>> abernethy: coming up, the phenomenon of creating another version of yourself online, in a virtual world called second life. >> there's people who get married inside a second life to someone that they don't even know who that person is in the physical world. >> abernethy: and, a profile of marilynne robinson- a much honored writer and mainline protestant christian. >> we have to think people are sacred. human beings are sacred. that's the beginning. captioning sponsored by the lilly endowment

>> abernethy: welcome. i'm bob abernethy. it's good to have you with us. as the chairman of the senate finance committee released details of a healthcare reform plan, people of faith continued to add their voices to the debate. a coalition of moderate and progressive religious activists went to washington to lobby members of congress in support of overhauling the healthcare system. they urged their representatives to see healthcare as a moral issue. the same group of christians, muslims and jews held a rally urging help for the estimated 45

million americans with no health insurance. they called on congress to put politics aside in order to get a bill passed. >> too often decisions are made about how reforms will affect cost to the government, not how the cost will affect our people. >> abernethy: healthcare was also on the agenda as religious conservatives from around the nation gathered in washington for the annual value voters summit. activists stressed that coverage of abortion should not be included in any healthcare reform plans. the crowd heard from prominent conservative politicians and celebrities. >> while some are prepared to write the obituary on our values and our movement, i believe we are on the brink of a great american awakening. and it will begin here and begin now and begin with you.

>> abernethy: with all the activity this week on the religious right and the religious left, kim lawton spoke to a leading religion and politics expert john green about how these movements have fared since the last election. >> reporter: john green is director of the ray c. bliss institute of applied politics at the university of akron. he says with the democratic congress and the new obama administration, religious conservatives have been adjusting to their new lack of access to the political power structure. >> religious conservatives are not completely shut out, because of course they still do have some republican and even some conservative democratic office holders that pay attention to them. but really, the access belongs to the other side, to the progressive religious activists, whether they're protestants or catholics or jews, who very much took advantage of the change in party control in washington. >> reporter: and are these moderate and liberal religious activists having an influence? are they making an impact on policy? >> influence is always a difficult thing to judge while a process is under way. you know, we can look back ten

years later and say, "boy, that made a difference." but it is certainly widely perceived by scholars, by journalists, by other observers, that religious progressives are having an impact on the obama white house, on the democratic congress, on the development of a wide range of policy proposals, from healthcare to climate change to poverty, so forth. exactly what that turns out to be, we don't know because the process is not finished yet. >> reporter: and what about the mood within these groups, on the right and the left? how are they seeing themselves after the last election? >> the progressive side seems to be very excited right now. they really believe that they are in the ascendancy, that they've had some success. and of course some people can point to some success, that they're growing, that they're reaching out to larger groups of people. right after the 2008 election there was some real discouragement among religious conservatives, although some of those individuals i've interviewed noted that they were pretty discouraged before the

election, because things were not really going the way that they had hoped. but there's a renewed sense of hope on that side as well. there's a sense that they have a way that they can now engage in the political process and that some of the things that president obama wants to do are not popular with some parts of the public. and religious activists see an opportunity on the right to mobilize some opposition. so they've really moved from being quite discouraged to being quite optimistic and quite active. but it's a different role; it's a role of being in opposition and not the role of having the insider connections. one of the things we know about religious conservatives going all the way back to the days of the moral majority, is that they tend to prosper in opposition. >> reporter: green says one surprising issue that has been galvanizing religious conservatives is healthcare. >> you know, who would have thought a few years ago that religious conservatives would be organizing around health care? but in fact they are. in some ways to oppose president obama, in some ways to try and influence the debate and get

whatever out come actually occurs closer to their values. so it'll be really kind of interesting to see what happens over the next year because, there might be a lack of access but there's no lack of activity among religious conservatives. >> abernethy: also in washington, as muslims observed the holy month of ramadan, secretary of state hillary rodham clinton held a state department iftar, the traditional dinner served after muslims break their daily ramadan fast. co-hosting the iftar was farah pandith, the obama administration's new special representative to muslim communities. pandith was sworn in this week. the job of her office is to help the administration reach out to muslims around the world. now, a special report on the online virtual world called second life, in which real people create digital versions of who they might want to be,

and then travel, worship, build buildings and even get married to other so-called avatars. lucky severson reports. >> reporter: when the sun comes up in second life, which it does every four hours, you are immediately overwhelmed by the vast, brightly colored mish-mash of stores, houses, and malls stretching across multiple continents-- all of it, including the mountains and forests, designed and built from scratch by the tens of thousands of people who regularly visit here. move your mouse and you tour the taj mahal. a few clicks and you are launched on a nasa rocket into low orbit. click again and you can join a service in an anglican cathedral. this live, online world called second life was launched in 2003 by the san francisco company linden lab and its founder phillip rosedale, who says he had no idea what would happen.

>> i always figured in the beginning that if second life looked like anything we were able to predict that we would have failed, that if it was predictable, we weren't doing the right stuff. >> reporter: second life is definitely not predictable. turn a corner and you might run into a furry animal that talks. it isn't just the buildings that are designed by residents. they also design themselves, creating virtual bodies called avatars either sculpted in their own likeness or, more often, someone they would like to be. and then they chat with other avatars, even becoming close friends. for some, the virtual world is a way to escape. others say it enriches their real-world lives. michael adcock has been into second life for about three years. he says, for him, hiding his real identity behind an avatar

which, in his case, looks like a warrior painted in silver, has helped him learn more about himself. >> i've found that i've been able to be a lot more up-front and blunt about what is on my mind right away. that happens to say quite a bit about myself, and i choose to look at that as a learning experience. >> reporter: most people in second life don't use their real names. the woman you see here might actually be a man, or vice versa. this avatar actually is a man. he's tom boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at the university of california, irvine and editor-in-chief of the american anthropologist. he has written extensively on the culture of virtual worlds. >> for some people, the escape factor is one of the best things about a virtual world like second life-- that you can try having a totally different life, and there's people who get married inside a second life to someone that they don't even know who that person is in the physical world, even if it's really a man or a woman in the physical world, and they have a

house and even virtual kids and a job, and they have a whole life inside of second life. >> reporter: it costs nothing to get into second life, but if you choose to be part of it, to build a home, for instance, then you will have to spend real money. it's like visiting a foreign land. you convert dollars into the second life currency, called linden dollars. >> see, here is what my house looks like. this is land that i own. i spent.. this cost about $50 u.s. to buy this land and about $15 a month to keep, to be able to continue to own it. that's how the company makes their money. >> reporter: you constructed a temple like this, or a cathedral like this once? >> yeah, i did. >> reporter: how long did it take you? >> eighteen months. >> reporter: eighteen months of your life? >> yeah, off and on. >> reporter: where is it? >> it's deleted now. >> reporter: wait a minute. eighteen months, and it's deleted? >> i couldn't afford to maintain, to keep the simulation running, yeah. >> reporter: it would have cost

him $350 a month to keep it. but there are other cathedrals he can visit which took other residents months or even years to build. >> there is a cathedral right here. >> reporter: you don't look like a typical sunday churchgoer. >> that's true, i don't. but they're nice, and they welcomed me and ask me how i'm doing. >> reporter: it took a decade for churches to have a strong presence on the internet, but professor boellstorff says it is beginning to attract followers in second life. >> there are already people i know who say that they go... go to, you know, every sunday they don't go to church any more in the... they go every sunday to church in second life, and that is their faith community that they are interacting with. >> reporter: we spoke with the leadership team of the anglican cathedral of second life. mark brown is the priest-in- charge. he runs the bible society in

wellington, new zealand. cady enoch chairs the committee. she's in columbus, ohio, and helene milena is the worship service leader. she's in west yorkshire, england. >> i think there is an intimacy here, in any online set up, but at the same time there is an anonymity, and the two mean that people can be very, very open. it would be very unusual in real life to meet someone and ten minutes later be knowing about their difficulties with their marriage, or something of that nature. >> reporter: in order to accommodate attendees from around the world, the virtual church is now offering seven services a week. >> straightaway it is the opportunity to mingle with people all around the world. in a typical service there will be about 20 nations represented in our community. i love the richness. regardless of where we are in the world, we can come together

and worship. >> reporter: second lifers tend to become hooked on the experience. michael adcock says he was spending 12 or more hours a day for awhile. this can have negative consequences on real-world relationships. there have been at least two highly publicized divorces resulting from what were supposedly virtual affairs in second life. questions are often raised about ethical behavior by people who can hide behind anonymous identities on the internet. >> if you look out on the web, as long as there's been forums where people post comments or chat rooms people are often quite rude to each other, and a lot of that is that degree of anonymity that's there. >> reporter: sibley verbeck founded the electric sheep company, which has created its own virtual worlds. he thinks people tend to be more civil in second life. >> but it is more human, because you see this human figure, and you're interacting with them in real time.

>> so i don't see much of a difference between what i'm doing here or what i'm thinking, or what i'm doing in my real life. it's all the same thing. >> reporter: there's not much you can't find or do on second life. there are virtual shops that sell everything from virtual artwork to virtual waterfalls. second life is a community of creators, and it's economy is based to a large extent on marketing art and architecture. >> so far as we can tell, there's like 60,000 people that are cash-flow positive from their operations, but there's thousands of people that would call this employment of some kind. >> reporter: elisha allen is director of new media and extended learning at the university of new mexico. like many l the university is experimenting with second life as way to reach students who can't make it to the campus. >> i've been to a number of conferences in second life where i had the opportunity to meet

peers at other universities without actually having to fly there, and it's interesting because the memories of those conferences are very real, and it did feel like i was there, wherever "there" was. >> reporter: but elisha agrees with those who say that navigating around second life can be daunting. >> second life, while it's maybe the state-of-the-art for virtual worlds right now, i think has a long way to go before it's something that i would consider to be really fully immersive. >> reporter: for others, like reverend mark, it's a godsend. >> there's no artificiality of me sitting in my study looking at my monitor. i'm real flesh-and-blood. the way i am relating and communicating, of course, is different, but the same experience is welling up, and at is really how this is able to be intense and intimate and, actually, quite a real experience?

>> reporter: almost a million- and-a-half people have visited second life in the last couple of months. they are typically in their mid- thirties. but there are millions of kids under 12 who are growing up with virtual reality games and programs designed especially for them. verbeck and others predict that a decade from now, when these kids are in their 20s, places like second life are going to grow dramatically in popularity. for "religion & ethics newsweekly," i'm lucky severson in san francisco. >> abernethy: the jury is still out on the ethics of these virtual worlds and lives. do they damage real human relationships? or are they just harmless fantasy? according to a new study from the barna group, the number of women serving as senior pastors has doubled in the last ten years.

the report found that one in ten u.s. protestant churches employs a woman as senior pastor. 58% of the women pastors serve mainline protestant churches. we have a profile now of the much-honored writer marilynne robinson. she received the orange prize for fiction this past summer, in britain, for the best writing in the english language by a woman. five years ago, she won a pulitzer prize for her novel "gilead," and her latest book, home, has also had glowing reviews. robinson is a mainline protestant with great respect for calvinist theology and strong opinions about the world around her. marilynne robinson's view of the world was formed in the mountains of idaho, where she grew up. she loved solitude and wilderness and sensed a larger presence. >> that never felt like emptiness. it always felt like presence.

it always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me. the holy is at the origins of everything that exists. everything. "so i have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes." >> abernethy: in iowa, where she lives now, teaching writing at the university of iowa, robinson tells her students to think for themselves. >> i want them to know that if they have their own testimony to offer, that if they are good observers, if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently, they will give the world something new, something worth having. >> abernethy: which is exactly what her admirers say robinson herself has done.

robinson is a regular churchgoer at the congregational united church of christ in iowa city, and she sometimes preaches there. she loves the old protestant mainline. >> i think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve, you know, serious attention, for example, social problems. they are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments. >> abernethy: robinson has great respect for the 16th century reformer john calvin, who she says was far more compassionate than his stern reputation suggests. for instance, about forgiveness. >> the assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever god might want forgiveness to be given, and we don't know, so you err on the side of forgiving. you assume your fallibility, and

you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to god or is god himself. >> abernethy: so you cannot judge. you have to forgive. but robinson is very critical of the so-called new atheists. >> i think this sort of avalanche of literature we have gotten lately is very second- rate. it simply is not well informed and not well considered. i consider it to be kind of noise. >> abernethy: she is deeply worried about the degradation of the earth's environment, especially its oceans, and she is scathing on popular, commercial culture. >> the idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more disrespectful of human life, and so on... there's a

cynicism about it, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like, you know, dispensable items. >> abernethy: do you see it as a barrier to religious life? >> i think it is a serious distraction. we have to think people are sacred. human beings have to be considered sacred. that's the beginning. >> abernethy: and the political climate? >> it's a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing we're going through now, what's in it for me? that's a huge change in the basic values of the culture. i got sort of tired when i was a kid of people saying you have to leave the world better than you found it. but now i think i would burst into tears if somebody said that to me... just, what a lovely thought, you know? >> abernethy: in spite of her love of solitude and lonely

observation, robinson's reputation as a novelist and her strong opinions have made her a popular speaker, a soft-spoken prophet. at a forum at georgetown university; she was asked about being a contrarian. >> i don't feel as if i'm a contrarian. i feel as if everyone else is. no, that's an exaggeration, but i do think there's a great deal in the culture that abrades and offends people in general. >> abernethy: she made it clear that at the same time that she embraces christianity she is also respectful of the secular. >> i know many, many, many people who authentically deserve to be described in that word who i can't imagine that god would not love. i have no conception of god that would not include love for those people. a lot of the things that i criticize are, in their impact, inhumane. my loyalty really is to human

loveliness, and the deep experience of self that every self deserves, and the deep acknowledgment that everyone owes to everyone else. if you were to think of yourself looking back on life, i think that some of the things that would please you most deeply are that at some moment you were... you comforted your child in one way or another, you soothed, you fed, you were adequate, you know? these things are very beautiful and, i think, sacramental. >> abernethy: back in her house in iowa city, robinson writes in whatever room she feels will be the most supportive. she is working now on a book about the bible. she writes fiction in longhand with a ball point pen in a college-ruled spiral notebook. nonfiction goes in her computer. she also walks her toy poodle, otis, named for the late musician otis redding.

as she walks, she says, she thinks... how to fix "the rattle," as she called it, in a sentence she had just written. maybe, too, how to fix the world, she says, echoing calvin, the world god has given us to enjoy. >> abernethy: sometimes, while she is walking otis, robinson reads a book. she says she has not bumped into anything, yet. on our calendar this week, muslims end ramadan with eid-al-fitr, the three-day festival that closes the holy month of fasting and prayer. worldwide, markets are packed as muslims buy food and gifts to celebrate. also on our calendar, jews begin observing their high holy days, a 10-day period of prayer and introspection beginning with rosh hashanah, the jewish new year, and ending with yom kippur, the day of atonement. in jerusalem, the chief rabbi of the western wall prepared for

the holidays by removing thousands of notes to god from the crevices in the sacred site. the notes and prayers are taken away twice a year, at the jewish new year and also before passover. after the notes are removed, they're buried near jerusalem's old city. that's our program for now. i'm bob abernethy. we have much more on our website, including kim lawton's extended interview with john green and much more about marilynne robinson. you can comment on our stories and share them. audio and video podcasts are also available. join us at pbs.org. as we leave you, music from the congregational united church of christ in iowa city, iowa. ♪

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