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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABERNETHY: Situation changing? What? Better job opportunities?

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

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

ZAPOR: Thank you.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Every day, hundreds of people gather in a makeshift worship center on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.They profess their Judaism in prayers, pictures, and words. They’re hoping to be heard most immediately by authorities in Israel, which they call the Promised Land. Many left spartan farm lives in the rural north of this ancient east African nation and moved to the city years ago in hopes that they, like thousands before them, would be taken to Israel.

Ethiopian Jew: Our members are suffering. They are destitute. They don’t have places to sleep.

Ethiopian Jew: I come to follow God’s word. He said, as I disperse you I shall bring you together. Because of that I want to go back to the Jewish home.

DE SAM LAZARO: Their pleas have fallen mostly on skeptical ears even though more than 75,000 Ethiopians, including many relatives of these people, were accepted in recent years into Israel.Their acceptance into Israeli society, however, has been difficult. Many in Israel’s religious leadership have questioned whether the Ethiopians are truly Jewish. Many were subjected to conversion rituals upon their arrival in Israel. In recent years, Ethiopians, particularly in the second generation, have taken to street protests.

Ethiopian Jewish Demonstrator: I think what we are looking here today is thousands of Ethiopians saying here to the Israeli society: no to discrimination, no for racism. All of us we came here to Israel to be equal with Israeli society.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Ethiopian Jewish tradition dates back hundreds of years—many believe more than 2,000 years.

MESFIN ASSEFA (Scholar-Activist): The origin of Ethiopian Jews dates back to biblical times when the Queen of Sheba or Magda first went to visit King Solomon, and she returned bearing a child conceived during this visit. The young prince, later King Melenik, went to Israel to meet his father when he was 20, and he returned to Ethiopia accompanied by 1000 members from each of the tribes of Israel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Other migrations followed from ancient Israel, he says, but this account has a number skeptics.

GETACHEW HAILE: It’s more of a legend than historical truth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Getachew Haile, a religion historian now in Minnesota, says there’s no evidence of any trail linking Ethiopia directly with ancient Israel.

GETACHEW HAILE: We have Greek inscriptions, Arabic inscriptions. There is nothing in the sort of Hebrew inscriptions.

DE SAM LAZARO: More likely, he says, Jews came here from the Arabian Peninsula or Yemen centuries later and settled amid certain isolated populations, helping convert them from the Orthodox Christianity that predominated.

HAILE: One possibility, this is a theory, is that some people might have migrated from over the Red Sea, come into Ethiopia, and converted them. The other is within the Ethiopian community, within the Christian community, who rejected Christianity.

DE SAM LAZARO: Through the ages, he says, some Ethiopian kings enforced a rigid conformance to the predominant Orthodox Christianity. Those outside this system, called falasha or foreigners have been marginalized.

HAILE: They are considered outcasts, and I have no doubt that they have been treated like that within the Ethiopian Christians.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thanks in large part to this persecution, the so-called falasha became Ethiopia’s poorest people, and this has complicated the transition for many who went to Israel from medieval poverty to a First World economy. Still, for the Ethiopians it is a huge improvement in the standard of living. Mengistu Kebede, who’d returned to Addis Ababa on vacation recently to visit family, gave us some perspective. It was a difficult adjustment to life in Israel, he says, but well worth it.

MENGISTU KEBEDE: It’s significantly better. Everybody wears shoes, they get enough pay for work, their clothes there are nice. Everything is much better.

DE SAM LAZARO: As part of earlier groups who were airlifted amid Ethiopia’s famine and civil war in the 1980s and ’90s, Kebede received a relatively warm welcome under Israel’s law of return. Today, however, the issue of economic motivation has clouded the politics of migration.

ASSEFA: I understand that there’s a perception that people coming from poor countries, from Africa, are coming for the economic benefits. But the issue is it’s the national law of Israel as well as the religious law to allow all Jews to return to Israel. It’s what God promised. As far as we know, all who have applied are bona fide Jews, and while there are advantages, the true motivation is a religious one.

DE SAM LAZARO: Amid the social, political, and economic challenges involving Ethiopian migration, Israel’s government has restricted the number it will allow in. In 2010 the government, in a move that it said should absorb all remaining Jews in Ethiopia, authorized visas for 8,000 new migrants. They’ll be allowed in in phases through 2016. Most of these worshipers did not make the cut. Deliverance to the Promised Land for these people, whose numbers are estimated in the low thousands, could take years, if it happens at all.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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

ALL: Happy New Year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAWTON: Or never end.

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

ABERNETHY: I wanted to ask you about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIONNE: Do you believe in miracles?

LAWTON: This is a religion show.

DIONNE: It is a religion show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIONNE: God and mammon is a rather old theme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABERNETHY: Mayan?

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

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

ECKSTROM: That’s right.

ABERNETHY: Kim?

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

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

BOB ABERNETHY: As 2011 draws to a close we take our annual look back at what we think were the most interesting and important religion and ethics stories of the year. We begin with a reminder from Kim Lawton of what some of those stories were.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: As the gap between rich and poor widened this year, people of faith stepped up their efforts to help those hard hit by the recession. Some, especially conservative, activists supported massive cuts to the federal budget, arguing that it was immoral to leave debt to future generations. But a broad-based interfaith coalition argued that it was immoral to make spending cuts that would hurt already-vulnerable people. Thousands participated in a prayer and fasting campaign to protect programs that help the poor in the US and around the world. When frustration about the economy spilled out into the streets with the Occupy Movement, many religious groups provided spiritual and material support. Local congregations led interfaith worship services and offered sanctuary to evicted protesters. Theologians debated whether Jesus would have camped out with the Occupy movement.

The role of religion in American politics remained controversial. GOP presidential hopefuls courted religious voters, especially evangelicals who are very important in the primaries. Many candidates made explicitly religious appeals. While some concern about the idea of a Mormon president lingered, especially among evangelicals, issues of character and marital fidelity appeared to generate more attention.

In several parts of the Arab World, popular uprisings toppled regimes and reignited debates about the role of Islam and government. New political successes for Islamist political parties raised concerns about human rights and especially the situation for dissenters and religious minorities. In Egypt, Muslims and Christians protested side-by-side in Tahrir Square, but there were several dramatic attacks against the nation’s Coptic Christian community. In Syria, protesters were met with a brutal crackdown from government forces.

American ethicists and religious leaders debated the morality of military intervention in Libya. Some said US participation in the NATO action was justified on humanitarian grounds, but others argued that it did not meet the criteria of the Just War doctrine. The killings of Osama bin-Laden and extremist American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki generated ethical debate about the US use of force in noncombat zones. There was also debate about the growing US use of weaponized unmanned drones.

American religious groups were divided over the Palestinians’ request for official UN recognition as a state. Many Jews and Evangelical Christians opposed the statehood bid. But some Christian and Muslim groups supported the idea, saying it was time for Palestinians to have their own state.

The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks prompted new examination of the state of interfaith relations. Many Muslim-Americans complained of a continuing rise of anti-Islamic discrimination. On Capitol Hill, Republican Congressman Peter King sponsored hearings on what he called the “radicalization of American Muslims.” There was acrimonious debate in several communities over proposed bans against shariah or Islamic law. At the same time, the 9/11 anniversary highlighted many projects where diverse faith communities have come together in new ways.

Several humanitarian disasters stretched the resources of faith-based groups. Religious organizations continued efforts in Haiti after last year’s devastating earthquake and cholera epidemic, and they offered aid in the wake of the Japanese earthquake. Many faith-based groups mobilized to help millions affected by a major famine in East Africa. There were also challenges here at home with deadly tornados, severe flooding, and a rare East Coast earthquake that caused as estimated $15 million dollars’ worth of damage at Washington National Cathedral.

But 2011 brought some occasions for celebration as well. Christians commemorated the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. And in Rome, on a record-breaking timetable, Pope John Paul the Second was beatified, bringing him one step closer to sainthood.

ABERNETHY: Kim a great summary. Kim Lawton is managing editor of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Kevin Eckstrom is the Editor-in-Chief of Religion News Service and E.J. Dionne is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist for the Washington Post and a professor at Georgetown University. Welcome to each of you.

ALL: Thank you.

ABERNETHY: I guess my pick for the year would be the Arab Spring and everything that flowed out of it leading to the Occupy Movement all over the United States. E.J. what do you make of that?

E.J. DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): Well I think the Arab Spring is one of those events that could have longest term impact on the nature of the world. I mean when you’re thinking about how many Arab and Muslim countries were transformed by this. We don’t know where this is going yet, but it was striking that this movement was a very broad alliance of people some who were Islamists, some who were secular, some from the Christian minority all saying we’re sick and tired of corruption and dictatorship. Now, it’s playing out differently in different places, we don’t know where it’s going but it sure was a very liberating moment. I’m not sure it led to the Occupy Wall Street, although some of the Occupy Wall Streeters talked about an inspiration, but it was a year in which protestors of a lot of different kinds changed the world.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And it really did bring up this whole question about when you have a democracy then what is the role of religion? And many countries obviously have been wrestling with this, we wrestle with it, but in Islamic countries that’s a question and how do you form a new government, write a constitution that acknowledges Islam but then what does that mean in terms of the laws and the people and the treatment of minorities and women. And so all of those issues are being debated and people are watching because there are a lot of Muslims countries that, that have been struggling with this issue.

ABERNETHY: And the irony that democracy might lead to a lot of things that we don’t like.

DIONNE: Right and I think Kim put her finger on something, which is you know we’ve had Christian democratic movements in western countries for a long time where there was some kind of linkage with, between religion and the state and yet an acknowledgement of the importance of religious freedom and democracy. There are religious parties inside Israel that compete with secular parties and so the real question, or one of the real questions is whether similar developments will take place in Arab world, in the Arab world and I think and we’ve seen certainly in countries like Indonesia where you can have parties that are Islamic but also democratic.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Religion News Service, Editor-in-Chief): And I think what’s interesting here at home on the Occupy movement was it’s not a religious movement per say, although there has been religious involvement, but it prompted a lot of really heavy religious and moral arguments about fairness and equity and how we spread wealth or how we hold people accountable. And so there for some fairly profound, I think, moral questions that were raised by the Occupy movement.

ABERNETHY: And E.J. a year ago we were all preoccupied with the Tea Party movement the year passed and we are all preoccupied on the left with the Occupy movement. What happened?

DIONNE: Well I think what the two movements had in common is that a lot of people in the country are unhappy with the results of the economic downturn on the state of the economy right through the 2010 election the inclination, the strongest organizing was on the side that said this is all the government’s fault and we have to tear down government. I think Occupy really changed our political debate in fundamental ways. A lot of people had been talking about rising economic inequality, which has really been happening over a 30 or 40 year period. It took this movement with a certain kind of media savvy to grab all kinds of people’s attention to get all kinds of people including conservatives to talk about what rising inequality means and whether we ought to do something about it.

LAWTON: I’m intrigued by the amount of religious participation there is in the Occupy movement just as there is in the Tea Party movement. There were a lot of Evangelicals that had some, you know, still do, that have some affinity with the Tea Party. On the religious left there’s a lot of participation, not just with chaplains, which they do have in the, in the movement but, but in, in talking about some of the language and helping behind the scenes with some of the strategy and also in some of the rhetoric that’s being used. You see, you hear things like greed is evil. That’s a moral kind of a calculation you know and inequality and the gap between the rich and poor, that’s wrong, it’s evil. Those are all moral issues and that’s the influence I think of the religious community. African American clergy have joined in on this and want to get more involved and they see it as an extension of the Civil Rights movement.

DIONNE: And this is the 25th anniversary of the Catholic Bishops’ very important statement at the time, economic justice for all. And some of us at Georgetown went back and were talking about this and in a lot of ways that statement from 25 years ago parts of it could be a manifesto for this movement demanding economic justice.

ABERNETHY: But do you hear in all this something that not only protests what we have, but that goes on to say that we ought to change it, fundamentally change the system, the political system, the economic system. Is that in there, too or not?

DIONNE: Well I think the I mean the Occupy movement has been very consciously not about particular demands, some people have criticized them for that, although I think historically a lot of movements change things not by putting up a program but by saying we need to move in a different direction. But I think a lot of these movements are more reformist than they are uh revolutionary.

ABERNETHY: Right.

DIONNE: There’s clearly a lot of frustration with Congress and the way Washington is working, but I still think even some of the more radical elements of some of these movements um are not looking to overturn the system, they just think it needs to be a whole lot better than it is.

ABERNETHY: Yeah. Meanwhile there’s been this amazing campaign on the Republican side for the nomination for president and in that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism comes up as you pointed out Kim in your piece. Is that going to hurt him?

ECKSTROM: I think it will be a challenge for him to get through the primaries. If he can make it through the primaries and gets the nomination and can get to the general election I think it’ll be less of an issue. But I think at this point in the last couple weeks what we’ve seen is that it’s not his Mormonism that’s Romney’s Achilles heel, it’s the conservative distrust of him. And you’ve seen it, you know, Romney has stayed fairly stable in the polls, he never gets above 20, 23% and everyone’s looking for a Plan B or another option but they’re not really falling in love with any of them so I think his problems are more about him and less about his Mormonism right now.

ABERNETHY: What’s been the role of religious conservatives in the republican campaign?

DIONNE: Well I think religious conservatives have been fragmented in this election. I think they kind of wanted to rally behind someone and it’s, their situation is much like that of other conservatives in the party, te- including Tea Party conservatives where a potential champion, for example Rick Perry, who soared in the polls after he got into the race and looked like he might be the person who could unite Tea Party conservatives, religious conservatives and other kinds and then had a whole series of problems and then he sort of collapsed again. Michele Bachmann was a favorite of some of them for a while. Now Newt Gingrich has picked up some of that support. So think that, you know, this election has been different say than the last one where a very large number of religious conservatives rallied behind Mike Huckabee some I think for anti-Mormon reasons but other simple because Huckabee was an Evangelical leader.

LAWTON: Well, but I think that it took them a while last time around for them to rally behind Mike Huckabee, which was one of his frustrations and that’s been the case this time around too that they haven’t been able to coalesce around one candidate and they are very important in this primary season as we’ve said. Last time around about 40 percent, more than 40 percent of all GOP primary voters were Evangelicals and in early states like Iowa and South Carolina that goes to 60 percent. And so if want to be the GOP candidate, you’ve got to get a significant number of those votes. And yeah, there’s something about that they haven’t done around Mitt Romney. Some of them like Ron Paul so-

DIONNE: It’s very interesting the first three states, you’ve got Iowa where the caucuses have a very high white Evangelical participation, then you’ve got New Hampshire which is a somewhat more secular and quite a bit more secular libertarian state and then you go back to South Carolina next which is again a place where Evangelicals are important.

ABERNETHY: 2011 was the 10th anniversary of 9-11, what do we know about U.S. attitudes toward Muslims and how has that changed over this time, Kevin?

ECKSTROM: They haven’t really gotten much better. I think that’s the simple answer. You saw this year about the hearings that Kim mentioned about radicalization on Capitol Hill, the brouhaha we’ve seen in the last couple weeks over a Muslim reality TV show. A lot, the anti-Muslim sentiment actually creeped up a little bit after Bin Laden’s death in May. A lot of people said well if we get rid of Bin Laden maybe people will feel better about Muslims and actually the opposite happened. So things continue to be tense I think what’s been really interesting to watch in the last couple weeks has been this kind of counter backlash to the Muslim reality TV show where Lowe’s, the hardware store, pulled its ads from conservative pressure and now everyone’s threatening to boycott Lowe’s ‘cause they, they don’t think that the show is getting a fair shake and that Muslims aren’t getting a fair shake. So there is a bit of sympathy I think to some degree for Muslims being under attack.

ABERNETHY: What do you make of the efforts going on in many states to whip of fear of Sharia, of Islamic law?

DIONNE: Well you know I think one of the disconcerting things that’s happened in attitudes towards Muslims is that overtime it’s become more of a partisan and ideological issue, which was not the case in the days immediately after 9-11, partly because President Bush made some very strong statements about Muslims being Americans, being our brothers and sisters but now you’ve seen this issue become more politicized so it tends to me in very conservative states, paradoxically often states with very, very small Muslim populations. But I think in a way that we are as a country trying to deal with Muslims as a new reality in our country in much the same way that we dealt with Catholic immigrants a hundred years ago or more as a new reality in our country. My colleagues at Brookings and the Public Religion Research Institute did a poll this year and we found overwhelming support for religious freedom and the rights of minorities – 9 Americans in 10 – but on particular questions about Muslims nearly half were uncomfortable with mosques in their neighborhood, nearly half thought that Muslim and American values are incompatible. A lot of the same things that are said about Muslims were said about Catholics, that Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign power, that they weren’t fully democratic. I take some of these numbers in a more positive way that you see quite a bit of movement toward toleration and embrace, but still some holding back I think it’ll take a long time. Younger Americans are much more open than older Americans.

LAWTON: And so much of many Americans views on Muslims and Islam have been tied to the war on terror. And so that’s an additional complication. That also then brings in foreign policy and lots of politics as well. So that’s been a complicating factor that many American Muslims are frustrated about – that they’re broad-brushed with a whole bunch of people around the world that they have nothing to do with.

ABERNETHY: The last U.S. troops from Iraq have been coming back. What do you make, what do you all make of the welcome that they’ve received and people’s feelings generally about the end of the Iraq War?

LAWTON: I’ve been surprised at the fact that prior to our entry into the Iraq War in the religious community this was a huge debate. Is this a just war? Should we be doing this? There were protests in the streets and now that’s it’s winding down I haven’t heard as much moral conversation from ethicists and religious leaders about what did it all mean now that it’s done and what did we leave behind? People were talking about do we have an ethical responsibility to that country and I don’t hear it being framed in that way and I found that interesting.

ECKSTROM: And I think it’s a very different reception of the troops coming home from Vietnam obviously got and I think a lot of people are happy about that. They’re proud that their veterans are coming home, but I’ve been surprised at how muted the reaction has been. I think along with what Kim has been saying it’s almost like you don’t know that it’s happening out there.

DIONNE: You know I’m struck by how on the one hand the reaction is very different than the reaction of World War II where we had a very clear victory, we announced it. On the other hand it’s also not like a Vietnam where we saw folks evacuated by helicopter from the roof of the embassy. I think Americans decided that they wanted to get out of this war several years ago and the Obama Administration decided that the only way to get out was in a slow and responsible way. So I’m not surprised by the quiet reaction, but you’re absolutely right, it is a reaction to the veterans and an appreciation is so much greater now. We did a terrible job as a country in sort of honoring the service of Vietnam veterans. It took us years to honor what they did for the country.

LAWTON: And we have seen a lot of religious involvement in working and ministering to some of these returning troops and you know not only some of those who were wounded physically but emotionally and spiritually, those wounds linger. And so I have seen a lot of religious energy put into that as well.

ABERNETHY: Kevin it’s been almost 10 years since the terrible scandal broke about the Catholic sex abuse of children. Where does that stand? Bring us up to date on that. What happened this year?

ECKSTROM: Well it had a couple things. One you saw this process enter the criminal justice system, the secular system. So you had a grand jury in Philadelphia indict a top church official for shuffling priests from one place to another. In Kansas City you had the first bishop ever criminally indicted for not reporting a known abuser. The other interesting thing that happened was it spread, in a way to Penn State. You know the church has long argued that it’s not just a church problem, that it’s a problem in schools and in universities and in boys scouts and wherever else. And this was the first big sort of example of that we saw. But what was what I think most interesting was mid-year the bishops put out a long anticipated report on what they called the causes and contexts of this problem, what went wrong basically. And they couldn’t really come up with a simple, you know, decisive answer. What they did essentially was the whole culture got off track in the 60s and the church got really swept up in that. And that’s sort of the big problem that they could point to, but there’s no single cause that they could find.

LAWTON: And the headlines on that were “Woodstock Made Me Do It” made them do it, and of course that’s not what the church wanted for PR.

ABERNETHY: And the media.

LAWTON: Well that was the media too, but still that was what some people took away.

DIONNE: And of course the problem on the scandal was not the 60s culture. I think what it created was a crisis of authority inside the church because a lot of the anger was not simply at the abuse itself as much as there was anger at that, but how long it took for the church to come to terms with it. But again the Penn State thing, the Penn State events suggest a very similar pattern of institutions being slow to respond.

ABERNETHY: What about immigration and the churches? What’s going on there, what’s been going on this year?

ECKSTROM: Well in Alabama you had one of these get tough immigration laws that was passed that took effect and the United Methodist bishop of Alabama.

ABERNETHY: And Arizona.

ECKSTROM: And in Arizona, but the Methodist bishop in Alabama said it is the meanest immigration law in the country. There were great fears that it would penalize churches for assisting immigrants whether they’re legal or not. Now certain parts of that law were thrown out and they’re on appeal so the churches right now are in the clear. But there’s a great concern in the religious community that their hands are being tied in their ability to minister to immigrants of one stripe of another.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up, but I don’t want it to run out without asking you as you look back on the year, what was the most intriguing story that you saw or one that got the least attention that should’ve gotten a lot more. Who wants to begin? E.J.?

DIONNE: What I was much taken by the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission on Peace and Justice’s critique of the economy that made you wonder is Pope Benedict going to show up at one of these encampments of Occupy Wall Street? Because it was a very tough critique of capitalism. It didn’t say get rid of the market system, but it raised a series of moral questions and I’d like to think and this has happened in other traditions as well, I’d like to think that we can have, at the end of this downturn and serious moral conversation about how you create and just and competitive economic system.

ABERNETHY: Kevin what do you, what do you see?

ECKSTROM: I was really struck by the sale of the Crystal Cathedral in Southern California. You had this institution that went bankrupt and I think it’s a microcosm of sort of the shifts that are going on in the American relig–

ABERNETHY: And It was a symbol of—

ECKSTROM: Protestant dominance. Yeah. And it’s symbolic of the shifts that are going on in the American religious landscape where white mainline aging Protestants are literally losing ground, literally, to Catholics primarily fueled by Hispanic immigration, it’s fascinating.

ABERNETHY: Kim?

LAWTON: I was struck by the number of religious successes I saw in the pop culture world. We had several books on the New York Times bestseller lists about heaven and hell including one that created a huge amount of controversy within the Evangelical community by an Evangelical pastor who had a more expansive view of who’s going to hell. We saw the Book of Mormon on Broadway sweeping the Tony’s. We had a movie called Courageous by a church in Georgia making over 33 million dollars and that’s still making money every day. And you know just stuff like that and of course who could forget Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos quarterback who make kneeling in prayer a sort of cultural phenomenon, generated a lot of controversy but still got a lot of people talking about the public display of religion.

DIONNE: And he won a lot of games.

LAWTON: Well…

ABERNETHY: Our time is up I’m sorry to say. Happy Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all our viewers and to Kevin Eckstrom, E.J. Dionne and Kim Lawton. I’m Bob Abernethy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker at rally: I myself overwhelmingly love this country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: It was a huge surprise when the legislature of one of the most conservative states passed one of the more liberal immigration laws in the country. That legislation will most likely be preempted by federal law, but the bigger surprise was how it angered so many members of Utah’s predominate faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons or LDS, even though it was the church that pushed through the legislation. This is Utah state senator Curt Bramble, a Republican and Mormon who helped craft the bill.

SENATOR CURT BRAMBLE: Personally I have not seen the LDS church lobby any issue harder than they’re activity on House Bill 116, the immigration legislation.

RON MORTENSEN: I jokingly said, you know, they may as well just pitched a tent in the back halls.

SEVERSON: Ron Mortensen is a career foreign service officer and a former Mormon missionary. He founded the Utah Coalition on Illegal Immigration and he’s not too happy with his church.

MORTENSEN: The church lobbyists had full access where normal people can’t go, in the back halls and through all the back alleyways and they were there full time this session.

SEVERSON: And the result was legislation that would allow undocumented immigrant families to continue living and working in the state, providing, among other things, they have no criminal record and pay a fine for being in the country illegally.

Originally the legislature was only going to pass an enforcement bill similar to the controversial one in Arizona until a compact of churches and the chamber of commerce asked for an additional bill with a more compassionate approach.

Critics like Representative Chris Herrod, a Republican and former missionary, say the bill was forced on the legislature.

REP. CHRIS HERROD: I’ve never in 5 years seen a bill pass in the fashion that that was passed.

SEVERSON: Because of the church?

REP. HERROD: Well, some could argue that but again that doesn’t make it right.

SEVERSON: Tim Chambless is a professor with the Hinkley Institute Of Political Science at the University of Utah.

PROFESSOR TIM CHAMBLESS: We do know that the Utah State Legislature is unique because about 91 percent of the 104 members of the Utah State Legislature self-identify as LDS.  And each member, almost each member would say they’re a good church member. They’re a member of the Republican party and their a good church member and they’re very divided on this issue.

SEVERSON: At first is was not widely known how hard the church had lobbied for the guest worker law. So why did it? The church says it was the Christian thing to do, that the bedrock moral issue is how we treat each other as children of God. Quin Monson is a political science professor at Brigham Young University.

PROFESSOR QUIN MONSON: There is an approach that the church has been supporting that allows people to square themselves with the law—it’s allowing people to live without fear, to stay with their families, to pay a fine and come out of the shadows.

SEVERSON: But in the view of the legislation’s opponents, it provides amnesty for law breakers, and goes squarely against one of the church’s 13 Articles of Faith, number 12.

MORTENSEN: It basically says we honor, obey and sustain the law of the land and that’s something that all the children learn when they’re growing up and especially the older generation. It was something that was drummed into you and that was just like one of the Ten Commandments, and so when people see people not complying with the law, that makes them nervous and raises questions.

SEVERSON: Ron Mortensen doesn’t argue with the compassion of his church, but he thinks the bigger reason for the legislation is that the church has grown far beyond U.S. borders.

MORTENSEN: In my opinion, the church has become a worldwide church and its interests now extend far beyond Utah, and it has to meet the expectations of its worldwide audience and a very large audience in Latin America.

SEVERSON: The church has over 14 million members worldwide, with more than half residing outside the United States.

MONSON: The population of Mormons in Mexico is hundreds of thousands if not over a million. There are at least a dozen temples of the church in Mexico and hundreds of chapels, so it’s a big population and it’s big all throughout Latin America.

CHAMBLESS: The church is concerned that anything that hurts its missionary effort is going to be something that maybe the church would not support.

MONSON: Utah is very cleanly connected with the church in a lot of people’s mind, outside of Utah and outside of the United States. And so if Utah is enacting some draconian restrictive immigration law, you can sort of imagine the reaction and then the blame that might be placed on the church for allowing it to happen. I can see that that might have been a motivating factor in getting involved and asking the legislature to dial it back.

MORTENSEN: There’s been pretty credible stories about withholding visas for missionaries in order to bring pressure on the church, so they’re playing in a very international arena. It’s no longer what’s necessarily good for Utah or even the United States, it’s what’s good for us worldwide.

SEVERSON: Mortensen says it might surprise some members to learn that the church sends undocumented members that live in the U.S. on stateside missions.

MORTENSEN: It’s long been the policy of the church to allow undocumented members to have temple recommends and to hold the priesthood, and it’s up to the bishops to decide if they’re worthy of that or not.

SEVERSON: Undocumented missionaries have been deported, and recently two minor church officials and their families were expelled from the country because they were here illegally. The church says it discourages members from entering any country without legal documentation.

For those who argue that a guest worker law violates federal law, others like Senator Curt Bramble, refer to a higher law, and uses the church’s harboring of runaway slaves as an example.

SENATOR BRAMBLE: During the 1860s, before the Civil War, members of the church that harbored slaves because slavery was immoral, was a violation of the law. We can talk throughout the history of mankind where laws that are on the books or laws that someone is demanding you follow result in an outcome that in and of itself is a violation of a higher law.

SEVERSON: Mortensen says the church’s view of the law may be changing because he thinks the church itself is changing.

MORTENSEN: The LDS church seems to be moving towards more of a social justice position and away from conservatism where it’s traditionally been.

SEVERSON: The pushback against the immigration law has been so public, delegates to the state Republican convention narrowly passed a resolution demanding that the law be repealed. Professor Quin Monson has done a study about how influential church endorsements can be with the membership, and he says as more members know how strongly the church feels about a guest worker provision, the tide may turn.

MONSON: When the church comes out and officially endorses a position and it’s united and the membership knows about it, then you see people shifting their position and this is even true when the issue pushes the membership in a direction that they might not otherwise want to go.

MORTENSEN: This is really a very, very divisive issue and I never have—on other issues—I never have heard people say, well, I’m going to stop paying fast offerings or I’m going to withhold some of my contributions or I’m really questioning my testimony, and I’m having people say that to me on this particular issue.

SEVERSON: Opponents say they’ll try to derail the guest worker law during the next legislative session although it seems unlikely they will succeed. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Salt Lake City.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome, I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. Today, a special report on the events and issues we see ahead in 2011. We do this with the help of Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University. Before we begin our discussion, as we close out the first decade of the new millennium we remember some of the stories that set the stage for the news we expect to cover in 2011 and beyond. Our managing editor Kim Lawton took a look back at the events of the last decade.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were perhaps the defining moment of the decade, and the repercussions are still being felt on many fronts. In the wake of the tragedy, mainstream Muslim leaders tried to spread a message that Islam is not synonymous with terrorism. But those efforts were complicated by an expanding extremist movement that recruits over the Internet, as well as several high-profile arrests of Muslims plotting more attacks. American Muslims worked to define their place in US society, but many felt unfairly targeted by enhanced security measures and what they saw as a rising tide of Islamophobia. President Obama made improving relations with the Muslim world one of the priorities of his new administration.

The 9/11 attacks led to American involvement in long and difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Religious and ethical leaders debated whether each conflict was just. President George W. Bush argued for a doctrine of preventive war, the idea that it was moral to attack a country to prevent it from attacking us first. The ethical debates intensified with revelations that the US was using torture as a means of getting information. After thousands of deaths of troops and civilians, President Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq and the intention to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Economic crises dominated much of the end of the decade as recession, unemployment and foreclosures took a toll on faith-based groups and the people they serve. Religious institutions were forced to slash their budgets and lay off staff even as they were asked to do more to help needy people.

Religion continued to be a potent force in politics. In 2000 and 2004, President Bush rallied religious conservatives. He set up a new White House office to expand government partnerships with faith-based social service organizations. Analysts spoke of a God gap, with voters seeing the Democratic Party as unfriendly toward religion. In the run-up to the 2008 elections, Democrats and the Obama campaign developed an unprecedented outreach to compete for religious votes. Many in that faith coalition were disappointed the Democrats didn’t build on the momentum in the 2010 midterm elections. Meanwhile, religious conservatives were energized by the Tea Party movement and vowed new activism leading up to the 2012 elections. Religious groups across the spectrum were involved in policy debates, from health care to immigration and gay marriage.

Issues surrounding homosexuality provoked bitter debates within religious institutions and American society as a whole. The 2003 election of Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the US Episcopal Church brought the worldwide Anglican Communion to the brink of schism, even as other denominations continue to debate the role of gay clergy. In 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, with four other states and the District of Columbia following suit. The issue continues to work its way through the courts.

For the Roman Catholic Church, a dramatic changing of the guard with the 2005 death of John Paul II, who had been pope for more than 25 years, and the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. For the US Catholic Church, much of the decade was focused on addressing a massive clergy sex abuse crisis, enacting new guidelines to prevent abuse, and confronting litigation that saw more than two billion dollars in payouts to victims. In 2010, the clergy abuse scandal exploded across many parts of Europe and posed new challenges to the Vatican and top church leaders.

The new millennium began with a sense of relief that a predicted Y2K computer meltdown never materialized. It ends with the development of social media like Facebook and Twitter offering new online possibilities for personal connection and outreach, enabling information to be disseminated at lightning speed—both for good and for ill.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks for that. Welcome to you, to Kevin Eckstrom, and to E.J. Dionne. E.J., we have a new Congress, Republican control of the House, more Republican votes in the Senate. Walk us through that a little bit. What do you expect that will mean for some of the social issues that are of most concern to religious communities?

EJ DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): You know, watching Kim’s set-up piece I was thinking of Yogi Berra’s great line: ‘Predictions are hard, especially when they’re about the future.” And who would have imagined a decade unfolding the way this last decade just unfolded? So I think we’re all in a difficult situation here. I think when you look forward to this Congress, so much of it is not going to be about social issues. The last Democratic Congress kind of acted to get some of those out of the way, notably don’t ask don’t tell. I think they really wanted that through because they knew it was going to be very difficult this time over. You may have some debate about abortion around the healthcare bill. Republicans want to repeal it. I don’t think they’ll be able to but they going to have a variety of ways of trying to hem in President Obama in sort of putting it into effect. So I think you may see it there. I think one of the sleeper issues will be fights we might have around the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, where you have, if nothing else for purely political reasons it’s a question where conservatives can talk about it as an economic issue: should we be spending the money? But there are always issues related to cultural values that get into those debates. So I suspect you are going to see some of those arguments around the humanities and arts endowments. Personally, I hope it doesn’t happen that way, but I think that is going to happen.

ABERNETHY: How about immigration?

LAWTON: Well, I was going to say that I am going to be watching to see how some of the evangelical political activists maneuver with the Tea Party politicians that got elected. You know, in this last election there was so much talk about how the Tea Party was so ascendant and there were a lot of religious conservatives that were supportive of the Tea Party. But when you get to issues like immigration or some of the other issues involving a social safety net for the poor, evangelicals don’t always line up as economic conservatives. And so while they might be hoping for some action on abortion or maybe even some of the gay marriage type issues—I don’t know that that’s going to come up in Congress, but I’m going to be watching some of the economic issues that do have some moral implications to see how much evangelicals, and some Catholics who were supportive of the Tea Party—where they come down.

ECKSTROM (Editor, Religious New Service): Right, and there are a lot of moral issues that a lot of religious groups care about. And so I think what you’re going to have is maybe a different set than what we’ve seen in the last couple years. Whereas under the Democratic Congress we were talking about moral issues like the environment and the minimum wage increase and things like that, you’re probably not going to see as much of that with a Republican House. Instead, you’ll have issues that maybe more conservatives tend to latch on to. But it’s not that these social issues are going to disappear, it’s just that there are going to be a different set of them.

DIONNE: That’s a good point, because you are going to talking more and more about budget deficits and cuts in government programs, and I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how religious groups that sometimes seem to be aligned with conservatives on some of the cultural questions are actually going to be saying no, you can’t cut this program for the poor or that program for the poor, because there are a lot of Catholics, a lot of evangelicals, and many in the rest of the religious community—mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims—who really want to protect some of those programs. So I think their voices are actually going to be very important at a time of budget stress.

ECKSTROM: And one issue I think that’s worth watching that we’ve already seen indications of is that House Republicans want to hold hearings on American Muslims and the radicalization of American Muslims – sort of home-grown terror threats – and what’s going wrong within American Islam that it’s allowing this to happen? So it’s a different kind of religious issue but one that’s already going to be on Congress’s agenda.

ABERNETHY: Before we leave that, E.J., what about the tone, the spirit that you expect. Is it going to be awful?

DIONNE: I’m not very optimistic that we’re going to see an outbreak of comity and friendship across party lines. On the Muslim hearings, having Congress sort of investigate a religious group in the country raises all kinds of questions, which I hope get raised. I’m not sure that the deal that President Obama reached with the Republicans on taxes can be easily replicated across other issues. After all, tossing out about $858 billion is a lot easier than cutting $400 billion or whatever they decide to do. So I think it’s going to be a very difficult couple of years.

LAWTON: And also, sort of in the backdrop, this coming year in politics is going to be the run up to the 2012 presidential election, and so that’s going to be complicating anything anyone wants to get done because there’s going to be a lot of posturing as people try to set themselves up for the next presidential election.

DIONNE: Which brings us to some very interesting debates inside the Republican Party. Your point about the Tea Party and the Christian conservatives overlapping but distinct groups—how are they going to play those roles inside the Republican fight for the nomination?

LAWTON: And a lot of religious conservatives were very unhappy with the Republican establishment, felt like they took them for granted, Republicans took the religious conservatives for granted—wanted them to come out and work and vote but didn’t necessarily take care of their issues. It will be interesting to see whether they feel the same way about the Tea Party as well.

ABERNETHY: And back on this question of tone, everything perhaps is going to be made more dramatic by the fact that it’s going to be, this year, the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

LAWTON: It’s hard to believe that it was almost 10 years ago when those attacks happened and that really did set up a lot of difficult issues for us as a country, both in terms of the war and as well as in terms of interfaith relations. I know a lot of Muslim groups are sort of bracing after seeing in the previous year a lot of protests against mosques and things of that nature. They’re concerned about the atmosphere and a lot of Muslims I’m talking with are worried about what’s going to happen leading up to the 9/11 anniversary.

ABERNETHY: But Kevin, you or E.J. have made the point that we have this real problem of trying to deal with homegrown terrorism and terrorism here that just emerges out of the suburbs some place, and on the other hand protecting the civil rights of a whole group of people.

ECKSTROM: This is a huge challenge for American Muslims and one of the big debates within the American Muslim community right now is how much do they cooperate with law enforcement on trying to prevent these sorts of attacks that nobody wants to see? How much should parents report their kids if they’re acting strangely or going to bad Web sites or talking in radical terms? And there’s a lot of Muslims who are afraid of being entrapped by the FBI and being led into plots that they might not otherwise do. But then they also know that if they don’t report them nobody else is going to and if there’s an attack, things are only going to get worse.

DIONNE: You’ve got tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in American suburbs, living middle-class lives, and if one or two or three or five of those thousands of kids is discovered to get involved in terrorism, suddenly we’re talking about these very middle-class, classically American places being breeding grounds for terrorism. I think one thing that is going to sort encourage that is if we make this big American Muslim middle class feel excluded from the rest of us, and we’re really going to have to think that through. Of course we don’t want home-grown terrorism, but we’re nowhere like where the Europeans are, because we have this great tradition of upward mobility and inclusion in our country.

LAWTON: And this has been a challenge for American Muslims themselves within their communities. If we launch programs to combat homegrown terrorism, homegrown extremism, if we launch programs in our mosques, does that appear like we’re giving in to the stereotype that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and so they’ve really struggled within their community how to approach this problem. They want to look proactive. They want to look like they’re addressing this as good, loyal Americans, but how do you do that without giving into the perception?

ABERNETHY: Kevin, what do you expect to happen with the cultural center/mosque near Ground Zero?

ECKSTROM: Well, it’s going to be a challenge. They presumably have all of the zoning things that they need. They’ve got their permits and the city is going to allow them to build it. What they’re missing right now is the money. And it’s going to take them a while to raise as much money as they’re going to need, but it’s also going to be difficult to get, I think, a lot of people to support that because that center is so radioactive and it’s generated so much heat that there’s going to be a lot of people who maybe don’t want their names associated with it. And on the flip side, there’s a lot of Americans who don’t want the money coming from some foreign anonymous donor somewhere, so they have a big challenge there.

ABERNETHY: Now you were referring earlier to the fact that the beginning of 2011 may well seem like the beginning of the election campaign of 2012, E.J.

DIONNE: Right, and I think you’re going to see some sort of interesting positioning inside the Republican Party. I mean, we still don’t know if Sarah Palin is or is not going to run for president. Sarah Palin seems to be more representative of the Tea Party side of the right, although she has clearly some Christian conservative support. Mike Huckabee is going to be competing with her as the spokesperson for Christian conservatives, but every Republican running for president wants a piece of that vote, because it is such an important vote in the Republican primaries, and that’s going to start right now. It’s already started, before the show went on the air.

ECKSTROM: And I think something worth watching there is Mitt Romney, who is at the front of a lot of these polls, these straw polls, whether or not he tries to make the case about his Mormon faith again with the evangelical base. A lot of people say, you know, he did that; he doesn’t need to do it again. Other people say that he’s never going to win them over; there’s a certain amount of the base that’s just never going to accept a Mormon candidate. So I think it will be interesting to watch how he navigates the Mormon question.

ABERNETHY: And meanwhile, E.J., every pundit worth his salt is giving Obama advice about what he needs to do, how he needs to change himself, how he needs to change his language. Talk about that.

DIONNE: Well, the range of advice goes from you must be nicer to the Republicans and look like you’re a centrist to you’re political and moral obligation is to confront these guys and have a big argument so that the issues can be clear to the country. And I think he’s going to try to do a little of the former to say I’ve reached out my hand to them, and when the hand is rejected on certain issues, he’s going to flip to the second. But I think one of the things to look for is whether he does speak more in a moral and spiritual language both about himself and the underpinnings of his policies, but also about this sense of America can grab its position in the world back after a period when Americans felt we were in decline. I think there’s going to be some John Kennedy-esque rhetoric coming out him getting the country moving again in the coming year.

LAWTON: And the Democratic Party is going to have to figure out what it wants to do in terms of faith-based outreach. There was a lot of criticism from Democrats about how the party handled that in the last midterm elections and a lot of faith-based moderates and liberals and even some conservatives that don’t consider themselves Republicans felt that the party didn’t do enough to reach out to them, so that’s going to be something they’re trying to figure out as well.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is supposed to begin n 2011. What are your expectations there?

LAWTON: Well, there’s some really difficult ethical debates still lingering in terms of what America leaves behind in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of civil society and …

ABERNETHY: And safety and protection for the people who helped us.

LAWTON: Exactly. Religious minorities and people who were seen as being part of the American offensive—what’s going on with them and what responsibility does America have within that? And those are going to be difficult questions. I’ve been surprised how little the religious community has been focusing on these issues of war. It seemed like last year, in the last election, people just didn’t really talk about those ethical, moral issues.

ECKSTROM: And, you know, we’ve heard a lot of talk about the president’s problem with his base—you know, the liberal base is dissatisfied for any number of reasons. But it’s worth remembering that a good chunk of that base voted for him because he said he was going to close Guantanamo Bay, and it’s still open, and that he said he’d get us out of Afghanistan, and he actually sent more troops in. So there’s, I think, some ethical problems that he faces in terms of not moving fast enough on that issue.

DIONNE: Actually, he said he’d get us out of Iraq, and he said Afghanistan was the good war, and we’ll presumably continue to pull out of Iraq. My hunch is that if we have a withdrawal this year from Afghanistan it’s going to be very small. It’s clear that the new timeline that the administration wants seems to be 2014. And there’s going to be some opposition in his own party to not withdrawing more quickly. I also think some of the new conservatives who are less interventionist in Congress may also be a surprising opposition to a long commitment there.

ABERNETHY: Let me ask you to look at Europe and the Vatican. What do you expect there in terms of this ongoing struggle about the sex abuse of kids by priests? Anybody?

DIONNE: Everyone is silent.

ECKSTROM: Happy topic. Well, this pope has the unfortunate possibility of his legacy being presiding over this sex abuse scandal that reared its ugly head—that the church didn’t learn anything from the first time around. And I think he has made some progress in sort of admitting that the church needs to do some introspection and figure out what went wrong so that we don’t make this happen again. But the pope is going to be 84 in 2011. I don’t know how much more time he has left in that job, but probably a few years, and I think he’s going to be doing some legacy-making, because this is now at the point where he can still do some things and see what happens.

LAWTON: Well, so many people in the church are frustrated because they want to get beyond this issue but they just can’t do it, and so that’s been something they’ve all had to confront.

DIONNE: I think it’s sort of an argument between people who defend the Vatican and the church say look, they understand, they’ve tried to fix this, they’ve made some moves versus others who say that they still haven’t fully taken responsibility for changing the structures of the church. It’s a classic argument between more conservative or traditionalist people and people looking for greater change in the church because they think it needs it, and I think that is an ongoing struggle and that the sex abuse scandal is a piece of that larger struggle.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up, but before we quit, in this coming year do you see something happening or that might happen or do you see some person that you’re going to be paying particular attention to?

LAWTON: Well, we should also point out that last year a lot of the things we discussed we didn’t predict. So, as E.J. said, it’s hard to know that. I think it is going to be a pivotal year for religious groups and issues surrounding homosexuality, whether we’re talking court cases around gay marriage or whether we’re talking denominations still really struggling over how to handle gay clergy and gay bishops. And the Anglican Communion, which has really been torn about by this subject, is also going to have to face some tough questions this coming year.

ECKSTROM: I’m going to keep an eye on Archbishop Tim Dolan in New York, who is the new president of the Catholic bishops conference. He’s a media-savvy guy, he gives you a bear hug, he’s sort of a telegenic face for the church. But he’s no shrinking violet. He will take on the issues of the day, but in sort of a friendly kind of way. It will be interesting. The only real power he has is the power of the megaphone, and which issues he chooses for the bishops to emphasize.

DIONNE: I think that’s an excellent selection. I would say if I could combine Palin, Huckabee, Obama, Romney—we’re going to see if the nature of the discussion of religion in our politics changes substantially this year or not. As we’ve already said, there are challenges to each of those figures, and it will be interesting to see how they deal with it.

ABERNETHY: I have been wondering with respect to Iraq and now Afghanistan why there was no peace movement—not more of a peace movement. Do you think with Afghanistan, as we begin to come out of there, that there will be such a thing?

DIONNE: I think going into Afghanistan there was very broad support when we started because many people, except for pacifists and a few others who have legitimate reasons for opposing all war, most people thought this was kind of a just war response, so you didn’t have a big opposition. I think now a lot of people say God, this is a terrible mess. I don’t have a good answer coming out of it, and I think that sort of undercuts what might otherwise be a big peace movement.

ABERNETHY: Thanks, E.J., our time is up. Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution. That’s our program for now. I’m Bob Abernethy.

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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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