KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s graduation time at the Helping Up Mission, a nondenominational Christian ministry for poor and homeless men in Baltimore. On this day, several men are being recognized for reaching new stages of success in their recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Helping Up believes that spirituality plays a key role in the recovery process, and it wants those who work there to reflect its values. The ministry relies largely on private donations, but it has received some public funding as well, and that raises a difficult question: If the mission takes government money, should it still be allowed to only hire people who share its religious beliefs?

BOB GEHMAN (Executive Director, Helping Up Mission): A faith-based organization is only faith-based if it can hire people of the particular faith that it espouses, so if, for instance, we were not able to discriminate in our hiring practices based on our faith and religion, that would change us.

BARRY LYNN (Executive Director, Americans United for Separation of Church and State): I don’t think that there’s any moral or ethical or constitutional justification for a religious group taking government funds, tax dollars, and saying we’re only going to hire the people we want, we’re going to have a religious litmus test for hiring. That’s dead wrong, and it should be stopped.

LAWTON: For decades, religious groups have been partnering with the government to provide a host of social services in the US and around the world. Those partnerships attracted new visibility—and new controversy—after President George W. Bush created his faith-based initiative—

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: People who don’t have hope can find hope.

LAWTON: —in his words “to level the playing field” so that more religious groups could compete for government grants.

A series of laws, regulations and court decisions have tried to ensure that the faith-based partnerships don’t violate the Constitution. For example, tax dollars may not be used to fund proselytizing. But the issue of religious hiring remains one of the most contentious questions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its regulations banned discrimination in hiring but granted faith groups an exemption, allowing them to hire on the basis of religion. But Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says federal funding should change the calculus.

LYNN: Whenever government money enters the picture, then the civil rights rubric of our country is you don’t get to discriminate anymore. If you’re engaged in federal work with federal money, you really have to play by the same rules as everyone else. You don’t get to be a bigot, you don’t get to discriminate, you don’t get to select people for a job or fire people from a job because of their religious beliefs or orientation.

LAWTON: Stanley Carlson-Thies heads the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, which helps faith-based groups protect their identity and practices. He says the law allows religious groups to create an organizational philosophy as other federally funded entities do.

STANLEY CARLSON-THIES (Executive Director, Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance): I think the faith groups see it as, you know, like a Democratic senator hires Democrats for his or her office, and environmental groups hire environmentally sensitive people, and so on, and they say hey, we’re a faith group, it’s faith that motivates us, defines us, so we’re looking for people who are, share that faith.

LAWTON: Carlson-Thies sees this as an issue that pits an individual’s rights against institutional rights. He says for faith groups it’s not discrimination in the traditional sense.

CARLSON-THIES: It’s not that they think of this as you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, we’re going to keep you out. No, it’s more do you share the things that motivate us? Do you have the same set of values? Do you have the same set of behaviors?

LAWTON: On the presidential campaign trail in July 2008, candidate Barack Obama visited a Christian youth program in Zanesville, Ohio, and promised that his administration would continue partnerships between faith-based groups and the government. But he said there would be a few caveats.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: First, if you get a federal grant you don’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them, or against the people you hire, on the basis of their religion.

LAWTON: When President Obama set up his White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, many civil rights groups expected to see all religious hiring preferences banned in federally funded programs. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Joshua DuBois, head of Obama’s faith office, has outlined a different course.

JOSHUA DUBOIS (White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, in speech): With regard to the issue of co-religionist hiring, hiring discrimination hiring, it’s a difficult topic and one that where there are very clear and strong opinions on both sides. The president has decided to take a case-by-case approach, and as difficult legal issues arise he wants me to work with the White House counsel, with the attorney general, to explore those issues and give him a recommendation.

LYNN: A case-by-case basis is like saying, well, maybe Rosa Parks may be in the front of the bus; other African-American women, they get into the back of the bus. There is no way to deal with fundamental civil rights issues on a case-by-case basis.

LAWTON: Both Carlson-Thies and Lynn were on a task force about government partnerships for Obama’s Faith Advisory Council. But the hiring question wasn’t allowed to even be part of the discussion. It’s an issue of deep concern for many faith-based charities, including Helping Up in Baltimore. The residential addiction recovery program has about 400 homeless addicts who live here for at least a year. They go through a 12-step program and receive counseling, medical help, job training, and Bible study. Executive director Bob Gehman says faith is crucial in the program’s effectiveness.

GEHMAN: Many of our men here have tried other programs, and they’ve come to us because they particularly like the faith-based ingredient that we have here. It offers them the kind of hope that they need in order to get beyond all the failures that they’ve had in the past.

LAWTON: That was the case for Michael Anthony Gross, who came here after three decades of cocaine and heroin addiction.

MICHAEL ANTHONY GROSS (Helping Up Mission): When I was in detox, I talked to a gentleman, and he recommended the Helping Up Mission, and he spoke about the spiritual basis that, you know, the program is run on, and I come to know that after all these years that’s what I was missing.

LAWTON: The mission’s internal surveys have found that two years out, almost 80 percent of the men who complete the program are still drug-free and employed. The program accepts men from all religious backgrounds, and leaders say religion isn’t imposed on anyone. The men may opt out of chapel or Bible study, but if they do they must attend another 12-step-style meeting. Tom Bond is Helping Up’s program director, who in 2002 came here himself as a homeless addict.

TOM BOND (Helping Up Mission): The whole faith and recovery both are highly unique. What we do is we just try to kind of create a platform and a vehicle for these guys to succeed and make things available to them and let them figure things out for themselves, not force it on them.

LAWTON: Gehman says the mission has been careful not to use any public money for the explicitly religious parts of the program. But he says hiring people who share the mission’s faith is central to maintaining its identity. If the government makes nondiscrimination a condition, they wouldn’t be able to accept public funding, and he says that would give other groups an unfair advantage.

GEHMAN: It really gives secular organizations a real power-edge, because they’re fully funded. They can build their buildings, they can develop their programs, and the faith-based organizations are left to have to raise their own money, which is becoming increasingly difficult.

LAWTON: Indeed, says Carlson-Thies, if the administration changed the longstanding policy, many charities from across the religious spectrum may be forced to end their partnerships with the government.

CARLSON-THIES: It’s not that we just say, well fine, if you want to walk away, walk away, because this implicates billions of dollars and a big volume of services.

LAWTON: One organization that might be affected is World Vision, the largest US-based relief and development group. World Vision has been taking federal funds since 1983 and last year received more than $300 million in cash and goods from the government. The Christian group wants to maintain the right to consider religion in its hiring. World Vision’s chief legal officer told me his organization has never discriminated among its recipients or engaged in illegal hiring practices. But, he said, if the policy changes and World Vision can no longer partner with the government, “the losers would be children in need around the world and American taxpayers.”

LYNN: Scientific studies certainly don’t prove that World Vision is the only group that can help the poor around the world, nor does it suggest that the best charities at home are those that have a religious title affixed to their name.

LAWTON: Under strong pressure from both sides, the Obama administration has been reluctant to clarify its position or make any changes, and White House officials declined to comment for this story as well. But with several court cases moving in the pipelines, the issue isn’t going away.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

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Can Islam make its peace with modernity and democracy? We highlight from the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly archive some comments over the years from scholars and experts on the compatibility of democratic values and Islam:

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic studies, George Washington University:

The Muslim people do not like freedom and democracy any less than anybody else. It is in the nature of human beings to like freedom. The problem is sometimes these terms are defined exclusively upon the basis of the Western experience, which is culturally bound and has taken many historical transformations to become what it is. The question isn’t whether Islam can live with modernism. There’s a much more profound battle afoot. It isn’t that modernism has won the day and now everybody has to conform to it. Modernism itself is floundering. Islam as a value system, not only as a religion, has to be thought about as a contending way of looking at the universe. Islam can live with modernism on a practical level. But there has to be an intellectual exchange. The idea that modernism is reality and everything else has to conform to it—that has to be challenged.

Karen Armstrong, author of Islam: A Short History:

Muslims have to modernize their societies, and they’ve only just begun. It’s a long, painful, difficult process. They are having to do it far too quickly, and they are experiencing many of the same traumas we did in Europe: wars of religion, revolutions, reigns of terror, exploitation of women and children, despotisms, basic alienation and anomie as conditions change and nothing new takes their place. We are watching people in some parts of the Islamic world going through a process that we went through ourselves but have forgotten. We think that anybody can just create a democracy in no time at all, forgetting that it took us hundreds of years to develop our secular and democratic institutions.

Omid Safi, professor of religious studies, University of North Carolina:

The Qur’an is clearly not a political constitution as we understand the term today. Nonetheless, it envisions a society devoted to justice for all and to aiding the oppressed in light of a collective responsibility before God. Historically, Muslims have relied on monarchies (whether in secular sultanates or religious caliphates) that have been open to abuses of power. Today Muslims are seeking newer models of government that offer the greatest possibility of self-determination and living a life free from injustice. The question for any society trying to reconcile religion and liberal democracy is whether it will ensure for women and religious minorities the same civil liberties it would mandate for its own male members. This is not an abstract, theoretical question for Muslims. It is timely and urgent, and it will need to be answered in the affirmative.

Roy Mottahedeh, professor of Islamic history, Harvard University:

What is the place of Islam in the travails the world is going through? Sometimes I’m inclined to agree with a sentence Mary McCarthy wrote in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—that religion makes good people better and bad people worse. Perhaps religion has added intensity to many of the struggles that are going on, but I don’t believe the actual struggles are primarily caused by religion. They have all almost naturally attained a religious flavor because the majority of the world’s people are now engaging in some way in politics, and their identity is more religious than nationalistic. It is popular to say that the Muslim world has not had a reformation, which is not quite correct. Some forms of Islam are very Protestant in character. Some are more Catholic in character. But Islam has not seen the elements of Enlightenment that passed from the West into the Muslim world fully absorbed into religious learning. That’s a revolution that is taking place now. It’s a gradual revolution, but I have no doubt that, 25 years from now, it will be a revolution that is largely accomplished.

Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle East politics and international relations, London School of Economics:

The genius of the West lies in sustaining an open society with constitutional checks and balances that protect individual rights, freedoms, and obligations. But the Enlightenment was not a coincidence. It occurred as a result of trade and cross-fertilization of cultures, particularly with the world of Islam. History shows that Islam’s decentralized institutions carry within them the seeds of democracy. The challenge is to rejuvenate Islam’s previous forms of local autonomy and decentralized authority—to limit the reach of the tyrannical state, empower the individual, and free the creative spirit. This ambitious project requires cross-cultural fertilization and receptiveness to universal currents.

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FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Jakarta looks like any other modern Asian capital, but here, alongside the glittering office towers, you’ll also find imposing houses of worship. At the Istiqlal mosque recently, about 10,000 worshipers gathered for Friday noon prayer. It’s part of a religious revival that’s been taking place alongside a booming economy in recent decades. It is visible in mosques—and in malls. At this crowded shopping center, the most popular garment seems to be the head scarf.

INDONESIAN WOMAN: I’m here because Islam tells women to wear the scarf.

Dewi Fortuna Anwar

DE SAM LAZARO: This 40-year-old accountant began covering her hair three years ago.

INDONESIAN WOMAN: I feel ashamed, because I should have been wearing it since I was young, but at least I am wearing it now.

DE SAM LAZARO: Islam is making a comeback in Indonesia along with democracy that began 10 years ago. For years after independence from the Dutch in 1945, and then under decades of Suharto’s dictatorship, religion was officially tolerated at best.

DR. DEWI FORTUNA ANWAR (Indonesian Institute of Sciences): Islam and the traditional, customary laws were regarded as being backward and primarily blamed for, you know, the defeat for many Muslim countries under European rule, so that many of the earlier nationalist leaders, many of the educated elite, in fact, turned their back on religion, and among the younger generation there seems to be a greater willingness both to be openly religious and to be modern and educated at same times. I think maybe this is not just a search for greater spiritual anchor, but also I think it’s greater self-confidence.

DE SAM LAZARO: She and others say this growth of religious expression is spawned by the new democratic freedoms. It’s neither fundamentalist nor militant, notwithstanding recent terrorist incidents. Bombings in two Jakarta hotels killed nine people last July, and a 2002 attack in the tourist haven of Bali killed more than 200. But religion scholar Ulil Abdalla, with the liberal Islamic Youth Association, says such extremism is not widespread.

ULIL ABDALLA (Islamic Youth Association): For some people, Islam as practiced in this country is corrupted. Movies and food and, you know, lifestyle and so forth, it’s pretty much influenced by the American cultures. So when radical Islamic ideologies was introduced by some activists to Indonesia, it appealed to young people, but that’s, you know, the appeal is limited to a fringe in the society. It’s not a predominant trend.

Ulil Abdalla

DE SAM LAZARO: The more accurate gauge, he says, is Indonesia’s recent election, in which secular incumbent [president] Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won easily. Islamist parties, which had surged to 40 percent of the vote in 2004, lost ground, to less than 30 percent.

ULIL ABDALLA: Some people feared that if democracy, if the democratic space is opened it will allow Islamist party to dominate the arena. That is not true.

DE SAM LAZARO: Significantly, the reaction of the Islamist and other parties after the election indicates a commitment to democracy, says Anies Baswedan, a scholar of political Islam.

ANIES BASWEDAN (Paramadina University): We have around 40 parties. Only nine were able to gain seats in the house, yet we do not see significant problems from supporters who are not having their parties in the house. Acceptance to political result, democratic result, is very important.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says Indonesians, especially the 14 percent who survive on less than a dollar a day, have much more pragmatic concerns—food prices, the economy in general, and corruption—even voters who’d like to impose stricter Islamic law or sharia.

MARTA: From what I understand about Islamic states, the people live in prosperity, and the law is enforced very strictly. Those who steal, those who are corrupt, they cut off their hand, rather than here, where people who can bribe judges and police get away with things.

DE SAM LAZARO: Yet Marta, who like many Indonesians uses just one name, voted for the secular president. So did his neighbor, Samsuddin, who praises a government initiative that’s helped the poor.

SAMSUDDIN: Number one is cash for poor families, and the second is cheap rice. We get $10 a month in cash and 15 kilos of rice. We are a Muslim family, but we are not that strict. I voted for the party that is already helping people. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Islamic or not.

DE SAM LAZARO: That kind of sentiment has moved Islamist parties to the center.

ANIES BASWEDAN: People understand now, campaigning, that “we are Muslims, we are an Islamic party, this is a sharia platform” does not sell. People ask, “Tell me what else, tell me in reality, what will you deliver beyond the slogans?”

FAHRI HAMZAH (Member of Parliament): We don’t name it sharia, because if you name it sharia people then from beginning suspicious to see.

DE SAM LAZARO: Fahri Hamzah is a Member of Parliament with the most successful Islamist party, called Prosperity and Justice, which joined the ruling coalition government. Although it once campaigned for Islamic law and more conservative women’s attire, Hamzah says they are happy to govern by consensus in a liberal democratic framework.

FAHRI HAMZAH: We are an Islamic party, but what we talk about Islam is Islam as the universal value, because we believe every religion, you know, inspired by God. We follow this direction that anti-corruption is Islamic agenda, clean government is Islamic agenda, you know, welfare, manage our economy, open economy, you know, liberalize our economy is one of the, you know, good agenda.

DE SAM LAZARO: That interpretation might well have its roots in the history of Islam in this vast, diverse archipelago.

DR. DEWI FORTUNA ANWAR: We are used to living in differences. Indonesia is composed of islands, over 17,000 islands and over 700 different ethnic groups with different languages, different cultural traditions. Islam came to Indonesia fairly late, from 12th century up, mostly through traders and Sufi teachers. They found Indonesia already very rich layers of cultures, and to be accepted a new belief, a new religion would have to adapt to local circumstances from the beginning. I think that was the case when Hinduism came here and when Buddhism came here and then when Islam came here, when Christianity also came here.

DE SAM LAZARO: So even though it’s 85 percent Muslim today, Islam here reflects Indonesia’s polyglot culture, readily evident in architecture, language, even in the mall scarf shops.

YUDI TOZA (Shop Owner): We believe in Indonesia that Islam is more modern, more moderate. People who wear the plain dress, it’s not our way.

ROSA LESTARI (Shop Clerk): It will look strange if an Indonesian woman wore that kind of plain clothes, especially nowadays. They probably think you are a terrorist’s wife.

DE SAM LAZARO: Shop owner, saleswoman, and customer told us there’s no contradiction between Islam and fashion, that the notion of a plainly dressed, fully covered woman is—foreign. Shopping here was Nur Inani, who was buying for customers in her own clothing business in the island of Sumatra.

NUR INANI: Mostly they are looking for clothes this long and this long, which is basically covering the butt and the arms. I look for the dress first, and then I will find the matching scarf, the color, the style.

DE SAM LAZARO: Terrorist incidents aside, Indonesia is enjoying a period of stability rarely seen in its independent history. Indonesians are free to choose their government, and they are free to pursue religion, and they’ve made it clear in elections that they want to pursue each separately, that is, to keep religion out of government.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Jakarta.

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KIM LAWTON: In a suburb of Istanbul, Kiri and Orhan Ozturk are teaching their kids about their Muslim faith. Kiri is American, and Orhan, Turkish. They met while Orhan was studying in the United States and were married in 1992. Kiri converted to Islam shortly after that. They moved to Turkey three years ago and say they’re happy to be raising their kids in a Muslim environment.

Kiri Ozturk

Ms. OZTURK: It’s so nice to be part of a community that you can share, and you don’t need to constantly be explaining why you’re doing things, especially during Ramadan when you’re fasting. It’s so nice to have everybody else be fasting at the same time.

ORHAN OZTURK: It’s a great feeling. Whenever you want to go, you go do your prayer, and you belong to a community. In the States you are basically segregated.

LAWTON: It may be a Muslim environment, but Turkey is officially secular, and there is intense public debate here about how to maintain that often tricky balance.

Ms. OZTURK: Trying to figure out what a non-Arab, practicing Muslim secular country should look like, how it should behave. And I don’t think everybody agrees yet on what that image is or how to put that together.

LAWTON: Partly in Europe, partly in Asia, Turkey has long been a bridge between East and West. But it doesn’t fit neatly in either.

ORAL CALISLAR ((Newspaper Columnist, CUMHURIYET): When you look from the Western side, Turkey is very Eastern country. When you look from the Eastern side, Turkey is very Western country.

LAWTON: The modern Turkish republic was founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who imposed a strict secular nationalism in an effort to westernize the country.

John Esposito

JOHN ESPOSITO (Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding): Ataturk promoted aggressively a notion of secularism, which was a very absolute separation of religion and the state, although the state did control religion.

LAWTON: John Esposito directs the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University and has written widely about Islam in Turkey and the Middle East. He says all too often secularism translates to hostility.

Mr. ESPOSITO: If you look at secular elites in Turkey, their notion of secularism is not simply separation of church and state. They basically have a very negative attitude towards religion — towards religion itself.

LAWTON: Oral Calislar is a columnist at the leftist daily newspaper CUMHURIYET. He says the secularists don’t want to see Turkey become a theocracy like Iran, which imposes strict Islamic law.

Mr. CALISLAR: Iran example always threatens Turkey’s people’s mentality. They thought that some day, if we don’t be careful, Turkey will be Iran, and because of that the secular people are afraid from that, and because of that they are very careful about Islamic movement, political Islamic movements in Turkey.

“When you look from the Western side, Turkey is very Eastern country. When you look from the Eastern side, Turkey is very Western country.”

LAWTON: A more openly Islamic view has been on the rise in this democratic state. The prime minister and current ruling party come from a religious political movement and often clash sharply with the secularists, and people like the Ozturks say those clashes filter down to average Turks, sometimes presenting challenges in living out their faith in their daily lives.

Mr. OZTURK: In a way, sometimes it’s easier in the States than here.

Ms. OZTURK: Yeah, I agree.

Mr. OZTURK: Although we are secular country and, you know, over 98-99 percent Muslim. But we go by the secularism very rigidly.

Ms. OZTURK: There’s sort of this message that’s going around that to be Muslim, to practice your religion is sort of backwards, old fashioned, and that to move forward is to be modern, to be more like the West.

LAWTON: One of the fiercest conflicts is over wearing the Islamic headscarf. Although it’s common to see women with the traditional religious head covering, Turkey has a longstanding ban on wearing headscarves in any public buildings, including government offices and universities.

Kiri chooses not the wear the scarf, but she sympathizes with those who do.

Ms. OZTURK: Women who choose to wear a headscarf cannot go to school, cannot get jobs, cannot enter many government buildings.

Mr. OZTURK: You can get jobs only in the private sector, not the…

Ms. OZTURK: …in the private sector, but even in the private sector…

Mr. OZTURK: …in the private sector, it’s harder…

Ms. OZTURK: …most of the private sector won’t hire women with scarves for fear that their corporation might be interpreted as being a religious corporation.

“Now Turkey is trying to redefine its identity, and this identity will never and shall never be a totally secular country.”

LAWTON: Headscarves are accepted at ZAMAN, a daily newspaper that promotes Islamic values. Columnist Kerim Balci says the ban fuels resentment.

KERIM BALCI (Newspaper Columnist, ZAMAN): Now Turkey is trying to redefine its identity, and this identity will never and shall never be a totally secular country. Turkish secularism needs to accommodate religion also. I think people will be more peaceful when they are able to express their religious identities more and openly.

LAWTON: The Turkish government oversees Muslim religious activities through an office of religious affairs currently headed by Ali Bardakoglu, who met with Pope Benedict XVI last month. That office hires and pays the country’s imams and writes the weekly Friday sermon they are supposed to deliver.

Only three minority faith groups are officially recognized: Armenian Orthodox Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Jews. All three technically have freedom of religion, but there are many restrictions. For example, they are not allowed to train new clergy.

Patriarch Mesrob II leads the Armenian Orthodox Church, Turkey’s largest religious minority.

PATRIARCH MESROB II (Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate): We are citizens of Turkey, and we do have certain issues that we would like to be solved, like having a seminary, teachers of language, teachers of religious knowledge, and these are some of the difficulties we face.

LAWTON: Roman Catholics and Protestants don’t have official legal status but are allowed to operate. Pope Benedict and the European Union have been pushing Turkey to grant more rights to its minorities. The EU has also raised concerns about the freedom of expression, especially Article 301, a vague law that makes it a crime to “insult Turkishness.” Among those prosecuted under the law was novelist Orhan Pamuk, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The charges against him were dropped on a technicality.

LAWTON: Columnist Oral Calislar has spent a total of seven years in prison for things he has written. He says the situation is better today.

Oral Calislar

Mr. CALISLAR: Yes, I am criticizing always, today also. I don’t make any backwards step, yeah. I can write what I think, but it creates sometimes some problems.

LAWTON: Turkey has already made many reforms sought by the EU, and Calislar says there is growing resentment that the EU isn’t giving Turkey a fair shake.

Mr. CALISLAR: There are so many problems between EU and Turkey, and some of them are coming from Turkey, inside Turkey. But some of them are also coming outside. For example, some EU countries are not acting fairly to Turkey.

LAWTON: John Esposito believes it comes down to cultural and religious differences.

Mr. ESPOSITO: Within a 30 or 40-year period, Islam has gone from being relatively invisible in Europe and America to basically being the second or third largest religion. So (a) that’s an issue; (b) in many European countries, in addition to religion falling off, you have a growing anti-immigrant attitude.

LAWTON: Despite the issues of concern, Turks across the spectrum believe their system can be a model for other Islamic countries.

Mr. OZTURK: Turkey can be an example and I think it is an example, an example of a Muslim secular country that Western world wants to see, including U.S. and EU.

LAWTON: Turkey certainly isn’t the only country debating the role of religion in society. How this ancient crossroads between East and West ultimately resolves those debates will reverberate well beyond these borders.

I’m Kim Lawton in Istanbul.

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