At the end of the “almost entirely secular” funeral for singer Michael Jackson, Pastor Lucious Smith, in a concluding prayer, reminded mourners that “even now the King of Pop must bow his knee to the King of Kings. And we pray that you would remind us, Lord, that our lives are but dust.”

Renaissance studies professor Gordon Campbell writes that this incident is emblematic of the melding of contemporary popular culture with the words of a 400-year-old translation of the Bible. “The formality of the language acknowledges its origin in the KJV,’’ he observes in his book Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011 (Oxford University Press).  While the modern idiom would be “bend his knee,” the use of “bow” recalls instead the repeated use of this idiom in the King James Version. Similarly, “our lives are but dust” echoes “he remembereth that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14), but it does so, Campbell says, in an archaic construction in which a negative is suppressed. The word “but” becomes adverbial and means “merely,” a construction common to the KJV.

Campbell’s book is one of a host of recently published and forthcoming books on the King James Bible’s 400th birthday, an occasion that is providing scholars and other commentators with an opportunity to praise and, if not bury, at least restore some measure of balance in assessing its importance, its influence, and its possible future significance.

It is fair to say the King James Bible is one of the most popular and, in many quarters, beloved books in the English language. At one time in the not too distant past it could be found in virtually every Protestant home in the United States. Along with Shakespeare, it is thought to have had an uncommonly large influence on the English language.

Campbell’s Bible is an excellent place to begin to sort through the history and influence of the King James Bible. Century by century, in England and America, Campbell guides the reader in accessible but thorough scholarship through the pre-King James beginnings of the Bible in English to the contemporary world where the KJV is available in a Kindle edition and MP3 formats.

Some of the history will be familiar, but other parts will be new and even startling or unsettling, especially to those who believe the 1611 text is the unalterable word of God. For example, Campbell notes the text of the KJV was not fixed in 1611, and there was no master first edition. “The absence of an agreed master text gave license to a long tradition of corrections, and there was not always a clear line drawn between corrections of printers’ errors and corrections of translators’ errors.”

Indeed, the stabilization of the text did not come until 1769, when English divine Benjamin Blayney’s Oxford folio was published. “The KJV that one can buy now,” Campbell observes, “is essentially this late-eighteenth century text, not the text of 1611.”

In succinct but informative chapters, Campbell moves through the pre-history of the King James Bible, beginning with the seminal figure of John Wycliffe. Although many think of Wycliffe as the first translator of the Bible into English, Campbell informs us while Wycliffe encouraged a number of translations by his followers, “there is no evidence that he undertook any translating himself.” Still, by the end of the fourteenth century “the English Bible was firmly associated with his name.”

Campbell also helpfully reminds us of the chief aim of Protestant Bible translators such as Wycliffe and, on the continent, reformers such as Luther and Erasmus: to put the Scriptures into the hands of the everyday laity. Henry Knighton, Wycliffe’s chronicler and contemporary, complained that the English church reformer “translated from the Latin into the language not of the angels but of Angles [the English], so that he made the Bible common and open to the laity, and to women who were able to read, which used to be reserved for literate and intelligent clergy.”

Wycliffe was the first but not the last Protestant associated with translation who would be martyred for his efforts. Since David Daniell’s definitive 1994 biography of Bible translator William Tyndale (1494?-1536), that English reformer with Lutheran sympathies has been getting increased attention for his major contribution to the King James Bible. Although he has often been overlooked by those who lavish extravagant praise on the KJB, especially for its literary merits, Campbell says Tyndale should be rightly known as “father of the English Bible,” and while he only completed translations of the New Testament, the Pentateuch, and the Book of Jonah, Tyndale was a looming presence in the 1611 version. Many of the phrases and cadences associated with the KJB, from “Let there be light and there was light” to “Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you,” came first from Tyndale. According to David Katz in his 2004 book God’s Last Words (Yale University Press), the portions of the King James Bible that Tyndale translated remain about 90 percent verbatim Tyndale. Yale critic Harold Bloom argues Tyndale should be ranked “one of the greatest writers in English, standing only after Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton,” and as New Testament scholar Gergely Juhász writes in his essay in the collection The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge University Press),  edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, “To put it somewhat bluntly: by modern standards of authorship, the KJB would be regarded as a form of plagiarism.”

After a synopsis of each of the major translations prior to the King James Bible, Campbell provides a useful overview of the commissioning of the King James Version, noting the king’s desire for an alternative to the popular but anti-monarchical Geneva Bible, as well as glimpses at individual translators and the organization of the translation companies. Readers seeking a fuller examination of the politics and personalities involved in the creation of the King James Bible might also turn to Adam Nicholson’s God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (HarperCollins).  Published in 2003, Nicholson’s highly readable, but sometimes excessively florid, account of the complex world of Jacobean England goes deeper into the intrigues and controversies swirling through England in the post-Elizabethan age, especially the Hampton Court conference of Puritans and bishops from the established English Church that aimed to reconcile the two increasingly cantankerous factions.

Nicholson provides fascinating sketches of the translators and others who played a role in bringing the King James Bible to life. He is especially good on the complex character of Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, who, says Nicholson, is in many ways the flawed hero of the King James Bible’s story: “as broad as the great Bible itself, scholarly, political, passionate, agonized, in love with the English language …. Worldly, saintly, serene, sensuous, courageous, craven, if not corrupt then at least compromised, deeply engaged in pastoral care, generous, loving, in public bewitched by ceremony, in private troubled by persistent guilt and self-abasement—but in the grim realities of plague-stricken London in the summer of 1603, he appears in the worst possible light.” During the long months of the plague, Nicholson says, Andrewes never once visited his parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where more than a third of its 4,000 people died.

While the stricter Puritans were disappointed with the 1604 Hampton Court conference because no great change to the established church was enacted, “at court an air of optimism prevailed,” Nicholson writes. “The English Church would be unified, its Elizabethan squabbles forgotten. England and Scotland would become one country. Peace would be established in Europe. There would even be discussions with the pope about the reunification of the Roman and Protestant churches. … James’s Arcadian vision of untroubled togetherness would descend on the soul of England like a balm.”

“Much of that looks like a joke now,” Nicholson adds. “Almost the only remnant of that dream, a piece of flotsam after the tide has passed, is the King James Bible.”

Like Nicholson and others, Campbell pays special attention to the brief given to the translators. They were “not to make a new translation … but to make a good one better.” Indeed, the first rule the translators were to follow was begin with “the ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the Bishops’ Bible, to be followed and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.”

As he follows the changing text through the centuries, Campbell corrects some common ideas about the KJB. He says the notion that it was published on May 2 is a myth, for there was no such thing as a publication date in the seventeenth century. He also provides interesting details on other aspects of Bible publication, such as the first introduction of chronologies to accompany the text (in 1679), which dated Adam’s death at 130 anno mundi (“year of the earth”). A more famous chronology by Church of Ireland Archbishop James Ussher, which dated the creation precisely to the evening preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004, was added in 1701.

Campbell says the unhappy Puritans were broadly content with the translation, although a little uneasy about the inclusion of the Apocrypha. Others over the years were less accepting. Despite the near unanimity in praise for the KJB that exists today—a “cascade of delight,” English professor Stephen Prickett calls it in his essay on “the King James steamroller” in The King James Bible after 400 Years—it was not especially well-received when it was published or for some decades thereafter. After 1611, while the KJB was the Bible required to be read in English churches, “There was widespread grumbling, from all corners, about both its scholarship and its style,” editors Hamlin and Jones write. Critics found it a rushed job, the equivalent of scholarly fast-food, in which “the cook hasted you out a reasonable sudden meal,” in the words of Protestant clergyman and scholar Ambrose Ussher, brother of the famous archbishop. Others called it harsh, uncouth, and obsolete. Indeed, Prickett argues that acclaim for the KJB really dates only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then for literary rather than religious reasons.

As religious belief waned during the Victorian era, recognition grew for the King James Version’s importance to the English language and to British and American literary life. Prickett is explicit: praise for the KJB, when it comes, is presented as exclusively aesthetic.

Poet and historian Thomas B. Macaulay wrote in 1828 that the English Bible was “a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.” Literary historian and critic George Saintsbury, writing toward the end of the nineteenth century, called it, along with Shakespeare, “the perfection of English, the complete expression of the literary capacities of the language.” Even a religious skeptic like H.L. Mencken, writing in 1930, said it was “probably the most beautiful piece of writing in all the literature of the world.”

Harold Bloom, one of the most prominent and prolific, as well as controversial, contemporary literary critics, echoes Saintsbury in his book The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (Yale University Press),  arguing the KJB stands at “the sublime summit of literature in English” alongside only Shakespeare. “Originally the culmination of one strand of Renaissance English culture,” Bloom writes, “the KJB became a basic source of American literature: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson are its children, and so are William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy. The KJB and Shakespeare fuse into a style of language that enabled the emergence of Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick, As I Lay Dying, Blood Meridian. Whitman’s verse and Hemingway’s prose alike stem from the KJB.”

While Bloom does not explore those large claims in his contribution to the cornucopia of books celebrating the KJB anniversary, eight of the essayists in the Hamlin-Jones collection do, examining the influence and impact of the King James version on figures from John Milton, John Bunyan, and the Romantic poets to John Ruskin, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and William Faulkner, as well as on African-American literature more generally and on lesser known—in the United States, at any rate—writers Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Smart.

Hannibal Hamlin, for example, in his essay on John Bunyan (1628-1688), best known for The Pilgrim’s Progress, observes that while writers had been making allusions to or paraphrasing and adapting the Bible long before the King James Bible, Bunyan “had the remarkable ability to transport himself into and live inside his favorite book … the Bible.”

“Pilgrim’s Progress is all Bible, all the time,” Hamlin writes. But the question is, which Bible? Bunyan, like many Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had access to more than one translation. Hamlin says there are some instances where the KJB and the Geneva Bible, the translation most popular with Puritans and other dissenters, diverge, and it seems Bunyan had Geneva in mind. But the Bible he clearly knew best was the KJB, and “the vast majority of identifiable biblical quotations and allusions in Grace Abounding and Pilgrim’s Progress are either decisively KJB or in language shared by KJB and Geneva.”

Hamlin goes on to observe: “One of the peculiarities of the history of the KJB is that the English Bible associated most strongly with a monarch and with the established church became the favored Bible of radicals and dissenters such as Bunyan. … The first major English writers who seem predominantly influenced by the language of the KJB are Milton and Bunyan.”

Similarly, it is worth noting—according to one of the essays in Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible,  edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid and published by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford to mark its collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, on a major exhibition on the development of the King James Bible—that KJB texts were so prominent in the works of great Nonconformist hymn-writer Isaac Watts and early Methodist Charles Wesley that if the KJB were lost, as one Wesleyan minister said, you could “extract much of it” from their hymns.

Perhaps one of the writers contemporary readers would find most unlikely to be influenced by the Bible is Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Yet literary critic and New Yorker staff writer James Wood, in his essay on her novel To the Lighthouse (1927) in the Hamlin-Jones collection, finds it “stealthily biblical, and its visionary power all the stronger for the submersion and ghostliness of its biblical allusions.” One of the novel’s central questions, he argues, turns on what it means to continue to need or make use of religious language whose content is no longer believed in.

Wood looks in depth at the difficult “Time Passes” section of the novel to argue that what the passage seems to suggest “is that though an antique biblical language is needed to evoke the almost cosmic confusion of the First World War, that same biblical language will not suffice to disclose revelation, because the formal belief that sustained and enriched that language has disappeared; in this sense, when God died, the language of revelation died with him.”

“It is this post-Christian dimension that makes To the Lighthouse both the great elegy for the innocence destroyed by the First World War, and the great farewell, comparable to ‘Dover Beach,’ to the last, frail sureties of Victorian Christianity,” Wood writes.

Another fine essay in the Hamlin-Jones collection by Katherine Clay Bassard argues the African-American writer’s approach to the KJB “is based on a dual perception of the Bible as a book of signs and wonders” which represents in dialectical form the fascination with the language of the KJB “as the vehicle for social power and an acknowledgment of the spiritual authority bestowed on the Bible as a sacred text within African-American religious culture.”

Harold Bloom’s Shadow of a Great Rock takes a different and, of course, contentious approach to his consideration of the KJB. Instead of looking just at the influence the KJB has exerted on writers, he surveys many of the 66 books of the Bible itself, as well as the Apocrypha.

Like most literary critics who write about the importance of the KJB, Bloom devotes most of his space to the Hebrew Bible, where he applies the theory he developed in his The Book of J to write about aesthetic achievements of the writer he posits as responsible for the Bible’s first five books. He often takes issue with contemporary conventional biblical critical theory, not only in the case of the Pentateuch, but also in such cases as the authorship of Isaiah. “I am unimpressed,” Bloom writes in his comments on Isaiah, “by fashions in biblical scholarship, which currently dissolve the Yahwist (J) into a mosaic of fragments. Isaiah now is even more atomized.”

Bloom is even more provocative in his handling of the New Testament, or as he somewhat snarkily calls it “the Belated Testament.“ While he finds the Hebrew Bible’s compilation and canonization to be guided by an “implicit aestheticism,” there is no such overall literary merit or aesthetic motivation to the New Testament. “Usurpation is the stance of the Greek New Testament toward the Hebrew Bible,” and he finds that with the exception of Paul and James, the New Testament is “a viciously anti-Jewish work. Paul is anti-Judaic but not a hater of Jews.” The New Testament, Bloom says, “has hatred at its core despite its doctrine of love.”

His judgment of the Gospel of Mark is typical. “Like the J writer’s Yahweh, Mark’s Jesus is both a person and a personality. You cannot apprehend either J’s Yahweh or the Marcan Jesus by employing theology: it would not work. Both J and whoever wrote Mark are uncanny writers, but J is sublime and Mark is weird. I intend no deprecation of Mark by that distinction. J is a great writer, comparable to Homer and Tolstoy, while Mark reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe, a bad stylist who yet fascinates.”

For Paul, Bloom deploys his most famous critical insight, saying the apostle suffers “an anxiety of influence in regard to the Hebrew Bible. Seeking power and freedom, Paul tears to shreds the authority of Tanakh. … Usurpation is the central resource alike of the strong poet and the spiritual innovator. Not even Isaiah and Jeremiah were enough for Paul to overgo; Moses himself was to be surpassed.”

Along the way, however, Bloom engages in some useful comparative readings of Tyndale and the KJB, and he sets the two versions of 1 Corinthians 13 alongside each other to interesting effect. “Paul uses the Greek agape, caritas in Jerome’s Vulgate and so KJB’s ‘charity,’” he notes. “For me, Tyndale’s ‘love’ works better, and I also prefer his ‘I imagined as a child’ to the KJB ‘thought.’ Best of all is Tyndale’s ‘even in a dark speaking’ rather than the KJB ‘darkly.’ And yet again I must commend Tyndale over the apostle himself, strictly as a literary judgment.”

The King James Bible did not only exert a literary influence. History professor Naomi Tadmor, in her The Social Universe of the English Bible (Cambridge University Press),  the most academic and philologically penetrating of the books under consideration, looks at a very different reciprocal relationship—the one between the translators and the social world in which they lived, the world they sought to reflect in their translations. A key reason for its popularity, she writes, is that the translation was “Anglicized” or “Englished.”

“The biblical text was not simply translated into English but also transposed, slightly molded or otherwise rendered in terms that made sense at the time,” she argues.

There are key shifts in meanings from Hebrew words to English words that were “textually telling and historically significant. … As the Bible was rendered into the vernacular … subtle and overt ‘Englishing’ also took place, which in turn plays a role in the widespread propagation of the English Bible.”

Such changes, she contends went beyond word and semantic substitutions to include the construction of a social universe. In four heavily footnoted chapters, Tadmor explores four sets of social relations and how the biblical translation and social circumstances interacted. In the first, she looks at how the Hebrew semantic construction “love thy friend” or “thy fellow man” evolved to become the English “love thy neighbor,” a very different injunction. The second chapter examines notions of gender and the ways in which English conceptions of marriage crept into the vernacular biblical versions over time, while the third chapter focuses on labor relations and how the Hebrew word that would literally be translated as “slave” was transformed into the English “servant.” The fourth chapter surveys notions of office and rule and the ways in which biblical terms were “Englished” and manifested in such renderings as “prince,” “captain,” “duke,” “sheriff,” and even “chamberlain,” which, she notes, is the ”sanitized term employed in some contexts for designating the Hebrew saris, meaning eunuch.”

Tadmor argues, for example, that by “rendering the word re’a as neighbor in the biblical translations, the moral relationship of the biblical injunction was conceived of in the English text as taking place in a social world shaped by local communities.” Similarly, she writes that the understanding of service relationships in early modern England found its way into the translations of the English Bible. She finds that the original Hebrew wording of the Ten Commandments, for example, makes no reference at all to servants in any conventional English sense of the word. Rather, the text mentions male and female slaves. “In the Fourth Commandment, for example, masters are instructed to allow their male and female slaves (as well as domestic animals) to rest on the Sabbath day. The Tenth Commandment concludes by prohibiting individuals from coveting not only their fellow man’s house, but also his chattels, including male and female slaves.”

Linguist David Crystal, in his delightful book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language (Oxford University Press),  sets out to test the assertion made in his 2004 book The Stories of English that “the King James Bible—either directly, from its own translators, or indirectly, as a gloss through which we can see its predecessors—has contributed far more to English in the way of idiomatic or quasi-proverbial expressions than any other literary source” and to quantify just how many expressions such as “salt of the earth”’ or “whited sepulcher” currently used in English have their roots in the King James Bible. But as he says in Begat, it is not quite as simple as that.

The answer was both more difficult and complicated than he thought, and in 42 short, breezy, and often humorous chapters, Crystal looks at biblical expressions that have entered the common language. “The most interesting cases of the Bible shaping our language are when we find expressions in daily use, where people take a piece of biblical language and use it in a totally nonbiblical context, knowing that the allusion will be recognized.” Even better, he says, are cases where the biblical expression is linguistically manipulated to make people sit up and take notice. “The writers aren’t expecting us to know which bit of the Bible the allusion refers to, only that they’ve done something clever with the English language.”

Crystal cites as one example the phrase “let there be light,’’ noting that if one types the expression into a computer search engine there will be over a million hits but only a small minority directly related to the Genesis story. It has been put to use in all sorts of nonbiblical settings, including as a title for art exhibits and pop music. It even turned up as the name of an episode on the TV series “Sex and the City.”

“The best evidence that an expression has been fully assimilated into a language is when it generates creative, playful alternatives,” Crystal concludes. He notes blog reports on airline delays with titles such as “Let There Be Flight,” while boxing and wrestling Web sites go for “Let There Be Fight.” But “let there be light” is not unique to the KJB. It was in the earlier Tyndale and the Bishops Bible before it went into the KJB.

Another chapter looks at the phrase “fly in the ointment,” which Crystal notes has achieved a vogue in popular culture: it’s the title of two novels and a book on popular science, and in music it turns up as the name of a pop group as well as the title of a 1990s album by the US rock group AFI, as well as the name of at least two songs. But, he says, while all dictionaries cite the King James Bible as its source, the phrase doesn’t actually appear there with those words. The verse in Ecclesiastes (10:1) actually reads: “Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour; so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honor.”

Crystal finds Isaiah provides a number of expressions that have been turned into idioms, including the verse “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” He notes a headline in a Colombian newspaper about the decline of paramilitary activity and the rise of a local literature which read “beating swords into pens,’’ and the opening of a tea house on the site of a former battleground in Thailand leads to “beating swords into teacups.” A 2000 book on adapting military technology for civilian products was titled “Beating Swords into Market Shares.”

The conflation of Isaiah 22:13, “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die,’’ with Luke 12:19, about the rich man who tells his soul, “Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry,” winds up in all kinds of modern variations, such as “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet” or “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we devalue the pound” or “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may be in Utah,”’ a reference to the state’s strict alcohol laws.

Another Isaiah phrase, “Behold the nations are as a drop of a bucket” (Isaiah 40:15) has resulted in the modern idiom “drop of/in a bucket,” but, again, the phrase is not unique to the KJB and appears also in Wycliffe, Geneva, and the Roman Catholic Douai-Rheims.

So what does Crystal conclude at the end of his biblical combing and computer searching? He says the influence of biblical idioms is substantial, and they are found in all contexts in which language is used, “from ABC television to zoology, taking in on the way such varied domains as basketball, comic strips, dentistry, engineering, pornography and social networking. The people implicated cover all walks of life: Shakespeare and Sinatra, Byron and Beckham, Osama and Obama. The sources range from News of the World to Newsweek, from Henry IV to The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Even the recent banking crisis has made a contribution: “Am I my Lehman Brothers’ keeper?”

Still, says Crystal, this remarkable and stylistic diversity stems from a surprising small number of instances of English idioms from the KJB—only 257. “I say ‘only 257’ because this puts in perspective the sometimes wild claims made about the role of the Bible in the history of the English language,” he writes, yet no other source, including Shakespeare, has contributed as many.

What about in the King James Version? Crystal says in only 18 cases is a modern idiom to be found in its exact form. In 37 cases, such as “fly in the ointment,” there is no exact King James antecedent. In some 196 cases another translation, especially the Geneva Bible, has the same form as the King James Bible. Is it right, then, to insist that no book has had greater influence on the English language than the KLB? “If this claim is interpreted with reference to the number of innovative idiomatic expressions in a single canonical work of literature, I think we have to say yes,” Crystal concludes.

But do the current anniversary observances celebrate the enduring and continuing importance of the King James Bible, or are they an elegy for an influence that has passed and that will render the KJB of antiquarian rather than theological or literary interest?

“In 1986,’’ Indiana University English professor Paul C. Gutjahr notes in his essay “From Monarchy to Democracy” in the Hamlin-Jones collection, “the New International Version accomplished what dozens of other American translations had been unable to do: dethrone the King James Bible as the bestselling Bible version among American Protestants, a position it had held for nearly three hundred and fifty years.”

Gutjahr‘s piece explores the long tradition of Bible translation in America, pointing out that in the nineteenth century alone, American biblical scholars created some 30 new translations. While many of these received lukewarm receptions, new translations continued to appear with increasing frequency in the early decades of the twentieth century, including, in 1901, the American Standard Version, “a version which many American Protestants would revere throughout the century as the gold standard of translation accuracy.”

Gutjahr touches briefly on the controversy surrounding the publication of the Revised Standard Version in 1952, which brought into sharp relief the deepening divisions within American Protestantism between mainline and conservative evangelical denominations. In the wake of the RSV’s slow acceptance, new translations continued to appear, with nine in the 1950s alone. In the 1960s and early 1970s, however, two new versions of the Bible utilized a new understanding of translation—the American Bible Society’s Good News for Modern Man (1966) and The Living Bible (1971). Both used the controversial translation principle known as “functional equivalence,’’ which stressed translating the Bible “thought-for-thought,” rather than the “formal equivalence” method which translated “word-for-word.” Functional equivalence translations aimed to make the Bible more accessible and simpler to understand by flattening and limiting the interpretative possibilities of complex passages.

“While the quest to present Bible readers with a readily understandable vernacular translation reached all the way back to the KJB, the NIV became a shining example of the contemporary cost of such a mission as the NIV offered its readers ever narrower and more focused lines of interpretation,” Gutjahr writes. “As the voice of the KJB receded in American culture, not only did a multiplicity of scriptural voices become more prominent, but also these voices were increasingly inflected with distinct interpretative stances.”

The use of functional equivalence and the rise of what Gutjahr calls revolutionary changes in publishing have made the last 40 years an era dominated by the proliferation of highly interpretative niche Bibles—The Couples Bible, Policeman’s Bible, Extreme Teen Study Bible, and the Celebrate Recovery Bible, for example.

“Perhaps no biblical edition better captures the current spirit of the age when it comes to American Bible reading than The HCSB Light Speed Bible,” Gutjahr observes, a response to the fact that 40 percent of Bible owners say the book is too hard to read and 59 percent feel they don’t have the time to read their Bible. The Light Speed Bible fuses the Holman Christian Standard Bible with a reading system developed by author and lecturer William Proctor, which he promises will allow readers to read the entire Old and New Testaments in 12 to 24 hours with 70 percent comprehension. “Accessibility, efficiency, and ease of use have clearly become key values in the production and consumption of American Bibles,” says Gutjahr.

The consequences of the shift, both for the future of the King James Bible and for Americans’ biblical literacy, remain uncertain, but Gutjahr is pessimistic: “Not only is the popularity of the KJB dying in America, but with it is American biblical culture’s ability to benefit from the many-layered riches found in the Bible.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service. He has written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on American prose and the King James Bible and on John Updike, Marilynne Robinson, and many other writers.

(Male voice): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…

(Female voice): The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…

(Female voice): For I know that my redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The familiar rhythms and cadences have echoed over four centuries, and believers and nonbelievers alike say it’s impossible to overstate the impact of the King James Version of the Bible.

JON SWEENEY (Author, Verily, Verily): It is the edition of the book, essentially. More than any other book in the world the Bible has influenced us, but this is the edition of the Bible that has influenced us the most.

LAWTON: Jon Sweeney is author of a new book, Verily,Verily, which examines that influence. He says the King James Version—the KJV—has been particularly important in American culture and history.

SWEENEY: It’s the Bible of the speeches of Lincoln. It’s the Bible of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It’s the Bible of the speeches of Martin Luther King. It’s the basis of cultural identity in the United States more than any other book.

LAWTON: Sweeney’s book is one of many being released for the KJV’s 400th anniversary. All year long, groups around the world are organizing celebrations, from symposia and exhibitions to special projects online. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Thomas Nelson Publishers is the leading commercial publisher of King James Bibles, and they’re still rolling off the presses. In this factory, workers add thumb indexes to help readers more easily find the various books of the Bible. For the 400th anniversary, Thomas Nelson has released a special limited edition King James Bible.

Today, more copies of contemporary translations may be sold, such as the New International Version or NIV. But the King James Version is still near the top of the list. In just the last 12 months, Thomas Nelson sold more than a million copies of the KJV.

The Bible is the best-selling book in history, and the King James Version of the Bible is the best-selling translation of all time. No one knows exactly how many King James Bibles have been published over the centuries, but experts say it’s likely in the billions.

RON WICK (Bible Collector): The King James is the most printed book in the history of man. It is an amazing thing.

LAWTON: The King James Bible emerged out of a tumultuous religious period in English history. For nearly a millennium, the Latin Vulgate Bible had been considered the only sacred text. As Latin became less used, ordinary people couldn’t understand what they heard when priests read the Bible in church. There were calls for an English vernacular Bible, but scholars who did the translations were branded heretics. In 1401, the English parliament made it a crime punishable by death. Enter William Tyndale, a renegade sixteenth-century scholar who made the first English translation from Hebrew and Greek texts. In 1536, even as King Henry VIII was separating from the Roman Catholic Church, he had Tyndale arrested and executed. But just a year later, it was Henry who authorized the first legal English translation.

LAWTON: Baylor University professor Scott Carroll directs the Green Collection, one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts and artifacts. He says 80 percent of Tyndale’s work ended up in the KJV.

PROFESSOR SCOTT CARROLL: I think he’s an unsung hero in the whole story.

LAWTON: After Henry VIII came a series of English Bibles, all intertwined in the often bloody battles between Catholics and Protestants. When King James I came to the throne, he wanted a version of the Bible that wasn’t tied to a particular movement. He formed a translation committee of scholars.

CARROLL: They were commissioned in 1604 to find the best translations out there and then match them up with the Greek and Hebrew, and if they matched up to take them. When you think about the King James, I think generally people think about—they think it’s a Protestant commodity. But in fact it really was a result, a culmination of Jewish, Catholic, even Greek Orthodox scholarship that led to this publication.

LAWTON: What has been called the “masterpiece by committee” was first published in 1611, and thanks to moveable-type printing, the King James Bible was widely distributed.

CARROLL: The success of the King James Bible is directly tied to the success of the introduction of the Gutenberg printing press and advancements made beyond that, absolutely.

LAWTON: It wasn’t always a smooth process.

CARROLL: 1631—the Wicked Bible, where a typesetter forgot to put the word “not” in and it says “thou shalt commit adultery,” and the poor printer was fined. He had to pull all the books off the market, so he lost his investment in that and he ended up dying in debtor’s prison.

LAWTON: The King James Bible caught on, and for the next three centuries it was virtually the only Bible used in the English-speaking world. Its literary beauty inspired writers and artists, who incorporated the language into their work, from the most beloved classics to the world of pop culture.

SWEENEY: The King James Bible is meant to be read a loud more than any other translation, and I believe that the translators themselves knew that. There were poets in those rooms in the Jerusalem Chamber in Westminster Abbey, and they wanted the Bible to sing. For instance, I Kings 19:12: “And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice….”

LAWTON: The KJV has had a significant impact on spoken English as well.

LAMAR VEST (American Bible Society): Many of those phrases that we hear today everyday, over 350 that have been identified that are used in modern English, came right out of the King James, and most people don’t have a clue that they’re quoting the King James Bible.

SWEENEY: The powers that be; a man after his own heart; signs of the times; eat, drink and be merry; the apple of his eye; can a leopard change his spots; am I my brother’s keeper; seek and ye shall find; the Lord is my shepherd; let my people go; and on and on and on.

LAWTON: The KJV’s poetic rhythms made it easy for people to remember.

Unidentified Man: “For I know the plans I have for you, saith the Lord.”

Unidentified Woman: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against God.”

LAWTON: Almost every American president has been sworn in with his hand on a King James Bible. KJV language has been the source of some of the most important speeches in America’s history, including Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King Jr.’s most beloved remarks.

Martin Luther King Jr: I’ve seen the Promised Land…

LAWTON: Politicians to this day make King James references.

President Barack Obama: … that I am my brothers’ keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.

LAWTON: For a long time, many Christians considered the KJV the only version authorized by God himself. With the advent of more modern translations, the number of King James-only churches has decreased dramatically. But the KJV has never disappeared from regular use.

BOB SANFORD (Thomas Nelson Publishers): There used to be—maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago a single translation might be the preferred translation of choice for a church. I think those days are gone. Where a pastor, if he’s smart, will use multiple translations, the King James will likely be one of them.

LAWTON: Even congregations which may think they don’t use the King James might be surprised to learn the language of the Lord’s Prayer recited in most churches is indeed KJV.

People praying: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven….

LAWTON: Recognition of the KJV’s influence crosses theological lines. The Vatican Embassy in Washington hosted a reception in honor of the 400th anniversary. Guests got a first look at a traveling exhibition that will be on display in Rome later this year, and at the Christian Science headquarters in Boston, the Mary Baker Eddy Library also has a special KJV display. There, visitors can hand-copy verses from the King James Bible in the same way monks and scholars copied Scripture before the invention of the printing press.

LAWTON: Still, many modern Christians say they find the KJV frustrating for personal use. The sometimes arcane words can be difficult to understand, and many trip over all the thees and thous. Jon Sweeney believes this is unfortunate.

SWEENEY: Contemporary translations are good. They’re great. They make the Bible relevant, but at the same time I think it makes it kind of ordinary, so reading the Bible is kind of like reading a popular novel.

LAWTON: Sweeney says the KJV can bring a sense of wonder and majesty that is spiritually meaningful if people take the time to experience it.

SWEENEY: It’s interesting to read a Bible and have thees and thous—different ways that might actually change how you think about the God that you’re praying to, about the God that you’re reading about, about the activity of that God, because you’re using language that feels more reverential. I find that it puts my heart in the right place.

LAWTON: And 400 years later, millions around the world still agree.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Minister leading church service: Let us stand and continue our morning worship.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: Serving God and ministering to people is deeply fulfilling, pastors say. Yet studies have found that Protestant clergy also suffer from depression and obesity at higher rates than the population as a whole.

REV. JOSEPH STEWART-SICKING (Loyola University Maryland): Researchers like to joke that what we know about clergy is they’re satisfied, stressed out, and fat.

POTTER: Joe Stewart-Sicking is an Episcopal priest who teaches pastoral counseling and studies why clergy are more stressed than most of us.

STEWART-SICKING: What makes the clergy vocation and occupation really different is that you work for God ultimately. If that work environment isn’t meaningful to you, you’re doing a lot of things like, you know, doing budgets or checking spelling on a bulletin, or office management, that’s going to really hit home, because you think your job should be about God.

POTTER: Add to that a new source of stress for many pastors in mainline Protestant denominations: as church membership dwindles they feel pressured to reverse the trend.

STEWART-SICKING: And a lot of pastors think that church growth is really the measure of their success, you know, and a lot of people are having to learn to deal with shrinking numbers, shrinking budgets, even closing churches.

REV. LYNDA FERGUSON (praying in home of church members): Lord, we thank you for your grace and your mercy today…

POTTER: Lynda Ferguson is pastor of Salem United Methodist Church in rural Bostic, North Carolina.

FERGUSON (praying in home of church members): …in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

POTTER: She’s the church’s only pastor—most Protestant churches have just one—ministering to a congregation of about 300.

FERGUSON: Used to be the churches were filled, and now today we have to play a role of going out and bringing people into the church or actually taking the church to people.

POTTER: In the past three years, Ferguson has put 90,000 miles on her car, visiting the sick…

FERGUSON (praying with sick church member): I ask, Lord, that you would just fill her with your holy presence and that your healing power will just consume her body.

WOMAN (speaking to Rev. Ferguson): He brought a lot of joy into this world.

POTTER: …consoling the bereaved.

FERGUSON (speaking to church members): I appreciate you letting me be part of your life.

Clergy are different in that we are called to go to many dark places. We enter into sacred places with people, places that often are very difficult and, you know, we don’t do that from a distance. Jesus didn’t sit off in a corner and say “I feel your pain” from over here. Jesus very much reached out and touched, and he felt intensely for people, and we do, too, and so when you do that on a day-after-day basis, it is a lot of stress.

POTTER: Today’s technology just adds to that stress.

FERGUSON: I couldn’t do my job probably without my laptop and my Blackberry but I’m on call 24/7, 365 days a year. I receive probably an average of 30 to 35 phone calls a day, 60 to 70 emails a day, and just taking care of that takes a lot of time.

POTTER: Feeling called to serve, not to be served, Ferguson hid her stress from the congregation. She worked 60 to 70 hours a week for more than five years and took little time off. And then one Sunday night it hit her.

FERGUSON: I came into the parsonage, and I put my things on the kitchen table, and I sat down and I—my body, I just felt like I couldn’t move, and I just sat there, and I was emotionally and physically exhausted.

POTTER: For years, clergy stress was a little bit like the weather. Everybody talked about it, and nobody did anything. But now, more than 50 programs across the country are working to improve clergy health, from foundation-paid sabbaticals to peer groups and retreats sponsored by church pension plans. Here in the mountains of North Carolina, the Episcopal Church brings groups of clergy together for eight days to de-stress and re-center themselves. This program started a decade ago with one workshop. It’s now held more than 20 times a year.

Retreat leader: The official theme for today is “where am I going?”

POTTER: The sessions cover everything from finance to vocation, giving clergy who are often isolated in their work a chance to share their stories and learn from each other.

REV. JOHN THOMPSON-QUARTEY (St. Mary’s by the Sea, Point Pleasant Beach, NJ): I was left alone in a very large parish and I was doing everything, everything, all the six or seven services during the weekend, running to all the hospital, home visitation. The doctor said, “You must be stressed out.” I said, “You think?”

POTTER: For many, the session on work and meaning was revealing.

REV. NICHOLAS PORTER (Trinity Episcopal Church, Southport, CT): What this has helped me realize is that I’ve sort of been feeling starved in my primary position.

REV. KYM LUCAS (St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Raleigh, NC): I realized that at work I spend the bulk of my time doing the things I hate and not the things that I love to do.

POTTER: Trying to do it all can take a toll on a pastor’s spiritual life.

THOMPSON-QUARTEY: I often carry the burden of being stressed from work because of such nasty emails and stuff, I bring it home, and I can’t even prepare myself to pray.

POTTER: Kym Lucas has four small children and ministers alone to a busy parish—a classic recipe for clergy burnout.

LUCAS: I felt like I had been burning the candle at both ends for a long time, for at least a year-and-a-half. And there was a part of me that felt a little guilty about taking this time, but I’m glad I did, absolutely glad that I did

POTTER: For Nicholas Porter, the retreat was a reawakening.

REV. NICHOLAS PORTER (Trinity Episcopal Church, Southport, CT): I love my job. Do I love all of it? No. At any given moment, if you were to have a little camera in my office, no. But I love my job. Healing lives, connecting people to eternity and eternal life and love—I mean this is great stuff. This is great stuff.

FERGUSON: That can be hard to remember when the stress of the job gets to be too much. Sometimes I’ll hear clergy, other clergy, not just Methodist clergy but other clergy, say to especially young people when they’re discerning a call to ministry, they will say to them, “If you can do anything else, do it.”

POTTER: After nearly collapsing from exhaustion and overwork, Lynda Ferguson finally took time off for a mission trip to Nicaragua and reset her priorities. She takes Fridays off now. Sometimes when her cell phone rings she doesn’t answer, and she’s lost weight in part by resisting the temptation to sample every dish at every church gathering.

FERGUSON (at church meeting): Bill caught me this morning running a little bit.

Church member: I saw you jogging.

Church member: Hey, she runs, she don’t jog.

FERGUSON: Just because I love the people, and I truly do, I cannot be there for everything, and they understand that, and they know that, and it is part of our job to set those boundaries, but it is very, very difficult to do so.

POTTER: Difficult, but essential for clergy to manage the stress that comes with the job and focus on the work they really feel called to do.

FERGUSON: There’s a lot of pressure that we put on ourselves as clergy because of what we’re doing, and we don’t want to let God down.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Bostic, North Carolina.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAWTON: … asking him not to do it …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABERNETHY: What do you make of that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABERNETHY: Kevin?

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

ABERNETHY: E.J.?

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

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

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BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: When Joseph Reyes, Catholic, and Rebecca Shapiro, Jewish, got married in 2004 they did not think their different religious beliefs would be a problem. They were leaning toward Judaism. The wedding ceremony was Jewish and later Joseph converted. But by this past April they were divorced, with religion playing a major role. Their daughter, Ela, now 4, was at the heart of the dispute.

JOSEPH REYES: Well, the decision was made that we would expose her to each of our respective faiths, and our daughter, Ela, would make her decisions based on what she saw.

ROLLIN: But once you had converted, then wouldn’t you be educating your child as a Jew?

REYES: The whole conversion ceremony was fairly suspect because I was just handed a bunch of books and said, “Read these—or not.”

ROLLIN: So you converted, but you didn’t really mean it.

REYES: Again, it was a cosmetic fix. My then-wife set this whole thing up and all I really did was show up.

ROLLIN: It was clear that Joseph’s conversion had little weight when he had his daughter baptized—secretly. The priest was unaware of the situation.

ROLLIN: Steven Lake is Rebecca’s attorney.

STEVEN LAKE: Mrs. Reyes, Rebecca, is Jewish, always has been. Mr. Reyes converted to Judaism. They got married in a Jewish ceremony. Their little girl was being raised Jewish, and suddenly in the middle of the divorce case on what supposedly was just a normal visitation, he took and had his daughter baptized without any discussion with his wife. She found out by email.

REYES: Being Christian and having grown up the way I had and experiencing the things I had experienced, certainly I wanted to share many of those things with my daughter.

ROLLIN: Joseph blames the entire conflict, even his insincere conversion, on his in-laws.

REYES: Her parents made it clear early on that they had an issue with my being a non-Jew, and that was something that I think plagued and burdened the duration of the marriage.

LAKE: It was only in the context of the divorce case where he blamed this all on her parents. That he did it because of the pressure of the parents. The parents of course, denied it, Rebecca denied and said nobody pressured him into anything.

ROLLIN: Although when Ela visits Joseph the court has given him the right to take her to church, the court has given Rebecca permission to raise her daughter as a Jew.

LAKE: As custodial parent, the law is that she has the right to raise her little girl in the Jewish faith. Having said that, again it’s a question of is there going to be a little exposure to Catholicism, or is it going to be each a tug of war pulling on a little girl trying to get her to follow one religion or the other?

ROLLIN: A greater tolerance of interfaith marriages has led to more of them. They now comprise 25 percent of American households. But according to the American Religious Identification Survey, interfaith marriers are three times more likely to become divorced or separated than people who marry in the same religion.

ROLLIN: Professor Katheryn Dutenhaver runs DePaul University’s interfaith mediation program in Chicago, which deals solely with religious conflict with regard to children after divorce. Clergy are always included.

PROFESSOR KATHERYN DUTENHAVER (Interfaith Family Mediation Project): When the couple come in to a mediation and they are with the clergy of their own faith and they see the clergy talking with each other and they see the clergy talking with the other parent, it becomes a different conversation than in the courtroom where you are trying to prove one is better than the other. I think the fear that people have is that if my child is raised in the other parent’s religion, then the child will grow closer to the other parent and closer to the other grandparents.

REVEREND THOMAS DORE: Very often they don’t know enough about their own religion, let alone the other person’s religion to understand what are the implications if my daughter is going to be Jewish or our daughter is going to be Catholic? What does that mean?

ROLLIN: All the mediators agree that the best solution for children is to be raised in one religion.

RABBI GARY GERSON: If there is a divorce and even if there isn’t a divorce, the child is put in the middle between the two parents, and the question becomes one of if I go to this faith, then am I estranging myself from the other parent or vice versa. Parents are the ones who need to make the decisions, set the boundaries and the rules for the family. Otherwise the child is caught in the middle, and beyond that it’s a lack of clarity for the child. To have a little bit of each is end up having nothing.

ROLLIN: Bridget Jeffries, an evangelical, and Paul Meyers, a Mormon, have a different view. They are raising their daughter, Harley, in both faiths. Their marriage is intact now but they were separated for awhile and they have struggled with the issue of how to religiously raise Harley. Their religious practices have much in common, but theologically there are major differences.

BRIDGET JEFFRIES: The idea of my daughter saying that she has faith in Joseph Smith as well as Jesus and the Trinity, the Godhead to Mormons, that was very difficult for me to process, to think about her going through. I mean I love my husband, I know that he believes in all that, but I really wanted my daughter to just have my own faith, without Joseph Smith and the baptismal confession. So that was a big deal to me.

PAUL MEYERS: I still want her to be Mormon since I believe that Mormon is more right than evangelical, but then again anyone who believes one thing has to assume that it’s more right than the others.

ROLLIN: They are certainly tolerant of each other’s religion, but like so many interfaith marriers didn’t understand their deep feelings about their own religion until they had children.

JEFFRIES: I don’t think that I realized how badly I was going to want my daughter to grow up in my faith when I had her.

ROLLIN: What bothers Paul the most is that Harley might opt out of religion altogether.

MEYERS: She might become apathetic towards just religion in general. Mommy and daddy can’t agree, so.… The idea of believing in something is much more acceptable to me then the idea of believing in nothing.

ROLLIN: Meanwhile, Paul brings Harley to his church one Sunday and Bridget brings her to her church the next Sunday. In addition, they go to both churches as a family and observe both traditions at home.

JEFFRIES: We celebrate the Protestant liturgical calendar, but when we do readings from it, we often do readings from both the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

ROLLIN: Does she show any signs of confusion or do you worry that she will?

MEYERS: She shows no signs of confusion whatsoever.

JEFFRIES: Not so far.

JEFFRIES: This has been very difficult and it’s been very hard. We’ve made a lot of compromises and sacrifices to make it work. So both of our religions say to get married within the faith and we think that’s a very strong counsel that people should follow. We just didn’t.

ROLLIN: And the Jeffries-Meyers family is not alone. According to the National Study of Youth and Religion, fewer than one-fourth of 18-to-23-year-olds think it’s important to marry someone in the same faith. And even the clergy has accepted that in America today interfaith marriages are an increasing reality.

REVEREND DORE: The days are gone when you go to school with only a Jewish community, only a Catholic community. To say you can’t talk to this one, you can’t see this one, you can’t get involved in this one—that isn’t real. It just isn’t a reality at all in their life.

ROLLIN: What Bridget and Paul have in their favor is that they are deeply aware of the problems they are facing and will continue to face, and of the joys.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Betty Rollin in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan made the rounds in Washington this week, introducing herself to the senators who will vote on her confirmation as the newest justice on the High Court. Special interest groups, many of them religious, are already urging specific lines of questioning for the upcoming hearings. If she is confirmed, Kagan would become the third Jewish justice and the third woman on the current court.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (at announcement of Supreme Court nomination): A court that would be more inclusive, more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever before.

ABERNETHY: Kagan’s confirmation would also mean that for the first time in American history the Supreme Court would have no Protestants. Does this matter? If so, what does it say about the place of Protestantism in America today? Joining me is Kim Lawton, our managing editor. Kim, I want to have a little discussion about this. People are saying, Protestants are saying, well, yes, this is a big symbol and they’re sad about it, of declining Protestant influence in this country. But at the same time I hear other people saying it’s really good news, because it is a symbol of how far the country has come in overcoming the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish prejudice that existed for so long—still exists, but there’s been a lot of progress made on that. And they also say it matters a lot more what somebody thinks, a Supreme Court justice thinks, on a particular issue than what kind of religious label that person wears. You hear that?

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, it is interesting. I mean, nobody is saying that she shouldn’t be confirmed because it throws the religious balance of the court out, or anything like that, but it has been a very interesting moment to take stock of this change in our society. But, yeah, what I’m hearing from people, what I heard from one Protestant pastor this week was he said to me I’m less concerned about her religious affiliation than I am about how she’s going to vote on, for example, some of the religion cases, and certainly that those ideas of the separation of church and state and what kind of relationship the government and religion should have—that’s been very controversial. There have been some very close decisions on the court, and so what she thinks about that, for example, is going to have a big impact no matter what kind of religious label she carries.

ABERNETHY: Yeah. There’s also this idea that has been spoken of this week sometimes about a Protestant worldview and how it’s important—Protestants after all are half the country, 51 percent, but still pretty close to half—that there is such a thing as a Protestant worldview and that this needs to be represented on the court. But is there such a thing as a Protestant worldview anymore?

LAWTON: Well that’s been really interesting for me this week to watch or to read what some people are saying just in terms of that notion. Of course people’s faith, their beliefs affect their worldview, affect how they look at things, their values. But is there a uniquely Protestant worldview in this kind of situation? There are certainly a lot of different kinds of Protestants, and even when the court had all Protestants they didn’t have all unanimous decisions, so I do think it’s been an interesting question that’s been raised.

ABERNETHY: And it doesn’t mean that there can’t ever in the future be another Protestant justice.

LAWTON: Well, certainly the Protestant influence in America is not going anywhere. I mean, our president is Protestant, we’ve only had one non-Protestant president, the majority of the US Congress is Protestant. Protestants still are a vibrant community in this country and still very influential, but things are different than they used to be.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

For much of the past two decades, the issue of nuclear disarmament had faded from public view.

Sporadic progress had been made since Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), but as international relations professor Amitai Etzioni argued in a recent article in the World Policy Journal, “While there have been deals aplenty, recent action toward these goals (reduction and elimination of nuclear arms) has been wanting….The hope that nuclear abolition would follow the original Reagan-Gorbachev arrangement lost much of its appeal after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Etzioni noted that while some reductions in arsenals continued even during George W. Bush’s administration, “dealing with American and Russian weapons lost any sense of urgency.”

Last week’s announcement that the United States and Russia have reached agreements to reduce their nuclear arsenals and that President Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev will meet in Prague on April 8 to sign to a new treaty that cuts the number of deployed nuclear weapons by 25 percent may change all that. The date of the signing is close to the anniversary of President Obama’s April 5, 2009 address in Prague on nuclear disarmament  that has been described by John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, as “perhaps the most significant nuclear weapons speech since World War II” and “more important than President John F. Kennedy’s nuclear test ban speech back in the 1960s.”

In mid-January this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand of its famous Doomsday Clock from five minutes to six minutes away from midnight, declaring that “we are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons.”

“For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material,” the group said in a statement. “Indeed, we may be at a turning point, where major powers no longer see the value of nuclear weapons for war-fighting or even for deterrence.”

The scientists cited a number of factors, including the election of Barack Obama and a joint letter he and Medvedev issued on April 1, 2009, pledging nuclear weapons cuts and a readiness “to move beyond cold war mentalities”; the bipartisan disarmament drive led by former top US policy makers George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn (their efforts included the recent documentary film, “Nuclear Tipping Point,” produced by the Nuclear Security Project); and growing participation in the public debate by “a range of civic and religious leaders, including evangelicals, on the role of nuclear weapons in national security.”

Religious groups have been involved in the public conversation about nuclear arms since the first atomic bombs were dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. On August 20, 1945, just days after the bombings, Protestant leaders, most of whom were associated with the Federal Council of Churches, the precursor body of the National Council of Churches, issued a statement expressing their “unmitigated condemnation” of the horrific attacks.

Less than a year later, the Federal Council’s Calhoun Commission, including Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett, founders of the journal Christianity and Crisis, issued a more full-bodied report entitled “Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith” and declared that “we have sinned grievously against the laws of God’” in using nuclear weapons. The report called on the United States to end any further atomic weapons production.

But as David Cortright, director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has pointed out recently, a very real ambivalence marked the churches’ response to the bomb. “As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, some of those who had greeted the bomb with horror now came to accept it as a necessary deterrent against godless communism and the perceived threat of totalitarian aggression,” he wrote in “Transcending Ambivalence: A History of Enjoying the Bomb,” published in the Spring 2009 issue of Yale Divinity School’s journal “Reflections.”  The issue was dedicated to the subject of faith and the future of nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, however, there was a resurgence of both religious and secular efforts to mobilize in support of nuclear disarmament and to push for an end to the arms race. Most notable were the nuclear freeze movement and the Roman Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace.”  Evangelicals, too, were early opponents of the use of nuclear weapons, including Sojourners, the Christian social justice community, and, from the middle 1980s, the National Association of Evangelicals. More recently, evangelicals have organized the Two Futures Project, a movement of American Christians for the abolition of all nuclear weapons led by the Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson.

The Catholic bishops’ 1983 letter, the product of a special moment in church history created by Vatican II, was significant in a number of ways, not least because it put the nation’s largest religious community squarely in the midst of the public debate over the Reagan administration’s nuclear arms policies. It also challenged the church’s own deep-seated anti-communism and was widely praised for what many regarded as the bishops’ nuanced approach to the nuclear weapons issue. In the letter, the bishops endorsed a “no-first-use” declaration by the United States and voiced support for a comprehensive test ban treaty, both of which continue to be sticky issues in current arms control debates. But they also supported continuing the core policy of deterrence even while making their approval “strictly conditional” and “a step on the way to progressive disarmament.”

Protestant denominations in the United States and international church bodies such as the World Council of Churches, however, pushed beyond the Catholic bishops and the idea of deterrence to hold up an abolitionist vision of a world without nuclear weapons. In 1986, the bishops of the United Methodist Church, for example, published their own pastoral statement, “In Defense of Creation,” which forthrightly rejected deterrence and said the doctrine “must no longer receive the church’s blessing.” Branches of what is now the Presbyterian Church USA also have a long history of opposition to the nuclear arms race, stretching back to 1946. In the 1980s, they endorsed a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race” and backed “a mutual freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons.” Over the years, regular Presbyterian statements have continued to follow on arms control and disarmament issues.

As underscored by the Presbyterian statement, the renewed debate in the 1980s paralleled and supplemented developments in the secular arena, especially the nuclear freeze campaign led by the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (now known as Peace Action) and other hybrid secular-religious peace groups.

On the international level, both the World Council of Churches and the Vatican, under a succession of popes, have been outspoken opponents of the arms race and any use of nuclear weapons. Pope John Paul II edged the Catholic Church close to pacifism, declaring there are next to no conditions in a nuclear age that justify nations going to war with each other.

While there had been sporadic arms agreements before, notably the important Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970 and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) agreement between President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, it was the mounting secular and religious pressures of the 1980s that created the framework for an accord between Reagan and Gorbachev calling for deep reductions in both US and Russian strategic arms. Their agreement resulted in the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the subsequent Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), signed in 1991. A second arms reduction treaty, START II, was signed by George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin in 1992, but it never officially entered into force when the Russians said they would no longer be bound by it after George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002.

A proponent of nuclear disarmament since his days in the Senate, President Obama quickly made the issue of nuclear disarmament a very visible part of the administration’s agenda. This was most notable in the speech he gave in Prague on April 5, 2009, in which he stated “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” He insisted he was not being naïve in holding up such a vision and acknowledged that it “will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime,” but nevertheless with patience and persistence it was an achievable goal.

Obama followed the Prague speech with two other important acts. In July, he and Russian President Medvedev signed an agreement on the basic terms of a treaty to sharply reduce each country’s number of warheads and missiles. In September, he chaired a session of the United Nations Security Council that adopted a resolution to shore up the rules aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

On December 5, 2009, the START I treaty quietly expired without a successor agreement in place, and in January, in his State of the Union address, Obama said the US was completing negotiations on what would be “the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades.” Under the terms of what is now being called New START, Russia and the US will cut their warheads to 1,550 on each side within seven years of a new treaty being signed.

But the difficulties presented by both the international negotiations needed to implement and enforce the agreements and the domestic political realities in the United States are not likely to quietly wither in the face of Obama’s soaring rhetoric or aspirations.

Senate approval of New START is expected to present challenges, although the administration says it hopes the deal with Russia will be ratified by the end of this year. As the Washington Post editorialized, “It’s hard to see how new treaties will bring about the disarmament of North Korea or stop Tehran’s centrifuges.” Other skeptical and critical voices are being heard from, some of them asking, as former correspondent William Beecher recently put it, why Obama keeps “waving the flag” of a world without nuclear weapons. “He’s well aware that nations make strategic decisions based on their perceived national self-interest,” Beecher has written. “With so much mistrust in the world, no member of the nuclear club is about to disarm when to do so would make the cheaters the strongest bullies on the block.”

At the moment, the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a key statement drawn up by every US administration setting out its basic nuclear doctrine, including the reasoning for retaining nuclear weapons and the circumstances in which they might be used, represents another slipped deadline. The NPR was due to be submitted to Congress on March 1, but a draft version was reportedly rejected by Obama as being merely a “tweaked” version of the Bush administration’s stance, rather than something that would reflect Obama’s nuclear-free aspirations and move much closer to a declaration of “no first use,” making clear the United States would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation. The Boston Globe’s Bryan Bender wrote in January that the review “is shaping up to be a major showdown for Obama this year” and that the president was “taking on some of the most sacred cows of the nuclear program.”

“My understanding is that the president and vice president are unhappy with the draft that has been produced,’’ Joseph Cirincione, president of the Plowshares Fund, told the Guardian newspaper on February 28. “Nothing has been settled on the key issue: what is the use for nuclear weapons? This is an issue the president cares deeply about.”

As Obama himself said in his State of the Union address, “Even as we prosecute two wars, we’re also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people—the threat of nuclear weapons. I’ve embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons and seeks a world without them. And at April’s nuclear security summit, we will bring 44 nations together here in Washington, DC behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.”

The tug-of- war inside the administration over the critical NPR comes as nuclear arms issues take center stage in the coming months. Along with the April 12-13 global nuclear security summit Obama alluded to, in May the United Nations will hold a conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, perhaps the toughest of issues as both Iran and North Korea press ahead with programs for developing their nuclear capabilities, and the nuclear powers are unable so far to come together on a comprehensive negotiating stance for either effort.

Obama is also expected to seek Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the United States has signed but not ratified. The Senate briefly took up the treaty in 1999 but rejected ratification. The Obama-orchestrated UN Security Council resolution in September 2009 called on all states to refrain from conducting nuclear test explosions and to ratify the CTBT.

For the most part, observes John Isaacs, members of Congress have been very quiet in response to the president on nuclear weapons issues. “The predominant sound from Washington, DC, from Congress, to the president’s proposals has been silence,” Isaacs said in December at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.  “The sounds of silence are because nuclear weapons simply are not that popular, and that gives the president…a freer hand than he would have on some other issues.”

Popular or not, it is worth noting that according to a Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly-United Nations Foundation survey in October 2008, controlling nuclear weapons around the world was ranked as the most important US foreign policy priority by 80 percent of respondents. Among Catholics and white evangelicals the percentages were even higher at 82 percent and 86 percent, respectively.

Religious groups are continuing their pressure on Obama—and the rest of the globe—to move toward a nuclear-arms-free world. In February, the Catholic bishops from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in an open letter to President Obama and the government of Japan, urged world leaders to “take a courageous step toward the total abolition of nuclear weapons and the realization of a world without wars.” In remarks prepared for a recent public forum organized by Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center on “God and the Bomb: Deterrence, Disarmament, and Human Security,” international affairs professor Douglas Shaw observed that “for all the complexity of and disagreement about nuclear weapons, there are some things we know about them. We ought not to live comfortably behind the threat of killing millions of other human beings in an afternoon—because it is morally dubious at best and because it is an unreliable means to guarantee our security.” Woodstock will repeat the forum on April 13 at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City.

“The moral end is clear: a world free of the threat of nuclear weapons,” Archbishop Edwin O’Brien of Baltimore, a member of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops committee on international justice and peace, told the Global Zero Summit in Paris in February. “This goal should guide our efforts. Every nuclear weapons system and every nuclear weapons policy should be judged by the ultimate goal of protecting human life and dignity and the related goal of ridding the world of these weapons in a mutually verifiable way.”

“The path to zero will be long and treacherous,” he added. “But humanity must walk this path with both care and courage to build a future free of the nuclear threat.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service. He has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on the war in Afghanistan and on God and empire.