Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . PERSPECTIVES . A Look Ahead to the Year 2006 . December 30, 2005

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Here to look ahead at the likely religion and ethics stories in the news in 2006 are Kim Lawton; Barbara Bradley Hagerty, religion correspondent for National Public Radio; and E.J. Dionne, columnist for THE WASHINGTON POST and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. Welcome to you all.

E.J., 2006 is an election year. The Iraq war is troubling everyone. What do you see?

E.J. DIONNE (Columnist, THE WASHINGTON POST and Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution): Well, I think what happens in Iraq will set the overall framework of the election because it's quite clear that how people react to the Bush administration and the Republican Party is framed by what's going on in Iraq. You actually have both parties without a unified view on Iraq. And so I think it will be as much an indirect election issue as a direct election issue. I think you will see more of the Democrats trying to talk openly about values and trying to link values to economic questions, particularly questions of social justice. And I think the difficulty the Congress has had in coming to terms with budgets -- how much do we tax, what do we spend, how does that affect the deficit? How does it affect the poor? I think these are also going to be debated in 2006.

ABERNETHY: Barbara?

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BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY (Religion Correspondent, National Public Radio): Well, I just, I just think that we need to keep an eye, as you said, on 2006 because I think the Democrats are beginning to see kind of a light at the end of the tunnel. They have not really been the values party. The Republicans have kind of captured that -- that term of the religious party. And I think the Democrats look, and they see the election of Tim Kaine, the Democrat from Virginia, to the governorship. And they look at his party -- his campaign -- and what they saw was something very interesting. This man actually kind of campaigned like a conservative Republican. He advertised on Christian radio, he talked about his authentic story, his authentic religious faith. And he won. And I think Democrats are beginning to look at that and saying, "You know what we need to do? We need to recapture, reframe issues and make them values. We want to be the party of values." And I think we're going to see that.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY): And this is welcome news, though, to faith-based groups -- religious progressives who've been wanting to have a voice, and they haven't had a voice in politics. So at the same time the Democratic politicians are doing this, the religious leaders from the more progressive end of the spectrum are in there strategizing: "How can we capture -- you know, how can we take advantage of this?"

Mr. DIONNE: And I thought it was striking -- Tim Kaine is a strong Catholic. He didn't only go to Mass before the election, he actually went to Mass the day after the election, which gave a little credibility to the whole thing.

ABERNETHY: What about religious leaders in the campaign? You were talking about that a little bit. Is there any consensus developing among them on social issues or on the war?

Mr. DIONNE: Well, I think religious leaders are split on the war. I think how the war debate goes in 2006 will depend very much on how vociferous, I think, the Catholic Church is and the mainline Protestant churches are in particular, because there clearly is a lot of opposition to the war there. The cliché of 2005 has been 2006 is a year of transition in Iraq. I think that cliché is true. And I think, really, the president probably has about a year to get this straight. I think if Iraq is not in good shape by the end of 2006, the pressure to begin serious withdrawals is going to be overwhelming.

Ms. BRADLEY HAGERTY: And I actually think there are going to be implications for domestic policy as well. I mean, if you look at the president's poll numbers or if you look at the poll numbers vis-á-vis Iraq, you look at evangelicals, 70 percent of evangelicals still support our being in Iraq, whereas 43 percent of non-evangelicals support it. So what that means is the president's entire base of support comes from evangelicals. And I think we're beginning to see him having a more sensitive ear toward evangelicals. We saw that with the case of Harriet Miers. When evangelicals said, "We don't want her to be the next Supreme Court justice," he backed off, which is very unusual for this president. He's a stubborn man, and he backed off.

Mr. DIONNE: Although, ironically, they are so loyal to the president that she also -- among the only supporters she had on the conservative side were evangelicals, which just, I think, underscores your point of how strong a constituency this is for the president.

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ABERNETHY: And Barbara -- abortion. It's in the courts; it's before the Supreme Court. What's happening?

Ms. BRADLEY HAGERTY: Well, I think there is pretty much a consensus that Roe v. Wade will remain intact. I think there's a national consensus about that.

ABERNETHY: It's a right?

Ms. BRADLEY HAGERTY: It's a right. I think pretty much everyone -- both in the public, and I think it's pretty firm within the Supreme Court, at least the majority of the Supreme Court. The really interesting question will be if Judge Alito is confirmed. How he will rule on certain kinds of ancillary issues like parental notification? Actually, he can't rule on that one unless they rehear the argument but, say, late-term abortion. That will come up eventually before the U.S. Supreme Court. How will he rule on these issues? So I think that there is for the first time in a long time a real kind of question mark over whether Roe v. Wade can kind of be pecked to death around the edges.

Ms. LAWTON: And one thing I found really interesting this past year, which I think is going to carry over in the new year, is the extent to which the grassroots conversation is shifting a little bit, and even people who are supporters of abortion rights are talking about maybe, you know, the concession, maybe there can be some restrictions or maybe there are some instances and maybe there should be more focus on preventing abortions. And so there's more conversation going on than there has been.

ABERNETHY: Kim, I want to ask you about the rebuilding of New Orleans. You were there, and you saw what the faith-based groups were doing -- a wonderful job by all accounts. Where does that go now? It's going very slowly, we know that -- but is it on track? Is it going to be all right?

Ms. LAWTON: Well, people aren't even at the rebuilding stage. I was just there and, you know, people haven't even cleaned out their homes yet. I think the issues before you can even get to thinking about rebuilding are so huge and, frankly, are not really getting a lot of attention by the politicians and certainly by the society. FEMA is pulling out, it's pulling back on some of its support, and there are a lot of people who have no place to live. Those people are all coming to the churches. People still don't have jobs, there're not schools and when the social systems are failing, when the federal and the state and the local governments aren't able to deal with it, people naturally go to the religious institutions. And they're holding a huge burden which is only going to get bigger.

ABERNETHY: E.J., when Katrina hit and we saw the pictures of the very poor and what the condition was of their life, there was kind of for a few days, there was the sense that, well, maybe this is going to open up a new war on poverty everywhere, in all the big cities. What happened?

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Mr. DIONNE: Well, it's really a national scandal, I think. It was a 30-day war on poverty, and then we all walked away. And when I say that, it's conservatives were talking about their own innovative ideas, liberals, others, and we just kind of forgot about it, and the national attention didn't focus on it. One of the striking things about Katrina is it's one thing to have buildings destroyed. But what we're seeing down there is the destruction of whole communities, and communities are very hard to rebuild. And we haven't even decided yet as a nation how much of New Orleans should be rebuilt. The people in New Orleans say, you know, "We want our city back." And it's not clear that the nation is prepared to help them get their city back, and I think they are understandably upset.

ABERNETHY: What happened to the compassion that was there right after Katrina?

Mr. DIONNE: Well, I still think there is a lot of individual compassion. I think anybody who sees a Katrina story on television feels for the people involved. I think that we weren't -- we're very good at palliative help, at giving people aid on the spot. We're not as good at taking a large problem and saying, "We're going to fix this." It's daunting, and I think people, all of us, tend to turn our heads from something that's that daunting.

Ms. LAWTON: And it's so complicated and there are so many interlocking issues of race and poverty. But also middle-class communities were totally destroyed, and I think that our attention span is really short. We want this to be over and fixed, and it's going to be a long time.

Mr. DIONNE: But there is a burden on politicians on this. I mean, politicians, including the president, were saying "We're going to do all this." And then there just hasn't been that much talk about that since. It's not just the country. I think Washington bears some responsibility here.

ABERNETHY: Do you think the good job done by so many churches and faith-based organizations there makes it more likely in years to come that there will be more support for government aid to faith-based social service groups?

Ms. BRADLEY HAGERTY: I actually do. Just a few days after Katrina I bumped into Jim Towey, who's the head of the faith-based office in the White House. And he said Katrina vindicates the faith-based initiative because what we saw, where FEMA did not get there in time or even the Red Cross, we saw Texas Baptist Men and other kind of small organizations rushing in with food and electricity and everything else. And he said, "You know, this just vindicates what we are trying to do." Whether that's true, you know, it will be left to be seen. But it was a good point.

Mr. DIONNE: Katrina also showed that you can't substitute effective government with those faith-based groups -- that they didn't have the resources, even though they did wonderful work. I do think you may see it in the education issue. President Bush is apparently very interested in the fact that the Catholic schools opened and took in a lot of kids. And I think you're going to see some push by the president to expand state aid to religious schools.

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Ms. LAWTON: And it's interesting, those folks who are really in favor of a strong separation of church and state are already in defensive mode about this, trying to find a way to praise the efforts of the faith-based groups but stop any forward motion on any support for vouchers or anything else.

ABERNETHY: Barbara, let me move on to something else. There seems to be a change of leadership going on in the religious communities, at least in the Protestant communities.

Ms. BRADLEY HAGERTY: I would agree with that. I think we may have seen Billy Graham's last crusade in New York City. We see televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell aging. Some people are a bit disaffected by Pat Robertson, you know, calling for the assassination of the Venezuelan president. I think we see people not listening to the televangelists as much as they used to. What we're seeing is kind of an emergence of a new type of leader. They tend to be megachurch leaders. Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, who's the author of THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE, is one. There are several others who are -- they have a softer edge to them. They aren't waging the culture wars quite as -- with quite as much kind of rhetorical fervor. Politics is not everything for them. They are very interested in their community. And so I think this is what we are going to be seeing. It's more democratic with a small "d" system that we're seeing.

Ms. LAWTON: In mentioning Rick Warren -- I'm really going to be watching this coming year his new, bold initiative to work on Africa and Third World on issues like AIDS ...

ABERNETHY: ... AIDS.

Ms. LAWTON: ... AIDS, illiteracy, poverty -- all of those more social issues. Yes, he still wants to, you know, spread the gospel, but for him that includes dealing with AIDS.

Ms. BRADLEY HAGERTY: I think there's a sense by Rick Warren and others that evangelicals have been a little bit inward looking. They've thought too much about their own needs, their own "felt needs," and that it's time for them to look beyond the boundaries of the United States and really help people.

ABERNETHY: That was one of the things that was so interesting about the aftermath of Katrina -- that it was these evangelical groups who had some -- many had had the reputation of not caring for others perhaps as much as they did. And we all saw that they were the leaders in what was done.

Mr. DIONNE: And I think that's the important thing about Rick Warren's ministry and others like him. And, by the way, "thou shall not covet thy neighbor's book sales." Rick Warren sold about 24 million books. And it's a kind of -- it's not necessarily that folks become liberals or even moderates, but there is a kind of exhaustion with a hyper-politicization of the church that I think Rick Warren represents, and he speaks for a lot of fundamentally conservative evangelicals, but also who are modern in spirit.

ABERNETHY: Kim, is the Episcopal Church of the United States of America going to come apart in this coming year?

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Ms. LAWTON: This coming year is a huge watershed moment for the Church, I think. They're meeting for their General Convention. They are electing a new presiding bishop, and the issue of homosexuality and the larger issues of interpretation of Scripture and who has authority for the Church -- all of that is going to come to the fore this coming year. I don't think there's going to be a huge rip that's immediate, but it's the slow tear that's been going on and will just continue, and this year will be key for that.

ABERNETHY: Let me ask each of you to think a little bit out loud about something that you think might be going on in this coming year that you really want to keep an eye on, that you think all the rest of us ought to be keeping an eye on, too. Who wants to start -- Kim?

Ms. LAWTON: We talked a lot about the polarization between the religious Right and the religious Left. I'm interested in the ways that they are coming together. There seem to be new coalitions happening on things like global poverty, AIDS, Darfur -- faith-based groups are the only ones really paying attention there. And I'm going to be watching that this year.

Mr. DIONNE: Ironically -- or whatever the word is -- that's exactly what I was going to talk about, because Allen Hertzke wrote a very interesting book called FREEING GOD'S CHILDREN and it's about these very unusual coalitions across divides on issues such as human rights, Darfur, sex trafficking, and -- but the broader perspective of human rights. And, again, I think there is this hunger on the part of a lot of religious people across these divides to keep some of the polarization of the larger society -- political polarization -- to keep that at bay.

ABERNETHY: Barbara?

Ms. BRADLEY HAGERTY: Well, because I like to get myself in trouble, I think I am going to continue to watch the intelligent design debate. This is an issue that's not going to go away, because people feel so strongly and with deep religious or secular roots to their feelings. It's not going to go away. And I think we're going to be seeing it playing out in the courts and in communities across the country.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to all of you: to E.J. Dionne of THE WASHINGTON POST; Barbara Bradley Hagerty of National Public Radio; and Kim Lawton of RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY.

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