BOB ABERNETHY, host: For decades, religious organizations such as the National Council of Churches, the Catholic bishops, and others have been working with labor organizers to try to improve conditions for farm workers, and there’s been some success, most recently in the tomato fields of south Florida, where immigrants harvest nearly all the winter tomatoes this country grows. Our report is from Saul Gonzales in Immokalee, Florida.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Florida may be better known for its oranges, but it’s tomatoes that rule in the farm fields surrounding the small town of Immokalee. In fact, during the winter months, nearly all of America’s domestically grown tomatoes, still green when they are picked, come from this part of south Florida, and it’s a large and poor immigrant workforce that’s essential in getting that crop from plant to plate.

Tomato harvesting is still very much a “by hand” work? There is no machine that exists that does this?

STEVE MCHAN: That is correct.

GONZALEZ: Steve McHan is harvesting manager for Pacific Tomato Growers, a major producer in Florida.

MCHAN: The production volume from here is somewhere around 1,200 to 1,400 boxes per acre, and we pack 25-pound boxes is what we’re averaging.

GONZALEZ: So it’s industrial scale?

MCHAN: Industrial scale, correct.

GONZALEZ: However, Florida’s tomato industry is a business that’s long been accused of exploiting its workforce through overwork, underpay, and mistreatment. That’s turned these fields into the frontlines of a high profile national campaign to improve the lives of farmworkers.

JORDAN BUCKLEY: People who work in agriculture are among the least paid, least protected workers in the whole country.

GONZALEZ: Jordan Buckley and his colleagues are with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, CIW, and the Interfaith Action Network, which works with faith groups to help farmworkers.

BRIGITTE GYNTHER: For people of faith, for us this is a moral issue. You know, how the people who pick our food our treated.

GONZALEZ: Now to understand the plight of farmworkers you have to know something about their place in America’s industrial food economy.

BUCKLEY: They are some of the poorest workers here in our country, and yet not for a lack of hard work. It’s not some dearth of industriousness. In fact, the reason is because the increasing consolidation of purchasing among retailors. So where you have the fast food and food service and supermarkets squeezing their suppliers and demanding ever cheaper costs for their tomatoes, that’s resulted in growers squeezing their farmworkers, and that’s why farmworkers haven’t seen a real wage increase in upwards of three decades.

GONZALEZ: Florida’s tomato workers are usually paid by how much they pick, traditionally getting about 45 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they fill. That means to make a day’s minimum wage, each worker has to pick two-and-a-half-tons of tomatoes a day. What does that kind of work pay mean for the daily lives of farmworkers and their families? Twenty-eight-year-old Darinal Sales struggles to support his wife and two girls on what he makes in the fields. Because four other farmworkers live in the same dilapidated trailer, his whole family shares one small room.

GONZALEZ: Ustedes viven aqui?

DARINAL SALES: It’s because of the situation at work that we live like this. Our pay just doesn’t last and allow us to live in better way.

GONZALEZ: Immokalee is a town full of young men from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti, many undocumented, who have come here to scratch out a better life for themselves by harvesting Florida’s tomato crops. Some of them end up victims of the industry’s worst abuses, including incidents of modern day slavery.

BUCKLEY: There have also now been nine federally prosecuted slavery operations in just the last 14 years here in Florida agriculture.

GONZALEZ: Slavery?

BUCKLEY: Yeah, literal slavery. Right here on Third and Boston we go down four blocks. That’s the site where workers were locked in the back of a cargo truck, literally shackled. We saw bruises on their wrists where they had been literally restrained by their employers.

GONZALEZ: Yet despite the dangers and pay, farmhands are eager to work. To see how eager, you’ve got to get up very early. Every morning in the pre-dawn hours this parking lot in downtown Immokalee becomes a giant open-air labor market. Hundreds of farmworkers come here looking to make contact with labor bosses. If they’re lucky they’ll be picked for another hard day of work in the tomato fields. The men and women selected are the ones boarding buses that take them to the fields. It’s in this parking lot that we met Aurelia Hinajosa, who’s worked in Immokalee’s tomato fields for nearly 30 years.

AURELIA HINAJOSA: Americans really like their vegetables and fruits, and who is going to pick it? The people born in this country have better kinds of work, and they’re not going to go to the fields.

GONZALEZ: But things are slowly starting to get better for Florida’s tomato field workers. Last year, after more than a decade of patient organizing work, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers reached a landmark agreement with growers and corporate tomato buyers like McDonalds and Burger King. The agreement gives farmworkers a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick. Now that doesn’t sound like much, but that one cent increase translates into an additional 32 cents for every bucket picked by workers. That in turn will boost each farmhand’s pay by about $5,000 a year.

BUCKLEY: We are basically on the threshold of entering into this new industry in having rights protected and their being this consensus among buyers that we demand humane labor conditions in our supply chain.

GONZALEZ: The agreement has also made some in Florida’s powerful tomato industry question their past actions and attitudes.

SARAH GOLDBERGER: Historically, it has not been the poster child for good behavior and good treatment of its workers.

GONZALEZ: You admit to that?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Sarah Goldberger is a spokesperson for Pacific Tomato Growers. She says the agreement between workers and the tomato industry has replaced tension with cooperation.

GOLDBERGER: It has been so non-adversarial. It is a pleasure, quite honestly.

GONZALEZ: That’s a big change?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Other changes in the fields, like this one owned by Pacific Tomato, include greater access to drinking water and more rest periods, regular bathroom breaks, and a zero tolerance for verbal abuse and sexual harassment by field bosses. Now that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and it allies have an agreement, they’re spreading the word about it. The small community radio station they run in Immokalee regularly tells workers listening about their rights, pay, and future organizing plans.

Radio (In Spanish): The campaign to improve the work conditions and pay in the state of Florida.

GONZALEZ: Worker advocate and former field hand Lucas Benitez met us at the early morning labor gathering to talk about how important these changes are to the men and women who pick America’s tomato crop.

LUCAS BENITEZ: That’s what we want, work with dignity. Where every worker, every person who goes to the fields feels pride in being part of the agricultural industry that is putting food on millions of tables every day and that the worker is getting paid enough to put food on the table of his own home.

GONZALEZ: However the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and its allies in religious and faith groups say they have much work left to do. That includes a new national campaign focused on  supermarket chains which have declined to  participate in the penny-per-pound pay agreement.

BUCKLEY: There are three principal sectors of tomato retail: fast food, food service, and supermarkets, and now the leaders of the fast food industry are on board. The leaders of the food service industry are on board. All that remains are the supermarkets.

GONZALEZ: To keep pressure on the stores and to make sure gains are protected, farmworkers regularly reach out to religious leaders and congregations.

And so I’m joined by Darinal and Oscar from the CIW.

GONZALEZ: This morning, Jordan and workers from Immokalee, including Darinal Sales, are addressing a Presbyterian church in Naples, Florida. These speaking engagements are part of a sustained campaign to get people of faith thinking about their fairness and justice when they sit down to eat. Brigitte Gynther of Interfaith Action has been working in Immokalee for eight years on behalf of workers.

GYNTHER: You know, there are many times when we say grace we are grateful for the food on our plates. But where did that food travel? Who picked it? How did it get to us? And that is something we don’t often think about. But I think as people of faith we are called to think about the connections between us and the people who toil in the fields day in and day out to put food our plates.

GONZALEZ: For the men and women who pick Florida’s tomatoes their most important harvest has been some measure of justice and respect.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Saul Gonzalez in Immokalee, Florida.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: On Thursday (November 1), many Christians mark All Saints Day, and on Friday (November 2), All Souls Day honors the saints and faithful who have died. During this time, many Latinos also observe what they call the Day of the Dead, when it’s believed the spirits of the departed return to Earth. There are different traditions for this across Latin America, and Hispanics in the U.S. are celebrating as well.

KIM LAWTON: In many communities, Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, is a joyful public event, with parades celebrating the belief that, for this one day every year, the spirits of loved ones have returned. Families often hold private observances as well.

ROCIO BERMUDEZ (speaking Spanish): Estamos de fiesta. Es una fiesta.

LUIS BERMUDEZ (translating): We are in a festive mode right now. It’s a party.

LAWTON: In Rockville Maryland, Rocio and Luis Bermudez incorporate their Roman Catholic faith with their Mexican-American traditions, building a special altar in their home. On the altar they place pictures of their deceased family members and a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Candles are lit to help the spirits find their way down from heaven. Water is put out to replenish the thirsty souls after their long journey. And since it’s a party, the altar is decorated with colorful papers and treats.

Mr. BERMUDEZ: The mango, the water, the tequila — it’s all an enticement so that they will come, and when they come they’ll have their favorite foods that they can celebrate with us.

LAWTON: When the altar is finished, the family offers prayers for both the living and the dead.

Mr. BERMUDEZ: We then pray to the Virgin Mary, to the saints, and to the Lord so that they’re with us, as well as our loved ones, as a sign of respect for God.

LAWTON: The Bermudez family says the Day of the Dead ritual reflects the Catholic Church’s teachings about life and death.

Mr. BERMUDEZ: So the belief is that when we die our body physically isn’t here, but our spirit still lives on forever. We actually are reborn. So that’s what we celebrate. The spirit doesn’t die, it lives on.

LAWTON: For the Bermudez family, that’s something to celebrate every year.

Mr. BERMUDEZ: I believe that when I go and I die, my spirit is going to go to heaven, and then every year I’ll be coming back on the Day of the Dead to visit down here to my loved ones.

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.

LEONARD DINNERSTEIN (Department of History, University of Arizona): People don’t like “the other” and in times of crisis, in times of great discontent, the minority group de jour is victimized as being the source of all the problems and also they have lower status so you can dump on them and most of your contemporaries agree with you.

High school students at demonstration: Our education is under attack. What do we do? Fight back.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: These high school students feel dumped on. They are protesting a new Arizona law that would cut the Tucson school district’s budget by $36 million a year if the district doesn’t stop the way it’s allegedly teaching its Mexican-American studies classes. State superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne wrote part of the law himself.

TOM HORNE: It says that you can’t have courses that are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnicity or that arouse resentment against other ethnicities. That’s the essence of it.

SEVERSON: The law also says ethnic studies classes cannot advocate ethnic solidarity or teach the overthrow of the US government. Horne was just elected Arizona attorney general after eight years as the state’s school chief. Each year he says he became more determined to shut down Tucson’s ethic studies program.

HORNE: It was necessary because in the Tucson Unified School District they were dividing kids up by race. They had Raza studies for the Mexican kids—La Raza, as you know, means “the race” in Spanish; African-American studies for the African-American kids; Indian studies for the Native-American kids, Asian Studies for the Asian kids. To me it sounds like the Old South dividing kids up by race that way.

SEVERSON: His primary witness against Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program is John Ward, who taught the class back in 2003 until, he says, he was pushed aside and eventually quit. Ward is Hispanic himself.

JOHN WARD: I think clearly their purpose was to create the next generation of ethnic radicals who could hit the pavement. They simply wanted to spread this message in a fertile classroom.

HORNE: They teach kids that they live in occupied Mexico, that the United States is run by a clique of white racist imperialist people that want to oppress Latinos.

SEVERSON: Abel Morado is the principal of the Tucson Magnet High School.

ABEL MORADO: If he believes that we are putting kids in a position to mistrust their fellow student and the authority figures in their life, then there’s not much I can say about that other than to say, well, you may be describing a program, but you’re not describing this one.

SEVERSON: Julio Cammarota is an associate professor of Mexican-American studies at the University of Arizona, where the faculty senate unanimously approved a resolution calling the law “distasteful” and “disturbing.” He says Horne has never attended an ethnic studies class in eight years.

JULIO CAMMAROTA (College of Education, University of Arizona): If he came to the classroom he would see that the classrooms are diverse. Students spend quite a bit of time learning how to respect each other’s cultures and cultural differences, so there is not this idea that one culture is superior to another, and that’s what he’s sort of implying, that there is cultural superiority of one group over the other. That’s ridiculous.

SEVERSON: This is a Mexican-American studies class at one of six high schools in the Tucson district. The class focuses on history and current affairs. The subject on this day was Native American Indian history. The teacher is Maria Frederico Brummer.

MARIA FREDERICO BRUMMER: I think it’s important for every one of our students to be strong citizens and knowing that they have a commitment to democracy, and part of that commitment is knowing exactly where our country is coming from, our history. Some of it might be negative and it’s our responsibility not to repeat any part of that negative history again

SEVERSON: Superintendent Horne says the classes are dividing kids by race, but not all the kids in this class were Hispanic, who make up over 60 percent of Tucson’s high school students. This is 15-year-old Shelbi Plank.

SHELBI PLANK: If you’re in a normal American history class, you learn the white perspective, like, and if you’re in the ethnic studies class you learn from the different races perspective, like from Asians you learn about how they have started their own perspective on things.

CAMMAROTA: And they’re not by far the best students at the school, but because of these courses they tend to do better than their peers at their school. They end up doing better. They end up scoring better on standardized tests, they end up graduating at a very high rate, they end up going on to college.

SEVERSON: Superintendent Horne disagrees with just how successful the program has been, but it does seem to have created some enthusiasm with the students. This is sixteen- year-old Carmen Camacho.

CARMEN CAMACHO: I love that class. I’m not going to lie to you. I love that class.

SEVERSON: Why do you love it?

CAMACHO: It’s just like you get to learn other people’s culture. You get to learn where other people came from.

SEVERSON: John Ward thinks the part of the new law that prohibits teaching the overthrow of America is not overreaching.

(speaking to John Ward): Do you think they were actually teaching that in these classes?

WARD: I do. When they teach that the entire governmental system is solely the product of the white power structure and that these students essentially have to resist that, the end result is that you essentially have to either totally overthrow or in some way totally remake the government.

CAMMAROTA: That’s treason, and we wouldn’t be teaching students to overthrow and be traitors of their country. We actually teach students to actually love the country, love to be here and be able to participate and contribute to this country.

SEVERSON: The turmoil here in Arizona over Hispanic issues like immigration and ethnic studies can be found in states throughout the US. In 2009 alone, over 200 state laws were passed aimed primarily at undocumented Hispanics. Ten states are now considering legislation fashioned after Arizona’s tough immigration law. It is, as they say, a hot-button issue.

Leonard Dinnerstein is an author and retired history professor at the University of Arizona. He says historically the finger-pointing in Arizona and other states, mostly directed against Hispanics, is nothing new.

DINNERSTEIN: So if you want to go through history with the ethnic groups, when the Scots Irish came, in colonial America they sent them out to the frontier because nobody wanted to live near the Scots Irish. They were irascible. The biggest prejudice in this country aside from anti-black and anti-Indian was anti-Catholic.

SEVERSON: He says one of the factors in today’s climate is that people feel vulnerable and fearful.

DINNERSTEIN: When people are unhappy they look for scapegoats: I’m not unhappy because of me, I’m unhappy because “those people” make me unhappy.

SEVERSON: One of the states considering an immigration law like the one in Arizona is Utah. But recently a group of civic and religious leaders created a compact http://utahcompact.com/ asking the legislature to consider more humane legislation. The Mormon Church supports it. So does Catholic Bishop John Wester.

REV. JOHN WESTER (Bishop of Salt Lake City and Chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration): My hope would be that religion can encourage people to look into the issues for themselves and to take a proactive, responsible position. All of us have a responsibility as citizens to weigh in on this and to be informed, not just to believe what you hear necessarily next door, but to really look into the issues, and then to really, to put a human face and to ask the question why are the immigrants here? What is it that’s driving them here? What do we need to do to solve this question? It’s a very complicated question.

SEVERSON: While the grownups fight it out in Arizona, the kids who attend ethnic studies are learning how democracy works.

CAMACHO: The government needs to really see what this class is about, and not just talking and saying, oh, it’s just, you know, negative stuff, because it’s not.

SEVERSON: Tucson educators say they don’t intend to change the way they are teaching because, they say, they’re not teaching anything wrong. Several have filed a suit against Superintendent Horne. The new law takes effect December 31.

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KIM LAWTON, anchor: A tense national debate about racial profiling has continued since Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested in his Cambridge home for disorderly conduct. Gates, who is African-American, was arrested by Sergeant James Crowley, a white officer who had responded to a 9-11 call about a possible break-in. The controversy intensified when President Obama said the police “acted stupidly” when they arrested Gates. The president later said he regretted his choice of words and he hosted both Gates and Crowley at the White House Thursday for a conciliatory beer. The incident and the ensuing debate show how divisive racial issues can be in this country.  Even though America has elected its first black president, efforts toward racial integration are often still fraught with difficulties, not least in churches where it’s been said that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: If something seems odd or unusual about these worshippers, maybe it’s the diversity, all the different colors and nationalities of their faces. This is the Wilcrest Baptist Church in Houston, and Pastor Rodney Woo couldn’t be more proud of the cultural and racial mix of his congregation.

Pastor RODNEY WOO (Wilcrest Baptist Church, Houston, TX): I think my main passion is to get people ready for heaven. I think a lot of our people are going to go into culture shock when they get to heaven, and they get to sit next to somebody that they didn’t maybe sit with while they were here on earth. So we’re trying to get them acclimated a little bit.

SEVERSON: Assuming Pastor Woo is right, there are a lot of congregations that need to get acclimated. A recent study found that only 7 percent of churches in the US are integrated. This comes as no surprise to Ohio State sociology professor Korie Edwards, author of the book “The Elusive Dream.”

Professor KORIE EDWARDS (Sociology Department, Ohio State University and Author, “The Elusive Dream”): We’re segregated in housing. Even the job market is segregated, and we end up going to churches with people who look like us.

Professor Michael Emerson

Professor MICHAEL EMERSON (Sociology Department, Rice University): Sometimes,you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I want to — I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.”

SEVERSON: Rice University sociology professor Michael Emerson, who authored the study on the make-up of churches in the US, says racial separation inside most churches is even more pronounced than it is outside for a number of reasons.

Prof. EMERSON: What we found in the study is that churches are 10 times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in.

SEVERSON: Emerson also found that churches in the South were the least integrated, partly because African Americans are concerned about whites taking over their congregation.

Prof. EMERSON: That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate them. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power, so they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Prof. EDWARDS: And so what happens in these congregations where you have whites and blacks, even though they may be well intended, people coming together and wanting to do the Christian thing, wanting to serve God together, you’re going to find that these kinds of issues that occur outside of the church come into the church.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rufus Smith of the City of Refuge Church in Houston is one of very few African Americans who lead an interracial church. Smith says when he took over the evangelical Presbyterian congregation it was mostly white, bored, and dwindling. He said he would only agree to be pastor if members promised to integrate.

Pastor Rufus Smith

SEVERSON: Today the church is about 45 percent white, 45 percent black, and the rest Hispanic and Asian. But Pastor Smith says the “grand experience” hasn’t always been pleasant.

Pastor SMITH: You’re certainly up against the natural stereotypes. You’re up against ignorance. You’re up against some hard-heartedness and, you know, some outright evil with respect to some people.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rodney Woo, half Chinese, grew up in a black neighborhood, went to an all-white church, and married his Hispanic childhood sweetheart.

Pastor WOO (preaching): The poor rich. Let me tell you who they are. They are the people who have a lot of money and nothing else.

SEVERSON: When he came here, the church had only two black members out of 180. Today Wilcrest Baptist has 500 members divided almost equally among whites, blacks, and Hispanics, with the remainder made up of Asians. Woo says he didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be integrating his church.

Pastor Rodney Woo

Pastor WOO: When we started a lot of people were going, “Ah, this is making me feel uncomfortable.” Whether the kids were in the nursery together, or their kids were in the young group, a lot of parents were fearful that their kids might start dating somebody that was a different race.

Prof. EMERSON: In the beginning stages, there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion. A lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that, it becomes something that people just a lot of times will say, “I couldn’t live without it.”

Pastor SMITH (preaching): Ask me how I feel.

CONGREGATION (responding): How do you feel?

Pastor SMITH: If I was any better, I would have to be twins, and that’s the truth if I ever told it.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rufus Smith has succeeded in not only integrating his church racially. His congregation comes from all walks of life. When it grew, he deliberately located the church between affluent and low-income neighborhoods. Carol Vance, a former district attorney, was one of the founding members.

CAROL VANCE (Founding Member, City of Refuge Church): We picked Rufus because he’s a great pastor, not because he’s black. But I think it’s wonderful that he is, because we’re sitting right here on the edge, and I sort of like to think of our church as the “bridge over troubled waters.”

Pastor SMITH: To me, one of the true tests of the power of the Gospel is to unify people across socio-economic, racial lines, which is what the heart of Christianity is and was.

SEVERSON: Karen Giesen has a doctorate in theology. She says she grew up in a white church where people bowed their head, folded their hands, and worshipped quietly — very different from what she experiences at City of Refuge.

KAREN GIESEN (Congregation Member, City of Refugee Church): The worship style is an issue. None of us are right in probably our heart language style. We’re all making a sacrifice to be there. It’s a mix. A lot of people go looking for churches saying, “I am looking for the one that ministers to me,” and to go here we’ve obviously all made a choice that we want to serve there.

SEVERSON: Rebecca Miller wants to be a pastor. She says she searched to find a church that felt like a community.

REBECCA MILLER (Congregation Member, City of Refuge Church): People worship the way the spirit leads them to worship. I really don’t think that there is anybody saying you can’t shout, you can’t scream, you can’t say “hallelujah” or you can’t clap your hands. It’s not the typical Presbyterian “you can’t raise your hands” church.

Pastor WOO: Where we really changed, and we saw the growth, grow at exponentially, was when the church became less than 50 percent white, and so there was no majority group, and that just changed the entire mindset.

SEVERSON: Church guitarist Jim Kruse married a Hispanic and adopted a Hispanic child. He says he’s learning a few things about his own prejudice.

JIM KRUSE (Guitarist, Wilcrest Baptist Church): What we’re learning is that you may not come to it thinking you are prejudiced. You may be seriously trying not to be prejudiced. But then you find out the things you are doing come across as prejudiced. So I think a lot of our effort has been to learn to relax, to let people be people.

SEVERSON: It would be difficult to find a more graphic example of religion bridging a racial divide than Dwight Pryor and Rick Taylor. Taylor describes himself as a reformed “redneck.”

RICK TAYLOR (Congregation Member, Wilcrest Baptist Church): From where I come from, to be honest, I was taught to hate people like Dwight and to not have anything to do with them and that they were less than I was, and I believed that most of my life. I truly did. But the Lord has a way of showing you your prejudices in your life.

Dwight Pryor and Rick Taylor

DWIGHT PRYOR (Congregation Member, Wilcrest Baptist Church): I grew up in North Mississippi. As a little kid on those school buses, watching those people would shout racist names at me, and some of them were deacons and pastors in our community. It left a cold chill in my heart — a hatred.

SEVERSON: Dwight is a control systems designer, and Rick is a retired general contractor. The bond that has grown between them is plain to see.

Mr. TAYLOR: Racism colors the truth. It makes people not look at other people as if they were human. It goes that deep. It truly does, and Christ teaches us that we are all the same.

SEVERSON (to Prof. Emerson): Are churches that integrate richer because they did it?

Prof. EMERSON: Yeah. I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, “It’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion.”

SEVERSON: And they will say, if they’re like Dwight and Rick, that church integration may not always come easy, but it comes with rich rewards and improbable friendships. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Houston.

Professor Michael Emerson

Q: Fewer than ten percent of churches in America are integrated.

A: Yeah, that comes from our research here, actually.

Q: The number is that low?

A: Yeah, seven percent. That’s what it is.

Q: Were you surprised at that?

A: Yes. Well, yes and no. But yeah, that’s pretty low.

Q: Why? What are the reasons for its being so low?

A: There are three things, and it depends on the group that we’re talking about, but there’s history, there’s culture, and then there’s social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.

Q: They worshipped together before the Civil War?

A: Absolutely. In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: “You’re going to worship with us.” Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they’d even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together. So we didn’t get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What’s happened then, of course, is now that we’ve had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship? We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you’re immigrants, you’re not part of that history. So it’s a little bit different experience. So it may be a language that separates you — again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.

Q: Are churches a reflection of our society? We live in different neighborhoods. We work in different jobs.

A: They are. But what we found in the study is that churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in. So there’s something more going on than just reflecting the neighborhood, yeah.

Q: What is going on? Is it cultural — that it is difficult to accept an outsider? Is a black church accepting whites, or the other way around?

A: I’ve been in both settings and observed, and I think when non-blacks visit a black church they will feel, they always talk about feeling so welcomed and warmly greeted but being surprised or shocked or whatever by the length of the service, by the different worship style. If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn’t feel that warmly received. But so — and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.

Q: Generally white services are more calm and by the book and a lot more emotion in black services. Is that difficult for whites when they go into a black church?

A: Right, right. Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn’t happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they’re quite a bit different.

Q: The congregation saying “Amen”?

A: Call-and-response style, yes, exactly. So whenever different groups get together then there has to be this long period of negotiation. How will we worship? What’s acceptable? What’s not? If I want to say “Amen” can I? It’s one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say “Amen,” maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.

Q: What is most likely, a black church that’s integrated with whites or vice versa?

A: We rarely see that. Almost never.

Q: Why is that?

A: Because I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, “People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?” I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, “I’m going to do that.” Now there are whites in African-American churches. They’re interracially married. They’re highly committed. Maybe there’s a professor or two, or a student. Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it’s a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they’re overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

Q: If the pastor is black, are whites going to be less likely to go to that church because the pastor is black and in charge?

A: Yup. It’s the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.

Q: But a white church doesn’t feel very welcoming to African Americans, right?

A: That’s right, that’s right. So you can see what is the difficulty. I mean, how do you make these things happen? We’ve done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there’s a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it’s out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race. So they actually put it into their mission statement, and they start changing things as a result. They may change how worship works. They may actively recruit folks and try and get them to come and help them to feel comfortable and get them involved in leadership, and there’s a variety of ways.

Q: Are they glad they did it? Does the church end up being richer for it?

A: I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, it’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you’re trying to go across cultures, and you don’t understand, you didn’t mean to offend somebody but you’ve offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something. They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.

Q: Would our society be a better society if we had more integrated churches?

A: I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don’t have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we’re doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality. I spent a lot of time developing in books why worshipping separately actually impacts inequality, economic, social, on and on. So I really do believe there are huge advantages to being together even though it’s difficult, even though we have a lot to learn.

Q: Is this integration happening more in one part of the country than in another part?

A: It happens a little bit more in the West, where there’s more fluid — where everybody’s originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it’s a bigger social cost. One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they’re doing that. Sometimes they’re questions about selling out on their race or “Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?” So there are costs to it, and I think they’re a little bit higher in the South because of its history.

Q: I guess a pastor really sometimes has to walk a tightrope as well as really be an amazing politician, too.

A: Absolutely. Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they’re African American they’ll say, “I’m not black enough for African Americans. I’m not white enough for the whites. I’m not Hispanic enough.” There’s always that sense of because we’re so racially defined, if you’re trying to cross the boundaries you don’t fit into any particular space. We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There’s something different. They are somebody who — they don’t exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other. So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

Q: There is an impression that in many ways church has meant more to the black community over the years than any other particular section of America.

A: Absolutely. It may be changing, but still it’s the one place, that total control of an institution, that African Americans have. So sometimes, you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.” It’s also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.

Q: And hearing liberation theology. Is that fairly common, as in Jeremiah Wright’s church?

A: Yeah, there are variations of it. He says that very strongly, and you’ll find congregations that do that and others that would not say it as strongly. But it is a very common strain. Yeah, absolutely.

Q: Do African Americans worry that if whites come to my church, they’re going to take over?

A: Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate then. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power. So they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Q: I imagine there are phrases in the Bible they have to be very careful how they use.

A: Absolutely. There’s a lot of terminology, like “washes whiter than snow,” and these things which when they’re said in a uniracial congregation, they just go fine. But when they’re said in a mixed congregation, some people will get offended and wonder, “Why are you saying that? What are you saying?” And sometimes the clergy are blindsided by that. Other times they realize that ahead of time and say they’re not going to use those terms. So it gets complicated for sure.

Q: Is there a trend? Even though it may be slow, are we seeing more integrated churches?

A: We’re going to see more, and we are seeing more, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Not because white and black are more likely to get together. Only a third of the seven percent of congregations that are interracial are black and white. What’s happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures. We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it’s] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture. If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I’ll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I’m in somebody else’s homeland. So I’m going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean. But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, “I have the right to hold onto my culture,” and that’s what makes it difficult.

Q: If you have a white church and Asians move in and Hispanics move in, is it less of a problem than if African Americans –

A: Yeah, I think it’s still a problem, but I think it’s easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that’s why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

Q: But if you have a white church, and you have a mix of Asians and Hispanics, it makes it easier for African Americans to come?

A: Yes and no, because what happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they’re mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it’s still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.

Q: Music is very, very important in a black church.

A: Absolutely, although every congregation will say, you know, every worship leader will say it’s vital. It’s very important, but again these are, you know, these are different cultural styles. So the tradition from Europe is that you’re supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don’t sing that way. But, you know, on the average.

Q: I was recently in South Philly in a neighborhood that has a lot of violence. If the churches there were more integrated, do you think that would work more toward healing the wounds that are there?

A: It would because, you know, think about it. I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you’re an integrated congregation? It doesn’t happen. But I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people — when they’re in mixed company, we speak differently. So one of the profound things we found when studying these congregations, the mixed ones, is just how much overlap and interracial ties that develop not only with the people in the congregation, but they start meeting each other’s families, and their friends, and they go to each other’s neighborhoods if they live in different neighborhoods, and at work they meet people they wouldn’t otherwise met, and so it creates a whole new definition of what the group is. So I think it’s a lot harder then to have racial violence against each other.

Q: Are you familiar with the City of Refuge Church and Reverend Rufus Smith?

A: I think they’re doing an amazing thing in that they have all groups. But they have large segments of white and black, and so I think it’s the most difficult of these kinds of congregations to have, and it takes a very deft leader, and him being African American, I mean I’m sure it’ll be interesting when you talk with him. He’ll have to be very knowledgeable of white culture, black culture, and walk these fine lines.

Q: His is more multiracial than, say, Pastor Woo’s –

A: Oh, Pastor [Rodney] Woo would be more multiracial and more groups, right. I think they have people from 40-some different countries. International church is what I would call it. They’re immigrants from all over the world, be they black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern.

Q: I assume that Pastor Woo’s church is the way it is either because the congregation wanted it, or because he wanted it. How did it end up being that way?

A: It was an all-white church. It was starting to decline. They had to hire a new pastor, and they hired him. But he came under the condition that “I want and I’m called to make this a multiethnic church.” So they knew. He’s interesting because he’s part-Asian, part-white. He’s married to a Hispanic woman, so that’s their family and that’s their vision.

Q: What’s it feel like in one of his services? I’m sure you’ve been there.

A: I think it’s pretty dynamic. There’s a lot of energy there and life, and you’ll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they’re listening in Spanish.

Q: So it’s a rich cultural experience.

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: And Pastor Rufus Smith and the City of Refuge. Tell me a little bit about that.

A: Same thing. There’s a lot of life there, but it’s a different sort, because there’s a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I’ve actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can’t comment wisely on it. I can say that I’ve talked to people in both congregations, and there are both positives and negatives. I mean, so if I’ve talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they’ll wonder, “Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?” And what’s happening is they’re falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It’s not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That’s certainly common in mixed churches.

Q: So there are downsides, but the downsides are outweighed by the upsides?

A: Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start — they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just — a lot of times they’ll say, “I couldn’t live without it. I just have to be there.”

Q: You see it manifest in any other ways, for instance, in the neighborhood? Do they socialize together if they go to church together?

A: They do, and that’s what really surprised us, because it was such strong effects. They’re more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods after they start being in these kinds of congregations. They are much more likely to say that their two very best friends are of a different race, that their circle of friends, their friends in the church, but also in their whole social network, absolutely. We’ve had people say, “Now when I go to work, I don’t feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn’t have done otherwise.” And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe’s connected to a whole network of people I don’t know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son’s birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.

Q: Will the election of Barack Obama have an impact on interracial churches? Will we see more of them?

A: Oh, yeah. I think with President Obama there’s going to be a discussion, because he himself is multiracial, because we have for the first time a non-white president. There’s going to be talk about what does this mean? What is it? Are we in a new era? And I think it’s going to open up a wider place for a discussion about we ought to come together in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our clubs and our networks. I think it’ll be more acceptable to talk about it. We’ll see what happens. It’ll take some time. But I think it will.

Q: But generally you think it will be positive.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you talk a little bit more about why it is difficult to integrate churches?

A: What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let’s tell jokes with each other. Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they’ll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn’t mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time. Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don’t. So I ask the clergy why don’t I see myself represented in leadership? And I’m told, and this happens quite a bit, “We don’t think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job.” So then I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that’s difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who’s there to give me an afterlife? And different traditions stress different — so then there’s that. I talked to an African American who says before she goes into an interracial church, she sits in her car and she listens to gospel music to get her fill, and she goes into an interracial church where they don’t do gospel music, and she’s ready to accept the other sorts of ways of worshipping. So there’s that. There’s always the question of time. Does time at 10:00 mean 10:00 sharp? Or does it mean give or take a few minutes? And a few minutes, is that plus or minus two minutes? Or plus or minus ten, or maybe a half an hour each way? So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we’re going to work through these.

Q: Are you looking at Protestant churches, Catholic churches?

A: Protestant, Catholic, even Muslim. We studied a mosque, and this is when we were at Notre Dame, and in this mosque they had people from a variety of countries, most of them immigrants. In some of the countries, when you go into a mosque you remove your shoes. To not do so could be punishable even by death in that nation. In other countries, it would be a great offense to remove their shoes when they come into the mosque, a sign of disrespect. So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn’t remove your shoes and someone’s taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship. And then they would have the shoe removers on one side, and the non-shoe removers on the other side until they could work through coming to understand why we might both be trying to worship authentically, and because of our cultural background we have these different ideas. But it took a while.

Q: Any particular denominations that you’ve seen the most progress?

A: You find the most in not any particular denomination specifically. It’s the style of worship. So if we have what we call a charismatic worship style, that means upbeat music and a more lively style of preaching usually, people are allowed to clap, say “Amen,” whether they’re mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, and Catholics, whatever, they’re much more likely to be integrated. There’s one denomination in particular, though, that has pushed very hard to be multiracial in its denomination — not only its denomination but, I mean, in its congregations, and it’s called the Evangelical Covenant Church, http://www.covchurch.org/ which is headquartered in Chicago. Their whole goal is that’s the kind of churches they start, multiracial, and I think they say now 20 percent of their churches are that.

Q: Is there particular Christian scripture that points to interracial acceptance?

A: Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we’ve broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That’s when they were called Christians. So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they’re stressing. They’re talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together. But you know, interestingly enough, those things were not talked about much at all for a few hundred years at least.

Q: But it’s there. It’s a fundamental part of Christianity that you should welcome people of all races.

A: That’s right.