Author Archives: Fred Yi

Legalizing Marijuana

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: On November 2, voters in Arizona and South Dakota decide whether to legalize marijuana for medical use, as 14 states and the District of Columbia already have. Meanwhile, in California, where medical marijuana is legal, voters are deciding whether to decriminalize recreational marijuana use. Is marijuana a gateway to harder drugs? Lucky Severson reports from Los Angeles.

BISHOP RON ALLEN (President, International Faith-Based Coalition, speaking in a church): It is because Satan has tried to make us think and have tried to make us believe that it’s nothing. Isn’t that just like the enemy? That it is less harmful than alcohol. Isn’t that how Satan comes in the back door to make you think that one sin is greater than another? You all have to say “amen.”

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: It’s Sunday, so Bishop Ron Allen is guest preaching in church. Any other day of the week and he’ll be preaching the same message to anyone who will listen. Bishop Allen is president of the International Faith-Based Coalition, comprising what he says are over 4000 churches nationwide. His one mission is to teach drug prevention to church leaders, and more urgently to defeat Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in California.

post01-marijuanaSTEPHEN GUTWILLIG (State Director, Drug Policy Alliance): First, it decriminalizes low-level possession of marijuana of up to an ounce by adults 21 and over, eliminates all penalties for that offense and allows adult 21 and over to cultivate small amounts of marijuana also for their personal use. And then the second thing that it does is it allows local governments to decide for themselves whether to regulate and tax sales of marijuana also for adults 21 and over if they choose to do so.

SEVERSON: Stephen Gutwillig is the California director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a nationwide organization working to change the focus of the war on drugs, especially state and federal laws prohibiting marijuana.

GUTWILLIG: Banning marijuana outright has fueled this enormous black market. It wastes hundreds of millions of dollars of law enforcement resources. It makes criminals of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens. That makes it very, very clear that marijuana prohibition has failed at every single level.

ALLEN (speaking in a church): And today we are in a critical position in the state of California. We have individuals that want to legalize a schedule one drug: marijuana. And what they’re saying to us is that it’s not dangerous. I beseech you. Don’t sit at home November the 2nd. Go down to the polls and vote.

post02-marijuanaSEVERSON: In 14 states and the District of Columbia, medical marijuana is now legal and available in approved outlets like this. Other states are considering it. But at the same time as arrests for every category of crime have gone down nationwide, recreational marijuana busts are skyrocketing. The FBI says police prosecuted 858,000 individuals for marijuana violations in 2009, and almost nine out of 10 were for possession of an ounce or less. Most arrests are misdemeanors but still result in a permanent drug arrest record.

GUTWILLIG: Every independent body that has been asked to look particularly at what should be done with marijuana, the answer has always been we should probably regulate it the way we do alcohol and tobacco, both because it’s widely available and widely consumed and it’s going to lead to mass arrests. That’s why alcohol prohibition itself was a disaster in the 1920s and ’30s and why it’s regulated today—not because it’s harmless, but because the risks associated with it are only magnified with a prohibition that drives its consumption underground.

ALLEN: When we talk about prohibition of 1920s and 1930s, we cannot relate that to what we’re dealing with today at all.

SEVERSON: Allen says legalizing marijuana would simply add to the destruction drugs and alcohol have already caused in African-American neighborhoods.

ALLEN(speaking in a church): Here’s their mantra: Marijuana is as harmless as alcohol, and so what I’ve been offering them is a rattlesnake or a cobra. Which one is harmless?

post03-marijuanaSEVERSON: Joining Bishop Allen’s coalition are conservative church leaders; the state’s two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer; Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina; outgoing Governor Schwarzenegger; and the two candidates who want his job—Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman.

MEG WHITMAN (Republican Candidate for Governor of California, speaking at a debate): I am firmly opposed to Proposition 19, which is the legalization of marijuana. But don’t ask me. Ask law enforcement. Every single law enforcement official is against Proposition 19.

SEVERSON: Not every single law enforcement officer opposes Prop 19. Several former police chiefs and the National Black Police Association support it. So does the California Council of Churches and the California NAACP, where Alice Huffman is president.

ALICE HUFFMAN (President, California NAACP): I would like to see it approved across the country. I believe prohibition has failed us, and it is failing us now.

ALLEN: I have called constantly for the resignation of Alice Huffman as the state president of the NAACP for this one reason. If you want to be a civil rights leader, you have to understand this one thing. What causes the devastation in the colored community? It’s not rocket science, Lucky, we all know it’s drugs.

post04-marijuanaHUFFMAN: Marijuana should be a different classification of a drug. It should not lead to any criminal arrests. It should not destroy our families.

SEVERSON: There’s another reason the California NAACP supports Prop 19, and it was underscored in a recent study of marijuana possession arrests in California.

GUTWILLIG: Statewide, African Americans are arrested at more than triple the rate of whites, typically double, triple, quadruple in all of the 25 major counties.

SEVERSON: According to the study, if, as a case in point, you lived here in South Central Los Angeles, and you were African American, you were seven times more likely to be arrested and cited for possessing marijuana than if you were white. The gap may be even greater because studies have shown that blacks are less likely to use pot than whites. Bishop Allen says the disparity, in part, is because the police discover marijuana possession while in they are in African-American communities investigating other crimes.

ALLEN: If we can do something about the drug abuse and the crime in these neighborhoods, then maybe the police officers won’t get the call to go and arrest in that particular area.

HUFFMAN: One law enforcement person says yeah, we call your community the pond. We go down to the pond. That’s where we go, I guess, fishing is what he was implying, and that’s exactly what happens. It’s like they target our communities.

post05-marijuanaSEVERSON: National studies indicate that enforcing marijuana laws costs American taxpayers over $8 billion annually. The costs of pot arrests in California are estimated at over a billion a year.

GUTWILLIG: Police will always deny that there are such a thing as arrest and ticket quotas, but clearly these exist. Arresting, detaining, citing petty marijuana possession offenders are among the safest and easiest ways to meet those quotas.

SEVERSON: The greatest fear of opponents to Prop 19 is that marijuana is a so-called gateway drug, that smoking it will lead to other stronger drugs like crack cocaine or heroin.

ALLEN (speaking to congregation): They said to me that it’s not a gateway drug. I have to disagree with them. I can only talk about Bishop Ron Allen. When I started my seven years of crack cocaine my first experience with drugs was marijuana.

GUTWILLIG: The overwhelming evidence shows that the enormous majority of people who try marijuana or who even smoke marijuana regularly never consume any other illicit substance. It’s actually what’s referred to as a terminus drug. It is the only illicit substance that most people ever try.

SEVERSON: Governor Schwarzenegger recently signed a law reducing the fine for marijuana possession to that of an infraction, like a traffic violation. But Alice Huffman says it won’t do anything about the disparity of arrests, and it won’t stop gangs from running illegal drugs in black neighborhoods.

HUFFMAN: I thought that the war on drugs was going to protect us. I did not realize that the war on drugs was going to destroy my families and destroy my community, and so I am very passionate now that I understand, and I think that this is a great opportunity to raise the awareness in America about a failed drug policy

SEVERSON: Even if California voters approve Prop 19, US Attorney General Eric Holder says the government will continue to enforce federal marijuana laws. But without the help of state and local police that wouldn’t be easy, because they’re the ones who make virtually all marijuana arrests nationwide and in California. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Los Angeles.

ABERNETHY: The latest Los Angeles Times/USC poll shows the marijuana proposition trailing among likely voters 51 percent to 39.

Australia’s First Saint

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: Last Sunday (October 14), the pope named six people saints, two men and four women. Among the crowd were 8,000 Australians there to honor one of those canonized, a nineteenth-century woman, Mary Mackillop, who devoted her life to education children in Australia’s vast outback. Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop is her country’s first saint. It’s not every day that an Australian becomes a saint and draws world attention, so Australia has been celebrating enthusiastically. There is even a sold-out musical of Mary MacKillop’s life, which included a brief excommunication because she upset the local bishops. Our reporter is Stuart Cohen in Sydney.

(from MacKillop the Musical): “And we declare her excommunicated. It is done.”

STUART COHEN, correspondent: Mary MacKillop the Musical was 10 years in the making, the creation of a part-time composer in the city of Melbourne. The effort to bring it to the stage accelerated two years ago as the likelihood of her canonization drew closer. Director Anthony McCarthy says Mary MacKillop’s life was well suited to be made into a musical.

post01-australiaANTHONY MCCARTHY: There’s some quite dramatic liturgical, ecclesiastical moments in her life. She gets excommunicated, she gets forgiven, she has to go to the pope, she meets the pope, she comes back.

COHEN: Mary MacKillop was born to Scottish immigrant parents in 1842. She became a nun at 25 and dedicated her life to educating children throughout Australia’s isolated rural areas. She co-founded the country’s first religious order, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, and opened dozens of schools across the country’s vast outback. In 1871, she was excommunicated, in part for exposing a pedophile priest. She was reinstated just five months later, and by the time she died in 1909, at age 67, her order had 750 nuns who were running 117 schools around the country.

MCCARTHY: I actually think that the production is serving a great historical purpose for the Catholic community and as well as the community at large.

post02-australiaCOHEN: The members of the cast of more than 80 are all volunteers, with one exception—Mary herself, played by professional opera singer Joanna Cole. For her it’s the culmination of a lifetime of association with Mary Mackillop’s Josephite order.

JOANNA COLE: I was educated by the nuns from kindergarten right through to high school. I really like to portray Australian women and Australian heroines, and I think she’s a very special heroine for Australia to look at, a very special role model.

COHEN: Australians aren’t known for being an especially devout people. But when an Aussie is recognized on the world stage, the entire country celebrates. In addition to the musical, there’s a new postage stamp bearing a picture of MacKillop and a light display on Sydney’s famous Harbour Bridge with images of Mary and some of her quotes.

COLE: She was a visionary and a pioneer, and I think her story should be told from that point of view. I think we should be very proud of the fact that this fabulous woman was born here in Australia and had such an effect on us.

COHEN: The Australian government has even taken the unusual step of copyrighting Mary MacKillop’s name and image to protect the memory of the country’s new national hero from over-commercialization.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Stuart Cohen in Sydney.

Pilgrimage of Remembrance and Healing

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Originally posted August 9, 2010

“Part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey,” says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed’s Warrior Transition Brigade. Produced and edited by Patti Jette Hanley.

 

CHAPLAIN RANDY HAYCOCK (Walter Reed Army Medical Center): Certainly the idea of pilgrimage is common to many faith traditions, as well as just to human experience. Part of the pilgrimage experience, and a lot of what we do at Walter Reed, is to help people again reconnect with what it means to be a safe, whole, healthy human being.

Speaking in Cathedral: Just relax and try and be in the present moment.

One of the questions that a lot of warriors have when they come to Walter Reed is what’s my life for? They’re looking for a sense of purpose and meaning, and that’s sort of the idea behind the life journey exercise at the beginning is to just get them to stop and reflect a little bit about their life. It’s become for me a kind of metaphor for life itself—that really we’re all on journeys and learning how to deal with things like loss and the horror of engaging in war.

Speaking in Cathedral: Many warriors tell me that they sometimes feel guilty that their friend had died and they hadn’t.

I think that’s part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart. There’s this kind of longing for more in life, and the idea of being on a journey with someone else is something that people get well in military life, because your life depends on the people around you. You gotta know people have your back.

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll walk this way and go into the War Memorial Chapel.

The War Memorial Chapel where they have the opportunity to talk about how their own journey intersected with the journey of their friend and basically just to do some grief work, and telling the story is an important part of healing in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Pilgrim-Soldier: It was like losing a brother, losing, you know, a family member, and that’s just always kind of haunted me.

Thousands of people have come into that little piece of geography to remember their war dead. So I think there is a kind of energy field here that, you know, I could come and just bring soldiers into that space and say “blah blah blah” and something would still happen simply because of the prayers and tears and, you know, heartfelt emotions that others have let loose in that place.

The next step is to gather around the High Altar, and then using that [Eric] Clapton song [“Tears in Heaven”] — there couldn’t be a better song written for warriors, because many of them feel like what’s the sense of going on?

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll call off the names of those we have come to remember…

Pilgrim-Soldier: Lance Cpl. Joseph Jose Gutierrez…

Concluding the way the army ordinarily does with coming to attention, calling off their names, sounding taps helps them to make a letting go of their friend so that they can get on the with the rest of their life.

Religious Responses to Anti-Gay Bullying

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: There is a new conversation taking place in parts of the religious community about anti-gay bullying. In recent weeks, several young men committed suicide after being targeted for harassment and violence because of their sexual orientation. Religious supporters of gay rights have launched new anti-bullying campaigns, while some opponents of homosexuality are re-examining their rhetoric. Our managing editor Kim Lawton has more.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: There’s been a lot of concern in the religious community about these acts of violence and harassment. Several religious denominations and faith-based organizations have been providing local congregations with resources. They’ve been urging pastors to preach about this in the sermons and providing information for youth groups and for youth leaders how to minister to people, young people, who might be struggling over some of these issues. A coalition of Jewish organizations from the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movement is actually asking Jewish leaders to sign a pledge promising to end bullying, this kind of anti-gay bullying, within the Jewish community. And even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons—they oppose homosexuality—this week they released a statement saying while we are not changing our position we do condemn any kind of bullying based on sexual orientation.

ABERNETHY: And the language involved, that’s being reconsidered, too?

LAWTON: Well, there’s been some interesting soul-searching among those religious groups that do consider homosexuality a sin. But how do they communicate that? How do they come across as they are communicating that? And some evangelical leaders have suggested that perhaps their community has been too harsh in their condemnations, as if homosexuals are in some kind of special depraved category or something like that. The Catholic Church, which considers homosexual behavior a moral disorder—one Catholic priest this week suggested that perhaps it should be considered within the pro-life agenda if these kids are committing suicide. None of these groups are suggesting that their churches change their theological position, and that then leads to this dilemma—how do you communicate dislike for the behavior without condemning the individual, and that’s a difficult dilemma.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton. Many thanks.

Eliza Griswold on the Muslim-Christian Divide

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: There’s been a lot of theorizing about the conflict between Islam and Christianity—what some have called a “clash of civilizations.” Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold wanted to learn about the conflict for herself up close and personal by talking to real people in the midst of it all.

ELIZA GRISWOLD: I wanted to go to where the world is really breaking apart. I wanted to go see what happens when these two religions meet on the ground in villages, mega-slums, floods, droughts. I really feel that I’ve seen that the world is breaking down on tribal lines, and the greatest of those tribes is religion.

LAWTON: Griswold spent the past seven years reporting from what she considers perhaps the biggest faith-based fault line in the world—the tenth parallel, the line of latitude 700 miles north of the equator in Africa and Asia.

post01-elizagriswoldGRISWOLD: These are very contested spaces traditionally, and religion has become grafted onto what makes them so contested today.

LAWTON: The area includes Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines—all places of bloody battles between Muslims and Christians. Griswold says geography, climate, wind patterns and human migration have led to clear lines of demarcation.

GRISWOLD: When we think of Islam we think of a billion people around the world. We don’t usually think that four out of five of those people live outside of the Middle East. They’re not Arabs. They live in Africa, and they live in Asia, and then you have about half of the world’s two billion Christians who also live in what we call these days the Global South.

LAWTON: Along the tenth parallel, both Christianity and Islam have been experiencing an explosive growth in numbers and religious fervor. Griswold wanted to examine whether fundamentalism necessarily leads to violence.

GRISWOLD: The belief that there is one and only one way to find God, and the understanding that that leads immediately to an enemy, because everybody else is wrong. That kind of binary division between us and them, the saved and the damned, I wondered if that was inherently violent because you were setting yourself against another person.

post03-elizagriswoldLAWTON: Griswold’s explorations were deeply influenced by her personal background. Her father, Frank Griswold, is an Episcopal bishop who from 1998 until 2006 was the top leader, the presiding bishop, of the US Episcopal Church.

GRISWOLD: I grew up with a lot of fear about what God’s will would mean. You know, after being a 12-year-old and watching my dad be consecrated as a bishop in the Episcopal Church, which involved lying face down on a cathedral floor with his arms out in a crucifix shape. That terrified me. If I submitted to God’s will, what would God ask me to do?

LAWTON: Griswold says her family encouraged wrestling over questions of faith and intellect.

GRISWOLD: How does the mind work in relation to God? How do all kinds of people believe in God? And how does intelligence apply to that? That notion very much is at the center of what sent me looking along the tenth parallel. So is the idea that people can believe in God absolutely without necessarily being dangerous or without necessarily there being a way to explain their faith away.

post02-elizagriswoldLAWTON: Her journey began in 2003 in Sudan, where nearly two million people had been killed in a civil war between the predominantly Muslim North and the predominantly Christian South. Two years before the war ended, Griswold traveled there to observe a meeting between evangelist Franklin Graham and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. She says Bashir was afraid the US would invade Sudan, while Graham wanted permission to do evangelism in the northern part of the country.

GRISWOLD: The trip itself was fascinating to me, because it was what happens when faith and foreign policy become interlinked. And it’s something we’d heard a lot about, certainly during the Bush administration, but both before, because this is a history that dates back to colonialism, and also still today there’s quite a strong religious lobby that works strongly in our foreign policy that we don’t always see.

LAWTON: You talk in your book about many people saying to you this isn’t really a conflict about religion; it’s a conflict about oil, or water, or politics, resources. How much is religion truly a factor in some of these conflicts?

GRISWOLD: It’s almost an impossible question to answer because I have found that each conflict is different. I never saw a conflict that we would see as religious that didn’t have some kind of secular or worldly trigger—whether that’s land, oil, water, even chocolate crops in Indonesia. Now does that mean that religion doesn’t come to bear on these conflicts? It’s more complicated than that.

LAWTON: Adding to the complexity, she says, are clashes within the religions.

post04-elizagriswoldGRISWOLD (speaking at bookstore): There is a very profound religious clash that we’re missing. It is not the clash between Christianity and Islam. It is the clash inside of religions. It is the question between Christians over who has the right to speak for God. Those same questions are going on inside Islam today, and yet we don’t hear very much about it.

LAWTON: Griswold saw religion being used to fuel violence, but she also saw it used as a force for reconciliation.

GRISWOLD: One of those places is in northern Nigeria, this town of Kaduna, where a pastor and an imam worked together to really transform one of the most violent fault lines along the tenth parallel into one of the most peaceful ones. How did they do that? Community building.

LAWTON: She says the pastor reminded her that events in the US and other parts of the West can have repercussions around the world.

GRISWOLD: He me told me this quote that I just find so relevant now, which is when the West sneezes Africa and Asia catch the cold. So what does that mean, really? Well, that means quite viscerally, for example, with the cartoon riots, the Danish cartoon riots several years ago, more people died in Nigeria than any other country around the world.

LAWTON: After seven years of talking to people on the front lines, Griswold says she didn’t discover any easy answers about the volatile mix of religion, politics, and violence.

GRISWOLD: What I probably took away is certainly empathy, but also—it’s a hard word to use because it comes with so much baggage—but a lot of humility, I guess. Because I didn’t feel myself in a place to intellectually judge people’s lives, although I began thinking—I didn’t even question that I would be able to sort of assess what people were up to by assessing their sociology, and in truth I couldn’t.

LAWTON: But she did come to see, as she writes in her book, that “religions, like the weather, link us to one another, whether we like it or not.”

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

Eliza Griswold Extended Interview

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“In a lot of places where there had been conflict in the name of religion there is now peace in the name of religion, and that’s a hopeful sign.” Watch extended excerpts from Kim Lawton’s interview with Eliza Griswold, author of “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam.”

 

Pastor David Platt on the Gospel of Wealth

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PASTOR DAVID PLATT: I’m in over my head at every level. Don’t tell that to this church, but I’m clueless. Yeah, if you could keep that a secret, but I am clueless.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: “Clueless” is not the word members would use to describe Pastor David Platt here at the Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama. He has a doctorate and two master’s degrees from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. At 26, he became the youngest pastor in the country to lead a megachurch—a rich megachurch. And then something radical happened.

PLATT: I guess I would call it a crisis of belief, where looking at the Bible and I’m preaching and I’m thinking do I really believe this?

SEVERSON: He started questioning how his Christian beliefs are intertwined with the American dream of prosperity and success.

post01-plattPLATT: I don’t in any way want to come across as anti-America. At the same time there are some ideals and values that are at the core of the American dream that are really contrary, even antithetical to the gospel that Jesus preached, and then the American dream obviously leads us sometimes in pursuits of money and possessions and pleasures in this world.

SEVERSON: What troubled him was the material comfort of his congregation and the multimillion-dollar megachurch they worship in. This was not the picture he had of the humble ministry of Christ.

PLATT: This idea that if you believe God, have enough faith, that he will give you health or wealth or prosperity, I don’t think, first of all, that it is a gospel at all. It’s not the good news that Jesus preached. More than health and wealth, Jesus I think gives us a picture more of a homeless and wounded gospel, and even the New Testament church is not a picture of prosperity theology. It’s a picture of adversity theology, persecution, struggles, poverty, helping one another out.

SEVERSON: Recent surveys have shown that while a significant number of mainline churches in the US have been losing members, many of those that preach the so-called prosperity gospel and the big churches, the megachurches, have been gaining members, churches like Faith Chapel, another even bigger megachurch in Birmingham led by Pastor Michael Moore. Pastor Moore’s church has grown from a few members to over 8,000. He’s dressed casually because this particular Sunday was set aside as a casual worship day. Members say Pastor Moore’s scholarship of the Bible is one reason the church has grown so large. Here’s his view of the prosperity gospel:

post02-plattPASTOR MICHAEL MOORE: If you read the scripture, prosperity is all through the Bible. It’s not a prosperity gospel; it’s a gospel that includes prosperity. I think God is good, and I think God want to bless us with material things. I think the issue is not whether God want to bless us with material things. I think the issue is why are you pursing God? See, are you pursing God to get something from him, or are you pursuing God for God’s sake? Now if you’re pursuing God for God’s sake, then God will bless you with things.

SEVERSON: The church’s new domes will soon house a bowling alley, a basketball court, and a play area for children, which Pastor Moore intends to eventually open up for his congregation and for poor kids in the neighborhood.

MOORE: I think we should all give to the poor. I think we should all bless the poor. I think those who have it should give. The question I would ask him or anyone else: how can I give something to the poor if I don’t have it?

SEVERSON: Many of Pastor Platt’s members do have it to give, but some were jolted out of their comfort zone when he told them they should follow the lead of the early Christian church and give their lives and their wealth over to God and those in need. He called it a radical experiment and published a book that has become quite popular called “Radical.” It’s about taking back your faith from the American dream.

PLATT: For some people that means selling there home, some people it doesn’t. For some people that means getting rid of this possession or living at this lifestyle, capping their lives here, capping their lives over here. It’s not a—there’s no hard and fast rules, I think, for what this looks like.

post03-plattSEVERSON: The pastor calculates that Christian churches in the US spend $10 billion a year on buildings and own property valued at $230 billion. He says too many churches are acting like big corporations, but Brook Hills is now constantly looking for ways trim its budget.

PLATT: Okay, how can we begin to reapportion this? Well, first of all, how can we put it all on the table and say God, whatever you want us to do and if you want us to sell this building then we will do that. We want to do whatever you want to do. If you want us to reallocate the use of this building for other purposes then we want to do that, and that’s part of what we’ve done in our budget.

SEVERSON: One of the sacrifices Pastor Platt challenges members to make is to go serve in places where there is vast physical and spiritual need—places like India and Africa. Over 250 members have moved to Third World countries to serve for three months, a year, or more to evangelize and to lend a hand. It was places like these that deeply influenced Platt’s theology.

PLATT: I remember one moment even locking eyes with this five-, six-year-old girl who was standing in her front yard, but it was basically a pile of trash and with a little blue tarp for a home, and I remember thinking my life is created for something much more than just a nice, comfortable Christian spin on the American dream.

SEVERSON: Some members choose places closer to home, like Chuck and Margaret Clark and their three children. They sold their large home in a well-heeled Birmingham suburb and moved to the inner city, though not without trepidation.

post04-plattMARGARET CLARK: I had probably two primary concerns, and one was giving up my earthly comforts, and then secondly was just the fear for my children. We were aware of the drugs and the alcohol and the sexual promiscuity downtown, and it was just causing me a great deal of fear.

CLARK: Well, you can look around and see there’s lots of apartments that have been burned out, and there was a girl that got off a school bus here that was shot and killed recently.

SEVERSON: The Clarks have only been in their new downsized home a couple months, but they’re slowly getting to know the neighbors, evangelizing when its appropriate, and helping out where they can. Margaret is no longer afraid.

CLARK: We want to redefine success for our children. If my children are kind, and if they are compassionate, and that they are willing to take risks for others the way Christ took a risk for us, then I will accept that definition as success for them.

SEVERSON: Sacrifices by Brook Hill members have come in big ways and small, but in ways that are transformational.

AMANDA MCCOLLUM: I’m actually a preacher’s kid, so I’ve been in church since before I was born, and it really just changed the way I view the church and the church’s role in the world.

post05-plattSEVERSON: Amanda McCollum is a financial planner who went on her first mission trip this summer to Guatemala. She now pays her tithes on her gross salary rather than her net earnings.

MCCOLLUM: That was one of the big steps. I quit my gym membership, and I cut back on my cable. I kind of pause my cable six months out of the year and then turn it back on for football season.

PLATT: Sitting here in the office one day with a very wealthy man in our faith family. He comes in and he says, “Pastor, I think you are crazy for saying some of the things you are saying.” And I said, “Okay,” and he said, “But the reality is you’re only saying what Jesus said,” and so he begins to share about how he is selling his home and cars, and with tears in his eyes this man looks at me and says, “I want my life to count.”

(speaking to congregation): Aren’t you glad God gives second chances?

SEVERSON: When he first started preaching his radical theology, it was simply too much for some members. They left the church.

PLATT: It’s been a struggle. I mean, there’s been a constant tension, I think, in our faith family. When Jesus said some of the things he said and the crowds sometimes left, I mean totally left. The reality is when Jesus got to the end of his time on earth there were only 120 people who had actually stuck around and done what he told them to do in Acts chapter 1. I mean, that’s not a megachurch, that’s a mini-church.

SEVERSON: He lost members in the beginning, but now Platt says the church has more disciples than when he started, which is about 4300. No way to tell what’s next. According to the pastor, the sacrifices have only begun.

Tea Party and Religious Conservatives

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The Tea Party movement has been on the march this election season with its message of reclaiming America through limited government, fiscal responsibility, and a free market. At rallies across the country, Tea Party activists reverently invoke the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. The focus is firmly on economics, with no mention of hot-button social issues like abortion or gay marriage. Yet the Tea Party has had great appeal for religious conservatives.

REV C.L. BRYANT (Adjunct Fellow, FreedomWorks): It is the people in our congregations who pay the taxes. That’s what makes it religious.

LAWTON: Rev. C.L. Bryant is a Baptist pastor from Louisiana and an adjunct fellow with FreedomWorks, one of the leading Tea Party grassroots groups. Before the Tea Party march in Washington, DC last month, Bryant led an optional nondenominational prayer service on the Mall.

post01-teapartyBRYANT: Our rights don’t come from Republicans. Our rights don’t come from Democrats. Our rights come from our Creator. That’s where God comes in, and God has always been in the mix when we talk about America.

LAWTON: There have been longstanding tensions in American politics between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Tea Party leaders emphasize that theirs is a secular grassroots conservative movement. But significant involvement from religious right activists has raised new questions about whether those tensions have been overcome and what agenda will take priority after the election.

PROFESSOR MARK ROZELL (George Mason University): There are a lot of Tea Party activists who I would characterize as much more libertarian in bent than socially conservative. They’re really concerned about big government and reducing government size and scope in our society more than they’re interested in the social issues agenda. But there are other Tea Party activists who combine both fiscal and social conservatism.

REV. RICHARD CIZIK (New Evangelical Partnership): The Tea Party leadership that’s libertarian and the conservative Republican evangelicals who don’t like Obama—they have an agreement here. But what I would say to the evangelicals who have joined this movement: be careful, you will be used.

LAWTON: According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, 11 percent of Americans consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, and 47 percent of them are Christian conservatives.

post05-teapartyREP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-Minnesota, speaking at Values Voter Summit): As for me, I prefer tea parties, just so you know.

LAWTON: The Tea Party had a highly visible role at the Values Voter Summit in Washington last month, an annual gathering of religious conservatives that always gives strong emphasis to social issues like abortion and gay marriage. One of the most popular speakers was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a favorite at many Tea Party rallies.

SEN. JIM DEMINT (R-South Carolina): The fact is you cannot be a real fiscal conservative if you do not understand the value of having a culture that’s based on values.

LAWTON: During one panel discussion, several local Tea Party activists said it was their Christian faith that compelled them to get involved with the movement.

KATY ABRAM (Tea Party Activist): For about two weeks, I woke up about 3:00 in the morning every morning, and I’m really convinced that it was God speaking to me every single night.

LAWTON: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a sponsor of the Values Voter Summit, says there is a natural overlap between his movement and the Tea Party.

post03-teapartyTONY PERKINS (President, Family Research Council): I’m not trying to turn the Tea Party into, you know, what we do, and they are not trying to turn us into what they do. We complement one another, and we work together because we have a common vision of responsible government, individual responsibility, and a stable society.

LAWTON: Perkins says social conservatives who are part of the Tea Party haven’t abandoned their core issues. It’s just that in this election, concerns about the economy have taken center stage.

PERKINS: When you look at government spending, rising debt, government expansion, takeovers, I mean, people they’re frightened, they’re scared, they’re frustrated, they’re angry. But there’s also the underlying values issues, the moral issues. For values voters it may be on the screen about the economy, but running in the back is where do these candidates, where do these parties stand on life, on marriage, on family?

LAWTON: Still, some evangelical leaders are uncomfortable with the current emphasis on economics.

REV. RUSSELL MOORE (Dean, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary): I think there are some issues that are transcendent and are more important than other issues. The right to life for the unborn is infinitely more important than the question of how high one’s taxes should be.

post04-teapartyCIZIK: I’m opposed to deficits, too, but that’s not what primarily drives me as an evangelical Christian. Limited government? Not really. What I want is a society and a government and its policies to reflect the values I find in Scripture—religious freedom, caring for the poor, caring about justice for all, caring about the least of these. But that’s not what you hear from Tea Party leadership.

LAWTON: Rev. Richard Cizik says he believes religious conservatives are in danger of being exploited by Tea Party leaders who have no intention of ever supporting their social causes.

CIZIK: They’ll take those evangelical votes, and then they will walk away from those people as quickly as a bat of an eye.

LAWTON: George Mason University professor Mark Rozell says similar things have happened before.

ROZELL: Very often in the past religious conservatives have felt burned that they have supported these Republican candidates who focused on the fiscal agenda hoping that those same candidates once elected would support the social issues agenda, and then when those individuals did not the religious conservatives became very discontented, and this has happened time and time again.

post06-teapartyLAWTON: There appear to be disagreements within the Tea Party over exactly how to approach social issues and religion. Former congressman Dick Armey, who is chairman of FreedomWorks, has repeatedly said that conservatives are not successful when they focus on what he calls “the wedge issues.” And while several national Tea Party leaders want to avoid God-talk, many in the rank and file don’t shy away from it.

BILLIE TUCKER (Tea Party Activist): And some people say don’t you put God into the Tea Party, Billie, because the minute you do you are going to run a bunch of people off. And I’m saying I’m putting God back into the United States of America again.

LAWTON: Some, like Indiana Republican congressman Mike Pence, tailor their message to their particular audience. At the Values Voter Summit, his speech was laced with references to religion and social issues, but at the Tea Party rally the same week he avoided even a direct reference to the Bible.

REP. MIKE PENCE (R-Indiana, speaking at Tea Party rally): Engraved on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia are words from an ancient text. Those words read, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

post07-teapartyLAWTON: Another complicating factor is conservative talk show host and Tea Party icon Glenn Beck, who is rallying for a national revival of faith, honor, and values. He, too, has support from conservative evangelicals who like his open discussion of religion and morality. But Beck is a Mormon, which has also generated controversy among evangelicals.

MOORE: You have a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which evangelical Christianity does not recognize as Christianity at all, who is being presented not just as a political leader but a religious leader, and not just as a religious leader but as the leader of a call to revival, and you have evangelical Christians cheering this and supporting this. That tells me that there is at least a significant segment of evangelical Christianity that has become defined politically rather than theologically and spiritually.

LAWTON: Despite the internal debates, Rozell says in these midterm elections the political bottom line is clear.

ROZELL: Most of these people, even if they disagree with each other as to whether the focus should be social or economic policy, they’re conservatives, and they’re going to vote against the Democratic Party, and that’s ultimately what’s going to count.

LAWTON: The bigger question, he says, is what happens if Tea Party-backed candidates do indeed win.

ROZELL: We learned from the 1994 so-called Republican revolution that it’s easier to be against something than it is to govern.

LAWTON: And agreeing on a post-election political agenda could be the biggest challenge of all.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.