WASHINGTON  (RNS)—Facing incendiary charges that health care reform would finance abortion and euthanasia, President Obama on Aug. 19 appealed to religious groups to help sell the plan and debunk critics’ “false witness.”

“I’m going to need the help of all of you,” Obama told a conference call and live webcast that attracted an estimated 140,000 people. “I need you to knock on doors, talk to your neighbors. I need you to spread the facts and speak the truth.”

The “40 Minutes for Health Reform” call, organized by the Washington-based group Faith in Public Life and supported by 32 religious organizations, was part of a campaign to get clergy and congregants actively involved in promoting health care reform.

The president used the call to decry what he called “misinformation” and “divisive and deceptive attacks” in the ongoing debate.

“There are some folks out there who are, frankly, bearing false witness,” he said.

Obama called the idea that the legislation would include “death panels” to determine whether elderly patients live or die “an extraordinary lie.” He said it was “not true” that the plans represent a “government takeover of health care” or “mean government funding of abortion.”

“These are all fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation, and that is that we look out for one another, that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper,” he said.

At the same time, conservative groups, including leading Christian activists, ramped up their continued opposition to the reform package, which they insist could ultimately lead to taxpayer-funded abortions or rationing of care for the elderly.

Just two hours before Obama’s call, Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council Action, unveiled a second ad that says money that could be used for surgery for the elderly would instead pay for abortions. Their tag line is: “Our greatest generation denied care. Our future generation denied life.”

Perkins said there was a lot of “gnashing of teeth over our first ad” but he stood by its claims.

He said his organization worked to amend legislation to ensure that taxpayer-funded abortions would not be included. “They were all voted down, primarily on party lines,” he said.

Despite denials by the president, a new poll indicates that a significant percentage of Americans believe the health care plan is likely to permit use of federal funds for abortions.

An NBC News poll released Tuesday showed that 50 percent of respondents said it was likely that taxpayer dollars will be used to pay for women to have abortions; 37 percent thought it was unlikely and 13 percent were not sure. Asked if the government would “make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly,” 45 percent said it was likely, compared to 50 percent who said it was unlikely and 5 percent who were not sure.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—When President Obama named his choices for his administration’s two top medical posts, he chose people of private faith and public acclaim whose positions may put them out of lock step with fellow believers.

Francis Collins, 59, Obama’s nominee to head the National Institutes of Health, has differed from fellow evangelicals by supporting evolution and embryonic stem cell research.

Surgeon General nominee Regina Benjamin, 52, is a Roman Catholic who attended Catholic schools and was awarded a papal medal but, according to the White House, agrees with the president on “reproductive health issues.”

Obama’s choices reflect his hopes to “break the mold” of Washington politics and forge an administration with a wide range of perspectives, said Emilie Townes, associate dean of academic affairs at Yale Divinity School. In fact, she said, the choices of Collins and Benjamin demonstrate “big tent” evangelicalism and Catholicism.

“They’re going to be able to speak to a variety of people about a variety of issues,” she said. “They’re not going to be lambs to the slaughter or ideologues. They’re pragmatic people who understand how to get things done but also bring a vision for something more than just how things have been done.”

Philip Clayton, a theology professor at Claremont School of Theology in California, agreed. “Both choices reflect Obama’s pragmatic idealism,” he said.

Although Collins and Benjamin are known most for their scientific accomplishments— he headed the Human Genome Project, and she was the first African-American on the board of the American Medical Association—they have each publicly addressed their personal faith.

“When as a scientist I have the great privilege of learning something that no human knew before, as a believer I also have the indescribable experience of having caught a glimpse of God’s mind,” Collins said at the 2007 National Prayer Breakfast, during which he described his transition from atheist to believer.

Regina Benjamin, a community doctor from rural Alabama, was nominated by President Obama to be the next surgeon general. (PHOTO/RNS/Courtesy Dept. of Health and Human Services)

He authored a book called The Language of God and more recently started the BioLogos Foundation, which aims to bridge divisions between science and religion. BioLogos officials said Collins would step down from its leadership if confirmed.

“Church was always a very important part of my life,” Benjamin told Catholic Digest in 2007. “I believe I am carrying on the healing ministry of Christ. I feel obligated to help continue his works.”

In the rural community of Bayou La Batre, Ala., Benjamin runs a medical clinic, which does not perform abortions. The 2008 MacArthur Fellow is a board member of the Catholic Health Association and has done missionary work in Honduras.

Still, the nominations of Collins and Benjamin have drawn some criticism.

While groups like Focus on the Family hailed Obama’s selection of an evangelical for the NIH post, its newsletter noted that anti-abortion proponents cannot completely affirm his stances, “particularly since he supports destructive human embryonic stem cell research.”

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, initially gave Benjamin a ringing endorsement, saying, “Her tireless and selfless efforts are a model for all physicians.” But he opposed any possible support she might give “mandated abortion coverage” in pending health reform legislation.

Catholic leaders from her native Alabama say they have not heard Benjamin voice support for abortion rights.

“She is a practicing Catholic and faithful and, to the best of my knowledge, in all those questions that have arisen so far, there has never been a conflict in her practice and in her conversation with regard to what the church expects of medical practitioners,” said retired Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile, Ala., who nominated her for the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice papal medal she received in 2006.

Former Surgeon General David Satcher, who taught Benjamin as a student at Morehouse School of Medicine, said it is inappropriate to expect a surgeon general to act on religious beliefs.

“While the religion of the surgeon general may very well influence his or her … approach, the message has to be the public health science,” he said. “It’s not a religious message. It’s a public health science message.”

Some scientists, including University of Chicago ecology professor Jerry A. Coyne, have expressed qualms about Collins. “I’d be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was science, and did not feel compelled to set up a highly publicized website demonstrating how he reconciles his science with Jesus,” he wrote in his blog.

But others familiar with Collins’ work say there’s no reason to fear his faith.

“Francis is first and foremost a scientist, and he adheres to the highest standards of research and scientific integrity,” said Ted Peters, author of Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom. “These standards are shared with people of different religious faiths as well as others who have no religious faith.”

Robert John Russell, director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., said there’s no difference between elected officials serving as people of faith in a government position than what will be asked of Collins and Benjamin.

“If you get someone who’s exemplary in their profession and they are comfortable with their own faith stance and can be appreciative of other faith stances, then that’s an added value,” he said.

WASHINGTON (ABP) — A number of religious leaders are backing an effort to defuse the contentious debate over abortion with common-ground solutions that reduce the need for abortion by preventing unintended pregnancies and supporting women who might otherwise abort for economic reasons.

Democratic Reps. Tim Ryan of Ohio, a member of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, a member of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, have introduced legislation titled "Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Pregnant Women and Parents Act."

More than three dozen faith leaders and organizations from across the political spectrum announced support for the bill, which seeks to redirect decades of debate away from abortion rights and toward the reasons women have abortions.

"It emphasizes not the 10 percent of the issue, where we continue to differ, but the 90 percent where we all agree," DeLauro said at a Washington press conference announcing the bill July 23.

Supporters range from NARAL Pro-Choice America to Florida Pastor Joel Hunter, a one-time president-elect of the Christian Coalition.

Concerns about bill 

Several Baptists submitted statements of support, including Frank Page, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who told the Associated Press he has concerns about the bill but that he tentatively supports it.

David Gushee, an ethics professor at Mercer University and regular columnist for Associated Baptist Press, said from his pro-life perspective it is "regrettable" the bill does not challenge legal access to abortion, but that it sends "a new kind of message" on abortion — providing "genuine choice" by meeting economic of economic and health-care needs of women who otherwise might feel they have no choice other than to terminate their pregnancy.

"Pro-life Americans should support this legislation because of the very many creative and concrete ways it addresses the real-life circumstances that families face in relation to preventing and dealing with unintended pregnancies," Gushee said. "In a time of economic crisis in our nation, more and more women and families are already being driven to abortion. This is terrible but true."

Melissa Rogers, visiting professor of religion and public policy at Wake Forest University Divinity School, said the bill signals that one chapter is closing and a new one is opening in the abortion discussion.

"For decades, many Americans have been locked in a debate about abortion," Rogers said. "The problem has not been the debate — it is an important one that should continue. The problem has been that, all too often, we have been so focused on areas of disagreement that we have failed to look for areas of agreement."

New approach 

Jonathan Merritt, national spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative, said young evangelicals take protecting unborn life just as seriously as their predecessors but bring a new approach to that commitment.

"Valuing results and eschewing combative rhetoric, we embrace a comprehensive approach that reduces abortion by preventing unintended pregnancy through means such as comprehensive sex education with an emphasis on abstinence, supporting pregnant women and families, and expanding adoption," Merritt said.

Glen Stassen, a professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, said provisions in the bill are similar to a teenage parent program in which his wife formerly worked.

Stassen said the program provided training by nurses in prenatal nutrition and childcare, as well as how not to get pregnant again. It also provided contraceptives. Social workers helped the young women plan their future. The program also included a childcare nursery, an OB/GYN clinic and community support.

Stassen said just 1 percent of the pregnant girls in the program had an abortion, compared to the usual rates of 75 percent for teenagers younger than 15 and 39 percent for those ages 15-19. With the support and training they received, he said, almost none of them got pregnant again until after they graduated from high school, and far more of them finished high school than in schools without access to the program.

Need for healing 

"Our polarized nation needs healing," said Stassen. "I plead for uncommon decency and mutual respect in discussing and working together to achieve the healing we need."

The bill says 49 percent of all pregnancies in America are unintended and that, excluding miscarriages, 42 percent of unintended pregnancies end in abortion. It says low-income women are four times more likely to experience an unintended pregnancy than their higher-income counterparts.

The bill summary says it aims to reduce the need for abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies from occurring in the first place through comprehensive education and after-school and other programs, increasing support for family planning services under title X of the Public Health Service Act and Medicaid and services that provide health care services, information about pregnancy and other supportive services for pregnant women and new parents.

Reflects consensus 

Congresswoman DeLauro said at the July 23 press conference the legislation "reflects real and principled consensus" among both pro-life and pro-choice groups.

"For too long we have allowed our differences to divide us on this contentious issue," she said.

She said the bill "aims to break a stalemate that has impeded forward progress on reducing the need for abortion in this country" and to "turn down the volume on the culture wars that have plagued our attempts to prevent unplanned pregnancies in the past."

Co-sponsor Ryan described the legislation as "historic."

"I believe that this is such a divisive issue that when we agree and find common ground on the abortion issue that there is no issue under this dome that we can't solve together if we're all willing to lead and we're all willing to compromise and we're all willing to take the best deal that we can get and move the ball down the field," Ryan said. "And we have done that on this issue."

Not everyone is on board, however. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council argued that instead of reducing abortion, the bill would actually increase federal funding for abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.

–Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Members of a new White House advisory council have mapped out plans to link government and religious groups, from interfaith service projects to regional town halls on fatherhood.

Eboo Patel, founder of Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, said his task force of the Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships will work to advance President Obama’s discussion about interfaith cooperation by fostering hands-on activities.

“Can we have interfaith service projects on 500 campuses?” he asked fellow leaders on the 25-member council. “Can we work with 25 State Department embassies to have interfaith service projects?”

Council members discussed the priorities of six task forces, which range from reforming the faith-based office to addressing the economic crisis.

Melissa Rogers, an expert on religion and public affairs at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, said the task force charged with reforming the office will examine everything from executive orders to PowerPoint presentations to ensure church-state restrictions are clear when religious organizations partner with the government.

Several council members told administration officials they want to make sure government partnerships extend to the city and county level—in part to ensure that economic recovery funds reach struggling grassroots nonprofits.

Joshua DuBois, executive director of the office, said he expects intergovernmental outreach to increase, but he is seeking recommendations from the advisers on best approaches for that cooperation.

Many of the advisers’ proposals will be developed into a report to the White House next year. Some of their work will be evident before then, such as regional town hall meetings on fatherhood scheduled for later this year.

COVINGTON, La. (RNS)—An Alabama woman used the spine of a Bible to conceal several hacksaw blades that helped her husband and three other inmates escape a maximum-security prison.

Claudia Buras was booked into the St. Tammany Parish jail on one count of introducing contraband into a penal institution and one count of assisting escape. Both are felonies, each carrying a maximum sentence of five years behind bars.

When Buras, 24, of Irvington, Ala., came to the jail to visit her ex-husband, murder suspect Eric Buras, she smuggled the hacksaw blades to him by delivering the Bible, Sheriff Jack Strain said.

She had peeled off the Bible’s spine and then glued it back with the 6- to 6 1/2-inch blades inside, investigators said.

After she left, Eric Buras was strip searched, but the Bible was never inspected, Strain said.

“Our deputies would not have dismantled the Bible,” the sheriff added.

Three other men accused of involvement in various murders escaped with Buras in the jailbreak. Three of the escapees were caught within hours; a fourth eluded authorities for just over two days.

Prison officials say the inmates removed the caulk around a window and then used the hacksaws to cut away metal bars over the window.

WASHINGTON (ABP) — The White House announced July 8 that President Obama would tap a prominent Christian geneticist who is one of the world’s most famous thinkers on the relationship between religion and science to a top government post.

Obama announced that he would nominate Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health.

“My administration is committed to promoting scientific integrity and pioneering scientific research and I am confident that Dr. Francis Collins will lead the NIH to achieve these goals,” Obama said, in the statement announcing the appointment. “Dr. Collins is one of the top scientists in the world, and his groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.”

Francis Collins (PHOTO/Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life)

Collins led the decade-long effort to map the human genome that culminated in 2003. An evangelical, he has written and spoken extensively about his view that Christian and other kinds of religious faith and modern science need not be in tension.

He has debated atheist thinkers over whether science and religious faith are inherently in conflict. However, he has also rejected young-Earth creationism and its close ideological cousin, the intelligent-design movement.

“I think I would also say intelligent design is not only bad science; it’s questionable theology,” Collins said, in a recent discussion with journalists sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “It implies that God was an underachiever and started this evolutionary process and then realized it wasn’t going to quite work and had to keep stepping in all along the way to fix it. That seems like a limitation of God’s omniscience.”

He describes himself as a believer in “theistic evolution,” in which God created the universe billions of years ago with the parameters precisely set to allow all current life forms, including human life, to emerge and evolve.

In his 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins detailed his struggles with the idea of religious faith as a young scientist and physician. He eventually left agnosticism and atheism for Christianity after examining classic philosophical and scientific questions.

In the Pew Forum discussion, he described his understanding of how the world came to be succinctly. “God, who is not limited in space or time, created this universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned — that fine-tuning argument — to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time,” he said. “That plan included the mechanism of evolution to create this marvelous diversity of living things on our planet and to include ourselves, human beings. Evolution, in the fullness of time, prepared these big-brained creatures, but that’s probably not all we are from the perspective of a believer.”

Collins is a native of Virginia and holds the bachelor of science degree from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina.

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Christian leaders, including three members of President Obama’s faith advisory council, pushed the president to make good on his promise of comprehensive immigration reform.

Samuel Rodriguez, Noel Castellanos, Vashti McKenzie and Jim Wallis of the group Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform said immigration reform must have the same high-level priority as the government’s focus on banks, auto companies and healthcare.

“Whether we came to this country by choice, by chance, by capture, we have to proceed. This is the urgency of the now,” said McKenzie, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Wallis, Castellanos and McKenzie all hold seats on the White House’s faith advisory council. Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform released a statement asking the president to back legislation that would reduce waiting times for immigrants separated from their families; to provide a process for foreign-born workers and their families already in the U.S. to earn citizenship; to expand legal avenues for workers and families to enter the U.S.; and to examine solutions to the root causes of migration.

Wallis, founder of the progressive evangelical group Sojourners, said immigration enforcement must comply with humanitarian values.

“Those principles will guide the process,” he said.

Wallis added he supports safe sanctuary of immigrants who use houses of worship as asylum from deportation, saying “the church has a history of not waiting for legislation.”

Castellanos, CEO of the Christian Community Development Association agreed: “Christians are going to do whatever it takes to help their neighbor. I think it pushes us to look at what our national laws are.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Laws meant to eliminate terror financing are targeting Muslims unjustly, interfering with their right to practice Islam and resulting in a decline in charitable giving, the American Civil Liberties Union has charged.

The 166-page report, “Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity,” said the laws undermine security, rather than fight terrorism. The U.S. Treasury Department quickly disputed the ACLU’s findings.

“Government actions are creating a climate of fear that’s chilling American Muslims’ exercise of their religion through charitable giving called Zakat,” said Jennifer Turner, a human rights researcher with the ACLU and the report’s author.

Zakat is one of five mandated “pillars” of the Islamic faith, along with prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and belief in one God. Zakat requires Muslims to donate 2.5 percent of their annual earnings to the poor, although many donate much more.

Many Muslims now are too scared to donate to charities because they are afraid they could be dragged into court or prosecuted for suspected ties to terrorism, the report asserted.

Turner, who spent the past year interviewing some 120 Muslim charity leaders, imams and donors, could not provide hard figures on how much Muslim giving had declined, either as a percentage or in real dollars.

Anti-terrorism laws allow the Treasury Department to designate charitable organizations connected to terror without notice or explanation, Turner said. So far, seven Muslim charitable organizations have been shut down under the new laws, he said.

The Treasury Department rejected the claim that it targeted donors.

“We’re increasing our engagement with the charitable community to help them protect against terrorist abuse of charity and to refine the guidance surrounding charitable giving,” said Natalie Wyeth, a Treasury Department spokeswoman.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Religiously affiliated universities rank the highest nationwide in graduating their students, while hundreds of public and private universities fall far below the low average of graduated students, according to a recent report based on data from the U.S. Department of Education.

From Catholic to Jewish and Baptist to Methodist, religious colleges and universities topped the charts in the American Enterprise Institute survey, which found an average of just 53 percent of entering students at four-year colleges graduate within six years.

Many institutions fared far worse, with graduation rates below 20 and 30 percent for students who entered in the fall of 2001. Religiously affiliated universities, however, rarely appeared in the rock-bottom rankings and held most of the top 10 slots across six categories of admissions selectivity.

Top 10 schools religious 

Among the “competitive” category of schools, which require students to have a C to B- high school grade average for admission, 100 percent of the top 10 schools to graduate their students were of religious orientation. The College of Our Lady of the Elms in Chicopee, Mass., graduated 89 percent of their students; Texas Southern University, by contrast, graduated only 12 percent.

The report ranked colleges based on admissions standards that ranged from “most competitive” to “noncompetitive.” It cited reasons beyond admissions criteria that affected graduation rates, including student demographics and the schools’ institutional mission. The authors, however, did not explicitly mention the colleges’ religious background as factors.

“While student motivation, intent and ability matter greatly, our analysis suggests that the practices of higher education institutions matter, too,” the report said.

Credits the mission statements 

Brian Williams, vice president of enrollment at John Carroll University in Cleveland, said religiously affiliated universities produce more graduates because their “mission statement attracts a certain type of student, as well as a certain type of employee.”

The report focused on the extremes of schools that either fail or succeed at handing out earned degrees. As a disclaimer, the authors repeated that the graduation rates do not always represent the quality of the university per se but possibly the quality of their mission statements.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Fellow evangelicals long have criticized Richard Cizik, who resigned under pressure from the National Association of Evangelicals in December, for being a little too green.

Emerging from a self-imposed media blackout, Cizik is back, and he’s wearing the label of converted conservationist even more comfortably now.

“I have become a conservative who, by some people’s definition, has become a liberal,” Cizik said during a meeting on climate change in May. “I am not a liberal. I am a conservative who, of all things, believes that some people should become conservationists.”

Richard Cizik participates in a fireside chat for Interfaith Power and Light in Washington, D.C. (PHOTO/RNS/David Jolkovski)

These days, Cizik said, he has more speaking engagements than when he worked as the NAE’s point man in Washington, and he’s making plans for a new evangelical organization that will address issues as “broad as God’s concerns are broad.”

“I’m just going to create an entity that will enable young evangelicals to be more effective as advocates for change,” said Cizik, who was hired earlier this year as a senior fellow by the Washington-based United Nations Foundation, founded by media mogul Ted Turner.

Cizik, 57, abruptly left the NAE, an evangelical umbrella group, after an interview with National Public Radio in which he signaled support for same-sex civil unions and admitted voting for President Obama in the Virginia primary despite Obama’s support of abortion rights.

At the time, NAE President Leith Anderson said his organization decided Cizik, who had been with the group for more than a quarter century, “cannot continue as a spokesperson for NAE.”

Although he declined to discuss his relationship with NAE, Cizik seems ready to move on and to resume his high-profile role in the nation’s capital. He’s building on his long-term interest in getting evangelicals of all ages involved in issues ranging from the environment to religious persecution.

Anderson, who hopes to announce a successor to Cizik within weeks, said he’s not surprised his colleague of 30 years plans to pursue a wider range of evangelical causes.

“These are his interests and these are his issues,” he said. “The difference is that when he was with NAE, he was connected to a broader constituency, and he’ll speak now as an individual rather than for an organization.”

E. Calvin Beisner, national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and a frequent Cizik critic, said he welcomes the transition because he believes Cizik went beyond the statements NAE member organizations adopted in a “For the Health of the Nation” document.

That document “said essentially nothing about global warming and yet he continued to make public statements hundreds of times, failing to explicitly express that this was his personal opinion and not representative of NAE,” said Beisner.

Although Cizik is prepared to address issues beyond climate in a future organization, the man who was once photographed appearing to walk on water in the pages of Vanity Fair says “creation care” appears to be what people want him to talk about.

“That is my perceived expertise, but that’s a bit of a misnomer,” he said. “I’m no less concerned about the broader array of issues.”

He's lectured on “Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth” at an interfaith gathering and appeared alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at an Earth Day news conference to push clean energy legislation.

As Cizik has discovered, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and there’s always a second act in Washington.

“I have more (speaking engagements) now than I had before, maybe in part due to some of the controversy associated with my name,” Cizik said. “It’s also true that some people have told me ‘You’re too controversial, and we’ll invite you next year.’”

In his speeches, Cizik often cites passages from the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, which depicts God “destroying those who destroy the Earth.”

Eventually, he said, mankind’s mistreatment of the planet will be questioned as much as silence about the rise of Nazism and toleration of slavery. He calls climate change “the civil-rights issue of the 21st century.”

Citing a report from the relief agency Christian Aid of Britain that 1 billion people could be negatively impacted by climate change by mid-century, Cizik said: “If the civil rights campaigns of the late 20th century were aimed at restoring the voting rights of African-Americans, a new kind of civil rights campaign is needed to protect the lives of a billion of our fellow human beings.”

Even so, he acknowledged that he still has an uphill battle in winning over skeptical fellow believers. A LifeWay Research poll shows Protestant pastors are evenly split, at 47 percent each, on whether global warming is “real and man-made” or just a myth.

“It just reveals that there’s a lot of work yet to be done to … convince the unpersuaded,” Cizik responded. “Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.”

But as he continues his work on going green for God, Cizik tells audiences evangelicals will need to build bridges with other faiths, just as they have on other issues. He recalls working with Tibetan Buddhists on religious freedom legislation, with Jews on Sudan’s troubled Darfur region and with Muslims on climate change.

“They’re not giving up their values, their commitment to Scripture or the rest,” he said of “new evangelicals” like himself. “But they do know that they do have to partner with others who don’t share their views in order to save the planet.”

WASHINGTON (ABP) — A group of high-profile religious leaders from various faiths is pushing President Obama to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate alleged United States-sanctioned use of torture since 9/11.

Thirty-three religious leaders met with administration officials after gathering in front of the White House June 11. They presented a letter signed by 50 individuals representing Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Sikh organizations urging the president to establish an independent, non-partisan commission to "uncover the whole truth" about U.S. torture policies and practices.

One of Obama's first acts in office was an executive order banning torture in interrogation of suspected terrorists. The president has said he believes use of torture is wrong, but he opposes a special inquiry, believing it would be perceived as retribution against his predecessor that would become a distraction from his policy agenda.

The religious leaders contended that existing institutions are inadequate to guarantee the abolishment of torture, and that an independent commission would be more credible and thorough in establishing safeguards to prevent future twisting or ignoring laws against torture.

"The reality is that our nation is now shackled to a shameful history of torture," the letter said. "As people of faith we know that only the truth can set us free."

"We must therefore, as a nation, be mature and honest enough to examine fully and disclose completely the wrong doing that has been committed," the leaders wrote. "The transparency and openness of a Commission of Inquiry will help to hold us all accountable for the policies and acts of torture carried out in our name. Accountability is essential in a nation of laws."

One of the signers of the letter, David Gushee, president of Evangelicals for Human Rights, wrote an Associated Baptist Press column in March arguing for a "Truth Commission" on the issue of torture. He said it is needed "because we need to know exactly what happened."

"It has been very difficult to have an honest public debate about exactly what our nation has done to those in our custody because we have never been given full information," Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, said. "We have half-debated what has been only half-revealed. We need to bring what has been done in the shadows into the full light of day, and see how it looks when exposed to that cleansing sunlight."

From a Christian moral perspective, Gushee said, an investigation could move the nation closer to reconciliation.

"Biblically, reconciliation generally involves truth-telling, repentance and forgiveness," he wrote. "Unpacked a bit further, reconciliation includes the wrongdoer's acknowledgment of responsibility, confession of the act as sin, expression of grief for any harm done, serious commitment to a new course of action and request for forgiveness. It sometimes also involves some concrete form of recompense offered to the one harmed by the one who did the harm."

"Once our nation's acts have been exposed to the clear light of day and we see that the facts merit repentance, I dream that we would demonstrate the moral courage to acknowledge responsibility for wrong acts, confess them as sin, express real grief for the harms done, commit ourselves to a new course of action (and solidify that commitment in concrete legislation and executive policies), offer recompense to those whom we have harmed where that is appropriate and ask our victims for forgiveness," he wrote.

In their June 11 letter, faith leaders quoted from Isaiah 11:2, pledging to pray for the president to receive "the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of God."

–Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

Samuel Rodriguez, Noel Castellanos, Vashti McKenzie and Jim Wallis of the group Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform said immigration reform must have the same high-level priority as the government’s focus on banks, auto companies and healthcare.

“Whether we came to this country by choice, by chance, by capture, we have to proceed. This is the urgency of the now,” said McKenzie, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Wallis, Castellanos and McKenzie all hold seats on the White House’s faith advisory council. Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform released a statement asking the president to back legislation that would reduce waiting times for immigrants separated from their families; to provide a process for foreign-born workers and their families already in the U.S. to earn citizenship; to expand legal avenues for workers and families to enter the U.S.; and to examine solutions to the root causes of migration.
Wallis, founder of the progressive evangelical group Sojourners, said immigration enforcement must comply with humanitarian values.

“Those principles will guide the process,” he said.

Wallis added he supports safe sanctuary of immigrants who use houses of worship as asylum from deportation, saying “the church has a history of not waiting for legislation.”

Castellanos, CEO of the Christian Community Development Association agreed: “Christians are going to do whatever it takes to help their neighbor. I think it pushes us to look at what our national laws are.”