Ted Conover just feels familiar, as if you have been introduced somewhere before. He has a simple face with tired, intelligent eyes and a soft voice. Any number of humble identities could suit him: a small-town lawyer in a smart pair of suspenders; a Northern California dude growing a couple of acres of pot; a brainy priest who nonetheless likes his scotch. Your last guess would be a tough-guy prison corrections officer, which, in fact, he was, roughly 10 years ago.

Conover was a guard at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, New York state’s toughest prison, for just shy of a year, but the job marked him. Like a soldier returning from war, nearly a decade later he says the unusually brutal prison visits him when he sleeps. Yet, unlike tight-lipped vets who often refuse to talk, Conover has, for the past two years, taught a class of New York University journalism students from his troubling book about Sing Sing, Newjack. He not only discusses the violence that he witnessed, but the violence he condoned as a rookie guard. The graduate seminar is called “The Journalism of Empathy,” and it seems a class long overdue.

During spring 2007, the seminar met on Mondays in the Carter Building, a block from Washington Square Park. If the building was a bit rundown — worn carpets, creaky elevator, and gloomy stairwell — the journalism students inside it were generally not. The half dozen lingering outside the classroom and those walking up and down the halls had surprisingly fresh faces. They all seemed a little young, a little undergraduate.

Conover arrived at the classroom carrying a brown shoulder bag, dressed in a black jacket with a black knit cap, looking like a merchant marine arriving from the docks. Sophisticated, even savvy, he didn’t seem to have one ounce of guile. But this gentle bearing was misleading.

In the 1990s, Conover asked New York corrections officials if he could write a story about a trainee going through boot camp. When they refused, he quietly applied for the job. On his resume, he noted a bit of journalism experience, but left off his ties to The New Yorker and the two books he authored. He turned in the application and forgot about it. Two years later, a letter arrived ordering him to report for training in three days, and while Conover knew being a corrections officer (CO) would be tough, how bad it actually became was shocking.

At New York University, Conover sat with his students at a long, brown table, with a cup of coffee and a pen. Behind him were a large whiteboard and a jumble of audio visual equipment. He had an unshakable cold. He said quietly, “I apologize. I hope I don’t lose my voice.”

Using first person, or “I,” in narrative nonfiction to empathize with the subject can be quite tricky, said Conover. A writer has to get uncomfortably close to the person, the subject. And the subject can often feel misled or betrayed, or can suck the journalist into his world, blurring the lines to an impossible degree, sometimes destroying the writer’s integrity. So Conover, who has an anthropology degree, relies on an ethnographic technique called “participant observer” to help his students negotiate the line between “I” the journalist and the subject.

Curious about their work’s legal and moral complications, a young woman at the end of the table was worried. What if she witnessed something clearly illegal? As a journalist, do you get involved?

“I mean, what do you do? Would you be considered an accomplice?” she asked. “I mean you’re not including it in your work, but if you’re aware of it and you’re taken in for questioning, you can get in a lot of trouble.”

Conover started nodding even before she finished her question. Does a journalist stop being an outside observer when witnessing, say, child abuse?

“So I guess I’m just wondering,” the girl went on. “My question is: Where is the line?”

“Yeah,” said Conover, his voice becoming more raspy.

“… Is there a line? Do you flirt with the line? …”

“There’s gotta be a line,” he said, still nodding. “You have to have a line.”
                           

Bizarro World Romper Room — with guns and iron bars

Conover’s own line blurred to an impossible degree while at Sing Sing, but a year after leaving the prison, it finally disintegrated. Just months before Newjack was published, in September 1999, he had begun recovering his life with his wife and child. He was lying in bed at home with the television on, his eyes closed. Exhausted. That’s when he was confronted with the past that he was trying to leave behind.

Sing Sing had done a tap dance on Conover’s psyche. In those winter mornings before going on duty as a guard, he sat in his car steeling himself before walking through the frozen gates. Guessing when the day-to-day violence particular to prison might boil over was unnerving and agonizing. He hated the job.

One guard Conover wrote of in Newjack, a real bastard by most standards, had once been taken hostage and tortured by inmates who seized the prison many years earlier. Conover later discovered that the guard’s rigorous, insulting, and unbending professional ethic partly arose from the fear of that happening again. Prison was basically “Bizarro World Romper Room” with guns and iron bars. Relationships with prisoners were stark and authoritarian, and the inmates challenged the guard’s authority daily in a thousand maddening ways.

Sometimes, they were relentlessly childlike: begging to take a shower, refusing to lock up, hanging sheets on the bars, breaking the little rules — “Oh please, come on CO! Come on, pleeeeeaaasse!” Or the inmates would give him a long stare that promised murder. Sometimes the bitterness would cross over into random assaults. Conover was sucker-punched in the head once when he walked past the cell of an infuriated inmate. Women COs had sperm flung on them. One inmate squirted piss from his mouth onto passersby.

Civility inside Sing Sing was not an option. And Conover, a thoughtful man searching to illuminate life’s daily contradictions, could not afford to be scared. To a prescribed degree, COs were allowed take down violent inmates, and Conover found that sometimes he longed to inflict undue pain.

“Guards don’t dare admit that all of us at times feel like strangling an inmate,” Conover wrote in Newjack. “That inmates taunt us, strike us, humiliate us in ways civilians could never imagine, and that through it all the guard is supposed to take it.”

Conover had not anticipated Sing Sing’s brutality. But he embraced it, slowly, immersing himself in the prison system’s logic both as a guard and as a journalist. Conover’s immersion journalism came from his study of anthropology at Amherst College (Massachusetts) in 1980. There he mastered the techniques of the participant observer, which ethnographers rely on to study their subjects, often living with them for extended periods of time. But while engaging a native is fine, going native is a bad idea. Using a set of research strategies — informal interviews, long-term immersion, self-analysis — the participant observer method helps keep the anthropologist oriented and aware of his ever-evolving relationship with his subjects.

One day, a well-read prisoner named Larson passed Conover an outdated book about anthropology through the bars. The book hailed from the days when the science tried to break down people into racial categories.

“Ah yes,” I said. “They used to worry about this stuff a lot.”

“No, it’s something else. The way you think and the way you walk.”

During his nine months at Sing Sing, Conover told a few friends what he was up to; otherwise, he kept his mouth shut and stuck it out until New Year’s, when he felt he had a natural ending to tie up the book. He held on for the spectacle of inmates celebrating the holiday with controlled fires set ablaze throughout the prison. And he also held on to satisfy his pride. Then, to the relief of his wife, he finally left.

But Sing Sing had seeped into his private life — a civilized world where education and kindness were not considered weaknesses. His marriage had become strained. He was physically exhausted and mentally divided in half. Every night, when he returned home from the prison, he retreated to his office through the back door, without telling the babysitter or his wife. He would type up his day, he understood later, to escape the brutality and peaceably reconcile his double life as best he could.

Though Conover quit Sing Sing, there was one prisoner he couldn’t leave behind: Habib Wahir Abdal, who was serving 20 years for rape, his second prison term. Abdal was one of those poor clichés, the prisoner who swore he was innocent. Whenever the two chatted, Abdal insisted he hadn’t done it. After a few looping conversations, Conover became weary and disappointed at Abdal’s denial. There was no point in arguing, and so Conover just nodded and would say, “okay, okay.”

Then, almost a year distant from the nightmare, free from the daily lies and deception, while lying in bed in the flickering glow of late-night television, Conover stirred to watch the breaking news. He opened his eyes. And he suddenly discovered he was in fact on the far side of a line he hadn’t seen.

“They didn’t even get around to mentioning his name until the end,” says Conover. “I looked at the TV, and out of Green Haven comes Habib and his lawyer, Eleanor Jackson Piel, and Barry Scheck. And I thought ‘Hoooooly shit! He was telling the truth.’”

Mama Piel

As literature, Habib Wahir Abdal’s life story was knitted together as tightly as a Dickens novel. It even had a perfect, melancholic ending. Abdal died in his bed, a free man, in 2005.

His body was found, still warm, by his lawyer, Eleanor Jackson Piel, who had fought his legal battles on and off since 1969. Piel traveled to Lackaw, New York in 2005 to discuss Abdal’s ongoing civil suits, and found him lying in his bedroom. She laid her hand on his body. His eyes were closed. He used to call her “Mama Piel.”

“Yeah, it goes back a long time,” Piel says fondly, while sitting at her desk in her Upper East Side law office.

In a black suit with a silver butterfly brooch on her lapel, Piel’s dark hair was pulled taut into a bun, giving prominence to her handsomely creased, hawkish face. She recounts Abdal’s life as if it were a long-forgotten gem rediscovered in her jewelry box.

She first met Abdal years before he was falsely convicted of rape, before he converted to Islam in prison, back when he was named Vincent Jenkins, a young hustler arrested for homicide in New York City in 1969.

“Evidently he won a large bet, and other people knew he had money and were chasing him. And I think they found him in a house. They came after him. And one of them slit his arm. He ran away and he got a gun,” Piel says, describing the circumstances of Abdal’s manslaughter conviction after he killed a woman and shot a man. “And there were witnesses who saw these people chasing him. I contended he was not guilty because it was self-defense.”

Piel fought the conviction for years.

“I was very emotional. I was very upset,” says Piel, and then she smiles as if a little embarrassed. “Oh, I was younger then.”

After serving his manslaughter sentence, Abdal moved to Buffalo, New York in 1982, where police snatched him off the street and falsely charged him with rape. They manipulated the victim to choose Abdal from a line-up, Piel says angrily, and convicted him in 1983.

Plot twist: Piel’s husband, Gerald Piel, was the publisher of Scientific American. After reading a few articles on DNA testing, Ms. Piel decided to have samples from the rape kit tested. But DNA testing in the late ’80s was “shaky,” Piel explained, and if Judge Elfklin, a federal judge in the Northern District — notorious for slow rulings — hadn’t sat on the case for years, premature testing might have failed to free Abdal.

A first round of tests in 1993 was inconclusive. But five years later, Piel, ready to try again, asked Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, who specializes in DNA exonerations, what he thought of the Boston lab she had used previously and whether she should do so again.

“Barry Scheck said, ‘Oh that’s a terrible laboratory! Don’t send it to that laboratory!’” says Piel, laughing. “He said there’s only one man who can do this, and that’s Ed Blake, and he’s out in Northern California!”

Within a year, Abdal was free. Under the fair compensation laws in New York State, Abdal’s attorneys, Scheck and Piel, sued for $4 million dollars. When the state offered a $2 million settlement, Abdal said “no way.”
 
Abdal wanted his day in court and a jury to proclaim his innocence “and that was that!” Piel said while laughing, “We had no idea what to do! Then Barry Scheck had the idea to start a civil suit for the year Abdal was in jail before the trial, and so Abdal finally took the money.”

Six years after leaving Sing Sing, Abdal died of lung cancer, and his surviving family members contested his will. He had left his millions to his mosque and to a close friend, cutting his family out completely because he didn’t trust them.

“They thought there was some skullduggery going on,” says Conover, who found himself somewhat drawn into the legal battle. The siblings hoped that he would testify that Abdal couldn’t read, to prove that he could not possibly understand any legal papers he may have signed.

“And it was kind of an amazing question to me because I’d always assumed he could,” adds Conover, who had stayed in touch with Abdal over the years, but learned of Abdal’s death months after the fact.

“It was galling when I realized I wouldn’t make a reliable witness about that. I wasn’t sure,” says Conover. “He’d never sent me anything in writing.”

Even the most thorough of journalists can miss an obvious fact. This is true, in part, because presumption is instinctual, a necessary skill in a blindingly hectic world. Likewise, Conover failed to recognize Abdal’s innocence out of necessity: prisoners had to be guilty to justify Sing Sing’s degrading ruthlessness.

Abdal’s role in Conover’s work couldn’t be second-guessed. It was a bruising epiphany for the author to realize his complicity, and so later, when asked to testify against Abdal’s wishes, Conover respectfully declined.

Yet, to this very day, nearly 40 years after they met, Mama Piel is still fighting Abdal’s legal squabbles.

The unseemly production
 
It was early spring — March — a month after his class discussing the line between reporter and subject. Conover sat looking at his hands as he lectured from Newjack, struggling to be precise as he spoke softly. He seemed to avoid telling the horrific story completely by rote. He said that he often felt guilty for bringing Sing Sing into his wife and child’s lives, but he never mentioned the anguish he felt over helping to imprison Abdal.

A young woman raised her hand. How had the compassionate intellectual sitting at the end of the table become the taciturn disciplinarian of the book? Were there two Ted Conovers? Was the hardnosed, matter-of-fact narrator a literary device? Conover, a bit rattled, explained that even today some part of him was still a CO.

The class was skeptical.

Conover stood up and stepped into character. He became a guard again, returning to a time when Sing Sing COs were outnumbered by the prison’s inmate population and Abdal was still guilty. When Conover had discovered he was as much prey as predator.

A guard needed to control the prisoner and himself — no doubts. This illusion of control was a brutal paradigm his psyche had suddenly recovered, as if he had gone back to the crux of that founding contract between man and state. Egged on by the class, he demonstrated his frisking skills, recalling the days he sometimes found himself at odds with Sing Sing’s violence, reluctant to dehumanize a man. He picked out his tallest student, Michael Tedder, directing him to assume the position. In Newjack, during a horrific frisk, Conover’s worries if a prisoner is ill:

He stood in front of me on a small square of carpet, briefs in his hands. He offered them to me, and I checked them quickly. There was some blood in the seat. “You okay?” I asked. He nodded, and I began directing him through the obligatory motions. But he knew them better than I did and was always a step ahead.

Jackie Barba, a cherub-faced, sharp-witted student sitting in Conover’s classroom, who had studied literature in college, wasn’t completely buying it. Her professor was obviously acting out a role, a humorous facsimile, she thought. “It made me wonder,” Barba said after the class. “You know, whether when he was in it, he was always acting and always a little amused to see himself in that role?” When Tedder looked around, Conover snapped “Face the wall!” The class giggled.

Later in Newjack, while being frisked by a guard, an inmate mutters, “You fucking OJTs are a pain in the ass.”

“What?” The officer asked.

The inmate took one hand off the wall and began to repeat the phrase, but was immediately jumped by the frisking officer and several others. When I heard about it, I was proud, because it showed we weren’t wimps.”

To endure Sing Sing, Conover reluctantly embraced its logic, both as a reporter and as a guard. Proud of the violence and embarrassed by his power, it split his psyche in two. But when forced to, he chose to exercise the brutal requirements Sing Sing demanded.

“I think taxpayers are quite happy not to know the details of all the dirty work that is done in our names,” says Conover over the phone in a soothing voice, “just as we’re happy not to know the details of how our hotdogs are made, or everything that’s going on in the kitchen. In fact, we pay not to know about that. So I’m always interested in the work that seeks to narrow that distance and implicate consumers in the unseemly production of something we need.”

Yet, even as Conover taught Newjack with his “prisoner” in a pat frisk stance, his thoughtful students — some amused, some unsettled (“It was kind of weird,” one said) — had trouble wrapping their heads around their professor’s post Sing Sing rationale. Though none ever doubted their professor’s sincerity, a few still had trouble accepting his willingness to embrace an authoritarian self.

Being one of the few male students in the class, Tedder later noted it was likely why he was picked for the frisk. That Conover got into fistfights or was beat up while working at Sing Sing surprised him. “How could this sweet man do this?” said Tedder, adding “but people really are multifaceted.”

After Tedder sat down, Conover drew a long black line on the white board. He wrote “participant” at one end and “observer” at the other end. His students took turns discussing where their semester’s work placed on the numbered line.

One woman had entered a beauty pageant, but few had come close to full “participant” to report their stories. Allie Zendrian, writing about a self-proclaimed ghost hunter, chose to observe her subject without involvement. Barba observed a class of budding comics take to the stage, terrified to try out stand-up comedy herself. Most students weren’t prepared to cross the line, but all of them now knew better where theirs was.

Conover says he would never do it again, immerse himself as deeply as he had to report Newjack. And frisking down his students, even in jest, suggests that his line is still blurred. An innocent man suffered, and Conover did nothing — could do nothing — because he couldn’t afford to doubt. In fact, it was shortly after Conover finished Newjack — after Abdal was freed and Conover realized his role in the injustice — that the nightmares began.

“There are people who think it’s immoral to be a prison officer. I’m not among them,” says Conover, “and I think it needs to be considered honorable work if it’s done in an honorable fashion. But I never anticipated that the work would involve something clearly as illegitimate as locking up an innocent person.”

Lackawanna

It is not as if Conover hadn’t tried reconciling his role in Abdal’s incarceration. He took time with Abdal when he visited New York City, and they roamed the city together: “I remember him looking around for the fragrant oils he liked to rub on his head,” says Conover. And when six American Yemeni men from Lackawanna were arrested for training with al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Conover, looking for a story, stayed as a guest at Abdal’s house in Lackawanna: “I ended up sleeping on his couch for a couple nights and spending whole days with him.”

He even wondered whether there was a book about Abdal’s life — it was never written. But Conover did appear with Abdal at the bookstore Talking Leaves in July 2001, shortly after Newjack came out in paperback.

“I went up to Buffalo and saw him the morning of my reading, and he asked if he could come. So he did. He ended up being a part of the whole presentation,” says Conover. “He brought his prayer rug and his tape player to my room at the Hyatt when I changed, so he could do his evening and afternoon prayers.”

Talking Leaves employees pushed back the bookshelves, sliding them away and putting chairs in where they could fit them. With 30 seats and standing room, perhaps 100 people attended the modest reading. At the front of the store, at a small table, sat Conover and Abdal, ready to take questions. Conover wore a blue shirt with his sleeves rolled up, and Abdal was in Muslim garb with his silver whiskers, polished bald head, and knotty walking stick, looking every bit the elder wise man. Conover gave his short reading and answered questions. Some he deferred to Abdal, who launched into respectful, if biting, monologues on the prison system, even as the corrections officers in the audience squirmed in their seats.

“It was a very interesting mix,” says Conover, “and my book, I think, attracts a readership that’s somewhat the same. It’s, on the one hand, people concerned about prisons as a social problem, themselves intrigued by prison reform and what my book might suggest for it. And then on the other side, there are people in corrections or law enforcement who know that this profession is sort of a degraded one, and a stigmatized one.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder

The afternoon was all that Conover had hoped for: that Newjack wouldn’t preach to any choir, but would rather “narrow the distance” between natural antagonists, forcing them all to face an uncomfortable truth of the prison’s complicated nature — at the blind spot of reason.

But his deep-immersion, first person reporting, his participant observer methodology, cost him as he sought that dangerous ground. In Newjack’s paperback afterward, Conover wrote that he had discussed his nightmares with psychologists at a medical convention. They supposed his nightmares were post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Conover respectfully shrugged and wrote:

That seems rather a grand name for it, and I don’t want to suggest that I went through anything like what soldiers who saw combat in Vietnam did. But I do think that if you repress something regularly (in my case, fear), it’s going to come back to haunt you.

The general thinking on PTSD is that writing down horrific events helps the traumatized to recover. In a way, the balm is almost too obvious. But only recently has this thinking been recognized in newsrooms like CNN International and the BBC. Frank Smyth, an investigative journalist captured during the first Gulf War in Iraq, suffers from PTSD. Smyth says that much more is needed to support journalists who suffer the disorder. Smyth also happens to be the Washington representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, and writes for the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. He recommends that journalists, who often booze it up to self-medicate, instead confront their emotions by expressing themselves through art or memoir. It seems the brain can literally heal itself through self-expression.

“The act of articulation — writing, drawing, painting, talking, or crying,” writes Smyth with co-author Joe Height, “seems to change the way a traumatic memory is stored in the brain, as if it somehow moves the memory from one part of the hard drive to another.”

Conover, to a degree, instinctively embraced Smyth’s counsel. Typing up his notes night after night while working at Sing Sing, Conover turned them into a Pulitzer Prize–nominated book. If he hadn’t, certainly his PSTD would have been far worse.

But even today, Sing Sing draws Conover back across the line he stepped over many years ago, with it shifting around here and there and undermining his peace of mind. Having sought to narrow the distance between people who often violently disagree, to illustrate the blind spot of reason, the filthy work of being both a guard and a journalist lingers.

“In the dreams, I’m almost always a prisoner myself, not a guard,” says Conover over the phone, his voice always a little distant. “And part of the nightmare I’m involved in is the need to get out of that prison because I’m not supposed to be there. I’m not serving a just punishment. I’m there mistakenly.”

Suddenly, he pauses as if to stop his thought, as if reluctant to say it aloud to a stranger. “And so, so in a way, Habib’s situation goes to the root of some of my worst fears about prison: that a person, that I — that any of us — can end up there wrongfully and have to endure.”

Rafael Enrique Valero

Though Nnamdi Okonkwo was displaying his sculpture at America’s top black fine arts show, he criticized the event and its audience — even the very idea that “black art” exists.

“I have some problems with shows like this,” said the Nigerian-born sculptor, who was showing his work at the annual Black Fine Arts Show in New York in February. “The majority of people who come here are looking for art that reflects African American history. History becomes part of judging whether a picture is good.”

Okonkwo’s work probably doesn’t fit easily into that story. His bronzed figures of plump females represent the veneration of womanhood, he explains on his website, and were inspired by his wife and mother, not by black identity issues. “Ninety-nine percent of what I do as far as exhibiting my work does not concern [being black],” he said.

The success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has rekindled all kinds of debates over race, and not just in politics. Headlines and TV broadcasters ask:

“Is Obama black enough?”

“Is America ready for a black president?”

“Does race matter anymore?”

A parallel debate in the arts sometimes leaves black artists feeling pressured to produce work that reflects African American history and identity.

“There is no such thing as ‘black art,’” argued Josh Wainwright, the producer of this year’s Black Fine Arts Show, the major annual U.S. event showcasing art by Africans and African Americans. The show was begun in 1997 to address complaints by black artists that the art world marginalized and ignored them.

Asked why there were so few black artists represented in major art galleries, Wainwright, who is black, said he had “a pretty good idea why, and it’s called racism.”

Yet others argue that categorizing the work of African and African American artists as black art is a matter of practicality and salability.

“This is an audience genuinely interested in what African American artists are producing,” said Tony Decaneas, owner of Panopticon Gallery of Photography in Boston. “But as a dealer, I’m torn between putting up work that people will buy, and displaying works that have integrity and are fresh.” Human interest pieces and photos of recognizable figures sell best, but he tries to balance those with lesser-known work.

“There is a disconnect, even in the art world … for black artists who are not necessarily putting out what black people might want to see,” said writer and cultural critic Frank León Roberts. Yet, he said, white audiences are “eating up” avant-garde black art often ignored by black audiences.

The expense of buying original art could be a factor. “I think that, as a community, black audiences would gravitate towards works with black actors and themes related to the black community, so long as it’s actually affordable,” Roberts said.

Sometimes art, music, and theater produced by black Americans “is reduced to the question of how can markets best facilitate getting black butts into seats to watch black people perform black things and black comedy,” said Tavia Nyong’o, a professor of performance studies at New York University. “That then turns blackness into a commodity.”

Painter April Harrison considers her art an expression of personal memories and universal emotions, not black identity.

“My paintings are about love and spirituality,” she said. “My main theme is family bonding, taking you back to a time when love meant something.” Harrison’s work is dreamy and colorful, often depicting children, family members embracing, and other scenes from her home in Simpsonville, South Carolina. Her gallery show “Southern Comfort/Southern Discomfort” in 2007 juxtaposed her images of black Southerners with those by painter Charly Palmer.

Palmer’s paintings are full of sorrow and frustration, anger and hope: several incorporate signs from the segregation era, like “Waiting Room for Whites Only” and “Entrance Colored.”

“I don’t think there is any type of ethnic art,” Palmer said in a phone interview from his home in Atlanta. “Our subject matter just happens to be African American.” The impulse towards labeling things “black art” is a sign that “American society wants to put all artists in a category.”

“When it comes to my art, I paint African Americans, but I’m really painting the American experience,” he said. The idea of “black art” is a sad legacy of racism in the United States. “It goes back to the history of America, when Europeans brought in the Africans as slaves,” he said. “The need for separation has been there from the beginning.”

In The Fray Contributor

Although he won’t turn 18 until August, Minnesota high school senior Josh Bernick participated in his state’s Republican Caucus.

“For the first time in my life, I actually feel like I have some authority in the world, and don’t just have to sit back and watch things happen,” said Bernick, a student at Henry Sibley High School in St. Paul.

Bernick is in the lucky minority: Fewer than 20 states let 17-year-olds who will be 18 by Election Day vote in the primaries.

Political parties and state attorneys general usually make that call — and states can be reluctant to lower the age bar.

“If you start making exceptions, where are we going to draw the line?” wondered North Dakota Secretary of State Al Jaeger, who said he would be reluctant to change the law in his state, as it would raise questions about who could vote in other elections. “We do have the presidential primary race to think about, but we also have city elections in June, and should 17-year-olds be able to participate in those?”

No, Jaeger argues, because the U.S. Constitution says “that to be a qualified voter, you have to be of age, which is 18 years old.”

Yet decisions banning 17-year-olds have sometimes crumbled under legal scrutiny. And in states that ban the practice — such as California and New York — some teenagers are irate.

“There is no reason why a person who will be 18 by November 4th, and can cast a ballot in the election, shouldn’t be able to cast a ballot to decide who should be their party nominee,” argued Rebecca Steiner, a senior at San Dieguito High School Academy in San Diego, California.

“I’m clearly informed enough about the issues,” said Steiner, the captain of her school’s debate team. “I read the L.A. Times and many online news sites every day, and my friends and I have political discussions on a regular basis.

“It should be the same rules for political parties in every state — either all 17-year-olds should be able to participate, or none should,” she contended.

“I already know I’m voting for Barack Obama,” said Jessica Wong, a senior at the New York High School for Math, Science, and Engineering. “And if I know I want to support the Democratic candidate, I should be supporting him in the primary, not just in November.”

Too, she said, as a member of a political club, the Junior Statesmen of America, she participates in weekly politics discussions.
“That’s a lot more than many adults I know talk about it.”

A lawsuit earlier this year persuaded Maryland to restore voting rights to some 50,000 teens who will turn 18 by November 4th.
Student Sarah Boltuck, then 17, and her parents sued the Board of Elections, in a case that re-established voting rights for teens in that age group.

Though Maryland’s attorney general had found 17-year-old voting unconstitutional, based on a Court of Appeals decision on early voting, opponents who argued that the legal reasoning was flawed prevailed, according to FairVote, a not-for-profit that advised the Boltuck family on the suit.

Publicity surrounding the case also ended up more than tripling the number of 17-year-olds registering to vote in Maryland by primary time, to 10,000, from about 3,000 a month before, according to FairVote representative Adam Fogel.

“It just really shows how engaged young people are, and how they want to participate,” Fogel said. “Voting is habit forming; if they are voting now, they will most likely be voting for life. I almost guarantee 99 percent of 17-year-olds voting in the primaries will be back to vote in November.”

Rock the Vote, which encourages young voters to register and vote, has expanded its campaign to high school seniors.

“We recognize the importance of 17-year-olds who will soon turn 18, and work to engage, educate, and inform that group,” said Rock the Vote representative Shavonne Harding.

Rock the Vote sponsored a pre-caucus “Rock the Caucus” event in Iowa, generating buzz via Facebook, and organizing mock caucuses in Iowa high schools. Record numbers of young voters ended up participating in the Iowa caucuses.

Bernick found his experience enlightening.

“I would say I’m very informed after attending the caucus,” he said. “Whenever I discuss the election with my friends now, I feel like I definitely have the edge.”

Jane Wolkowicz

 
One of the first female faculty members at the resurrected education university in Kabul, Afghanistan, rummaged through her desk in the office of the English department, a narrow room with a single window.

We had just spent the morning with her, observing her colleague as he taught an English class. She said she had something to show us, a gift from her students. But after opening and slamming metal drawers shut, she sighed. She couldn’t find the photograph she was looking for, so she described it to us: Some of the male students had found a broken stair railing with vertical metal bars. They all held it up to their faces like they were in prison, and posed with exaggerated expressions of misery. One of them displayed a handmade sign: “Guantanamo University.”

“That was my gift,” the young professor said, rolling her eyes like an exasperated mother. I felt a stab of shame in my country’s government.
 

And now the Americans

If we are to believe the American point of view, the recent history of Afghanistan could be divided into pre- and post-Taliban, one of the world’s most infamous theocracies.

The Taliban years, from the mid-1990s until the U.S.-led overthrow after September 11th, seem to us a nightmare of medieval proportions: adulterers and thieves stoned and hanged in public, ancient Buddha statues destroyed, burqa-clad women beaten with sticks for showing an ankle or for wearing fingernail polish, music and kite-flying prohibited.

We Americans were all too eager to portray post-Taliban life as an explosion of long-denied freedoms. Women threw off their burqas and went to beauty parlors. Girls returned to school. Kites, pop music, and Bollywood flicks filled the skies, airwaves, and cinemas, and the newly installed Democratic government and constitution would soon usher in a new era of hope and modernization.

Of course, now we know the liberation of Afghanistan has proven more complex.

Nearly seven years after the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance made its triumphant entry into Kabul, President Hamid Karzai and NATO struggle to keep even Kabul under their control. The Taliban have regained control over much of the south and the volatile regions along the Pakistani border. Regional leaders — many of them affiliated with the Northern Alliance, which fueled the brutal civil war that preceded the Taliban — govern with equally draconian restrictions on women. In many provinces, local villages have chosen to side with the re-emerged Taliban over NATO and the new government; they reason that at least life was orderly, free of suicide bombings and rampant opium trafficking, under the old regime.

Four years ago, when I visited Afghanistan with photojournalist Stephanie Yao, I was struck to discover that nearly all the Afghans I met saw the United States as just another foreign occupier. (The Taliban originated in Pakistan.)

“First we had the British,” a longtime Kabul resident, a woman of about 60, told me. “And then the Soviets. And then the Americans came in to fight the Soviets. Then the mujahedin [the anti-Communist resistance fighters who started a civil war after the Soviets left]. After that, the Taliban. And now the Americans again. We’ll see if they do any better than the others. Probably not.”

Meeting the English professors

I recall first meeting the woman I shall call Fahima by accident, as my group and I were being escorted from one dull official meeting to another. At a teacher-training college, streams of students whisked past us. The young women and young men never mixed, but they wore modern clothes, by Kabul standards. The men wore jeans and western-style button-down shirts in bright solids and plaids. The women were in trim two-piece ankle-length skirt sets and modern headscarves that were close-fitting, not the voluminous shawl-like ones most other women in Kabul wore. I felt disconnected from them; I wanted to know them and their lives, but they glided past us like fish in an aquarium.

I cannot remember why Fahima was different, how we managed to stop and talk to her and Hamid (also a pseudonym) — both young professors in their late 20s. Maybe they overheard us speaking English to each other and said something to us, or maybe we heard them talking in English. I do recall making eye contact with her, and being drawn by her lively, dark eyes. She was surrounded by men, her male colleague and three male students; mixed-gender groups were unusual. She was tall, taller than some of the men, and her tailored gray skirt and top seemed to accentuate this. She told us they were all professors and students in the English department, and that now, particularly since the American invasion, this was the “hot” major.

Russian used to be the sought-after major, she said. Once there were hundreds of Russian majors at the university, and now there were about a dozen. The Soviets were yesterday’s occupier. Now everyone, from the United Nations, to construction companies, to journalists, were willing to pay top dollar to English-speaking, trustworthy Afghan workers, interpreters, or fixers. The students flanking her puffed up with pride as she talked about how only top applicants were accepted into the department.

“Will you come visit us in our department later?” Fahima asked, as our escort from the dean’s office started shifting from one foot to the other. We had another meeting to get to. We agreed to come by later.

Waiting for the grass to grow

“Come in, come in,” our two new professor friends beckoned us into the office, which had two proper desks, and several haphazardly arranged student desks, the kind with the chair attached. Hamid rushed around to arrange the student desks into a comfortable configuration for us. Then, to be official, or perhaps because it was the only space left for them, each of them took their seats behind their two desks.

Their desks, jammed together, took up nearly the entire length of the room. The female professor had to walk all the way around her colleague’s desk, a breezy sweep of gray fabric and trim white headscarf, and work her way into her desk, which was closer to the door. He took his place after her, easing into his. The ease with which they did this, the proximity of their desks, spoke of an intimacy that defied their propriety. Of course, we never saw them once touch, and they never held eye contact with each other for more than a second — even that would have been considered brazen outside of this liberal university campus. But their fondness for each other occupied the little air in the room. We settled into our seats, talking about all manner of things.

Fahima told us about her ill-timed entry into teaching. After her education was interrupted several times by the civil war, she finally graduated and was hired by the college. The year was 1995. Unfortunately, she barely finished a year before the Taliban took control of the city and banned female teachers and students.

“I spent five years at home. I read my books and dictionaries as much as I could,” she said, her English accented and precise. Some of her female students came to her family’s home, where their professor secretly tutored them. But as the Taliban became increasingly extreme, she feared what would happen to her if she got caught — and her anxious students stopped coming. “All I wished I could do was stand in class one day and teach my students. I prayed for it.”

The college was one of the few in Afghanistan that had close to a 50-50 male-female student ratio in 2004, but a female professor was in the distinct minority. Women comprised only 15 percent of university faculty in the country. Fahima knew how important she was to her female students.

“They sew clothes for me,” she said, motioning to the sleek gray outfit she wore — a sort of Muslim-friendly skirt suit, with a slightly fitted button-up top and a long, flowing skirt. These gifts from students were welcome, she said, given that the cash-strapped university couldn’t afford to pay her a living wage. The young women had a special bond with her, she admitted, often seeking her out for personal advice.

“I hope when my female students see me, they know what is possible for them.”

Then, realizing she had been talking about herself for a while, she turned to her male colleague, who had been listening attentively. “Well, what about you? Let’s hear about your stories.”

He waved her off, shaking his head. “I have no good stories,” he said. “Only yours are good.”

All of us women cajoled him until he offered that he loved soccer. “I was a footballer,” he said.

“Was?” I asked.

“Before the Taliban, he was a very good player,” Fahima said. “He played for a professional team.”

His easy smile became broader as he lowered his head sheepishly. He said he had not played seriously for years. Though he wore a baggy button-up shirt and jeans, I could see the strength of his legs in the way he stood, feet slightly apart as if ready to defend the goal, and the athleticism in the broadness of his slightly squat torso. But of course, I was not supposed to be noticing these things. Away from the relative freedom and permissiveness of the college campus, our Afghan American interpreter had laid out the rules clearly for me: No eye contact with men.

Not eager to get in any kind of trouble, I took her lead and got used to studying the carpet or some other focal point on a wall as I talked to men. But here, on campus, I immediately sensed the slack in the rein. I found myself using the additional freedom I had to study men in subtle ways, noticing all the things that even a light gaze now and then could pick up. Even our interpreter, thoroughly accustomed to both Afghan and American ways of being, reacted to it.

“He has pretty eyes,” she whispered to me at one point on campus, out of either professor’s earshot. I nodded immediately, having noticed his heavy-lidded, golden-hazel eyes as well, so often crinkled in a smile. Of course, Fahima, who worked with him day in and day out, could not have been blind to this either.

“But of course, it’s quite a miracle he can play football — soccer — so well,” she continued the discussion, a glint in her almost-black, almond-shaped eyes, “since he is so short.”

Her laughter came musical and easy, and he let out an open-mouthed gasp in mock offense. He feigned indignation, but couldn’t stop the smile from creeping up on his face. Clearly this was a running joke between them. She was one of the tallest Afghan women we met in our time there, her lithe frame appearing to stand an inch or two higher than her colleague’s with her heeled shoes on.

I wanted to know more about his competitive soccer days, so I asked. That was more than a decade ago, he said, and seemed at a loss to describe a time so far removed. I pressed on a bit. “What were the games like? Whom did you play? What did your uniforms look like?”

His expression clouded. “The Taliban didn’t like us wearing shorts. When we played in Kandahar, the Taliban shaved our heads and imprisoned us for two days. Our hair was too long and our beards too short. Soon, we just stopped playing. There wasn’t really space for football.”

Much has been made of the Taliban’s conversion of Kabul’s soccer arenas into public execution sites, like modern-day coliseums for the aforementioned hangings and stonings. But I knew this was not what he meant. Space was in the mind and heart; the capacity to relish sport that was subsumed first by the civil war and then by the Taliban’s harsh rule, and the poverty that overtook the city during both eras.

He grew quiet. I tried to shift to a brighter perspective.

“Well, now that the Taliban are gone, are you playing again?”

The professor raised his eyebrows, as if he had never really contemplated the idea, even though nearly three years had passed since the overthrow. Everyone in Kabul seemed so busy, so frantic to catch up with the sudden new world order — going back to school, learning English, angling for lucrative contractor jobs. Soccer seemed frivolous.

“No. Maybe someday I will,” he said. He turned to the window, as if trying to see through the university walls to the brown rubble and dirt roads outside. “Someday when grass grows in this place.”

 
Liberation in the classroom?

Later that afternoon, Fahima sat with us as we observed Hamid teaching his English III class. The students were working on identifying subjects, verbs, and objects in sentences. Their professor was encouraging them to come up to the white board to write sentences and then underline the subjects, verbs, and objects in different-colored dry-erase markers. It reminded me of the sentence-diagramming exercises I so dreaded in middle school English.

The male students were eager, their hands shooting up at every opportunity. But the women’s hands remained firmly on their desks or in their laps, and they avoided eye contact with their teacher. One broad-shouldered male student, wearing a snug-fitting white polo shirt, went up to the board twice. The second time, he wrote “I like to swim” in large letters, skewed at a strange angle because of his somewhat forced stance. Our interpreter laughed and whispered to me that he seemed to be flexing his muscles as he wrote. There was no mistaking it; that was exactly what he was doing. The telltale arms-akimbo stance and exaggerated motions, uncapping and recapping the different-colored pens — some male behaviors are universal, apparently. 

The professor finally called on Lima, a petite, pale girl in a light-brown outfit and cream-colored headscarf. Fahima whispered that Lima was a top student, much better than the boys who had gone up before her. Lima stared at her shoes as she walked quickly up to the board, snatched a pen, and wrote her sentence in small, timid handwriting. She bit her lower lip as she found each of the colored markers, underlining words as if this all couldn’t end soon enough. It was the best, most complex sentence that had been written, with conditional tense and dependent clauses.

“Very good. Excellent,” her professor encouraged her.

She slunk back to her desk quickly, with a slight smile on her face.
 
I knew it was easy to exaggerate in our minds the significance of that moment. The idealistic, feminist, American part of me wanted to think that something revolutionary had happened. That little by little, each woman student the professor coaxed to the front of the room was changing Afghanistan. That somehow, that turn up at the board incrementally altered each woman.

But when I talked to some of the female students later, I learned that many of them doubted they would pursue careers after their education. Their parents would resist any job that would require living away from home, thus limiting their options. Even jobs in the city would be difficult to get to, since few had their own transportation. There were still few female drivers on the road, despite the lifting of Taliban restrictions on women driving. And they were expected to marry soon, with no guarantee their husband and in-laws would approve of them working.

Fahima admitted she was a rarity — a woman of nearly 30, whose father was comfortable with her pursuing a career and remaining single, for now. Her father was disgusted by families — particularly uneducated rural ones, she said — who married their daughters off as young as eight years old in order to benefit financially from the arrangement.

Ultimately, the shortsightedness brought on by poverty would likely be the worst enemies of her female students’ budding careers. Though a bilingual woman working or teaching for an non-governmental organization, or interpreting for the United Nations, would make good money for her family, many parents pushed their daughters to marry early for economic reasons. Not only would the bridewealth paid by the husband’s family provide much-needed cash, but marrying off a daughter would also mean one less mouth to feed.

An educated daughter might catch the eye of a more affluent family’s son, and she might be better taken care of with her in-laws than with her parents. The students at the college were from middle-class families for the most part. But in Afghanistan, to be middle class is still a struggle. In reality, the economic exchange system of marriage had been in effect for centuries, millennia even. In harsh times, that could be relied on. The whispered promise of education and employment for Afghan women felt alien and unreliable in these times.

Still, I engraved Lima’s slight, self-satisfied smile in my memory. I wanted to remember it, for what it was worth. 

Fahima who was sitting in the corner of the room with us, suddenly had a gleam in her eye. She smiled and stage-whispered to us as the teacher walked toward the front of the room: “Maybe we should lower the board, because now Hamid is going to write something.”

We stifled our giggles. The class seemed unfazed and unaware. Hamid stopped for a moment and glared at Fahima. But then his stern look broke into a smile, and he shook his head. Barely missing a beat, he grabbed a marker and began writing the homework assignment on the board.

After the class, alone with Fahima in the cramped English department office, we teased her about her colleage. She raised her dark brows in an exaggerated gesture of surprise, shook her head fiercely, and then furrowed her brows to say, “No, no, no. We are just friends and colleagues.” Her English was, as always, crisp and formal, but I could detect the hint of a chuckle behind her declaration.

 
Graduation

Later that week, we went with our two new professor friends to the school’s graduation ceremony — the first for the three-year program since the Taliban’s overthrow. The women who received their diplomas that day, in a local restaurant banquet room, were the first female university graduates in a decade. The occasion was festive, beginning with a reading of Quran verses, and ending with a live band that alternated between deafening Persian synth-pop and Pashtun folk music.

Young women in colorful, sparkly outfits and headscarves posed for pictures with their proud parents. They sat talking to each other and fingering their colorful pink-and-turquoise diplomas, while the boys danced with abandon. The women feigned a lack of interest in the young men taking turns on the dance floor, twirling, clapping, and writhing until their faces glistened with sweat. Fahima told me the women would dance later, when the men finished.

In America

After our visit to Afghanistan, I learned that our professor friends would be coming to the University of Indiana. I lost contact with them, but I couldn’t help wondering if the time they spent traveling together may have caused love to flower.

As Afghanistan’s fragile post-Taliban hope fractured into dwindling U.S. and NATO control, suicide bombings, and growing daily death tolls, I felt that wish was hopelessly romantic. Did I expect the two of them to taste American freedom, fall rapturously into each other’s arms, then return to Afghanistan and, by the sheer force of their love and determination, save all the college-aged women? I wanted a Hollywood ending — just as we Americans had envisioned fixing Afghanistan as a matter of casting off the Taliban like a burqa, as the sunshine of freedom heralded a new day.

If I learned anything from my time in Afghanistan, it was that only Americans, not Afghans, saw the overthrow of the Taliban as a defining “before and after” moment. For most, the near quarter-century of war and unrest that had preceded 2001 — the endlessly changing regimes, each one brutal and ineffective in its own way — had numbed them from investing too much importance in the end of a theocracy and the beginnings of a U.S.-installed democracy.

But it was the final twist in this story that delighted me with the surprise of discovering lost friends, and blindsided me with the realities of the threatening, lawless place this so-called democracy has become.

When the original version of this piece was posted online, I immediately heard from the young man I am calling Hamid for the first time in years. He and his female colleague were indeed at the University of Indiana, getting their master’s degrees. It was a dream come true, he said. He had even started playing soccer again, but had been sidelined by a knee injury.

But their dreams came with a price back home. Fahima’s family had been threatened because she had gone away to study at a U.S. university. This kind of affiliation with America was cause enough for extremists to attack.

I had read news accounts of this growing climate of fear, the threat of an unseen but ever-tangible form of vigilantism that pervaded Afghan life now. Four young actors from the Hollywood movie The Kite Runner were relocated to the United Arab Emirates by the movie studio, for fear of repercussions resulting from a culturally inflammatory rape scene. Last year, prominent female radio journalist Zakia Zaki was shot dead in her home north of Kabul, after criticizing warlords. It was the third such murder of a female Afghan journalist in two years.

I apologized to my worried friend, but he interrupted me with his own apology. We had so much fun when you came and interviewed us, he said.

“It’s not at all like it was then. We all felt free to talk to you,” he said, his voice heavy. “Kabul is so different now.”

Angie Chuang

In a jungle encampment in eastern Myanmar, 67-year-old monk Saw Wizana sits meditating in orange robes. Behind him, hundreds of men with semi-automatic weapons line up in military formation and march in circles around a field. They are preparing for another battle against Myanmar’s military government.

Saw Wizana and the soldiers are Karen, the largest ethnic group in Burma. They have been fighting the government for 60 years in what has become the world’s longest running civil war. While tens of thousands of monks caught the world’s attention last August and September for their massive nonviolent protest, some Buddhist clergy in Burma — including Saw Wizana — insist that violent resistance is the only viable strategy against the ruling junta. Today, monks from both schools of thought continue to battle the military dictatorship. They say they belong to the same revolution.

Saw Wizana argues that as a Buddhist monk, he supports the controversial Karen armed struggle because he says it saves lives.

“We want to use a peaceful way like Martin Luther King, like Gandhi, but the military regime doesn’t accept it. That’s why we have to pick up arms,” he said. “Of course we want peace. Everyone wants peace. But it doesn’t work. That’s why we need weapons. We only use them to defend ourselves.”

The Saffron Revolution, brutally suppressed

The Buddhist country of Myanmar, named Burma until 1989, is among the most oppressive in the world. Pro-democracy advocates are routinely imprisoned, and ethnic groups like the Karen are regularly attacked by the military government.

Until recently, because of the government’s stranglehold on dissent, only the Karen rebels have openly confronted the dictatorship. But in August and September of last year, when tens of thousands of monks became involved in what originated as pro-democracy and student protests against rising fuel prices, a nonviolent resistance was reborn.

After days of nationwide protest dubbed the “Saffron Revolution,” the monks were brutally beaten and shot at by the military.

Monk Saw Wizana says the tragic result of September’s protests, in which at least 31 people were killed and hundreds imprisoned, proves that nonviolent resistance won’t work against the Burmese dictatorship.

“Nearby countries like Sri Lanka, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand — they are all Buddhist countries, and they wouldn’t hurt monks,” he said. By contrast, in Myanmar, he added, “monks were tortured by the military soldiers and forced to worship their torturers.”

Buddhism and armed struggle 

Saw Wizana — an imposing, heavyset man with gold wire frame glasses and rolls of orange fabric — has been a monk for 37 years. He spent four years in prison between 1984 and 1988, and was forced into hard labor as punishment for challenging the government.

“I was in the forest with several young students I was teaching. When we were sleeping, the military shot my students because we are Karen,” he said. “I told them they were breaking the law, and because I talked back to them, I was put in prison.”

He insists the Karen armed struggle is not in conflict with Buddhism because it is protecting life.

“We have to use it together with religion,” he said. “Use weapons for defense and religion to keep us courageous.”

Of the armed groups that have fought Myanmar’s dictatorship, all but the Karen have surrendered. The Karen National Union (KNU) comprises Christian, Buddhist, and Animist ethnic Karen people, and has suffered major troop losses over the decades. The KNU estimates its forces are outnumbered by government forces at least 25 to 1.

The KNU is also criticized for planting landmines, recruiting child soldiers, and instigating violence in civilian areas — accusations they deny.

At KNU headquarters, Saw Wizana is known as “Monk Rambo.” Other monks say they too understand the Karen armed struggle. One of them, 53-year-old Oh Bah Seh, was a leader of last year’s protests and says he does not condemn the Karen war. He is neither Karen nor part of the KNU movement. “No one wants violence, but because of the inhumane persecution [by] the government, that is why some came to take arms to fight the evil system.”

He, however, practices nonviolent resistance, like most other Buddhist monks. He says that as he was being beaten with a stick during the September protests, he still continued chanting loving kindness toward his oppressors.

Nonviolence is key, others say

Twenty-eight-year old Ghaw Si Tha, another leader of September’s peaceful marches, said nonviolence is key to a Buddhist resistance.

“We must go on chanting love, as we are monks. Even though they use force, even though the regime doesn’t follow the Buddhist precepts, we have to be faithful to love,” he said. “We believe that only love can produce success. That’s why we march with loving kindness, peacefully without violence.”

In Myanmar, political resistance by Buddhist monks dates back to British colonial times when Buddhist clergy helped fight for independence. The Buddhist clergy are a venerated group, seen by the general public as leaders. Today, Myanmar’s 400,000 monks are a group outnumbered only by the military.

Although unwilling to give specific details, monks Ghaw Si Tha and Oh Bah Seh say there are plans for future nonviolent protests in Burma. Many suspect August 8 — the 20-year anniversary of the massive pro-democracy protests, as well as the opening of the Beijing Olympics — to be a day to watch in Myanmar.

“Now, in this way, we Buddhist monks are also doing the same thing as the Karen fighters,” said Oh Bah Seh. “Revolution.”

Anna Sussman

1620: The Mayflower Compact
Religious radicals seeking to “purify” the Church of England are run out of the country, and cross the Atlantic on a ship called the Mayflower, settling in what is now Massachusetts. Upon landing, the so-called Puritans draft the Mayflower Compact, considered the first written constitution in North America, in which they state their journey had been “undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith,” and they were now forming a “civil body politic.”

1636: Roger Williams founds Providence
The Massachusetts Bay Colony banishes Roger Williams, a radical clergyman who preaches freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. Williams and a small group of followers buy land from the Indians and establish Providence, Rhode Island. A beacon of religious liberty in early America, Rhode Island is at one time the only colony not to have anti-Quaker laws on its books.

1681: William Penn founds Pennsylvania
William Penn, a Quaker convert from a wealthy English family, obtains a colonial charter and founds Pennsylvania on land purchased from Indians. The colony becomes home not only to the much-persecuted Quaker minority — subject to exile and execution elsewhere for their anti-authoritarian and nonviolent views — but also to a wide range of other religious groups unwelcome in other colonies. Penn drafts a colonial constitution far ahead of its time, the Frame of Government, which codifies principles of religious liberty and the balancing of power across different branches of government.

1779: Virgina Statute for Religious Freedom
Three years after penning the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drafts the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The statute forbids the government from dictating religious beliefs, arguing that “Almighty God hath created the mind free” and “civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” The Virginia General Assembly takes seven years to enact the statute, but Jefferson cites it in his epitaph as one of his three greatest achievements.

1787: Constitution
The Founding Fathers complete the Constitution, which states in Article Six that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Article Six also allows public officials to affirm, rather than swear, their support of the Constitution, a passage aimed at accommodating the Quaker minority, who were forbidden by their beliefs to swear oaths.

1791: First Amendment
Congress ratifies the Bill of Rights, whose First Amendment declares that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These 16 words, the so-called establishment clause and free exercise clause, become the bedrock of constitutional law concerning the separation of church and state and the freedom of worship.

1797: Treaty of Tripoli
The U.S. Senate ratifies a treaty with Tripoli aimed at stopping Barbary pirates from terrorizing American shipping. The treaty declares that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

1802: “Separation of church and state”
Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “building a wall of separation between church and state” to describe the First Amendment in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

1827: Ezra Stiles Ely, Christian crusader
Presbyterian minister Ezra Stiles Ely preaches “The Duty of Christian Freemen to Elect Christian Rulers,” a sermon calling for the election of candidates who “know and believe the doctrines of our holy religion.” His movement amounts to a 19th-century version of the Christian Coalition, except that the early Christian political agenda focuses not on abortion or homosexuality, but on the evils of Sunday mail delivery.

1833: Last established church
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts officially rescinds support of an established church. It is the last state to do so. (At the time of the Revolution, most states had an official religion.)

1920: Prohibition
Decades of agitation by religiously inspired temperance activists culminates in the 18th Amendment, which bans the sale, manufacture, and transport of alcohol. Support for Prohibition is strongest among certain Protestant denominations, and the teetotaler cause brings together diverse constituencies, including the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, African American labor activists, and the Ku Klux Klan. Thirteen years later — after speakeasies mushroom throughout the country and illegal booze sales make gangsters rich — the amendment is repealed.

1925: The Scopes trial
John Scopes, a Tennessee high school teacher, violates a state law that bans teaching that “man has descended from a lower order of animals.” His trial unleashes a titanic struggle between supporters of creationism and evolution, who find their paladins in famed attorneys Clarence Darrow (for the defense) and William Jennings Bryan (for the prosecution). While trained chimpanzees parade outside the courthouse, inside the proceedings soon descend into a rambling discussion of what in the Bible is factual. Scopes loses and is levied a $100 fine, but the losers in the court of public opinion are Christian evangelicals, savaged by the press as “yokels” and “morons.”

1928: Catholic runs for president
Al Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, becomes the first Roman Catholic to become a major party’s nominee for president. Facing allegations that he would be a pawn of the Pope, Smith declares his belief “in the absolute separation of church and state.” Smith’s candidacy is greeted with great hostility, including Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings, and Republican Herbert Hoover trounces Smith on Election Day.

1947: Court endorses “Wall of Separation”
In Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court rules 5-4 that government funding to bring students to and from their parochial schools does not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause. But this decision also said the Founders intended a “wall of separation” between church and state. “Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion to another.”

1954: “Under God”
Congress adds the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

1956: “In God We Trust”
A federal law establishes “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States. It appears on U.S. currency.

1960: Catholic wins presidency
John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, faces Richard Nixon in a closely fought presidential race. In an effort to defuse anti-Catholic sentiment, Kennedy gives a speech before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston, Texas, in which he states: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.” Two months later, Kennedy wins by a mere 0.1 percent margin in the popular vote.

1962: Public school prayer banned
In Eagle v. Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited prayer in the public schools as a way to prevent “the indirect coercive pressure” that occurs “when the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief.”

1976: Jimmy Carter, evangelical president
Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, is elected president of the United States, bringing evangelical faith out of the political wilderness. In a Playboy interview published weeks before his election victory, Carter admits to having looked on women with “lust” and having committed adultery in his “heart.”

1979: Moral Majority
Televangelist Jerry Falwell founds Moral Majority, a conservative Christian political organization that fervently opposes abortion, gay rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and arms talks with the Soviet Union. With a membership in the millions at its peak, Moral Majority dominates an ascendant Republican Party throughout the 1980s, transforming the Religious Right into the establishment voice of American evangelicism and a potent force in national politics.

1987: Religious expression permitted in public places
The Supreme Court throws out a ban by the Los Angeles airport on leafleting by members of Jews for Jesus. This is the first of several “free speech” rulings over the next two decades that allow religious expression in public or even government settings, as long as it is initiated by private individuals or groups, rather than government officials. The Court ruled, for example, that a Christian student club in an Omaha public high school could meet after class.

2003: George Bush, “compassionate conservative”
President George W. Bush, a self-identified “compassionate conservative” strongly favored by evangelical Christian voters, says that God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Four months after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Bush announces to a Palestinian delegation that the Almighty spoke to him with the words “George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan” and “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.”

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Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

In the basement of a row house in East Baltimore, Maryland, Adolphus Moseley, who had served time in jail for cocaine possession, was listening to a visitor who had been arrested decades earlier for drunken driving.

“I understand addiction,” George W. Bush was saying, according to a reporter allowed to overhear the conversation, “and I understand how a changed heart can help you deal with addiction.”

President Bush was talking about himself, of course. In the last year of his presidency, he seems to have become more candid about a problem with alcohol that he has often talked about more vaguely in the past: He had quit drinking at the age of 40, and has attributed his continuing sobriety to vigorous exercise, and religious faith.

But the president was in Baltimore for what he might call a higher purpose. He was visiting the Jericho Program, which works to help recently released prisoners succeed outside of prison. Jericho is run by Episcopal Community Services of Maryland, one of some 5,000 religiously oriented groups throughout the United States that, during the Bush administration, have received funds from the federal government to provide various social services.

The day before, in his final State of the Union address, Bush had trumpeted what he had intended from the start of his presidency seven years earlier to be a key part of his domestic agenda, his so-called faith-based initiative.

His visit to Baltimore, like his faith-based initiative itself, may not have gone completely as planned. When Moseley suggested that the city could use more programs like Jericho, Bush replied: “There are programs like that all over the city. They are called churches.”

“They are not sincere, like Jericho,” Moseley said.

The president seemed taken aback, according to press reports. “My only point to you is there are a lot of faith-based organizations that exist to help deal with very difficult problems,” Bush said. “It starts with the notion that there is a higher power that will help people change their thinking.”

Mixed legacy

For the past seven years, Bush has hoped to change the thinking of America about the involvement of the state in church activities. But many observers see at best a mixed legacy.

Some who support Bush’s goals say that they have not been fulfilled, or point to inequities: One report showed that federal funding awarded to black churches is disproportionately low.

But opponents question the whole concept, accusing the president, in the words of a recent editorial in The New York Times, of having “worked to blur the line between church and state.”

It is not just the achievements of his faith-based initiative, but its very definition, that is also in something of a haze.

By the way that President Bush talks about programs such as Jericho, it would be easy to infer that it is their religious orientation that makes them effective. But studies are inconclusive about the degree to which faith-based organizations are any more effective at providing social services than secular ones. And — to pick the program that Bush chose to highlight — Bonnie Ariano, Jericho’s director, says that there is no religious content to their program.

“Sometimes a client will ask to say a prayer,” Ariano says, “and we will ask the other clients if that is okay with them.” The role that faith plays in the program is in motivating the organization to work with the poor.

Indeed, anything more would be unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that federal money cannot be used to fund religious worship, religious instruction, or any kind of religious proselytizing, since these activities would violate one of the core principles upon which the nation was founded: the separation of church and state.

It is this principle that critics of varying beliefs see endangered by Bush’s faith-based initiative. Some worry that the government could wind up funding religious ideology. Others are concerned that the government money could interfere with religious activity. Still others are most disturbed by the fact that the religious institutions getting federal funding are exempt from many federal civil rights and labor laws.

Faith and the feds

Government involvement with religious organizations did not begin with the Bush administration. During the Great Depression, government looked to religious groups to help address the social ills of that era. Many years later, Congress and President Bill Clinton once again turned to those of faith. During Clinton’s second term, the Charitable Choice laws were passed, which clarified the rights and responsibilities of faith-based organizations receiving funds for certain social service programs.

Bush campaigned to bring these organizations further into the federal fold on his way to the White House. Once elected, he signed a number of executive orders. One stated that faith-based organizations should get an equal chance at receiving federal dollars, and the other created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

In 2006, $2.2 billion dollars was awarded to faith-based organizations to aid such needy constituents as the homeless, at-risk youth, recovering addicts, returning offenders, and people with AIDS. The number, according to the White House, represents a 41 percent increase over 2003, although some have disputed this figure.

The Criticisms

1. Proselytizing

Critics charge that religious views have dictated the policies and practices of a range of federally funded programs.

Many of the pregnancy resource centers funded by Bush’s initiative were found to be providing false or misleading information about abortion, according to a 2007 report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Callers to the center were told that “having an abortion could increase the risk of breast cancer, result in sterility, and lead to suicide and ‘post-abortion stress disorder.’”

“Abstinence-only” and other religiously inspired views reportedly led to the cessation of funds awarded to nongovernmental agencies in developing countries to provide condoms or to educate people about their use.

Department of Justice officials in charge of a program that funds faith-based organizations that run halfway houses told investigators they assumed these groups were exempted from the religious activities ban if chaplains or “organizations assisting chaplains” were involved. But this stance “could be read as allowing all providers of social services in these settings to engage in worship, religious instruction, or [proselytizing],” regardless of whether the religious activities are voluntary on the part of the participant, according to a report in 2006 by the General Accountability Office, an official government watchdog.

2. Inequity

One research group has found that the money distributed by the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives has not been awarded evenly among religious groups.

Only 2.5 percent of black churches have received funding from Bush’s faith-based initiative, a survey by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies showed.

“The administration has not been successful in informing the black ministers about the nature of the program,” David Bositis, senior political analyst for the Joint Center told Black Enterprise.

3. Politics over faith

Even while Bush is criticized for pushing the government’s relationship with religious groups too far, others allege he has acted as if he has done more than reality would bear out.

David Kuo, who was the second-in-command at the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has accused Bush of manipulating religion for political gain. Most recently, he coauthored an op-ed in The New York Times excoriating Bush for not doing enough. “Every nonpartisan study has concluded that the initiative has not delivered the grants, vouchers, tax incentives, and other support for faith-based organizations that the president originally promised,” the piece said.

The rise in funding to faith-based groups announced by White House was indeed misleading, according to a piece in The American Prospect. The article says the administration juggled the numbers to make it look like a rise. It points out that certain agencies were already distributing grants to these groups, but had not been part of the original tally.

4. Special arrangements

The government may be doing more than offering funds to religious groups. Since 1989, Congress provided hundreds of special arrangements, protections, or exemptions for religious groups, according to a two-part series in The New York Times in 2006. The story points out that these advantages give religious groups an edge in the competition to provide social services, whether they are government-funded or not.

A number of states have also exempted religious child-care programs from certain oversight, including Texas under Bush’s tenure as governor. There, religious groups were exempted from the need to license their programs under legislation pushed through by Bush. Although few groups took advantage of the new law, at the facilities that did, abuse of the law was 10 times more likely to occur, according to a study by a local watchdog group. The state no longer exempts religious groups from licensing. 

5. Undermining religious independence

Ironically, even many of the potential recipients of these grants are worried about their effect.

A letter signed by a 1,000 religious leaders representing a wide range of beliefs stated that they are concerned the funds would encroach upon their activities: “The flow of government dollars and the accountability for how those funds are used will inevitably undermine the independence and integrity of houses of worship.”

As Rev. Ted Fuson, pastor of the Culpeper Baptist Church, told the Jewish World Review: “The folks that send the money tend to tell you what to do with it and rightfully so, if you are taking tax dollars.”

The future

Will the faith-based initiative end with the Bush administration?

The answer is unclear. According to Christianity Today, all remaining presidential candidates have “voiced support for federal funding of faith-based social services. So far, however, none has unveiled a specific plan for the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.”

Meanwhile, the concept has spread beyond the federal government. More than 100 mayors and 35 governors now have faith-based offices.

Mike Muller