: Flavia says donating a kidney turned out to be a spiritual experience for her, definitely worth the short time she spent recovering from surgery.

FLAVIA WALTON: Just feeling good that I’ve been able to do something and that hopefully I’ll be able to make a difference not only in the life of the recipient of my kidney, but hopefully it’ll spread, and hopefully I’ll be able to make a difference in helping other people make a decision to make a difference in the lives of others.

LAWTON: And as politicians and ethicists wrestle over how to encourage more organ donations, the Waltons hope stories like theirs will be the best incentive of all.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.