(RNS) With the 2012 election less than six months away, congregations are getting the message that Americans want religion out of politics. But that doesn’t mean they plan to keep mum in the public square.

Instead, they’re revamping how congregations mobilize voters by focusing on a broader set of issues than in the past. Preachers are largely avoiding the political fray, and hot-button social issues are relegated to simmer in low-profile church study groups.

Members of St. Stephan's United Church of Christ in Newark, N.J., worship on a Sunday morning. Religion News Service photo by Jennifer Brown/The Star-Ledger of Newark

Why? For one, Americans are growing impatient with religious politicking: 54 percent want houses of worship to keep out of politics (up from 52 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 1996), according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Churches seem to be responding.

“The biggest change we see is a drop-off in the percentage of people saying they hear politics from the pulpit,” said David Campbell, a University of Notre Dame political scientist whose Faith Matters project tracked 3,100 people over five years.

“It’s been happening everywhere,” Campbell added. “People say they don’t want to hear about politics in church, and they’re actually hearing less of it.”

Still, that doesn’t mean the public is clamoring for a totally secularized public square. Some believe the backlash is against a particular type of religious activism that aligns closely with one party’s agenda or set of candidates.

“When people say they want religious organizations out of politics, they mean religious organizations telling people who to vote for,” said Gordon Whitman, director of public policy for PICO, a national network of more than 1,000 faith-based organizations. “We find … lots of consensus that our religious values should inform our positions on issues.”

In April, PICO launched a national campaign to enlist congregations in registering low-income voters and championing multiple issues of “economic justice.” Missouri pastors are now leading efforts to cap payday lending rates at 36 percent. Minnesota clergy are rallying parishioners and others to oppose a new voter ID initiative, which they say would disenfranchise low-income residents and others who lack state-issued ID cards.

For religious conservatives, social issues still matter in 2012, but they’re not always being billed as top priorities.

Hispanic evangelicals, for instance, criticized President Obama earlier this month for supporting same-sex marriage and remain opposed to abortion on demand. But those concerns won’t trump the more pressing matter of immigration reform, which could lead to endorsements for Obama and Democrats running for Congress.

That’s according to Miguel Rivera, chairman of the board for the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, whose membership includes leaders from 16,000 churches.

“We are very happy with the outcome of the referendum (banning gay marriage) in North Carolina,” Rivera said. “But we hope our politicians will understand that this type of agenda is no longer acceptable if we want our country to unite again and work for the betterment of our communities.”

The National Association of Evangelicals plans to use soft-sell techniques in mobilizing its 45,000 churches to impact votes. Churches won’t receive candidate scorecards, which “are often thinly disguised partisan devices,” according to Galen Carey, NAE’s vice president for government relations. Instead, they’ll be equipped with resources for studying what the Bible says about such issues as immigration and marriage.

“Churches are wary of becoming involved in a very partisan way, or campaigning on issues that might be controversial, because their mission is to reach their whole communities,” Carey said.

Religious involvement in partisan politics is driving Americans, especially those under 35, away from organized religion, according to Campbell. Some rising evangelical leaders see this young adult drift, documented in this year’s Millennial Values Survey, as a factor that makes nonpartisanship a practical necessity for churches seeking to grow and thrive.

“The last generation of Christians saw (the two major parties) as strategic allies in pushing their agendas,” said Jonathan Merritt, the 29-year-old evangelical author of “A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars.” “The next generation is reconsidering how that has blinded us and harmed us.”

Being nonpartisan is proving a tricky task in the political arena. Example: When Pastor Paul Slack of New Creation Church in Minneapolis makes a faith-based case against a voter ID initiative in Minnesota, he frames it as fighting against a GOP agenda.

“It’s politically motivated,” Slack said at an April press conference. “Voter ID is designed intentionally to make it harder for certain Minnesotans to vote. … We need to get more people at the polls so they can take part in sharing the common life together because that is indeed a value of our faith.”

Come October, however, all bets for nonpartisanship will be off, at least in churches participating in Pulpit Freedom Sunday. The Alliance Defense Fund is urging pastors to preach Oct. 7 on political issues and endorse specific candidates in defiance of Internal Revenue Service codes for tax-exempt institutions.  More than 250 pastors have already signed up, including Ron Johnson Jr., senior pastor of Living Stones Church in Crown Point, Ind.

Churchgoers “have the opportunity to vote with their feet,” said Johnson, who preached in 2008 on why voting for Obama would be immoral. He’s now running for state representative.

“If they don’t like the messaging, then they don’t have to worship in our congregation.”

(RNS) More than two dozen faculty members have resigned from Shorter University, a Baptist school in Georgia, after it required them to sign a “personal lifestyle statement” that condemns homosexuality, premarital sex and public drinking.

An online campaign called “Save Our Shorter” says that the lifestyle pledge, adopted in the fall of 2011 along with a statement of faith, has led to dozens of resignations. University president Donald Dowless on Friday (May 18) confirmed that 36 faculty have resigned and at least 25 cited disagreement with either the personal lifestyle statement or the faith statement.

The school usually has about 100 full-time faculty.

“The Shorter Board of Trustees is slowly destroying the reputation of our beloved school and causing irreparable damage to the cause of Christ,” the Save Our Shorter website says.

Dowless said Friday that some of those who resigned did not state the reason for leaving.

In a Wednesday statement, Dowless said he and the university board recognized there are “strong feelings on both sides” about the new employment rules but the board decided to “reclaim our Christian roots” even if the consequence was a loss of faculty and staff.

“Our University was at a crossroads to either take steps to regain an authentic Christian identity in policy and practice or we would become a Christian University in name only,” he said.

The university, in Rome, Ga., now requires faculty to sign a personal lifestyle statement that says they will not engage in illegal drug use or drink alcohol in restaurants, stadiums and other public locations.

“I reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible, including, but not limited to, premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality,” the statement reads.

The Georgia Baptist Convention began appointing all trustees of the school’s board in 2005 after a ruling in the state convention’s favor by the Georgia Supreme Court.

(RNS) The oft-cliched Christian notion of heaven — a blissful realm of harp-strumming angels — has remained a fixture of the faith for centuries. Even as arguments will go on as to who will or won’t be “saved,” surveys show that a vast majority Americans believe that after death their souls will ascend to some kind of celestial resting place.

But scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers. Like modern curators patiently restoring an ancient fresco, scholars have plumbed the New Testament’s Jewish roots to challenge the pervasive cultural belief in an otherworldly paradise.

The most recent expert to add his voice to this chorus is the prolific Christian apologist N.T. Wright, a former Anglican bishop who now teaches about early Christianity and New Testament at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. Wright has explored Christian misconceptions about heaven in previous books, but now devotes an entire volume, “How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels,” to this trendy subject.

Wright’s insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. He’s not just another academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths. Wright takes his creeds very seriously and has even written an 800-plus-page megaton study setting out to prove the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus.

“This is a very current issue — that what the church, or what the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world — they are the beginning of the real world — in biblical understanding.”

Still, the appearance of a recent cover story in Time magazine suggests that putting-the-heaven-myth-to-rest movement is gaining currency beyond the academy. Wright and Morse say they have both made presentations on heaven research at local churches and have been surprised by the public interest and acceptance.

“An awful lot of ordinary church-going Christians are simply millions of miles away from understanding any of this,” Wright said.

Wright and Morse work independently of each other and in very different ideological settings, but their work shows a remarkable convergence on key points. In classic Judaism and first-century Christianity, believers expected this world would be transformed into God’s Kingdom — a restored Eden where redeemed human beings would be liberated from death, illness, sin and other corruptions.

“This represents an instance of two top scholars who have apparently grown tired of talk of heaven on the part of Christians that is neither consistent with the New Testament nor theologically coherent,” said Trevor Eppehimer of Hood Theological Seminary in North Carolina. “The majority of Christian theologians today would recognize that Wright and Morse’s views on heaven represent, for the most part, the basic New Testament perspective on heaven.”

First-century Jews who believed Jesus was Messiah also believed he inaugurated the Kingdom of God and were convinced the world would be transformed in their own lifetimes, Wright said. This inauguration, however, was far from complete and required the active participation of God’s people practicing social justice, nonviolence and forgiveness to become fulfilled.

Once the Kingdom is complete, he said, the bodily resurrection will follow with a fully restored creation here on earth. “What we are doing at the moment is building for the Kingdom,” Wright explained.

Indeed, doing God’s Kingdom work has come to be known in Judaism as “tikkun olam,” or “repairing the world.” This Hebrew phrase is a “close cousin” to the ancient beliefs embraced by Jesus and his followers, Wright said.

“It’s the recovery of the Jewish basis of the Gospels that enables us to say this,” Wright said. “We are so fortunate in this generation that we understand more about first-century Judaism than Christian scholarship has for a very long time. And when you do that, you realize just how much was forgotten quite soon in the early church, certainly in the first three or four centuries.”

Christianity gradually lost contact with its Jewish roots as it spread into the gentile world. On the idea of heaven, things really veered off course in the Middle Ages, Wright said.

“Our picture, which we get from Dante and Michelangelo, particularly of a heaven and a hell, and perhaps of a purgatory as well, simply isn’t consonant with what we find in the New Testament,” Wright said. “A lot of these images of hellfire and damnation are actually pagan images which the Middle Ages picks up again and kind of wallows in.”

Wright notes that many clues to an early Christian understanding of the Kingdom of heaven are preserved in the New Testament, most notably the phrase “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” from the Lord’s Prayer. Two key elements are forgiveness of debts and loving one’s neighbor.

While heaven is indisputably God’s realm, it’s not some distantly remote galaxy hopelessly removed from human reality. In the ancient Judaic worldview, Wright notes, the two dimensions intersect and overlap so that the divine bleeds over into this world.

Other clues have been obscured by sloppy translations, such as the popular John 3:16, which says God so loved the world he gave his only son so that people could have “eternal life.”

Wright offers a translation that radically recasts the message and shows how the passage would have been heard in the first century. To hear it today is to experience the shock of the new: God gave his son “so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.”

“And so it’s not a Platonic, timeless eternity, which is what we were all taught,” Wright said. “It is very definitely that there will come a time when God will utterly transform this world — that will be the age to come.”

WASHINGTON (RNS) Prison Fellowship founder and former Nixon aide Chuck Colson was memorialized Wednesday (May 16) at Washington National Cathedral in a service steeped in Scripture and prayers about prison and redemption.

Colson, who died April 21 at the age of 80 after a brief illness, was known as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and served seven months in prison on Watergate-related charges. But at the 90-minute service, he was recalled as a transformed “friend of sinners.”

The choir sang “The King of Love My Shepherd Is”, composed and directed by Canon Michael McCarthy, director of music at the Cathedral. Approximately 1,200 people gathered on May 16, 2012 for Charles Colson's memorial service at Washington National Cathedral. RNS photo by Donovan Marks/courtesy Washington National Cathedral

“Chuck was not perfect, but he was forgiven,” said the Rev. Timothy George, the homilist and dean of Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School.

Colson, a former Marine captain, was buried with full military honors at a private service at Quantico National Cemetery on April 28.

The cathedral service drew about 1,200 people, from members of Congress to evangelical luminaries such as GOP strategist Ralph Reed, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Christian singer Steven Curtis Chapman.

His daughter, Emily Colson, recalled how her father’s faith transformed both him and his family and how he cleared his schedule to spend time with her autistic son.

“Today is a celebration of my father’s life but today is also about us,” she said. “I encourage you to continue the work God has begun through my father’s life. Do the right thing, seek the truth, defend the weak, live courageous lives.”

The service included prayers for Colson’s family and for prisoners across the globe.

George noted that Colson, who became a Christian shortly before heading to prison, clung to the same Scriptures that were read amid the hymns inside the storied gothic cathedral.

“He never forgot Jesus’ words, ‘I was in prison and you visited me,’’’ said George.

Charles Colson’s daughter Emily Colson (left) and wife Patty Colson (right) attend Colson’s memorial service at Washington National Cathedral on May 16, 2012. RNS photo by Donovan Marks/Courtesy Washington National Cathedral

Chaplain Danny Croce, an ex-convict who came to lead a prison ministry after receiving a scholarship in Colson’s name, spoke of his fellow ex-con’s tradition of preaching at prisons on Easter Sunday and sending thousands of volunteers into prisons across the world.

“Though they don’t give you a Bible in school, Chuck made sure you had one in jail,” said Croce, founder of New Hope Correctional Ministry in Plymouth, Mass.

Speakers recalled how Colson, a Southern Baptist, reached out to people of other denominations in the Evangelicals and Catholics Together initiative, as well as the movement that sprung up from the Manhattan Declaration, a 2009 manifesto opposing same-sex marriage and abortion and affirming religious liberty.

He was also remembered for his ability to ask for forgiveness and forgive others.

“I had known no one who could forgive so completely as Chuck does,” said former Minnesota Gov. Albert Quie, who was Prison Fellowship’s acting CEO in the late 1980s.

In her tribute, Emily Colson said her father left instructions that the service should be joyful because he expected to be enjoying the presence of God.

“I don’t want people to be sad,” her father instructed, “because I believe with every ounce of conviction in my body that death is but a homecoming.”

(RNS) The pulpits of the nation’s black churches took measure Sunday of President Obama’s decision to support gay marriage, and the result was conflicted.

Some churches were silent on the issue. At others, pastors spoke against the president’s decision Wednesday — but kindly of the man himself. A few blasted the president and his decision. A minority spoke in favor of the decision and expressed understanding of the president’s change of heart.

Bishop Timothy Clarke, head of the First Church of God, a large African-American church with a television ministry in Columbus, Ohio, was perhaps most typical. He felt compelled to address the president’s comments at a Wednesday evening service and again Sunday morning. He was responding to an outpouring of calls, emails and text messages from members of his congregation after the president’s remarks.

What did he hear from churchgoers? “No church or group is monolithic. Some were powerfully agitated and disappointed. Others were curious — why now? to what end? Others were hurt. And others, to be honest, told me it’s not an issue and they don’t have a problem with it.”

What did the bishop tell his congregation? He opposes gay marriage. It is not just a social issue, he said, but a religious one for those who follow the Bible. “The spiritual issue is ground in the word of God.”

That said, “I believe the statement the president made and his decision was made in good faith. I am sure because the president is a good man. I know his decision was made after much thought and consideration and, I’m sure, even prayer.”

Clarke asked his church “to pray for the president and pray this will not become a political football with uncivil language and heated rhetoric. We can disagree on this, as we do on many things, and still love each other.”

The conflicted sentiments within African-American churches reflect a broader struggle in the American public. A USA Today Poll showed that slightly more than half of Americans agreed with the president’s decision. A scientifically valid breakdown of African-Americans was not available, but past polls have shown blacks generally opposed to gay marriage.

African-Americans are a key voting bloc for the president this November. In 2008, exit polls showed Obama lost to John McCain among white voters but won more than 95% of the African-American vote.

Dwight McKissic, senior pastor at the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, said last week he would not speak on gay marriage Sunday because it was Mother’s Day and his wife would lead the church.

However, he planned to focus directly on the topic in next week’s sermon. “President Obama has betrayed the Bible and the black church with his endorsement of same-sex marriage,” McKissic said.

On the opposite side of the issue, pastor Enoch Fuzz of Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church of Nashville, Tenn., said last week that he understood why many pastors opposed gay marriage, but he planned to discuss Sunday why he supports gay marriage. “I know many in the black community have trouble accepting gay marriage,” he said. “But all of us have gay friends or family, and we love them.”

Fuzz said he thinks the president’s comments won’t hurt him politically, although some African-American Christians may be upset with him. “There’s really no better option. People are not going to go out and vote for Mitt Romney.”

In Columbus, Mayor Michael Coleman is confident black churches and voters will stick with the president, even if they disagree over gay marriage. The four-term African-American mayor made the same conversion himself on the issue of gay marriage — for the same reasons — this year.

“I had to evolve on the issue and think it through, too, and I came to the conclusion it was the right thing,” said Coleman, a Democrat who supports Obama. “When it is the right thing to do, politics is irrelevant.”

Coleman discussed his change with the leader of Columbus’ largest black church. “He disagrees with me rather strongly,” Coleman says. Will it endanger his political support? “No. We’re very close.”

Obama won’t be abandoned by black churches either, not in the key swing state of Ohio, Coleman said. “Many in the pastoral community appreciate his courage in making the decision, even if they disagree,” Coleman says.

In North Carolina, where black churches helped pass a constitutional amendment last week banning gay marriage, Ron Gates, president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance of Asheville/Buncombe County, decided not to focus on gay marriage in his Sunday sermon but instead make it “a footnote,” so his continued support for the amendment was clear.

“I support my president and love my president, but I think he is wrong,” said Keith Ogden, pastor of the predominantly black Hill Street Baptist Church in Asheville. “He is not God, and he doesn’t speak for all black folk because he is African-American.”

(Dennis Cauchon writes for USA Today.)

(Contributing: Bob Smietana of The Tennessean (Nashville); Jon Ostendorff of the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times.)

WASHINGTON (RNS) After nearly four years in the Oval Office, President Obama is incorrectly thought to be Muslim by one in six American voters, and only one quarter of voters can correctly identify him as a Protestant, according to a new poll.

(RNS) President Obama and his family pray during Easter services at Allen Chapel AME Church in Washington on April 4, 2010. As many as four in 10 Americans cannot identify the president as a Christian. RNS file photo courtesy Pete Souza/The White House.

Voters do better identifying Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, according to a poll released Thursday (May 10) by the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service. A slim majority of voters — 51 percent — knows the presumed Republican presidential nominee is Mormon.

“Wow. He said it 100 times that he’s not a Muslim,” said Zainab Al-Suwaij, executive director of the American Islamic Congress, expressing surprise over the persistent number of American voters (16 percent) who make the mistake.

Is there something insidious behind the belief, a concerted attack to link the president with a religion that’s considered alien — or worse — by some Americans?

“I think it’s more a lack of information than an attack on him,” said Al-Suwaij.

While Americans across the board get the president’s religion wrong, the religious group that most often thinks Obama is Muslim is white evangelical Protestants (24 percent). American unaffiliated with a religious group make the error least often: just 7 percent identify Obama as Muslim.

Daniel Cox, PRRI’s research director, said the small but not insignificant sliver of Americans who still believe Obama is Muslim is “fascinating.”

“Quite frankly, I’m not really sure what to make of it other than this person, although he speaks quite comfortably about his faith, doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve,” Cox said. “It’s an important part of who he is, but it’s not an important part of his public persona.”

The poll also found that white evangelical Protestants, who were suspicious of Romney in the early GOP primaries, are warming up to Romney now that he’s the presumptive nominee.

Romney’s support among white evangelicals has jumped 27 percent since October; evangelicals support him over Obama, 68 to 19 percent.

“There are clear signs that white evangelical Protestants are moving beyond any reservations they may have held earlier in the campaign about Romney’s Mormon faith,” said Cox.

Earlier this year, when primary voters faced more choices, evangelicals showed a preference for Catholics Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich, who campaigned hard on social issues dear to conservative Christians before dropping out.

“Americans want someone with strong religious convictions, but they don’t have to be the same as their own,” said Cox. “The exception is white evangelicals, who want them to be the same.”

But with a Mormon now the presumptive GOP nominee, that’s no longer a possibility for evangelicals, and the poll shows they are coalescing around Romney, Cox continued.  “It’s a binary choice for them between someone who is on the right side of their issues and someone who is not.”

White evangelicals — depending on how the term is defined and how the question is asked – make up between 20 and 25 percent of American voters. Among Republicans, they are a particularly powerful bloc, representing about 40 percent of GOP voters.

Obama’s support lies in Catholic and mainline Protestant territory. Catholic voters overall say they would be more likely to vote for Obama (46 percent) than Romney (39 percent), though white Catholic voters state a preference for Romney over Obama (48 to 37 percent).

The scenario of four years ago, in which Obama enjoyed strong support among Hispanic Catholics and weaker support among white Catholics, seems to be playing out again.

White mainline Protestant voters also prefer Obama over Romney (50 to 37 percent) and religiously unaffiliated voters stand even more firmly in the Obama camp (57 to 22 percent).

The poll also showed:

– Obama maintains a significant lead over Romney in a head-to-head matchup (47 to 38 percent).

– Sixteen percent of voters have yet to make up their minds about a presidential candidate. Among this group, Obama holds a slight edge (42 to 37 percent).

– More than 60 percent of white evangelical, white mainline Protestant and Republican voters know that Romney is Mormon. Less than half of Catholic and Democratic voters know this.

The poll, of 1,006 Americans surveyed between May 2 and 6, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

(RNS) Southern Baptist leader Richard Land has issued a lengthy public apology for his racially charged comments about the Trayvon Martin case, and said he has sent a personal letter to President Obama seeking forgiveness.

Land, who leads the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, issued the two-page apology Wednesday (May 9), a week after a five-hour meeting with African-American leaders and other Southern Baptist officials.

Because of that meeting, “I have come to understand in sharper relief how damaging my words were,” he wrote in the statement released through his denomination’s news service.

Land had previously apologized for his comments, which charged Democrats and civil rights leaders with exploiting the killing of the unarmed Florida teen. He also has apologized for failing to attribute the material he used when discussing the case on his radio show.

The latest apology included references to his “insensitivity” towards Martin’s family, and a clarification that “racial profiling is a heinous injustice” and that he does not believe U.S. racism is a myth.

Land also confessed that he “impugned the motives” of President Obama and civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

“It was unchristian and unwise for me to have done so,” he wrote, adding that he sent them letters of apology asking for forgiveness. “God alone is the searcher of men’s hearts. I cannot know what motivated them in their comments in this case.”

An investigatory committee is looking into charges that some of Land’s comments may have been plagiarized. In a Wednesday statement, Steve Faith, chairman of the ERLC’s trustees, said ERLC leaders expect to make a public statement about the probe by June 1.

“The trustees are aware of their responsibility to the Convention and to the watching world,” Faith said.

The meeting with Land included Fred Luter, the New Orleans pastor expected to be elected in June as the SBC’s first African-American president; leaders of black Southern Baptist groups and two former SBC presidents, Frank Page and Paige Patterson.

Ed Stetzer, a researcher for the Southern Baptist Convention who criticized Land’s comments, said he was grateful that black Southern Baptist leaders confronted Land, and wished more white leaders had spoken up.

“I am very glad that Dr. Land listened to them and apologized,” Stetzer wrote Wednesday on his blog.

Citing his Christian faith, President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage in an interview with ABC news on Wednesday.

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama said, less than a week after Vice President Joe Biden also backed same-sex marriage.

“I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient,” Obama said. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word marriage was something that invokes very powerful traditions and religious beliefs.”

Obama’s announcement on Wednesday marked a shift in his religious views on marriage.

When he was campaigning for the Senate in 2004, Obama said: ”What I believe, in my faith, is that a man and a woman, when they get married, are performing something before God, and it’s not simply the two persons who are meeting.”

Obama repeated that sentiment in a 2008 campaign event at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, saying “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. For me as a Christian, it’s also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

But on Wednesday, Obama cited his faith as part of the reason he changed his views:

“This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and (Michelle Obama), you know, feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others.

“But, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president.”

News of Obama’s “evolution” quickly spread on Twitter. Here’s a sampling of what religious leaders had to say:

(If you have trouble viewing this Storify feature with your web browser, you can also see it here.)

WILMINGTON, N.C. (RNS) The sign outside the polling station at Devon Park United Methodist Church exemplified this state’s struggle with a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

“A true marriage is male and female and God,” the church marquee read. All around the church sign were small campaign signs that read: “Vote Against Constitutional Amendment” and “Amendment One Harms Children Vote Against.”

The amendment was approved Tuesday (May by 61 percent of voters, with some counties endorsing it with more than 80 percent of the vote. Only seven counties voted against it.

“In some sense North Carolinians are voting against their own beliefs,” according to the Raleigh-based Public Policy Polling firm said. “Fifty-three percent of voters in the state support either gay marriage or civil unions, yet a majority also support the amendment that would ban both.”

North Carolina is one of a number of states grappling with the issue of gay marriage this year. Minnesota also has a marriage amendment planned for a vote in November, while Maryland and Washington state will consider moves to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage. President Obama on Wednesday came out in support of gay marriage after years of an “evolving” position.

Amendment One spurred 30-year-old Kim Boomhower, of Mebane, N.C., to vote for the first time in her life. She voted against it.

“Don’t get me wrong, I still could care less about who’s president, governor, commissioner of revenue, etc.  But when I read the language of the proposed amendment, I was shocked to think that my daughter would have to live in a place where hatred, segregation and bigotry were written into our constitution,” she said.

“What if my daughter loved someone who wasn’t ‘approved’ by the state?  What if she didn’t want to get married? She and every other human being should have the right to love whomever they choose, without penalty or isolation.”

On Wednesday, petitions were already circulating online throughout the state to repeal the amendment.

In the state’s mountain west, associate pastor Luke Lunceford of Laurel Springs Baptist Church in Deep Gap said voting for the amendment “advanced the gospel based on our beliefs in the Bible.”

“I found a lot of holes in the arguments against it,” he said. “But I think churches that were outspoken for the amendment need to go out of their way to show love to the homosexual community because just because we voted for the amendment doesn’t mean we don’t love them.”

At the First Assembly of God polling place in Wilmington, John and June Roberts voted for the amendment because “we believe traditional marriage helps create good role models for children. Otherwise, it’s confusing to children.”

Though University of North Carolina Wilmington student Sophia Lanza is an evangelical and believes in marriage between one woman and one man, she voted against the amendment.

“The Bible says you can’t judge others. And women could be in danger because of this amendment,” she said. “I care a lot about our country, and I just don’t believe Jesus would want us to hold our righteousness above anyone else.”

Wilmington resident Ben Murph said he checked the box for the amendment without a second thought.

“I’m 77 years old, and I think God created us for a purpose, that women should produce children and a man is there to be the head of the household,” he said. “I don’t believe in any woman marrying a woman.”

(Amanda Greene is the editor of Wilmington FAVs.)

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday (May 5) called on Catholic colleges and universities in the United States to do more to affirm their “Catholic identity,” particularly by ensuring the doctrinal orthodoxy of their faculty and staff.

Speaking to a group of bishops from Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Wyoming, who are in Rome on a regularly scheduled visit, Benedict said there has been a “growing recognition” on the part of Catholic colleges of the need to “reaffirm their distinctive identity.”

But “much remains to be done,” the pope said, singling out the church law requirement that Catholic theology teachers “have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority,” usually the local bishop.

That requirement was introduced more than 20 years ago by Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, according to the Rev. Scott Brodeur, a professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. But there has been “continuous resistance against it.”

“If he is repeating it it is because it has not yet been fully implemented,” Brodeur said.

Benedict’s remarks come a few months after U.S. bishops denounced Sister Elizabeth Johnson, a theology professor at Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York. Johnson’s book “Quest for the Living God” does not accord with “authentic Catholic teaching,” said the bishops’ doctrinal committee.

Benedict said Saturday that the need for theology professors to be faithful to church doctrine becomes “all the more evident” when considering the “confusion” created by “instances of apparent dissidence between some representatives of Catholic institutions and the Church’s pastoral leadership.”

“Such discord,” the pope added, “harms the church’s witness and, as experience has shown, can easily be exploited to compromise her authority and her freedom.”

Benedict also urged American bishops to ensure that young people receive a “sound education in the faith,” saying that this is the “most urgent internal challenge facing the Catholic community in your country.” Affirming a university’s Catholic identity “entails much more than the teaching of religion” and should be achieved by encouraging students to embrace faith in “every aspect of their education,” the pope said.