BOB ABERNETHY, host: Religious groups held rallies and a 48-hour prayer vigil in front the Supreme Court this week as the justices heard oral arguments over Arizona’s controversial immigration law. At issue in the case is whether the state law infringes on the federal government’s authority to establish and enforce immigration policy. But several faith groups argue the law violates the dignity of immigrants and could result in racial profiling.

For more on this I am joined by Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Patricia Zapor, a staff writer with Catholic News Service who’s been covering the faith community and immigration. Pat, it’s nice to have you back here again.

PATRICIA ZAPOR (Staff Writer, Catholic News Service): Thank you, it’s good to be back.

ABERNETHY: The Catholic bishops and many other religious leaders want a whole new kind of approach to immigration. What specifically, what exactly do they want?

ZAPOR: Well, that could take the whole program to explain. They want a comprehensive approach, something that gives people who are already here illegally the chance to legalize their status so that they can pull their families together, reunite torn-apart families, work legally, be able to go home to their home countries and visit their families there. They want a path for jobs. There’s a whole assortment of things.

ABERNETHY: Any likelihood that they might get those things any time soon?

ZAPOR: I think that’s probably very unlikely in an election year, although it might make for some good political demanding during this season.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly): One of the arguments this particular week, as the case was at the court, from the religious community was that some of the local laws could hinder their ministry. What were they talking about?

ZAPOR: Well, this came up most conspicuously in 2006 in a version of legislation that passed the House included a provision that would make it illegal for anybody to help people who are in the country illegally. Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, then the archbishop, at that time told his priests that if this bill passes I am not going to expect you to follow through with that, to follow that law. It’s seen as an imposition on the rights of people of faith to take care of others.

ABERNETHY: People talk about the rights of other people, too, and what do the religious leaders say to those who say look, we’ve got laws, and laws need to be enforced and obeyed?

ZAPOR: Well, I think the religious leaders agree that states, government have a right to enforce their borders, but their arguments against the current immigration situation relate to the civil rights era, when Dr. Martin Luther King and bishops and priests and rabbis were at the forefront of arguments that the laws requiring segregation were inhumane, and they were unjust laws, that they had a right and an obligation to fight against those laws.

LAWTON: What are some of the theological and moral arguments that these religious leaders, really across a pretty broad spectrum, are making on this?

ZAPOR: Well, and they go back to the Old Testament and into the New Testament to calls to take care of the stranger, to take care of those people who have no rights in a society. They are throughout scriptures. That’s one of the main things that they go to.

ABERNETHY: There was some new data that came out this past week about the number of immigrants from Mexico going down for the first time in a long time. Does that change things at all?

ZAPOR: Not really, because there are a lot of people who are in the country illegally, to begin with, and that hasn’t particularly—doesn’t reflect a slowing of migration from Central America, from South America. Just because the situation in Mexico is changing doesn’t really change the whole picture all that much.

ABERNETHY: Situation changing? What? Better job opportunities?

ZAPOR: In Mexico, yes. Mexico’s economy has improved, there’s a lower birthrate, an assortment of factors involved in that.

ABERNETHY: Pat Zapor of Catholic News Service, many thanks.

ZAPOR: Thank you.

KATE SEELYE, correspondent: On the outskirts of Cairo, members and supporters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood celebrate the start of a new political era. With nearly half the seats in parliament, the party is set to wield significant influence in Egypt. Newly elected deputy Azza al Jarf calls Egypt’s first free election in decades historic.

The Brotherhood has been waiting a long time for this moment. Formed in 1928 to promote Islam, it was later banned in Egypt and its leaders repeatedly imprisoned. But as secular autocrats have collapsed from Tunisia to Egypt, Islamist parties have stepped into the political vacuum, and groups like the Brotherhood are now riding a wave of popular support with their calls for social and economic justice. On election day in a poor Cairo suburb, Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Beltagy spelled out the party’s goals.

MOHAMED BELTAGY: We were oppressed and intimidated for 80 years, but today we are about to embark on a long journey to meet the needs of the people.

SEELYE: Beltagy and his party weren’t the only Islamists voted into parliament. The Noor Party, which advocates a more fundamentalist agenda, won nearly a quarter of the seats. Together, Egypt’s Islamists make up more than 70 percent of the new parliament. Liberal and youth parties account for the rest. Blogger Mahmoud Salem, who ran and lost in a district of Cairo, says youth candidates like himself didn’t stand a chance against the better known and funded Islamists.

MAHMOUD SALEM: The issue is that if you’re a party that only started three months ago you don’t have the chance to create the groundwork that is necessary. You know, as opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood who’s been around for 80 years, you know. So people vote for whoever they see in front of them.

SEELYE: It was young, secular Egyptians like Salem who sparked last year’s protests with their demands for justice and freedom. They were been sidelined in these elections, but Salem say he has no regrets.

SALEM: Now we get to play the role of the opposition, which is so much more fun, you know: Hey, Islamists, you wanted power? Fantastic. I want social justice now. Get it done.

SEELYE: But others worry democracy has been hijacked by parties they say have little respect for personal rights and freedoms.

PROFESSOR SAID SADEK (Professor of Political Science, The American University in Cairo): It is scary on many issues, especially the social issues, minorities, Christians. Also the status of women, civil liberties, personal liberties in general. What are they going to do with them?

SEELYE: Sadek says Egyptians have legitimate concerns about this parliament’s intentions, given the poor human rights records of Islamist-run countries like Sudan and Iran.

SADEK: Islam has many variety of readings and many interpretations. If they are going to adopt a moderate version, we all support them, but if they are going to adopt a very strict interpretation and they want to impose it on others, we’ll have trouble.

SEELYE: But in this working-class Cairo neighborhood, shoppers have other things on their mind. Many are struggling to get by. At this local food bank shoppers are snap up macaroni and lentils at wholesale prices provided by the Muslim Brotherhood. Nearly half of Egypt’s more than 80 million citizens live on less than two dollars a day, and economic despair fueled last year’s anti-government protests. For decades, the Brotherhood has provided for the poor, offering free health care, education, and other services. Now voters are hoping that the Brotherhood’s history of charitable work and its promises to improve people’s lives will lead to real change.

RAMADAN (Man at Food Distribution): The past government was dishonest. We hope the future will bring reforms.

SEELYE: Egypt faces many challenges. Buildings burned during last year’s protest are reminders of the country’s ongoing instability. Investment is down dramatically, as is tourism, which employs more than 10 percent of the population. Unemployment is surging. Corruption is rife. Given the country’s deep problems, the Brotherhood’s leaders say their priorities will be rebuilding Egypt’s economy and infrastructure, not pushing religion. Ossama Yassin is a Muslim brotherhood deputy in parliament.

OSSAMA YASSIN (Member of Parliament): We don’t want what’s known as a religious state. We want a modern, civil, democratic state belonging to the people.

SEELYE: Sensitive to concerns about an Islamist agenda, the Brotherhood has been moderating its religious language and emphasizing its respect for the rights of other religions and groups.

YASSIN: There is no basis for the liberals’ fears. The state we seek will guarantee freedoms and rights, like the freedom of religion and speech, the right to form groups and political parties, and the right to demonstrate.

SEELYE: By contrast, the Noor Party is calling for a religious state. This summer many of its fundamentalist supporters, known as Salafists, gathered in Cairo to demand an Islamic caliphate. Salafists once shunned democracy, claiming it gave the laws of man precedence over those of God. But today democracy offers them a chance to press for harsh religious legislation. Tarek Shaalan is a founding member of the Noor Party and holds a PhD from the University of Central Florida. He says his party seeks social justice and the strict application of Islamic law, including banning alcohol and segregating the sexes on Egypt’s beaches.

TAREK SHAALAN: The reason I want to make it segregated so I want to make the woman feel more comfortable, you understand me? Don’t look at Islam that we’re bringing a problem. No, we bring the solution, not the problem, okay?

SEELYE: Hard-line Salafist views have proliferated on religious channels here. It’s not uncommon to hear preachers like Yasser Borhami, a founder of the Noor Party, accuse Christians and Jews of being infidels. This kind of talk deeply worries Egypt’s Coptic Christian community of more than four million. Over the past several years, attacks on their community have grown. Churches have been burned and Copts killed. Salafists have been blamed for inciting sectarian violence, a charge Shaalan denies.

(speaking to Tarek Shaalan): You acknowledge that there have been growing attacks on Christians in this country?

SHAALAN: Well, I don’t want to see it this way. It’s not because of religion. It’s because of lots of other things, you know?

SEELYE: The Noor Party’s positions have been criticized by the Muslim Brotherhood. The two Islamist parties are rivals, but in Cairo cafes where Egyptians debate the future, some worry that Noor’s ultraconservative agenda may pull the Muslim Brotherhood to the right. The best protection for minority and women’s rights lies in the drafting of Egypt’s new constitution, according to Coptic community leader Mona Makram Ebeid, who is also an advisor to Egypt’s ruling military authority.

MONA MAKRAM EBEID (Member of Advisory Council to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces): I think the biggest battle now that we all must focus on is the constitution.

SEELYE: Makram Ebeid says parliament will appoint an assembly this spring to draft the constitution. She insists it must address the concerns of all of Egypt’s communities.

MAKRAM EBEID: I hope that the majority of the Muslim brothers, who are much more moderate and much more professional, will be able to have a fair constitution which takes into consideration the rights of every individual in this country, of every citizen in the country, whether it’s economic rights, social rights, political rights, religious rights, cultural rights.

SEELYE: In Tahrir Square, where the protests began just over a year ago, demonstrators continue to demand those rights. Democracy is very fragile here. Egypt is now run by a heavy-handed military which took over when Mubarak stepped down. The generals say they’ll transfer power after presidential elections this summer, but some have doubts. Nevertheless, Islamists long banned in Egyptian political life have new responsibilities and a new sense of accountability. And Makram Ebeid believes that will have a moderating effect.

MAKRAM EBEID: So I don’t think that they will be able so much to impose their own views or change the personality of Egypt as they wish, because I think that this will make them lose their popularity. The more there is an opening to democracy, the more the process of democratization will be, will go ahead, and the more they will come more to the center.

SEELYE: While some might disagree, few dispute the importance of Egypt’s democratic opening. The test will be safeguarding the process so that future voters can choose to re-elect their parliamentarians or not.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Kate Seelye in Cairo.

Head Start Leader: What number is this, Jeffrey?

Child: Six?

Leader: Six, good job.

BOB FAW, correspondent: Thousands of children in Illinois have been helped the last five decades by Catholic Charities. In Joliet, for example, the agency runs this Head Start program. It also shelters and nourishes children in need. Of 15,000 in the state’s foster care program, the agency takes care of more than 2000. Now though, as director Glenn Van Cura knows, Catholic Charities is in a bitter legal dispute with the state because when it comes to fostering or adopting children, the organization will take married and single people but will not accept same-sex or unmarried couples.

Wedding ceremony: I now pronounce you husband and husband and wife and wife.

GLENN VAN CURA (Executive Director, Catholic Charities Diocese of Joliet): The idea between a man and a woman and marriage is a sacred bond, and cohabiting, gay or straight—that’s not that sacred bond. It’s not stable.

FAW: It’s in violation of church doctrine?

VAN CURA: Right.

ROBERT GILLIGAN (Executive Director, Catholic Conference of Illinois): We will continue to say that children are best raised in the situation where there is a loving home and a mother and a father, and that will be true as long as we’re able here to articulate it. It’s the truth, and that’s what the church is about is trying to speak the truth to these very sometimes controversial social questions.

FAW: Last year Illinois enacted a law recognizing same-sex unions. Now couples like Michelle Mascaro and Corynne Romine have the right to foster or adopt children.

MICHELLE MASCARO: The church can decide whether or not they want to marry a couple. That’s a church religious right, but the state has created ways for families to come together, and they’ve said, you know, that you can come together through adoption, and it doesn’t matter what that family constellation looks like. Are you fit to be a parent?

FAW: Does it anger you, what’s—because that clearly is…..

CORYNNE ROMINE: It doesn’t make me feel second-rate, because I’m not. It does make me angry, yes.

Mascaro (speaking to children): Okay, David, it is going to be your turn…

FAW: Michelle and Corynne have adopted three children, David, Joseph, and Emma. Because Emma was adopted through a religious agency, the two women felt they had to hide their true relationship.

MASCARO: And they might say no, you can’t have this baby who was our baby. You know, she came right from the hospital home with us.

FAW: Catholic Charities says it’s a matter of religious freedom and that if civil law and church doctrine collide doctrine takes precedence and gives it the right to discriminate. Bob Gilligan is with the Catholic Conference of Illinois, which is the public voice of the Catholic Church in the state.

(speaking to Robert Gilligan): When it comes to gay couples, then, they are excluded. Is that not discrimination?

GILLIGAN: There is a form of discrimination there, sure. We don’t accept the application of an admittedly unmarried or same-sex couple.

FAW: Now the state of Illinois is in the process of cutting off the nearly $4 million it funnels annually to Catholic Charities because it says discrimination against gay or unmarried couples who want foster children is illegal and short-sighted. Kendall Marlowe is with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

KENDALL MARLOWE (Deputy Communications Director): I grew up in a family that took in foster children, and I’ve been a foster and an adoptive parent myself as an adult, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that what helps a child succeed is that unconditional love and guidance, and in both my experience and in the research literature that has been produced on this issue, there’s no indication that sexuality, sexual orientation has anything to do with parenting.

FAW: Child advocate from the ACLU Benjamin Wolf insists Catholic Charities’ policy harms children.

BENJAMIN WOLF (Associate Legal Director, ACLU of Illinois): We need everybody. It’s hard enough to provide good homes for abused and neglected children without imposing additional discrimination on the pool of foster parents.

VAN CURA: There’s not one example that they can show that a child has not been placed in a home.

GILLIGAN: They’re not excluded. There’s 47 other private child welfare agencies in the state. There’s many other agencies that they can go to.

MASCARO: It’s not okay to say to people like us if we lived in a part of southern Illinois or in Peoria to say, oh, you can go to some other agency, because Catholic Charities has the lock on it. They’re the only agency out there.

FAW: Despite the fervently held beliefs on each side, the legal situation is anything but clear-cut. Catholic Charities, for example, argues that the Illinois law on religious freedom permits the agency to discriminate.

GILLIGAN: The title of the bill is the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act. Where’s the freedom? Where is the protection for religious entities? It’s in the bill itself. There’s a section in there that says that the bill should not infringe upon religious practice, religious ministry.

MARLOWE: Every faith-based organization in the state of Illinois has the full capacity and the full right to pursue their religious freedom. The question is what happens when you are paid with taxpayers’ money, state money, to provide state services? And in those cases we have to insist that those agencies comply with Illinois law.

FAW: Catholic Charities of Illinois has placed thousands of children in homes over the past 50 years. Eighty percent of its foster-care budget comes from the state. Even if it loses that money, says Bob Gilligan, Catholic Charities will continue with adoption and foster care.

GILLIGAN: It’s part of our mission, it’s part of our teachings, it’s part of what we do as Catholics. But we have to do it in honoring our own tenets and our faith that call us to do this. If we can’t do it in a faith-filled mission, then we can’t do it using public money. We’ll do on our own terms.

MARLOWE: We don’t want to see them leave this work. But if that is what’s going to happen, the Illinois child welfare system that they helped build is more than capable of taking on this transition. There are other agencies bound by the exact same regulations that Catholic Charities is that are ready to step up and take on this work.

FAW: Gay adoptive parents like Michelle and Corynne think that history is on their side, that eventually Catholic Charities’ policy of exclusion will go the way of earlier social practices, like the 1950s when black Americans were denied public accommodations.

MASCARO: It harkens back to just say you can’t eat in this lunch counter, go eat at one down the street. We know that in every other aspect that’s not right. It’s not legal. It’s not sanctioned in this country. Why is it still allowed or could it be allowed in adoption? This is an abuse of what they perceive as their religious freedom.

WOLF: There were agencies 30 years ago, 20 years ago, that didn’t want to place children in homes of interracial couples. I mean, the world is changing.

FAW: So the issue in Illinois, now focused on gay couples, comes down to this: when anti-discrimination laws and church doctrine clash, which should prevail?

GILLIGAN: This is an emerging conflict in our society. As you enact antidiscrimination laws, to what degree does a religious institution have to comply with it? We do a lot of things in the public square. Is the Catholic Church in compliance with all the rules and policies and laws of the state if we won’t do certain things against our conscience? It’s a good question.

FAW: And as the definition of the modern family continues to change, will church doctrine also have to change?

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

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Like many church leaders in Alabama, Father Tom Ackerman of the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham was caught off guard by the toughness of the state’s new immigration bill.

FATHER TOM ACKERMAN: I think there was some surprise about how extreme it was and how really sort of vicious it was, particularly some of the vicious rhetoric: “We want to affect every aspect of their lives. I’ll do everything short of shooting them.” These are senators and representatives saying these things.

SEVERSON: Here’s what Mayor Lindsey Lyons of Albertville, Alabama had to say about the bill’s critics.

MAYOR LINDSEY LYONS: When they say that we’re cruel or heartless or however they want to word it, you know, the fact of the matter is, we have rights. We have rights to protect our citizens, and what is wrong with coming up with solutions to protect our citizens, to protect our jobs. and to protect our quality of life?

SEVERSON: The solution the legislature came up with has caused quite a commotion. A federal judge temporarily blocked the enactment of House Bill 56 because of several lawsuits filed by four Alabama bishops of different denominations, the Justice Department, the ACLU, civil rights groups, joined by county sheriffs and 16 foreign governments. But some of the loudest protests came from church leaders like Pastor Angie Wright of the Beloved Community United Church of Christ.

PASTOR ANGIE WRIGHT: If I have ten undocumented persons in my church for an English-as-a-second-language class, or for worship, or vacation bible school. and I know that they’re undocumented, I can go to prison for 10 years and pay a $15,000 fine.

SEVERSON: In a nutshell, the bill, as it stands now, criminalizes working, renting, having false papers, shielding, harboring, hiring. and transporting undocumented immigrants. It also deprives them of most local public benefits. As it was intended, it punishes just about every aspect of illegal immigration.

FATHER ACKERMAN: The reason why we’ve filed this suit is because we want to keep the government out of our business. The government is trying to tell us what we can or can’t do in terms of works of mercy, works of charity, which are fundamental to our faith.

REPRESENTATIVE DAN WILLIAMS: Coming up on the left is where most of the Hispanics worked in town. This was the poultry processing plant.

SEVERSON: Representative Dan Williams was Mayor of Athens, Alabama for 18 years until he ran for the legislature 3 years ago. He supports House Bill 56.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: The vast majority of people, when I was running for this office, the number one or two issue with them was illegal aliens. That’s it. Illegal aliens: “You need to do something about them. We want something done about them.”

SEVERSON: Williams was elected with the first Republican sweep of both houses in the legislature and the governorship in Alabama history. The new legislators quickly hammered out an immigration law, one that terrifies Janeth, an undocumented mother of two from Mexico who has been in the US for more than ten years. She’s a cashier in a store. Her husband works in construction.

JANETH ( with translator Helen Rivas): It’s terrorizing. Ever since they passed this law we don’t go out. We don’t go to restaurants, we don’t go to the park. We see a patrol car, and it terrifies us to think they may stop.

SEVERSON: She and her husband are buying their home at a very high mortgage rate. The new bill would allow the bank or anyone they have a contract with to cancel the contract, and they would have no recourse.

JANETH: I came here because my family didn’t even have any way to eat. To get this we’ve worked day and night, three jobs. If I have to leave here, one day to the next, if this law goes into effect I’m going to have to leave my house, my car. We’re going to arrive back home in our home countries in worse shape.

PASTOR ANGIE WRIGHT: Why make criminals out of people who have been our neighbors and our brothers and sisters and really are not causing any problems for any of us?

SEVERSON: An Alabama criminal justice survey found that violent crime in the state is down 10 percent over last year and below the national average. Property crime is also down. But Albertville Mayor Lyons says those statistics don’t hold up in his town.

MAYOR LINDSEY LYONS: When you have people coming from other countries that’s never driven a car before, and they start driving here with no insurance, no driver’s license, etc, causing multiple, many accidents.

SEVERSON: But, he says, that wasn’t the worst of it.

MAYOR LINDSEY LYONS: Because invariably you’re going to have the underlying current of crime and criminals come in with an influx of illegal immigrants, and that all is based on prostitution and brothels, your drug activity and your drug gangs, which have been present here in Albertville. That’s like it is in any community where you have the immigrant issue.

SEVERSON: He says hundreds of illegal immigrants moved in after Albertville-based poultry companies advertised in Mexico looking for cheap labor.

MAYOR LINDSEY LYONS: We had probably with our large two poultry plants here 2500 employment. They were vast all white and black American citizens, okay, and as the years went on and they were able to conduct business with the illegal alien population, well that just dwindled down, dwindled down, dwindled down.

SEVERSON: The Pew Hispanic Center estimates there are between 85,000 and 120,000 undocumented immigrants in Alabama, comprising a little less than 4 percent of the workforce. The state’s unemployment rate is above the national average at about 10 percent.

FATHER ACKERMAN: We have high unemployment not because the Hispanic immigrants are here. We have high unemployment because the housing market went bust, and we had a credit crisis. The immigrants have nothing to do with the high unemployment here. I think it’s primarily politicians preying on the fear of people. When economic times get tough, people often look for scapegoats.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: You know, I go back “it’s the economy stupid,” that’s what it always is and people can say what they want to, but when you got a job and you’re making some money and your family is doing alright, you don’t have problems. But when my children lose their jobs, and I start having to help my children and my grandchildren, and maybe if I lose my job, I’m concerned about a guy who’s illegal coming here working. He’s doing okay and I’m not.

SEVERSON: The legislation authorizes police to demand papers from people they stop who they suspect are undocumented, something opponents say will lead to racial profiling. That’s already happening, according to Father Ackerman.

FATHER ACKERMAN: One of our priests actually has been stopped several times, pulled over. And then once they see that he has a collar on, “Oh, Father, go ahead.”

SEVERSON: Religious leaders are concerned that they will be breaking the law if they transport members they know are illegal to church.

FATHER ACKERMAN: If we’re transporting illegal immigrants, that’s a violation of this law, and those vehicles can be confiscated.

SEVERSON: Representative Williams says he thinks religious leaders’ opposition to the bill is overblown.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: I don’t think you’re going to see policemen stopping the church buses to see if there’s somebody with brown skin riding to Sunday School.

FATHER ACKERMAN: If that wasn’t going to happen then they should have written that into the law. I’m talking about how the law is written, not how they expect it to be applied.

SEVERSON: Williams says he and his Republican colleagues have been called racists and that it’s unfair.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: People still look at Alabama, and they see those grainy films from the 1960s and the police dogs and the water hoses in Birmingham. Well, Alabama is not like that anymore, but they’re trying to bring this back, that that’s what we are.

Speaker at rally: I myself overwhelmingly love this country.

SEVERSON: The young man speaking here, Victor, was brought here by his parents when he was a toddler. Victor is undocumented and part of a group of high school kids calling themselves Dreamers, who have been very vocal against the law because they’re the one’s who will likely suffer the most if they or their parents are deported. This is Jose. He’s undocumented. He says his dream was to become a teacher or a doctor.

JOSE: I came here at the age of 3. In all honesty, Mexico, it seems like a foreign world to me, and with all the problems it has now it’s frightening, the thought of having to go back there.

SEVERSON: Eduardo has his papers, unlike many of his friends.

EDUARDO: I’m mostly sad because I’ve got papers and then my friends, most of them are going to have to go back to their country or whatever, and I’m here lucky, being able to have the education and all the benefits they can’t.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: You know, we’re all trying to get along. We’re all trying to raise our children, our grand children and everything. It’s just, you got that “illegal” word there that makes a difference.

SEVERSON: The judge who stayed the enactment of the law says she will issue her decision by September 29^th. Regardless of the outcome, it is likely to be appealed.

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

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: One iconic image of the Paris that tourists come to see is Notre Dame Cathedral, a centuries-old symbol of Roman Catholicism in France. But inside this Catholic church in Paris, the sparse congregation reflects a wider truth: Christianity is on the wane across Western Europe, and nowhere is its decline more visible than in France.

REV. MICHEL BRIERE: The eldest daughter of the Church, that’s what we were called. Today, saying you believe in a religion takes a real identification of faith. Today, the number has really diminished.

POTTER: Twenty years ago, about 80 percent of French people described themselves as Catholic. Today, it’s just over half and less than 5 percent—most of them older—regularly go to Mass. Father Briere blames a growing culture of consumerism and a Catholic hierarchy that he says has been too rigid, failing to draw young people into the Church. That’s true across Europe, but France is a special case, a country where religion is widely seen as a source of trouble. If France had an official religion it would be laicite or secularism, a principle that’s enshrined in this country’s constitution and reflects its history of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, as well as the French Revolution, that basically booted the Catholic Church from power.

That history lives on in French movies and classrooms, where students are taught in gory detail about a 16^th-century massacre, when thousands of Protestants [Huguenots] were slaughtered by the Catholic forces of the King. And that history still lies on public display in Paris. These are the bones of Catholic priests killed and mutilated by a revolutionary mob in 1792—small wonder that the French concept of separation of church and state is strikingly different from that in the US, says Jocelyne Cesari, a French political scientist and research fellow at Harvard.

PROFESSOR JOCELYNE CESARI (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University): There is this idea that the state has a responsibility in France to control and regulate religion that otherwise can lead to civil war.

POTTER: That control extends to the churches themselves, including Notre Dame, which all became state property 100 years ago, along with existing synagogues. Another example: in France, for a marriage to be legal it has to take place at a city hall. Church weddings are ceremonial but not official, and the wall between church and state doesn’t end there.

CESARI: In the French case it means also restraining or limiting as much as possible the public manifestation or expression of religious groups. In other words, in France it’s better if you act civilly with no religious affiliation. It’s seen as more legitimate, while in America it’s quite the opposite.

POTTER: But the idea that religion should be kept private has collided with the reality that France has changed. Islam is now the country’s second biggest religion. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe—almost five million, twice as many as in the United States, according to recent estimates. Many are the French-born children and grandchildren of Muslim immigrants from former colonies like Algeria, who moved to France after independence in the 1960s.

M’HAMMED HENICHE (Union of Muslim Associations): Those who practice today are not the same as those who practiced before. They were people who came from their homelands, immigrants, so they tried to be as quiet as possible. Today, these are French people who never set foot in the Middle East or Africa. They were born here, grew up here, and they are practicing Muslims and they are reclaiming their religion. They see themselves as French and Muslim. Why would they hide their religion?

POTTER: They may not want to hide it, but in some cases they’re being forced to. Over the past decade, the French government has clamped down on the display of religious symbols. Since 2004, students have not been allowed to wear headscarves, large crosses, or skullcaps in public schools. The result: new Muslim schools like this one, where every girl in this 11^th-grade class wears a headscarf. “We come because we can wear it,” one of them says.

This year the government went further, banning the niqab or full-face veil not just in schools but in all public places. The law affects a tiny minority of Muslims—only a few hundred women wear it in France—but those who do were outraged.

WOMAN: When I hear France—liberty, equality, fraternity—it’s a big lie. I feel like I’m in a dictatorship.

VERONIQUE RIEFFEL (Islamic Cultures institute): The ban is a very bad thing because, you know, every Muslim, even men and even women who don’t wear the niqab, feel concerned, you know, feel rejected by this ban.

POTTER: But the vast majority in France approved of the ban—80 percent, according to public opinion polls.

WOMAN: Look, I think secularism is indispensable. It’s a protection so everyone has peace, believers and non-believers, and so all these religious, fanatic excesses are regrettable, appalling. I’m very much a feminist. I hate the idea of the veil.

POTTER: Despite the new laws, a very public display of religion takes place every Friday in this Paris neighborhood. Two streets are closed to traffic so thousands of Muslim men can pray outside a mosque that’s much too small to hold them all, largely because of property costs. France has just 2,000 prayer rooms and a few dozen full-sized mosques. While the community solicits donations to build new ones, the local government allows this public exercise of religion, to the annoyance of some non-Muslims. There are other chinks in the wall of secularism. Religious schools can receive state funding. Most national holidays come from the Catholic Church calendar, and once a year Catholics from all over flood the streets of Paris as they leave on a three-day, 75-mile pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Chartres.

OLIVIER BOBINEAU (Paris Institute of Political Studies): But people don’t like it. They don’t like it, even Catholics. The pilgrimage to Chartres? Those are fundamentalists , traditionalists. Our culture erases religion. We’re here but we don’t show ourselves.

POTTER: Olivier Bobineau teaches the sociology of religion and lives it himself. He’s a Catholic who wears a small cross on a chain that he keeps hidden most of the time. But one night, at a meeting with high government officials…

(speaking to Bobineau): … so you leaned forward, you could see it, and somebody said..

BOBINEAU: Be careful.

POTTER: … put that away.

BOBINEAU: Yeah. Today it’s unimaginable to go against the state, against the public space, and to show a cross, a skullcap, a veil. It’s impossible. It’s wanting to destroy the state. That’s what the French feel. The majority of French people do not think it’s possible to be French and Muslim. Most French people think you can’t be a citizen and believe in God. We are the most atheist people in the world. Why? Because when you are a believer, in France people think you have lost your freedom, your reason, okay?

POTTER: The French also remember the violence that broke out across the country a few years ago. For two weeks, young Muslims angry about unemployment and discrimination took to the streets and burned thousands of cars, and that anger has not entirely subsided.

HENICHE: We are a little anxious. I have to tell the truth. We are anxious. You sense it among the faithful because the faithful are returning to the mosque. Maybe that’s a positive thing. It’s pushing Muslims to return to the mosque. They sense a threat, that the days ahead won’t be better days for us.

POTTER: The tension comes down to a fundamental disconnect, with French Catholics seeing Islam through their own secular prism.

CESARI: What they are expecting from Muslims is this kind of very loose connection with no particular affiliation to Islamic organization, with no particular desire to dress differently or to eat differently, but okay, you can be buried as a Muslim or you can marry in your—you can have a religious ceremony in your mosque. This would be okay.

POTTER: Underlying the debate over Muslim dress is the question of security after 9/11.

BOBINEAU: People say that’s what religion is. It’s violence. Look at the news, the Twin Towers, bin Laden. The news reinforces the illusion that this is a war of civilizations.

HENICHE: We think we have work to do to convince the French people, to show them that Muslims are patriots, and the proof and history is with us.

POTTER: The Great Mosque of Paris is one piece of that history, built by the French government in the 1920s to honor Muslim soldiers who fought and died in World War I. At this cemetery outside Paris, the only all-Islamic burial ground in France, each grave represents a Muslim family’s decision to call France home. The new generation sees itself as both Muslim and French, no matter how uncomfortable that makes their secular countrymen.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Paris.

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BOB FAW, correspondent: Ernest Gaines is older now, 78, and hobbled by a bad back, but as he slowly makes his way to the church where as a boy he rang the bell at funerals he will not, indeed, cannot forget the debt he owes to his ancestors in this Louisiana bayou country.

ERNEST J. GAINES: Without them, buried back there under those pecan trees, I would not be the writer today, if I would be a writer at all.

FAW: For more than 50 years, he has brought them to life in short stories and novels, some made into major films. Perhaps his most famous novel, “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” charts the dawn of the civil rights movement from her days as a slave.

From “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman”: “I’ve been carrying a scar on my back ever since I was a slave.”

FAW: Miss Jane Pittman was inspired by Gaines’s Aunt Augusteen, whom he calls the greatest influence in his life.

FAW: She could not walk.

GAINES: She could not walk. She crawled over the floor all her life, but she did everything in the world for me.

FAW: She could not walk, but you say she taught you how to stand.

GAINES: Right. By her action, by her overcoming all the obstacles.

FAW: Gaines remembers his aunt and other forebears as he sits in the church which he has restored on plantation land where he once picked cotton.

GAINES: When I’m sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.

FAW: And Gaines feels so indebted to his elders that on his own property he has also lovingly restored and now maintains this cemetery where many of those elders are buried.

GAINES: I’d always go back to the cemetery and sit on one of those tombs back there, and I felt more at peace at that time than any other time in my life. I could feel their spirit there with me.

FAW: That connection helps explain why Gaines writes so passionately about the people and places in his past—because he worries that past is facing extinction.

From “A Gathering of Old Men”: “That tractor was getting closer and closer to the graveyard, and I got scared that that tractor would plow up them graves and get rid of all the proof that we ever was.”

GAINES: All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

FAW: John Lowe, professor of literature at Louisiana State University, is an expert on Ernest Gaines.

PROFESSOR JOHN LOWE: He’s writing for his people. You know, there’s an old African proverb that says no people should be hungry for their own image. That world was missing, and he’s put that world on the stage now.

FAW: There is in that world darkness, then hope. In “A Lesson Before Dying,” an innocent man, Jefferson, will be executed. But before that he learns to face death with dignity.

From “A Lesson Before Dying”: “Good-bye, Mr. Wiggins. Tell the children I’m strong. Tell them I am a man.”

LOWE: His works radiate that spirituality that Gaines has always seen as part of the human condition—that man has to believe in something bigger than himself, and it might be religion, it could be any number of things. Jefferson does walk to the electric chair as a man, because he has come to understand that his life has meaning for other people in the community, and it makes a big difference to them how he handles that situation, and so he does, indeed, endorse something bigger than himself.

FAW: Through Jefferson’s transformation his teacher, Grant Wiggins, also grows and emerges stronger.

From “A Gathering of Old Men”: “Ain’t going to be no lynching tonight.”

FAW: And in “A Gathering of Old Men” an entire community, long beaten down, finds self-respect.

MARCIA GAUDET: There is a sense of hope.

FAW: Marcia Gaudet is the director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

GAUDET: It may not be perfectly optimistic hope, but there’s certainly the possibility of hope, and that’s a much more realistic thing.

FAW: Raised a Baptist, Gaines attended Catholic school for three years. He doesn’t want readers to overstate religious symbolism in his work, but many scholars find it there—from Miss Jane Pittman’s religious conversion to the Christ-like figure of Jefferson in “A Lesson before Dying.”

LOWE: Gaines was raised in a religious tradition, and this is a pretty religious state even today, and it’s quite understandable that his work would be permeated everywhere, you know, with this kind of religious symbolism. In the South, our great mythology is the Bible. It’s not Greek or Roman myth like it is in Europe. It’s the Bible.

From: “A Gathering of Old Men”: Go home, Jameson. I don’t want to have to tell you anymore.”

FAW: Black clergymen in Gaines’s novels are sometimes portrayed as sanctimonious and ineffectual. When in “A Gathering of Old Men” a group of black men stand up to white oppression for the first time in their lives, the minister tries to stop them.

From: “A Gathering of Old Men”: “Reverend Jameson, nobody listening to you today. You old bootlegger, shut up.”

LOWE: Gaines understands the importance of the church, particularly during the civil rights movement. But at the same time he’s also aware because of the way the white community imposed it on the slave community to keep blacks in line. I think he has a very mixed attitude about the church.

FAW: For the black church, Gaines is awed by its role as a sanctuary.

GAINES: What I miss today more than anything else—I don’t go to church as much anymore—but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.

FAW: Do you regard yourself as a religious person?

GAINES: I think I’m a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don’t only believe in God, I know there’s God.

FAW: Gaines wrote the first draft of all his novels by hand. While he isn’t writing much now, he still remembers 1948, when he first left the plantation land around False River, carrying with him an imaginary block of wood.

GAINES: The old people told me that okay, you can leave us, but you would carry this, this symbolic big piece of wood that I must struggle with for the rest of my life until I’ve completely finished that wood, which I doubt that I ever will. But there will always be something to chip away and to carve into something nice and beautiful.

FAW: Ernest Gaines—honoring the past, making it come alive because he must.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Oscar, Louisiana.

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Although the social revolution led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. grew out of the black church, from even the earliest days of the movement there were white foot soldiers, too. King initially came to national prominence while leading the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, where he was serving in his first job as a local pastor, and working closely with him there was a young white pastor named Robert Graetz.

REV. ROBERT GRAETZ: We were here because God brought us here, and in a very real sense this changed the character of the movement here, because it was not totally black then from that point on.

LAWTON: Graetz is now 82 years old and still active in the Montgomery community.

GRAETZ: Fifty years ago we were a praying people…

LAWTON: On this day, he’s participating in the unveiling of a new sign marking a site that was important during the bus boycott. He and his wife, Jean, still work for civil rights, reconciliation, and a vision that began more than 50 years ago, a vision they shared with King called “the beloved community.”

GRAETZ: We are all different, but we are still all together in this one relationship, and the key to that kind of a relationship was respect, which means I look at you and I say, you know, “I know that you have value. God put value in you.” You look at me and you say the same thing.

LAWTON: Graetz had grown up in an all-white Lutheran community in West Virginia. While he was in college in Ohio, he become aware of the injustices faced by African Americans and had what he calls his “race relations awakening.” Graetz and his wife got involved in ministries in black communities, and when he finished seminary, Lutheran officials asked him to pastor an all-black congregation in Montgomery.

GRAETZ: We had very few black pastors because we require the seminary training for all pastors. That’s why they needed some white pastors like me to serve in largely black congregations.

LAWTON: The young Graetz family arrived in Montgomery in 1955 and began their work at Trinity Lutheran Church. They soon met a neighbor named Rosa Parks.

GRAETZ: When we got into town she was one of the first people outside of the congregation that we met. She was the adult advisor to the NAACP youth council which met in our church, so we saw her regularly.

LAWTON: Graetz was also introduced to another new pastor, King, who had arrived the year before.

GRAETZ: I decided that anybody who sounded as smart as he was and was articulate as he was, and had the name Martin Luther, I had to get to know him better.

LAWTON: He also came to know the struggles of his congregation because of segregation and discrimination on every front, including the public transportation system.

GRAETZ: If you wanted to find one aspect of life here in Montgomery, and probably many other cities in the South, where people were really troubled about the way they were treated, it would be the buses. Everybody either experienced bad treatment on the buses or knew people who had been treated badly.

LAWTON: Several local activists, including the Women’s Political Council, had been talking about staging a boycott. Then came the final catalyst: the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat. When a boycott was called for the following Monday, Graetz says he faced an ethical dilemma because of concerns about what his denominational leaders might think.

GRAETZ: The church officials knew that I had been involved in things like this, and they said, “We want you to go to Montgomery, but you have to promise not to start trouble,” and so the question was, would my taking part in the bus boycott be starting trouble? Jeannie and I prayed about that a lot and finally decided the only way that I could continue to be the pastor here was to take part in the activities that our members were taking part in, and from that point on we were totally a part of what was happening.

LAWTON: On Sunday morning, Graetz stood before his church and expressed full support for the boycott.

GRAETZ: And I said, “I want you all to stay off the buses. I’ll be out in my car all day long. If you need a ride, I’ll be glad to come and take you wherever you need to go.” So I spent the whole day just driving people around, picking people up on the street, whatever.

LAWTON: Community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to oversee the boycott. King was the chairman, and executive committee members included Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, as well as one white member—Robert Graetz. Graetz says it was exhilarating to be part of it all.

GRAETZ: The feeling among the people across the community was that we were doing something that was changing the world.

DR. HOWARD ROBINSON (Archivist, National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State University): The Graetzs were really like one of the very few white people in Montgomery who took a very overt, obvious position in support of the boycott, and they suffered because of it.

LAWTON: The Graetz family became targets of the Ku Klux Klan.

GRAETZ: People would call us up and say, “I see your children out in the yard there. Are you sure they’re okay out there?” And the children would be in the yard, so that we knew that there were people who were looking at what was going on.

JEAN GRAETZ: I was scared to go out and take the trash out, because I knew that these people had been around our house and put sugar in the gas tank and slashed our tires, and I didn’t feel safe outside at night.

LAWTON: Their parsonage next to the church was bombed twice, once while no one was home, and once in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping, including their nine-day-old baby. The house sustained some damage, but no one was injured. Supporters later planted a tree in the crater where the bomb went off. Graetz says he and his wife wrestled over the impact on their children.

GRAETZ: It was okay for Jeannie and me to put our lives in danger, but did we have the right to put our children through that? And we finally decided that we couldn’t control that—that God had brought us here, the children were in God’s hands, and if God wanted them to be protected, that would be his job.

LAWTON: Jean Graetz says African-American friends and sympathetic white supporters gave them strength.

JEAN GRAETZ: I felt that the Lord had put a circle of love around us, because we had wonderful friends, and I knew God’s love was around us, and I just pictured this circle around us so that the hate from the people that didn’t like us couldn’t get through.

LAWTON: Graetz says the civil rights movement had a strong spiritual underpinning. The weekly mass meetings held in support of the boycott were basically worship services, full of prayer, sermons, and lots of singing of traditional hymns.

GRAETZ: These hymns oftentimes took on new significance because of how they related to how people related to one another in the movement. Bible verses which we would think of—oh, that’s a nice thought—became deeply moving to us because of what we were going through here.

LAWTON: Graetz says this reflected the theological tone set by King.

GRAETZ: In effect, the church in the black community was reinterpreting what the Bible said about how human beings ought to treat one another, so that it was the black Christians teaching white Christians what it meant to be Christian.

LAWTON: After about a year, the boycott ended when courts struck down the bus segregation laws. At the last mass meeting, Graetz read the Scriptures—I Corinthians 13, the well-known passage about love.

GRAETZ: And I got up and started reading and in the middle of the reading, again, loud applause, and I thought, they’re not letting me finish. And I looked down at what I was reading and realized that what I had just read was, “When I became a man I put away childish things.” And people knew that we had matured in this process. We were different people.

LAWTON: The Graetzs have remained active in many civil rights causes. They are now consultants at Alabama State University’s National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture. http://www.lib.alasu.edu/natctr/ They give tours and discussions about justice and the work that still needs to be done in order to achieve their vision of the beloved community.

GRAETZ: People will say to us, “We really appreciate what you did,” and our response always is it wasn’t just us. It was 50,000 black people who stood together, who walked together, who worked together, who stood up against oppression. If it had not been for this whole body of people working together, this would not have happened.

LAWTON: And that’s a story they want to keep alive.

I’m Kim Lawton in Montgomery, Alabama.

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