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Look Ahead 2011
BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome, I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. Today, a special report on the events and issues we see ahead in 2011. We do this with the help of Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University. Before we begin our discussion, as we close out the first decade of the new millennium we remember some of the stories that set the stage for the news we expect to cover in 2011 and beyond. Our managing editor Kim Lawton took a look back at the events of the last decade.
KIM LAWTON, managing editor: The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were perhaps the defining moment of the decade, and the repercussions are still being felt on many fronts. In the wake of the tragedy, mainstream Muslim leaders tried to spread a message that Islam is not synonymous with terrorism. But those efforts were complicated by an expanding extremist movement that recruits over the Internet, as well as several high-profile arrests of Muslims plotting more attacks. American Muslims worked to define their place in US society, but many felt unfairly targeted by enhanced security measures and what they saw as a rising tide of Islamophobia. President Obama made improving relations with the Muslim world one of the priorities of his new administration.
The 9/11 attacks led to American involvement in long and difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Religious and ethical leaders debated whether each conflict was just. President George W. Bush argued for a doctrine of preventive war, the idea that it was moral to attack a country to prevent it from attacking us first. The ethical debates intensified with revelations that the US was using torture as a means of getting information. After thousands of deaths of troops and civilians, President Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq and the intention to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Economic crises dominated much of the end of the decade as recession, unemployment and foreclosures took a toll on faith-based groups and the people they serve. Religious institutions were forced to slash their budgets and lay off staff even as they were asked to do more to help needy people.
Religion continued to be a potent force in politics. In 2000 and 2004, President Bush rallied religious conservatives. He set up a new White House office to expand government partnerships with faith-based social service organizations. Analysts spoke of a God gap, with voters seeing the Democratic Party as unfriendly toward religion. In the run-up to the 2008 elections, Democrats and the Obama campaign developed an unprecedented outreach to compete for religious votes. Many in that faith coalition were disappointed the Democrats didn’t build on the momentum in the 2010 midterm elections. Meanwhile, religious conservatives were energized by the Tea Party movement and vowed new activism leading up to the 2012 elections. Religious groups across the spectrum were involved in policy debates, from health care to immigration and gay marriage.
Issues surrounding homosexuality provoked bitter debates within religious institutions and American society as a whole. The 2003 election of Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the US Episcopal Church brought the worldwide Anglican Communion to the brink of schism, even as other denominations continue to debate the role of gay clergy. In 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, with four other states and the District of Columbia following suit. The issue continues to work its way through the courts.
For the Roman Catholic Church, a dramatic changing of the guard with the 2005 death of John Paul II, who had been pope for more than 25 years, and the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. For the US Catholic Church, much of the decade was focused on addressing a massive clergy sex abuse crisis, enacting new guidelines to prevent abuse, and confronting litigation that saw more than two billion dollars in payouts to victims. In 2010, the clergy abuse scandal exploded across many parts of Europe and posed new challenges to the Vatican and top church leaders.
The new millennium began with a sense of relief that a predicted Y2K computer meltdown never materialized. It ends with the development of social media like Facebook and Twitter offering new online possibilities for personal connection and outreach, enabling information to be disseminated at lightning speed—both for good and for ill.
ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks for that. Welcome to you, to Kevin Eckstrom, and to E.J. Dionne. E.J., we have a new Congress, Republican control of the House, more Republican votes in the Senate. Walk us through that a little bit. What do you expect that will mean for some of the social issues that are of most concern to religious communities?
EJ DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): You know, watching Kim’s set-up piece I was thinking of Yogi Berra’s great line: ‘Predictions are hard, especially when they’re about the future.” And who would have imagined a decade unfolding the way this last decade just unfolded? So I think we’re all in a difficult situation here. I think when you look forward to this Congress, so much of it is not going to be about social issues. The last Democratic Congress kind of acted to get some of those out of the way, notably don’t ask don’t tell. I think they really wanted that through because they knew it was going to be very difficult this time over. You may have some debate about abortion around the healthcare bill. Republicans want to repeal it. I don’t think they’ll be able to but they going to have a variety of ways of trying to hem in President Obama in sort of putting it into effect. So I think you may see it there. I think one of the sleeper issues will be fights we might have around the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, where you have, if nothing else for purely political reasons it’s a question where conservatives can talk about it as an economic issue: should we be spending the money? But there are always issues related to cultural values that get into those debates. So I suspect you are going to see some of those arguments around the humanities and arts endowments. Personally, I hope it doesn’t happen that way, but I think that is going to happen.
ABERNETHY: How about immigration?
LAWTON: Well, I was going to say that I am going to be watching to see how some of the evangelical political activists maneuver with the Tea Party politicians that got elected. You know, in this last election there was so much talk about how the Tea Party was so ascendant and there were a lot of religious conservatives that were supportive of the Tea Party. But when you get to issues like immigration or some of the other issues involving a social safety net for the poor, evangelicals don’t always line up as economic conservatives. And so while they might be hoping for some action on abortion or maybe even some of the gay marriage type issues—I don’t know that that’s going to come up in Congress, but I’m going to be watching some of the economic issues that do have some moral implications to see how much evangelicals, and some Catholics who were supportive of the Tea Party—where they come down.
ECKSTROM (Editor, Religious New Service): Right, and there are a lot of moral issues that a lot of religious groups care about. And so I think what you’re going to have is maybe a different set than what we’ve seen in the last couple years. Whereas under the Democratic Congress we were talking about moral issues like the environment and the minimum wage increase and things like that, you’re probably not going to see as much of that with a Republican House. Instead, you’ll have issues that maybe more conservatives tend to latch on to. But it’s not that these social issues are going to disappear, it’s just that there are going to be a different set of them.
DIONNE: That’s a good point, because you are going to talking more and more about budget deficits and cuts in government programs, and I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how religious groups that sometimes seem to be aligned with conservatives on some of the cultural questions are actually going to be saying no, you can’t cut this program for the poor or that program for the poor, because there are a lot of Catholics, a lot of evangelicals, and many in the rest of the religious community—mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims—who really want to protect some of those programs. So I think their voices are actually going to be very important at a time of budget stress.
ECKSTROM: And one issue I think that’s worth watching that we’ve already seen indications of is that House Republicans want to hold hearings on American Muslims and the radicalization of American Muslims – sort of home-grown terror threats – and what’s going wrong within American Islam that it’s allowing this to happen? So it’s a different kind of religious issue but one that’s already going to be on Congress’s agenda.
ABERNETHY: Before we leave that, E.J., what about the tone, the spirit that you expect. Is it going to be awful?
DIONNE: I’m not very optimistic that we’re going to see an outbreak of comity and friendship across party lines. On the Muslim hearings, having Congress sort of investigate a religious group in the country raises all kinds of questions, which I hope get raised. I’m not sure that the deal that President Obama reached with the Republicans on taxes can be easily replicated across other issues. After all, tossing out about $858 billion is a lot easier than cutting $400 billion or whatever they decide to do. So I think it’s going to be a very difficult couple of years.
LAWTON: And also, sort of in the backdrop, this coming year in politics is going to be the run up to the 2012 presidential election, and so that’s going to be complicating anything anyone wants to get done because there’s going to be a lot of posturing as people try to set themselves up for the next presidential election.
DIONNE: Which brings us to some very interesting debates inside the Republican Party. Your point about the Tea Party and the Christian conservatives overlapping but distinct groups—how are they going to play those roles inside the Republican fight for the nomination?
LAWTON: And a lot of religious conservatives were very unhappy with the Republican establishment, felt like they took them for granted, Republicans took the religious conservatives for granted—wanted them to come out and work and vote but didn’t necessarily take care of their issues. It will be interesting to see whether they feel the same way about the Tea Party as well.
ABERNETHY: And back on this question of tone, everything perhaps is going to be made more dramatic by the fact that it’s going to be, this year, the tenth anniversary of 9/11.
LAWTON: It’s hard to believe that it was almost 10 years ago when those attacks happened and that really did set up a lot of difficult issues for us as a country, both in terms of the war and as well as in terms of interfaith relations. I know a lot of Muslim groups are sort of bracing after seeing in the previous year a lot of protests against mosques and things of that nature. They’re concerned about the atmosphere and a lot of Muslims I’m talking with are worried about what’s going to happen leading up to the 9/11 anniversary.
ABERNETHY: But Kevin, you or E.J. have made the point that we have this real problem of trying to deal with homegrown terrorism and terrorism here that just emerges out of the suburbs some place, and on the other hand protecting the civil rights of a whole group of people.
ECKSTROM: This is a huge challenge for American Muslims and one of the big debates within the American Muslim community right now is how much do they cooperate with law enforcement on trying to prevent these sorts of attacks that nobody wants to see? How much should parents report their kids if they’re acting strangely or going to bad Web sites or talking in radical terms? And there’s a lot of Muslims who are afraid of being entrapped by the FBI and being led into plots that they might not otherwise do. But then they also know that if they don’t report them nobody else is going to and if there’s an attack, things are only going to get worse.
DIONNE: You’ve got tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in American suburbs, living middle-class lives, and if one or two or three or five of those thousands of kids is discovered to get involved in terrorism, suddenly we’re talking about these very middle-class, classically American places being breeding grounds for terrorism. I think one thing that is going to sort encourage that is if we make this big American Muslim middle class feel excluded from the rest of us, and we’re really going to have to think that through. Of course we don’t want home-grown terrorism, but we’re nowhere like where the Europeans are, because we have this great tradition of upward mobility and inclusion in our country.
LAWTON: And this has been a challenge for American Muslims themselves within their communities. If we launch programs to combat homegrown terrorism, homegrown extremism, if we launch programs in our mosques, does that appear like we’re giving in to the stereotype that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and so they’ve really struggled within their community how to approach this problem. They want to look proactive. They want to look like they’re addressing this as good, loyal Americans, but how do you do that without giving into the perception?
ABERNETHY: Kevin, what do you expect to happen with the cultural center/mosque near Ground Zero?
ECKSTROM: Well, it’s going to be a challenge. They presumably have all of the zoning things that they need. They’ve got their permits and the city is going to allow them to build it. What they’re missing right now is the money. And it’s going to take them a while to raise as much money as they’re going to need, but it’s also going to be difficult to get, I think, a lot of people to support that because that center is so radioactive and it’s generated so much heat that there’s going to be a lot of people who maybe don’t want their names associated with it. And on the flip side, there’s a lot of Americans who don’t want the money coming from some foreign anonymous donor somewhere, so they have a big challenge there.
ABERNETHY: Now you were referring earlier to the fact that the beginning of 2011 may well seem like the beginning of the election campaign of 2012, E.J.
DIONNE: Right, and I think you’re going to see some sort of interesting positioning inside the Republican Party. I mean, we still don’t know if Sarah Palin is or is not going to run for president. Sarah Palin seems to be more representative of the Tea Party side of the right, although she has clearly some Christian conservative support. Mike Huckabee is going to be competing with her as the spokesperson for Christian conservatives, but every Republican running for president wants a piece of that vote, because it is such an important vote in the Republican primaries, and that’s going to start right now. It’s already started, before the show went on the air.
ECKSTROM: And I think something worth watching there is Mitt Romney, who is at the front of a lot of these polls, these straw polls, whether or not he tries to make the case about his Mormon faith again with the evangelical base. A lot of people say, you know, he did that; he doesn’t need to do it again. Other people say that he’s never going to win them over; there’s a certain amount of the base that’s just never going to accept a Mormon candidate. So I think it will be interesting to watch how he navigates the Mormon question.
ABERNETHY: And meanwhile, E.J., every pundit worth his salt is giving Obama advice about what he needs to do, how he needs to change himself, how he needs to change his language. Talk about that.
DIONNE: Well, the range of advice goes from you must be nicer to the Republicans and look like you’re a centrist to you’re political and moral obligation is to confront these guys and have a big argument so that the issues can be clear to the country. And I think he’s going to try to do a little of the former to say I’ve reached out my hand to them, and when the hand is rejected on certain issues, he’s going to flip to the second. But I think one of the things to look for is whether he does speak more in a moral and spiritual language both about himself and the underpinnings of his policies, but also about this sense of America can grab its position in the world back after a period when Americans felt we were in decline. I think there’s going to be some John Kennedy-esque rhetoric coming out him getting the country moving again in the coming year.
LAWTON: And the Democratic Party is going to have to figure out what it wants to do in terms of faith-based outreach. There was a lot of criticism from Democrats about how the party handled that in the last midterm elections and a lot of faith-based moderates and liberals and even some conservatives that don’t consider themselves Republicans felt that the party didn’t do enough to reach out to them, so that’s going to be something they’re trying to figure out as well.
ABERNETHY: Meanwhile the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is supposed to begin n 2011. What are your expectations there?
LAWTON: Well, there’s some really difficult ethical debates still lingering in terms of what America leaves behind in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of civil society and …
ABERNETHY: And safety and protection for the people who helped us.
LAWTON: Exactly. Religious minorities and people who were seen as being part of the American offensive—what’s going on with them and what responsibility does America have within that? And those are going to be difficult questions. I’ve been surprised how little the religious community has been focusing on these issues of war. It seemed like last year, in the last election, people just didn’t really talk about those ethical, moral issues.
ECKSTROM: And, you know, we’ve heard a lot of talk about the president’s problem with his base—you know, the liberal base is dissatisfied for any number of reasons. But it’s worth remembering that a good chunk of that base voted for him because he said he was going to close Guantanamo Bay, and it’s still open, and that he said he’d get us out of Afghanistan, and he actually sent more troops in. So there’s, I think, some ethical problems that he faces in terms of not moving fast enough on that issue.
DIONNE: Actually, he said he’d get us out of Iraq, and he said Afghanistan was the good war, and we’ll presumably continue to pull out of Iraq. My hunch is that if we have a withdrawal this year from Afghanistan it’s going to be very small. It’s clear that the new timeline that the administration wants seems to be 2014. And there’s going to be some opposition in his own party to not withdrawing more quickly. I also think some of the new conservatives who are less interventionist in Congress may also be a surprising opposition to a long commitment there.
ABERNETHY: Let me ask you to look at Europe and the Vatican. What do you expect there in terms of this ongoing struggle about the sex abuse of kids by priests? Anybody?
DIONNE: Everyone is silent.
ECKSTROM: Happy topic. Well, this pope has the unfortunate possibility of his legacy being presiding over this sex abuse scandal that reared its ugly head—that the church didn’t learn anything from the first time around. And I think he has made some progress in sort of admitting that the church needs to do some introspection and figure out what went wrong so that we don’t make this happen again. But the pope is going to be 84 in 2011. I don’t know how much more time he has left in that job, but probably a few years, and I think he’s going to be doing some legacy-making, because this is now at the point where he can still do some things and see what happens.
LAWTON: Well, so many people in the church are frustrated because they want to get beyond this issue but they just can’t do it, and so that’s been something they’ve all had to confront.
DIONNE: I think it’s sort of an argument between people who defend the Vatican and the church say look, they understand, they’ve tried to fix this, they’ve made some moves versus others who say that they still haven’t fully taken responsibility for changing the structures of the church. It’s a classic argument between more conservative or traditionalist people and people looking for greater change in the church because they think it needs it, and I think that is an ongoing struggle and that the sex abuse scandal is a piece of that larger struggle.
ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up, but before we quit, in this coming year do you see something happening or that might happen or do you see some person that you’re going to be paying particular attention to?
LAWTON: Well, we should also point out that last year a lot of the things we discussed we didn’t predict. So, as E.J. said, it’s hard to know that. I think it is going to be a pivotal year for religious groups and issues surrounding homosexuality, whether we’re talking court cases around gay marriage or whether we’re talking denominations still really struggling over how to handle gay clergy and gay bishops. And the Anglican Communion, which has really been torn about by this subject, is also going to have to face some tough questions this coming year.
ECKSTROM: I’m going to keep an eye on Archbishop Tim Dolan in New York, who is the new president of the Catholic bishops conference. He’s a media-savvy guy, he gives you a bear hug, he’s sort of a telegenic face for the church. But he’s no shrinking violet. He will take on the issues of the day, but in sort of a friendly kind of way. It will be interesting. The only real power he has is the power of the megaphone, and which issues he chooses for the bishops to emphasize.
DIONNE: I think that’s an excellent selection. I would say if I could combine Palin, Huckabee, Obama, Romney—we’re going to see if the nature of the discussion of religion in our politics changes substantially this year or not. As we’ve already said, there are challenges to each of those figures, and it will be interesting to see how they deal with it.
ABERNETHY: I have been wondering with respect to Iraq and now Afghanistan why there was no peace movement—not more of a peace movement. Do you think with Afghanistan, as we begin to come out of there, that there will be such a thing?
DIONNE: I think going into Afghanistan there was very broad support when we started because many people, except for pacifists and a few others who have legitimate reasons for opposing all war, most people thought this was kind of a just war response, so you didn’t have a big opposition. I think now a lot of people say God, this is a terrible mess. I don’t have a good answer coming out of it, and I think that sort of undercuts what might otherwise be a big peace movement.
ABERNETHY: Thanks, E.J., our time is up. Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution. That’s our program for now. I’m Bob Abernethy.
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Decade in Review 2000-2009
Look back at excerpts from our conversations with reporters over the past 10 years about religion and its changing role in the world.
Look Back 2010
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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Ethnic Studies in Arizona
LEONARD DINNERSTEIN (Department of History, University of Arizona): People don’t like “the other” and in times of crisis, in times of great discontent, the minority group de jour is victimized as being the source of all the problems and also they have lower status so you can dump on them and most of your contemporaries agree with you.
High school students at demonstration: Our education is under attack. What do we do? Fight back.
LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: These high school students feel dumped on. They are protesting a new Arizona law that would cut the Tucson school district’s budget by $36 million a year if the district doesn’t stop the way it’s allegedly teaching its Mexican-American studies classes. State superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne wrote part of the law himself.
TOM HORNE: It says that you can’t have courses that are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnicity or that arouse resentment against other ethnicities. That’s the essence of it.
SEVERSON: The law also says ethnic studies classes cannot advocate ethnic solidarity or teach the overthrow of the US government. Horne was just elected Arizona attorney general after eight years as the state’s school chief. Each year he says he became more determined to shut down Tucson’s ethic studies program.
HORNE: It was necessary because in the Tucson Unified School District they were dividing kids up by race. They had Raza studies for the Mexican kids—La Raza, as you know, means “the race” in Spanish; African-American studies for the African-American kids; Indian studies for the Native-American kids, Asian Studies for the Asian kids. To me it sounds like the Old South dividing kids up by race that way.
SEVERSON: His primary witness against Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program is John Ward, who taught the class back in 2003 until, he says, he was pushed aside and eventually quit. Ward is Hispanic himself.
JOHN WARD: I think clearly their purpose was to create the next generation of ethnic radicals who could hit the pavement. They simply wanted to spread this message in a fertile classroom.
HORNE: They teach kids that they live in occupied Mexico, that the United States is run by a clique of white racist imperialist people that want to oppress Latinos.
SEVERSON: Abel Morado is the principal of the Tucson Magnet High School.
ABEL MORADO: If he believes that we are putting kids in a position to mistrust their fellow student and the authority figures in their life, then there’s not much I can say about that other than to say, well, you may be describing a program, but you’re not describing this one.
SEVERSON: Julio Cammarota is an associate professor of Mexican-American studies at the University of Arizona, where the faculty senate unanimously approved a resolution calling the law “distasteful” and “disturbing.” He says Horne has never attended an ethnic studies class in eight years.
JULIO CAMMAROTA (College of Education, University of Arizona): If he came to the classroom he would see that the classrooms are diverse. Students spend quite a bit of time learning how to respect each other’s cultures and cultural differences, so there is not this idea that one culture is superior to another, and that’s what he’s sort of implying, that there is cultural superiority of one group over the other. That’s ridiculous.
SEVERSON: This is a Mexican-American studies class at one of six high schools in the Tucson district. The class focuses on history and current affairs. The subject on this day was Native American Indian history. The teacher is Maria Frederico Brummer.
MARIA FREDERICO BRUMMER: I think it’s important for every one of our students to be strong citizens and knowing that they have a commitment to democracy, and part of that commitment is knowing exactly where our country is coming from, our history. Some of it might be negative and it’s our responsibility not to repeat any part of that negative history again
SEVERSON: Superintendent Horne says the classes are dividing kids by race, but not all the kids in this class were Hispanic, who make up over 60 percent of Tucson’s high school students. This is 15-year-old Shelbi Plank.
SHELBI PLANK: If you’re in a normal American history class, you learn the white perspective, like, and if you’re in the ethnic studies class you learn from the different races perspective, like from Asians you learn about how they have started their own perspective on things.
CAMMAROTA: And they’re not by far the best students at the school, but because of these courses they tend to do better than their peers at their school. They end up doing better. They end up scoring better on standardized tests, they end up graduating at a very high rate, they end up going on to college.
SEVERSON: Superintendent Horne disagrees with just how successful the program has been, but it does seem to have created some enthusiasm with the students. This is sixteen- year-old Carmen Camacho.
CARMEN CAMACHO: I love that class. I’m not going to lie to you. I love that class.
SEVERSON: Why do you love it?
CAMACHO: It’s just like you get to learn other people’s culture. You get to learn where other people came from.
SEVERSON: John Ward thinks the part of the new law that prohibits teaching the overthrow of America is not overreaching.
(speaking to John Ward): Do you think they were actually teaching that in these classes?
WARD: I do. When they teach that the entire governmental system is solely the product of the white power structure and that these students essentially have to resist that, the end result is that you essentially have to either totally overthrow or in some way totally remake the government.
CAMMAROTA: That’s treason, and we wouldn’t be teaching students to overthrow and be traitors of their country. We actually teach students to actually love the country, love to be here and be able to participate and contribute to this country.
SEVERSON: The turmoil here in Arizona over Hispanic issues like immigration and ethnic studies can be found in states throughout the US. In 2009 alone, over 200 state laws were passed aimed primarily at undocumented Hispanics. Ten states are now considering legislation fashioned after Arizona’s tough immigration law. It is, as they say, a hot-button issue.
Leonard Dinnerstein is an author and retired history professor at the University of Arizona. He says historically the finger-pointing in Arizona and other states, mostly directed against Hispanics, is nothing new.
DINNERSTEIN: So if you want to go through history with the ethnic groups, when the Scots Irish came, in colonial America they sent them out to the frontier because nobody wanted to live near the Scots Irish. They were irascible. The biggest prejudice in this country aside from anti-black and anti-Indian was anti-Catholic.
SEVERSON: He says one of the factors in today’s climate is that people feel vulnerable and fearful.
DINNERSTEIN: When people are unhappy they look for scapegoats: I’m not unhappy because of me, I’m unhappy because “those people” make me unhappy.
SEVERSON: One of the states considering an immigration law like the one in Arizona is Utah. But recently a group of civic and religious leaders created a compact http://utahcompact.com/ asking the legislature to consider more humane legislation. The Mormon Church supports it. So does Catholic Bishop John Wester.
REV. JOHN WESTER (Bishop of Salt Lake City and Chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration): My hope would be that religion can encourage people to look into the issues for themselves and to take a proactive, responsible position. All of us have a responsibility as citizens to weigh in on this and to be informed, not just to believe what you hear necessarily next door, but to really look into the issues, and then to really, to put a human face and to ask the question why are the immigrants here? What is it that’s driving them here? What do we need to do to solve this question? It’s a very complicated question.
SEVERSON: While the grownups fight it out in Arizona, the kids who attend ethnic studies are learning how democracy works.
CAMACHO: The government needs to really see what this class is about, and not just talking and saying, oh, it’s just, you know, negative stuff, because it’s not.
SEVERSON: Tucson educators say they don’t intend to change the way they are teaching because, they say, they’re not teaching anything wrong. Several have filed a suit against Superintendent Horne. The new law takes effect December 31.
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Religious Leaders and the DREAM Act
On December 14, a group of religious leaders held a prayer summit and “Jericho March” on Capitol Hill to urge senators to vote in favor of a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country by their parents and who go on to post-secondary education or military service. Watch excerpts from remarks by Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and interviews with Rev. Minerva Carcano, bishop of the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church; Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners; and Rev. Russell Meyer, a Lutheran pastor in Tampa and executive director of the Florida Council of Churches.
Haiti Unrest
BOB ABERNETHY, host: Violent demonstrations broke out in Haiti this week over allegations of fraud in the recent presidential election—this on top of the growing cholera epidemic. Several relief organizations say the unrest has been preventing them from treating the thousands of Haitians suffering from the illness. More than 2,000 people have died and more than 100,000 have become sick. Our managing editor Kim Lawton has been talking to relief workers in Haiti. Kim, what do they tell you?
KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, they’re telling me that the situation is a lot more difficult than many people here may realize. The political unrest, protests in the streets, sometimes violent clashes have really created a situation where it’s hard for people to get around. Many of the relief groups and the faith-based groups have been on lockdown for several days in Port-au-Prince, but also in other cities around Haiti.
ABERNETHY: Lockdown meaning they don’t go anywhere?
LAWTON: They are told don’t go anywhere. Don’t go on the streets. And I understand that you can’t even get anywhere if you try to get on the streets. There are these big barricades and even stones and rocks. Sadly, Haitians are dragging rubble from the earthquake that still hasn’t been cleared away—they are dragging that into the streets so people can’t get around, which means the workers can’t get to the cholera clinics. They can’t get to the rebuilding projects, and it just puts all of that help further back.
ABERNETHY: And as you indicated it does seem as if it’s worse than a lot of us had thought.
LAWTON: Well, as you know I was supposed to be down there right now with a TV crew for our program, and our flight got cancelled. There was an Episcopal delegation with the presiding bishop of the US Episcopal Church. Their flight got—their plans got canceled, postponed anyway. They are trying to figure out what to do. A lot of people can’t come and go because the airports have been closed. That’s how bad the situation has been.
ABERNETHY: Yeah, and all this pent-up furry from a year ago when the earthquake—almost a year—when the earthquake hit, it just must have magnified the response to the election results.
LAWTON: Well, some of the people I have been talking to say this protest and all of this violence isn’t just about politics and the election. It’s about the frustration of the people and their plight so long with, you know, not having a place to live. A million-and-a-half people still living in tents and tarps, now the cholera epidemic, and they’re just very frustrated.
ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks.
