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.

DEBORAH POTTER (Correspondent): At first glance, the Front Porch Cafe could be any neighborhood coffee shop. But the make-shift kitchen isn’t quite up to par, and those guys at the grill aren’t your typical cooks.

JON SCYOC (Former Inmate): I actually have a small felony on my record. Well, it’s still a felony. And I know how hard it was for myself to get jobs.

THOMAS JONES (Former Inmate):Since I had my felonies I been having real poor jobs. And I chose to do street life, and street life is nothing but trouble—death, jail, or, you know, both.

POTTER: Most of the workers here are ex-offenders. The cafe is run by South Street Ministries, a Christian fellowship that also offers Bible study for inmates.

Former Inmate: What are they doing for like housing for like ex-felons?

POTTER: A place to live, a job, even just a “welcome home” are hard to come by when you’ve been where some of these men have been.

MICHAEL STARKS (Former Inmate): I’ve been arrested 117 times. I’ve been shot four times. I’ve been convicted 12 times.

PERRY CLARK (Former Inmate): We want fast money, OK? So consequently I went to prison for ten years for aggravated robbery, OK? Behind the aggravated robbery was drugs.

POTTER: Perry Clark now runs a construction business. Michael Starks is a community organizer. Both former drug users say they went straight after finding faith behind bars but that when they were locked up the churches they knew were not on their side.

STARKS: The church was of the mindset that, hey, he did wrong, he’s being punished. They thought that if you did wrong, you went to prison and that was it, and they were going to throw away the key.

CLARK: I wrote three churches to let them know, not asking for anything, that I was reentering back into the community after ten years of incarceration. And I didn’t get a response back.

POTTER: Both men are now involved in active prison ministries, helping ex-offenders rejoin the community.

CLARK: I want them to know that they can live normal life once they out.

(Speaking with woman) It’s not easy, though, when the problem is enormous.

POTTER: More than two million Americans are now imprisoned, four times as many as 30 years ago. The major reason: mandatory sentencing for non-violent crimes and drug charges. But the war on drugs, declared in the 1980s, has not had the effect its backers predicted. Arkansas Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen has seen the results.

JUDGE WENDELL GRIFFEN (Arkansas Circuit Court): Drug use has not declined. All it has done has produced an explosion on our prison population. The whole mandatory sentencing guideline mantra was sort of like the Kool-Aid that we should never have drunk.

POTTER: Behind bars, the racial disparity is striking. Black men are six times more likely to be imprisoned than whites, especially for drug offenses, even though the rate of drug use is only slightly higher for blacks. Law professor Michelle Alexander, author of the book, “The New Jim Crow,” says the nation faces a human rights nightmare more than 40 years after the end of legal segregation.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER (Author, “The New Jim Crow“): In cities like Chicago, more than half of working-age African-American men now have criminal records, and they can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind in the Jim-Crow era are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon.

POTTER: In the 1960s, ministers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were in the forefront of the civil rights movement. There’s been no similar movement to end mass incarceration.

ALEXANDER: I think Dr. King would be just so deeply saddened and appalled by what we’ve allowed to happen in this country in the years since his death.

TOM NAVIN (Social Action/Prison Ministry, Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, Ark.): We’re told to visit the prisoner, and so that goes with what we do and who we are.

POTTER: Tom Navin oversees prison ministries for the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, but he says Jesus’ command to care for prisoners is not widely followed.

NAVIN: We’ve gotten people to be interested in prison ministry and contribute money to us and pat us on the back, but it’s really tough to get people to volunteer to go into the prison. That’s really a tough sell.

POTTER: As an ordained Baptist pastor, Judge Griffen believes churches should lead a national campaign against mass incarceration.

JUDGE GRIFFEN: We don’t recognize the God in our brothers and sisters who are in prison, and the biblical imperative is for us to see that our sisters and brothers in prison are our sisters and brothers. We owe it to God to get them out.

ALEXANDER: Just as in the days of slavery it wasn’t enough to shuttle a few to freedom, today we’ve  got to work for the abolition of the system of mass incarceration as a whole and that means, in my view, that the church has got to find its prophetic voice in the era of mass incarceration and really call on politicians and policymakers to undo the massive tragedy that has been done.

POTTER: Some legal reform is underway. States from Ohio to California have approved early release programs and lower penalties for lesser crimes, changes driven largely by the high cost of keeping so many people behind bars.

ALEXANDER: I think Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said we have to be careful of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If we can afford once again to lock people up en masse, nothing will prevent us from doing so if we don’t learn the most important lessons from this time, which is that none of us should be viewed as disposable. None of us should be treated as throwaway people, rounded up, locked up and then branded criminals and felons and ushered into a permanent second class status. That’s the lesson we have to learn from this time, and it’s not about saving money. It’s about saving lives, saving our own sense of humanity.

STARKS: If you got people in prison, they need to be loved, too, because if they cannot see the love of Christ, in spite of their circumstances, then they’ll never come to accept the fact that Christ cares about them at all. How can he care about me when no one from the church is in my life, no one from the church steps forward to give me an embrace?

JUDGE GRIFFEN: Talking about congregational involvement requires getting congregations to be about social change, and we in the American religious community have been very, very content to sing our way to heaven, but we have forgotten that in the Lord’s Prayer the word is “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

POTTER: Without more support from faith-based or community groups, many of these prisoners face a tough road. Within three years, national statistics say, more than a third of them will be back behind bars.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Akron, Ohio.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: As one pastor put it, “This is a King among presidents.” A memorial to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled in Washington this week, the first individual who’s not a president to receive such a tribute on the National Mall. A 30-foot statue lies at the heart of the granite monument that displays words from King’s writings and speeches. The choice of a Chinese sculptor and royalty payments to King’s family drew controversy and complicated the $120 million private fundraising effort. Congress authorized the monument in 1997. Despite the postponement of the memorial’s dedication because of Hurricane Irene, this weekend was still a time of reflection. Here to share his thoughts is the Reverend Dr. Robert Franklin, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, which is also the alma mater of the late civil rights leader. Dr. Franklin, welcome.

REVEREND DR. ROBERT FRANKLIN (President, Morehouse College): Thank you.

DE SAM LAZARO: This unveiling comes at a time of serious political polarization in this country. Do you think that the monument has the potential any way to provide some healing in that divide?

FRANKLIN: I believe so, and I certainly hope so. Dr. King was a man of healing and reconciliation even in the context of calling for justice. American politics is broken today, and Dr. King’s message, his life, his values and virtues can offer us a strategy for healing what is broken. It means political opponents must never dehumanize each other. They must speak truth to power, but they must also be willing to negotiate as well as confront, and I think the King memorial will be an inspiration and a reminder that that reconciliation is possible in America.

DE SAM LAZARO: What do you think his words would be today in this political environment?

FRANKLIN: Well, that we have to listen. We have to search for common ground, something that Dr. King learned from Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays at Morehouse College, and that it’s never appropriate to dehumanize or demonize your opponent. We must always recognize their humanity and recognize their self-interest and try to appeal to that. That’s why King was such a genius as a moral leader. He confronted, but he balanced that with negotiation, and today all I hear from so many of our public officials, religious leaders, media commentators is confront, confront and polarize. Dr. King says no, you’ve gone overboard, and there’s another side to balancing this for the common good.

DE SAM LAZARO: One of the points of contention in the debate over this monument has been the whole issue of separation of church and state and the dedication of something to someone who is not—just not even a president but also at his core was a Baptist minister. Talk a little bit about it in that context.

FRANKLIN: Well, you put your finger on a fascinating question, because we’ve grappled for the past decade-and-a-half with the question of church and state and the appropriate presence of religion in our very diverse public life. I think that Dr. King actually offers a refreshing model of how you can be a religious person, a person of faith in the public square. How? Well, he was exceedingly ecumenical and interfaith. He respected the traditions, the texts, the beliefs and practices of other people without ever disrespecting or dismissing or marginalizing them, and although King was exceedingly particular, I mean, as you say, he was a black Baptist preacher from the South, he was also always in search of what’s universal in my particularity, and I think that’s an invitation to all Americans, and when we look at that monument I hope we see King saying I’m looking for common ground, not for the basis for further polarization.

DE SAM LAZARO: Well, Dr. Franklin, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today.

FRANKLIN: Thanks very much.

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

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

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

GRAETZ: Fifty years ago we were a praying people…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m Kim Lawton in Montgomery, Alabama.

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Beck began his event by referring to America as a chosen nation. Pastor Paul Jehle, who offered the opening prayer, reinforced Beck’s sense of America’s divine purpose by drawing upon Puritan John Winthrop’s immortalized call for America to be a “city on a hill.”

Historians have very little use for the idea of American exceptionalism and its supporting religious rhetoric. The historical record points not to the exceptional experience of America but to its common history with other nations. America is, after all, a nation of immigrants, and it is one shaped by both transatlantic and transpacific exchanges. Apart from this historical challenge to American exceptionalism, insistence upon the nation’s unique greatness raises the specter of America’s exceptionally violent history and culture. Not only was America among the slowest of nations to abolish slavery, it is well known that America’s violent crime rate and prison population exceed that of any other industrialized country on the planet.

Yet these are not the only problems with the exceptionalism narrative. Exceptionalists like Beck claim that colonial America was a haven of religious practice and freedom that anticipated the founding of the United States on Christian principles and religious tolerance. While respected historians affirm the importance of Christianity in early America, they have also demonstrated that both colonists and the first citizens of the new United States subscribed to a variety of faiths—or none at all. They have shown that figures such as George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin may have been sympathetic to Christianity, but they were hardly orthodox Christians.

Colonial Americans, moreover, were not exceptionally tolerant of religious dissenters. Prior to the writing of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Puritan and Anglican state churches dominated colonial religious life, and they actively limited the free expression of groups such as the Quakers and the Baptists. Even with the free exercise clause in place, Americans practiced toleration fitfully. This is why Catholics were considered by a substantial number of Americans to be un-Christian and un-American well into the 1960s and why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. The recent controversy about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero is simply the latest episode in America’s checkered history of religious freedom and “tolerance.”

These historical realities have no effect on Beck and other proponents of exceptionalism because their vision of America depends upon a combination of historical amnesia and revisionist history. For example, Beck repeatedly implored Americans to focus not on the “scars” of history but on the good America has done and will do. It was the height of irony for Beck to ask Americans to forget the scars of our past on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and in the shadow of memorials to Abraham Lincoln, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War. Americans visit these sites precisely to remember, to grieve, and to honor the scars left by the horrors of assassination, slavery, and war.

There was one brief moment, however, when Beck’s comments matched the gravity of the American past. Midway through the program he noted: “America has been both terribly good and terribly bad.” He followed this comment with a vague admonition to learn from and repair the bad, only to quickly return to his message about American greatness. Had Beck sustained this theme of the ambiguity of American history he would have been more faithful to the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr, the two figures who loomed largest over the proceedings. Lincoln’s and King’s rhetoric—especially the Second Inaugural and the “I Have a Dream” speech—were premised on a full acknowledgment of the good and bad of American experience. They understood that national “scars” represent both injury and healing, and they knew that to dismiss the injury precludes the healing.

Lincoln and King are exceptional historical figures. They had an exceptional grasp of the greatness and misery of the American past. They had an exceptional sense of caution when they spoke of God in relation to American destiny. They had an exceptional vision of American promise. More Americans should follow their exceptional example.

Andrew Finstuen is director of the Honors College and associate professor of history at Boise State University. He is the author of “Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).