President Obama’s State of the Union speech marks a major shift in strategy for the Democratic Party. During the 2008 campaign, Democrats caught the religion bug from the GOP. Apparently they have finally killed it. Obama is back on message. Echoing Franklin Roosevelt, he preached economic liberty to the poor and justice to the oppressed without pandering to religious prejudices. For decades Republican leaders have used faith to cloak exploitative economic policies that favored the rich and the powerful. No more. I am encouraged that going into the 2012 campaign the president is not going to let them set the terms of the debate.

Matthew Avery Sutton is an associate professor of history at Washington State University and the author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007).

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome. I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. Our panel of top reporters looks to the year 2012, and the top religion and ethics stories they see ahead. Kim Lawton is managing editor of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Kevin Eckstrom is the editor-in-chief of Religion News Service. And E.J. Dionne is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a professor at Georgetown University. Welcome to you all, and Happy New Year.

ALL: Happy New Year.

ABERNETHY: E.J., the Iowa caucuses take place in just a few days. What do you see there and what is the role of religious conservatives in the Republican campaign?

E.J. DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): Well, in the Iowa Republican caucuses religious conservatives always play an important role. And what’s been striking for most of this campaign is how fragmented they’ve been. There’s been a real argument among them about who the better candidate is. There’s no national champion as we talked about last week, Mike Huckabee, four years ago really emerged as a unifying candidate for Christian conservatives. Some of that also I suspect has to do with other forces in the Republican Party. There is the Tea Party which includes a lot of evangelical Christians, one should say, but is a kind of different thrust and you have a campaign built much more around economics and the role of government than around the issues that specifically inspire religious conservatives, such as abortion and issues related to gay marriage. So I think that there is not going to be the kind of clarity about their role this time as there was four years ago.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And of course, we do have two Mormon candidates and that’s still an issue. It hasn’t been front and center this time around for evangelicals as much as it was last time around but there has been talk about Mormonism is a cult or Mormons aren’t Christians and that’s a prevailing attitude among many voters which makes them maybe in a primary a little more hesitant to vote for a Mitt Romney or a Jon Huntsman. One interesting comment last time, a couple months ago, was from when Cain was getting all the support but then all the allegations starting coming forward about him and one evangelical pastor said so, our choices are we vote for a Mormon who’s had one wife, we vote for a Catholic, Newt Gingrich, who’s had several wives or we vote for an evangelical, Herman Cain, who apparently had a whole harem. So, you know, they’re not liking their choices.

DIONNE: You know what’s interesting this time compared with the last time is Mitt Romney ran into I think some real anti-Mormon prejudice the last time. The Latter Day Saints church has really made a very aggressive effort this time to kind of fight against that by explaining its faith. I was at a session that they organized by the Poytner Institute over at the Pew Forum where they were talking about here’s who we are and here’s who we’re not and I think it’s obviously very useful for the church but I actually think it’s a useful way to combat religious prejudice generally.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor -in-Chief, Religion News Service): One of the things I’ve been struck by and may be worth watching is the difference it seems of the Mormonism between Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Everyone knows that Mitt Romney is a Mormon and an outspoken one. He was the equivalent of a church pastor for a long time. He built a temple in Boston. He’s very Mormon. Jon Huntsman is also Mormon but to a different kind of way. It’s almost like oh yeah and he’s Mormon, too. And so I think it will be interesting to watch to see if Huntsman actually goes anywhere whether or not he will face the same sort of Mormon scrutiny that Romney has.

ABERNETHY: Why should he be considered not as great a Mormon as Romney?

ECKSTROM: Well I think it’s mostly because people just don’t know much about him or don’t even know who he is. I think he’s a relative unknown. It’s not that he’s any less devout or any less of a good Mormon that Romney. But, Romney, I think took the brunt of the anti-Mormon sentiment.

DIONNE: But I also think Romney was a real leader in the church. I think that’s right. And I think this is a very important part of his identity and he’s been very clear about that.

LAWTON: And we should say too that while evangelicals in the primaries might say I don’t know if I want to vote for a Mormon, if you put a Mormon up against Barack Obama, they’re going to vote for the Mormon most likely, because there’s so much anti-Barack Obama sentiment out there within conservative voters. And so I do think that it’s more of an issue in the primaries than it would be in a general election.

ABERNETHY: Has there emerged yet what looks like a great underlying theme for the election of 2012? Is it going to be jobs? Is it going to be the role of government? What do you see?

DIONNE: Well, the economy is always an issue in American elections. And when the unemployment rate is this high and when you’ve gone through such a terrible economic time since 2008, since the crash of 2008, it’s inevitable that the economy is a central issue. But I thought one of the most interesting events of the year in terms of speeches that politicians give was Barack Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Teddy Roosevelt, a hundred and one years ago, gave his New Nationalism speech which set him up for his run as a progressive third party candidate in 1912. And I think Obama was really sending a signal there that he wants this election not just to be a referendum on the past and he has some interest in that because the economy is still, even if it improves, is going to be less than people want. But he wants it to be about the future and about the role of government in the economy, what should government do to make opportunity available to the middle class? What should the rules of the economy be? And I think that, I happen to like the speech, whether you like the speech or not, I think it set a really interesting framework for the election because the Republicans in this election will clearly but running as much more pure free market candidates without government interference, lower taxes, less regulation. I think there could be a clarity to this campaign and to the argument that we haven’t seen in a long time.

LAWTON: And religious groups have been involved in these economic debates and in the economic campaigning, political campaigning, as well, on both sides, which makes it interesting to have that moral injection on both ends of the debate and so you have people from a more moderate, more liberal standpoint talking about the immorality of hurting people who are already vulnerable, cutting programs that would hurt the poor, cutting programs for foreign aid and so there’s been a lot of concern about that which is translating into politics. But you also have it in the conservative side. It’s immoral to leave a lot of debt to our children. A lot of that kind of language and that is seeping into the campaigning as well.

ABERNETHY: It’s interesting that, E.J., maybe you can note this. It’s not winner take all, is it, this year? Is it? Can’t you come in second and still have a lot of delegates and be influential at the convention?

DIONNE: Historically, Democrats got rid of winner take all which is one of the reasons why the ’08 race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton went on so long. Republicans have, at the front end, have tended to get rid of winner take all though there is some of it still at the back end of this process. But it could mean that the Republican race will last longer this time.

LAWTON: Or never end.

DIONNE: Yes, or maybe never end. I mean it’s the first time I’ve heard talk of a brokered convention which journalists love because that would be fun but it never happens. And I still don’t think it will happen.

ABERNETHY: I wanted to ask you about that.

DIONNE: If no one gets a clear majority, in other words, if there were at least three candidates with significant blocks of delegates, I still don’t think it will happen, but it’s more plausible it seems, at this moment, more plausible than it’s been in a long time.

ABERNETHY: What about somebody being nominated who is not now running?

DIONNE: Well, there are a lot of Republicans who long for that. I have been very struck by some of my conservative friends who are genuinely unhappy with the make-up of this field. And, I’ve been reminding people, maybe just showing that I’m getting older, there was a write-in campaign for Henry Calbot Lodge that carried the New Hampshire primary way back in 1964. And you wonder if something like that will happen. Again, still unlikely but this has been such a strange contest I don’t rule anything out anymore.

LAWTON: And I’m going to be watching too, on the other side, the Democratic side, how President Obama is going to reach out to people of faith. That was a huge issue in the 2008 election. President Obama had mounted a campaign of faith-based outreach, unprecedented for a Democratic candidate in a really long time. And, you know, is he going to continue that? Is that going to be as robust? And how are people of faith feeling about him? And I know you’ve also looked at the fact that there is some dissatisfaction with him.

ECKSTROM: Right, both on, obviously on the right, but also on the left. There’s a lot of progressives who saw him as the knight in shining armor who was going to come in and right all the ills of the world and obviously that hasn’t happened. And so I think the President’s biggest challenge is, when it comes to religion, is not speaking in Catholic terms, or Jewish terms, or mainline Protestant terms or anything like that, but is getting anybody out to vote for him. I mean, getting his base and getting just any of his supporters, whatever faith they may be, getting them motivated enough to go out and vote for him.

DIONNE: And I think you saw in 2010 that Democrats on the progressive side really fell down in terms of their organizing among religious people compared to what they did in 2008. And they have some ground to make up now.

ABERNETHY: What about gridlock in Washington? Is there any possibility, any even remote possibility, that in this election year coming up there will be any change in that?

DIONNE: Do you believe in miracles?

LAWTON: This is a religion show.

DIONNE: It is a religion show.

ABERNETHY: But look, there is a new poll, Pew poll, I think, that says there’s the greatest disapproval of Congress now that there has ever been in the past. So where does that lead? How does that affect the election?

DIONNE: First of all, those of us who are journalists can be grateful to Congress because somebody can poll lower than we do. I mean, my sense is that the only way you really could see some systematic breaking down of the gridlock is if it looks like President Obama is going to win the election, in other words, if by the middle of the year, he got what looked like a reasonably big lead a lot of the Republicans in Congress who have wanted to block his programs say wait a minute. He’s going to win. We’ve got to get reelected. We’ve got to start working with him. That happened with Bill Clinton in 1996 where the gridlock broke up. If, on the other hand, the election continues to look competitive in the middle of the year, as if you were to place a bet, that’s probably where you would place it, then I’m not sure there’s a lot of political interest on either side in sort of making concessions. I think they will fight it through to the end and then see what happens.

ABERNETHY: What do you imagine the future to be for the Occupy movement?

ECKSTROM: Well it will be interesting a, whether they can make it through the winter. It’s cold out there. But then b, sort of what do they become? One of the big sort of criticisms of this movement has been that nobody quite knows exactly what they want or what they stand for or what they’re even demanding. And so I think the big challenge for them in 2012 is going to be saying OK this is what we need to happen. It’s an election year, there’s a lot of people paying attention, so they probably have a better chance than not. But, the questions that they raise, the moral questions about fairness and equity and corporate responsibility, those aren’t going away, whether or not the movement is able to harness that into something kind of tangible, I think, is still a little unclear.

ABERNETHY: It’s been seen as very secular movement even though religious people have helped it in many ways.

LAWTON: Well, that’s what I want to watch. That’s exactly what I want to watch. Because it does have this perception that it’s a bunch of you know secular, I don’t know, unemployed people hanging around but there’s a strong religious current in it. And that was growing toward the end of 2011 and so you saw African American clergy getting involved, wanting to liken it to the Civil Rights Movement. You had a lot of mainline Protestant, Catholic, other church leaders providing support on the edges. Some of them told me that they didn’t want to be too out front, they didn’t want to look like they were high jacking the movement, but they are there and how is that going to affect what they do, what the rhetoric is, and is that going to continue.

ECKSTROM: It’s also worth noting that one of the most iconic images from this movement was when they paraded around a golden calf, modeled on the bull of Wall Street. When the marched that around lower Manhattan and here in Washington, D.C. That’s clearly a Biblical image so it’s not a completely secular kind of loosey goosey movement.

DIONNE: God and mammon is a rather old theme.

ABERNETHY: What about the extremely interesting cases that are going to be coming down from the Supreme Court, beginning with Obama’s healthcare? The Supreme Court’s going to hear that case and hand down a decision about it right in the middle of the election campaign.

DIONNE: And there’s some much speculation about how a court that often goes five to four in a conservative direction but doesn’t always go five to four in a conservative direction will rule. And, some of the judges in the circuit court who have upheld the healthcare plan have been conservatives and they were, in some ways, you felt they were writing to justices like Scalia and Thomas and Roberts and Alito and saying wait a minute it would not be conservative to overthrow this law. Then the other debate is which way would Republicans or President Obama be better off? Would it be a stinging defeat for Obama and therefore hurt him or would it take this issue off the table or even allow him to go on the offensive and say well we do need a national healthcare plan again so it is going to be an extraordinary day when the court rules on that.

ABERNETHY: Are religious groups involved in that, have they got appeals going for them?

ECKSTROM: Quite a few, especially from the conservative side. One of the first, original challenges to this healthcare law came out of Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell. But there’s a lot of conservatives who, not only for their conservative political ideology, but their religious ideology, don’t like the idea of the government telling them you have to have insurance. And, that’s really what the fight is over is the mandate to purchase individual health insurance or pay a fine. So there’s a lot of conservative groups who are against it. But there’s also a lot of progressive groups who are very much in favor of this, in fact don’t think it went far enough. The interesting group to watch is actually going to be the Catholic bishops because the bishops fought tooth and nail over provisions of this law but then after it was passed and signed into law they said well, we’re not going to fight to remove it.

DIONNE: And then you also have the Catholic Health Association which runs a very large share of hospitals in the United States, a minority, but they have a vast system and there other religious hospitals, religiously sort of affiliated hospitals, in the country who in general supported the healthcare reform because it would expand coverage of poorer Americans, working class Americans, who use their facilities.

LAWTON: But, one of the more contentious parts of that, sort of a lesser aspect, was coverage of contraception. And the Catholic Church was very concerned about being forced to cover things they don’t agree with, such as contraception. And so, that was a battle that’s still going to be played out on some of the local levels.

ABERNETHY: The Supreme Court is also going to consider and hand down an opinion, presumably, about immigration.

LAWTON: Well this has been a really difficult issue, especially for a lot of people in the religious community. A lot of people of faith have been actively helping immigrants and some of the laws, the Arizona law is going to be up before the Supreme Court, there was also a law in Alabama that a lot of religious groups were involved in. And people of faith are helping immigrants, they don’t want it to be criminalized to help immigrants, they are also don’t want the people that they are trying to help be considered criminals. I am interested that even evangelicals seem a little divided on this issue. Technically they tend to me more law and order people and therefore against loosening up on immigration. On the other hand, you have a lot of evangelical congregations that are seeing an influx of Latinos in the pews. And, so it’s a personal issue for a lot of these people. And you know, the kids in the youth group might be, their parents might be undocumented. So you’re seeing some wiggle room in the religious community.

DIONNE: Latinos, immigrants, illegal as well as legal, are among the most vibrant parts of both the evangelical world and the Catholic world. And I think you, the truth of the matter is a lot of the churches are in competition with each other to try to win the allegiance of Latinos which I think helps explain why a lot of Christian groups, regardless of their views on other matters, have tended to be more open to immigrants cause these are the people in their congregations.

ECKSTROM: And speaking of courts, another case to watch, it’s not at the Supreme Court level just yet, but the Prop 8 battle in California. In 2008, voters passed basically an end to same-sex marriage and it’s gone through the courts so far. Federal court has ruled against Proposition 8, saying that it’s unconstitutional. Now it’s going to the federal appeals court and regardless of what the federal appeals court decides, which could very well come in 2012, it’s probably going to go to the Supreme Court very soon after so this is going to be a crucial decision to watch for where that debate’s going to go.

LAWTON: And speaking of gay issues, we have in 2012 a couple of mainline Protestant denominations that are going to be meeting and this has been a tough issue for them and it’s going to continue to be tough in 2012. The United Methodists will be meeting and one of the issues before them is going to be can they marry, can their clergy marry same-sex couples in the states where that is legal. They can’t do that right now. There has been a group of retired United Methodist ministers that is doing that because active ministers could face penalties or the possibility of being defrocked. And, so that’s going to be up for grabs. In the Episcopal Church, you still see this slow breaking apart in the whole worldwide Anglican Communion over some of these issues, interpretation of scripture, and there are a lot of court battles and individual congregational battles going on there too.

ABERNETHY: And E.J., the Pope is scheduled to go to Mexico and to Cuba.

DIONNE: You know, the Vatican’s relationship with Cuba has been fascinating. I happen to be in Rome when Pope John Paul’s trip to Cuba was announced and there have been some interesting differences of opinion. The Vatican has tended to be in favor of a gradual, peaceful transition from the Castro regime. And the fact that the Pope is willing to go there speaks to this desire for a gradual change. Some of the Cuban community in the United States, the Catholic Cuban community one should say, are very uneasy about this. They would like a sort of harder push to get that regime out. So there have been some arguments over the years between our Cuban community, particularly in South Florida, and the Vatican. It will be fascinating to see how exactly, what Pope Benedict says about alterations in that regime and religious freedom. Castro himself, is a dictator, he also has had this kind of lifelong fascination with religion. He seems to be an atheist “but”. Maybe the “but”’s getting bigger as the years go by.

ABERNETHY: Folks, our time is almost up and in the couple minutes remaining I want to ask you, in addition to what we’ve just been talking about, what else are you watching? What are you really keeping an eye on that you think is going to be happening in 2012?

DIONNE: Well I’m looking in the campaign, I think it could be a very good campaign or a really terrible campaign. The good campaign, as I said, is because the parties will probably be as philosophically divided as they have been since 1964. We could have a really fundamental debate where we decide on a direction for the country for some time ahead and that could be a great thing. I also worry that with all of this advertising, the money that can be spent by outside groups because of the Citizens United decision, we may have more outright lying on the air and I know a lot of people think well campaigns are full of lies. It could be much much worse this year and I am very worried about what that’s going to do to us and what it might, how people will feel about this process at the end.

ABERNETHY: Kevin, are you looking at anything that might be a little brighter than more lies?

ECKSTROM: Well, actually I was going to say the end of the world because in 2011, Harold Camping famously said that the world was going to end on May 21st and then it was October 21st. It didn’t happen. 2012 apparently is supposed to be the year that the world will end according to the Mayan calendar so I don’t expect it to happen.

ABERNETHY: Mayan?

ECKSTROM: Yes, the ancient Mayan calendar. So, a lot of people are wondering if that’s actually going to happen. I don’t think it will but doomsday stories are always fun.

DIONNE: That’s the boldest prediction I’ve ever heard on this show.

ECKSTROM: That’s right.

ABERNETHY: Kim?

LAWTON: Well, I’ll take it back to a more serious note, hopefully, I don’t know. That was pretty serious. Another case before the Supreme Court is a church state case that looks at who gets to define who is a minister. Does a congregation get to decide who their ministers are? Or does the government have an input? And this makes a difference when you talk about clashes between religious beliefs and civil rights law. So, for example, if you are a congregation that believes only in a female pastor does that violate gender, anti-gender discrimination laws? And so, there’s been a lot of differing opinions in the court and how broadly does the definition of minister go. If you perform ministry in the church by running the screen in the front, does that make you a minister? If you are the janitor, some people say that’s a ministry, does that make you a minister? And what was really surprising to a lot of religious groups was that the Obama administration argued that there should be no exceptions. That religious groups should not be exempted from these civil rights laws and that had a lot of religious groups upset so I’m going to be watching that and especially the reaction to that decision.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up. Is up now. Thanks to Kevin Eckstrom, to E.J. Dionne and to Kim Lawton. Happy New Year to you all and to all our viewers. I’m Bob Abernethy.

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.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In thousands of schools across India, teachers will tell you to add one more “R” to reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. Recess, they’ll tell you, may be the most critical part of a student’s school day. That’s because nine a.m. recess is when 300 students in this school in the northern province of Rajasthan are provided a hot meal, as are a few younger siblings who are allowed to come along.

DINESH SHARMA: In this school, only about five children in all are able to bring a lunch from home.

DE SAM LAZARO: Anywhere from a third to 40 percent of the world’s undernourished children live in India today, and about half of all children here have stunted growth. The statistics are all the more telling given India’s strong growth rate and its booming economy in recent years.

BIRAJ PATNAIK: India finds itself acutely embarrassed. Its ambitions of being a global power are very poorly reflected in social sector indicators, and there is acute embarrassment that the second-fastest growing economy in the world has almost half of its children malnourished.

DE SAM LAZARO: Patnaik works for India’s Supreme Court advising a commission that monitors compliance with the court’s orders. About a decade ago, civic activists, saying the government was denying children their basic right to food, took their case to the court. The justices twice upheld this right and ordered that every child be provided a cooked meal in school. At first, Patnaik says, there was resistance from government officials.

PATNAIK: On the grounds that there was no infrastructure, that teachers would get overburdened, that India just didn’t have the financial resources to start a program of this nature. But the Supreme Court reaffirmed that fiscal constraints can never be allowed to come in the way of children’s right to food, and if the government had to tighten their belt, that had to happen elsewhere.

DE SAM LAZARO: With the stroke of a pen, the court ordered the largest school meal program in the world. That left the daunting task of implementing it.

CHANCHALAPATHI DASA: The challenge in our country is how to deliver it and deliver it up to the last mile. That is the challenge. Because a large country with 120 million children in hundreds of thousands of schools that delivery is a genuine challenge.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dasa heads a nonprofit group called Akshaya Patra. It was started in the nineties when a group of Hare Krishna devotees began preparing a few hundred school lunches. Although it is one of the world’s oldest belief systems, the modern day Krishna consciousness movement was led by Swami Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada and was especially visible in the West in the 1960s and ’70s. The call to serve meals was inspired by an encounter the swami had after attending a banquet.

DASA: He saw there was leftover of all the food, and the plates strewn there, and there was street children, poor children from the village and some stray dogs fighting for the leftover of the food. When Prabhupada saw that there were tears in his eyes, and he called some of his disciples and said, “Just look at this. You can’t allow this to happen.”

DE SAM LAZARO: That exhortation formed the spiritual basis for Akshaya Patra’s work. But when school lunches became the law of the land, the group went to the government for funds to expand and to India’s corporate sector for expertise.

DASA: Passion alone is not enough. You need to have organization. You need to have organizational capabilities. You need to have management capabilities. Akshaya Patra has been a very unique marriage of dedicated missionaries and professionals coming with a heart.

DE SAM LAZARO: And with their wallets. Among India’s growing middle class there’s a dawning of philanthropy, he says. Many people are attaining wealth at a much earlier age.

DASA: My parents probably would have a house—we come from a middle-class family—would have a house when they were probably 50 years of age. In today’s India, by the time someone—and someone working in a software company in India—by the time they are 28 or 30 years old they already have a house, they have a car, and then what? They still have a lot of disposable income, and they are genuinely looking for opportunities where their money can be used well for social development.

DE SAM LAZARO: Akshaya Patra, which means “bottomless pot,” is now the largest of many nonprofit school lunch providers. It serves 1.3 million children every day from kitchens like this one, efficient and productive as any in the world.

GOVINDA DAS: Every day we cook about 150,000 meals in three hours time, and the ingredients that we use, something like 7000 kilograms of wheat flour every day, and from that we make about 300,000 chapatis—flatbreads—per hour.

DE SAM LAZARO: Hours before students show up at school, workers begin feeding wheat flour and water into giant mixers. At the other end, lightly greased flatbreads called chapatis emerge, 40,000 of them every hour, in spotless conditions. Elsewhere, in industrial-sized cauldrons, rice and a lentil stew called dhal are prepared. Flavoring varies by regional preference, but there are no animal products. Hare Krishna devotees are vegetarian in principle. So are most students, by economic necessity. In Rajasthan’s desert summer, school starts early, and the meal arrives as early as nine a.m. Four years after Akshaya Patra began delivering meals in this area, the most visible impact is in school attendance. It’s up 11 percent, no surprise to the principal.

MADHU KILANI: They belong to very poor families. They belong to labor-class families, and their parents are also not very much literate. And some of the students have, their economic condition is so poor that at night also they are not able to eat food in their home, so they depend, many of their strengths depend on their midday meal.

DE SAM LAZARO: For the whole day’s nutrition?

KILANI: Yes, for the whole day nutrition.

DE SAM LAZARO: She says the students have more energy and improved concentration in class. For its part, Akshaya Patra aims to expand its lunch program five-fold by 2020. Still, not all children have benefited equally from the Supreme Court’s order, says compliance officer Patnaik.

PATNAIK: Jharkhand, for instance, is a state where I often visited, and I despair at the quality of the meals that are being served there. Even in states where the meals work well, in the more inaccessible and remote parts of the state you have meals which are not comparable at all in quality to what children in the rest of the country are getting.

DE SAM LAZARO: “We like it,” these children said when asked about their Akshaya Patra meal. When I asked how many students have to go hungry on days when there’s no school, the response was also nearly unanimous. And they are the more fortunate. Despite the Supreme Court order and despite recent initiatives to address it, malnutrition is the root cause of 2500 child deaths in India—every day.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Jaipur, India.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In a region that’s seen civil wars and bloodshed, Ghana has enjoyed years of peace.

Church leader: May somebody leave this service knowing that their tomorrow is better than their today…

DE SAM LAZARO: In its packed churches there’s a palpable sense of optimism about Ghana’s future.

REV. FRED DEEGBE: I wish I could say we’ve reached the Promised Land. We are quite close to it, we believe.

DE SAM LAZARO: The first building block to Ghana’s relative prosperity has been a free press.

Radio announcer: This is your show, the unique breakfast drive….

DE SAM LAZARO: Almost everyone listens to the radio in Ghana and lively political give and take is a breakfast staple. Tempers flared close to boiling point at times in the studios but only until the show was over. All was quickly forgiven. In a continent where long-running dictatorships are the norm, Ghana has enjoyed two decades of thriving democracy. Two incumbent leaders have lost in general elections. In 2008, the margin was less than one percent. Yet on both cases the sitting president stepped aside, and power was transferred peacefully.

PROFESSOR EMMANUEL GYIMAH-BOADI (Executive Director, Ghana Center for Democratic Development): This is the first time we’ve had both economic growth and political stability and freedom.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ghana was the first African colony to gain independence back in 1957, from Britain. It had its share of autocrats and military coups until the early 90s, when long ruling military strongman Jerry Rawlins stepped aside and allowed democratic elections. Ghana has seen steady economic growth ever since. It exports gold, diamonds and cocoa beans, and now new wealth awaits.

Video announcer: In June 2007, Kosmos struck gold…

DE SAM LAZARO: Major offshore oil reserves have been found here and the first oil revenues began to flow last December. Across Africa the discovery of such riches, especially oil, has become known as the “resource curse.”

DEEGBE: Instead of having oil be a source of prosperity and progress for this nation we just allow a few people, very corrupt people, to amass this wealth and flaunt it to all of us, and we want to work towards this not being the story of Ghana.

PATRICK AWUAH: Ghana has been very fortunate to have oil after democracy and not before. Because that democracy is going to influence how Ghana manages its oil wealth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Patrick Awuah is one of a growing number of overseas Ghanaians who’ve returned. He went to college in the US, then worked at Microsoft. He started a university called Ashesi or “beginning.” Ghana’s fledgling democracy needs ethical leaders he says.

AWUAH: We’ve borrowed the model of the liberal arts and sciences as the way to do that, that teaches broad perspectives, a deep ethos, a deep concern for ethics and a specialization.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ashesi has 450 students and will soon triple that number in a new campus being built just outside the capital, Accra, with funds from the World Bank and other investors. Students and alumni we talked to echoed the school’s values

NAA AYELEYSA QUAYNOR-METTLE (Business Major, Ashesi University): You are training ethical leaders, entrepreneurs who are going to take over in terms of the integrity, in terms of sharing the national cake or the national pie among everybody so that the majority of the Ghanaian nationals are not eating the drops or the crumbs from the table, but then they are sharing equally.

DE SAM LAZARO: For now, Ghanaians are hardly sharing equally. There’s still deep poverty in rural areas, where the majority of Ghana’s 22 million people live. Development experts say the best way to attack poverty is to create jobs and improve the rural economy. A number of efforts have begun to do this. For example, shea nuts are a major export. They’re processed in Europe and America into shea butter, used in skin creams or as a food additive. Now several small processing enterprises have been set up in Ghana, supported by private aid groups as well as the US government. Some are mechanized but hundreds of women are employed in traditional processing, kneading a dough that comes from boiling and crushing the nuts to release the prized shea butter.

RITA DAMPSON (Small Business Owner): When you pick the nuts and sell, that is just the end of it, but when you process it into butter, the profit you can get to support your children by paying their school fees.

DE SAM LAZARO: So there is more profit than if you process the nuts?

DAMPSON: Yes, please.

DE SAM LAZARO: There’s a long way to go. Ninety-five percent of Ghana’s shea nuts are still exported raw, and processing is even more difficult with what is still Ghana’s chief export: cocoa beans. Very little chocolate is made anywhere in Africa because of a lack of refrigeration or milk. So the emphasis here instead is on getting a better price. Kojo Aduhene Tano and his neighbors belong to Kuapa Kokoo, Ghana’s largest cooperative. It was set up 20 years ago with the help of British aid group called Twin Trading. Its buyers have pledged to pay higher fair-trade prices. The coop even owns part of a fair trade chocolate line called Divine, sold mostly in Europe and online in the US. Nationwide, the coop has 64,000 members, and its profits have paid for community wells, credit unions, and schools. It’s hardly made anyone rich. Fair trade does not have a fair share of the chocolate market. Kuapa accounts for just five percent of cocoa growers in Ghana.

KOJO ADUHENE TANO: We need more money from you.

DE SAM LAZARO: People in rich countries need to buy more fair trade chocolate, he says, even as I discover that he got his first taste of it very recently.

(speaking to Tano): How old were you when you first tasted chocolate?

TANO: I was 48 years.

DE SAM LAZARO: You were 48 years old?

Life is still tough, but Kojo Tano is much more optimistic about the future. He only went through eighth grade, but his six children are being educated. The two oldest are away in college.

TANO: When I grow old they will look after me.

QUAYNOR-METTLE: This is the best times to be a young person in Ghana.

DE SAM LAZARO: That optimism is echoed in the capital, especially among young people.

QUAYNOR-METTLE: There’s the oil find, Vodafon has just come to settle, there’s KPMG, there’s Price-Waterhouse, there are all the giant multinational companies coming in. The opportunities are just overflowing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Whether it’s in big oil or tiny shea nuts, Ghana’s challenge will be to make the benefits flow more equitably, also to keep its commitment to democracy and freedom of information. Religious leaders in this largely Christian country will have a key role in all of this.

DEEGBE: With the advent of oil, there is a civil society oil and gas platform who are watching, who are keeping vigil over everything. There’s even a faith-based organization, coalition between the Christian Council of Ghana and the Ghana Pentecostal Council. Between those two you have a majority of Ghanaians, and we are extending that a third level to add a coalition that involves the Muslims, and what we want to do is to monitor what comes in.

Radio newsreader: The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation has for the second time lifted a total of 994,691 barrels of Jubilee crude oil …

DE SAM LAZARO: For now, oil revenues are being meticulously reported. How they should be monitored and spent is an on going debate that will escalate as elections approach in 2012.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Accra, Ghana.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: There are some things the government must do, and the first reason for taxes is to pay for them. Beyond that there is wide debate over how taxes can be efficient and fair and what kind of society they should promote.

PROFESSOR GREG MANKIW (Professor of Economics, Harvard University): People on the left think that the tax code is not nearly redistributive enough, think that the rich are really getting away with murder. People on the right think that it’s not the job of government to be redistributing income and that the tax code we have is too progressive.

O’BRIEN: Greg Mankiw was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the second Bush administration.

MANKIW: It’s a difference of values, of what you think government should be. In coming to any sort of tax reform those different values are going to collide, and there’s no easy way to sort of reconcile these very different philosophical positions about what the scope of government should be.

Professor Michael Sandel teaching at Harvard: How should income and wealth and opportunities and the good things in life be distributed?

O’BRIEN: The collision of the competing views of the role of government is the grist for a very popular course at Harvard taught by Michael Sandel, a professor and political philosopher.

PROFESSOR MICHAEL SANDEL (Professor of Government, Harvard University): The main purpose of a tax system is to raise revenue for the common good, for the public good. That’s its purpose. But it has to do so in a way that is fair, that involves shared sacrifice, because really it’s a matter of sharing the burdens of a free society and of a good society. That’s, morally speaking, what taxes are about. So unless a tax system meets the test of fairness, none of its other advantages really matter.

O’BRIEN: For Peter Wehner, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, the issue is freedom.

PETER WEHNER (Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center): This country was founded on liberty. It wasn’t founded on income equality. And there is a certain view, which I subscribe to, which says that people ought to be able to keep much or most of what they earn and to have the government in the business of taking it and deciding how it, government, will spend it rather than you as an individual I think is flawed, and I think it’s contrary to much of the American tradition, and I happen not to think that it’s consistent with ethical or moral or religious traditions as well.

O’BRIEN: But according to Michael Sandel, fairness—“sharing the burdens of a free and good society”—may compel a significant redistribution of wealth.

SANDEL: Some people do work harder than others, but what’s reflected in the vast income inequalities that we’ve seen in recent years is not hard work primarily. School teachers work hard, bus drivers work hard, kindergarten teachers, daycare workers—they work hard. Do they work less hard than hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers who reap hundreds and thousands of times what they do in the market economy? Most of the wage differences, most of the income differences have very little to do with differences in effort. Most of them have to do with supply and demand and with the qualities that our society happens to value, and a lot of this is no doing of the people who are lucky enough to have those talents and those abilities to wind up on top. And if that’s true, then it seems to me there is an obligation for those who are affluent, those who succeed under this system, to share their bounty with those who through no fault of their own are less well off.

O’BRIEN: In Alabama, which has its share of “less well-off,” families falling below the poverty level still pay income taxes and a hefty nine percent tax on groceries, while many wealthy property owners pay next to nothing in property taxes. Schools suffer, and some families find it even harder, because of taxes, to put food on the table. The Alabama legislature is composed almost entirely of Christians, but to one critic the state’s tax policy stands Christian values on their head.

PROFESSOR SUSAN PACE HAMILL (Professor of Law, University of Alabama): The moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics demand that our taxes raise a level of revenue embracing the reasonable opportunity of all and that the burden be allocated in a moderately progressive way.

O’BRIEN: Susan Hamill is seminary trained, a United Methodist, a tax attorney, and a law professor at the University of Alabama, and she’s made a name for herself crusading for tax reform in Alabama based on Judeo-Christian ethics—the Bible.

HAMILL: The Bible, first and foremost, absolutely forbids oppression—this is where I got started with this in Alabama—forbids oppression. What is oppression? Oppression is taking a person who’s already down, who is struggling, who is vulnerable and making their situation worse, actively doing so.

O’BRIEN: The idea that those who write our tax laws should be in any way guided by religious beliefs has been greeted with a degree of skepticism by some leading economists, like Greg Mankiw.

MANKIW: I don’t think one can go straight from any sort of religious view to what an optimal tax system looks like, but in terms of thinking about fairness and what’s the role for government—sure, I think all of our values come into play.

O’BRIEN: There’s no debate that tax laws should be fair, but how in a pluralistic society such as ours do we even define the word “fair”? And assuming we can define it, how far should the government go using tax dollars to promote fairness?

WEHNER: The aim of tax policy is to generate economic growth. A rising tide lifts all boats. I don’t think that, as a general proposition, using tax policy to create fairness or equality works. To take money from the rich, money that they have earned because they have worked hard, is not by itself just, and again, if you take money from the rich beyond a certain point you’re going to create disincentives for wealth creators, and that’s going to have a huge effect on the poor as well.

O’BRIEN: One remedy championed by Steve Forbes in his run for the presidency in 1996 is a flat tax—17 per cent across the board, scrapping the current complicated and loophole-laden IRS code. The flat tax may have antecedents in the religious tradition of tithing, where each person gives the same percentage regardless of income.

MANKIW: Well, I think a flat tax would for sure be more efficient, and I think the strongest argument in favor of a flat tax has to do with efficiency.

O’BRIEN: Many economists, like Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, say the government should rely less on taxing income and more on a value-added tax on consumer goods, a form of flat tax found in much of Europe.

MANKIW: It’s a consumption tax rather than an income tax, so it does not tax savings. So if I earn some money and I put it in the bank and I don’t spend it, it doesn’t get taxed until I take it out and spend it later on whatever I buy. And I think there’s a lot of economists have argued over the years that consumption is a better basis for taxation than income, because consumption is actually what we’re enjoying. And also saving is a part of economic growth, so if we exempt saving until it’s later consumed, it’s going to tend to promote economic growth. So I think there’s a strong case to be made for using consumption as the basis for taxation.

O’BRIEN: If, however, sacrifices are to be shared equally, some adjustment would have to be made for those who have little money at all and are hard pressed to cover even the most basic necessities. Our tax code may be the best measure of what kind of a people we are and what kind of a country we have created. The late American philosopher John Rawls defined a just society as one you would want to live in, even if you did not know in advance what your place in it would be—whether you would be rich or poor, male or female, or what your race or I.Q. would be. In his course at Harvard, Professor Sandel also questions whether a country committed to equal opportunity should allow the wealthy to pass on their vast fortunes to their children and grandchildren.

SANDEL: If we believe that everyone should have an equal chance to work hard and aspire and succeed, then it’s very difficult to justify that children of wealthy parents should have a huge advantage even before they start. The estate tax, quite apart from raising revenue, is a way a society says we want to give everyone equal opportunity as far as we can, and we don’t want to give a huge advantage to people, to let them start way before everyone else simply because they had the good luck, or the good judgment, to be born to affluent parents.

WEHNER: If your parents, upon dying, want to give their children the money rather than going to the government, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Is it fair to the children who by birth might get that money that it’s taken from them and it’s given to the government? I don’t think that there is an ethical or moral imperative to do that.

O’BRIEN: Even if political philosophers and economists could agree on the fairest and most efficient method of taxation, that surely doesn’t mean it will ever happen, because of the power of special interests, such as homeowners.

MANKIW: So why should the tax code subsidize home ownership, which is eventually at the expense of renters? On the other hand, trying to get rid of that is very hard, because homeowners think they’ve become entitled to it, so there’s no question that that’s going to be a hard one to get rid of, but it’s also the right thing to do. It’s easy for me to talk about tax reform. I have tenure. The typical congressman has to get reelected every two years, and so that makes their set of constraints much more troublesome and difficult to navigate than mine.

O’BRIEN: What the tax debate makes clear is just how divided the country is over how to define the role of government and the values it should promote.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington, DC.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: All week, financial experts in and out of Washington warned of the catastrophic consequences if Congress does not raise the country’s debt ceiling by August 2. After that deadline, the government would not be able to pay all its obligations for the first time in history. Officials warned that that could trigger financial chaos and vast hardship. By week’s end, there were signs of a temporary fix to the debt ceiling problem, but no agreement on a long-term deal on spending and taxes, which many had wanted, including the president.

President Obama: And I think it’s important for the American people that everybody in this town set politics aside, that everybody in this town sets our individual interests aside, and we try to do some tough stuff.

ABERNETHY: In the midst of the financial debate, where are the churches? Can religious leaders influence the politicians? Author and activist Reverend Jim Wallis is the editor of Sojourners magazine. His is a leading religious voice in political debate. Jim, welcome.

JIM WALLIS (President, Sojourners): Thanks, Bob.

ABERNETHY: There are two big questions that people have been arguing about in this town. One is the debt ceiling. The other is long-term. The debt ceiling is something has to be done now, but long term, how do we bring the country’s spending and taxes in line? You’ve been working very hard lobbying to protect government programs that help the poor. How are you doing?

WALLIS: Well, I think I’m happy with what we’ve seen so far. We started with a provocative question: What would Jesus cut? That got attention to the question. Then we fasted for almost a month in Lent. That brought more attention to it. Then we formed a “circle of protection”: Roman Catholic bishops, Salvation Army, National Association of Evangelicals, many people, not the religious left here, almost everyone saying that you can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poorest people. And I think that voice is now being heard. We’ve talked to Republicans, Democrats, and the White House right along on this.

ABERNETHY: You are trying, I think, to get a meeting with a lot of the players in this?

WALLIS: We have been meeting right along.

ABERNETHY: Well, what do you say to them?

WALLIS: We say, you know, there are principles here, that a budget is a moral document and must be evaluated by those from the bottom up. That’s our point of view. And the common good has to outweigh ideological political battles in this town. But we also ask them what their faith means. If they are people of faith, and many say they are, what their faith means, their moral compass, how they decide things.

ABERNETHY: You take that argument, what does your faith mean, to Republicans in the House who insist on no compromise?

WALLIS: We sure do. The Catholics, evangelicals, Republican side, Democratic side. Now we don’t get involved, Bob, in which bill we are going to support. We don’t lobby for bills. But we say there are principles here. You can’t just have the benefits all go to corporations and wealthy people and nothing for those who are most vulnerable.

ABERNETHY: But the common good. This idea of the common good, very important in religious and ethics. How do you define it, and who says what the common good is?

WALLIS: Well, this week we’ve organized 5,000 pastors to say let’s look at the real people in our congregations and our communities, what’s going to happen to them, as opposed to the Washington, D.C. question, who’s up, who’s down, who’s going to be the Speaker of the House next time, who’ll win the next election. The common good is about the real people, the people we have to always take into account. And pastors, I think, I wanted to talk to people whose job it is to have re-read the Bible to get to the focus on who the real people are here.

ABERNETHY: But this argument about how to cut spending, what could be cut, how to raise income, this is a very technical, very political argument. How do people, how do religious leaders feel? Do you feel that you have the ability to get in and be influential in something as technical as this debate?

WALLIS: You know, the details are technical and not difficult, really. Once you agree to some principles, the details can be worked out by the politicians. We say “let justice roll down like waters.” Let the politicians work out the plumbing here. You know, we don’t get into all the details. We’re saying there are principles here. If this is going to focus on targeting poor people, we say that’s wrong. It’s got to be shared sacrifice here. How you do it, this really isn’t rocket science. We could solve this if the principles were clear from the start.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine.

WALLIS: Thank you, Bob.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. It’s a big place with lots of exhibits depicting the creation of the earth in six days, just as it occurred in the Book of Genesis. Ken Ham, a former high school science teacher from Australia, is the CEO of the Christian ministry that created the museum.

KEN HAM: I’d say the Creation Museum, what’s happened here is way above our expectations. It exceeded all of our visions and dreams.

SEVERSON: He says some of the 1.3 million visitors who’ve come here in the last four years are simply curious, but a majority, like Danella and Donna from Indianapolis, are believers.

MUSEUM VISITOR: The Bible is the Bible, you know. God created the earth and all of it in 6 days. Can’t argue with God.

SEVERSON: It’s a place where homo sapiens and dinosaurs live together in harmony, where Adam and Eve explore the Garden of Eden, and Noah builds an ark loaded with creatures small and large, even dinosaurs. Ken Ham now has plans to build his own ark, a really big one, much longer than a football field, all part of a huge theme park called the Ark Encounter. He says his ark will have the same dimensions as the one described in the Book of Genesis.

HAM (speaking on radio): Genesis, could it be a metaphor?

SEVERSON: Ham delivers his views about the ark and creation in 90-second radio spots that air, he says, on over 600 radio stations nationwide. He says his views are gaining traction, although they are not yet widely accepted in the religious community. But it’s not Ham’s version of the creation that troubles Reverend Joseph Phelps, pastor of the Highland Baptist Church in Louisville. It’s the tax break that has been approved for the ark park.

REV. JOSEPH PHELPS: I honor anyone who has a different understanding of creation than I or my church might have. That’s not the problem at all. It’s when, as in the case of the theme park, when they want to ask for public monies in order to fund putting out their particular point of view. That’s where we have a problem.

HAM: It’s not really a tax break, it’s a tourism incentive, and what it is, it’s actually a rebate on the sales tax generated at the particular facility.

SEVERSON: What it is is a tax rebate that would allow the ark park to recoup more than $37 million in sales taxes. Under Kentucky’s Tourism Act, any company that promotes tourism is entitled to a rebate. The Creation Museum is considered a nonprofit ministry, but the ark park is intended to return a profit to its private investors. Pastor Phelps and other religious leaders argue that the tax break would violate the separation of church and state.

JOSEPH PHELPS: Well, first of all, I think it’s unconstitutional. I think to put out a particular religious point of view, such as that theme park, or if it was an evolution theme park, either one of those points of view, if they’re coming from a religious vantage point, cannot be merged with government funding, government support.

HAM: Don’t we have freedom of religion in this country? Don’t we have freedom of speech? So if you were a Christian, and you happened to be running a business that happens to have a Christian theme but you are a for-profit business, why is that different to a secular business that’s running something that just doesn’t happen to have a Christian theme?

SEVERSON: The conundrum here is that Kentucky desperately needs jobs.

HAM: The Ark Encounter is going to employ almost a thousand people, and the impact on the number of jobs associated with that is going to be in the thousands, and our particular research has shown it will be many thousands, and it will bring millions and millions of dollars into the community. In fact, the research that we did shows that the economic impact of the Ark Encounter project over 10 years will be something like $4 billion.

SEVERSON: Kentucky’s Democratic governor supports the tax incentives. He says he wasn’t elected to debate religion, he was elected to create jobs, especially in hard-hit communities like Williamstown near where the ark park will be located and where a majority of the unemployed have been out of jobs for over two years.

WADE GUTMAN: The city and the county both are in desperate need like every place in the country for revenue, and this will generate a tremendous amount of revenue.

SEVERSON: Wade Gutman is the head of the Industrial Development Office and the Chamber of Commerce for Grant County. He says he has slept with a smile on his face ever since he heard the theme park was going to be in his backyard.

GUTMAN: I would have a definitely different feeling if it was nonprofit. But since it is for-profit, and it will create so many jobs and boost our economy almost immediately once construction starts, I couldn’t find anything to be against it about.

DAN PHELPS: In the original story, Noah basically built the ark on his own shekel. He didn’t have any government funding or anything like that involved.

SEVERSON: Dan Phelps is president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society. He joins other academics who say the theme park sends the wrong message about Kentucky.

DAN PHELPS: They’re doing it on the aegis of saying that this will bring a lot of jobs to the state, and it might bring a large number of low-paying jobs to the state, but it’s definitely hurt the image of Kentucky. Jay Leno has already joked about Kentucky and the ark on his monologue on at least two different occasions.

SEVERSON: But Phelps’s biggest concern isn’t Kentucky’s image. It’s the message the theme park will send to the state’s high school and college students.

DAN PHELPS: Almost every year here in Kentucky we have attempts to get laws enacted into the state legislature that would promote creationism, and right now outside of the larger cities a lot of students aren’t learning very much about evolution. The textbooks soft-peddle it. The teachers tend to avoid the subject basically for fear of offending people, and the Creation Museum and the ark park can only make this worse in Kentucky.

HAM: So in other words they only want their particular view presented. They want their view of millions of years and evolution and there’s no God presented. They really don’t want someone like us having the freedom to present this particular position.

SEVERSON: Ham has not minced words in his views of mainline churches that don’t espouse a literal translation of the creation.

HAM: Yes, I would say that churches aren’t doing their job if they’re not teaching the Book of Genesis as it is meant to be taken, because many churches, unfortunately, have taken man’s ideas of millions of years of evolution and then they reinterpret the Book of Genesis., and what we would say is, while we wouldn’t question their Christian testimony in regard to their salvation, we would say that they are really undermining the authority of God’s word.

JOSEPH PHELPS: I don’t preach against creationism, but I would say that the majority of our church would support an evolutionary understanding of how God created this world.

SEVERSON: And they would support your position against giving them this tax break?

PHELPS: Yes, this church is a strong supporter of the separation of church and state.

SEVERSON: According to some interpretations of the Book of Genesis, it took Noah about a hundred years to build the ark. The Ark Encounter is scheduled to launch in three years.

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