LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is a scene more than a few Americans are familiar with: standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the DMV. This one is in Sumter, South Carolina.

Woman in DMV line: Oh, that’s your birth certificate?

SEVERSON: Amanda Wolf has been waiting over 6 months to get the proper papers so she can finally get a photo ID.

AMANDA WOLF: I was adopted in Georgia, and my name was different on my birth certificate, and plus my birth mother and birth father was on the birth certificate, so we had to go to Vital Check, and with Vital Check you have to have a major credit card, which I don’t have.

SEVERSON: And so it went, on and on. Amanda had a student photo ID when she lived in Florida and used it to vote when she moved here, but not anymore—not under the state’s controversial new voter ID law that was fashioned after an Indiana law the Supreme Court upheld in 2008. State Senator Chip Campsen sponsored the South Carolina law.

STATE SENATOR CHIP CAMPSEN: And the court has concluded that whatever those hurdles you have to clear to get the ID necessary to vote…

SEVERSON: …is worth it.

CAMPSEN: It is worth it, that is correct.

SEVERSON: It is those hurdles, critics say, that will keep some eligible people who lack the proper ID from voting. The South Carolina law requires a state-issued photo ID, a military ID, or a passport. Amanda finally qualified for a photo ID after she got some free help from a retired judge. Attorneys often charge as much as $1800 for the service.

WOLF: To get a photo ID in the state of South Carolina you have to have your birth certificate, a Social Security card. You have to have your marriage license if you’ve been married. You have to have a divorce decree if you’ve been divorced, and it’s just one thing after another after another, and a lot of the stuff is really difficult to get a hold of.

SEVERSON: Barbara Zia is the co-president of the South Carolina League of Women Voters.

BARBARA ZIA: The League submitted our comments, along with other organizations to the state, contending that the law was discriminatory and that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of eligible voters would be disenfranchised.

SEVERSON: State Representative David Mack:

STATE REPRESENTATIVE DAVID MACK: It’s horrible. It’s designed to suppress the vote of people of color. People of color and poor people, that’s exactly what it’s designed for. There’s no documentation of fraud as relates to voting, and there has been no problem with fraud as it relates to registering people to vote,

SEVERSON: You don’t think people are going to be disenfranchised?

CAMPSEN: No.

SEVERSON: At all?

CAMPSEN: No. The state has to assure that the folks that are casting votes at the polls are actually casting votes that are legitimate, and they are actually individuals who they say they are, who they are supposed to be.

ZIA: There are no documented cases of voter fraud by impersonating somebody else to vote for decades in South Carolina. We’ve talked with the state elections commission. They know of none, and they’ve gone on record saying that there is none. So we say it’s a solution in search of a problem.

MACK: If there were cases of fraud they would have been front page news throughout the state of South Carolina and other places, and it’s just not a problem.

SEVERSON: State Senator Campsen insists there have been cases of voter fraud, and there are some that are still under investigation. He says that it would be contrary to human nature if there wasn’t voter fraud.

CAMPSEN: And I know this: Human nature being what it is will steal. I lock my house. My house has never been broken into, but I lock it, and I don’t have to have a thief break into my house and steal something before I’m justified in locking my front door, and so human beings will steal my car, they’ll steal my money, and they’ll steal my vote, too.

SEVERSON: Braden Bunch owns Brick’s Place. He was the head of the Sumter County Republican Party until recently. He thinks requiring photo ID to vote is only common sense.

BRADEN BUNCH: It’s a pragmatic step in order to fix the possibility of irregularity or even just getting rid of these old wives’ tales out there, that all kinds of fraud and deceit is going on. If you have this in place those stories go away.

SEVERSON: What’s happening here is part of a national trend. Altogether 34 states have introduced photo ID legislation. Critics say nationwide it could keep millions from voting. South Carolina’s own study says African Americans are most likely to be impacted. That’s why the Justice Department has put it on hold while it investigates. Barbara Zia says the law will also make it more difficult for the elderly, the disabled, and students whose IDs no longer work to vote. But, she says, it will definitely impede minorities the most.

ZIA: And many South Carolinians, especially citizens of color, were born at home and lack birth certificates, and so to obtain those birth certificates is a very costly endeavor and also an administrative nightmare.

SEVERSON: South Carolina is one of several states, mostly in the South, that because of a history of discrimination is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to get clearances from the Justice Department whenever changes are make to voting laws. Dr. Brenda Williams has registered hundreds to vote. She says the new legislation is reminiscent of the Jim Crow laws that legalized discrimination against African Americans even at polling places until they were abolished by the Voting Rights Act.

DR. BRENDA WILLIAMS: There was a poll tax back during those days, and African Americans had to pay a tax. African Americans were penalized when they went to even register to vote at the courthouse. They were given literacy tests and had to guess how many marbles were in a jar and different things in order to deter and disenfranchise as many people as possible.

SEVERSON: Does this remind you of that?

WILLIAMS: Yes, this is just déjà vu.

DONNA SUGGS: I ain’t never had the opportunity to vote, and I wanted to vote, and I cried because I didn’t have the papers to vote.

SEVERSON: Donna Suggs has been a nurse’s aide all her life.

SUGGS: I had no birth certificate.

SEVERSON: Well, can’t you just go apply and get a birth certificate?

SUGGS: No. I was born by a midwife in Hartsville, South Carolina, and they didn’t report my birth.

SEVERSON: In the South in particular births among African American’s were not sometimes recorded in court houses. They were recorded in family Bibles, and often a midwife did not record them at all. Donna was finally able to get a photo ID after an attorney helped her get her birth certificate free of charge.

(to Donna Suggs): Now that you’ve got your photo ID…

SUGGS: You want to see it?

SEVERSON: Sure, I do want to see it.

SUGGS: Okay.

SEVERSON: So now she is officially Donna Suggs.

REV. JAMES WILLIAMS: Disenfranchising someone, yes, it is a moral issue.

SEVERSON: United Methodist minister James Williams pastors two churches and operates a funeral home. He says he knows that many of those in his congregation and those he buried never had a birth certificate. In his view voting is sacred, and depriving someone of that right is morally wrong.

REV. WILLIAMS: Jim Crow has changed. Jim Crow no longer wears a white sheet. Jim Crow no longer rides in a buggy. Jim Crow now is in a $3,000 suit driving a Mercedes Benz. The tactics to keep oppressed has changed. They no longer beat you over the head with a stick. They beat you over the head with legislation.

BUNCH: It is not harder for a black man to vote than it is for a white man to vote. We all can walk down to the polls together and cast our ballot. It’s that simple.

SEVERSON: If you all have a photo ID…

BUNCH: Well, and the point being is that it is an equal burden on a white man to get an ID than it is on a black man to get an ID.

SEVERSON: That may not be quite accurate, but there is little chance that the South Carolina legislature will amend the voter ID law unless the Justice Department finds that a significant number of South Carolinians will be deprived of the right to vote.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Columbia, South Carolina.

BOB ABERNETHY (Host): We take a look now at the week’s top religion news and religion’s role in the general news with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program and David Gibson, national reporter for Religion News Service who joins us from New York. David hello. Evangelical Christians in New Hampshire made up just over 20 percent of the Republicans voting there. In South Carolina, coming up, they probably will be more like 60 percent. What difference do you expect that to make?

DAVID GIBSON (National Reporter, Religion News Service): Bob, I think it’s going to make a critical difference because South Carolina is really shaping up as a make or break last stand for social conservatives. They just cannot get on board with Mitt Romney for a variety of reasons. But social conservatives, these Evangelicals, Fundamentalists also can’t decide among themselves what candidate they want to back whether it’s going to be Rick Santorum one day, or Newt Gingrich. Rick Perry just doesn’t seem to be generating anything whatsoever. But if they can’t decide and decide by Jan. 21 when the South Carolina primary happens, then they could effectively deliver the nomination to Mitt Romney. And then they’ll have to decide whether in the general election, you know, if Mitt Romney is not Mr. Right, if it’s good enough that he’s Mr. Right Now.

ABERNETHY: Kim, a lot of Evangelicals say they’re very uneasy, uncomfortable with Mormonism, with a Mormon candidate. Why is that?

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): Well, and we should point out that there are a variety of reasons why a lot of Evangelicals haven’t backed Mitt Romney. His faith is one. A lot of them say they don’t trust him on some of their core issues like abortion. He changed his position. Or they don’t like where he stood on health care some time back. But there is the issue of his Mormon faith. Many Evangelicals don’t consider Mormons real Christians. Now that’s very offensive to members of the LDS Church who say, “We believe in Jesus is the son of God, you know, we believe Jesus is the savior, so yeah we’re real Christians.” But for some Evangelicals, the fact that Mormons don’t believe in the Trinity, they believe that God and Jesus were separate, physical beings, that’s a real difference with traditional Christianity. Mormons believe that God continued revelation in the Book of Mormon. Evangelicals and other Christians, not just Evangelicals, Catholics, mainline Protestants say this is outside the stream of traditional Christianity. So for some Evangelicals that means, “We don’t necessarily really want our president representing that.” Some Evangelicals have said, “That would legitimize a faith which we don’t agree with.”

ABERNETHY: David, is there an anti-Mormon strain within Catholicism?

GIBSON: No there really isn’t, Bob. It’s not showing up in the numbers. Mitt Romney is doing very well with the Catholic vote so far in the primaries that we have so far and he’s still polling well nationally with Catholics who just tend to be a little more moderate, I think, in their views. For them, Mitt Romney is completely acceptable. Perhaps Catholics have a kind of communal memory of the bias that they faced for so long in American culture and they don’t want to inflict that on Mormons as well. And I think that’s an irony that Kim was picking up on, that you see Evangelical bias against Mormons in the culture and perhaps in this election. Yet you see those same Evangelicals flocking to Catholic candidates like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich, who’s a convert to Catholicism.

ABERNETHY: The big news for a whole lot of people in the religious communities this week was that Supreme Court decision saying that religious organizations can hire who they want to without regard to the anti-discrimination laws. Kim, pick up on that.

LAWTON: Well, I think for a lot of religious groups a key part of that was without government interference, that the government can’t come in and second guess the decisions that they make, especially when it comes to the people who are their leaders, the people who transmit their faith or lead their worship or do religious teaching.

ABERNETHY: People who are ministers.

LAWTON: Well, that’s the term although that’s the big question, who is a minister? And the court left a little open wiggle room in that one. They didn’t give a definition, “This person is a minister.” And that’s the concern of some civil rights groups that this will be interpreted broadly so that the janitor does ministry therefore he or she is a minister. But religious groups were watching this very closely because they were very concerned about creeping government power and if the government can come in a say “Well you shouldn’t have fired that minister,” then that would, they felt that interfere with their ministry.

ABERNETHY: David do you want to follow on that?

GIBSON: Yeah because I think it’s a very important decision, a unanimous decision, a resounding rejection of the Obama administration’s argument to limit this so-called ministerial exception. And a lot of conservatives in particular are hoping this signals that their signature issue, one of them – religious freedom, will prevail throughout the coming campaign. They’re concerned that the Obama administration is trying to curtail religious freedom, that its promotion of gay rights, for example, will impinge on the conscience and the rights of religious believers who are opposed to same-sex marriage. Same goes with these Health and Human Services regulations that are pending that would mandate all insurance plans to cover contraception. That’s a real problem for Catholic and Evangelical institutions and groups in particular. And they’re hoping that this signals that the administration is going to have to back off on some of those plans and policies.

ABERNETHY: So quickly Kim, just to sum it up. Religious groups are more free now than they were before to hire and fire people according to what they believe?

LAWTON: Well, they say that they’re free under the First Amendment as they always were. They were worried about the government coming in and changing that in some way. And I think David’s right that this has been an issue for a lot of religious groups as the culture becomes more diverse and there are different points of view, how can these religious groups do their faith, exercise their beliefs in a culture that may, you know, largely differ with them? And can they hold those religious beliefs on some very controversial issues like homosexuality or, you know the role of women and how can they do that in this context and so I think they were very pleased.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. David Gibson of Religion News Services. Many thanks.