DR. BRENDA WILLIAMS: (singing) God is a good God, yes he is. God is a good God, yes he is. One more time.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the medium security pod at the detention center in Sumter, South Carolina, and this is Dr. Brenda Williams, all four feet, eleven inches of her.

DR. BRENDA: OK, now listen up. What were going to do is this. A couple of things, then we’re gonna go on, ’cause I am a very short-winded person.

SEVERSON: She says she was afraid to talk in public until the teacher made her give an oral report in 7th grade. Her husband, Dr. Joe Williams, says that was just the beginning.

DR. JOE WILLIAMS: She was talking when I first saw her and she’s continued to talk since then.

DR. BRENDA: (To inmates) Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. That’s all some folks do. We do more than talk. We back up our talk.

I called Mr. Mathews and said, “Hi, my name is Brenda Williams,” blah, blah, blah, and he said, “I know about you. You don’t have to give me an introduction.”

SEVERSON: Few in Sumter would deny that Dr. Brenda Williams is a force of nature, or that her husband Dr. Joe is the calm in the eye of the storm. She’s a general practitioner. He’s an internist and geriatrician. They’ve run a clinic in this city of 100,000 for 30 years. No one is turned away. Her latest project is called Do Right and the folks who agree to “do right” get on the list to get a free home. So far they’ve given away four.

PATRICIA DUNHAM: This is my dining room. I never had one of those before.

SEVERSON: (to Patricia Dunham) It’s a nice dining room.

It’s the first house Patricia Dunham has ever owned. For her and her husband and three kids, it’s a dream come true. It may be comfortable now but it wasn’t when the doctor found it.

DR. BRENDA: The house had a porch that was falling in. It had 59 broken window panes. All of the wiring was stripped of copper. The plumbing stuff was missing.

The houses are not just given, quote unquote, “given” to the families, they have to work for it. They have to earn it.

PATRICIA DUNHAM: I do community service, clean up paper, go to church, be active in my kid’s schooling, come to the meetings once a month, basically easy stuff that’s not hard to do to get a free home, and I thank you very much. (hugs her)

SEVERSON: The cost of fixing-up these fixer-uppers comes out of the Williams pockets. They receive no outside funding. But they’re not pushovers. People who don’t follow the rules don’t get a home.

DR. BRENDA: The Do Right families have to do at least 4 hours of community service a week. The Do Right families have to turn in a church program. The pastor or the leader of the religious organization has to sign that program and date it. I want a written report, not an oral report, it has to be in writing…

SEVERSON: You’re pretty tough.

DR. BRENDA: Yes, I know.

SEVERSON: Nick McCormac is a staff writer for Sumter’s newspaper The Item. He’s covered Dr. Williams.

NICK MCCORMAC (The Sumter Item): She doesn’t want people to take things for granted, basically. She wants them to earn it. It’s to give them that empowerment, to make them proud of themselves, to build themselves up so they can go on and own their house or be a voter and be engaged and have that pride that comes along with those kind of things.

DR. BRENDA: It’s demanded that the recipients of that free home go back to school and get a high school diploma if they haven’t graduated from high school. It’s mandatory.

SEVERSON: Patricia got her high school diploma. Now she’s attending college, and she has her own home.

PATRICIA: It feels so good when I go pay my taxes in January.

SEVERSON: Linda Prince earned her new home by following the rules, which includes cleaning up litter in the neighborhood.

DR. BRENDA: The neighborhood is improving and you know one thing, we ran the drug dealers away. OK, there might still be one or two hanging around somewhere, but there was a house not too far from here, by the way, that was all the time frequented by drug dealers, and they’re gone now.

DR. JOE WILLIAMS: I for one believe that this is the best country in the world. I believe that we all have to figure out a way to make it better.

SEVERSON: It’s a calling for them, making things better, a way to pay back for their good fortune. Both are deeply religious. He is a United Methodist. She belongs to an Apostolic church.

DR. BRENDA: (singing) And we all know that he loves us.

SEVERSON: She says she gets her inspiration from the good book, from scriptures like the 41st Psalm, verse one.

DR. BRENDA: “Blessed are ye who consider the poor for the Lord will deliver you in your days of trouble.”

DR. JOE: There’s a large portion of our community, the so-called underclass, that seem to be mired I poverty. And really, as I tell my wife all the time, those are the people I’m really concerned about.

SEVERSON: For them, the core of the problem facing the African-American community is the break up of the family.

DR. JOE: We have problems with men and women not getting together and getting married, or breaking apart in terms of the family, that we really feel very discouraged about.

SEVERSON: Makesha Kennedy is an exception. She and her husband were married ten years ago after the Williams prodded them and other couples to tie the knot.

Makesha has three children, getting good grades, with a father at home. She now works at the doctor’s office. So does Amanda Elizabeth Wolf. She met Dr. Brenda, as the staff calls her, when she was in jail a year ago.

AMANDA ELIZABETH WOLF: I mean, we’ve come a long ways, and you know, I have to give number one credit to God, but if it weren’t for Dr. Brenda and Dr. Joe, I wouldn’t be blessed with this house right now.

SEVERSON: Amanda is now a member of what is known as the Do Right Crew, mostly former inmates who meet with the Do Right Kids, youngsters Dr. Brenda has recruited, to do community service and talk about the problems of growing up.

AMANDA ELIZABETH WOLF: You know whenever I do, I guess, want to relapse or think about going back to my old ways, I think, you know, well I’m accountability to the Do Right kids, you know. And I don’t want to have to go to them and say, “Hey, listen, I screwed up, I’m back in jail.”

DR. BRENDA: I need you to sign up. Here’s lime-green paper, it says do right, do right, do right. If you’re part of the Do Right Crew, there’s so many benefits that come along with being part of the Do Right Crew.

SEVERSON: Even these prisoners are eligible for a free home, and she’ll help with a job too, if they “do right.”

DR. BRENDA: I’ll do everything I can to find you a job. I can’t promise you that job will come but I’ll sure do my doggone best to help you get a job.

SEVERSON: The director of the detention center says he had to turn the lights out late one night to get her to go home, but he’s glad she comes.

SIMON MAJOR (Sumter Lee Detention Center): She’s very encouraging, but not only that now, there’s another population that she talks to also, as she speaks with the inmates, our officers get to hear that same encouraging word.

SEVERSON: And then she gets to her most passionate cause right now, registering pre-trial inmates to vote.

DR. BRENDA: Your vote is just as powerful as Donald Trump’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as President Barack Obama’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as Oprah Winfrey’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as Bill Gate’s vote. They’re billionaires. You have power.

SEVERSON: Before she was done, most of the men signed up to register to vote. It’s not an easy process in South Carolina.

DR. BRENDA: (To inmate) I’ll bet your momma has your birth certificate.

(To inmates) You all come and give us a hug, we love you now..

The bible says that many are called but few are chosen. But I truly believe that he chooses certain individuals to do his tough stuff.

(singing) Thank you Jesus.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson at the Sumter Lee Regional Detention Center in South Carolina.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Every year, more than two million couples marry in the United States.

Conversation at wedding expo: When is your wedding? August 25th. Oh, you want to sign up here? Sure.

GONZALEZ: And some of those soon to be brides and grooms were here at this southern California wedding expo. As they plan their big day, it’s easy to find people ready to talk about what it takes to keep a relationship strong.

JESSICA VARGAS: I think we definitely are working every day on our relationship, making sure that that stays steady, and then we also have our personal goals that we want.….

RAYMOND GERST: We already went through the tuxedo rentals. We needed that…

GONZALEZ: Raymond Gerst and Jessica Vargas recently became engaged.

GERST: Communication, flat out. We are slowly evolving into having better communication between each other.

VARGAS: I know who he is. I know his flaws, I know the things that annoy me, but at the end of the day…

GERST: As do I…

VARGAS: …I have him, and I know he will be there for me, and as long as that communication stays good I think we’ll do all right.

GERST: As do I.

GONZALEZ: However, statistics show that just over 50 percent of first marriages in the US end in divorce. Couples whose relationships do sour, though, have gotten help from a powerful ally in recent years—the United States government. Starting with a Bush administration initiative in 2006 called the Healthy Marriage Initiative, Washington spent over half a billion dollars bankrolling various marriage education and healthy relationship programs across the country, many run by churches and religious groups.

DENNIS STOICA: We believe that being successful in marriage, it’s primarily a skills-based function, and what we provide is the skills to allow those people to be successful.

GONZALEZ: Dennis Stoica is the president of the California Healthy Marriages Coalition. It’s a nonprofit group that received over $12 million from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Most of the federal dollars Stoica’s group receives in turn goes to marriage education groups run by mostly Christian churches and religious groups, such as the Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino County, which held this marriage forum. It now gets more than 50 percent of its marriage education funds from the federal government.

STOICA: And it makes sense that the church would be interested in this. I mean, if you think about it, no matter what religion somebody belongs to or you’re affiliated with, all religions that I am aware of think that marriage should be a holy institute, so it is a strong alignment of values, yes.

GONZALEZ: The material used in government-funded marriage education programs mostly deals with communication problems and conflict management between spouses, like this scenario in a video produced by a federally funded group in Alabama.

Video excerpt: Robert! You didn’t even start dinner. I asked you two things and you promised two things: clothes and dinner. All you had to do was turn on the oven! I left you a note right on the refrigerator and I know you saw it because I see what’s in your hand. Hey! ….Whew! You can see where this conversation is headed. Robert and Tanya are both tired and stressed. He made some promises he didn’t keep, and she is coming on pretty strong…

GONZALEZ: Fighting poverty is primarily why the federal government is funding marriage education, the argument being that couples that stay together, especially in low-income minority communities, are more stable and less likely to seek government assistance.

Although few question the benefits of marriage, there are critics of Uncle Sam’s big role in marriage education.

PROFESSOR SHARON HAYS: Do you have the government telling you what kind of relationships you’ll establish?

GONZALEZ: Sharon Hays is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and an expert on families and government policy.

Man speaking at marriage forum: Would any of you care to share any of your joys or struggles in marriage?

GONZALEZ: She worries about federal money going to Christian religious groups that might criticize gay couples or couples who choose not to marry.

(speaking to Sharon Hays): If marriage is generally a good thing for society, it’s a good thing for people to get married, why shouldn’t government be involved in that?

HAYS: It is implicitly saying there is only one road. There is only one correct pathway, and it is the marriage pathway. Always when I look at all these materials on marriage promotion efforts, I worry that there is an underlying moral agenda here, that it’s actually not a story about ending poverty, but a story about morality—that it is the morally correct thing to be married. Unmarried people are morally incorrect. This is of course, right, the biggest concern relative to having government in the marriage promotion business.

STOICA: If people want to get married, we want them to be successful. But if people don’t want to get married, we don’t want them to get married, because if you don’t want to be married you’re not going to stay married.

Woman speaking at marriage forum: It is a commitment as one…

GONZALEZ: And Stoica says the groups he funds steer clear of proselytizing. However, he is a devout Catholic who sees his marriage work as a vocation.

STOICA: I believe this is God’s calling for me, is that I do believe that marriage is designed by God and that he wants people to be happily married, and that by helping people be happily married I’m fulfilling upon God’s calling for my life.

GONZALEZ: And you feel you can save people’s marriages without necessarily imposing your own religious standards on them?

STOICA: Absolutely. Our religious standards—they just don’t show up in the classroom. They just don’t show up.

GONZALEZ: Few independent studies have been done to assess the quality and effectiveness of federally funded marriage education. The federal government commissioned one report released last year by the social policy study group Mathematica. It studied 5,000 low-income couples in 8 states participating in Building Strong Families [BSF], part of the government’s marriage and relationship education effort. It found that “when results are averaged across all programs, BSF did not make couples more likely to stay together or get married. In addition, it did not improve couples’ relationship quality.”

HAYS: It is quite surprising, right. Here is this federal program that has been well funded for five years, and the research on it has shown that it is not effective. It is not effective in doing what one might call the simplest thing, which is to get people to get married.

GONZALEZ: Hays believes the money spent on marriage education should instead go to other programs, such as job training for the poor. However, Stoica stands behind both marriage and marriage education as ways to make millions of people’s lives better.

STOICA: I believe, frankly, that marriage education is the best anti-poverty program that the federal government has ever invested in, because of its preventative nature. Over 90 percent of Americans end up getting married. Over 95 percent of Americans say they want to get married. All we are doing is giving people increased probability of having what they want, which is a happy marriage.

GONZALEZ: The Obama administration is expected to continue supporting marriage education programs. It’s budgeted $150 million for the next fiscal year.

GERST: I’m thinking about having something like this on the tables …

VARGAS: But, see, then that totally changes my color scheme again.

GONZALEZ: At the marriage expo, the focus is preparing for the first few hours of matrimony and not the joys and challenges that will come later.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.