BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, a special report on religion and the economy. According to new figures from the U.S. Labor Department, more than six million Americans are now receiving unemployment benefits. Every metropolitan area in the country has seen a rise in unemployment rates over the last year, and the biggest jump was in Indiana’s Elkhart County. Kim Lawton went to Elkhart to find out how the religious community there is responding to the crisis.

KIM LAWTON: In Goshen, Indiana, just outside Elkhart, it’s the annual Family Fest at Bethany Christian Schools. Usually, it’s a time of joyous community celebration. But this year there was a new note of anxiety as the area reels from one of the worst unemployment crises in the country.

Allan Dueck

ALLAN DUECK (Principal, Bethany Christian Schools): People are recognizing this as a widespread need and know that “there but for the grace of God go I.” It could be me tomorrow or my family member, and so I think there’s a real sense of pulling together in ways we can.

LAWTON: This is RV country, where more than 60 percent of the nation’s recreational vehicles have been manufactured. But in tough economic times when gas prices are unpredictable, when people aren’t buying luxury items and when banks are restricting loans, the RV industry has collapsed. Factories here have closed or made drastic cutbacks, and the ripple effect is touching virtually everyone.

According to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, since the beginning of this year the unemployment rate in this area has jumped to nearly 20 percent. That’s well over twice the national unemployment rate, and many believe the rate here is actually much higher, because the official numbers don’t include those who don’t file for unemployment benefits. In this area that includes large numbers of laid-off undocumented immigrants and Amish people who took factory jobs when they couldn’t make a living on their farms.

Derald Bontrager is president and COO of the Jayco RV company, which his parents started 41 years ago on his family’s farm. At Jayco’s peak two years ago, they were producing nearly 40,000 campers a year. Now they’ve had to cut that in half.

DERALD BONTRAGER (President and COO, Jayco): It’s a gut-wrenching experience to go from 2,200 employees down to 1,100, particularly in this environment, because you know that each one of those employees you lay off, that the chances of finding any meaningful employment in the near future is almost non-existent.

LAWTON: Bontrager, who is a leader in his local Mennonite congregation, says he’s dealing with a difficult moral equation.

Derald Bontrager

Mr. BONTRAGER: In many cases, the people that we’re no longer able to employ are the same people that I go to church with on Sunday. I see them at the basketball games on the weekend; I see them at the restaurants. But you really have to try to separate that from knowing that we have a real obligation to make sure that we survive as a company in this environment, because we still are employing 1,100 people.

LAWTON: Bontrager says he’s relying on his faith.

Mr. BONTRAGER: You need to draw strength from somewhere, and I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather draw strength from than God.

LAWTON: In this overwhelmingly Christian community with a significant Mennonite population, churches are being called upon more than ever to help meet physical and spiritual needs. One of the most prominent efforts is Church Community Services, a ministry supported by Mennonite, Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical congregations. CCS has several programs, including a food pantry that is seeing all-time highs in the number of requests. They also provide emergency assistance to people who can’t pay for rent, utilities, and prescription medicine. Dean Preheim Bartel is executive director.

DEAN PREHEIM BARTEL (Executive Director, Church Community Services): To me, it’s a way of Christians actually putting their hands and their feet to what they believe. So it’s not just something in their head, but it’s something they are actually doing. They’re putting their heart and soul into it.

LAWTON: The needs are now so great CCS is moving to a bigger space to better handle the situation. Resources are being stretched thin. The agency has been seeing between 300 and 400 new clients every month. Many have worked their entire lives and never needed outside help.

SHARLEE MORAIN (Volunteer, CCS): And these people, they’ve not been in the system before. They just got laid off, and they’re, like, “Ugh, I don’t know what to do,” and the system just beats you up.

Dean Preheim Bartel

LAWTON: The agency is sponsoring a job-training program for women called Soup of Success or SOS. It’s a holistic project that teaches women how to be good employees as they work in a small business packaging dry soup and cookie mixes into gift baskets. They learn life skills as well as job skills. Preheim Bartel says through it all CCS is trying to instill hope amid tough times.

Mr. PREHEIM BARTEL: Sometimes as an agency we can’t provide the tangible things people need, but what we can do is we can treat them with dignity and respect, and we can provide them with an atmosphere that’s hopeful.

LAWTON: Requests are also dramatically up at the Maple City Health Care Center, which provides sliding scale discounts for people who can’t afford medical care. Until now, they’ve always required patients to pay at least 10 percent of their costs.

Dr. JAMES GINGERICH (Family Practice, Maple City Health Center): When you start having families come in where the kids are only really getting meals at school for free lunches and breakfasts, and they’re choosing between food and healthcare, a 90 percent discount doesn’t cut it.

LAWTON: The health center has begun asking patients to volunteer at a local charity in exchange for $10 credit toward their medical bills. Dr. Gingerich says the program has been especially meaningful for the area’s growing number of unemployed Latino immigrants, many of whom are undocumented.

Dr. GINGERICH: Those people don’t have access to food stamps. They don’t have access to unemployment. They don’t have a safety net that other unemployed people do, and they’re often socially much more isolated because they don’t — they’re immigrants. They don’t have generations of connections in the community.

Dr. James Gingerich

LAWTON: The trickle-down effect of the unemployment crisis is hurting businesses and nonprofits across the board. Bethany Christian Schools is a Mennonite school for about 280 students in grades 6 through 12. They’ve been trying to provide tuition help so unemployed families can keep their kids in the school. Bethany’s main fundraiser is an auction at the annual Family Fest. People donate items to be auctioned off, such as handmade quilts and furniture. This year’s event fell short of what they made last year. Principal Allen Dueck says the school faces a tight budget.

Mr. DUECK (Principal, Bethany Christian Schools): Teachers are looking at a zero increase this year, and we hope that will be enough to make things work. We may have to reduce staffing a little bit, depending on how enrollment shakes down for next year.

LAWTON: Churches, which support these community ministries, are facing their own budget shortfalls at a time when they are being asked to do more. Many congregations have established job counseling programs and support groups for the unemployed. Church leaders say the situation has taken a heavy spiritual toll.

At Elkhart’s Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary they’re teaching future pastors how to counsel people affected by the crisis. Seminary president Nelson Kraybill says it starts with listening.

NELSON KRAYBILL(President, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary): You don’t come with quick and easy answers, and anyone who does, saying, “Well, this is what you ought to do” or “This is where you’ve made a mistake” — if you start with that I think you have defeated the entire purpose of the pastoral encounter.

LAWTON: Rick Yoder was laid off in September after working for a major RV manufacturer for 25 years. He’s in a church support group.

Rick and Joy Yoder

RICK YODER: Some people are executives. I come in as a laborer, forklift driver, truck driver, and we all say the same things. It’s about our identity, our livelihood, and changing. It’s the hardest thing to do.

JOY YODER: It’s probably the biggest challenge for me. I pray a lot, and I journal a lot, and it fluctuates from day to day, because I’m the main bread winner now, and I’ve never been in that role before.

LAWTON: Rick’s wife, Joy, works in the kitchen at Bethany Christian Schools, so she gets a discount to help with their daughter Jama’s tuition. But she doesn’t earn enough to cover all the family’s bills. Church friends have stepped in to help.

Mr. YODER: Right away some people come to me from our Sunday School class and said, “We know you need a roof on your house, and we want to do something.” That was so hard to accept, but I had to. But, you know, you do, and someday I’ll be on the other end giving.

Ms. YODER: We are used to giving and helping needy people here, and I think that’s been one of the biggest struggles, but also an area that I’ve had to learn to — the people want to help, and to say no you’re hurting them, and you’re taking that gift away from them.

LAWTON: Laid-off executive Michael Stevens says unemployment has made his faith stronger. A cradle Catholic, he’s spending more time at church and in prayer. He believes God will provide him the right job at the right time.

MICHAEL STEVENS: Even though it’s devastating to lose your job, as one door closes another one opens, and people should really embrace that and pray to God about that and look to go into that next open door, because that might be the door that he’s calling you to.

LAWTON: Kraybill says the entire community is learning important spiritual lessons.

Mr. KRAYBILL: When I have my bank account and my retirement and secure employment and my mortgage pretty well paid off, it’s pretty easy for me to get spiritually smug and think I don’t need God, and it’s in the people around us who are the most vulnerable where we are going to see the face of God.

LAWTON: Despite all the bad news, local leaders say faith and a strong community spirit are prevailing.

Mr. BONTRAGER: We’re still a very vibrant community, and people are committed to making it work—and we’re not going away.

LAWTON: They say that spirit will get them through this crisis. I’m Kim Lawton in Elkhart County, Indiana.

Psychologists who study forgiveness find that, generally speaking, people who forgive lead happier and healthier lives than those who don’t. The Amish people we interviewed agreed, citing their own experience of forgiving others. Some said they were “controlled” by their offender until they were able to forgive; others said the “acid or hate” destroys the unforgiving person until the hate is released. Coming from members of a religious community that emphasizes self-denial, these comments show that the Amish are nonetheless interested in self-care and personal happiness. Forgiveness may be self-renouncing in some respects, but it is not self-loathing. The Amish we interviewed confirmed what psychologists tell us: forgiveness heals the person who offers it, freeing that person to move on in life with a greater sense of vitality and wholeness.

Still, if the Amish provide evidence that forgiveness heals the forgiver, they provide even more evidence that forgiveness benefits the offender. Forgiveness does not deny that a wrong has taken place, but it does give up the right to hurt the wrongdoer in return. Even though Charles Roberts [the shooter at the Nickel Mines schoolhouse] was dead, opportunities to exact vengeance upon his family did not die with his suicide. Rather than pursuing revenge, however, the Amish showed empathy for his kin, even by attending his burial. In other words, the Amish of Nickel Mines chose not to vilify the killer but to treat him and his family as members of the human community. Amish forgiveness was thus a gift to Charles Roberts, to his family, and even to the world, for it served as the first step toward mending a social fabric that was rent by the schoolhouse shooting. These acts of grace astounded many people who watched from afar.

Living in a world in which religion seems to nourish vengeance more often than curb it, the Amish response was a welcome contrast to a barrage of suicide bombings and religiously fueled rage. What is less clear is whether the rest of us saw the Amish response as something to emulate, or as just a noble but impossible ideal.

Perhaps the answer to that question lies somewhere in the middle. Perhaps we were awed and truly impressed that the Amish sought to counter evil with a loving and healing response. At the same time, we may know that had our children been the ones gunned down in the West Nickel Mines School, our response would have been rooted in rage rather than grace. It’s an honest perspective, but also a problematic one, because it assumes that revenge is the natural response and forgiveness is reserved for folks like the Amish who spend their lives stifling natural inclinations.

We often assume that humans have innate needs in the face of violence and injustice. For instance, some who said that the Amish forgave Roberts “too quickly” assumed that Amish people had denied a basic human need to get even. But perhaps our real human need is to find ways to move beyond tragedy with a sense of healing and hope.

What we learn from the Amish, both at Nickel Mines and more generally, is that how we choose to move on from tragic injustice is culturally formed. For the Amish, who bring their own religious resources to bear on injustice, the preferred way to live on with meaning and hope is to offer forgiveness — and offer it quickly. That offer, including the willingness to forgo vengeance, does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong. It does, however, constitute a first step toward a future that is more hopeful, and potentially less violent, than it would otherwise be.

How might the rest of us move in that direction? Most of us have been formed by a culture that nourishes revenge and mocks grace. Hockey fans complain that they haven’t gotten their money’s worth if the players only skate and score without a fight. Bloody video games are everywhere, and the ones that seemed outrageously violent ten years ago are tame by today’s standards. Blockbuster movie plots revolve around heroes who avenge wrong with merciless killing. And it’s not just the entertainment world that acculturates us into a graceless existence. Traffic accidents galvanize hoards of lawyers who encourage victims to get their “due.” In fact, getting our due might be the most widely shared value in our hyperconsumerist culture. “The person who volunteers time, who helps a stranger, who agrees to work for a modest wage out of commitment to the public good…begins to feel like a sucker,” writes Robert Kuttner in EVERYTHING FOR SALE. In a culture that places such a premium on buying and selling, as opposed to giving and receiving, forgiveness runs against the grain.

Running against that grain, finding alternative ways to imagine our world, ways that in turn will facilitate forgiveness, takes more than individual willpower. We are not only the products of our culture, we are also producers of our culture. We need to construct cultures that value and nurture forgiveness. In their own way, the Amish have constructed such an environment. The challenge for the rest of us is to use our resources creatively to shape cultures that discourage revenge as a first response. How might we work more imaginatively to create communities in which enemies are treated as members of the human family and not demonized? How might these communities foster visions that enable their members to see offenders, as well as victims, as persons with authentic needs? There are no simple answers to these questions, though any answer surely will involve the habits we decide to value, the images we choose to celebrate, and the stories we remember.

In fact, forgiveness is less a matter of forgive and forget than of forgive and remember — remembering in ways that bring healing. When we remember we take the broken pieces of our lives — lives that have been dismembered by tragedy and injustice — and re-member them into something whole. Forgetting an atrocious offense, personally or corporately, may not be possible, but all of us can and do make decisions about how we remember what we cannot forget.

For the Amish, gracious remembering involves habits nurtured by memories of Jesus forgiving his tormenters while hanging on a cross. … When thirteen-year-old Marian said “shoot me first” in the schoolhouse, and when adults in her community walked over to the killer’s family with words of grace a few hour’s after her death, they were acting on those habits. And just as surely their actions at Nickel Mines will be recounted around Amish dinner tables for generations to come, creating and renewing memories about the power of faith to respond in the face of injustice — even violence — with grace.

In a world where faith often justifies and magnifies revenge, and in a nation where some Christians use scripture to fuel retaliation, the Amish response was indeed a surprise. Regardless of the details of the Nickel Mines story, one message rings clear: religion was used not to justify rage and revenge but to inspire goodness, forgiveness, and grace. And that is the big lesson for the rest of us regardless of our faith or nationality.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Tuesday, October 2, is the first anniversary of the atrocity in an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where a gunman murdered five girls and severely wounded five others before killing himself. And then another shock for many: The Amish community forgave the killer and reached out compassionately to his widow.

There’s a new book coming out next week called AMISH GRACE: HOW FORGIVENESS TRANSCENDED TRAGEDY. One of the authors is Steven Nolt, a history professor at Goshen College in Indiana and an expert on Amish life.

Professor Nolt, welcome. How could the Amish forgive something as atrocious as those murders?

Dr. STEVEN NOLT (Co-Author, AMISH GRACE and Professor of History, Goshen College, Indiana): Forgiveness is central to Amish theology. The Amish believe, in a real sense, that God’s forgiving them is in some ways dependent upon their extending forgiveness to other people. For them this is also about following Jesus, about doing what Jesus said, what Christ taught in the Lord’s Prayer, which is a central text for the Amish: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

ABERNETHY: But why are the Amish seemingly so much better able to do this kind of thing than other Christians?

Dr. NOLT: In a lot of ways, this is built into their cultural DNA. They have a 300-, 400-year history of responding to wrong in this way. They have examples, and they also do it as a community. They don’t view forgiveness as the responsibility of the specific individuals who have been wronged. It’s something that’s shared by the entire community.

ABERNETHY: You’ve written that the Amish think that the act of forgiving wipes away feelings of revenge and hate. But might not that kind of thing repress something that’s important to get out and therefore not be very healthy?

Dr. NOLT: Yeah, when the Amish talk about forgiveness they talk about it in a couple of ways. What we heard right after the Nickel Mines shooting was a decision to forgive, wanting to say publicly we are committed to forgiving. We’re committed to reaching out compassionately to the family. The Amish are quite aware that forgiveness is — the emotional side of forgiveness is a process. It’s a difficult process. It’s something that certainly wasn’t over in five or 10 days after the shooting. It’s something that’s still going on now. So I don’t think their forgiveness in early October meant that they felt that forgiveness was complete.

ABERNETHY: In some cases, confession and contrition are considered necessary before there can be forgiveness. Now, obviously, that couldn’t happen here because the shooter was dead. But, in general, do the Amish believe that?

Dr. NOLT: No, they don’t. They make a distinction between forgiveness and pardon and reconciliation, and it’s possible that for pardon or for reconciliation to take place you need to have a two-way relationship. But forgiveness they see as something that they extend regardless of the stance of the offender.

ABERNETHY: Are there any signs that what the Amish did a year ago, this extraordinary act of forgiveness, is having effects in the wider world?

Dr. NOLT: Well, I just think the interest in the wider world in this story, in taking forgiveness seriously — not necessarily imitating what the Amish did exactly but in thinking about forgiveness as a complex and difficult but important process and trying to apply that to our own lives, our own context — has really been a heartening development.

ABERNETHY: Steven Nolt of Goshen College, many thanks. His book, with his two co-authors, is AMISH GRACE.