LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: It was only fitting that the first parachutist out of the plane at this festival for atheists and non-believers at Fort Bragg is herself an atheist—Sergeant Rachel Medley.

SERGEANT RACHEL MEDLEY: I am an atheist and I’m a good person—have, you know, a great life and have great friends, and my service to my country is based on my personal morals which are help other people, be kinds to others, treat others as you would like to be treated.

SEVERSON: She would like to be treated with more respect, as would many of the troops attending this first ever event expressly for soldiers who don’t believe in God. Sergeant Justin Griffith was one of the organizers.

SERGEANT JUSTIN GRIFFITH: This is us coming out of the closet, you know, shattering that stained glass ceiling. We want to remove the stigma about atheists and whatever they think the word “atheist” means.

SEVERSON: As unlikely as it may seem, one token of respect they would like is an atheist chaplain. That’s a tall order considering that conservative evangelical clergy dominate the ranks of the chaplaincy. Organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals, the NAE, dispute any need for an atheist chaplain. Galen Carey is an NAE vice president.

GALEN CAREY: Well, evangelicals very strongly supported the men and women in uniform, and they want to see that their spiritual needs are met. I don’t think you would find many who could understand, frankly, the point of a chaplain for atheists.

SEVERSON: There are over 3000 chaplains all together. Ninety percent are Christian, even though only about 7 out of 10 soldiers claim to be Christian. There are also a handful of Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu chaplains. Jason Torpy, an Iraq veteran, wants to know why the much larger group of atheists or humanists, estimated to be about 40,000 soldiers, don’t have their own chaplain.

JASON TORPY: They have trainings for the Jewish perspective and Eastern Orthodox perspective and the Christian Science perspective even though, you know, our group—even just the atheists, not even the general nontheists, you know—even though we dwarf their numbers.

SEVERSON: Torpy is a graduate of West Point. He was a captain in the 1st Armored Division and is now the president of the Military Association of Atheists and Free Thinkers.

TORPY: If I’m atheist or humanist, where’s that support for us? The same reason that a Christian will benefit from that and a Muslim will benefit from that and be a better soldier if they’re affirmed, and they can grow on their values, and they can plug into their community. we will benefit from that as well, but we can’t right now because the chaplains either are ignorant of or hostile to nontheistic beliefs.

SEVERSON: Our request for an interview with the Department of Defense was declined. Instead, we were given a statement reiterating the Pentagon’s longstanding position. It reads in part, “Anyone wanting to become a chaplain must have an endorsement from a qualified religious organization.” For the Department of Defense it is a sensitive issue, with pressure building from atheist groups around the country accusing the military of promoting Christianity. But Colonel Stephen Sicinski, the Fort Bragg base commander, would deny that.

COLONEL STEPHEN SICINSKI: I don’t see there being any inequality today. I’m not tracking as to where you might think that there is inequality of treatment. We don’t treat soldiers that are atheists as atheists. We treat them as soldiers.

SEVERSON: In 2010, Colonel Sicinski, at the urging of base chaplains, approved and supported a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association event called Rock the Fort to boost morale and, in the colonel’s words, “bolster the faith.”

GRIFFITH: We were “treated” to a just massive festival, and they were actually very successful. They converted hundreds of soldiers onstage.

SEVERSON: And when Sergeant Griffith asked for a similar event for atheists and humanists, Colonel Sicinski declined at first. Months later he changed his mind, and that set the stage for this event called Rock Beyond Belief. The keynote speaker was the British biologist and famous atheist author Richard Dawkins.

RICHARD DAWKINS: I’m delighted that a barrier has been broken through, that there never again can be a religious rally on a military base without the authorities knowing that it will be followed by something like this.

SICINSKI: This is just a manifestation, the latest manifestation of our attempt to ensure that a segment of our population gets the type of equal consideration that other types or segments of the population would.

SEVERSON: Prior to this event the military announced that there would be no base chaplains available for interviews. One chaplain wrote an open letter on Fort Bragg’s Facebook page saying the secular festival would promote and glorify violence against people who possess a faith in God. There was no violence at the Rock Beyond Belief event. Sergeant Griffith, who was a passionate Christian in his teens and now wears dog tags that say he is an atheist, claims that he’s had death threats.

GRIFFITH: I get death threats on a regular basis claiming that I‘m going to burn down the chapel, and that’s not the case at all. In fact, we want to use the churches. We want to be a part of the community.

SEVERSON: Among atheists, one of the most objectionable tests they are required to pass involves their spiritual fitness. It’s a new test given annually. Sergeant Griffith failed.

GRIFFITH: It went on and on telling me that I need to improve my spiritual fitness. But if I need help, I call this 1-800 number. So I called that 1-800 number, and I was basically just going to yell at whoever it was, and to my surprise this was a suicide hotline. I was told that I was suicidal because I was not religious.

SEVERSON: Atheists contend it’s difficult to advance in the army if a soldier isn’t deemed spiritually fit.

GRIFFITH: I take this test again and again and again, because every three months since I failed a section, the spiritual portion, that means I’m red and I have to take it again in three months. It’s offensive in the highest. It’s illegal. it’s unconstitutional, it’s a waste of money, and it’s another tool to keep us down, to tell us atheists that we’re freaks or somehow unfit.

CAREY: It’s in the military’s interest as well as the individual service member’s interest that their spiritual needs are met, but I don’t think that anyone is being discriminated against in the military because of absence of having a spiritual affiliation.

SEVERSON: Jason Torpy says the discrimination is often subtle, but it’s ever-present and, he says, it’s misplaced because, he argues, atheists are making a greater sacrifice.

TORPY: Not only am I here serving my country, expanding the value, you know, liberty, protecting and defending Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. This is even more valuable because I’m giving the one life, you know, and when I die I don’t go to heaven.

DAWKINS: I must say if I were in a fox hole in the heat of battle I’d much rather be with an atheist solder than with a soldier who believed that some kind of supernatural being was watching over him. I’d want a soldier who knew that it was his own wit and bravery keeping us safe.

SEVERSON: Galen Carey with the National Association of Evangelicals says if atheists and humanists need someone to talk to, to receive counsel from, there may be another way.

CAREY; Well, there are times when psychologists, psychiatrists, other counselors are needed. That’s not exactly the role of a chaplain, so if we need to have more psychiatrists, then sure, we should bring them in. But that doesn’t mean we need to have chaplains.

SEVERSON: Atheists argue that going to a psychiatrist, for whatever reason, is often interpreted as a negative on a soldier’s record.

TORPY: Chaplains have unfettered access to troops and they have clergy confidentiality. If you go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist within the military it goes on your official record, which can jeopardize your job.

MEDLEY: It’s just like anything else. Anything that’s different or newer than other ideas is always met with a little bit of trepidation by people. That’s human nature. In the sixties we were having the same conversation about people with different colored skin, so it’s not a new conversation. It’s just a new subject.

SEVERSON: It’s a conversation that will likely go on for some time, but for those who share the goals of people here, there are signs of incremental progress in their campaign for equality with religious denominations. This festival is one sign.

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

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Three years ago, Anne Stine was a busy mother with three young children and a husband who was on the road a lot. Then her 87-year-old father, a very independent World War II veteran who lived about an hour away, suffered a stroke.

ANNE STINE: And what I found was a man who was no longer independent. He was confused and worried and starting to bark orders. So it was a very emotional time for him, and it was a scary time for both of us.

LAWTON: Her dad, who lived alone, needed a lot of care, and the issues surrounding his care were overwhelming.

STINE: The doctors came in and the social workers come in, and they start all these questions: Where do you want your dad to go in rehab? Are you set up in Medicare and Medicaid? The list went on, and I was just a mom with three little kids and not prepared to take on that responsibility, and yet I had to.

LAWTON: According to a recent study, 36 percent of all caregivers are adult children taking care of an aging parent, and that’s expected to rise dramatically. People 85 and older are the fastest growing group in America, and census projections say their numbers will more than double—to 11.5 million—by the year.

Author Jane Gross says it’s a situation our entire society is unprepared to deal with. Her own education began about a decade ago, when she and her brother needed to care for their ailing elderly mother. As a journalist for the New York Times, Gross was used to getting information easily, but with this she says she felt clueless on multiple fronts.

JANE GROSS: (Author, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents and Ourselves): Medical. Various entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid and how they work. Residential. Where was she going to live? Legal. Financial. Those are the most obvious ones, but they don’t overlap and, you know, you can’t make three phone calls and figure them all out.

LAWTON: Based on her experiences, Gross started the New Old Age blog and wrote a book called A Bittersweet Season: Caring for our Aging Parents and Ourselves. With so many people living longer, Gross believes one of the biggest social questions is how to pay for their care during the period of long, slow decline.

GROSS: My mother was as well-prepared as a person can possibly be for the end game, if you will. I mean, she had every document known to man in perfect order, and she had a decent amount of money. She spent $500,000, bare minimum, out of pocket, her own money, and then wound up on Medicaid.

LAWTON: Gross says health care benefits don’t include provisions for home health care or assisted living.

GROSS: You can get a new heart, but you can’t get somebody to take you to the supermarket. The assumption is that families will do that for themselves, and families will pay for it themselves until they’re impoverished, and then the government will pay for them if there’s any Medicaid.

LAWTON: Complicating the situation even further, as is often the case, Gross and her brother had to work through longstanding tensions in their own relationship as well as what she calls “old family baggage” with their mother.

GROSS: If there were some way for people in the moment to understand which of it is real and which of it is baggage and leave the baggage at the door, they would come out of it much better.

LAWTON: The many difficult problems can take a severe emotional toll, especially for women, who are the majority of parental caregivers. Gross says she never realized how many exhausted, stressed-out caregivers were out there until she became one of them.

GROSS: You would see them all the time in the parking lot of either the assisted living community or the nursing home, invariably slumped over the steering wheel and crying, and then suddenly you realized it’s very hard.

STINE (on phone to her father): Do you need me to stop and bring you lunch?

LAWTON: Anne Stine says she felt torn between managing the care of her father and still meeting the needs of her children.

STINE: You have the little ones who demand so much time, and then if you’re in a situation where your parent is also demanding a lot of time you do become sandwiched, and you’re also pulled in both directions, and what is the right thing to do, and priorities.

LAWTON: A committed Episcopalian, she says for her it was a spiritual issue.

STINE: I needed support from my church and my faith community right off the bat. I knew that I had to rely on God’s strength and not my own. Leaning on God’s strength, leaning on my faith community, I turned to my church and said, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.”

REVEREND KATE BRYANT (St. James Episcopal Church, Leesburg, Virginia): If we’re caring for other people, we’re no good unless we take care of ourselves, and believe me, I have to remind myself of that quite regularly.

LAWTON: Reverend Kate Bryant is rector of Stine’s church, St. James Episcopal Church in Leesburg, Virginia. She went through a similar experience with her own mother and says the spiritual aspects can often be overlooked.

REV. BRYANT: As in any care giving situation, that care can be so demanding emotionally, physically, and it’s also demanding spiritually. I think a lot of people who are in care giving situations ask, “Why is God doing this to me? Where is God in the midst of all this?” and they really struggle with spiritual matters as they pertain to aging parents.

LAWTON: Bryant says many people in her congregation were dealing with aging parents, so she and Stine began searching for faith-based resources and support groups. But there didn’t seem to be any.

STINE: In my frustration I said something like, “Well, there should be.” I mean, when you become a parent there’s all these support groups and information. You’re bombarded with it. But nothing when you have to take care of a parent?

LAWTON: They started the Caregivers for Aging Parents ministry at St. James. The ministry provides practical resources for parental caregivers and pairs those who have gone through it with those who are just beginning.

REV. BRYANT: Know where your parents’ finances are kept, what that situation is. Do you have a living will? Do you have a health care proxy? Some of that information you can get at any local council on aging. It’s laying over the spiritual component that’s so important in the context of a church community.

LAWTON: In the end, Gross says the most important lesson she learned was not letting the logistics completely overwhelm what was truly important.

GROSS: The decisions that seem like they matter so much when you’re making them by and large don’t, but the quality of the time does. And you know, since time is finite I would worry less about fixing stuff that ultimately can’t be fixed and worry more about gathering memories and feeling good about the experience.

LAWTON: For Bryant, caring for an aging parent led to a new understanding of the biblical commandant to honor your father and your mother.

BRYANT: When we are children, we interpret that word honor as meaning being obedient. As parents age and become elderly or are aging that honor takes the form of kindness, thoughtfulness, care giving.

STINE (speaking to her father): How old were you in this picture?

PHILLIP WESTON: Twenty-one.

STINE: Twenty-one.

LAWTON: And despite the demands, or perhaps because of them, Stine says she has found that caring for an aging parent can indeed be a spiritual blessing.

STINE: And this experience has actually given me so much in return, and it’s really caring, really serving. The depth that goes into your soul when you don’t know how you’re going to do it, you really seek God and see God firsthand in the midst.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During Holy Week, Christians remember the familiar story of Jesus’s death and resurrection. But exactly where does that story take place? The Bible offers only a few clues.

REV. MARK MOROZOWICH (Catholic University of America): The Gospels weren’t really written to record a history. They were written to provide a testimony of faith.

LAWTON: According to the New Testament, Jesus was crucified at a spot outside Jerusalem called Golgotha, which in Aramaic means “place of the skull.” The Latin word for skull is calvaria, and in English many Christians refer to the site of the crucifixion as Calvary. The Gospel of John says there was a garden at Golgotha, and a tomb which had never been used. Since the tomb was nearby, John says, that’s where Jesus’s body was placed. The Gospel writers say the tomb was owned by a prominent rich man, Joseph of Arimathea. They describe it as cut out of rock, with a large stone that could be rolled in front of the entrance.

Father Mark Morozowich is acting dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America.

MOROZOWICH: At the time of Jesus, when he was crucified, he was not really a significant feature in Israel. I mean, certainly there was jealousy, certainly he had his followers. But there was no church that was built immediately upon his death or to mark his resurrection.

LAWTON: In the fourth century, as Emperor Constantine was consolidating the Roman Empire under Christianity, his mother, St. Helena, traveled to Jerusalem. According to tradition, she discovered relics of the cross upon which Jesus had been crucified. The spot had been venerated by early Christians, and she concluded it was Golgotha. Constantine ordered the construction of a basilica, which became known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

MOROZOWICH: Now people throughout history have debated was it really there, or was it here? Traditionally in that fourth century time that was so amazing, they found this rock and this tomb not far from one another as we see even today in the church you know they’re just a short distance from one another.

LAWTON: Over the centuries, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed, rebuilt and renovated several times. There have been numerous power struggles over who should control it, and even today, sometimes violent squabbles can break out among the several Christian denominations that share jurisdiction. But it is considered one of the holiest sites in Christianity, a massive place of pilgrimage and intense spiritual devotion. At the entrance, visitors can kiss the Stone of Unction which, according to tradition, marks the place where Jesus’ body was washed for burial. The dark chapel commemorating the crucifixion is in one upper corner, and the place marking the tomb on the other side.

MOROZOWICH: What more of a moving place to walk in Jerusalem, the place of the crucifixion, to meditate at Golgotha where Jesus Christ died, the place where he rose from the tomb. So they are very beautiful and very moving moments when a person can have a very deep relationship with God.

LAWTON: During Holy Week in particular, the Holy Sepulchre is the center for special devotions, such as the Holy Fire ritual, where flames from inside the tomb area are passed among the candles of worshippers.

MOROZOWICH: The bishop brings out the light from the tomb and this illuminates and plays on this whole sense of the light of the world coming forth again.

LAWTON: But despite the history and devotion, some question whether that indeed is the true spot. Some Christians, including many Protestants, believe Jesus could have been crucified and buried at a different place in Jerusalem known as the Garden Tomb.

STEVE BRIDGE (Deputy Director, The Garden Tomb): The tomb was discovered in 1867. For hundreds of years before that it had lain buried under rock and rubble and earth and things had grown on top of it.

LAWTON: Steve Bridge is deputy director at the Garden Tomb, which is located just outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate. He says this site was promoted in the late nineteenth century by British General Charles Gordon, who argued that the hillside with the features of a human skull could be actual crucifixion site.

BRIDGE: When we’re looking, now we’re looking side on, and you can see maybe what looks like the two eye-sockets there on the rock face. The Bible tells us Jesus was crucified outside the city walls at a place called Golgotha, which simply means the skull, and so many people believe that Skull Hill is Golgotha, the place of the skull where Jesus died.

LAWTON: This Skull Hill looms over an ancient garden, with cisterns and a wine press, which could indicate that it was owned by a wealthy person. In the garden was a tomb, hewn from the rock.

BRIDGE: The tomb itself is at least two-thousand years old. Many date it as older than that. But it’s certainly not less than 2,000 years old. It’s a Jewish tomb, it’s definitely a rolling stone tomb. That means the entrance would be sealed by rolling a large stone across.

LAWTON: Inside the tomb is a 1300-year-old marking of a cross with the Byzantine words “Jesus Christ, the Beginning and the End.”

BRIDGE: So there’s burial space for at least two bodies, probably more. That, again, matches the bible description. It was a family tomb that Joseph had built for himself and his family.

LAWTON: Bridge says Christians are deeply moved by this visual image of where Jesus may have been placed after he was taken down from the cross.

BRIDGE: On that day, as far as people were concerned, that was the end of the story, that was the end of one that they had hoped would be the Messiah, because a dead Messiah is no good. But three days later, we believe God raised Jesus to life and that was the start of what we now call Christianity of course.

LAWTON: According to Bridge, the Garden Tomb is not trying to set up a competition with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

BRIDGE: There’s no doubt that historically, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has the evidence on its side, and we certainly wouldn’t want to do or say anything that would suggest that we think they’re wrong about the site or that we think that we’re right. What we say we have here is something that matches the Bible description.

LAWTON: And Bridge says, for him, it doesn’t ultimately matter where the actual place is.

BRIDGE: That’s very secondary to Jesus himself, who we believe he is, and why he died, and, you know, on that score us and the Holy Sepulchre would be exactly the same, telling the same story but on a different site.

LAWTON: Father Morozowich agrees that, especially at Easter time, Christians should focus more on what Jesus did, rather than on where he may have done it.

MOROZOWICH: Where he walked is very, very important. At the same time though, we know that Jesus is more than this historical figure that walked the earth, and in his resurrection, he transcends all of that. So he is as real and present in Mishawaka and in Washington, DC as he is in Jerusalem.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Filmed in part on location at New York’s 92nd Street Y.

PROFESSOR AMY-JILL LEVINE (Co-Editor The Jewish Annotated New Testament): Jesus argues with fellow Jews. You can’t be more Jewish than to argue with fellow Jews. It’s not a problem.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the 92nd Street Y in New York, Vanderbilt Divinity School professor Amy-Jill Levine is making the case that Jews and Christians alike need to pay more attention to the Jewishness of Jesus, and the best way to do that, she believes, is by reading the New Testament from a Jewish perspective.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: If I want to understand Jewish history, the New Testament is one of the best sources that I’ve got.

LAWTON: Levine, who is an observant Jew, is co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, a version of the Christian scripture with footnotes and commentaries written entirely by Jewish scholars.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: The New Testament does have extraordinarily beautiful and profound material in it. Paul’s hymn to love in First Corinthians or the parables of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, or comments such as “God is love,” which is First John. This is magnificent material, and everybody ought to appreciate it. I find for myself the more I read the New Testament, in fact the better Jew I become.

LAWTON: The Jewish Annotated New Testament is one of several new projects urging Jews especially to take a new look at Jesus. Bestselling author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s latest book is called Kosher Jesus. That notion, he says, is a radical departure from what he learned as a child.

RABBI SHMULEY BOTEACH (Author, Kosher Jesus): When I grew up Jesus’ name, his very name, was off limits. Jesus was seen as the arch-enemy of the Jewish people. He was really seen as an apostate and traitor to his people.

LAWTON: Boteach believes the time is ripe for a new paradigm.

RABBI BOTEACH: We can’t ignore the 600-pound gorilla in the room, which is Jesus. Christians and Jews come together, and they can never mention Jesus. Christians are afraid of offending the Jews, the Jews are uncomfortable with the mention of Jesus.

LAWTON: Growing up in a predominantly Roman Catholic neighborhood in Massachusetts, Levine had the impression that the Christianity of her friends was just a different form of her family’s Judaism, and then she heard otherwise.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: When I was in second grade, a little girl accused me of having killed her Lord, because she had been taught that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. And I couldn’t fathom how this religion that had such beautiful attributes, and a Jewish man named Jesus, and the same Bible, was saying horrible things about Jews. So I started asking questions.

LAWTON: She says her lifelong study has shown her how embedded Jesus was in the Jewish tradition.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: He teaches like a Jew. He talks in parables, and Jews then knew that parables were not simple banal little stories. They were designed to shake us up, to get us to see the world in a new way, to challenge us. And Jesus is just a fabulous Jewish storyteller.

LAWTON: She says his teachings, such as in the famous Sermon on the Mount, are expansions of teachings in the Torah.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: He’s going to the law and bringing out the heart of it, which is also what Jewish teaching does. So he says not only don’t murder; he actually says you have to love your enemy, and he’s the only person in antiquity I’ve found who says that. But I think that gets to the heart of scripture.

LAWTON: Levine doesn’t shy away from what she calls the “problematic” passages in the New Testament, passages that have been used by Christians over the centuries to persecute Jews.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: We need to know what the New Testament says about the Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus; how the New Testament characterizes Jewish groups, particularly the Pharisees; and we need to know that within historical context. That doesn’t mean we erase them. It doesn’t mean we fudge the translation. It means we deal with them just as Jews have dealt with those problematic passages in the shared scriptures.

LAWTON: Levine believes Christians too can benefit from studying the Judaism of Jesus.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: Jews have been arguing about the law since Moses came down the mountain.

(to audience):Thank you for that “Amen.” That’s lovely. I wish that happened in my synagogue more often.

LAWTON: On this day, she was a guest lecturer at the evangelical Oral Roberts University.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: Unless Christian preachers, teachers, Bible study leaders know about first-century Judaism, often what happens is Jesus gets yanked out of his Jewish context, and he becomes the only Jew who’s compassionate toward women, interested in adapting Torah, interested in adapting the law to the needs of the contemporary community, the only Jew interested in peace among a group of very bellicose, warlike Jews.

LAWTON: She says when Christians don’t understand Jesus’ Jewish context it can lead to misunderstandings about his message, which in turn can lead to harmful stereotypes.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: What I hear in a number of sermons and read in a number of sermons is that Torah is difficult to follow, it’s an impossible burden that weighs people down, and then Jesus comes along and says basically “Don’t worry, be happy.” In actuality, Jews in the first century and Jews who practice Torah today did not find Torah a burden. They found it to be a delight.

LAWTON: Or, she says, many Christians will talk about the angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament in contrast to a New Testament God of love.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: It’s the same God: merciful, compassionate, generous, loving, but not inclined to take sin lightly either.

PROFESSOR BRAD YOUNG (Oral Roberts University): It’s crazy that for 2,000 years Christians have followed a faith in Jesus while rejecting the faith of Jesus.

LAWTON: Oral Roberts professor of Judaic-Christian studies Brad Young agrees that Christians must understand the Jewish roots of their faith. He admits many Christians have been too busy trying to convert Jews to try and learn from them.

PROFESSOR YOUNG: Be honest about your beliefs, share them, but be willing to listen to the other side, and maybe that will change some of your beliefs. Maybe our beliefs will change. We need to share it with one another to go to the next step.

LAWTON: And, he acknowledges, the question of whether or not Jesus was the messiah can’t be glossed over.

PROFESSOR YOUNG: We should recognize when we talk about two great traditions of faith, Christianity and Judaism, that there are very sharp differences, and sometimes understanding the differences are even more important than understanding the similarities.

LAWTON: Rabbi Boteach’s new book does not accept that Jesus was the messiah. Nonetheless, Kosher Jesus has been denounced as heresy by some of Boteach’s fellow Orthodox Jews who worry that the ideas in it could make Jews vulnerable to missionary efforts. Boteach argues that Jews need to reclaim Jesus.

RABBI BOTEACH: Why are we allowing the Christian community to teach us about the Christian Christ in order to convert when Jesus was a Jew and we should be teaching them about the Jewish Jesus in order to enrich their Christian experience?

PROFESSOR LEVINE: For people who are afraid that if Jews were to read the New Testament and find some of this truly magnificent material the next thing we know they’re going to line up at the baptismal font and say, “Please convert me”: I don’t think the way we prevent Jews from wanting to convert is to keep them ignorant of the New Testament.

LAWTON: Looking at Jesus through Jewish eyes, she believes, not only strengthens the individual faiths but can also bring them together.

PROFESSOR LEVINE(lecturing to audience): In learning more about each others’ traditions, we come better to respect our neighbors, and if we are really lucky, for Jews reading the New Testament would give us deeper insight into our own Judaism, and for Christians reading the New Testament with Jewish annotations will give Christians deeper insight into the Lord and Savior they worship. Thank you very much.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in New York.

Read an excerpt from Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels

PROFESSOR ELAINE PAGELS (reading from the Book of Revelation): “And another sign appeared in heaven; a great red dragon with ten horns and seven diadems on his head. His tail swept down a third of the stars in heaven and cast them to earth. And the dragon stood before….”

BOB FAW, correspondent: For almost two thousand years, that fantastic, sometimes nightmarish language of the Book of Revelation has confused and inspired, It was the inspiration for  paintings by William Blake, for the poetry of John Milton. Lyrics like “he hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword”: that too came from Revelation. Despite its profound impact, noted biblical scholar Elaine Pagels says Revelation remains “the strangest book in the Bible” and “the least understood.”

PAGELS: It’s the most controversial book in the Bible. It’s always been that. Some people thought it didn’t belong there at all. And other people wanted to throw it out. Others love it, and some hate it. Some Christians never talk about it; some people never stop talking about it. A lot of people throughout the country were using it as a predictor of current events and using it as part of their impetus to get into the Iraq war. People could apply this sort of war against good and evil to almost any situation you were involved with.

FAW: Pagels, author of the acclaimed book The Gnostic Gospels, was one of the first scholars to study ancient scrolls unearthed in Egypt in 1945. What the scholars found is that the Book of Revelation was not written by the author of the Gospel of John but by a different John living on the isle of Patmos off what is now Turkey.

PAGELS: He seems to be a Jewish prophet who is a refugee from a war in his own country, which was Judea, from Jerusalem, where a war had broken out in 66 to the year 70 when the Romans came in with 60,000 troops and totally destroyed Jerusalem.

FAW: It was, she writes, John’s “cry of anguish.”

PAGELS: This book picks up the language from the prophets and speaks about Rome and the leaders of Rome, the emperors, as a huge bright red dragon with seven heads, seven horns on its head. It was anti-Roman propaganda, because John was devastated by what had happened to his people, what had happened to the city of Jerusalem.

FAW: He writes it in language of dreams and nightmares.

PAGELS: Yes. It was probably dangerous in the Roman Empire to openly express hostility to Rome, so people would have done it in coded language.

FAW: John’s Book of Revelation targeted the Roman Empire as evil. But nearly 300 years later, when the Roman Empire became Christian, a wily and powerful bishop, Athanasius,  used the Book of Revelation to strengthen his hold on the Christian movement.

PAGELS: He says well it’s not just about the Roman Empire. This is about me fighting my opponents trying to create the orthodox Catholic Church in the fourth century. So he turns it into a story about Christians against other Christians, and that’s taken up later by Martin Luther against Catholics. It’s taken up by Catholics against Martin Luther.  It’s taken up by Catholics against Protestants and Protestants against Catholics, and it keeps on going that way.

FAW: And it was Bishop Athanasius who decreed that the revelation written by John of Patmos would be in the Bible even though most bishops would have left it out, says Pagels.

PAGELS: Most of the list we have of what’s supposed to be the New Testament completely leave this book out. It’s just gone. The one person who puts it in is Bishop Athanasius, and he realized that he could take this imagery of the war of good against evil and turn it against his religious enemies.

FAW: In that treasure trove of scrolls found in Egypt in 1945 there was not just one Book of Revelation. There were several, altogether different than the book that got in the Bible.

PAGELS: Most of them aren’t about the end of the world, and they’re not about judging the good and the evil. These other revelation texts have a different vision of the human race, that the same people could be both cruel and compassionate, that we are more complex than that.

FAW: They would not have been as useful for Bishop Athanasius to consolidate the church. That’s why he chose this particular one?

PAGELS: I think that Athanasius did choose this to consolidate the church and talk about you have to be, you know, orthodox to go up into heaven. Otherwise you fall into the lake of fire. I mean, this had been terrifying images for thousands of years.

FAW: Those images, the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the whore of Babylon—that is the version which resonates even now, largely, says Pagels, because those images can mean whatever a reader wants them to mean.

PAGELS: This book isn’t communicating much that’s cerebral. It’s really about what we hope and what we fear, and it’s as though you take all of your nightmares about plague or destruction or war or torture or natural catastrophe, and you just wrap it into a huge single nightmare, you get the Book of Revelation. But it comes out with hope at the end, so it’s very appealing to people who live in times of huge turmoil.

FAW: I wonder if a reader could come away thinking this book should not be taken as seriously as history has shown it has been taken.

PAGELS: I think you’re right that when you look at a book that’s in the Bible and you start to look at it in historical context, and you say, oh, this person wrote it in that situation, in war, you can say it doesn’t matter as much. It’s not necessarily something that came down from heaven. I’m a historian and that, to me, is an important way of looking at it. It’s not the only way. It’s not the way most religious people look at it. But it seems to me an important way of understanding our tradition.

FAW: Elaine Pagels’ new book, Revelations, may not become a best-seller like The Gnostic Gospels was, but it is already focusing attention on this Princeton professor, who says revelation might not give her comfort but that it does satisfy her curiosity.

PAGELS: I actually find this very compelling, and I am saying why? That’s a question I ask myself. What is it I love about this tradition, this Christian tradition? I wanted to think about how religion works, why people still are very deeply affected by religious language. I wanted to explore that, and this book is a perfect book for that because it’s not about the intellect. It goes straight to the emotions.

FAW: The Book of Revelation—always perplexing and provocative and now seen anew.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Princeton, New Jersey.

KRISTIN CORNWELL (Teacher, Hanley Elementary School, speaking to students): All right, I am going to give you five seconds to be settled.

BOB FAW, correspondent: In Memphis public schools, where only a small  percentage of students go on to college, Kristin Cornwell tells all her fourth graders they can be “college-ready.”

CORNWELL: The expectations haven’t been set before necessarily even that high, and they live up to it. One of the biggest delights is when I hear kids sitting in their groups, and they’ll whisper to each other, “Get college-ready,” and they’ll sit up straight, and they know exactly what that looks like, and they want that for themselves.

FAW: In a public school system where failure is common…

ERIN SVOBODA (Teacher, Kingsbury Middle School, speaking to students): Where’s the right angle in that diagram?

FAW: …Erin Svoboda’s goal is that 100 percent of her students pass the state math exam.

SVOBODA : A lot of my students are a little bit jaded, and they maybe feel a little bit even cheated. They understand that maybe they haven’t received the education that they should have. So I hope to maybe renewing their faith in their education and the schools and in what they can do with that later.

FAW: In this poor neighborhood, where reading scores are abysmally low, Katelyn Woodard praises her students for trying to find the right answer.

KATELYN WOODARD (Teacher, Hanley Elementary School, speaking to students): It’s by itself beautiful. Good job, Demetria.

Students: Good job, Demetria!

FAW: Katelyn, Erin, and Kristin are graduates of MTR—Memphis Teacher Residency, a  three-year-old program designed to give poor inner city students the same opportunities as students in wealthier areas. David Montague is the director of the school.

DAVID MONTAGUE (Memphis Teacher Residency): It’s absolutely an injustice, because there’s such a large academic achievement gap between students that are generally poor and minority relative to students who generally live in the suburbs and who are white.

FAW: Funded mostly by foundations and private contributions, this program takes college graduates and gives them housing, training, and tuition, even awards them a master’s degree. In return, they agree to teach in an inner city school here for four years. The program is faith-based.

MONTAGUE: What we’re doing here we’re doing within a Christian context. We believe in God’s word as revealed in Scripture, and that faith informs how you think about students. It informs your efficacy. It informs your belief that every child can learn.

FAW: There is something about this work that draws people of faith. Erin, for example, planned a career as a hospital pharmacist until her faith made her decide otherwise.

SVOBODA: I feel like this is absolutely where God wants me to be. I had much different ambitions for my life and much different aspirations. But I feel like the Lord kept putting this in my path.

(speaking to students): Remember what this page is called? What’s this page called?

FAW: Katelyn also sees what she is doing in the classroom as a kind of ministry.

WOODARD: How I want to live out my faith in the classroom is by constantly looking at the Lord and looking at how he deals with the world and reflect that in my classroom. If I treat them with that respect and that love that I really believe the Lord has for everyone, then they feel that.

FAW: Is there any such thing as an unteachable child?

SVOBODA. No.

FAW: To these teachers their students are not potential dropouts, but God’s creatures.

CORNWELL: I’ve seen kids who everyone said, “There’s no way. There’s no way that child is going to be successful.” And I’ve seen them overcome that when someone believes in them, when someone takes the time to sit with them and work with them and pull the assets that we can see from them, and they start to believe, “I can do this.”

MONTAGUE: What we still have particularly in urban education is what some people often call soft racism or soft bigotry, which is this idea of teachers at times having very low expectations of their students because of the race or class that they come from. So what we’re trying to do is say absolutely every single child can learn, and we’re going to have very, very high expectations for those children.

FAW: In this school, presided over by principal Rosalind Davis, the teachers from MTR have already had a huge impact.

ROSALIND DAVIS (Principal, Hanley Elementary School): They’ve changed the culture of the school. Their approach to the work, their work ethic, and their strategies, the way they interact with the students.

FAW: Because, says Davis, these teachers with strong faith bring something many other teachers often lack.

DAVIS: Sometimes what’s missing from a teacher’s belief system is a belief that something supernatural and miraculous could happen in schools. They might get knocked down one day, but they come back fighting the next because they prayed about it, they reflected and, you know, they get up.

FAW: Don’t be misled. The MTR program is not some roundabout way to impose doctrine, much less to proselytize, as Montague explains.

MONTAGUE: If you do a Bible study, and you explain why Jesus is the son of God and the only way to heaven, what you’re doing is you’re creating a very unhealthy and non-safe environment for every child in that classroom that doesn’t come from a Christian family, okay, and so you’re inhibiting your children, your students from being able to learn.

SVOBODA: I might not be able to necessarily tell them that I believe that they’re God’s children and that he loves them, but I’m trying to show that love to them.

DAVIS: Your faith isn’t something that you walk around beating people on the head with. People should be able to tell that you’re a Christian without you saying a word.

FAW: It is grindingly difficult work. Children coming here test well below students in more affluent areas. What is accomplished in the classroom is often offset by what they experience outside. Dealing with all that is a real test of faith.

(speaking to Erin Svoboda): You’re swimming upstream.

SVOBODA: That’s what it feels like most days, yes.

FAW: Your faith keeps you going?

SVOBODA: Yes. I will be honest. I don’t know how other people do it. Without that or motivating you have no ideal how anyone would willingly wake up and come to this every day. I don’t mean to make it sound that terrible, but it is hard.

FAW: The program is so new it is hard to measure its success. But test scores are climbing, and students are responding.

(speaking to student): She pushes you?

TEAVIKA JOHNSON: Yes.

FAW: You don’t mind the discipline? You like it?

JOHNSON: No, because it helps me more so I can understand more.

FAW: (speaking to student): The goal up there says 100 percent. So she really inspires you?

WENDY CABAERA: Yes. Actually, for me she is one of our best teachers.

FAW: And if the cynic were to argue that here they can make only the smallest of inroads, that progress will be scant and short-lived; that goals like Erin’s 100 percent target are not likely to be reached—if so, their faith, they insist, will not be diminished.

CORNWELL: I walk here in knowing that I come with my five loaves and two fish, my meager here’s my best that I have, and God’s going to have to multiply that. Whether he chooses to do that now or 20 years from now in urban education, that’s up to him.

WOODARD: What you come to learn through doing this job and through your faith is that there’s a deeper joy and peace and contentment than you could ever imagine that comes from knowing that you’re doing God’s work.

FAW: As they answer a calling and live their faith one student, one classroom at a time.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Memphis, Tennessee.

BOB ABERNETHY (anchor): Now, a profile of a best-selling writer of fantasy and adventure long before J.K. Rowling created Harry Potter. She is Madeleine L’Engle, whose science fiction, beginning with A WRINKLE IN TIME, like the Harry Potter books, has been both widely read by young people and strongly criticized by some religious conservatives. I spoke with Madeleine L’Engle a year ago about Christianity, censorship, science, suffering, and love.

Madeleine L’Engle broke her hip last year, and that has slowed her down. But on this evening, as an Episcopal lay woman she was saying vespers with the nine Episcopal nuns at New York’s Community of the Holy Spirit. L’Engle prays and reads the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer every morning and evening. For many years, she did her writing at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where she is still librarian and writer-in-residence. So does all that Christian practice make her a Christian writer?

MADELEINE L’ENGLE: No. I am a writer. That’s it. No adjectives. The first thing is writing. Christian is secondary.

ABERNETHY: At occasional workshops for other writers, Madeleine passes on her unsentimental, uncomplaining approach to life and her craft.

L’ENGLE: Basically one word: write. So who would like to be the first to read?

A young poet went to Colette and complained that he was unhappy. And she said, “Who asked you to be happy? Write.” And I think that is very good advice.

ABERNETHY: Madeleine is working now on a book about aging and an article about hate. She has written more than 50 books, of which the most famous is A WRINKLE IN TIME, published in 1961 after more than 30 rejections. The heroine is a teenager named Meg who expresses L’Engle’s own deepest belief.

L’ENGLE: Meg finally realizes that love is stronger than hate. Hate may seem to win for a while, but love is stronger than hate.

ABERNETHY: A WRINKLE IN TIME is a science-fiction fantasy that has sold more than six million copies and is now in its 66th printing. Readers still send Madeleine copies of that book and others to autograph, and she says she never tires of signing them.

L’ENGLE: Never, because anybody who has received as many rejection slips as I have is not going to complain about autographs.

ABERNETHY: Many Christians have found in Madeleine L’Engle’s books a profound religious message. Others have seen her witches and dark forces as essentially un-Christian, and their complaints to schools and libraries have made L’Engle one of the ten most banned writers in the country.

MS. L’ENGLE: We have always liked banning. And Hitler and his cohorts started banning books and then to killing people. You have got to be very careful of banning. What you ban is not going to hurt anybody, usually. But the act of banning is.

ABERNETHY: L’Engle’s view of the universe has been shaped by both Christianity and science. Often, at night, she reads both the Bible and books about particle physics, and she sees no conflict between them.

L’ENGLE: Religion and science? One and the same. I don’t have any trouble with it. A lot of people do. They have to put one here and one there, and I think they’re much more like that, each one informing the other.

ABERNETHY: But isn’t the skeptical scientific attitude a challenge to faith?

L’ENGLE: Religion is less accepting than science. Science knows things move and change, and religion doesn’t want that. So I am more comfortable with science. At the same time, I am not throwing God out the window.

ABERNETHY: But you’re making a distinction between religion and God.

L’ENGLE: Temple, the archbishop in the 19th century, said, “God is not chiefly interested in religion.” I like that.

ABERNETHY: L’Engle has experienced a lot of loss in her life: the death of her husband, Hugh Franklin, an actor well-known for his role as a doctor in the TV series ALL MY CHILDREN. She wrote about their marriage and his death in her book TWO-PART INVENTION. She wrote about her mother’s death in THE SUMMER OF THE GREAT GRANDMOTHER. Many of Madeleine’s close friends have died, and last Christmastime so did her son, Bion.

MS. L’ENGLE(reading from her journal): It’s late at night on Christmas Eve. We went to the Cathedral for the midnight mass. Bion died a week ago today. I still don’t believe it. Bion’s death has ripped the fabric of the universe.

ABERNETHY: Madeleine has kept journals almost all her life, and she says writing in them about grief makes it easier to bear.

L’ENGLE: I am very grateful that I have a journal and that I can write, because that helps me to objectify things that might just mess me around emotionally otherwise. I can no longer look at this and weep and feel sorry for myself. I see it more clearly. And it sends me back to work.

ABERNETHY: Eventually, Madeleine says, she will write about her son. Madeleine sees suffering as a normal part of life, and she also says she feels closest to God when she suffers.

L’ENGLE: In times when we are not particularly suffering we do not have enough time for God. We are too busy with other things. And then the intense suffering comes, and we can’t be busy with other things. And then God comes into the equation: “Help.” And we should never be afraid of crying out, “Help.”

ABERNETHY: Madeleine also sees suffering as necessary for a full life.

L’ENGLE: Where there is no suffering nothing happens. One time, my godmother went to visit my mother, who was her best friend, and something awful had happened. I don’t know what. And she burst into tears, instead of offering comfort, and said, “I envy you. I envy you. You had a terrible life, but you have lived.”

ABERNETHY: L’Engle insists that, in the end, life and the universe are good. She remembers singing a sad ballad to one of her two granddaughters when she was a child.

L’ENGLE: And she said, “Gran, you know that is a bad one.” And I said, “What?” “Gran, you know that’s a bad one.” And I said, “Why, Charlotte? Because everybody dies?” And she said, “No, Gran. Nobody loved anybody.” And then it was the next night, putting them to bed, that Lena just looked at me cosmically and said, “Gran, is it all right?” She didn’t mean any thing … She meant the whole thing. “Is it all right?” And I swallowed my heart and my everything and said, “Yes, Lena. It’s all right.”

ABERNETHY: Madeleine grew up an only and, she says, a lonely child. So she loves family gatherings such as this one, with four generations. She says she expects to keep enjoying good company, good food, good talk, and work for another twenty years.

L’ENGLE: I was writing in my journal yesterday and ended a paragraph with, “I think it smells like hope.” And we have to hang on to that.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At a megachurch in Orlando, evangelical Christians gathered to pray for the nation. The meeting was organized by a group called The Response, which has been holding similar sessions in other early primary states. They say they’re praying because they are well aware of the importance of the upcoming election and of their own role in helping to choose the Republican nominee. According to exit polls, two-thirds of the GOP primary voters in South Carolina last week described themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. Forty-four percent of them voted for Newt Gingrich. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum each got 21 percent of the evangelical vote. Here in Florida, conservative Christians make up about 40 percent of likely Republican primary voters.

STEVE STRANG (CEO, Charisma Media): It is important just because there are so many of us. But we don’t all think alike. We don’t all support the same person.

LAWTON: And that division among evangelicals has been a major factor this primary season. Although one-time presumed frontrunner Romney does have some support within the evangelical community, so far many rank-and-file conservative Christians haven’t rallied around him. Some believe it’s at least in part because of Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—the Mormons.

WARREN COLE SMITH (Associate Publisher, World Magazine): Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is a concern of mine because I have a concern as an evangelical Christian that I should not promote what my faith teaches is a false religion.

LAWTON: Warren Cole Smith is associate publisher of the Christian news magazine World. He wrote a blog in which he said if Romney believes what the Mormon faith teaches, he is “unfit to serve” as president.

SMITH: You could start with the doctrine of the Trinity, what theologians would call their Christology, in other words their understanding of who Christ is. And you wouldn’t have to go any farther than that to identify very quickly some differences between orthodox Biblical Christianity and Mormon theology.

LAWTON: Mormons hold several views which set them apart from Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. Not accepting the doctrine of the Trinity, Mormons believe that Jesus and God were separate physical beings. Founder Joseph Smith taught that traditional Christianity had fallen away from the teachings of Jesus, so additional and continuing revelations, like the Book of Mormon, were needed to restore the true faith. The LDS church may hold different views from the mainstream, but Mormons are deeply offended by the suggestion that they are not “real” Christians. Joanna Brooks is senior correspondent for ReligionDispatches.org, an interfaith online magazine.

JOANNA BROOKS (Senior Correspondent, Religion Dispatches): The name of Jesus Christ is in the name of our church. So, you know, Mormons do tend to feel like we’re being profoundly misunderstood when we’re classified as not being Christian.

LAWTON: And does it matter in a presidential race?

SMITH: It is a position of such high visibility in the world that, yes, having a Mormon in that particular chair would have the effect of promoting Mormonism, of normalizing Mormonism culturally both here in the United States and around the world.

BROOKS: Mormons are actually pretty cautious about the scrutiny that might come to faith as Romney runs and if he were to win the presidency. At the same time, you know, perhaps over the course of a Romney presidency people would finally get used to the idea that Mormons are fairly normal members of American society.

LAWTON: The LDS church has not commented on Romney’s campaign because it doesn’t want to appear to be interfering in the election. However, the church has released a series of ads highlighting the variety of people who hold the Mormon faith. This primary season, Romney has avoided direct discussion of the faith issue. He has been doing a lot of outreach to evangelicals.

MITT ROMNEY: I am convinced that if we have a president who will tell the truth and live with integrity and who knows how to lead and rebuild an economy, who will then draw on the patriotism of the American people, we will be able to restore those values and keep America as it has always been, the hope of the earth.

LAWTON: In Florida, evangelical Republican Cathleen Kwas is supporting Romney largely because of his economic experience.

CATHLEEN KWAS (Evangelical Voter): I’m not electing him to be the pastor of my church or anything like that. I think he’s a moral man. I think he’s a strong husband, a good father, and I’m sure we share a lot of the same, you know, ethics and values. And you know, the Mormonism isn’t—I don’t even think about that.

LAWTON: Charisma Media CEO Steve Strong is among other evangelicals who say they are reluctant to support Romney because of his policies, not his faith.

STRANG: I have no criticism of Governor Romney personally other than the fact that you have to question how conservative he is by some of the things he did in Massachusetts. Thankfully his flip-flopping, in my opinion, was flip-flopping in the right direction. That is a factor, but for me that is more of a factor than what church he goes to.

LAWTON: If not Romney, who? In the South Carolina vote, many evangelicals appeared to accept Gingrich’s argument that he is the candidate with the best chance of winning.

NEWT GINGRICH: We must have somebody who knows what they believe, is prepared to defend what they believe, and will do what it takes to defeat Obama.

LAWTON: Evangelicals appear divided over whether Gingrich’s marital past will be a factor.

STRANG: I think Newt Gingrich’s past is a huge issue, and it isn’t so much that he could be forgiven. Forgiveness is the essence of Christianity, and we’ve all been forgiven. But it shows his character, and not once, but a couple times. I have no doubt he’s changed. No doubt. But it is troubling.

KWAS: I don’t hold Newt Gingrich’s past against him. I do believe he made mistakes in the past, and that’s not influencing me now. I think he has had a change of heart, but I just believe he’s not steady and calm, and I think he’s fairly progressive, and so the moral thing isn’t what’s going to sway my opinion.

LAWTON: Earlier this month, a group of conservative Christian leaders urged unified support for Santorum. Strang decided to join them.

STRANG: Because I want to make a statement that character is important and not think that we have to give it to somebody just because all the pundits say that they have the election wrapped up and they are the ones that can beat president Obama. I think that it is unknown.

LAWTON: But given his low standing in the polls, many evangelicals do wonder about Santorum’s electability. Susan Berdet says she wrestled a lot before finally casting her absentee ballot for Santorum.

SUSAN BERDET (Evangelical Voter): I do want someone to beat our present president. Badly. But I want it to be the right person. I just felt that Rick Santorum represented my beliefs.

LAWTON: Santorum has been urging other evangelicals to also vote their values.

RICK SANTORUM: It’s not about winning or not winning, it’s about how you want to win. Do you want to win by being just a little better, or do you want to win with a mandate?

LAWTON: Polls show that despite any misgivings in the primary, in a race between Romney and Obama the majority of evangelicals across the country would vote for Romney. But they may not be enthusiastic about it.

SMITH: The real question is will evangelicals both turn out in large numbers and be energized as volunteers and financial supporters of Mitt Romney? It doesn’t take a majority of evangelicals to stay home. It just takes a few million evangelicals to stay home or to choose to not get as actively involved in this race, to cost Mitt Romney the presidency, should he become the Republican nominee.

LAWTON: With all the decisions looming, many evangelicals say they will continue to pray for wisdom.

I’m Kim Lawton in Orlando.