BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome, I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us for this special report on the most important religion and ethics news of the year that’s almost over. Our panelists are E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a professor at Georgetown University; also Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service, and Kim Lawton, managing editor of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. We begin with a video reminder of the major events of 2010 assembled by Kim.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: It was a challenging year for interfaith relations, as American Muslims faced new tensions on several fronts. Plans for an Islamic cultural center near the site of Ground Zero generated a firestorm of debate and protest.

Protester: No mosque, not here, not now, not ever.

LAWTON: And the proposed construction of mosques in other communities generated opposition as well. A Florida pastor’s announced intention to burn the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11 set off an international furor, including violent protests in several Muslim nations. The pastor eventually backed off his plan, but controversy continued. Leaders from several faith traditions joined with Islamic leaders to denounce what they called “growing Islamophobia” across the country. Meanwhile, amid several high-profile arrests of American Muslims allegedly plotting terrorist attacks, US mainstream Islamic groups launched new campaigns to combat extremism within their communities.

Imam speaking to Muslim students: Nonviolence, the sanctity of life is valued, and it’s not the sanctity of Muslim life, it’s the sanctity of all life.

Despite some limited signs of economic recovery, many American families continued to face unemployment and foreclosures. Religious institutions were called upon to do more to help the needy even as they dealt with their own sustained budget cuts.

On the political front, religious conservatives appeared to be reenergized by the Tea Party movement and its campaign for limited government. Although the focus of the midterm elections was on economics, many religious right activists were hopeful a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives will provide momentum for their social agenda. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats were criticized for failing to reach out more to religious voters. Many faith-based moderates and liberals were disappointed that President Obama did not employ more religious rhetoric when he discussed issues like health care and the economy. And according to one survey, growing numbers of Americans, nearly one in five, believe incorrectly that President Obama is a Muslim.

Issues surrounding homosexuality continued to pose difficult challenges for many in the religious community. Faith groups were on both sides of the issue as Congress debated lifting don’t ask don’t tell, the 17-year-old ban on gays serving openly in the military. They also filed briefs on both sides in several court cases over gay marriage. The Episcopal Church installed its second openly gay bishop, Reverend Mary Glasspool, a lesbian.

The Roman Catholic Church confronted the ongoing clergy sex abuse crisis, this time centered in several European countries, and there were more questions about how high-ranking church officials dealt with the crisis. Pope Benedict XVI offered renewed apologies about the problem and promised new guidelines for handling allegations of abuse.

Faith-based charities scrambled to meet needs in the wake of several humanitarian disasters. Here in the US, social service groups tried to help people along the Gulf Coast after the devastating BP oil spill. In Pakistan, religious relief groups rushed to deliver aid after a summer of massive flooding that has left an estimated four million people still homeless. And for nearly a year now, faith-based groups have been actively working in Haiti, providing emergency aid and helping to rebuild after the January 12 earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and displaced almost two million. A rising cholera epidemic is complicating those efforts.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks for that. To you and to Kevin Eckstrom and to E.J. Dionne, welcome. I want to get to churches and politics and economics, jobs in just a minute, but first, Kevin, what do you make of all this Islamophobia?

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): It’s an extraordinary place for us to be in 2010. The most extreme example you can think of on this was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where a zoning dispute over whether or not to build a mosque, whether they had the right to build a mosque, turned into a debate over whether Islam is actually a religion or not. And we saw it in New York in Ground Zero with the Park 51 mosque that Kim referred to in her piece. And what you saw this year was a fundamental debate over whether or not American Muslims are in a separate category or should be in a separate category from everyone else in terms of their rights, their responsibilities, and their place at the American table. And, you know, when you have a Florida pastor who can come out of nowhere and threaten to burn a pile of Qurans and get a call from the secretary of defense you know that we are not in …

LAWTON: … asking him not to do it …

ECKSTROM: That’s right. You know that we are not in an ordinary year when it comes to American Muslims.

ABERNETHY: But meanwhile there were legitimate threats. There was a Time Square bomber and others.

LAWTON: And this put a lot of pressure on the American Muslim community, as we saw, as they were trying to portray this message that Islam is not the same as terrorism. They are not mutually the same thing. But yet there were these arrests, and so they were really having to confront their own ideology and how they get their message across, and that was a big challenge for them this past year.

E.J. DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): You know, we as a country have gone through bouts of this before, and I think when we confront this now it’s worth looking back. We had a party in our country formed in the 1850s in response to the big Catholic immigration, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothings, and it took us a long time to work through anti-Catholic prejudice. It wasn’t until 1960 that John Kennedy was elected president. We had enormous fights over the Mormons and their role in our society. I think what may be most distressing about this year is that the issue of reaction to Islam has become politicized in a way that it wasn’t immediately after 9/11. You know, it’s worth remembering that right after 9/11 President Bush went out of his way to visit the Islamic center here in DC. It kind of took any political sort of edge off this. I think in this election you have more of it occurring on the right and among Republicans. It was used in the campaigns by some Republican congressional candidates, and I think you are going to need some spokespeople on the conservative side who are very much opposed to Islamophobia to speak out so we can sort of go back to the moment, oddly, that we had after 9/11 when their was a lot of opposition in the country to Islamophobia, because everybody understood our need for Muslim allies around the world.

LAWTON: Well I was just going to go on top of that to say that it’s also been a challenge for leaders of other faith traditions. Muslims are looking to them, saying some of you experienced this yourselves. Where are you? Are you supporting us? Are you supporting our religious freedom? And you have seen some high-profile press conferences and statements by some of the leaders of the national religious organizations. Some Muslims wish that there were more of that going on. But I also think in some local communities, as a response to this protest in the streets, there are more interfaith dialogues going on at the local synagogue and at the local church as people try to figure out what is going on within the religious community.

ABERNETHY: There’s a correlation, isn’t there, with what’s happening to jobs and the economy and the fear a lot of people have about everything. And E.J., I wanted to ask you to move from this into the election of 2010, the Tea Party, and how some of these things appeared in the election returns.

DIONNE: What was striking about the election overall is that it didn’t shift religious alignments very much. I mean the Democrats lost ground pretty well across the board, not only among more religious voters but also among more secular voters, partly because a lot of their people didn’t show up this time around. But the Tea Party is fascinating, because on the one hand the poll data makes it very clear that there is a substantial overlap between support for the Tea Party and support for the religious conservative movement. But there is also some difference between the two. The Tea Party is mildly more secular, but what I think it is even more than the Christian conservatives were is a kind of assertively nationalist movement, and that there is a feeling—I think there is a feeling in the country that we have lost ground as a nation in the world over the last 10 years. That feels part of it. There is certainly some uncertainty over the economy, and that feeds a kind of “let’s take care of our own first” feeling in the country. And so I think watching the relationship between this new Tea Party movement and the older religious conservative movement is going to be one of the most interesting stories between now and the 2012 election.

ABERNETHY: And there was this phrase that we heard often—“We want to take back the country.” How do you transpose that? How do you interpret that?

DIONNE: Many people interpret this depending on their own politics, you know. Some people look at it and say this is a reaction to immigration and it’s a reaction of traditionally white or Anglo-Saxon Americans to the growing diversity of America. I think some people might look at it in more economic terms and say, boy, did we feel more secure 30 years ago. There was less income inequality 30 years ago. Average people could count on sort of decently paying jobs no matter what their education level was. Some of it is connected to that, and I think some of it is this sense of who are in the world now compared especially to China, but to some degree compared to India, and a lot of politicians are speaking more about American exceptionalism, we are still an exceptional nation, and I think that comes from a desire to hold on to that sense and that it’s been threatened by the downturn, by a sense our power has been depleted by the two long wars we’ve been in. And so I think there is this spiritual element to what is a national discussion about our national standing.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, between the parties did we see a God gap again in this last election?

LAWTON: Well, that’s what people used to talk about, the God gap—that Democrats appeared to be less friendly towards religion than Republicans, and President Obama and his campaign in the last presidential election and the Democratic Party had really seemed to make an effort to change that and had really reached out to the religious community. I’ve been surprised at the difficulty of President Obama’s relationship with the religious community over this past year. A lot of religious moderates and liberals have been very frustrated with him and some of his policies. They’ve been disappointed he hasn’t been speaking more about religion, and a lot of their community were frustrated that the Democratic Party didn’t appear to be reaching out to them in the past midterm election, so some of that separation still seems to be there.

ECKSTROM: I think the most interesting God gap you saw this year was the gap between perception and reality on whether or not the president is a Muslim or not.

ABERNETHY: What do you make of that?

ECKSTROM: I think when people say that he is a Muslim or that they think that he’s a Muslim, they are certainly not saying it as a compliment. It’s a way of smearing someone now in America in 2010. If you don’t like them, you can say that they are a Muslim. It’s a way of saying that he’s different, that he’s other, that he’s not like the rest of us. But you know, you have a president who speaks in Christian terminology, who went to church on Easter, who talked about finding salvation at the foot of the cross and all this. And yet there’s this gap, this interminable gap that they can’t seem to quite get over. As much as he talks, as many places as he goes, people still want to think that he’s not quite like us, and the Islam label or the Muslim label is a way of expressing that.

DIONNE: And I think there’s another side to it which Kim talked about in that excellent piece—more information per second that any video this year—and that is that President Obama talked quite a lot about religion and his own faith and his own views on the relationship between religion and public life from 2006 to 2008 when he was running for president. I think he’s done a lot less of that in the White House. Now he might defend himself saying I had awfully big problems to deal with out there. Nonetheless, I think that was a missing piece in the way he talked about issues. It was a missing piece partly, I think, on the grounds of persuasion; that providing an underlying philosophical rationale for what he was doing would have helped him, I think, in these two years. But also it’s a sort of a missing piece of who he is, and I think he does need to talk more about it. And it’s not just that minority that sees him as Muslim. I think there’s a minority that dislikes President Obama that would say almost anything about him. But there’s a larger group that just doesn’t have a sense of exactly who he is in this area, and I think he addressed it really well, I think, his critics believed that, from ’06 to ’08. I think he needs to address is again.

LAWTON: And it showed up in issues such as the health care debate or the economic issues, where a lot of times during the campaign trail he would use the phrase “we are our brothers’ keepers, we are our sisters’ keepers.” He would frame issues like health care as a moral issue and use sometimes religious language to talk about that, and he hasn’t done that as much in the Oval Office, and that has frustrated faith-based activists on the ground who believe that and who use that kind of language to mobilize their own people.

ABERNETHY: The recession continues and hurts everybody, and not least churches. Anybody want to talk about what the job problem has meant in churches?

LAWTON: Well, they’re having to do more to help people in their congregations. A lot of food banks and faith-based social services are saying they are seeing more and more people coming to them. People, middle-class people who’d never gone to a food bank before in their lives are now having to do that because of the ongoing economic problems, and at the same time religious institutions, like everybody else, are making budget cuts and slashing staff because of the difficulties.

ABERNETHY: Pastors, assistant pastors, associate pastors out of work.

LAWTON: A lot of congregations talk about that, really cutting back.

ECKSTROM: And what I’m hearing from clergy is that the recession that began in 2008 is actually now sort of catching up in reality with people as they are making their pledge payments for 2011 or going forward, where they are saying I’d like to pledge the same that I did last year but my husband just lost his job or we just don’t have as much money this year. So there’s going to be some difficult choices facing American congregations going forward from here about how they balance lower income from the pews with demand increase for services.

DIONNE: I was so struck in Kim’s piece that she kept coming back to what religious institutions are doing in the charitable sphere, whether it’s for the unemployed here or the suffering folks in Pakistan, and I think sort of one of the good news stories of the year was the publication of a book called “American Grace” by Bob Putnam of Harvard, David Campbell of Notre Dame, where they found that American—first of all, there is an enormous amount of charity that comes out of the religious community in America and that people connected to religious institutions seem to have more of a proclivity toward doing that, and that there is a kind of built-in religious tolerance in the country because of our religious diversity. It was actually a very optimistic book about the nature of religion in America, and I think Kim’s piece kind of underscored that.

ABERNETHY: Kevin, social issues. Don’t ask don’t tell was repealed. Proposition 8—I don’t know where that stands; maybe you do. Talk about those a little bit.

ECKSTROM: It was a significant year for the gay movement in all of its various forms. Gay and lesbian soldiers will now be able to serve in the military openly. On the marriage front, you had a federal court strike down California’s ban on gay marriage, and I think the most significant and often overlooked part of that ruling was that the judge said that religious feelings about homosexuality, religious bias if you will, is not enough to legislate on—that whatever your religious feelings are on the issue, that that’s not enough when it comes to civil rights, and that’s a fairly significant finding, and he found it as a finding of law, a finding of fact—that it wasn’t disputable, and that’s going to be going forward. But you also see in the sort of conservative resurgence that there’s a lot of resistance to going too fast on this issue. And so you’ll see, like in New Hampshire, where the Republicans have regained control of the legislature, they might try to repeal the gay marriage law there that’s a couple years old. You saw judges in Iowa who lost their jobs because they voted in favor of gay marriage last year. So it’s—this issue is always sort of two steps forward, one step back.

LAWTON: It’s been a difficult issue for a lot of people in the religious community whose religious beliefs teach that homosexuality is a sin, and that rubs up against civil rights and so you get to this very difficult place. So I was struck this past year by how people were examining their rhetoric, and you had the anti-gay bullying, the very tragic cases of young gay people committing suicide, and then people in the religious community looking at their rhetoric to say is it possible to oppose homosexuality without being a bully or appearing to be discriminating, and it’s a very difficult issue for a lot of people in the religious community, and how that gets worked out in society has been a challenge and will continue to be so.

ABERNETHY: And E.J., we had this interesting split within the Catholic Church this past year over the health care bill and the bishops on one side and the Catholic Health Association on the other—a lot of nuns.

DIONNE: This was a huge split. I just want to go back to the gay issue for one moment. The passage of don’t ask, don’t tell—it’s hard, I think, to fully appreciate how big a move that is. Think of where we were 15 years ago, and it passed because a number of Republican senators decided that a) they were for it on principal, but b) this is now the more popular position in the country. So we still have a lot of arguments over gay marriage, but the status of gay people has changed radically in this country in a very short time. To go to your question, this was a huge fight in the Catholic Church, and it’s going to have repercussions, where you really had a dispute over what the bill actually said. You had the Catholic bishops insisting that the language in the bill could still lead to federal financing of abortion. You had the Catholic Health Care Association, which is pro-life, and quite a large group of nuns who are also pro-life, saying we looked at this language; this bill does not finance abortion. And I think this has sort of implications for which side will the Catholic Church be on in a lot of other fights. Catholic social teaching, there’s always been a kind of amalgam: very pro-life on abortion but very much in favor of social justice. In this bill those two kind of collided. The Catholic Health Association said there is no conflict here, and I think you’re going to see a lot more arguments in the church about this in the coming several years.

ABERNETHY: And back to what you were saying before, Kevin. There’s a difference, isn’t there, between being for don’t ask don’t tell and on the other hand having that spill over into gay marriage. There’s a lot of resistance to gay marriage.

ECKSTROM: That’s right. There has been a 30-point shift in the last 15 or so years on the question of gays in the military. The shift on whether or not gays should be allowed to be married is somewhere more like in the five to ten range. It’s still very on the border of being a majority or minority of Americans who support it.

DIONNE: Although you still now have a substantial majority who support either gay marriage or civil unions. Civil unions in a very short time has gone from being a rather advanced or very liberal position to being a kind of middle-of-the-road position.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, quickly, are the Episcopalians still divided over gay bishops?

LAWTON: Many, many mainline Protestant denominations have been very divided over issues surrounding homosexuality/ Not just gay bishops—whether gay clergy can be in the pulpit, and gay marriage, whether their clergy can actually perform a same-sex marriage. So this has been and will continue to be a very difficult issue for many religious groups.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up. I wanted to ask each of you as you look back on the year whether you see something that we didn’t pay enough attention to—underreported. Who wants to begin? Kim?

LAWTON: Well, I was very struck by the Gulf oil spill and how that was an occasion for many conservative religious people to get a little more environmentally friendly. You saw Southern Baptists and others very struck by that tragedy and taking a look at some of their environmental positions.

ABERNETHY: Kevin?

ECKSTROM: I was struck by the change in rhetoric from the Mormon Church, actually, on the gay issue, where after the Prop 8 ruling came out and the gay bullying came, the church said, you know, we’ve been discriminated against in the past. We need to be much more careful about how we discriminate.

ABERNETHY: E.J.?

DIONNE: The decline of traditional culture-war politics on the one side and the rise of a different kind of cultural fight around immigration, Islam, Hispanics. I think that’s a shift we are going to be thinking about for a long time.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to you, many thanks. Our time is up. Many thanks to E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and Kim Lawton of this program.

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DVD: “Marriage is reaffirmed each time a man and woman choose to make each other husband and wife…”

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Just weeks before upcoming statewide elections, Minnesota’s Catholic bishops, spearheaded by John Nienstedt of Minneapolis-St Paul, sent this DVD to every Catholic household in the state—400,000 in all at a cost of one million dollars, funded by an anonymous donation.

DVD: “At best, so-called ‘same-sex marriage’ is an untested social experiment, and at worst, it poses a dangerous risk with potentially far-reaching consequences.”

DE SAM LAZARO: Critics of Archbishop Nienstedt take issue with many of his assertions in the DVD, but they also question the timing of the DVD campaign, coming as it does just prior to the elections.

MARY LYNN MURPHY (Catholic Rainbow Parents): He is playing partisan politics from a tax-exempt pulpit. That is what he is doing. He skirts that issue because he doesn’t name a specific candidate, but he is in fact lobbying, right now. This is the time for the election. We all know that. He knows that. I think that’s very inappropriate, and he’s manipulating his flock in doing that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Of the three major party candidates for governor, only one—Republican Tom Emmer—supports an amendment to the state constitution that Nienstedt wants that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. While insisting that he isn’t endorsing Emmer, the archbishop made his preference clear.

DVD: “Marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and to protect this truth, it is time in Minnesota to let the people speak.”

DE SAM LAZARO: Would it have been more prudent or less controversial to have a longer conversation about this without the election looming to complicate matters?

REV. DAVID MCCAULEY (Minnesota Catholic Conference): I don’t know that we can answer that question.

DE SAM LAZARO: Father David McCauley of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, which represents the bishops, says as religious leaders they have a responsibility to speak out on timely moral issues of the day.

MCCAULEY: Thirty-one states have addressed the topic of gay marriage, and there can be no denial that it has become very much a topic of conversation in both national and state conversation, and I can see why they would want to make Catholic people aware of Catholic teaching at this time and culture.

DE SAM LAZARO: So far some 2500 people turned their DVDs in to a group that promised to bring them back to the bishop. Another 1000 were returned to sender directly and hundreds to a local artist creating a sculpture with them. Among the most vigorous opponents are Michael Bayly with a group representing Catholics from sexual minorities and Mary Lynn Murphy with a group called Catholics Rainbow Parents.

MURPHY: In those DVDs he says straight out that our children are second-class citizens—the parents of gay children—our kids are second-class citizens and don’t deserve the rights that other American have.

MICHAEL BAYLY: Now some would say that, oh, if they were speaking out on immigration reform or civil rights wouldn’t you think that that would be an appropriate thing for them to do, and of course I would. But the difference I see is that in all of those cases, the efforts to speak out, the end result is to broaden the circle, to expand the circle, and to include others in, whereas in this case, with the anti-gay marriage campaign, they’re seeking to exclude a huge part of the population, not just Catholics.

DVD: “The Church’s teaching on marriage is not a condemnation of homosexual persons as human beings. It is simply a reflection not only of the scriptures, but of the unique, procreative nature of the male-female bond.”

MCCAULEY: The teachings of the church regarding sexuality are the same for heterosexual people as they are for gay people. The church has always stated that the genital expression of sexuality is limited to those who are married, who have entered into that solemn covenant with one another to be faithful and to be supportive of one another and are open to share in God’s work of creation and that those things are not possible in a gay marriage.

DE SAM LAZARO: Nienstedt has long been outspoken on the issue of gay marriage, often battling in public with gay activists like Bayly. But Bayly says that debate has widened.

BAYLY: It’s no longer the usual suspects who are, you know, talking about this. It’s the rank-and-file Catholics, and they’re doing it, you know, by the hundreds and perhaps by the thousands within this archdiocese.

DE SAM LAZARO: One of those Catholics is Father Michael Tegeder, who ministers to a suburban Twin Cities parish. In a public letter he took issue with the archbishop’s contention that gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage. He says the real threat to marriage is poverty.

REV. MICHAEL TEGEDER: The political candidates don’t need that kind of issue out there when we’re faced with other real significant issues that they can do something about. The constitutional amendments are very unrealistic. It’s not going to happen.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says the response from parishioners and others has been overwhelmingly positive, even from some unlikely places.

TEGEDER: They’re coming from such hotbeds of radicalism like Ramsey, Minnesota; Montgomery, Minnesota; Hastings, Minnesota.

DE SAM LAZARO: Surveys show that Catholics are almost evenly divided on gay marriage, although a clear majority now favors civil unions.

TEGEDER: I have a responsibility to my parishioners to speak, you know, for their concerns. So often in these cases if I don’t say something, I hear from my parishioners saying you are the pastor. You are the priest. You are to speak for us.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tegeder has not been reprimanded by the archbishop, but Nienstedt turned down Tegeder’s request that he meet with concerned Catholics.

TEGEDER: We have a lot of people who are in same-sex relationships in our communities, our Catholic communities, and the DVD campaign was very hurtful to them and to their families and friends and to many other Catholics.

DE SAM LAZARO: In an editorial, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said, “The church’s tax-exempt status could be threatened if it directly endorsed candidates. But instead it’s endorsing a policy outcome that’s entirely consistent with its theology in the same way Catholics have campaigned for decades to outlaw abortion.” But even though it’s generated controversy, most political analysts say the DVD campaign won’t have much impact on the election outcome. Most voters seem far more concerned about the economy.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in St. Paul.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The Tea Party movement has been on the march this election season with its message of reclaiming America through limited government, fiscal responsibility, and a free market. At rallies across the country, Tea Party activists reverently invoke the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. The focus is firmly on economics, with no mention of hot-button social issues like abortion or gay marriage. Yet the Tea Party has had great appeal for religious conservatives.

REV C.L. BRYANT (Adjunct Fellow, FreedomWorks): It is the people in our congregations who pay the taxes. That’s what makes it religious.

LAWTON: Rev. C.L. Bryant is a Baptist pastor from Louisiana and an adjunct fellow with FreedomWorks, one of the leading Tea Party grassroots groups. Before the Tea Party march in Washington, DC last month, Bryant led an optional nondenominational prayer service on the Mall.

BRYANT: Our rights don’t come from Republicans. Our rights don’t come from Democrats. Our rights come from our Creator. That’s where God comes in, and God has always been in the mix when we talk about America.

LAWTON: There have been longstanding tensions in American politics between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Tea Party leaders emphasize that theirs is a secular grassroots conservative movement. But significant involvement from religious right activists has raised new questions about whether those tensions have been overcome and what agenda will take priority after the election.

PROFESSOR MARK ROZELL (George Mason University): There are a lot of Tea Party activists who I would characterize as much more libertarian in bent than socially conservative. They’re really concerned about big government and reducing government size and scope in our society more than they’re interested in the social issues agenda. But there are other Tea Party activists who combine both fiscal and social conservatism.

REV. RICHARD CIZIK (New Evangelical Partnership): The Tea Party leadership that’s libertarian and the conservative Republican evangelicals who don’t like Obama—they have an agreement here. But what I would say to the evangelicals who have joined this movement: be careful, you will be used.

LAWTON: According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, 11 percent of Americans consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, and 47 percent of them are Christian conservatives.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-Minnesota, speaking at Values Voter Summit): As for me, I prefer tea parties, just so you know.

LAWTON: The Tea Party had a highly visible role at the Values Voter Summit in Washington last month, an annual gathering of religious conservatives that always gives strong emphasis to social issues like abortion and gay marriage. One of the most popular speakers was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a favorite at many Tea Party rallies.

SEN. JIM DEMINT (R-South Carolina): The fact is you cannot be a real fiscal conservative if you do not understand the value of having a culture that’s based on values.

LAWTON: During one panel discussion, several local Tea Party activists said it was their Christian faith that compelled them to get involved with the movement.

KATY ABRAM (Tea Party Activist): For about two weeks, I woke up about 3:00 in the morning every morning, and I’m really convinced that it was God speaking to me every single night.

LAWTON: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a sponsor of the Values Voter Summit, says there is a natural overlap between his movement and the Tea Party.

TONY PERKINS (President, Family Research Council): I’m not trying to turn the Tea Party into, you know, what we do, and they are not trying to turn us into what they do. We complement one another, and we work together because we have a common vision of responsible government, individual responsibility, and a stable society.

LAWTON: Perkins says social conservatives who are part of the Tea Party haven’t abandoned their core issues. It’s just that in this election, concerns about the economy have taken center stage.

PERKINS: When you look at government spending, rising debt, government expansion, takeovers, I mean, people they’re frightened, they’re scared, they’re frustrated, they’re angry. But there’s also the underlying values issues, the moral issues. For values voters it may be on the screen about the economy, but running in the back is where do these candidates, where do these parties stand on life, on marriage, on family?

LAWTON: Still, some evangelical leaders are uncomfortable with the current emphasis on economics.

REV. RUSSELL MOORE (Dean, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary): I think there are some issues that are transcendent and are more important than other issues. The right to life for the unborn is infinitely more important than the question of how high one’s taxes should be.

CIZIK: I’m opposed to deficits, too, but that’s not what primarily drives me as an evangelical Christian. Limited government? Not really. What I want is a society and a government and its policies to reflect the values I find in Scripture—religious freedom, caring for the poor, caring about justice for all, caring about the least of these. But that’s not what you hear from Tea Party leadership.

LAWTON: Rev. Richard Cizik says he believes religious conservatives are in danger of being exploited by Tea Party leaders who have no intention of ever supporting their social causes.

CIZIK: They’ll take those evangelical votes, and then they will walk away from those people as quickly as a bat of an eye.

LAWTON: George Mason University professor Mark Rozell says similar things have happened before.

ROZELL: Very often in the past religious conservatives have felt burned that they have supported these Republican candidates who focused on the fiscal agenda hoping that those same candidates once elected would support the social issues agenda, and then when those individuals did not the religious conservatives became very discontented, and this has happened time and time again.

LAWTON: There appear to be disagreements within the Tea Party over exactly how to approach social issues and religion. Former congressman Dick Armey, who is chairman of FreedomWorks, has repeatedly said that conservatives are not successful when they focus on what he calls “the wedge issues.” And while several national Tea Party leaders want to avoid God-talk, many in the rank and file don’t shy away from it.

BILLIE TUCKER (Tea Party Activist): And some people say don’t you put God into the Tea Party, Billie, because the minute you do you are going to run a bunch of people off. And I’m saying I’m putting God back into the United States of America again.

LAWTON: Some, like Indiana Republican congressman Mike Pence, tailor their message to their particular audience. At the Values Voter Summit, his speech was laced with references to religion and social issues, but at the Tea Party rally the same week he avoided even a direct reference to the Bible.

REP. MIKE PENCE (R-Indiana, speaking at Tea Party rally): Engraved on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia are words from an ancient text. Those words read, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

LAWTON: Another complicating factor is conservative talk show host and Tea Party icon Glenn Beck, who is rallying for a national revival of faith, honor, and values. He, too, has support from conservative evangelicals who like his open discussion of religion and morality. But Beck is a Mormon, which has also generated controversy among evangelicals.

MOORE: You have a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which evangelical Christianity does not recognize as Christianity at all, who is being presented not just as a political leader but a religious leader, and not just as a religious leader but as the leader of a call to revival, and you have evangelical Christians cheering this and supporting this. That tells me that there is at least a significant segment of evangelical Christianity that has become defined politically rather than theologically and spiritually.

LAWTON: Despite the internal debates, Rozell says in these midterm elections the political bottom line is clear.

ROZELL: Most of these people, even if they disagree with each other as to whether the focus should be social or economic policy, they’re conservatives, and they’re going to vote against the Democratic Party, and that’s ultimately what’s going to count.

LAWTON: The bigger question, he says, is what happens if Tea Party-backed candidates do indeed win.

ROZELL: We learned from the 1994 so-called Republican revolution that it’s easier to be against something than it is to govern.

LAWTON: And agreeing on a post-election political agenda could be the biggest challenge of all.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: California’s gay marriage law remains in legal limbo. The state’s Supreme Court judges have less than two weeks to either uphold or strike down the gay marriage ban known as Proposition 8. Prop 8 passed last Election Day, in large part because Mormon churches mobilized for it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints withstood blistering criticism from outside the faith. Now resentments are festering inside the Mormon community. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Dr. Pam Chan is an OB/GYN and a lifelong Mormon living in San Francisco. She found herself deeply conflicted when she got the message that her church was going all out in support of Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California.

Dr. PAM CHAN (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): There would be little announcements made here and there, announcements about how we might be able to volunteer our time to, you know, go door-to-door, to hand out flyers, to stand on street corners with signs, and these little announcements, you know, I’d hear and I’d look around and wonder, “Is everyone okay with this? Does anyone besides me see a problem with this?”

Pam Chan

SEVERSON: Ron Packard is a lawyer, a former Mormon bishop and former mayor of Los Altos, California. He is now a councilman who supported Proposition 8 and says it’s extremely rare for the church to get involved in ballot issues.

RON PACKARD (Former Mormon Bishop): I think that they made an exception to their general policy of not getting involved because they have a core concern about the protection of families and the possible disintegration of families in modern society.

SEVERSON: The church’s official position is that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained by God, and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for his children. Mormons believe they are led by a modern-day prophet who receives revelations from God, and when the prophet speaks members usually follow. But with this issue Dr. Chan discovered that other active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were also strongly opposed to the church’s position on gay marriage.

Dr. CHAN: Our church is the church of Jesus Christ, first and foremost, and my understanding of the Gospel of Christ is that it’s a Gospel of love and acceptance. So it seems like a policy that’s about discrimination, which often goes hand in hand with fear and hatred, not about love and acceptance, and that for me is really troublesome.

SEVERSON: Bob Rees is a retired professor of literature at UCLA, a former Mormon bishop and a church scholar.

BOB REES (Former Mormon Bishop): In reality, this is an issue which has divided our society. It’s divided churches. It’s divided families, and some individuals are divided within themselves.

LISA FAHEY (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): So during the rallies I had some signs that said “Straight and Active Mormon for Marriage Equality” because I wanted to let people know, and I got a lot of attention for that. People came up and shook my hand and hugged me and told me, “Thank you very much.”

SEVERSON: Lisa Fahey and Kim McCall are also active Mormons, also conflicted.

Ms. FAHEY: That’s my whole point for speaking out — letting other people know that you can vote “no” or you can be for gay marriage and still be an active Mormon.

Ron Packard

Mr. PACKARD: The church has a long tradition of encouraging thinking members to not be afraid to speak up — beginning with Brigham Young. He said doesn’t want blind allegiance. He wants people to pray about it, think about it, and come to their own conclusions.

SEVERSON: In the year 2000, a majority of California voters approved a proposition stating that only a marriage between a man and a woman was valid. Eight years later, the California Supreme Court ruled that the ban on gay marriage violated the state’s constitution, and that’s when the drive began to amend the constitution with Proposition 8, and that’s when church leaders sent out a letter to its members calling on them to donate their time and money to an unequivocal moral cause. Although many churches and a majority of Californian’s supported Proposition 8, Mormons were probably the most organized and donated almost half the $19 million generated for the campaign.

Mr. REES: And I think there’s no question that the church’s involvement in this was determinative. Many people were unprepared for the effectiveness of the church in doing what it does. I think the church was probably unprepared for such a strong negative response to its involvement.

SEVERSON: The church may also have been unprepared for the number of members who opposed the church’s proclamation. Members who are still active like Laura Compton, a church organist and mother of two, who operates a Web site called Mormonsformarriage.com. She says the site still gets lots of attention and in the run-up to Proposition 8 was getting thousands of hits a day.

LAURA COMPTON (Mormonsformarriage.com): The comments that we have gotten are a lot of members who say, “Thank you so much for creating this community. I felt so alone.” A lot who said, “Because you have this site, I’m able to continue going to church.” A lot of people who have called us to repentance for what we have been doing, and a lot of outside people who’ve said, “Thank you for showing us that not all Mormons, you know, want to take away our rights to marriage.”

Ms. FAHEY: It’s been really difficult to be a member of the church during this time. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that possibly I should be excommunicated, and that’s really hurt me, because I feel like I’m really a very loving, forgiving person.

Kim McCall and Lisa Fahey

Mr. REES: The most unfortunate thing for me in all of this thing that happened over Proposition 8 was the divisiveness, the acrimony. Each side began in some sense emotionally and spiritually dis-fellowshipping or excommunicating the other side.

SEVERSON: Ron Packard says the most fierce opposition has come from gay rights advocates that have rallied against the church around the nation. He’s says he on a blacklist because he supported Proposition 8.

Mr. PACKARD: There’s some people who’ve lost their jobs because they supported Proposition 8.

SEVERSON (to Mr. Packard): Really?

Mr. PACKARD: Yeah.

KIM MCCALL (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): So one of the dynamics of the church over the last hundred years is to move more and more mainstream. Okay, we looked very sort of un-American. You know, Brigham Young was opposed to the Pledge of Allegiance [Editor's Note: Mr. McCall's statement about Brigham Young is in error. Brigham Young died in 1877. The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892], and we looked really outside the mainstream, and there’s been a, you know, more American than thou now we’re the most patriotic people. Okay, we weren’t very monogamous. Now we’re more monogamous than everybody else. You know, we’ve got to be. You know, we’re so worried about polygamy in our history and how odd it makes us look that maybe we need to overreact.

Mr. REES: I think there is little question that a from a public relations point of view the church has suffered over its involvement in Proposition 8, and I know of people who have had second thoughts about joining the church over this issue. I know some of our missionaries have had a difficult time finding open doors and open hearts because of this.

Mr. PACKARD: A majority of the people of the United States don’t want same-sex marriages. So for the majority we may have, instead of getting a hit we get a halo. Whenever any organization gets involved in the political process, there’s going to be some who consider it a hit and others who feel that they’re a hero.

SEVERSON: Ron Packard says the church does not discriminate against gays, that his niece and some of his friends are gay, and that the church does not have a policy of denying the sacrament to homosexual members. But Lisa Fahey says there are still members who don’t understand what it means to be gay.

Laura Compton

Ms. FAHEY: I even had some friends say that they still think that homosexuality is a choice. I don’t think the church leadership feels that way but members — some members feel that way, wrongly of course.

SEVERSON: Bob Rees says as a bishop he counseled gay and lesbian members who felt they were not wanted in the church.

Mr. REES: We have congregations who are not inclusive of the homosexual members of their congregations. We have families in which brothers and sisters don’t speak to one another over these issues, and I as a Christian, I can’t understand that. It breaks my heart.

SEVERSON: Laura Compton says since Proposition 8 the church leadership has become more flexible, making it known that members can still be in good standing even if they oppose the church’s position.

Ms. COMPTON: This has not challenged my faith, no. My faith is independent of the morality or the politics of gay marriage. It’s deeper. My faith is in a Christ who loves everybody and wants everyone to come to him, and a God that loves the world no matter whether they are Mormon or Muslim or Jewish or Catholic, and wants all of us to be there and all of us to treat each other like we’re brothers and sisters and not like we’re them and us.

Mr. REES: The function of faith communities is to make a home a for us, and I think that many of our Latter-day Saint brothers and sisters feel homeless, because we haven’t created a home for them. But I see that changing. I think there is much more understanding.

SEVERSON: As other states take up the issue of gay marriage, Mormon church leaders this time around have not asked members to get involved. Meanwhile, the California Supreme Court is once again considering the constitutionality of the ban on gay marriage. Their decision is expected soon.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in San Francisco.

Rev. Bear Ride: The church is our home. I was born into the church, baptized into the church, and raised into the church, and went on to be ordained and served the church. So the church is my home, and I can’t imagine where else I’d want to be to get married.

Rev. Sally Craig: I’m delighted that it’s become a civil right that all people in this state can have equally. But I’m even more delighted to be able to be in a church like All Saints (Episcopal Church in Pasadena) that is progressive, Gospel-based, inclusive of all of us and that we can have a church ceremony with our friends and family and church family. It means everything to be here under the watchful eyes of God and the saints above the community all around us in this special community for us.

Rev. Ride: For us, the marriage is–it’s important that it’s a civil contract between two people, and that, of course, is the groundbreaking aspect of this. But it’s also, in our tradition, a covenant between two people who love each other and promise to spend the rest of their lives together caring for each other and being a supportive community one to each other under the eyes of God, you know, in the grace of a caring community. So it’s both things, and that’s why it makes so much sense for us, and it makes perfect sense for us to be married in a church that can be, at the same time, an agent of the state in signing off on the legal contract aspect of it and blessing the covenantal relationship as well.

Rev. Craig: I’m thinking of marriage as a calling or a vocation that invites us to live into all that we are meant to be within community, where others who are in marriages or loving relationships will be reminded of the vows that they have made to each other, and they’ll call us into account as well, and it’s a community-binding, community creating experience.

Rev. Ride: And, additionally, we did have a wonderful commitment service about seven years ago or so at our house that was a house blessing and a commitment service for our relationship. And that was, as I said earlier, was the covenant part of the celebration. We do want to underscore the legal part, because that’s the justice issue. That’s what we’ve been working for, what the community has been working for, what this church has been working for, as a peace and justice church. So this is really significant to us, that our family will be legally recognized and protected just like any other family. There is a great deal of debate, naturally, within the Presbyterian Church and other denominations about the status of marriage. In fact, the General Assembly in the Presbyterian Church will be, again, debating the nature of marriage. At this point it would be a chargeable offense for a Presbyterian minister to officiate at our wedding, a legal wedding, because in the church’s constitution a marriage is a civil contract, it says, between a man and a woman and a covenant between two people who love each other. That’s archaic language now in California, so that’ll be a very fascinating conversation for them to have. We have many Presbyterian friends who are going to be here to celebrate with us–clergy and friends. This congregation is our home now, and we feel very much we’re solidarity members of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. And these people are our pastors and our family. And it feels, it makes perfect sense for us to be in a place where it is completely celebrated and embraced.

Rev. Craig: There are different structures within our denominations that are really worth talking about. But here it is not only welcomed, marriages are not only welcomed, but welcomed also joyfully. The vestry went on stand, I think the day after the state did it, and said we will treat all couples that we believe qualified to marry, marry here. Nothing like that has happened in our denomination

Rev. Ride: I believe that God created us in God’s own image, and that God created us to be in a relationship, and I don’t think that language is prescriptive of who, you know, we should march lock-step with. But, rather, God has created us with love and for love to be with another, to be cherished. You know, I think I really don’t understand the folks who talk about the biblical concept of marriage, because if you look at the Bible there are all sorts of different types of marriage. You know, it’s very common to have multiple wives, or concubines are fine, or a levirate marriage, in which case the wife would be required to marry the man’s brother. You know, I mean that was the law of marriage. So I’m not sure–I think we’re picking and choosing the biblical concept of marriage.

Rev. Craig: I think we don’t feel that there’s a rich conversation at this time about how to read the Bible or how to understand the fundamental meanings of love and justice and relationship and community. It’s better to go forward in faith sure and smiling, I think, than to sit and battle biblical verses. I think something happens when people who love each other walk into the room. You can tell if it’s a good and just and ethical and faithful marriage. You can tell that it was meant to be. We don’t even have to speak, but us and the others that were married yesterday and tomorrow and the day after and the day after will just be living witnesses, to use faith language.

Rev. Ride: I trust that this is a hopeful moment as well as a joyful moment and that people will realize that, you know, like any basic, fundamental human right we can now celebrate this as well, that marriage is, you know, marriage is a human right, and we claim that.

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Rev. Mary Holder Naegeli (San Francisco Presbytery): It’s been a hard and difficult decision [not to perform same sex weddings] on one hand because of the population of the Bay Area, but I have decided not to conduct same sex weddings for several reasons. The first reason really starts with the Bible. It is the book that is our primary authority and speaks for God and speaks God’s will to us, and starting in the garden, the very beginning of the Bible story, we have the account of God creating man and woman, and at the end of that wonderful account, beautiful account of Adam and Eve being created, God says a man shall leave his father and his mother and he shall cleave to his wife and the two will become one flesh. Jesus quotes that verse in Matthew 19 in the Gospel and says the creator said this, which for Jesus to say that means this is direct from God, defining marriage as between a man and a woman. And then the Apostle Paul in his letters also quotes that same passage, which puts tremendous weight on it to define marriage that way. And then on the other hand the scripture negatively says that homosexual behavior cannot express the design of God that was made known at creation, and we have several instances from beginning to end of scripture that make that point. There isn’t any wiggle room, there’s no any softening of that position anywhere. So putting the positive case together with the negative case, I can participate only in marriages between a man and a woman.

The Book of Order speaks to this issue particularly in the Directory for Worship, in the definition of marriage in a description of a marriage ceremony and that aspect of the worship life of the church. So there, of course, it says that we understand marriage to be covenant between a man and woman, and no other arrangement is accommodated for in the Book of Order.

The institution of marriage, in theological terms, really revolves around the concept of covenant, which is a rich biblical word to describe first of all the relationship that God established with those he created — a commitment, a love, a regard for. And when we talk about marriage as a covenant we are talking about two people making that kind of commitment to each other. It’s sort of like there’s a special hold in trapeze that trapeze artists use. They don’t hold hands swinging on a trapeze just like this, because if one lets go the grip is gone, but they make a special kind of grip where each grabs the wrist of the other so that if one lets go there is still a bond. And that’s a really nice picture, I think, of the covenant of marriage.

The Bible says positively about marriage that it is, first of all, created by God, and that’s the verse that I hold very dear, this one in the end of chapter 2 of Genesis, “For a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” Then, and because that’s a reiterated, repeated statement in the scripture two more times, that pretty much is the biblical basis for our understanding of marriage. There are instructions in Paul’s letter about specifics, about roles, whether or not they exist, and the mutuality of marriage, the fact that a person, a married person belongs to his or her spouse. That’s a completely mutual thing. That’s very important in our understanding, biblical understanding, of marriage.

Is gay marriage a sin? Well, we have to take a step back and say that homosexual practice is not God’s design for humanity. Not being God’s design for humanity, having these clear prohibitions in the Scripture make homosexual practice a sin. Homosexual marriage makes permanent a situation that God wants to redeem. That’s one of the big reasons, by the way, why I don’t conduct marriage ceremonies for gay and lesbian people, because why would I, a representative of God, help people make permanent with a vow — I take marriage vows very seriously — but with a vow to make permanent then, seal something that God wouldn’t agree with? God wouldn’t bless that. That’s my basic conscience problem with the whole issue.

The situation that now has been created in the state of California is going to be confusing. Sociologically, there is going to be more and more pressure to not only accept or tolerate, let’s say, something that is not of God’s design, but to promote it and make it normative in the life of Californians, which when you hold a biblical position like I do it makes life really uncomfortable. There are all sorts of issues related to parenthood and adoption, and I can’t even imagine, now this is all pretty new, but that’s going to require a lot of untangling of something that’s gotten confused now.

The Presbyterian Church has business before this assembly to reword the definition of marriage in our Book of Order. It’s possible that the wording could be changed at this assembly but it would have to be ratified by the majority of presbyteries in our country. So nothing can happen that’s instantaneously applicable at this assembly in this regard if it’s a Book of Order change. It’s just like if you were to change the constitution of the United States you’d have to have a majority of states, or probably more than that, actually ratify that. [it is the] same thing in the denomination. I think that there is going to be a vigorous debate. I don’t have a sense at this point of what the folks here are going to do and we’ll find out later in the week. The committee takes it on, has open hearings, listens to a debate, and then later in the week they make a recommendation to the full assembly, which debates it again. So there is a two-phase process here, and anything can happen.

There are three positions I think that clergy hold on the matter of gay marriage. There are people like me, who for biblical reasons, theological constitutional reasons, who are not open to conducting gay marriage. There are people who are all for conducting gay marriages and will do so regardless of what the Presbyterian Church says, and then there are people whose personal feelings may be positive toward conducting gay marriages but wont because it’s unconstitutional in our denomination, and that group of people is in a particularly uncomfortable place, I think. I feel for them because of this, their own personal feeling, it being legal in the state but not legal in the denomination to do so. So there are really three clergy groups I think, and I’m of the first one I mentioned, that I’m not conflicted about it at this time because my beliefs align with what the Book of Order and the confessions say about marriage, and gay marriage is prohibited.