Author Archives: Fred Yi

Religion, Spirituality, and the Movies

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It’s Oscar time, and as the Academy Awards are handed out this weekend, revisit our archive of interviews and stories about such recent films as The Tree of Life, Higher Ground, The Way, and more.

The Tree of Life

Director Terrence Malick’s new movie “The Tree of Life” is a meditation on traditional Christian questions about evil, suffering, grace, and beauty, says Calvin College professor of English Roy Anker. Watch our interview with him about the film.

 

The Way

Actor Martin Sheen says his new movie about the Camino de Santiago is ultimately about “a journey of the spirit as well as the flesh” as well as a search for ritual and transcendence.

 

Higher Ground

Writer and author Frederica Mathewes-Green comments on Vera Farmiga’s latest film, “Higher Ground,” which also marks Farmiga’s début as a director. The actress plays Corinne, a woman who struggles with faith, doubt, and conservative evangelical Christianity.

 

Of Gods and Men

Father James Martin, SJ, culture editor of America magazine, shares his thoughts about the movie “Of Gods and Men,” the story of a community of Trappist monks in Algeria who have close relationships with their Muslim neighbors but who must decide whether to stay or leave when they are threatened by Islamic militants. The movie is based on the book “The Monks of Tibhirine” by John Kiser.

 

True Grit

Watch Cathleen Falsani, author of “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers,” discuss the movie “True Grit.”

 

Gay Rights in Uganda

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PASTOR JOSEPH TOLTON (preaching at memorial service): “David’s murder was meant to cause all of us who support human rights to live in fear…”

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: David Kato was memorialized recently on the anniversary of his death, a small service led by a minister visiting from New York. Kato’s advocacy of gay rights in a land where homosexuality is deeply taboo made him a target for a tabloid called Rolling Stone. It published the names of what it called the country’s “top homos.”  Under a banner headline and the words “Hang Them” was Kato’s photograph. A few days later, he was beaten to death. Advocates say it was only the most publicized incident in an atmosphere of growing hostility—socially and legally—toward gays.

TOLTON (preaching at memorial service): “You Ugandans are people of courage. You are people of honor and people of determination, and you are defying the odds because you are taking a stand that we will not be crushed by the Bahati bill.”

DE SAM LAZARO: The Bahati bill, named after its author, David Bahati, in Uganda’s parliament, was introduced in 2009 and reintroduced earlier this month. It would add severe penalties for homosexuality, which is already illegal under so called sodomy laws passed during British colonial times.

Frank Mugisha, gay rights advocate in UgandaFRANK MUGISHA: I could be put in jail for life for not doing anything but for saying I am a homosexual and for being out.

DE SAM LAZARO: Frank Mugisha is Uganda’s best known gay rights advocate.  He took over the group led by David Kato. Mugisha blames American evangelical pastors, like Massachusetts-based Scott Lively, for helping stoke intolerance here.

PASTOR SCOTT LIVELY (speaking on video): “What has caused these people to end up in this condition that God condemns, that is hurting them and that we want to help them to overcome?”

DE SAM LAZARO: Videos posted on the Internet show Lively conducting seminars here decrying a global homosexual agenda, insisting that homosexuality is a learned behavior that can be unlearned, and that he’d helped many people do so. Lively denies he ever called for violence, but in a deeply religious country, Mugisha says such messages affirm local clergy and policymakers.

MUGISHA: You have political leaders saying we should never accept homosexuality, a political leader saying if the law is passed, I’ll go and take a job in the prisons to hang the homosexuals myself. So if it is a political leader, a member of parliament saying that, then how are the people who believe, who have voted for them, who listen to them, how are they going to react?

DE SAM LAZARO: Reaction on the streets was strongly in favor of the anti-homosexuality bill. Polls have shown that 95 percent of Ugandans favor criminalizing homosexuality.

Man on street: I have a verse in the Bible, in Leviticus 20, verse 13. It says homosexuals should be put to death.

DE SAM LAZARO: When first introduced, Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill did call for the death penalty in certain cases. It provoked an international outcry among donor nations. A large part of Uganda’s budget comes from foreign aid. The measure was shelved until what some people here call a new provocation late last year.

US Secretary of State HILLARY CLINTON (in speech): Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human, and that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.

DE SAM LAZARO: Clinton told this gathering of diplomats in Geneva that the US was placing the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people at the heart of its human rights agenda and tying it to aid decisions.

CLINTON (in speech): The president has directed all US government agencies engaged overseas to combat the criminalization of LGBT status and conduct, to enhance efforts to protect vulnerable LGBT refugees and asylum seekers, to ensure that our foreign assistance promotes the protection of LGBT rights.

PASTOR JOSEPH SERWADDA: When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that gay rights were human rights, our response was this is going to be very tough on Africa, because most African nations consider gayism…

Pastor Joseph SerwaddaDE SAM LAZARO: Gayism?

SERWADDA:  …gayism as a behavior, not as a culture, not as a faith, and definitely not as a way of life.

DE SAM LAZARO: Pastor Joseph Serwadda, who heads an association of Pentecostal and evangelical churches, says Western countries are imposing their values and agenda on sub-Saharan Africa. As proof he noted that the head of mission at the US embassy here attended the funeral of gay activist David Kato.

SERWADDA: Many people, thousands of them, die of HIV/AIDS, of other illnesses and ailments. Many people die in road accidents, and we’ve never seen an ambassador show up at a graveside.

DE SAM LAZARO: Could it be that his picture was on the front page of a magazine that said, “Hang Them”?

SERWADDA: Could also be because America has an agenda for homosexuals in Uganda.

DE SAM LAZARO: Like police and prosecutors in the Kato murder case, he says robbery or a soured business deal could well have been the motivation, not homophobia. Pastor Serwadda isn’t sure he’s ever met a gay person in Uganda and that, he says, is proof that homosexuality was never an issue here until gays in the West began stoking it—encouraging Ugandans to push for special rights and protections he says they don’t need.

SERWADDA: Nobody has gone to jail; nobody has been harassed; nobody has been ostracized because of their sexual orientation.

DE SAM LAZARO: Wow. That’s contrary to what we hear.

SERWADDA: You’ve just come in the country a couple of weeks ago. We live here. I’ve lived here for more than 50 years, so I know.

DE SAM LAZARO: But you’ve never met a gay person.

SERWADDA: Only one, and I wasn’t sure he was.

DE SAM LAZARO: But you know that they’re not harassed.

SERWADDA: They’re not.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says the Obama administration is pushing gay rights now to court the gay vote in the US election. We tried to talk to US officials for this report, but our request to interview the ambassador or any other spokesperson for the US embassy in Uganda was turned down. It’s an indication of how delicate the issue of gay rights is in this country. Meanwhile, the anti-homosexuality legislation—with the death penalty clause removed—is working its way through a weeks-long hearing process. It will be closely watched around the world. In Washington, that will include the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. Last year, it awarded its annual prize to Frank Mugisha.

US Senator John Kerry at RFK Center event: “Robert Kennedy would have been amazed by your work, Frank.”

Frank Mugisha receives an award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights DE SAM LAZARO: It’s the first time the award has ever been given to a gay rights campaigner. Mugisha says the prize and the notoriety are a mixed blessing. It bestows international legitimacy and may allow him access to policymakers. Still, with emotions running high, Mugisha says he lives in almost constant fear for his physical safety.

MUGISHA: I’m not scared of the government. I keep saying that. Because if the government really wanted to harm me they would do that. But I’m scared of the ordinary people. Just recently when someone wrote in the newspaper about me, and if you went and read, there were Facebook comments on that, and if you read the comments there were people who were saying they could kill me if they saw me.

DE SAM LAZARO: On Facebook?

MUGISHA: Yeah, on Facebook, comments on the monitor, and there were who people were saying all kinds of horrible things, so you just imagine. And I interact with people, you know, and people tell you horrible things right to your face.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mugisha says he is bracing himself for the renewed public debate as hearings are scheduled for the anti-homosexuality legislation.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Kampala, Uganda.

Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation

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Read an excerpt from Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels

PROFESSOR ELAINE PAGELS (reading from the Book of Revelation): “And another sign appeared in heaven; a great red dragon with ten horns and seven diadems on his head. His tail swept down a third of the stars in heaven and cast them to earth. And the dragon stood before….”

BOB FAW, correspondent: For almost two thousand years, that fantastic, sometimes nightmarish language of the Book of Revelation has confused and inspired, It was the inspiration for  paintings by William Blake, for the poetry of John Milton. Lyrics like “he hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword”: that too came from Revelation. Despite its profound impact, noted biblical scholar Elaine Pagels says Revelation remains “the strangest book in the Bible” and “the least understood.”

PAGELS: It’s the most controversial book in the Bible. It’s always been that. Some people thought it didn’t belong there at all. And other people wanted to throw it out. Others love it, and some hate it. Some Christians never talk about it; some people never stop talking about it. A lot of people throughout the country were using it as a predictor of current events and using it as part of their impetus to get into the Iraq war. People could apply this sort of war against good and evil to almost any situation you were involved with.

Romans burning the Temple in JerusalemFAW: Pagels, author of the acclaimed book The Gnostic Gospels, was one of the first scholars to study ancient scrolls unearthed in Egypt in 1945. What the scholars found is that the Book of Revelation was not written by the author of the Gospel of John but by a different John living on the isle of Patmos off what is now Turkey.

PAGELS: He seems to be a Jewish prophet who is a refugee from a war in his own country, which was Judea, from Jerusalem, where a war had broken out in 66 to the year 70 when the Romans came in with 60,000 troops and totally destroyed Jerusalem.

FAW: It was, she writes, John’s “cry of anguish.”

PAGELS: This book picks up the language from the prophets and speaks about Rome and the leaders of Rome, the emperors, as a huge bright red dragon with seven heads, seven horns on its head. It was anti-Roman propaganda, because John was devastated by what had happened to his people, what had happened to the city of Jerusalem.

FAW: He writes it in language of dreams and nightmares.

PAGELS: Yes. It was probably dangerous in the Roman Empire to openly express hostility to Rome, so people would have done it in coded language.

FAW: John’s Book of Revelation targeted the Roman Empire as evil. But nearly 300 years later, when the Roman Empire became Christian, a wily and powerful bishop, Athanasius,  used the Book of Revelation to strengthen his hold on the Christian movement.

Bishop AthanasiusPAGELS: He says well it’s not just about the Roman Empire. This is about me fighting my opponents trying to create the orthodox Catholic Church in the fourth century. So he turns it into a story about Christians against other Christians, and that’s taken up later by Martin Luther against Catholics. It’s taken up by Catholics against Martin Luther.  It’s taken up by Catholics against Protestants and Protestants against Catholics, and it keeps on going that way.

FAW: And it was Bishop Athanasius who decreed that the revelation written by John of Patmos would be in the Bible even though most bishops would have left it out, says Pagels.

PAGELS: Most of the list we have of what’s supposed to be the New Testament completely leave this book out. It’s just gone. The one person who puts it in is Bishop Athanasius, and he realized that he could take this imagery of the war of good against evil and turn it against his religious enemies.

FAW: In that treasure trove of scrolls found in Egypt in 1945 there was not just one Book of Revelation. There were several, altogether different than the book that got in the Bible.

PAGELS: Most of them aren’t about the end of the world, and they’re not about judging the good and the evil. These other revelation texts have a different vision of the human race, that the same people could be both cruel and compassionate, that we are more complex than that.

FAW: They would not have been as useful for Bishop Athanasius to consolidate the church. That’s why he chose this particular one?

PAGELS: I think that Athanasius did choose this to consolidate the church and talk about you have to be, you know, orthodox to go up into heaven. Otherwise you fall into the lake of fire. I mean, this had been terrifying images for thousands of years.

FAW: Those images, the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the whore of Babylon—that is the version which resonates even now, largely, says Pagels, because those images can mean whatever a reader wants them to mean.

PAGELS: This book isn’t communicating much that’s cerebral. It’s really about what we hope and what we fear, and it’s as though you take all of your nightmares about plague or destruction or war or torture or natural catastrophe, and you just wrap it into a huge single nightmare, you get the Book of Revelation. But it comes out with hope at the end, so it’s very appealing to people who live in times of huge turmoil.

FAW: I wonder if a reader could come away thinking this book should not be taken as seriously as history has shown it has been taken.

PAGELS: I think you’re right that when you look at a book that’s in the Bible and you start to look at it in historical context, and you say, oh, this person wrote it in that situation, in war, you can say it doesn’t matter as much. It’s not necessarily something that came down from heaven. I’m a historian and that, to me, is an important way of looking at it. It’s not the only way. It’s not the way most religious people look at it. But it seems to me an important way of understanding our tradition.

FAW: Elaine Pagels’ new book, Revelations, may not become a best-seller like The Gnostic Gospels was, but it is already focusing attention on this Princeton professor, who says revelation might not give her comfort but that it does satisfy her curiosity.

PAGELS: I actually find this very compelling, and I am saying why? That’s a question I ask myself. What is it I love about this tradition, this Christian tradition? I wanted to think about how religion works, why people still are very deeply affected by religious language. I wanted to explore that, and this book is a perfect book for that because it’s not about the intellect. It goes straight to the emotions.

FAW: The Book of Revelation—always perplexing and provocative and now seen anew.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Princeton, New Jersey.

BOOK EXCERPT:

Read an excerpt from REVELATIONS: VISIONS, PROPHECY, AND POLITICS IN THE BOOK OF REVELATION by Elaine Pagels

John’s Book of Revelation appeals not only to fear but also to hope. As John tells how the chaotic events of the world are finally set right by divine judgment, those who engage his visions often see them offering meaning—moral meaning—in times of suffering or apparently random catastrophe. Many poets, artists, and preachers who engage these prophecies claim to have found in the them the promise, famously repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Revelations by Elaine PagelsFinally, too, this worst of all nightmares ends not in terror but in a glorious new world, radiant with the light of God’s presence, flowing with the water of life, abounding in joy and delight. Whether ones sees in John’s visions the destruction of the whole world or the dark tunnel that propels each of us toward our own death, his final vision suggests that even after the worst we can imagine has happened, we may find the astonishing gift of new life. Whether one shares that conviction, few readers miss seeing how these visions offer consolation and that most necessary of divine gifts—hope.

But we have seen that the story of this book moves beyond its own pages to include the church leaders who made it the final book in the New Testament canon, which they then declared closed, and scriptural revelation complete. After Athanasius sought to censor all other “revelations” and to silence all whose views differed from the orthodox consensus, his successors worked hard to make sure that Christians could not read “any books except the common catholic books.”

Orthodox Christians acknowledge that some revelation may occur even now, but since most accept as genuine only what agrees with the traditional consensus, those who speak for minority—or original—views are often excluded.

Left out are the visions that lift their hearers beyond apocalyptic polarities to see the human race as a whole—and, for that matter, to see each one of us as a whole, having the capacity for both cruelty and compassion. Those who championed John’s Revelation finally succeeded in obliterating visions associated with Origen, the “father of the church” posthumously condemned as a heretic some three hundred years after his death, who envisioned animals, stars, and stones, as well as humans, demons, and angels, sharing a common origin and destiny. Writings not directly connected with Origen, like the Secret Revelation of John, the Gospel of Truth, and Thunder, Perfect Mind, also speak of the kinship of all beings with one another and with God. Living in an increasingly interconnected world, we need such universal visions more than ever. Revering such lost and silenced voices, even when we don’t accept everything they say, reminds us that even our clearest insights are more like glimpses “seen through a glass darkly” than maps of complete and indelible truth.

Many of these secret writings, as we’ve seen, picture “the living Jesus” inviting questions, inquiry, and discussions about meaning—unlike Tertullian when he complains that “questions make people heretics” and demands that his hearers stop asking questions and simply accept the “rule of faith” And unlike those who insist that they already have all the answers they’ll ever need, these sources invite us to recognize our own truths, to find our own voice, and to seek revelation not only past, but ongoing.

From “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” by Elaine Pagels (Viking, 2012)

Ashes to Go

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Watch the Ash Wednesday ritual of the imposition of ashes as it was observed during the morning commute at the Dupont Circle metro station in Washington, DC by Julie Bringman, director of Sunday night ministries, and volunteers from Foundry United Methodist Church.

 

JULIE BRINGMAN (Foundry United Methodist Church): I work specifically with a Sunday evening service at Foundry that’s a little more casual, a little more accessible than church always is so we thought that in the theme of casual and accessible we would bring the ashes to the street. A lot of people don’t remember that its Ash Wednesday, it falls at a different time every year or they don’t know where to go to church or what time or don’t have time to, so we thought if we bought the ashes to the morning commute more people would remember that it was happening and be able to participate and receive the ashes if they wanted to.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the season of Lent which is 6 weeks preceding Easter where we get ready for Easter so it’s a time of reflection and analysis with the hope that this time of preparation makes room for God.

We receive ashes on our forehead to remember that life is short. That we are all transient beings and we don’t know what our time is and we want to be grateful for the time that we have. So while putting ashes on the forehead someone says you come from dust and you will return to dust.

I think that there are a lot of things that we have the habit of only doing in church that make a lot of sense when we take them outside of church so even that sense of Ash Wednesday and that life is short and we want to be grateful for the time that we have in the midst of the morning commute is when people may need that reminder even more.

We hope that we do things and we do things in creative ways and then God shows up and so I guess my hope is that people who saw this had a small moment of awareness or awakening or attentiveness that gets us out of the routine and open to new things and that that makes room for God.

Voter ID

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

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

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

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

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

South Carolina State Senator Chip CampsenSTATE SENATOR CHIP CAMPSEN: And the court has concluded that whatever those hurdles you have to clear to get the ID necessary to vote…

SEVERSON: …is worth it.

CAMPSEN: It is worth it, that is correct.

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

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

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

Barbara Zia, co-president of the South Carolina League of Women VotersBARBARA ZIA: The League submitted our comments, along with other organizations to the state, contending that the law was discriminatory and that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of eligible voters would be disenfranchised.

SEVERSON: State Representative David Mack:

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

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

CAMPSEN: No.

SEVERSON: At all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEVERSON: Does this remind you of that?

Dr. Brenda Williams, voting rights activistWILLIAMS: Yes, this is just déjà vu.

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

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

SUGGS: I had no birth certificate.

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

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

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

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

SUGGS: You want to see it?

SEVERSON: Sure, I do want to see it.

SUGGS: Okay.

SEVERSON: So now she is officially Donna Suggs.

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

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

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

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

SEVERSON: If you all have a photo ID…

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

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

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

USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the height of last year’s devastating famine in the Horn of Africa, Rajiv Shah, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, visited a refugee camp in Kenya. There were thousands of families who had walked for days to escape starvation in Somalia. He says one woman’s story particularly touched him.

DR. RAJIV SHAH (Administrator, US Agency for International Development): Along the way, she literally couldn’t continue to carry both of her kids, and she had to make this gut wrenching choice about which child she would carry to safety and which one she would leave behind, and that’s the kind of decision that no mother should ever have to make.

LAWTON: Shah says encounters like that bolster his conviction that the US has a moral obligation to help ease suffering around the world. It’s an obligation, he says, that’s also in America’s strategic interest.

SHAH: We’re a nation based on moral values, and when we express those values to communities around the world, we’re showing them an America that is an optimistic America, an inclusive America, and a country with whom they want to partner and not fight.

USAID administrator Rajiv ShahLAWTON: Shah believes faith-based groups can—and should—be key partners in the US government’s humanitarian efforts.

SHAH: We want to do our work, which is about protecting people who are vulnerable around the world and expanding the reach of human dignity, as broadly as possible. and often it is communities of faith, faith-based organizations, that are there working when the rest of the world has forgotten about people who have no other place to turn.

LAWTON: At 38, Shah is one of the Obama administration’s youngest top-ranking officials. He is Hindu and says his interest in humanitarian issues was first fostered by his parents, who immigrated to the US from India.

SHAH: When I was seven or eight years old, I don’t remember exactly when, I went to visit India, and they took me through slum communities just so I could see how people lived. And I grew up in suburban Detroit. I’d never been exposed to that before. And when you see other kids your age, when you’re seven or eight years old, living in entirely different circumstances, it affects you in a very profound way, and it has led to a constant motivation I’ve had.

LAWTON: Shah took over at USAID on January 7, 2010, just five days before the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. He was immediately pulled into managing what would become the largest humanitarian response in history. After the quake, USAID worked closely with several faith-based organizations to provide food and shelter. Shah says he saw firsthand the effectiveness of those groups.

USAID administrator Rajiv ShahSHAH: Partners like World Vision or Catholic Relief Services that take the time to engage with communities they’re trying to serve, that are willing to be there for the long run, that work in partnership and cooperation with governments so that they are coordinating their efforts and getting the most out of what we—the investments we make.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (delivering speech): I want to acknowledge one particular member of my administration who I’m extraordinarily proud of and does not get much credit, and that is USAID Administrator Dr. Raj Shah, who is doing great work with faith leaders. Where’s Raj? Where is he? There he is, right there.

LAWTON: Under Shah’s leadership, the Obama administration has increased its partnerships with religious groups by more than 50 percent. According to Shah, USAID now has 115 different partnerships with organizations of faith around the world, and he hopes to expand that even further.

LAWTON: What is it that faith groups bring to the table in these partnerships?

SHAH: Well, I think it’s a core motivation that’s driven by a desire to get results. Organizations that are committed to the outcomes, that measure results, that ensure that scarce taxpayer dollars are in fact benefiting those who are most vulnerable often are communities of faith, and we want to work with them to achieve those results.

LAWTON: Government partnerships with faith groups have been controversial. Some critics worry about the US being tied to the religious mission of a particular group or taxpayer money being used for explicitly religious activities, such as evangelizing.

SHAH: Those are not activities we support. You know, we have a very clear set of defined outcomes and results that we’re willing to finance and that we believe we can support, and, you know, frankly, if you look at the broad range of what faith community groups are doing around the world, it’s actually service.

US military personnel overseeing food aid distributionLAWTON: Another controversial partner has been the military. Some nongovernmental groups have criticized the growing role of the US military in disaster relief, especially in areas where the US has been at war. But Shah says it can work. He cites Haiti as a model.

SHAH: Many of our NGO partners and others who had previously been sometimes nervous about working with the military came back and said, wow, they were, they were great to work with, they were so responsive to our needs and the needs of local communities and they were really there to serve. And I’m just very proud of the way American men and women in the armed services conducted themselves in Haiti, and they made us all proud.

LAWTON: Is there a concern, though, about the perception of the US humanitarian arm too linked with the military side?

SHAH: I don’t think we should be concerned about perceptions. I think we should be concerned about results and outcomes, and at times of crisis we will turn to whomever we can, whenever we can, to help save lives and protect people.

LAWTON: Shah says in an era of budget cutting, US faith leaders from across the religious and political spectrum have played an important role lobbying Congress to keep funding for programs that help the world’s poor.

SHAH: When people see that great coming together, it reminds us all that on some basic moral issues, we can stand together even in sometimes partisan environments.

LAWTON: But he admits in the current climate, it can be difficult to make the argument to maintain foreign aid funding, even though it represents less than one percent of the federal budget.

SHAH: At the end of the day when you ask Americans what we should be spending abroad, they’ll say about 10 percent of the budget. Unfortunately they believe we spend 20 percent and so we have a lot to do to communicate the fact that this is a relatively small investment.

LAWTON: Shah says resources must always be allocated for humanitarian disasters. But he says the administration wants to put a new focus on long-term initiatives as well.

SHAH: It turns out that for about a tenth the cost, somewhere between one-eighth and one-tenth the cost of feeding someone for a year, you can help invest in their ability to move themselves out of poverty.

LAWTON: And he says the government is well aware that communities of faith have vast potential resources that can be enlisted in the battle.

SHAH: There are 330,000 congregations in this country that represent–I think the top ten alone reach more than 100 million people. You know, if we could just reach a small fraction of that community, that’s our vision of success.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

Church Worship Services in Public Schools

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At FDR Public School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Abounding Grace Ministries held what could be one of its last worship services in the building. The nondenominational church has been renting worship space here for the last three years. Pastor Rick Del Rio says the reasonable rent was critical to his predominantly low-income congregation.

REV. RICK DEL RIO (Pastor, Abounding Grace Ministries): It’s the only thing we could afford. Two, it becomes that place where families can unite, and we really cultivate those relationships so that it is an oasis.

LAWTON: Del Rio describes his church as a source of stability in the neighborhood and says the city’s policy is unfair to the people he serves.

Rev. Rick Del Rio, pastor of Abounding Grace MinistriesDEL RIO: At the expense of the poor they want to go ahead and make this decision. What do we tell our people?

LAWTON: Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says allowing churches to worship in public schools creates a constitutional problem.

BARRY LYNN, (Executive Director, Americans United for Separation of Church and State): When a church uses a school on a regular basis it’s very easy for a community or the students in that school to think there’s a special connection between one religious group and that public school.

DEL RIO: All of this just in case some kid is going to have the wrong perception? Why don’t you explain to the child that worship, the freedom to worship is one of the most basic rights?. Teach the kid. You know what? This is a wonderful country, a wonderful city. We all need to be tolerant of each other.

LAWTON: Del Rio and other opponents of the ban argue that churches are being treated differently than other groups, such as Alcoholic Anonymous and the Boy Scouts, which still can rent space in New York City public schools.

Barry Lynn, Executive Director, Americans United for Separation of Church and StateLYNN: The law says there are whole categories of things that can’t be done in a public school. You can’t have a commercial event, you can’t have a partisan political rally or a convention, and you also can’t have worship services, so this is not viewpoint discrimination.

LAWTON: Thousands of churches around the country worship in public schools. Del Rio says New York City’s policy may be a precedent in what he sees as a movement to secularize the nation.

DEL RIO: If you think Occupy Wall Street can make some noise, there is going to be some real movement here from communities like ours, because we are not going to let this die.

LAWTON: Abounding Grace has found a new temporary worship location for the next few weeks and has joined a coalition of churches fighting the policy. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.