The Christians Living Under Buddhist Nationalism

Yale scholar David Moe explores the faith and identity of ethnic minorities in his home country of Myanmar.

Children and their parents praying in a temporary church at a camp for internally displaced people in Myanmar.

The rural Chin village in the mountains of Myanmar where scholar David Moe was born in 1983 no longer exists. This village of 70 Christian families has moved twice, higher and higher into the mountains.

Moe’s desire to become a pastor led him to pursue higher education outside of Myanmar, and today he is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in Southeast Asian studies at Yale University.

Yet he hasn’t forgotten the community that raised him. His new book, Beyond the Academy: Lived Asian Public Theology of Religions, argues that highly educated theologians should dialogue with those outside the ivory tower and engage the perspectives of grassroots Christians—those without theological training. For the book, Moe interviewed 15 grassroots Christian leaders in Myanmar who hail from the Chin, Kachin, and Karen communities.

These Christian ethnic minorities live in a unique context: In Myanmar, Buddhism is the state religion, and Buddhists make up 90 percent of the population. Most of the country’s elite, including the ruling military junta, are from the Buddhist Bamar ethnic group.

After Myanmar gained independence from the British in 1948, the new Buddhist nationalist leaders argued that those who weren’t Buddhist or Bamar were not true Burmese, leading to decades of discrimination and oppression of ethnic minorities. The 2021 military coup ramped up fighting between armed ethnic groups and the military junta yet also rearranged loyalties as interracial and multiethnic groups banded together to resist the coup.

Christianity Today asked Moe about the gaps between academic public theology and the faith of Myanmar villagers, the role Buddhist nationalism plays in Myanmar, and the intertwining of religion and identity that has led to a rise in Christian nationalism among Chin refugees in the US. The responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Can you tell me about your journey from a small village in Chin State to the Ivy League?

I was born and grew up in a village called Khin Phong. I went to school there and served as a Sunday school teacher at the village church.

I am the first graduate from our village school to get a PhD. The school was established in 1946, two years before Myanmar gained independence from the British. My late mother never went to school, but she was a very faithful follower of Jesus Christ. She always encouraged me to be faithful to Christ and serve God. I see my mother as a role model for my Christian faith.

I started my theological journey at a seminary in Myanmar because I wanted to be a pastor. Then I had a chance to go to Malaysia for my MDiv. In Malaysia, I had a chance to come to the US for further graduate studies. When I finished my PhD in theological studies, I didn’t immediately find a job. The military coup happened in 2021, so I couldn’t go back to Myanmar.

I applied to be the pastor at two very small Burmese churches in the US, but I was rejected. Then I had an opportunity to teach at Yale, focusing on Southeast Asian studies, religion, politics, and ethnic identity.

My scholarship engages four different communities: the academic community, the Burmese Christian community, the public society, and the political state. I feel that I’m in the right place.

In seminary, you began reading Asian liberation theologians like Taiwan’s Shoki Coe and India’s M. M. Thomas. How did their ideas differ from the kind of grassroots faith that you saw in your church growing up?

I love academic work; that’s why I’m in academia. But particularly when it comes to the discipline of public theology, academics are only engaging with other academics. That is not quite relevant for real life. If we are concerned about public life, we need scholars to engage with grassroots people.

Of course, we are not endorsing everything grassroots Christians do. They also have limitations, but if we want to understand public life—the common good in society—we need to engage with grassroots Christian churches that are witnessing about Jesus Christ without knowing any theology. They are just living their lives.

Because of my background, I see myself as a theologian who bridges the academy and the grassroots church.

What are some of the gaps that you found between academics and grassroots Christians?

Theologians in the academy talk a bit too much about politics and political power while sometimes forgetting about spiritual power. This gap is especially noticeable in Africa and Asia, where people are mostly thinking about spiritual power in their daily life.

When it comes to salvation, some academics focus too much on physical liberation. But these grassroots Christians talk a lot about life after death, about spiritual salvation.

Another gap: Academic theologians focus too much on the prophetic role of Jesus Christ without sufficiently addressing his priestly life and its implication for pastoral work. Myanmar ethnic minorities relate Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to their pre-Christian cultural practice of ritual sacrifice, which is similar to what the Israelites practiced in the Book of Leviticus.

I asked one of the grassroots church elders I interviewed what his favorite book of the Bible was, and he said Hebrews because “it focuses on the sacrificial role of Jesus Christ as the priest.”

Could you explain a bit more about the religious makeup of Myanmar? Why is it that most of the ethnic majority, Bamar, is Buddhist, while most ethnic minorities are Christian?

There are two main factors. First, as I just mentioned, the pre-Christian cultural practice of rites among ethnic minorities paved the way for the gospel. The second is that ethnic minorities practiced spirit worship based on oral tradition; they didn’t have any written documents. When the Western missionaries came, they helped develop literature in the region, translated the Bible, created a Burmese-English dictionary, and started schools and medical clinics. This is how ethnic minorities came to love Christian missionaries. On the other hand, Bamar Buddhists already had literature because Buddhism is a systemic religion. They had a systematic way of thinking, so Western missionaries did not convince them to become Christian.

For us Chin people, we lived high up in the mountains northwest of India, so not many Bamar Buddhist missionaries reached us. However, in the lower regions, where Bamar and Karen minorities lived together in the same cities, some might have been evangelized.

How did Buddhism become intertwined with Bamar identity, leading to Buddhist nationalism?

That began in the colonial period under the British (1824–1948) when Buddhist nationalism first emerged as the anti-colonial movement. During that time, Western missionaries also came to Myanmar, so for the Buddhist nationalists, Western missionaries and the British colonizers didn’t seem that different.

After we gained independence from the British in 1948, Buddhist nationalism turned into an anti-ethnic minority movement. Many Buddhist nationalists believed that ethnic minorities easily embraced Western Christianity. That’s why they faced discrimination in the Buddhist-majority country.

Growing up in the village, did you ever hear of the term Buddhist nationalism?

I did not. I only heard about this term after I entered the academic community. However, I did experience it. We understood Buddhist nationalism as lumyo-gyi wada, which means the “domination of the majority race.” The leaders promoted Burmese as the national language at the expense of ethnic minority languages, nationalized Buddhism as the state religion, and privileged the Bamar majority Buddhists.

When I was in the village, we felt it was natural that the majority had control over the minority. I knew that ethnic minorities faced discrimination based on their identity. The idea was that to be Bamar is to be Buddhist, and to be Chin is to be Christian. Even if ethnic minorities changed their religion to Buddhism, they couldn’t change their ethnicity, so they would still face discrimination.

When you asked grassroots Christians about their thoughts on Buddhist nationalism, some said they thought it was a myth, as they had only had positive experiences with Buddhists, while others said it was reality. Were you surprised by the answers?

I was a little surprised, but I understand their response is based on the people they encounter. It’s fair, because when we say “Buddhist nationalism,” we are not saying that all Buddhists in Myanmar are bad. I approach Buddhism paradoxically: There is the moral rule of Buddhism and the amoral rule of Buddhism.

In the West, the common perception of Buddhism is the Dalai Lama version of Buddhism, which is filled with peace and compassion. But they have not look at the ugly side of Buddhism, where Buddhism is misused as a political tool for violence, identity-based discrimination, and nationalism. This is more apparent in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka. We need to look at both the beautiful and the ugly sides of Buddhism so we can fairly engage with moral Buddhists who also hate Buddhist nationalism.

Due to ongoing fighting between the military and armed ethnic-minority groups, 70,000 Chin refugees now live in the US. How have they brought over this idea of blending religion and nationalism?

Many Chin refugees hate Buddhist nationalism back home in Myanmar, but when they come to the US, they really love Christian nationalism. Some display flags in their churches and homes. I ask them, “You say Buddhist nationalism is a problem in Myanmar, but how come you don’t think Christian nationalism is a problem?”

I think they justify this by arguing that Christianity is above all other religions. They also say that the US is built on Christian principles. They think Democratic presidents are anti-Christian.

Do many support Donald Trump for president?

Absolutely. They really love him because they believe he can make America’s economy great again and that he will protect Christian identity. They also view Trump as powerful and think that he has accomplished what he promised to do.

In your book, you note that Kachin Christians often justify their fight against the Bamar military by pointing to the Bible. Could you explain more about that?

After the coup, I interviewed a couple of Christian activists who say they love the Old Testament because it is explicit about evil and how God’s chosen people fought against their enemies. Because they believe the coup is evil, they like passages in Psalms—for instance, Psalm 1:1–2—that call God’s people to fight and resist evil. Moses is their role model.

Your book also includes a quote from some Kachin Christian who said they “would not go to heaven if there are Bamar there.”

Even before the coup, Kachin Christians faced a lot of discrimination. For them, being Bamar, being Buddhist, and being part of the army are inseparable. They don’t like Bamar people. It’s as if the anti–Buddhist nationalists have become the anti-Bamar people.

This is a radical view that shows how much Kachin people hate Bamar Buddhist nationalism. That’s why they say if there are Bamar in heaven, they would choose another place because they would not want to live together with them in the future. Of course, this is not the correct view for Christians, as we have to love Bamar even if we hate some policies or Buddhist nationalism.

You did a round of interviews before the 2021 coup began, then another round almost a year after the coup. Did you find that your interviewees’ answers had changed in that time?

The leaders I talked to still saw the military junta as the same—evil.

However, the way some Christian minorities saw Buddhists became more positive after the coup because there was an opportunity for interreligious resistance to the coup.

As I said earlier, Buddhist nationalism first emerged as an anti-colonial movement, then as an anti–ethnic minority group movement. But after this coup, Buddhist nationalism turned into an anti-democracy movement, which opened up the opportunity for some ethnic minorities and Bamar people to work together as they resisted the coup.

Are you seeing more people from grassroots backgrounds going into the academy and helping bridge academia with what is happening on the ground?

I think it’s growing in that direction, especially in my community. There is a paradigm shift among the younger generation. But we need to push the boundary of contextual theology and engage with the grassroots people. Engaging grassroots Christians and including them in academic writing is very difficult. It’s easier to engage with another academic book than with the people. I think many people know it’s needed, but I think many people are lazy.

Many scholars of world Christianity celebrate how Christianity moved its center from the West to the Global South. I don’t think they pay enough attention to how Christianity is flourishing particularly among the ethnic minorities and poor people living in the Global South. It’s not just a demographic move but a socioeconomic move toward the poor, the marginalized—people who are similar to Jesus’ disciples in the first century.

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

Ideas

A Vision for Screen-Free Church

Brad East

Contributor

Too many of our worship services are digitally indistinguishable from secular spaces. Church can and should be different.

Edits by CT / Source Image: Getty

Some years ago, author Hal Runkel trademarked a phrase that made his name: screamfree parenting. It’s a memorable term because it captures viscerally what so many moms and dads want: parenting without the volume turned up to 11—whether of our kids’ voices or our own.

I’d like to propose a similar phrase: screen-free church. It’s a vision for an approach to Christian community and especially public worship that critically assesses and largely eliminates the role of digital devices and surfaces in church life. But the prescription depends on a diagnosis, so let me start there.

Consider the following thesis: The greatest threat facing the church today is not atheism or secularism, scientism or legalism, racism or nationalism. The greatest threat facing the church today is digital technology.

At this point, you’re already either vigorously nodding or rolling your eyes. This is one of those claims for which true believers are zealous converts. The point of what follows, however, is not to mount the full argument on behalf of my claim; that would require another article altogether, and we would never get around to the details of a screen-free church. But I do want the idea to seem plausible to you, so let me address the skeptics at the outset. If you’re not the choir to whom I’m preaching, honor me by suspending your disbelief for a few minutes.

It’s unlikely that many Christians are conscious techno-optimists, arguing explicitly that digital technology is basically good, maybe even a gift from God for use in worship. The uncritical integration of screens in American churches, however, suggests that in practice this is what many of us believe.

Yet the observable effects of a screen-mediated life should quickly disabuse us of that notion. Count the ways digital technology influences us: it speeds up our lives; shortens our attention spans; decreases literacy; distracts from duties and loves; fosters an “itch” we constantly feel the need to scratch; draws us from faces and bodies and the outdoors to screens and artifice and the indoors; blurs the line between virtual and real; increases loneliness and isolation, anxiety and depression; elevates safety and risk aversion over courage, adventure, and risky behavior; and much more besides. These effects are a threat to vibrant faith for many reasons, not least that people incapable of focus will be incapable of prayer.

In short, a simple exhortation to be a little more careful—to limit your teen’s screen time or put the phone down during dinner—is not a sufficient remedy. As Marshall McLuhan observed 60 years ago, the “conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

Strong words, but McLuhan knew what he was talking about. He articulated a fundamental principle that he learned first from the Psalms: “We become what we behold” (see Psalm 115:8; 135:18)—and there are some things not worth beholding (Phil. 4:8). Speaking presciently about our own time, McLuhan went on to say that “subliminal and docile acceptance of [forms of media] has made them prisons without walls for their human users.” Have you ever read a better description of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire of misery?

But neither is it the right tack to reject all technology. Christians are not called to be Luddites, and the church is not anti-tech. Anything made by humans is a kind of technology, and understood in this broad sense, technology is at home in the church. The church quite literally could not exist without it. We have every reason to trust that God imparts and blesses a variety of technological uses and gifts to humanity in general and Christians in particular—to better love him and serve our neighbors.

Yet to say this is emphatically not to let us off the hook about screens. Technology use requires discernment, spiritual and otherwise. Christians, especially evangelists and evangelicals, are quick to see potential uses to advance the gospel but slower to see the long-time formative impact of a technology on a community over time. If, though, we become what we behold, then we’d better be shrewd about adopting new objects for beholding.

To echo McLuhan’s more famous line: If the medium is the message—if the vehicle of the gospel has the potential to speak alongside, or even louder than, the gospel itself—then we must be vigilant about the media that fill our lives and, above all, our public gatherings of worship. My contention is that the overwhelming evidence for the deleterious effects of a screen-mediated life should make us extremely wary of welcoming this particular technology into church.

Now, let’s say you’re intrigued. It’s probably hard to imagine your congregation, let alone the bigger one down the road, minus screens and digital devices. We do live, after all, in the digital age. What would a screen-free church look like? How would you even get people on board?

The first thing to know is that this is not only possible but already happening, probably in your own town or city. “High church” liturgical traditions like the Eastern Orthodox often have sanctuaries devoid of screens and other evidence of digital technology. At most, the priest has a microphone for the hard of hearing or if it is a large sanctuary.

That may strike you as awfully close to the Amish. Fine—so long as we agree the comparison isn’t a critique. The Amish are a sophisticated technological culture with wisdom to share. The question they pose is not “Won’t you join us, back in the 19th century?” It is instead “How have you too discerned God’s will for technology in the life of his people?” The answer, far too often, is “Oh … we haven’t.”

So screen-free church is possible in the year of our Lord 2024, even for the non-Amish. But I realize the Orthodox may seem quite distant from your congregation, so let’s start small before we think big.

Begin with smartphones themselves. Every church of every kind should foster—through some combination of quiet example, tacit incentives, gentle encouragement, and direct prescription—public liturgical space absolutely free of smartphones.

Pastors should lead the way. If they never say no to technology, then a yes means nothing. Children learn this lesson very early. Only in a relationship where a denial is possible does an affirmation take on meaning. Congregational leadership is worth its salt on tech issues when and only when it can point to technologies it discourages or refuses to permit in the sanctuary. If it simply throws open the doors to all and sundry, then it has to that extent forsaken its charge to care for the flock.

Practically, let pastors leave their phones in their offices or, even better, at home. No one should use smartphones in any public roles of leading worship, whether clergy or laity, whether reading Scripture or leading prayers.

By the same token, pastors should not invite people to “open up their Bible apps.” Such an invitation is well-intentioned but doubles, as McLuhan would remind us, as an occasion for distraction. Why? Because in opening their phones, parishioners will see a text message they missed, a social media alert, or an update on a football injury. Instead of focusing its attention on the Word of God, the congregation has inadvertently been summoned to do anything but.

One way to encourage screen-free worship is to set up boxes, lockers, or “pockets” just outside the entrance to the sanctuary. Depending on your church’s size and comfort level, these could range in terms of their security. (I’m well aware that people are anxious about losing their phones. All the more reason to leave them at home.) In this case, churches would be following the lead of many middle and high schools, where educators have finally realized that students can’t learn with smartphones in their pockets, much less on their desks.

The knock-on effects of a phone-free sanctuary are plentiful and salutary. Teenagers would have no brief against their parents—Why can’t I use mine, since you’re on yours? Attention would be focused on the Lord and his ministers, the words and the prayers, the bread and the wine. Physical Bibles might reappear. Songs might be memorized. Sermons might be absorbed! Boredom would have to be suffered rather than digitally medicated. This is all to the good.

If this brief sketch sounds wonderful, maybe too wonderful, I promise you it is far easier to accomplish than it may sound. Whereas if it sounds fanciful, allow me to point out that this is not a call to return to the way we worshiped long ago in Bible times. It is the way we worshiped in this country less than 15 years ago.

What else might be done to promote a screen-free church? Let me close with a list of five practical examples.

First, pastors should broadly encourage a culture of scriptural literacy by inviting or even expecting people to bring physical Bibles to church. Christians of every age, but especially children, teenagers, and young adults, will not become literate or think of their faith as related to the practice of reading without the omnipresence of books in their lives. In the church, that means the Bible. If the only Bible Christians know is on an app, we’ve already lost the battle.

Second, pastors should severely curtail the practice of livestreaming worship. I’ve laid out a full case elsewhere for churches turning off the streaming faucet, so to speak. One option is to record the sermon or the whole service and to share a password-protected link later that day solely with members of the congregation. That way, the church can welcome and remain connected to those who are homebound or unwell or otherwise unable to make it without communicating (again, via the medium that, all by itself, speaks a message of its own) that “streaming from home” is equivalent to being present in the body.

It isn’t. No pastor should say, “Thank you for joining us, whether here in person or online.” Nor should the shape of the service in any way be adjusted to make it more palatable to streaming technologies. Believers who gather together as a body should never feel like fans of a band or standup whose performance has been arranged primarily for “live recording.” That kind of Netflix Special–ification of Christian worship is everything wrong with today’s digitized church.

Third, pastors should limit or eliminate reliance on videos for announcements and illustrations. Screens are tools of distraction because their power to capture our attention makes them irresistible vessels of entertainment. Our eyes always want more, just as our bellies never have their fill of sugar.

But church is not meant to be empty calories—or extra ones. It is meant to be a feast, a spiritually nutritious meal hosted by the Lord himself. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred (and I’m generous with that one exception), videos in Christian worship serve only to distract, dull, overwhelm, or entertain. They are a Trojan horse for superficiality. They promise engagement but invariably overshadow the words of Scripture or the sermon, which are undeniably less entertaining, less engaging, than whatever a video might have to offer. It turns out that preachers who rely on video are unwittingly putting themselves out of a job.

Fourth, does it follow that churches should therefore rid the sanctuary of physical screens altogether? I understand why many would hesitate at this point, even if they agree with me regarding the greater screen-free vision. Perhaps the church is large, and screens project an image of what is happening on the stage or before the altar. Perhaps screens are reserved exclusively for text: the words of a song or a passage from Scripture. Surely such minimal use is permissible?

Maybe. But since I’m trying to cast a vision and expand our imaginations, suppose for a moment what would be lost without screens—and thus what would be gained.

One desirable loss would be the temptation to stare at a screen instead of the embodied human being(s) in front of the assembly. This is difficult when screens proliferate in liturgical space, because they draw the eyes—and thus the eyes of the heart—this way and that.

Another loss would be the felt need by pastors and church staff to do something with the screens once available. This is one more demonstration of McLuhan’s rule: Screens are not neutral. Sitting there blank is not an option; we feel they ought to be filled, put to use, somehow. Like the television, they beckon to be turned on. Yet if they weren’t there at all, they couldn’t ask to be used in the first place.

Fifth and finally, everything I have suggested so far would both build on and require the creation of a new ecclesial and congregational culture. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, leadership coach and former pastor Carey Nieuwhof looked a decade ahead and saw a church transformed by the move online. In truth, he wasn’t so much predicting the future as prescribing how he thought faithful churches ought to change in the present moment of technological and social destabilization. Accordingly, he argues that “growing churches [would become] digital organizations with physical locations.”

As a description of the vision animating (or terrifying) church leadership today, Nieuwhof’s forecast was on target. As a recommendation of how Christians should face the digital age, his advice couldn’t be more wrong.

Either way, his comments are useful because they encapsulate the implicit and often explicit culture of our congregations. They clarify the conversation.

Here are the stakes: Our churches feel no different, digitally speaking, than our public schools, universities, retail stores, restaurants, and places of entertainment. They’re awash with screens, smart devices, QR codes, videos, canned music, links, social media—all of it. The tsunami of information continuously assaulting our eyes, minds, and hearts is just as powerful, just as loud, just as overwhelming within our spaces of worship as without.

It shouldn’t be. Church should and could be different.

Granted, change would entail a minor, or not so minor, revolution. If, however, digital technology is indeed the greatest threat facing the life, worship, and mission of the church today—if it reliably robs us of attention, literacy, courage, and inner peace—then we shouldn’t be surprised. A screen-free church may be a big ask, but in response to such a threat, anything faithful is bound to be.

Let’s not worry about how difficult making the necessary adjustments would be. Let’s worry about the threat itself, then act.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

- More from Brad East

Ideas

The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart

Alexander Sosler

The love of many Christians has grown cold. How can we reorder our desires and affections?

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Pexels

Thirty years ago this month, Christian historian Mark Noll wrote an instant classic that launched an infamous accusation against the evangelical movement at the time: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

Noll was addressing the growing lack of depth in modern Protestant Christianity—spawned by the problem of an anti-intellectual, overly emotive, and pragmatic wave that led Christians to stick with what works and what feels good. His book quickly became a clarion call for evangelicals to prioritize investing in the mind in high culture, scholarship, and academia.

This thesis was also formative for me as a young person. Growing up, the shallowness of contemporary Christianity concerned me. In a church context that seemed to function on good feelings and the right vibes, I welcomed a renewed emphasis on thoughtfulness and theological depth. In fact, part of the reason I pursued higher degrees was this very longing for a more substantial faith.

To borrow a term from Andy Crouch, the past evangelical emphasis on intellect was a fine “gesture”—and by gesture, I mean an occasional response or action. The initial gesture says that the problem is intellectual, and we need more scholarship, good thinking, and deeper theology to change people’s minds. We’ve grown shallow and need to grow deep.

But this gesture can also turn into a posture of defense that is mobilized by rightness versus wrongness. This, in turn, can lead to a penchant for crushing our ideological opponents with winning arguments. In short, it can produce a prideful Christianity that knows it’s right.

Politically, this looks like redness or blueness defining our orthodoxy. Theologically, being Arminian or Calvinist becomes a badge of inclusion or exclusion. Gone is any spirit of mystery or corresponding human charity. God is on our side because our tribe knows what’s right.

Maybe the greatest scandal of the evangelical mind was assuming that the mind is or was our deepest scandal. I would argue that the bigger scandal, especially today, is not an inadequate mind but a disordered heart.

In other words, it’s not that we don’t know enough but that we love the wrong things—or perhaps we love the right things in the wrong ways. Our affections, in short, have gone awry. We desire power, so we fight and jockey for position. We want to be right, so we view others as opponents to be conquered. We fear the world, so we sequester into silos. Like a Grinch-sized heart, two sizes two small, the evangelical heart has grown cold and loveless.

Michael Luo picks up Noll’s argument in The New Yorker. In his suggested solution for erring evangelical minds is a vital recovery of worshiping God. If I could change his language slightly, I may phrase the solution as a vital recovery of love.

As Augustine once wrote that whoever “thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures” in such a way that “does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour” doesn’t understand the Scriptures at all.

As Christians, love is the Great Commandment of our lives—but this doesn’t amount to social niceties or sentimentality. It means that we are meant to become people of character and depth committed to the good of our neighbors. It means our hearts become shaped into a posture of love for God and people.

In this suggestion, I do not want to say less than Noll. I’m not against reason, but I am for wholeness. The focus on love is not a reduction from Noll but an expansion. In this diagnosis, our intellect is equally implicated, but the scandal lies far deeper—as does the solution.

And what, indeed, is the solution?

I believe such a reordering of love requires we reimagine our modes of spiritual formation and education in a way that takes affection seriously. Our methods for discipleship must cultivate in us a deeper sense of belonging, train us in tangible habits and practices that shape our seeing and being, and help us develop a richer aesthetic framework.

First, in our modern quest for meaning, we’ve lost sight of the fact that our ultimate purpose is found in belonging. If you prioritize your independence, you’ll always feel adrift and alone. But if you belong somewhere, your meaning and purpose will follow. Belonging cultivates affection, and affection is particular—because you can’t love people in the abstract.

Over time, my individual life matters less as I find myself caught up with life in my community. Even if or when my job lacks fulfillment, my communal life upholds me. What I do becomes less important than who I am doing it with and who I am doing it for.

The agrarian writer Wendell Berry distinguishes between “boomers” (an attitude, not the generation) and “stickers.” Boomers are motivated by greed. They exploit and think momentarily, looking around and always wanting more. Stickers are motivated by affection. They seek to repair and think long-term; they embrace their own lives and want no others.

Our modern world encourages us to always run toward something else or buy something new. It’s no wonder our faith has grown loveless when we are always on the go and always on the move. And if we are going to resist this impulse, we ought to forsake the race for bigger and better and settle into our given lives. Wherever we end up and whatever church we attend, God is ready to meet us in and through the people he has placed around us. More than that, we must think long-term—what will be good for my great-grandkids rather than what serves me now.

Staying in place seems boring, dull, mundane. I hear the refrain from my college students often: “I want to travel!” Yet this desire for newness, novelty, difference, may be a source of our ills. Eugene Peterson characterizes the modern age as having a tourist mentality. It’s easy to sell and package the gospel with this mindset: Come hear this new person; travel to this cool retreat; this novel thing will make you happy. You don’t want to miss it!

But the Christian life, Peterson argues, is more like the slow, plodding way of the pilgrim, who takes one step after another. We are moving, but our movement primarily takes the form of seeking and drawing nearer to a Person we know. And all along the way, God wants to meet us in the slow, mundane, boring parts of life—in the form of our habits and rituals.

As James K. A. Smith has argued, we can’t merely think our way to God. Humans are desiring creatures, not just brains-on-a-stick. Jesus’ first words recorded in the Gospel of John are “What do you want?” (1:38), not “What do you know?” or “What do you believe?” Desires play a central role in our inward lives, and our desires are shaped through practice. In other words, our practices shape our pursuit, and our habits shape our affections.

If that’s true, Christian formation must consider how our habits order and disorder us—how we shape our aspirational desires rather than cater to our basest desires. We need an embodied faith that practices its way toward loving what we ought to love. Growth requires the pain of challenge, and challenge means changing the way we live.

There are no quick fixes for any sickness of the human soul. Without a steady, habitual, slow formation over time, we’ll be tossed to and fro by the winds and waves of new doctrine or life circumstances (Eph. 4:14). We’ll always stay tourists and never complete our pilgrimage.

The other weakness of a purely modern and rationalistic way of looking at the world is that it creates a Christianity that can be explained—robbing it of its supernatural awe and wonder. Jesus becomes a concept to grasp and defend, not a person to love and share. We could be believing and saying true things with good motivations, but our imagination is fundamentally diseased.

I love the way the novelist Flannery O’Connor describes the connection between our beliefs and our vision. What she argues for the fiction writer is also true of us: “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

In other words, our beliefs dictate how we see, but they are not what we look at. She goes on to say that belief or faith is something which “can’t be learned only in the head; it has to be learned in the habits. It has to become a way that you habitually look at things.”

Formation is a way of seeing before it is a way of knowing—and our vision is ultimately shaped through our habits. But the shift from relying on our intellect to engaging our heart requires a renewed imagination.

“Imagination entails much more than our individual fancies and visions, and its hold on us reaches far beyond the limits of our own minds,” Karen Swallow Prior explains. “The imagination shapes us and our world more than any other human power or ability. Communities, societies, movements, and, yes, religions are formed and fueled by the power of the imagination.”

Our imagination colors the way we see the world around us and affects how we view the neighbors and strangers Jesus has called us to love with empathy and compassion. But more than that, it impacts the eyes of our faith—without which it is impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6).

“This is characteristic of imagination: To see what is unseen,” Walter Cabal writes in Ekstasis. As such, he goes on to suggest, “The healthy imagination has equal—or dare I say—more potential for bringing life into the world than facts.”

One vital way we can train our imagination is through the arts—an aesthetic orientation opens our inward contemplation to the “moreness” of life and its meaning.

The arts help us pay attention in particular ways. Attention, as Simone Weil reminds us, is another term for prayer. The psalmist proclaims, “One thing I ask from the Lord … that I may … gaze on the beauty of the Lord” (Ps. 27:4). Beauty compels us to the Beautiful One—and it invites us to become what we behold.

Through the arts, we can reimagine the world through God’s eyes—which, despite its darkness and suffering, is a place exploding with his abundant beauty, creativity, meaning, and grace.

It’s not that there wasn’t or isn’t a problem with the way we think but that the scandal of our mind was too small a thing to aim at. It’s not merely that we haven’t thought deeply or been intellectually formed—though that’s true enough. The problem is that our formation has been fragmented and cheapened.

Our evangelical hearts need healing. When we are whole, we will be healthy, and when we are healthy, we can love rightly. Christianity is about living into human wholeness—not being reduced to certain aspects but living into the fullness of humanity. Christianity offers not just another belief system but an alternative way to live and love—which is tied to place and community, habitual and slow, with an eye toward the beauty of God.

Not only do we have the mind of Christ but he also dwells in our heart through faith, rooting and grounding us in his love (Eph. 3:17). Let us pray, then, for the power to comprehend this love which “surpasses knowledge” (v. 19)—one that overflows our lives and pours itself into the world around us.

Alex Sosler is an Associate Professor of Bible and Ministry at Montreat College and an Assisting Priest at Redeemer Anglican Church in Asheville. He is the author of A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation and Learning to Love, as well as co-author of The Artistic Vision and editor of Theology and the Avett Brothers.

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News

The Copyright Controversy Behind a Viral Gospel Hit

Akosua Frempong

A producer claims a Ghanaian praise group stole his lyrics, raising questions about credit and ownership in Christian music.

Team Eternity Ghana

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash / Facebook

Earlier this year, a gospel group from Ghana sparked a popular dance challenge.

In May, Team Eternity Ghana released “Defe Defe,” which climbed the charts in Africa and claimed the top spot on Ghana’s Apple Music Top 100 list a week after it dropped. Soon afterward, Britain’s Got Talent’s Afronitaaa started the dance challenge that went viral. Within three months of its release, the original live performance of “Defe Defe” racked up 4.4 million views on YouTube.

But in the wake of the song’s enthusiastic reception, Team Eternity Ghana has found itself tangled in a copyright dispute with Ghanaian producer Kwame Mickey, who said they unlawfully used original lyrics from a song he produced (also called “Defe Defe”) 20 years ago.

Like any growing genre, Christian music’s increasing global popularity has placed a higher value on hits—and raised the stakes of proper attribution and credit. But in a Christian context, conflicts over credit and compensation can be especially fraught. The appearance of greed or opportunism can threaten a Christian artist’s reputation, but failure to claim credit threatens their livelihood—especially for independent musicians and producers or those working in smaller and developing industries like Ghana’s.

“Many dismiss the importance of legal considerations with statements like ‘Since it’s a God thing, it’s free and for everyone,’” said Eugene Zuta, a Ghanaian songwriter and worship leader. “As a result, copyright issues are often disregarded, and regulations are violated. Some of my songs have been used by others, who make light of their infringement with lame excuses.”

In public comments and interviews, Mickey claimed that Team Eternity Ghana used words original to the chorus of his version of “Defe Defe.” Both choruses include the common Ghanaian expression defe defe as a refrain to convey the same basic message: Without God’s help, they would have been defeated by their enemies (defe defe roughly translates to “defeated”).

Team Eternity Ghana’s “Defe Defe” is an upbeat contemporary gospel anthem featuring segments of rap and improvisational solo vocals. The lyrics blend English and Twi, the language spoken by the Akan people, the largest ethnic group in Ghana. The first verse begins in English—“Father, the universe you made”—and switches to Twi at the beginning of the second stanza—“Bɔhyɛ na Wohyɛɛ no aba mu o” (“The promise you made has come to pass”).

Mickey’s “Defe Defe” employs a more traditional Ghanaian folk-influenced sound and electronic drumbeats. Musically, Mickey’s song has little in common with Team Eternity Ghana’s “Defe Defe,” aside from the use of an identical phrase.

In June, Mickey accused the group of song theft, prompting the Ghana Copyright Office to weigh in on the dispute. James Owusu-Ansah, a researcher for the office urged the parties to settle out of court, saying that a proceeding would be “time consuming, tiresome and expensive.”

Meanwhile, on social media, Team Eternity Ghana fans accused Mickey of making a money grab. Mickey publicly denied any interest in a payout, saying in an interview that he already receives substantial income from other sources.

By July, the parties had reached a settlement, with Mickey telling the press that he received both an apology and a financial sum. The producer also said that he granted Team Eternity Ghana rights to use the phrase derived from his existing song.

The music industry in Ghana is far less litigious than in the US, where lawsuits over lyrics, grooves, and sampling are commonplace.

“The importance of preserving intellectual property in our part of the world is still not very popular; most people tend to overlook it. Intellectual property is still a new concept to most people, and they do not see [music] as property worth protecting,” said Ghanaian attorney Adwoa Paintsil.

She also pointed out that Ghanaian artists try to quietly settle disputes.

“There is a tendency to settle matters quickly and out of court,” Paintsil told CT. “Thankfully, a few people have taken the bold step by instituting actions to preserve their intellectual property.”

Paintsil pointed to a recent example of a case in which a Ghanaian music producer sued the Confederation of African Football for copyright infringement and was awarded $250,000 by the court. Paintsil said that cases like this may help raise awareness in the industry about what it means to fairly and ethically use someone’s musical output and show artists that they have recourse when another creator or entity uses their intellectual property without permission.

For some, the case of “Defe Defe” is less about intellectual property and more about who gets to lay claim to religious phrases, texts, or themes.

“It is a known fact that almost every gospel song takes its inspiration from Christian beliefs and practices,” said Paintsil. “Religious sentiments, dogma, practices cannot be copyrighted.”

In Paintsil’s view, to claim the rights to the phrase defe defe would be to claim ownership over a common Akan expression.

“Establishing originality of the word defe would have been a herculean task for the producer, as it is a vernacular word,” Paintsil added. “It is not a special phrase invented by Kwame Mickey. And the song does not use a unique interpretation of the phrase other than what is commonly known within the Akan community. The use of defe on its own would fail to meet the test of originality.”

Nonetheless, Team Eternity Ghana’s payment of a settlement suggests that, at the very least, the artists involved wanted to avoid a prolonged public conflict. Paintsil also said that a settlement suggests Team Eternity did not challenge the authorship of the producer.

The worship megahit “Way Maker,” written and originally recorded by Nigerian artist Sinach, is also currently the center of a conflict between the recording artist and a producer. Recently, the original studio recordings of “Way Maker” have been removed from platforms like Facebook and YouTube in the midst of a dispute with producer Michael Anthony Oluwole.

In 2023, Oluwole spoke publicly about his claim that Sinach had failed to give him a production credit for the song, which would have generated royalty payouts.

“It is what it is. People tell you this is for God and we’re doing it for God,” said Oluwole. “They understand what royalty is, they know how to sign for royalties. … They signed it as though they produced it. And that’s how it’s been done in the gospel space in Nigeria.”

Oluwole said he repeatedly and personally reached out to Sinach to resolve the oversight with no success. In August 2024, fans noticed that the original studio recording of “Way Maker” had been removed on various online platforms. Currently, the recording is still absent from Sinach’s YouTube channel. Neither Sinach nor Oluwole have spoken openly about details of the ongoing dispute.

As the viral success of songs like “Way Maker” and “Defe Defe” suggests, the global Christian music industry is unpredictable, and social media can drive a song’s popularity without traditional gatekeepers. In an environment where one surprise viral hit can generate life-changing income and launch a career, producers, songwriters, and artists will need to securely credit their musical contributions and proactively protect their intellectual property.

“People think we had a release strategy, promotion budget, and stuff like that, but guess what? It wasn’t like that,” Joseph Gordon, one of the singers in Team Eternity Ghana, said in an interview. “We count it all to the grace of God.”

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News

Satellite Imagery Documents Erasure of Armenian Christian Heritage

Jayson Casper

As archaeologists discover new ruins revealing the ancient origins of the church, new technologies reveal the extent of its destruction in neighboring Azerbaijan.

Aftermath of the Azerbaijan Shelling in 2020 Over The Shushi Cathedral In Nagorno Karabakh.

NurPhoto / Getty / Edits by CT

Discovered ruins of a fourth-century church in Armenia are “sensational evidence” of the nation’s early Christian history, stated Achim Lichtenberger, the lead German archaeologist of a binational excavation effort with the local National Academy of Sciences. Carbon dating of wooden platforms may establish an octagonal structure as the oldest documented church in Armenia.

Tradition indicates that Armenia became the world’s first Christian nation in AD 301. The church design reflects features resembling similar building styles in ancient eastern Mediterranean civilizations, previously unknown in the Caucasus region. The ruins were found in Artaxata, once the capital of the Kingdom of Armenia, which means “the joy of truth” in the original Indo-Iranian language.

But Christina Maranci, an Armenian professor of art and architecture at Harvard University, said the joy of these discoveries is outweighed by alarm at the destruction of Armenian heritage sites in the neighboring country of Azerbaijan. The Muslim-majority nation initiated fighting that displaced its Armenian residents from a disputed region and is now accused of systematically removing the remaining evidence of their ethnic historical presence.

“This is their long-term plan,” she said. “The intent is to erase evidence of our existence, which they do not admit anyway.”

In a 44-day war with Armenia in 2020, Muslim-majority Azerbaijan reclaimed most of its internationally recognized territory in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave then populated by ethnic Armenians who had proclaimed themselves a breakaway republic they called Artsakh.

And last month marked the one-year anniversary of a lightning Azerbaijani offensive to capture the remaining pockets of land, which resulted in their near depopulation as 100,000 refugees fled to Armenia. Furthermore, beyond the geopolitical dispute and humanitarian crisis, critics see new evidence that Azerbaijan continues to demolish signs of the region’s historical Armenian presence.

Maranci is one of several academics employing scientific and technological advances to demonstrate claims of antiquity. Her expertise includes the study of spolia, remnants of ancient structures repurposed in modern construction.

As an example, Manci cited two monasteries from the 14th and 15th century that were destroyed—twice. In the 1950s, Soviet authorities leveled the structures and haphazardly incorporated the medieval stones into the building materials for two public schools. Children could daydream, Maranci said, while looking at randomly placed images of crosses, saints, and angels.

Until Azerbaijan bulldozed the schools to make way for new roads.

Though the spolia in the schools were clearly visible, Azerbaijani officials may have not bothered to notice them, as they removed outdated structures in favor of modern housing developments. Intentional or not, Maranci said the disregard for Armenia’s religious heritage fits into a wider pattern of cultural erasure.

Satellite Imagery Documents Erasure of Armenian Christian Heritage

A satellite photo of Chirag/Chragh School before and after destruction

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©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

A satellite photo of Zar/Tsar School before and after destruction

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©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

Her work is referenced by Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW), a Cornell and Purdue University initiative founded in 2020 that documents both Armenian and Azerbaijani historical sites. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a six-year war between the two nations resulted in Armenian control of Nagorno-Karabakh and its surrounding territory. Many Azerbaijani villages were looted and leveled.

Out of 63 mosques, CHW found that Armenians had destroyed 8 and inflicted major damage on another 31.

The accusation of Azerbaijani erasure, however, has not been limited to Nagorno-Karabakh. In a report released earlier this month, CHW used satellite imagery to confirm the destruction of 108 monasteries, churches, and cemeteries—98 percent of the sites the organization had located—in the noncontiguous Azerbaijani territory of Nakhchivan, which borders Turkey and Armenia.

CHW increased its geolocation of cultural heritage during Azerbaijan’s 2023 blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, and then again following the Armenian exodus. With over 2,000 sites in its database, 436 are actively monitored at the time of writing.

In its first post-displacement report, CHW noted the destruction of the 19th-century St. John the Baptist Church, known locally as “Kanach Zham,” and an 18th-century cemetery. Four other sites were destroyed, with an additional nine newly threatened. This group includes two 13th-century churches, the only historic structures left standing in a village that was leveled to prepare for a new housing development.

“Azerbaijan knows it is being monitored,” Maranci said. “I don’t know what games are being played, but they are destroying centuries of history, faith, and identity. I wish it would stop.”

In 2021, the International Court of Justice warned Azerbaijan not to allow the destruction of cultural heritage. But three months later, the minister of culture announced a plan to remove Armenian inscriptions from churches, labeling them “forgery.” Azerbaijan follows an internationally discredited theory that claims most of these structures belonged originally to an ancient Christian people called Caucasian Albanians.

Satellite Imagery Documents Erasure of Armenian Christian Heritage

A satellite map of St. Astvatsatsin Monestary of Tsghna before and after its destruction

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©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

A satellite photo of St. Hovhannes Church before and after descruction

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©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

A satellite photo of Surb Sargis Church and Surb Grigor Church before and after destruction

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©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

The evangelical minority in Azerbaijan pays little attention to the claims and counterclaims regarding Armenian heritage sites.

“The issue of cultural heritage is not something we think about,” said one church leader, granted anonymity to speak freely on a sensitive topic. “But the government’s development of this area is legitimate.”

Azerbaijan is rated “not free” in Freedom House’s annual survey of political rights. And for the first time, the US State Department included Azerbaijan in its most recent designation of violators of religious freedom.

The church leader stated that most Azerbaijani evangelicals come from a Muslim background and are not actively persecuted by the state. But their churches tend to be far from Nagorno-Karabakh and prioritize local witness and social acceptance.

This leader said his own church has already engaged in evangelism among the few Azerbaijanis within the reclaimed lands. He found the development work taking place impressive and professional, acknowledging that progress thus far is only a small part of what is planned. Left fallow for decades, the regions bordering Nagorno-Karabakh acted as a buffer zone and were treated by Armenians as a negotiating pawn while they sought local self-rule.

The Azerbaijani government designated the region as a “green energy zone,” and is now facilitating the voluntary return of citizens displaced 30 years ago. Critics have stated the construction contracts are awarded to figures with close ties to the president’s family.

Yet despite his positive assessment of state land development, the evangelical leader said that the destruction of area churches is likely even greater than what groups like CHW are documenting. He said the church buildings should be given instead to “living churches” like his own so that spiritual life can continue therein.

Unless Azerbaijan concludes a peace treaty that would facilitate the return of Armenian refugees, he said. Then these churches, including the downtown cathedral in the capital city of Baku, could be restored to the historic Armenian Orthodox church.

Peace negotiations have been an on-again, off-again process. In hopes of improving the prospects for peace, last December Armenia dropped its bid to host this year’s COP29 global environmental summit and backed Azerbaijan’s successful candidacy, thereby securing the release of 30 prisoners of war. (COP29 will take place in Baku on November 11–22.) In July, Azerbaijan stated that 90 percent of a proposed peace treaty text had been agreed upon. And in August, it dropped its demand for a land corridor through Armenia to connect Nakhchivan with the main part of the country.

Azerbaijan is insisting that Armenia adopt constitutional language forswearing any claim on Nagorno-Karabakh—a domestically polarizing issue. But while Armenia expressed hope that a peace treaty could be finalized before the start of COP29, Azerbaijan countered that the current Armenian proposal was “unrealistic.”

Aren Deyirmenjian, Armenia representative for the evangelical Armenian Missionary Association of America, said he believes his government has made it clear that Armenia has no claim on Artsakh. It has offered paths toward peace, which Azerbaijan has rejected. He wonders what more they can want.

But he acknowledged the source of their popular anti-Armenian sentiment.

“I have heard terrible stories about Armenians doing very similar things to what Azerbaijan is doing now,” said Deyirmenjian. “Somehow, that makes you understand why there is so much hatred in the Azeris’ hearts.”

However difficult, apologizing is the Armenian “biblical duty,” he said. It should then be reciprocated, which may seem highly unlikely. Yet if Armenia is indeed the world’s first Christian nation, its actions must be different from those of the Azerbaijani enemy. Apologies would demonstrate the humility, he said, that is essential for eventual reconciliation.

Until then, evangelical hearts are pained by the cultural destruction.

“There is clear intent to erase our heritage,” Deyirmenjian said. “While the world is busy, Azerbaijan wants to get rid of all evidence that Armenians are native to these lands.”

- More from Jayson Casper

Theology

The Evangelical Legacy of Gustavo Gutierrez’s Liberation Theology

Compiled by Franco Iacomini

How the Peruvian priest influenced the fathers of integral mission.

Alessandra Tarantino / AP Images / Edits by CT

Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, the father of liberation theology and Catholic theologian who first argued for a “preferential option for the poor,” died on October 22 at the age of 96.

The Peruvian priest’s ministry was heavily influenced by the injustices he observed in his country. For years, under the hacienda system, just 2 percent of Peruvians controlled 90 percent of the land, while sharecroppers earned pennies farming it and laborers worked in slave-like conditions on the estates.

In 1968, a coup tried to end this arrangement and empower peasant workers. But the many people left behind by these reforms soon left the haciendas, relocating to impoverished settlements outside Lima.

Moved by this suffering, Gutiérrez, a member of the Dominican order, published his most influential book, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation, in 1971, arguing that genuine liberation unfolds in three essential dimensions. First, political and social liberation addresses and eliminates the immediate causes of poverty and injustice. Second, the poor, marginalized, and oppressed are freed from conditions that limit their capacity for dignified self-development. Third, these communities are liberated from selfishness and sin and can now restore broken relationships with God and others.

When priests began embracing liberation theology across Latin America, the Vatican pushed back, criticizing its seemingly Marxist influence and reduction of Jesus’ status of divine savior to that of social liberator. However, unlike other advocates of liberation theology, Gutiérrez was never sanctioned by the Catholic hierarchy.

Though Latin America was still overwhelmingly Catholic in the early days of Gutiérrez’s ministry, many of the region’s earliest evangelical leaders came of age wrestling with similar questions. These ideas led fellow Peruvians like Samuel Escobar and Pedro Arana and Ecuadorian René Padilla to develop misión integral or integral mission, which sought to balance Christian responsibility to share about Christ’s saving work with a duty to respond to social inequities.

CT asked evangelicals familiar with the life and work of Gustavo Gutiérrez to share how liberation theology affected Latin American evangelical theology, practice and growth. Answers were edited for clarity and concision.

This piece will be updated.

JUAN FONSECA

Researcher on the history of the evangelical movement at Universidad del Pacífico, Lima, Peru

Samuel Escobar and Gustavo Gutiérrez were two Peruvian theologians who, in different ways, influenced evangelical and Catholic Christianity, respectively, encouraging both to embed their missionary work within Latin America’s context of suffering.

In 1969, at the First Latin American Congress of Evangelization (CLADE I), the evangelical theologian Samuel Escobar challenged Latin American evangelicals to “find a way to embody their faith in the Latin American reality.” For example, he urged them to develop an original, native hermeneutic in response to questions arising from the poverty belts of major cities or the indigenous cultures of the continent.

Two years later, Father Gustavo Gutiérrez published A Theology of Liberation, one of the foundational texts of liberation theology. Father Gutiérrez significantly impacted global Christianity in his insistence on placing the poor at the heart of the Christian mission, a conviction that transcended denominational boundaries and deeply renewed Christian theology.

However, in those same years, in the poorest neighborhoods of Latin American cities, Pentecostal preachers were mobilizing the unadorned spirituality of the poor. Despite a lack of formal theology and equipped with few material resources, Pentecostal churches nevertheless became the religious alternative to Catholicism for the continent’s impoverished.

To paraphrase American theologian Millard Richard Shaull, liberation theology chose the poor but the poor chose Pentecostalism in Latin America, an observation the truth of which other liberation theologians have already acknowledged. However, based on my own observation of Peru’s religious landscape, rather than placing liberation theology and Pentecostalism in opposition to each other, it is more appropriate to view Gutiérrez’s ministry and Pentecostalism as converging movements. Both liberation theology and Pentecostalism make the poor a common focal point for their respective hermeneutics, the privileged subject of their reflections and missions, and the face of Christ within their spiritualities.

British theologian John A. Mackay wondered in a CT article, in 1969, whether the future of Christianity would belong to “a reformed Catholicism and a mature Pentecostalism.” Gustavo Gutiérrez and liberation theology have already done their part in the process of reforming Catholicism. It remains for Pentecostals to continue maturing through their faith in the Christ of the poor.

David Kirkpatrick

Author, A Gospel for the Poor: Global Social Christianity and the Latin American Evangelical Left, United States

Gustavo Gutiérrez gave voice to an entire generation of Latin American theologians wrestling with questions of violence, injustice, and inequality in a Cold War context. His urging of a critical reexamination of traditional approaches to Scripture and call to amplify the voices of the poor had an immense impact on his generation of Latin American theologians, which included many prominent Catholic and Protestant figures such as Pope Francis and Methodist theologian José Míguez Bonino.

In 1973, René Padilla wrote the first article dedicated to liberation theology to appear in Christianity Today. Padilla, alongside many evangelicals, disagreed with Gutiérrez’s approach, which Padilla called a “straitjacket” on the Bible. “No attempt is ever made to show why this specific praxis (rather than any other) is chosen as the object of reflection, or to show what makes this reflection specifically Christian,” Padilla wrote. But he also refused to allow critiques of liberation theology to silence prophetic calls for justice. Many Latin American Protestant evangelicals agreed that an unjust postwar context called for new approaches to faith and practice.

In response to the English version of A Theology of Liberation, which was released in 1973, Padilla argued, “The need for a liberation of theology is then as real in our case as in the case of the theology of liberation.” Padilla’s answer was misión integral, a holistic approach to Christian mission that synthesizes the pursuit of justice and the offer of salvation, rather than joining the growing movement of liberation theology.

But Padilla concluded his CT article by asking a question that would define his life and work: “Where is the evangelical theology that will propose a solution with the same eloquence [as Gutiérrez] but also with a firmer basis in the Word of God?” Gutiérrez inspired an entire generation of Latin American Protestant evangelical theologians to continue their search for and theological construction of a truly Latin American theology of justice and mission.

Valdir Steuernagel

Pastor and theologian, Brazil

I never had the privilege to meet Gustavo Gutiérrez, even though his name was around me since the 1970s. Once I heard that he died, I found his book We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People in my library. As I opened it, the very first words touched me deeply: “To follow Jesus defines a Christian.” I smiled, because this is exactly what I would like to say too.

I come from another school of theology, but I share Gutiérrez’s recognition that context is important in the process of doing theology and that our context was Latin America. His being Peruvian affected how he thought and lived out his faith, which was always rooted in his confessional environment. Similarly, I am Brazilian, and this is the location in which I encountered the gospel and where I have had the privilege of living out my vocation.

My identity has also been shaped by an evangelical confessionality, which has been nurtured within the circles of the Latin American Theological Fraternity. But we were moved by Gutiérez’s conviction that theology had to move from the “libraries” to the “communities.” Our faith had to reach the most vulnerable people in our societies. With Gutiérrez, we were challenged to look at the “underside of history,” the communities so often hidden by the “victorious” narratives of history or who had become the “underside” precisely because of those victors.

I can still hear some of the conversations and arguments [among Catholic followers of liberation theology and evangelicals who defend integral mission] that pointed to the differences in our respective theologies. And I also see Gutiérrez’s commitment to his God-given calling and his long and deep sense of belonging [within the Catholic church], in which the poor and the most vulnerable had a special place, a place where they were embraced by a God of love and justice.

Ruth Padilla DeBorst

Professor, Comunidad de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios and Western Theological Seminary, Colombia/United States

It is impossible to conceive of theological work in the effervescent Latin America of the mid-20th century and the beginning of the 21st century without acknowledging the generous contribution of Gustavo Gutiérrez. Although this Peruvian priest and most of his liberationist colleagues were primarily developing their theology for and within the Catholic church, it nevertheless influenced evangelical thought.

The integral mission movement developed at the same time in the evangelical student movements and the Latin American Theological Fraternity. In 1972, René Padilla and Samuel Escobar met with several liberation theologians and interacted diligently with their writing, and they later spoke of how this experience had valuably challenged their hermeneutics and how they understood the ethical praxis of the Christian faith. Those who identify themselves as evangelicals today would do well to look with appreciation at the legacy of this giant of theology, not only in Latin America but worldwide.

Harold Segura

Pastor and director for Faith and Development of World Vision Latin America, Colombia/Costa Rica

Liberation theology emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s with theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez (to whom today we bid farewell with gratitude and admiration), who presented the idea of a Christianity committed to the most vulnerable and excluded people. This theology placed the reality of poverty and injustice at the center of Christian reflection, affirming that the gospel should lead not only to spiritual salvation but also to social transformation.

For many evangelicals, this approach was a challenge. Most evangelical churches had focused their message on personal salvation, prioritizing conversion and spiritual life. Liberation theology, with its emphasis on social justice and its dialogue with the social sciences, was viewed with skepticism. Many considered it a political deviation that threatened the purity of the gospel.

However, not everyone rejected it. Some evangelical movements began to reflect on their own role in society and took a more active stance in the face of injustice. This theology had an undeniable influence on what, around the same time, began to be known as integral mission–a vision of the gospel that seeks not only the salvation of the soul but also the welfare of the body and justice in society. Integral mission was not a direct result of liberation theology, but liberation theology sparked the dialogue and reflection that allowed integral mission to emerge from evangelical soil.

In some evangelical communities, this social awakening did not change the belief that church growth efforts should focus on personal conversion and evangelization. In fact—partially in reaction to the political activism of liberation theology—evangelical movements experienced considerable growth, especially in some traditional evangelical sectors, where a more conservative and non-political faith was emphasized.

Today, many Latin American evangelical churches continue to navigate between spirituality and social engagement, seeking ways to be faithful to the gospel while responding to the needs of an unjust world.

- More from Franco Iacomini

Ideas

Voting Is Important to Me. That’s Why, This Year, I Won’t Vote.

Robert Postic

A Christian political scientist considers what to do when no viable candidate aligns with our core values—or even comes close.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

“Vote Biblically!” At least here in Michigan, it’s impossible to miss the signs. Among evangelical Christians, they seem as ubiquitous as the ichthus fish bumper sticker.

I’m sympathetic. All my life, I’ve attended evangelical churches and called them home. I grew up with a message of “God, country, and family.” And I’ve always been conservative in both my theology and my politics. In most elections, I vote straight-ticket Republican, and voting is extremely important to me.

It’s precisely because voting is so important that I believe we need to thoughtfully evaluate calls to vote biblically and consider everything that can mean. Sometimes, given short-term political dynamics or the candidates available, declining to vote can be the best way to reflect our values and acknowledge the importance of an election. Sometimes, the right choice—and one way to conform our politics to Scripture—may be not voting, as new research suggests millions of American Christians are planning this fall.

The way we talk about voting in many predominantly white evangelical churches sends more than one message. In recent history, it has often been a thinly veiled encouragement to vote Republican. But it also sends the message that you must vote, that voting is an American duty and possibly even a Christian duty. Here I want to focus on that second claim about voting itself.

There is no biblical mandate to vote. That’s not to suggest that voting is somehow inconsistent with biblical teaching. God forbid! Choosing to vote in democratic elections and, more generally, to engage in peaceful civic participation is in alignment with virtually any reading of the Bible.

The problem is that many voters feel cross‑pressured. It’s not always obvious how we should vote. Sometimes, none of the viable candidates align with our core values—or even come close. This year, the Democratic presidential candidate holds positions I believe to be inconsistent with Scripture. But I also believe the Republican candidate lacks the requisite character to be president.

Some Christians in this position choose to vote for a third-party candidate. I respect that choice and agree that it’s much more important to vote for the candidate who best represents our values than it is to vote for someone who can win. Issues and character matter. But I also understand the political and legal realities in America that make it functionally impossible for third-party candidates to succeed. So rather than vote third party, I choose not to vote.

That decision always has its detractors, but this year it seems particularly unpopular. Over the last few weeks, I’ve encountered two main objections to my choice.

The first is that we’re always presented with imperfect choices. This is life. In voting, as in everything else, we simply need to deal with it and make the best choice we can from the options provided, even when those options are suboptimal.

The basic claim here is true, even about decisions far more personally consequential than a vote. For example, we pick imperfect spouses and imperfect churches. Fair enough.

But these analogies are less compelling than they appear at first glance. Neither choice is similarly binary, and neither begins with a very small pool of options from which we’re forced to select. In choosing a spouse, we are active in selecting the candidate pool—and anyway, choosing not to marry is a decision the Bible endorses (1 Cor. 7:39–40).

Likewise, when choosing a church, we typically have many viable options, not just two. Still, if the comparison seems compelling, let’s extend the analogy.

Imagine having to choose between (1) a church that doesn’t affirm the deity of Christ but holds to a traditional view on issues of sex and gender and (2) a church that does affirm the deity of Christ but also has an affirming view on issues of sex and gender. A congregation of the Latter-day Saints, perhaps, versus a very progressive Episcopalian church. In such a quandary, I expect many of my fellow conservative evangelicals begin to see the case for choosing not to choose as we try, however haltingly, to “cling to what is good” (Rom. 12:9).

The second objection I’ve been hearing is that policy issues alone should be the deciding factor in an election: Voting is about policy outcomes, and the stakes are too high to worry about lesser considerations, like character. God uses imperfect people to accomplish his good ends, and surely our standards are not higher than God’s?

As a political scientist, I agree that voting is about policy outcomes. But as a Christian, I disagree that it’s only about policy outcomes.

Yes, God uses imperfect people. But of course, he has no choice—“There is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10)—and God does reject some people for some roles, especially powerful roles, due to poor character. (King Saul comes to mind.) Moreover, God operates with knowledge, freedom, and love I don’t have. His omniscient use of imperfect people in his redemptive work is hardly comparable to me voting for a deeply flawed candidate against my better judgment.

And yes, issues are important. Over the next four years, many federal judges and perhaps some Supreme Court justices will be appointed. Economic policy decisions could have major effects on our daily lives. Policies on abortion, foreign policy, and immigration have life-or-death effects. Again, fair enough.

But I believe how we get there is as important as where we arrive. “Winning the presidential election is vitally important,” James Dobson wrote in 2007, “but not at the expense of what we hold most dear.” I’m convinced character is a core value too. It’s equally part of what I “hold most dear” in politics—and not nearly so divisible from policy as many suggest. Without good character, the candidates we support may not even try to deliver the policy results they promise in exchange for our votes.

I understand the arguments for voting even when the viable choices are bad. I understand why some Christians believe it’s better to pick a side and push it to improve insofar as they can. My goal here is not to argue that all Christians should decide against voting. It is the more modest claim that in a binary election with choices like these, not voting may be the best way for many Christians to heed their consciences and the promptings of the Holy Spirit—even to “vote biblically.”

Robert Postic is a professor of political science at the University of Findlay. He received his MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary (1990) and his PhD from Wayne State University (2007).

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Ideas

Radical Hope in an Age of Climate Doomsday

Bethany Sollereder

The current environmental crisis is progressing fast and furiously. How do we avoid despair?

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

One of the worst feelings in the world is seeing a disaster unfold that you can’t stop. The car crash you see happening a split second before impact. The sick person you can diagnose but cannot cure. An avalanche rolling down a mountain, when you know nothing can be done to stop it. A category five hurricane heading your way, promising to bring untold destruction.

For a growing number of people, climate change evokes this very feeling. As new temperature highs are smashed every couple of years (with 2023 breaking all previous global average temperatures in the last 100,000 years), the earth’s changing climate feels like watching a train wreck happen in slow motion.

Record-breaking floods, wildfires, and storms slam into government indecision, political apathy (or denial), and personal entitlement. In just the past month, monster hurricanes Helene and Milton ripped through Southern US states, leaving communities devastated. The growing disparity between the scale of the challenges we face and the tiny amount of power any regular person has can fuel a sense of despair and anxiety.

People process large-scale disasters in different ways. A great many opt for denial, ignorance, or apathy (“there’s nothing I can do, so why try?”)—and there’s little to be done about them except to continue spreading awareness and education.

But for those who believe the warnings, there are two common ways of reacting. The more optimistic folks want to believe the best-case scenario; that a solution is plausible and within reach—that with just the right amount of coordinated effort, we can pull this off and change the world, perhaps even within a generation or two. While the more pessimistic people want to hear the worst-case scenario so they can expend their energy and effort carefully and with the long road ahead in mind—they know it’s foolish to sprint at the beginning of a marathon.

I noticed these two different reactions at the beginning of COVID-19 lockdowns at my Oxford college. Some people were confidently telling us, “This will all be over in three months—we will be back to normal by September!” I walked around in my Eeyore-ish way saying, “Well, historical data suggests it will be at least a year, maybe two, before anything like normal life will resume. We better get used to this.”

I genuinely thought I was helping people by setting out a reasonable goal, so they wouldn’t have the sense—which I hate more than nearly anything—that the finish line keeps moving each time you approach it. But many of my more optimistic friends felt like I was crushing their hope. My attempts to always consider the worst-case realistic scenario eventually earned me the affectionate nickname “the Prophet of Doom.”

Regarding climate change, here is my “doomsday prophet” take: In one sense, the anxiety people feel is justified by the grim facts. The world is experiencing changes that are rapid and widespread and will bring intense suffering to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.

We are in the grip of a serious global substance addiction to fossil fuels. The difficult truth to face is that we have already burned enough oil and natural gas to throw the climate into a new norm. The longer we burn fossil fuels, particularly at the furious rate we’ve become accustomed to, the worse it is likely to get.

Fossil fuels have brought us so many good things. Longer, better-fed lives. Less infant mortality. Rapid and cheap travel. We don’t want to lose the many benefits of our fossil-fuelled culture. But nor do we want to see our futures burned up by unbridled consumerism or thoughtless greed.

As with any serious addiction, withdrawal feels painful, is costly, and—when done poorly—can be deadly. In fact, the dramatic changes needed to curb our addiction would likely mean tremendous suffering and probable loss of life.

Think about it: We’ve built our entire developed world to depend on large-scale agriculture, the quick and efficient transportation of food and goods, and houses dependent on energy-intensive heating and cooling systems. If we cut off the oil that is a lifeblood to these systems, people can die.

As the climate warms, these heat events will become more frequent, but the most effective way to lessen their death toll is to use even more energy to create cool spaces. It is a vicious cycle—one that doesn’t stop at temperature changes.

Likewise, the staples of our diet come from an unsustainable agriculture system. One study found that 1.78 billion people are fed by crops that depend directly on fossil fuel–generated fertilizers—which, when overused, can poison waterways and damage the soil’s productivity over time.

All this shows what a wickedly complex problem climate change is. Scientifically, it involves biodiversity loss, water and air pollution, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, and ecological system breakdown. Socially, it involves technology use, sustainable development goals, cultural norms, population growth, economic and political systems, religious beliefs, and psychological and physical limitations.

The reason climate change is so difficult to talk about is that bringing up any one issue is like pulling on a thread in a spiderweb: Every other thread in the web vibrates in response. We feel powerless to effect the changes we would like to see when simply meeting the needs of each day feels like an uphill battle. And so, the anxiety builds—until the anxiety itself feels like part of the avalanche threatening to tumble down on us. Is there any hope at all?

The short answer is yes. In fact, I think this is the time for radical hope. I first encountered this term in Jonathan Lear’s excellent book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Lear explores the history of the Crow tribe in the mid-1800s as they responded to the changes brought by western settlement of their territories in Montana.

The key figure in the book is the Crow chieftain Plenty Coups, who spent his life leading his people through those often-traumatic changes with one key insight: The old nomadic way of life chasing the buffalo was inescapably and irretrievably lost. How could his people hope when the very possibility of a meaningful Crow life was being destroyed? They had to learn to live a new way of life. Even their core values, like what it meant to be courageous, had to be re-formed in a culture where traditional warrior acts of courage were illegal.

Radical hope, then, is the hope that is formed when all our previous hopes are gone. Radical hope was the kind God provided the Israelite exiles in Babylon when he said,

Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. … Seek the peace and the prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. … Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. (Jer. 29:5–8)

This passage comes before the familiar words in verse 11: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’” Yet God’s good plans were not for that generation to return home to the way things had always been. Instead, their hope and future lay in investing in exile. Like the Crow, they accepted the reality that their old lives were gone and had to be made anew.

In the same way, for us, radical hope means settling down in our own exile and waiting for God’s promise to be fulfilled beyond the scope of our own lifetimes.

We are just beginning to see the consequences of a crisis that will characterize the world in future decades and realizing that all our goodwill—all our recycling, paper straws, and bamboo toothbrushes—will not avert the behemoth of climate change. The juggernauts of economy and politics are simply too strong for our small acts to make much difference.

In 2016, 195 countries joined the Paris Agreement, a pact to try to keep climate change from exceeding a 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7-degree Fahrenheit) change. That hope of keeping the world under 1.5 degrees is now gone, but there is still a place for radical hope.

What does this radical hope look like in our everyday lives?

For me, it looks a lot like the old serenity prayer: “Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Worked out practically, it means planning my energy to try to make the most difference I can with the choices I make and the tools I have.

One tool that helps me budget my attention and energy well is called the “spoon theory”—which I heard about from my friends with chronic disabilities. It is a way to measure the effort you have to expend when illness prevents you from doing all you want to in a day. In short, spoon theory asks you to imagine your daily energy level as a certain number of spoons. Then you divide up your daily tasks based on how much energy each one takes: two to get up and dressed, six for grocery shopping, three for making a meal, and so on.

I do a similar thing with creation care. I generally use half of my spoons of environmental energy for advocacy and trying to change systemic and political institutions: voting, writing letters to political leaders, mobilizing and educating people. The other half I use on the smaller, more psychologically rewarding but less impacting works: restoring a stream bank, researching and substituting better products into my life, scouring thrift shops.

The effort I spend throwing my tiny bit of democratic influence into pursuing systemic change rather than trying to pursue a perfect private life means that my toothbrush is still plastic, and my infrequently driven car is still gas-powered—but I have a greater chance of making a large-scale difference than if I put all my efforts into making my private life perfect.

When cultural models either deny climate change or give up every good of modern society and live with perfect integrity off-grid on an organic farm, I’ve found that spoon theory helps me manage the perfectionism that could overwhelm and kill the possibility of doing real, concrete good without feeling overwhelming guilt about all I cannot do.

Western culture is deeply avoidant of some of life’s basic realities: sickness, suffering, death. Some try to cheat them with ever more elaborate uses of fossil-fuelled power, such as cryogenic freezing.

But as Christians, our ultimate source of radical hope is found in the Easter story. Jesus did not avoid intense suffering and death but accepted, endured, and overcame them. And in doing so, he made a way for the radical hope of resurrected life. The Christian hope is not in avoiding or cheating death or suffering, but in walking through it with courage and virtue while we anticipate the hope of resurrection and life everlasting in God’s new creation.

As natural disasters strike, as food insecurity increases, as human migration intensifies, we remember Jesus’ words: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). And because of his victory, we can live out our radical hope by loving mercy, acting justly, and walking humbly with God in difficult times.

Bethany Sollereder is a lecturer in science and religion at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in the theology of suffering and has written Why Is There Suffering?: Pick Your Own Theological Expedition, the world’s first theological “choose your own adventure” book.

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News

Gen Z Christians Aren’t Sold on Trump or Harris

Harvest Prude in Grove City, Pennsylvania

Young Americans resist polarization as they show up to vote for president for the first time.

Lynne Sladky / AP Images

Sophia Cappawana was elected to public office before ever casting a vote in a presidential election.

At 19, Cappawana serves on the local council in Duncannon, Pennsylvania; she conscientiously noted that she is “most likely” the youngest member in its history. The daughter of a former mayor and local tax collector, Cappawana had political ambitions since her student council days, but she knows she’s an outlier among Generation Z.

“I don’t feel like my peers pay attention as much,” said the young council member, a Presbyterian who attends Grove City College, a Christian liberal arts school in Pennsylvania.

Historically, young people have been among the least likely to show up at the polls. But that may be changing: Half of those under 30 voted in the 2020 general election, a new record, up from only 39 percent among that cohort in 2016.

And especially in a battleground state in a close presidential race, both parties are trying to nab younger voters. Cappawana sees political messaging when she’s scrolling Instagram or reading on Breitbart and Newsmax.

“I’ve made up my mind for Trump,” she said. She ticked off reasons, believing that the Republican candidate would be better for the economy and that global affairs would be less chaotic with him in charge.

Vice President Kamala Harris leads by 31 points over Donald Trump among likely voters ages 18 to 29 years old, according to last month’s Harvard Youth Poll. In 2020, exit polls found voters under 30 went for Joe Biden by around 60 percent compared with 36 percent for Trump.

Like the majority of evangelical voters overall, many politically active young evangelicals told CT they would also be casting their vote for Trump.

“You don’t see much of a generational divide when it comes to support for Trump: white evangelicals are pretty much all in, and they have been since 2016,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

But he noted that the Harris campaign has been making a robust effort to reach out to young voters in general, including hosting events on college campuses. Some of that may break through to young evangelical voters as well, and CT interviewed several young Christian Harris supporters as well.

In a recent Lifeway Research survey, just under half of evangelicals under 35—48 percent—said they sided with Trump.

“Both parties are putting a priority on young voters in a way they maybe haven’t always in the past,” said Cedarville University political science professor Mark Caleb Smith.

“American politics is so polarized and opinions are so hard among most of the population, there just aren’t that many persuadable voters. And so the goal becomes to find new voters. … You look for young voters who are brand new to the system and try to pull them in, shape them from that point forward.”

Harris’s campaign has leaned into memes in it’s social media outreach to younger voters. The campaign also sought to court younger voters with policy announcements like a plan to provide payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and to provide a $6,000 tax credit for new parents.

Trump has courted young men by appearing on the social media platforms of men with huge followings, from YouTuber Logan Paul to video game streamer Adin Ross. Next week, Trump is sitting down for an interview with podcasting giant Joe Rogan.

Both campaigns have also had surrogates seeking to fire up younger voters: Pop megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Harris and Tim Walz on the day of the vice presidential debate and encouraged her fans to register to vote. On the conservative side, tech billionaire Elon Musk, as well as Charlie Kirk with the Republican youth organization Turning Point USA, have sought to mobilize young people.

Gloria Cope, a 23-year-old Virginia resident voting for the first time, has also noticed the political content on social media. On Instagram, she watches debate recaps and commentary from conservative influencers. “My algorithm has pretty much figured it out,” she said.

Cope plans to vote for Trump and said that as a Christian, the issues top of mind for her are abortion and religious freedom. Cope, who is Hispanic and grew up in a white foster family, said she also pays attention to border and immigration issues and foreign policy.

“A lot of the reasons I’m voting conservative, voting for Trump, are either religiously based or based on my circumstances,” she said.

On the other side of the aisle, Allie Cottom, a 19-year-old from Pittsburgh, is planning to vote for Harris.

Cottom was raised nondenominational and is in the process of converting to Eastern Orthodoxy. She’s also evolved politically, moving from the conservative politics of her parents to now a self-described moderate Democrat.

As a history and education major, she agrees with Democrats’ education policies, though she described some areas where she diverges to an extent, such as on abortion policy. She also believes the Democrats align more with her religious values than Republicans at the moment.

“Your Christian values should lead you to love others and not necessarily take it upon yourself to judge them and try to ‘fix them.’ That’s not our job,” Cotton said. “I think it’s important to recognize that Christians should help people and evangelize if that’s what your denomination is focused on. But it’s more about how you treat others and less about what you get out of it.”

She pushes back when fellow Christians insinuate you can’t be a Christian and a Democrat.

“Being a Democrat is not a monolith,” she said. “You can agree and disagree with different things in the party in the same way I’m sure a lot of Republicans don’t agree with everything their party is doing.”

Jacob Reese is one young Republican who doesn’t agree with everything his party is doing at the moment.

“I don’t think [Trump] represents the entire corpus of what the American conservative movement is,” he said.

He’s found some of Trump’s rhetoric “extremely irresponsible” and some of the former president’s stances on social issues—such as “his position on life” disappointing. He referenced the watering down of the Republican Party platform when it comes to abortion.

“We can be realistic about Donald Trump and JD Vance, where they’re at on life. You can be honest about that and recognize they’re not a Mike Pence on life,” Reese said. “But it doesn’t mean that we have to undermine what I believe is a core value of Republican platforms since Reagan—standing for life.”

Reese also disagrees with Trump’s protectionist trade policy, saying he prefers a free market model to one that relies on widespread tariffs, believing that will cause prices to rise.

But he still plans to vote for Trump, citing stronger disagreements with Democrats’ policy positions.

Reese said he and his friends discuss politics but have tried to keep it all in perspective: “Whenever I get annoyed at some stupid policy things that the Trump administration comes out with or another terrible idea from the Kamala Harris camp, ultimately, I have to remind myself, this is temporary. It’s very important we should be engaged, but it’s not the ultimate thing.”

At AEI, Cox has found in focus groups that there may be less enthusiasm in general for either party among young people, in contrast with previous generations.

“The millennial generation, when they were young, during the Obama years, were not just supportive of Obama—they were Democrats. They identified as Democrats. They generally believed in the Democratic Party.”

But the “same is simply not true for Generation Z,” who have told Cox they don’t believe Democrats are doing enough on issues that are important to them.

“The Democrats have squandered a huge advantage among young voters, who are seemingly much more divided than you feel like they should be, given how unpopular Trump has been among young people since he first arrived on the scene,” Cox said.

Adam Mikhail, a 19-year-old international relations major at Wheaton College, is one of those young voters. A dual citizen, Mikhail grew up in Cairo, the son of Coptic and evangelical parents, and said his stances shifted to the left due to the political instability he experienced in Egypt.

On issues like economics, criminal justice, and health care, Mikhail’s faith leads him to back policies that he believes support “human life and flourishing, justice, neighborly love, and good stewardship.” He said has been disappointed with several recent Democratic positions, including on the Israel-Gaza war.

“Frankly, I used to be a fan of Kamala Harris when she was running for president in 2020. She seemed to genuinely support a progressive platform,” Mikhail said. Now he believes she’s “pulled back to cater to conservatives and moderates.”

Mikhail voted early for Harris, more out of hopes it will help prevent a second Trump term than out of genuine enthusiasm for Harris herself. He listed concerns with Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss and the January 6 Capitol riot.

While young people are inundated with political information online, Mikhail said campaigns need to do more than show up in the places where young people are to truly earn their support. Many of his peers are politically apathetic and distrustful of politicians.

As many as half of young people will sit out this election, according to Cox, yet their voices, opinions, and approach to the public square will still shape American life around them, even if they’re not reflected in the exit polls.

“Young voters are essential to winning, but we also aren’t all easily convinced,” Mikhail said. “Targeting Gen Z through social media trends will not automatically earn a vote, as many of us want to be convinced that the vote will matter.”

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News

Indian Christians Worry About Indian American Political Success

Surinder Kaur

How an increasing number of Hindu politicians in America might threaten religious freedom in India.

Participants marching in the Annual India Day Parade in New York.

Anthony Behar / Sipa USA / AP Images

This year’s elections will not put a Hindu in the White House, but the 2024 campaign has highlighted the growing influence of the world’s 1.2 billion Hindus on US politics.

At the top, though she identifies as a Christian, Democratic candidate and current vice president Kamala Harris is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan, a Brahmin (the highest caste in Hinduism) immigrant from India. On the Republican side, Usha Vance, nee Chilukuri, wife of Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance, is also from the Brahmin Hindu community.

Nationally, five Indian Americans serve in Congress. Nearly 50 hold seats in state legislatures, the majority Hindu, though several are Sikh or Muslim.

The growing presence of Hindu Americans in US politics is a relatively new development. Though Dalip Singh Saund became the first Indian American elected to Congress in 1957, the number of Indian Americans in politics only began to increase in the last decade. In September 2023, representative Shri Thanedar, a Democrat, launched the controversial Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain American caucus.

This swift rise in political participation and leadership is particularly striking given the community’s relatively small size. The population of Hindu Americans is about 2.5 million, or slightly less than 1 percent of the US population. The community’s influence transcends its headcount, largely because its overwhelmingly high socioeconomic status gives Hindu Americans the potential to make large contributions to political campaigns. In 2022, the median income for Indian American household was $145,000.

“There was always a Hindu vote, which was not recognized publicly,” Democratic strategist Ramesh Kapur toldThe Universal News Network in March, “but it is being recognized now.”

But rather than celebrate the success of Indian Americans in US Politics, back in India, as Hindu nationalism continues to strengthen, many Christians are nervous about the political priorities of the largely Hindu contingency across the Pacific. Some worry that right-wing Indian groups will encourage the US to engage in India without holding the country accountable for religious freedom abuses against Muslims and Christians.

Rajesh Sampath, a philosophy professor at Brandeis University and a former Hindu who converted to Catholicism, said he worried “about the uncritical acceptance of the Indian American rise.” Not questioning candidates’ positions on Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, and ensuring that they are not under the influence of right-wing nationalism “could have adverse effects on civil rights, not only for Indian Christians in India but also in terms of race and equality here in the US.”

Hindu American power play

Hindu elected officials have served as both Democrats and Republicans and, in general, hold a number of perspectives on domestic policies. But their advocacy, or lack thereof when it comes to religious freedom of religious minorities in India, is what worries Indian and Indian American Christians.

For instance, both Democrats and Republicans have approved millions in arms deals to India while stalling efforts to designate it as a Country of Particular Concern by the US State Department, explained Neal Christie, the executive director of the Federation of Indian American Christian Organization.

(This designation is given to any country that the US government officially identifies as having systematic and severe violations of religious freedom, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.)

Meanwhile, in Congress, a resolution supporting Father Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest who died in custody in 2022 while imprisoned under anti-terror laws and condemning the Indian government’s treatment of political prisoners, has not made it out of a committee since it was introduced in July. Christie attributes this hesitation to “many lawmakers’ vested economic interests in India and their fear of backlash from Hindu nationalists in their constituencies.”

“Politicians in the US, particularly Hindu ones, make a lot of noise when it comes to the attacks on Hindu temples in the US, but when it comes to the suffering of minorities in India, such as the demolition of churches in Manipur, we don’t see the same level of concern,” said Allen Brooks, a spokesman of the Assam Christian Forum.

As American leaders have increasingly seen China as the biggest threat to America’s geopolitical future, many have warmed to India. To that end, both Democrats and Republicans “have cultivated significant ties with Hindu nationalists for geopolitical gains, prioritizing trade and industrial relationships in South Asia over the pressing issue of religious freedom for minorities,” said Sampath.

Since first sending Narendra Modi into national office in 2014, supporters of Hindutva have exported their ideology overseas. In the US, Hindu American groups supporting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Vishva Hindu Parishad have aggressive political outreach strategies in the United States.

These organizations promote a worldview that largely aligns with portions of the Republican platform regarding nationalism, traditional values, and defense of cultural identity, said John Dayal, a veteran human rights activist and spokesman for the All India Catholic Union. Dayal believes these groups have helped Hindu Americans find political success in American politics.

“Their main role for the moment is exonerating Prime Minister Modi and cleansing his image as well as that of other polarizing leaders from the Hindu right wing.”

Ron Adar / SOPA Images / AP Images

Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America marching in the India Day Parade.

What is more concerning, according to Dayal, is the “power wielded by affluent upper-caste Indian Americans in both politics and the corporate sector.” If Indian CEOs of US companies adopted right-wing political ideologies, “the power they could exert would be alarming,” Dayal said. “The access that the Hindu right wing has to the corporate sector and to the politicians in America is a very dangerous thing.”

The growing influence of Hindu American groups, as well as politicians, has also raised concerns about their potential impact on US foreign policy, particularly regarding religious freedom in India.

Of particular concern has been the admiration and endorsement of Modi by the Hindu American politician Vivek Ramaswamy, who was one of the Republican presidential candidates. After terming Modi an “excellent” prime minister and an “outstanding leader” in July 2023, Ramaswamy repeated praises of Modi as recently as September 2024 and credited him for “restoring Indian national pride” while making no mention of the abysmal human and minority rights record under Modi that critics repeatedly raise.

Christie questions how Hindu American legislators can align with values like tolerance, respect, and fairness if they legitimize a nationalist or exclusionary agenda in India.

Dayal shares similar concerns about both Hindu American politicians and Hindu groups in the US like the Hindu America Foundation, who has been accused of lobbying on behalf of the Indian government and having a relationship with far right organizations.

“When Hindutva, Modi, or the Sangh Parivar [family of Hindutva organizations] come under scrutiny in America, through reports of the USCIRF or through the work of advocacy groups, Hindu outfits like Hindu America Foundation (HAF), which have close ties with many Hindu American politicians, sanitize their sinister deeds, demonize the source of the scrutiny, and let extreme right NRIs [non-resident Indians] emerge as spokespeople for the community in the US.”

A recent report released by the Political Research Associates accuses the HAF of showing two different faces. While presenting itself publicly as a mainstream civil rights organization in American society, it has simultaneously opposed protections against caste discrimination, expressed prejudice against Muslims, and shown clear support for Modi’s BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). Through this dual approach, the report states, HAF has been able to introduce these ideas into American institutional spaces where they previously would not have been welcome or taken seriously.

These groups, like HAF, “capitalize [use it for their advantage] on fears of radical Muslims,” says Christie, which he sees as “stereotypical and racist.” They also perpetuate negative portrayals of Indian Christians as “Rice Christians,” accusing them of forced conversions and spreading harmful stereotypes.

(“Rice Christians” or “Rice Bag” is a slur used against Christians in India alleging that they converted to Christianity for a bag of rice.)

The shifting Indian vote

In the 2020 election, 74 percent of Indian Americans voted, making them among the most politically engaged communities of all US ethnic groups. Traditionally a Democratic-leaning community, Indian Americans are beginning to show signs of political realignment. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, while 68 percent identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, an emerging 29 percent now identifies as Republican—a trend that has caught the attention of both sides of the aisle.

The biannual Asian American Voter Survey released in July 2024 showed that the number of Indian Americans planning to vote for Joe Biden dropped almost 20 points—from 65 percent in 2020 to 46 percent in 2024. While the survey didn’t ask respondents if they would vote for Harris, it did find that 54 percent of Indian American voters said they had a somewhat favorable or very favorable impression of the vice president.

Some Hindu Americans who felt that Harris’s positions on religious freedom, India-US relations, and minority rights were not in their best interests have criticized Harris’s (and Biden’s) policies and politics. A section of Hindu American voters also has misgivings that she “failed to connect with them in her previous campaigns for president and vice president.” Hindu right-wing publications have clearly rejected her identity as an Indian or a Hindu in the past, and she has been accused of not trying hard enough to reach out to mainstream Hindu organizations.

Political scientist Sangay Mishra notes that Hindu Americans are increasingly framing their political choices around support for India, viewing Democratic criticism of India’s policies as hostile to Hindu interests. This sentiment is echoed by activists like Utsav Sanduja, who launched the Hindus for America First PAC, arguing that “the Hindu voice, unfortunately, has been kind of hijacked by woke elements” and that Democratic “human rights lectures” risk alienating India from America.

A group of Hindu donors has also been pushing the Biden-Harris campaign to include a dedicated “Hindu page” in its 2024 manifesto, similar to sections included in earlier campaigns tailored to Muslim, Jewish, and African American voters.

On the Republican side, candidates like Ohio state lawmaker Niraj Antani have been proactive in highlighting their Hindu faith, presenting themselves as protectors of religious freedom and traditional values. Antani, in campaign messaging, frequently references his Hindu identity, perhaps most recently by praising the opening of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, India, a common nationalist Hindu refrain.

Diaspora’s divided voice

Last year, Modi met with Biden several weeks after more than 200 Christians died due to violence in the Indian state of Manipur. Indian Americans and several civil rights and interfaith leaders protested these attacks, as well as the Indian government’s increased restrictions on the press and civil society, in front of the White House.

After a video of a mob celebrating a sexual assault in Manipur went viral, Indian Americans and Indian expats took to the streets in cities in six American states, and more than 700 Indian Christians prayed for peace and justice in front of the UN.

The Indian Christian diaspora in the US could play a significant role in the complex political landscape surrounding religious freedom, but “because the Indian Christian diaspora is diverse ethnically and socio-economically and has not come to a common consensus on its commitment to human rights in the US and globally, they stay very quiet,” Christie said. He noted that many in this community stay quiet out of fear for their financial stability, property, the safety of their families, and worries about losing their Indian citizenship.

“Indian American Christians are a minority within the minority,” Sampath said. “You’re caught between these worlds, trying to survive as an Indian Christian minority within the larger Indian diaspora.”

Christie believes that Indian American Christians have a responsibility to advocate for more than just their own interests.

“If we benefit Muslims, Christians will benefit,” he said. “If we benefit Christians, Muslims and Hindus will benefit. Human rights is not a zero-sum game.”

- More from Surinder Kaur

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