Evangelicals for Harris Asked to ‘Cease and Desist’ Billy Graham Ad

Kathryn Post – Religion News Service

Franklin Graham says the campaign is “trying to mislead people” by positioning his father’s preaching in contrast to Donald Trump.

The ad uses clips from a Billy Graham sermon.

YouTube screengrab

The ad begins with a clip of Billy Graham, wearing glasses, a gray suit and tie, leaning in toward a pulpit.

“But you must realize that in the last days, the times will be full of danger,” Graham declares. “Men will become utterly self-centered and greedy for money.”

Suddenly, a clip of former president Donald Trump is spliced in. Standing before a row of American flags at a campaign rally in Des Moines, Trump says: “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.”

For the next few seconds, the ad, which has racked up over 30 million views, flips between Graham’s 1988 sermon, contrasting his points with shots of Trump using violent language, claiming to be “the chosen one” and talking about kissing women without their consent.

That ad, the result of a $1 million ad campaign by Evangelicals for Harris, is now the subject of a potential lawsuit from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based nonprofit that supports the ministries of Billy Graham’s son and grandson.

In late September and early October, Evangelicals for Harris, a grassroots campaign of the political action committee Evangelicals for America, said it received multiple letters from lawyers representing the association, including a “cease and desist” letter. An October 2 letter, sent from outside counsel and obtained by Religion News Service, threatened to sue Evangelicals for Harris on the basis of copyright infringement.

In a statement to RNS, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association said it does not generally comment on potential disputes, but it acknowledged having communicated with Evangelicals for Harris regarding its concerns about the “unauthorized, political use of BGEA’s copyrighted video,” and said it would continue to address the matter.

“It may be worth noting that, in all of his years of ministry and across relationships with 11 US presidents, Billy Graham sought only to encourage them and to offer them the counsel of Christ, as revealed through God’s Word. He never criticized presidents publicly and would undoubtedly refuse to let his sermons be used to do so, regardless of who is involved,” said the statement.

In August, the association’s president and CEO, Franklin Graham, turned to the social platform X to voice his displeasure at Evangelicals for Harris’s use of his father’s sermons.

“The liberals are using anything and everything they can to promote candidate Harris. They even developed a political ad trying to use my father @BillyGraham’s image. They are trying to mislead people,” he wrote. “Maybe they don’t know that my father appreciated the conservative values and policies of President @realDonaldTrump in 2016, and if he were alive today, my father’s views and opinions would not have changed.”

In response to the threatened lawsuit, Evangelicals for Harris released a statement saying Franklin Graham is taking a page from Trump’s playbook by trying to silence the group through legal action.

“Franklin is scared of our ads because we do not tell people what to do or think. We merely hold Trump’s own words up to the light of Scripture, the necessity of repentance, and Biblical warnings against leaders exactly like Trump,” it wrote in a post on X.

The lawyers representing Evangelicals for Harris also released their formal legal response to the threatened lawsuit. Originally sent on September 28, the letter asserts that the ad does not constitute copyright infringement or violate the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s right.

They write that the public discussion of Trump’s moral failings is “essential First Amendment expression” and that the use of Billy Graham’s sermon is protected under the Copyright Act.

“EFH will not be removing the ‘Keep Clear’ advertisement in response to your demand. The advertisement is a transformative, noncommercial use of less than two percent of a widely disseminated video, aimed at a market that BGEA (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) was prohibited from targeting,” the letter says.

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Evangelicals for Harris was founded by Jim Ball, an evangelical minister and former head of both the Evangelical Environmental Network and Evangelicals for Biden. Since its launch in August, the group has had over 300,000 people sign up for information about the campaign, according to Ball. Jerushah Duford, Billy Graham’s granddaughter; Bishop Claude Alexander of The Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina; and Baptist pastor Dwight McKissic are among the group’s signatories. (Alexander is also a CT board member.)

Ball said the “Keep Clear” ad, named after Graham’s admonishment to “keep clear of people like that,” was inspired by a desire to rely on the biblical wisdom of Billy Graham, whom Ball considers a personal hero, and to reintroduce young people to the evangelist.

“We’ve never had a situation where a single individual has threatened democracy and the rule of law like Mr. Trump has,” said Ball. “We’re also hoping to provide a witness to others that love should be at the heart of how we look at politics. … How are we called to love our neighbors in the public square? We think hands down that Kamala Harris is the candidate that everyone should be voting for on that regard.”

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Ideas

Facing My Limits in a Flood Zone

Hannah King

As a minister, I’m used to helping people during crisis. But trapped at home during Hurricane Helene, I could only care for who was in front of me.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / Getty

When we moved to the small town of Canton, North Carolina, last fall, we heard stories about flooding. Living in the mountains spells unpredictability. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred flooded the river that runs through our city, destroying significant portions of the downtown area. Some homes and businesses were lost.

So when we heard that Hurricane Helene had headed our way, people took it seriously. It seemed our little city was on guard and prepared for the storm. But on Friday morning, we still watched with collective shock and dismay when floodwaters were approaching rooflines and still rising.

One mantra I’ve been hearing in the aftermath is “Mountain people are resilient.” And they are. The spirit and the strength of our new community in this crisis is honestly staggering. But any level of preparedness or resilience doesn’t nullify trauma. Or homelessness. Or watching your business literally disappear before your eyes in a mudslide.

As community members and church leaders in the area, my husband and I have been eager to support our neighbors who were impacted by the flood. But widespread cellular and internet outages have made even the most basic communication and collaboration difficult. The first few days after the storm, our lives became hyperlocal: We walked through town, talking and praying with people and pooling resources with friends on our street.

Then, my husband started making his way around the county to coordinate broader efforts. I was at home with three small children and no way to hear or share news or participate in citywide projects. My inability to contribute was maddening. I was wracked with a strange combination of frantically wanting to help and being extremely limited in what I could do.

The truth, I soon remembered, is that limitation is a basic human condition. In our digitized, high-speed age, we believe the lie that we are limitless, omnipresent and omniconnected—but in reality, we are so very finite. Sometimes it takes a crisis to force us to realize this. Even then, we tend to rage against our limits, punishing ourselves for not being able to do more or becoming so disillusioned that we retreat into apathy.

But on the other side of the frustration is a freeing realization: All that any of us can do is the one or two things in front of us. We feed our kids; we pray for our neighbors; we donate or fundraise or hand out bottled water. These things might feel laughably small or even irrelevant in the face of national or global crises, but they are the very things God entrusts to us. In return, we must trust that God conscripts us, limits and all, to manifest his limitless love and presence in the world.

I see this promise on display in the composite stories around me. One of my neighbors, a pharmacist, is working part-time shifts at the hospital while also caring for her six school-age kids at home. Another, a pastor’s wife and small business owner, helps empty someone’s flooded house during the day and shares her family’s Wi-Fi signal with needy neighbors (like me) at night. This week, a newly ordained Lutheran minister whom we’ve never met drove a truck full of supplies across the state to our Anglican church—supplies she bought with the money she was gifted for her ordination. In their unique ways, each of them is part of the tapestry God is weaving to showcase his beauty in this tragedy.

Each of them also wishes they could do more. Many out-of-state friends and colleagues wish they could do more than donate, send supplies, or pray. But to those of us on the ground, each small offering we receive multiplies—it becomes not only blankets or bottled water or money but also a tangible reminder that we have not been forgotten. Today I unloaded dozens of relief boxes packed by complete strangers, people I will likely never meet or get to thank directly. Their gifts brought tears to my eyes.

Sometimes, of course, even small acts of obedience like packing a relief box or helping to unload it can feel overwhelming. In a crisis, our brains often lock down and we lose the ability to function normally. We feel overwhelmed by all the needs or frozen with confusion and fear. In these moments, the act of obedience entrusted to us might be as simple as getting out of bed or even offering up a prayer for help.

When I lost my brother suddenly six years ago, my first steps forward included choosing to eat breakfast and then going for a walk outside one day at a time. In the disorientation of that grief, I worked on my own small obedience.

But I did not walk alone. People supported me in myriad ways. They sent flowers, brought meals, played with my kids. Then, as now, it wasn’t a singular hero who swept in and fixed everything but an army of people doing the little things they could do to help. Because of them, my memories of a dark season are littered with gratitude and even joy. I believe the same will be true of this season in my town’s life.

I return to this belief as I grow in my understanding of Helene’s impact in my community. When I walked through town today, I began to realize how long this season will be. We will be recovering from this flood for years. The thought overwhelms me. My limited ability to help others over the long haul—or even to help myself when despair wells up in my throat—tempts me to burn out or to give up.

But in view of God’s expansive resources, our personal limitations are a gift to be received. In our collective weakness, we experience his strength. And in our small acts of obedience, we participate in a much larger economy of grace.

In this economy, the line between “helpers” and “receivers” blurs as we all practice saying “please” and “thank you.” And our confidence grows—not in our ability to accomplish our desired ends, but in the Father’s ability to fulfill his purposes through us.

This frees us to offer up what we have every day, even though we know it’s not enough. We trust that he will take and distribute our offering as he sees fit. We can’t control or understand how our offering might multiply. Sometimes we can’t even see it. But in the end, we will all be fed by his mercy—with baskets left over.

Hannah Miller King is a priest and writer serving at The Vine Anglican Church in Waynesville, North Carolina, and the author of a forthcoming book about living with hope in the presence of pain.

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Theology

5 Lessons Christians Can Learn from the Barmen Declaration

Kimlyn Bender

How a wartime confession resisted Hitler’s Nazification of the German church, and why its principles are still relevant today.

The Protestant Bishop Ludwig Muller does the Nazi salute outside the Town hall of Wittenberg in 1933.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

In recent weeks, a group of evangelicals crafted a Confession of Evangelical Conviction in response to the “social conflict and political division” plaguing the American church, especially amid another contentious presidential election season.

Few know, however, that this confession was conspicuously modeled on another: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, a framed copy of which hangs in my office. It was penned during Nazi-era Germany by Christians who opposed indirect state interference in the work and life of the church.

The Barmen Declaration has since become a model for resistance against other forms of ideologies and political systems that domesticate the gospel and compromise the church’s witness. It inspired both the Belhar Confession, penned in opposition to South Africa’s apartheid, and the international Orthodox opposition to the Russian Orthodox Church’s nationalist views after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Making public statements in response to cultural shifts has become a modern evangelical instinct, due in part to the legacy of Barmen. What can we learn from this document, and what critical reminders does it offer the Christian church today? There are many things we might consider, but here are five enduring lessons.

1. Our theology always has real-world implications.

In the 1930s in Germany, a group called the “German Christians” was already sympathetic to the political goals of National Socialism long before the rise of Hitler since they shared its convictions of racial and ethnic nationalism and antisemitism. They hoped to unite various German confessions under a single bishop and establish a single Volkskirche, or “people’s church”—one sympathetic to the Nazi government and supportive of the Germanic ideology of Adolf Hitler’s Reich.

These German Christians believed the divine will was revealed in Jesus Christ and in Scripture, but they also insisted that it could be discerned through natural theology—in nature and historic events. They concluded that the existence of different races and people was God’s design and that each group was to be kept distinct (the intermarriage of Aryans and non-Aryans, specifically Jews, was officially forbidden by the government in 1935). Natural theology for the German Christians was thus one of Volk (“peoplehood”), a mystical fusion of culture, blood (racial supremacy), and soil (land/nation).

In addition, German Christians believed the divine was expressed, and could be discerned, in singular historical turning points. Foremost among these events was the rise of National Socialism and Hitler, which they understood in spiritual terms and took to be the direct work of God’s providence in history for the salvation of the German nation.

In contrast, a group of Christians who called themselves the “Confessing Church” sought to oppose the German Christian teachings and governance. In May 1934 in the city of Barmen, 139 concerned delegates gathered for what would become the Confessing Church’s most famous synod, not least because of the Barmen Declaration that it produced.

Lutherans Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit and the Reformed theologian Karl Barth were commissioned to write the confession, with Barth as its principal author. The confession has six articles—the most well-known article of which is the first, which states,

Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

“We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.

From its first article, the Barmen Declaration explicitly rejects the premises of natural theology, and this rejection is a key to its legacy. In a time when distorted theology led to devastating consequences, the declaration sought a return to “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture.”

2. The church’s confession must be centered on Jesus Christ alone.

Many National Socialists spoke freely about God, but in terms of an absolute being. Most often, they referred to God with reference to his omnipotence as “the Almighty” (this was Hitler’s preferred way to speak of God). Others, like Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s propaganda minister, spoke passionately of “the Divine” or of “Providence.”

But these were vague utterances. As one pastor during the war observed, the word God in Germany is “an empty word into which any concept can be poured.”

In contrast, every resistance to National Socialism by Confessing Church members—such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Barth—was sustained by an appeal to the singular and supreme revelation of God in Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture.

These Christians perceived that, no matter how much traditional Christian language its leaders used, National Socialism was a rival religion that appealed to a different god—whether a god of a mystic ideal of racial superiority, or of the state itself, or of a generic, divine “Almighty.”

Moreover, the theologians in Germany who were most open to a natural theology of nature and history—and in turn downplayed God’s particular revelation in Christ and, at times, denied Jesus’ relation to Israel and Judaism—were those who were the most implicated in compromises with National Socialism.

Only a particular theology of the God of the gospel, a theology of the cross, could ever resist such idolatry in its full force.

3. An exclusive confession of Christ protects against ideological and political capture.

We as Christians can never place our ultimate hope in earthly political leaders or movements, no matter how promising or powerful they seem or however threatened we may believe ourselves to be. (Many Germans overlooked problems with National Socialism and fascism because they were terrified of communism and the Russian revolution of 1917.)

When rightly understood, Barmen offers a basis for both theological and political resistance against any claims to absolute allegiance made by a state or government. It also serves as an inoculation that fights against any ideology, whether of the left or the right, that might invade the church body.

For Christians, there can only be one Lord, one subject of our ultimate hope and allegiance. As the second article of Barmen declares, Jesus Christ has a claim “upon our whole life,” and Christians should reject “the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords.”

It was thus inevitable that the church would come into irreconcilable conflict with the National Socialist regime. As Judge Karl Roland Freisler of the Nazi People’s Court in Berlin noted at the death trial of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke: “There is one thing, Herr Graf, which we National Socialists and the Christians have in common, and only one: we both demand the whole man.”

4. Theological declarations, apart from confessional community, are not enough.

Those who assented to the Barmen Declaration not only viewed it as a binding confession but also lived a confessional life together in community. These committed Christians strove to remain faithful to the one Word of God and to be in service to the church and the vulnerable. Though few, they lived a life of intentional witness and corresponding suffering.

Most Protestant churches in Germany had no tradition of political resistance, and most Christians in Germany found such a thing inconceivable. Yet the Confessing Christians learned that, at times, discipleship entailed dissent. Bonhoeffer is perhaps the most famous of such dissenters, but there were many others like him.

Despite its shortcomings, the Confessing Church was the only German entity to resist the Nazi regime. Every other part of the nation—industry, the financial sector, the arts, the universities—was subjugated to state control. And the leaders of the Confessing Church paid a steep price for their convictions. Some were sent to concentration camps. Others were imprisoned or executed.

The Barmen Declaration was poignant because it was not only a statement of words but also a call for a holistic commitment to a costly way of life.

5. We should not romanticize Barmen but seek to live out its spirit in our present age.

It is tempting for us to romanticize Barmen, but there are a couple reasons why we should not do so.

Even for those who strongly disliked the government’s interference in their self-governance, most pastors in Germany—including many who were part of the Confessing Church—were not necessarily opposed to the National Socialist movement itself. Most remained loyal to their nation’s government, not wanting to appear unpatriotic or sectarian in any way.

In fact, the majority welcomed the chance to demonstrate their loyalty by signing up to serve in the German army when the war came. And despite several contrary examples, most said nothing when persecution of Jews and others intensified and was evident to all.

Moreover, we should remember that any superficial comparison between modern Western democracies in the early 21st century to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is unhelpful and often distortive. While some Christians in America see themselves as being in a state of persecution, such does not begin to compare to the systematic oppression of the churches that intensified in Germany from 1935 onward and throughout the war.

What can be directly applied from Barmen, though, is that the ultimate task of the church is not to align itself with the levers of political power for its own self-preservation. Rather, the church should trust its safeguarding to the Lord, in whom we find our true and proper power.

Faithfulness to the gospel, not political effectiveness, is the church’s divine commission. And there are real dangers when these are reversed or when the first is replaced by the second.

Two decades after World War II, in his treatise “The Christian Community and the Civil Community,” Barth remarked prophetically, “The secret contempt [that] a church fighting for its own interests with political weapons usually incurs even when it achieves a certain amount of success, is well deserved.”

In the end, the Christians in Germany who were the most committed to resisting the evils of the state were, ironically, those who were the least invested in preserving the church for its own sake. Instead, they were interested only in remaining faithful to the gospel—and this translated into acts of political resistance, often by Christians who were little known and frequently forgotten.

Friedrich Justus Perels was a Christian lawyer in Germany who was deeply involved in the Confessing Church. With remarkable clarity of conviction, he worked to free political prisoners, help relatives of those in concentration camps, and assist Jews in Germany. For these actions, he was arrested in October 1944.

On February 2, 1945, he was condemned to death. During the trial in Berlin, Freisler, the judge who presided over the trial, screamed at Perels: “After the war the Church will be wiped out.”

But Perels calmly replied, “The Church will endure.”

This is the confession of one whose hope was not in the church itself but in God, who through his Son promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

Kimlyn J. Bender is the Foy Valentine Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University. His books include Reading Karl Barth for the Church and 1 Corinthians in the Brazos Theological Commentary series.

- More from Kimlyn Bender

News

Back at Shooting Site, Trump Supporters Pray for His Protection

Harvest Prude and Megan Fowler in Butler, Pennsylvania

Still shaken by the tragic attack, Butler, Pennsylvania, welcomed the former president back with cheers of triumph and a memorial for the previous rally’s victim.

Donald Trump returned on Saturday to the scene of his attempted assassination in July.

Justin Merriman / Bloomberg via Getty Images

When Kori Koss heard that Donald Trump was coming back to Butler, she felt her stomach sink.

It’s been less than three months since a would-be assassin’s gunshots narrowly missed the former president. The shooter killed one man, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, and gravely injured two others.

Koss lives down the road from the Butler Farm Show grounds, close enough that she and her kids had set out chairs and set up a livestream of the July 13 rally. Close enough that at 6:11 p.m., they heard what they thought were fireworks.

Her husband, who had walked to the rally, called and told her someone was shooting. She told him in a panic to “get out of there.”

So when she found out Trump was returning in less than a week, she prayed every day leading up to the rally. When Saturday dawned, she took a chair, a cup of coffee, and her Bible out to her backyard that faces the rally site and opened up to Psalm 27.

Out of the first five verses, one line especially struck her: “My heart will not fear.” Meditating on that psalm, with its themes of God’s protection, brought the 46-year-old mother comfort and a sense of peace.

Koss, who attends a Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Butler, prayed Psalm 27 “over Trump and America” and prayed that “others would come to know God through this event.”

When the day of the rally came, it felt like déjà vu. Once again, her family opened up their yard for parking for rally-goers and exchanged small talk with attendees who tramped through her backyard. Once again, her father-in-law and husband attended. She and her kids watched from their backyard. But this time, there were no gunshots.

This time, the stream of people that filed in did not file out until much later. The rally wrapped up without any tragic incidents.

“Butler is a pretty tough, patriotic, resilient community,” Koss said. “I think people obviously showed up to support each other, like the churches did.”

Koss wasn’t the only person praying over her town.

The day before the rally, a group of Trump supporters gathered to “pray for the protection and safety” of Trump and the event, Deseret News reported.

The prayer gathering opened with the Lord’s Prayer, and the group also prayed a prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, which Trump had recently shared on social media. Eventually, the gathering shifted into a testimony night, where people shared where they had been when the original shooting happened, Deseret wrote.

Back at the rally grounds, the former president’s event was part somber memorial service, part “Trump farm show,” as Koss put it.

During his remarks, Trump fired up his supporters, saying that when the July shooting took place, “we all took a bullet for America.”

“Exactly 12 weeks ago this evening on this very ground, a cold-blooded assassin aimed to silence me and to silence the greatest movement, MAGA, in the history of our country,” Trump said.

“But by the hand of providence and the grace of God, that villain did not succeed in his goal, did not come close. He did not stop our movement; he did not break out our spirit. He did not shake our unyielding resolve to save America from evils of poverty, hatred, and destruction.”

In the bleachers behind the stage, Comperatore’s firefighter coat and helmet were placed where he had been sitting at the July rally. Introductory remarks paid tribute to Comperatore and honored his family members, who attended the event.

In the hours of speeches leading up to Trump’s appearance, nearly every speaker hailed the courage of the first responders on July 13, remembered David Dutch and James Copenhaven, the two men injured in the shooting, and honored Comperatore’s memory.

Many also attributed Trump’s survival to God, with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump saying that God had spared Trump’s life: “Donald Trump was made for a time such as this.”

“If you have any questions whether God exists and whether he performs miracles, we got our answer right here July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania,” said Lara Trump, who serves as the cochair of the Republican National Committee.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, told the crowd, “I truly believe God saved President Trump’s life that day.” The Ohio senator also joined the crowd in chants of “Corey, Corey, Corey.”

He told attendees that it was a “testament to your courage and patriotism that you’re here again today.”

James Sweetland, the doctor who had come to Comperatore’s aid at the July rally, shared his story from the stage. Sweetland said after the shots rang out, he heard someone shouting that a bystander was down, but he hesitated to assist. Then he heard a “clear, rich, and reassuring” voice telling him to go help. “I’m telling you right now, that was the voice of God,” he said.

At 6:11 p.m., Trump led the crowd in a moment of silence while bells tolled four times for each victim. Tenor Christopher Macchio then sang “Ave Maria.”

“Corey’s not with us tonight, and he should be,” he said, mentioning the volunteer firefighter’s widow and two daughters by name. “I can only imagine the depths of your grief.”

Some speakers urged rally-goers to help turn down the heated political rhetoric. A local sheriff asked them to disagree respectfully and passionately but “without violence.” Sweetland challenged attendees to reach out to at least two people they know with different political views and ask to meet with them to discuss their differences “in a civil and respectful manner.”

After that, Trump’s remarks quickly shifted to standard rally fare, and he touched on everything from immigration to fracking with bombast, at times doubling down on debunked claims that he won the 2020 election and directing insults toward Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

At one point, Trump invited tech billionaire Elon Musk on stage. Musk, who endorsed Trump July 13, encouraged everyone in the crowd to pester their friends and family until they registered to vote.

A massive crowd filling the grounds listened to the former president with reverence, occasionally punctuating the air with chants or a stray “We love you, Trump!”

Some dedicated supporters had even camped out the night before to get a good spot in line, and traffic in the surrounding area had slowed to a crawl by that morning. The grounds bristled with a large security contingent, with local police presence and Secret Service agents dotting the crowd and snipers watching on nearby rooftops.

Rally-goers sported typical campaign merch, but many also wore T-shirts or held signs referencing the Butler event.

Many waved signs that read “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” a reference to Trump’s words after the bullet grazed his ear and he got back on his feet to let the crowd know he was all right. Others wore shirts with an image of Trump with his fist in the air and the caption, “I Survived Butler.”

Jacob King, a student at nearby Grove City College, will cast his first vote for Trump come November. The 18-year-old, who sported a “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president” T-shirt, told Christianity Today he likes how Trump “stands for more freedom in our country.”

Karen Toff, a 63-year-old with short hair dyed pink, had a “Women for Trump” button pinned to a shirt that read “Pray, Vote, Pray.” She said that Trump is the “most pro-life president we’ve ever had.”

Toff, who belongs to a Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod congregation, said she appreciates Trump’s stance on shifting abortion policy to the states. She’s found herself disagreeing with other pro-life Christians who have voiced support for a national abortion ban: “I don’t think that’s reasonable.”

Toff said she also supports Trump’s foreign policy. “We need to help our people first,” she said.

Several attendees mentioned economic issues, citing high gas and grocery prices, as reasons they thought life had been better when Trump was president.

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Lisa Sicilia, who carried a Bible with her and offered “hallelujah” and “amen” in response to the speakers’ remarks, said she had been praying at the July 13 rally. On Saturday, she made her way through the crowd to the front. Standing by the short metal fence, she bowed her head and clasped her hands until the end of the event.

Around town, the aftereffects of the shooting have lingered. One congregation, the Church of God at Connoquenessing, put up billboards in several spots around town, including near the fairgrounds, that read, “We Thank God For His Mercy. We Comfort Those Who Mourn.”

Another, Gospel Life Church in nearby Evans City, set up a pop-up prayer tent in the days after the shooting with signs that read, “Pray for America.” Kori Koss stopped to join in prayer after seeing the signs on her way home one day.

Karen DeLorenzo, a 43-year-old teacher who attends a Presbyterian church in town, said she thought the rallies had driven more people to put out many Trump-Vance signs, as well as a few Harris-Walz signs.

“People are a little more open with what their feelings are, in either direction,” she said.

Brandon Lenhart, the senior pastor at North Main Street Church of God, said the weeks after the shooting were “surreal.” Helicopters and a security presence remained in town, and major news outlets camped out near the Farm Show grounds and held interviews in local spots like Vintage Coffee House.

“Now we’re on the map, but not in the way I think we would like to be. You don’t want to be known for ‘That’s the place the assassination attempt happened on this former president,’” he said.

Families from North Main Street Church attended both rallies, though one woman, who had been less than ten feet away from Comperatore during the time of the shooting, told Lenhart she couldn’t go back. Another couple, who parked in Koss’s neighborhood for both rallies, left the rally early and came back to their car after only a few hours. They found they just couldn’t stay.

In the aftermath of the July rally, Lenhart found himself preparing remarks on Saturday night to address the tragedy when he took the pulpit. “It is a traumatic experience for many in our community. Many of our churches had people there, so I felt like I should address that,” Lenhart said.

This time around, there thankfully wasn’t any need to scramble the church’s regular programming.

DeLorenzo, who also lives close to the Farm Show, was glad when she heard that Trump was returning.

“I think it was important for Butler to have a second [rally] back here again too,” DeLorenzo said, “to end on a better note. Rather than being remembered by that, let’s be remembered by this huge, peaceful rally.”

News

JD Vance Says Trump White House Will ‘Fight for Israel’

Bonnie Kristian in Washington, DC

The candidate’s message at an October 7 memorial rally was popular among Christian supporters.

JD Vance at Philos Project's "Remembering October 7th" memorial rally.

Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

Several hundred people on the National Mall in Washington cheered Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance as he headlined an October 7th memorial rally, punctuating his remarks on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war with shouts of “yes” and “amen.”

“I know that in this crowd some of us are Christians, some of us are Jews, some of us are people even of no faith,” Vance began. “But we are united in the basic, common-sense principle that we want the good guys to win, and we want the bad guys to lose. And what happened on October the 7th was disgraceful, and we have to fight to make sure it never happens again.”

Monday’s event was assembled by a coalition of 60 organizations led by the Philos Project, a group that “seeks to promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East.”

Over the rest of his 12-minute speech, Vance ranged from campus protests—also a popular theme from fellow speakers on the lineup, including activist Adela Cojab and Daily Wire journalist Kassy Akiva—to antisemitism, American ignorance of Holocaust history, and a throwback invocation of “peace through strength.”

The VP candidate was met with a standing ovation, and the attendees launched into chants of “Bring them home!” when Vance said the “only way this war is going to end is when Hamas gives up its arms and stops the fighting and lets the hostages come home.”

The Catholic convert didn’t make theological arguments, never alluding to Christianity outside of two brief mentions of agreement across faiths and a sign-off of “God bless you.”

Still, Christians in the audience—who have been following the war and praying for peace in Israel—said they continue to see God at work. Attendee Joseph McLean said that Vance’s remarks made him feel as if things were going to change soon.

“I felt like Israel was going to be protected with that man speaking, that man speaking and his soon-to-be boss, Donald Trump,” said McLean, who is from Mobile, Alabama. “I believe both of them will be elected, and this whole nation will change as a result of it, so I’m praying for it.”

Last month, Trump called himself a “big protector” of Israel and claimed without explanation that the Jewish state is at risk of “total annihilation” if the “other side” is elected. Vance made a similar comment Monday, saying if Americans “do this the right way, we’re going to reject [antisemitism] in the ballot box on November 5.”

An elder at a Pentecostal-leaning church, McLean envisioned God directing a Trump-Vance White House on whether to send US troops into combat against Hamas or even Iran.

“I believe as these men get in, they will hear God,” McLean said, “and if he says, ‘I want them over there,’ they’ll be there.”

American defense of Israel is McLean’s top issue for this election, he added, because he believes the US was created by God for this purpose and “without Israel, us protecting them, we don’t have an America.”

In a recent Lifeway Research survey, evangelical Christians and Trump supporters are more likely than others to prioritize a candidate’s position on foreign policy when deciding their vote.

Vance supporter Alexandra Salcedo, a student at Penn State and a California native, cited concerns around anti-Israel protests in America as a major issue for her this election.

“I usually lean more Democrat, but this election I’m going to lean Republican,” said Salcedo, who traveled to Washington specifically for the memorial rally.

As a Christian, Salcedo said she prays for both sides in the Israel-Hamas war, “but I do feel like Israel has been treated and portrayed unfairly.”

She also mentioned protests when weighing whether US troops should fight on Israel’s behalf. “I think at this point it might be necessary,” she said, “because we see groups in college campuses just spreading hate and harassing even Americans.”

During his speech, Vance criticized the chant “from the river to the sea” heard at many pro-Palestinian protests.

“This is not just a dispute about territory or borders. This is a war between a peaceful nation and terrorists who want to exterminate the Jewish people and eradicate the state of Israel forever,” he said. “Americans believe that Israel, we believe that the Jewish state, has a right to exist. And Donald Trump and I will fight for that every single day when we’re in the White House.”

Vance criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate-stage claim that no US troops are “in any war zone around the world.”

“There are American troops in harm’s way,” he said, warning that “America and the world are at risk of being dragged into a massive and bloody regional conflict” in the Middle East. He did not say whether he’d take those troops out of harm’s way, however, simply adding a line of blame for Iran.

Vance also said that Harris and President Joe Biden “haven’t done a thing” to bring hostages home from Gaza.

The Biden administration could “use [its] authority to help bring them home,” and a future Trump administration will “bring home American hostages wherever they’re held and whoever’s holding [them],” Vance said, not specifying how.

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Vance’s speech continued the trajectory of his much-scrutinized comments about Israel and Iran at last week’s vice presidential debate. There, he answered a question about a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran by saying it’s “up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe.”

On the National Mall, Vance again endorsed Israel’s right “to do what it takes to end the war,” pledging to “give Israel” that “ability.” He did not say what kind of US support that could entail or whether it might include US boots on the ground.

The Philos Project characterized the memorial rally as a bipartisan gathering, and Philos senior research fellow Andrew Doran mentioned the difficulty of “trying to thread that needle.”

The programming up through Vance’s speech had a rightward tilt, but speakers varied in their positions and tone.

Comedian Zach Sage Fox and Concerned Women for America chief Penny Nance spoke of praying for innocent Gazan children’s safety. Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies advised that when “a mass murderer tells you they are going to kill you, believe them. Act. Rise up and kill them first.”

Organizers did invite the Harris-Walz campaign to participate as well, Doran noted. Unfortunately, he said, “We didn’t get a response.”

- More from Bonnie Kristian

Ideas

You Are the Light of the Public Square

Justin Giboney

Contributor

American Christians can illuminate our country’s politics—if we engage with moral imagination, neighborliness, boldness, and humility.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

The Christian public witness has raised a voice of emancipation in American history. Our faith has provided the civic muscle to build schools for the poor and hospitals for the sick. Christians have visited the lonely and comforted the dying. The church has confronted sex trade pimps and run off neighborhood dope peddlers. It’s no exaggeration to say that no other institution in America has a comparable record of service. At our best, Christians have illuminated the way toward justice and moral order in US society.

Conversely, at our worst, American Christians have misused the church’s social and political capital. We’ve demeaned the outcast and condoned the worst elements of secular society for the sake of our own power or validation. Too often, our hymns and public action have been in conflict. We’ve lent moral authority to amoral leaders and allowed ourselves to become the prop of devious political interests.

When wielded with selflessness and sobriety, the Christian public witness can be the conscience and Good Samaritan of this nation. When driven by pride, conformity, or domination, it can trample the best American ideals and even tread over the principles of our own divine exemplar, Jesus Christ.

Our public engagement has been a powerful—and regrettably mercurial—force in the American experiment. And in this polarized moment, we must decide which side of this dual legacy we’ll continue. Will we reflect the tenacity and grace of Fannie Lou Hamer and Dorothy Day? Or will we embrace the hubris of the Christian nationalist and the opportunism of the jackleg preacher?

If the issues our nation faces today were small and superficial, believers could just play nice and mind our own business. But it’s far more complicated than that. Americans’ disagreements concern our fundamental values and the well-being of our neighbors. Debates about economics, the scope of parental rights, and life-or-death issues like health care and abortion can’t be shrugged off.

We share this democracy, and many of our positions impact other people and groups—America is truly a union. We should be respectful across political differences, but not every political perspective is as good as the next one. There are ideas and movements that deserve a very public and democratic death, which means political conflict is unavoidable and necessary. We can’t silently watch from the sidelines as Wall Street steals from the widow or social media sexually corrupts the orphan.

The question is not “Should Christians engage in public life?” but “How can Christians imitate Christ as we engage constructively in the conflicts of democracy?”

First, we must engage with moral imagination, which is a product of faith. Moral imagination gives us a redemptive perspective by reminding us that today’s issues are significant but not ultimate. Therefore, our social and political action is significant, but this world’s direction is determined by God—not us, our allies, or our opponents.

Moral imagination gives us the vision to transcend the contempt, skepticism, and desperation that mark the spirit of our day because we know that whatever happens, it’s not the end of the story. Christians must have the capacity to see and pursue what ought to be rather than being arrested by what is or what is most probable. We can acknowledge a bleak reality without becoming its slave.

Christians politicking with moral imagination will see beyond the nasty behavior of our opponents to the brokenness behind those actions. We’ll tenaciously confront the unjust and immoral without denying their human dignity or reciprocating their hatred. We will not be profane to get our points across or pretend the other side is pure evil to articulate why they’re wrong. Even when integrity is not rewarded in culture or politics, moral imagination will remind us that it’s still our duty as followers of Christ.

Moral imagination makes us aspirational and innovative. During the 2024 election cycle, many American Christians’ political commentary has depended on fearmongering. Our public witness is lazy and pedestrian, so everything the left does is called “Marxism,” and the right’s efforts are dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0.”

We settle for those tired allegations because articulating an artful, fair critique of our opposition takes more time and vision. Christians must demand better of our would-be leaders (James 3:1). Anyone who wants to lead us must have a positive vision and a critique that addresses the best arguments on the other side. We cannot be satisfied with caricatures and misrepresentations.

Next, to be a neighbor in public life is to be an advocate: to identify an issue that’s tormenting a community and passionately seek a solution. Sacrificing your time, resources, and social capital to aid others is the 1 John 3:16 definition of love. It’s the imitation of Jesus in the public square.

Loving, neighborly advocacy can’t be mean-spirited. But sadly, some of the most passionate advocates in our democracy seem to be the most bitter. This is an occupational hazard of frontline advocacy: The setbacks, heartbreaks, and dreams deferred can distort a person. Our passion can become poisonous, a toxin that drains the spirit of compassion. Our social actions can become counterproductive, and our ugly posture can end up doing a disservice to both our cause and the people we’ve set out to protect.

For Christians, advocacy must always be an act of love, not a source of contempt and rage. It must be a means of worship, a service to our neighbors done in obedience to God. We should campaign and reform like Thomas A. Dorsey, the godfather of gospel music, composed, with a joyous spiritual in our hearts and a mind resolved to “never turn back.”

A good cause isn’t enough in and of itself; the spirit of our efforts must also be redemptive. We should advocate because it glorifies God, not because we’re assured of personal exaltation or temporal victories. As C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend, “It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that), but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God.”

Lastly, we must lead with boldness and humility. The Christian in conservative circles must speak without equivocation against racism and for civic pluralism. The Christian in progressive spaces—the academy and the Democratic caucus—must stand firm in professing that the value of autonomy ends where sin begins. Those who worship at the altar of scientism or self-perception must lovingly be confronted with moral knowledge and wisdom.

Yet we can’t allow our boldness to become self-righteousness. We must reckon with our tendency to overestimate our own rightness and goodness. If we’re to lead well in a diverse democracy, we must first acknowledge our own failures and humbly accept correction for our errors, including correction from Americans with views very different from our own.

The American abolition and Civil Rights movements are proof that Christian witness can light the public square. Our faithfulness is needed now amid the fog of polarization.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

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Culture

Heaven Is A Homeplace

Amanda Held Opelt

Hurricane Helene devastated the land I love. My pain points me toward what’s to come.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels, Unsplash, Wikimedia Commons

On the morning of Friday, September 27, I sent a frantic text message to my cousin Paul:

“Been thinking of Granny’s house and hoping it survives this storm! Let us know!”

It wasn’t long after I sent the text that the lights went out, along with the internet. And cell signal, already spotty in the mountains, seemed to drop altogether. There we were: me and my husband and our two small children, alone with the wind, the rain, and our worry.

I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina in a little community called Meat Camp just north of Boone. My husband and I are grateful to be raising our girls here, in a region where my roots grow deep. My six-times great-grandfather came to this area around the time of the American Revolution and set up a homestead on the banks of Little Rock Creek in Bakersville, an hour or two south of where I live now.

A farmhouse dating back to the mid-1800s still sits along that creek, inherited and recently renovated by my cousin Paul. “Granny’s House,” as we’ve always called it, is home to so many memories for me: Christmas mornings, summers splashing in the creek, bountiful tables of fried trout, biscuits and gravy, soup beans, and fresh tomatoes. Just across the road is a small graveyard where Granny (my great-grandmother) along with countless other relatives (great-great grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins) are buried.

That house and that land are the center of kinship and ancestry for me, a physical space reminding me of who I am and whom I came from. Appalachians call this a “homeplace.”

Though I spent my growing-up years in Alabama and East Tennessee, I think I was always meant to come back to Western North Carolina. We’ve now lived here for 13 years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life. It was here where I discovered the meaning of the word home, where my husband and I created our own “homeplace” of sorts.

People say that home is where the heart is. But I like to think that home is where the body is. What I mean is that to “be home” is to know a place, a people, and a personal shelter in an embodied way. Home is something you feel in the ground beneath your feet, the roof over your head, and the other human bodies encircling you with unconditional love. It is both concept and substance, an incarnation of belonging.

For Appalachians especially, home is more than a house. Home is the land that sustains you. It is the rich soil of the bottomland where you plant your garden and grow your apple trees. It is the fields and forests where your ancestors grazed cattle, hunted game, and foraged for food.

Home is a terrain veined by countless rivers and creeks, the lifeblood of our population. Our waterways carve out the hollers we call communities, churn the wheels that traditionally grind our grains, give us water to drink and fish to eat, and offer our children endless hours of play along the banks and mossy creek rocks. We navigate our lives by these waterways. They create the undulating grids of our townships, chart the course for our roads and infrastructure. They name our communities: Little Rock Creek, Laurel Fork, the New River, Cane Creek, Pine Run, Boone Fork, the Toe River, Meat Camp Creek.

Home is a culture, the generational practices born of hardscrabble living and ingenuity. It is the art, the music, the foodways, and the storied mythologies that are imparted to you by grandparents and great-grandparents. Home is an economy of creativity and provisions: familiar coffee shops, favorite eateries, concert venues, farmers’ markets, and theaters.

Home is the vast network of kinship that supports you. It is the friends who show up with food when you are sick, the neighbors who mow your grass when you are out of town, the family who comes around you to mourn when you mourn and celebrate when you celebrate. Home is the church that communally practices the habits of a holy life: worshiping, praying, learning from Scripture, and serving those in need.

And yes, home is a house—a literal “homeplace” that holds in its holy walls all those instances of safety and rest. It is the floorboards your children learn to walk on, the walls and roofs that keep the rain and cold out, the tables on which you break bread with family and neighbors, the kitchens and laundry rooms in which you conduct life’s labors in all their mundanity and joy. Ordinary havens, extraordinary vessels of love. Home is a sacred space.

Home is sight, smell, sound, and taste: the vista from a hilltop, the wet earth of a creek bank, the plucked string of a mandolin, the sweetness of fresh-baked apple pie. Home is the topography you are always eager to return to. Home is the place where the road rises up to meet you.

But sometimes the road falls out from under you.

When Hurricane Helene tore through Southern Appalachia, every stream, every tributary, and every underground spring in the mountains became a raging torrent. Our beloved waters that made this place home suddenly took so many homes away.

The waters engulfed roads, pulling pavement into the water and washing out bridges. It poured into our downtown businesses, scattering merchandise and spoiling food. Our hillsides rushed down upon houses in waves of mud. Trees smashed into roofs and cars.

Suddenly, everything that makes a home a home was interrupted. Power was lost, well pumps could no longer draw water into houses, and all communication was down. Restaurants, stores, and schools across the region shut down indefinitely. The winding roads that used to take us to town, to church, and to our friends were suddenly inaccessible, washed away and making many neighborhoods and communities devastated islands, cut off from the rest of the world.

There is a feeling of betrayal when a land you love so much seems to turn on you. I felt this acutely even though my own house remained undamaged by wind or water. We had no power and no water, and we quickly ran through our shelf-stable food. Limited cell coverage meant painfully scarce communication with friends and family. When we saw that the only two bridges leading in and out of our neighborhood were dangerously close to collapsing, we made the hard decision to relocate to my parents’ house.

Our house was standing, but we’d lost our home.

Now we are left wondering: When can we “go home”? What we are really wondering is—when will our friends be safe, when can we hike again, when can we rebuild our gardens, when can we have coffee together, when can we break bread at our table, and when can we worship in our sacred sanctuaries?

When home is disrupted by a broken creation, when we suffer as inhabitants of a world that has been groaning since the Fall, we are wont to think of our heavenly home. Popular belief among many evangelicals is that when we die, we go to heaven and leave this physical earth and these corporeal bodies behind forever. We picture heaven as a disembodied, ethereal place, no longer spoiled by the hardships of materiality.

But Romans 8:21 tells us that God’s plan is for a new heaven and a new earth. Revelation 21 and 22 speak of an embodied experience of God’s perfect presence, where a crystal-clear river flows from the throne of God and there is a tree of life bearing fruit every month (22:1–2). The Holy City where we will reside rests on a mountain, and its walls and gates are beautiful (21:10–19). Isaiah speaks of feasting and drinking an abundance of food and wine in this new heaven and earth (25:6), a place where all people will be safe and secure.

And just as Jesus’s body was resurrected, so too our bodies will be resurrected, free from the pain of hunger, thirst, and loneliness. Our heavenly home is resurrected life with Christ. It will be a physical, material reality, just as our own homes are now. Finally enfolded in the communion of all the saints, we will know no wants and experience the joy of true, deep rest. It will be the ultimate “homeplace.”

This feeling of the absence of home in the wake of a disaster is perhaps a gift, a way of knowing that deep in our hearts we long for sacred belonging, and what we long for will be given to us someday. What’s ours to do now is to endure—to celebrate the comforts of home (when we have them) as a foretaste of what’s to come, to rebuild when homes are broken, and to pray for the eventual restoration of all things.

Late Saturday night, I received a text from my cousin. He’d heard from a neighbor that the storm was indeed bad at Little Rock Creek, that the waters had risen, and that the trees had come down. But Granny’s house was undamaged, standing strong as it had for 150 years: a homeplace just waiting to shelter someone.

A picture of our future home and shelter from all harm.

Amanda Held Opelt is an author, speaker, and songwriter. She has published two books.

- More from Amanda Held Opelt

Books

Review

We Have Never Been Deplorable

Carrie McKean

A new book critiques elites’ incurious accounts of the American right and illuminates their complicity in our social breakdown.

Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo / Getty

By the time Hilary Clinton “put half of Trump’s supporters” into “the basket of deplorables” in 2016, I confess I was frustrated enough to largely agree with her—even though she was talking about people I cared about in communities like mine. It seemed simple to me at the time: If you don’t want to be called “deplorable,” maybe don’t behave so deplorably.

Eight years later, I don’t need to rehash all the reasons I’d come to feel that way. The excesses of Trump and his loyalists are widely recognized, even among many Trump voters. My experience through those years is also familiar to many moderate evangelicals, who, like me, grew increasingly baffled as our faith leaders, friends, and family wholeheartedly endorsed a man who reflected none of our shared values, values that for so long we’d loudly insisted were bedrock and nonnegotiable. How could this be happening?

Though I’m ashamed to say it now, my confusion hardened into cynicism as I consumed a steady diet of commentary about the danger posed by MAGA voters. I grew arrogant, sure of my intellectual and moral superiority over people I’d come dangerously close to dismissing as backwater boors, and less and less aware of my own hubris (Prov. 16:18).

Then came the pandemic. By August of 2020, I was astonished at my own quick pivot—taken aback by how quickly I’d grown thankful to live in a deep red town. I wrote dispatches from West Texas for The New York Times and The Atlantic describing how good it was to live in an area that didn’t kill small businesses out of “an abundance of caution” or sacrifice our children’s educations on the altar of safety.

The responses I got from readers of legacy media in more progressive enclaves (some hate-filled death wishes, some longing for the normalcy I enjoyed) were eye-opening. In the more negative exchanges, I was baffled time and again by my correspondents’ inability to see how they’d become the very thing they hate: bigoted, closed-minded, arrogant, and incurious about the lives of people who are different from them. I ate a slice of humble pie and saw how I’d become enamored with the polished speech and polite niceties of the ruling class, so enchanted that I’d missed both the failures of those I’d grown to admire and the complexity of those I was tempted to deplore.

I still live in a politically conservative community, and I haven’t stopped wrestling with the apparent mismatch between values and votes in the years since. But I’m leaving my impatience and cynicism behind. Though I still share many of the core concerns of the anti-MAGA crowd, I’m wary of the broad, flat brush with which sophisticated politicos paint conservative, religious parts of the country like mine. By the time Trump left office, I’d grown to understand that it isn’t fair—let alone permissible for Christians (Matt. 5:44)—to deplore those who voted (or will vote) for him.

But finding critical yet nuanced writing about my neighbors has been a challenge. Much of what comes from the progressive left—usually some version of the claim that all evangelical Republicans are white Christian nationalists who pose a dangerous threat to democracy—is reductive and one-dimensional. It doesn’t match the reality I see in my everyday life, where, for example, a Trump-voting Hispanic pastor provides shelter and resources to countless migrants.

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, a new book from sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, is an illuminating exception to that rule. For anyone genuinely curious about why working-class, culturally conservative Americans, many of them evangelical Christians, remain so loyal to Trump, We Have Never Been Woke is required reading.

In a book that’s both granular in its detail and panoramic in its perspective, al-Gharbi builds a tightly argued case for how the “Great Awokening” is neither particularly novel nor particularly helpful to the marginalized and disenfranchised of American society. Drawing on both his working-class background and the experiences and expertise afforded by his access to some of the most hallowed halls of American academia, al-Gharbi understands that we can’t reduce the current political moment to a battle of blue heroes and red villains.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer a road map out of our political predicament. Yet for Christian readers, Never Been Woke’s conclusions suggest the church is uniquely positioned to help repair our divided society—if we can return to our first love (Rev. 2:4) and the love Jesus commands of us (Matt. 22:34–40).

Core to grasping al-Gharbi’s argument is his concept of “symbolic capitalists.” This is a group he defines as the academics, bureaucrats, consultants, journalists, and other “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis.” That is, they are our culture’s elites, often (but not always) wealthy, well educated, and enormously influential, with insatiable appetites for the one sort of capital that might be more useful than cold, hard cash when it comes to getting ahead these days: social currency.

One way symbolic capitalists amass more social currency is to champion social justice and the oppressed. But the main effect of their activism, al-Gharbi charges, is the advancement of their own agendas and personal success.

That’s not an accusation of deception or even cynicism. These elites sincerely (and loudly) believe in ideals like equality and justice, Never Been Woke contends. Yet there’s a “profound gulf between symbolic capitalists’ rhetoric about various social ills and their lifestyles and behaviors ‘in the world.’” To put it plainly, in the parlance of evangelicals: They don’t practice what they preach.

From this premise, al-Gharbi ranges widely. In some ways, the book reads as a “theory of everything,” arguing that underneath the discord so often pinned on the bad behavior of working-class Republicans—people who don’t use the “right” words or put their pronouns in their bios—is a simmering pot of resentment stoked by cultural elites.

Those most skilled at playing the rhetorical “virtue game” are at the top of the societal heap, and their displays of virtue do far less to help the underclass than to protect their own comfort and power. The “Great Awokening” is all fervor and no self-sacrificing love. It turns even well-meaning adherents into hardened ideologues serving a small and capricious god in their own image. It’s legalism, secular-style.

In practice, this looks like calls to defund the police coming mostly from people who live in low-crime neighborhoods. It looks like spending big money to hire DEI experts instead of materially—maybe even self-sacrificially—improving the lives of the poor. It looks like self-identifying into marginalized groups (Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s history as a “Native American” is a prime example) that just so happen to give you a leg up on elite college and work applications.

It looks like calling for pandemic-era lockdowns while ordering DoorDash; or renaming a school named for a confederate general while doing little to ensure the minority students within are learning to read; or thrilling with enthusiasm at a Black Lives Matter march while being irritated by the homeless Black man on your block.

Or, to borrow the apostle Paul’s words, it looks like speaking in the tongues of men or of angels without having love (1 Cor. 13:1).

So we live in a society ruled by symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi writes, but significantly populated by people they deplore. The result is polarization and mutual disdain, with each side unwilling to give the other a fair hearing or take responsibility for its own sins and errors.

It reminds me of nothing so much as my daughters’ sisterly conflicts. Though I will not name names, one of my children is fiery and hot-tempered, while the other is into covert ops. Though they’re each guilty of instigating arguments, over the years I’ve learned that some of the trickiest situations to navigate start with the quiet provocateur deliberately pushing her less-restrained sister over the edge. When I intervene, she’s all innocence: “What did I do? She should have better self-control.”

It’s easy to exclusively blame the child with the explosive reaction. It’s also, often, a mistake. And the same is true on a much larger scale. Yes, MAGA fanaticism is a problem. Racism and storming the Capitol are wrong. But the “deplorables” have real concerns that deserve to be heard, not manipulated and inflamed by opportunistic politicians. To refuse to listen to the story beneath the noise of outrage—even when the outrage is offensive and crass—only drives us further apart.

As Christians, we should know this. Jesus’ answer to the problem al-Gharbi describes is for us to take seriously his command to love the least of these and to lay down our lives for our friends, including the ones in the red hats. It’s to meet with Nicodemus and to dine with Zacchaeus.

Al-Gharbi is not a Christian. After a crisis of faith resulted in his “abandoning a calling” to become a Catholic priest, he entered a season of atheism before converting to Islam. Some Christians, to their peril, will dismiss We Have Never Been Woke on this ground alone. Others will read with misplaced glee, touting it as a masterful book that “owns the libs.” Either response would miss an opportunity to grow in wisdom and love.

I had a recurring thought as I read this book: I cannot believe he’s writing this. I cannot believe it’s getting published.This book doesn’t reflect well on the gatekeepers of all the institutions al-Gharbi needs on his side to succeed in his field. For that reason alone, many people would not have written this book or at least would have picked a different, softer angle.

After all, al-Gharbi isn’t a right-wing pundit lobbing bombs at the left from a safe perch at Breitbart. As he repeatedly acknowledges, he’s a symbolic capitalist, too. He’s asking his peers to be honest with themselves about their complicity in America’s social breakdown. He doesn’t question their motives or principles, but he does reveal the tension produced when those principles are paired with a very human desire to maintain one’s advantages and to pass them on to one’s children.

That gentle example deserves imitation. What might it look like if more of us—Democrats and Republicans, elite and working class—took the time in the lead-up to the election to admit how our own behavior has failed the test of 1 Corinthians 13? What if we confessed that we also have conflicting desires and betrayed principles? How can we better listen for God calling us to honesty about ourselves, repentance where we have ignored or maligned our neighbors, and real service to others?

Christians are also uniquely positioned to respond to al-Gharbi’s warnings about modern identity politics, in which some groups are encouraged to take great pride in their identities while others are strongly discouraged from doing the same. As al-Gharbi explored in a conversation with political scientist Yascha Mounk, this “asymmetric multiculturalism” is celebrated on the left, but it’s socially unstable. We should lean into what unites us, he advises, instead of emphasizing differences and valuing some while denigrating others.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that actually it’s a lot easier for people to [get along] if you start by foregrounding things that people have in common—like ‘we’re all Americans’ or ‘we’re all Christians,’” al-Gharbi said in his conversation with Mounk. “One important path forward is to find ways of appealing and justifying and affirming superordinate values, superordinate identities, common goals, shared interests,” he continued. “If you can’t build things up—if you’re only focused on criticizing and deconstructing and problematizing and tearing things down—it’s really impossible to meaningfully sustain [shared] identities and shared goals and shared values.”

This is where the church can shine if we turn away from our political idols and self-aggrandizement and turn toward Jesus. We can remind one another that what we have in common in Christ is far more profound and significant than what separates us. We can move from that common ground to be agents of social repair in our communities. With God’s help, we can live and serve and even engage in politics in humble, practical, other-oriented love.

Despite his deconversion, al-Gharbi concludes We Have Never Been Woke by quoting Jesus in Matthew 6 and warning against “performative displays” of righteousness. That’s a problem on the left, the book’s main subject for critique, but it’s also a problem on the right and in every group of fallen, sinful humans. It’s a problem in my own heart. “Ultimately, Jesus argued, people have to choose what’s really important to them,” al-Gharbi writes, “and it’s a choice they make with their actions, not their words. You know the tree by its fruit.”

As I came to better understand in the years between 2016 and 2020, conservatives can rightfully dislike the rotten fruit of our cultural elites. But if we’re to fully benefit from al-Gharbi’s message, we must turn this scrutiny on ourselves as much as our political rivals: What fruit are we bearing? Is it carefully arranged to make us look righteous? Or is it good and abundant and beautiful and life-giving fruit, bringing glory to God and nourishment to all?

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.

- More from Carrie McKean

Books

Review

The Internet’s Sins Are Our Sins. But It Shouldn’t Escape All Blame.

Bonnie Kristian

A critic of tech panic forgets that our tools shape us just as we shape them.

Americans tend to be optimists about technology. We see it as a means of progress, comfort, wealth, and discovery. And why not? Technology has treated us well, and very few among us would pooh-pooh the engine, the hot water heater, the refrigerator, the word processor, the text message.

In technology—it might be a mild blasphemy to say—we live and move and have our being. Technology shapes how we work, travel, and eat—even how we think and write and speak to one another. And technology is increasingly digital: The mass of hardware and software we commonly sweep together as “the internet” reaches into ever more parts of our lives, if only invisibly.

But in the last decade, the internet has rather lost its sheen for select segments of the American public. This change should not be overstated; though a Jonathan Haidt–style tech skepticism generally prevails within elite media, Americans still use the internet, oppose smartphone bans in schools, and, on average, give children their first smartphones at the tender age of 11.

Yet we do have a growing sense of unease. Certainly, the kind of excitement that existed in 2008—fueled by hopefulness about social media’s role in politics—is long gone. We have become the internet’s accusers, as long-time journalist Jeff Jarvis argues in The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic. We allege misdeeds, he writes, ranging from polarizing “society into echo chambers” to “robbing us of our attention, altering our brains, making us stupid, and electing Donald Trump.”

Are these accusations unfair? I wanted to read Jarvis’s book because I’ve leveled a version of several myself and could fairly be called a tech skeptic. (My kids won’t have smartphones at 11.) But maybe I’ve been swept along too far toward pessimism. Maybe I’m beholden to an overblown moral panic. Maybe I’ve made the internet a scapegoat for sins not its own.

So I came to The Web We Weave to encounter a more considered tech optimism than the basic American instinct and to give that optimism a fair shake. Jarvis does make vital, if occasionally inconsistent, points about individual responsibility and state regulation. But his defense of the internet also wrongly presumes that technologies are neutral tools, uncritically embraces online living, blurs the line between journalism and advocacy, and misunderstands the biblical idea of covenant.

Responsibility and regulation

The most important takeaway of The Web We Weave is this: The internet’s sins are our sins, and we can repent of them. We are responsible for the digital landscape we’ve created, but we can also change it. We aren’t fated to the futures of sci-fi doom or glory.

“What the internet is, good and bad, is made of human accomplishment and human failure,” Jarvis writes. “All the ills the internet is accused of fostering—racism, divisiveness, injustice, inequity, ignorance—are not the fault of the technology. The technology did not cause them—we did.”

In one of several dips into religious language, Jarvis examines “the internet’s seven deadly sins,” It stands accused, in his telling, of encouraging hate, lies, greed, the corruption of youth, addiction, excess, and hubris. In every case, Jarvis concludes, the internet “is blamed as the cause of [these] ills when often it is merely a conduit for them.”

Generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT is especially adept at channeling human vice, for it uses scads of human-made content as its raw materials. The Web We Weave describes this AI as a sort of structural sin detector, able to observe and sketch contemporary human evil on a grand scale.

Jarvis is careful to clarify that his call for responsibility here is not a call for state regulation. He understands the problem of regulatory capture and supports Section 230, a widely misunderstood law that functions as the “Internet’s First Amendment” by protecting online platforms from legal liability for what their users post. He’s an ardent advocate of free speech, attuned to the danger of drawing a “legal line between good and bad speech,” the risk of panic-induced legislation, and the foolishness of imagining we can eradicate disinformation. He even rejects secondhand censorship, noting that laws forcing platforms to take down “legal but harmful” speech aren’t meaningfully different from direct suppression.

Tech as tool

Jarvis is at his most sensible on those themes. He recognizes that the underlying issue is human behavior and that laws are “ineffective at regulating” behavior “except in the extreme.”

In consequence, The Web We Weave proposes “different strategies” to reform our online conduct: “education, moral suasion, social pressure, and the public negotiation of norms.” In its efforts in these directions, however, the book falls short.

Undergirding many of Jarvis’s recommendations is an understanding of digital technologies as morally neutral tools. Much “like the printing press and steam, the transmitter and the automobile,” he argues, the internet and AI are tools “which we may use to good ends and bad.”

In a bare sense that’s true—yet thinking of technology only or even primarily as a “tool we use to mold our culture” can blind us to how the tool molds us in turn. We do have agency. We do wield the hammer. But day in and day out, it works on us while we work with it. Our hands grow calloused. Our backs habitually bend, then strain to straighten. Our minds, as the old saying goes, begin to see everything as a nail.

The insufficiency of Jarvis’s take on how technology affects us is particularly evident when he engages with Haidt (along with fellow travelers Jean Twenge and Nicholas Carr). He accuses these thinkers of being self-interested “moral entrepreneurs” and “paternalistic prigs” chasing money, fame, and book deals. Brushing away Haidt’s reams of research documenting the ill effects of letting children online too much and too young, Jarvis subscribes instead to the Taylor Lorenz Theory of Why the Kids Are Not Okay, which he summarizes—not in so many words—as the existence of adult Republicans.

That concern set aside, Jarvis blithely welcomes AI into the classroom, inviting educational institutions to stop asking students to absorb facts and learn to write. They can “concentrate less on memorization and content creation,” he says, because these are “things machines can now do.” So eager is Jarvis to defend generative AI as a neutral tool that he pins all responsibility for problems on its makers, letting users off the hook.

And he either misses or misunderstands the Haidt-style case for getting children off social media, contending that this would leave them “no better off” because they’d be “more isolated.” They wouldn’t, because, as Haidt has explained, this is “a collective action problem: it’s hard for anyone to quit as long as everyone else is on a platform.” But if we all quit together, quitting isn’t isolating. Kids would relearn other ways to hang out.

A life online

Perhaps that relearning is difficult for Jarvis to imagine because, as he frankly admits, he is extremely online. In one passage, while conceding that real-life connections matter, he describes living a very internet-mediated existence. “I care more,” Jarvis says, “about the communities I interact with online” than about local relationships in his “suburban town where some of my neighbors are Trump voters.”

Thus, describing research in which algorithm changes on Facebook and Instagram led to users spending “dramatically less time on both platforms,” Jarvis doesn’t seem to see that result as especially welcome.

Or, when he describes Black women being “harassed, abused, surveilled, and doxed” on Twitter (now X), he never considers that they should log off, apparently accepting that Twitter is a big enough part of their lives to warrant enduring abuse. Ideally, of course, Black women (and everyone else) would be able to use social media without being harassed. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and suffering through digital attacks is not our best or only option.

Jarvis concedes that the “internet’s business model” involves “seducing and tricking people into diverting their attention from more important matters.” But his solution is not spending more of our lives offline. Instead, he foresees “develop[ing] new models to support creativity, reporting, education, and civic involvement online”—that is, moving those important matters outside the arena of embodied life.

What happened to our power to decide our own future? If humans can change the direction of the whole internet, surely we can also sometimes turn off our screens and engage out here in meatspace.

Activist journalism and ‘AI boys’

Much of that online education, if Jarvis had his way, would be conducted by an increasingly activist press.

Like Margaret Sullivan, another journalist of his generation, Jarvis is tired of “the old journalistic trope that newspapers just deliver the facts.” He wants journalists to “be advocates and activists for truth and understanding, equity and justice,” to “play the role of educator to place facts in the context of history, economics, and ethics.” It’s not enough for reporters to report on problems, Jarvis says. They must also “seek solutions,” “understand needs,” “see opportunities,” and “provid[e] leadership.”

Of course, we already have a kind of journalism to do all these things. It’s called opinion. For decades—and for good reason—opinion has been distinguished from straight reporting, but that distinction has become a point of contention in recent years.

Like many who want to blur the line between reporting and opining, Jarvis does so in pursuit of social justice, and he never ceases reminding the reader just how progressive he is. Jarvis is a white man, and he has even dared to become an old white man. But he makes sure we know he’s what left-wing writer Freddie deBoer has dubbed a “Good White Man,” the kind of progressive white man who shoulders “a special burden of helping to end injustice and to ‘center’ women, people of color, and other minority groups, to step back and let others speak.”

This is difficult to do when one is a white man writing a book. Jarvis coins the phrase “AI boys” and uses it throughout to reiterate his contempt for the predominantly male developers and entrepreneurs who create the technology he embraces—technology he says should be wrested from their control once they’ve launched it.

He suggests that the real motivation of those who raise concerns about “the internet, social media, and algorithms … might well be fear or bigotry directed at people who exploit a moment of technologically driven change to demand a seat at the table of power.”

And he has that increasingly common tic of invoking “women and people of color” as a magical monolith whose wisdom is perpetually neglected by a dastardly press. This might be a strong narrative were the mainstream press not so obviously interested in demographic diversity. The very day I wrote this review, a reporter asked me for an interview, casually mentioning her interest in including “other sources in my story than just white men.”

A strange covenant

For all that, The Web We Weave won me back a bit at the end. There, Jarvis returns to his theme of individual responsibility and even virtue, urging readers to hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior online and so make a small but realistic contribution to a more humane and truthful internet culture.

Curiously, he couches this proposal in the language of covenant, explicitly invoking the word’s biblical history to say “that we—users, companies, technologists, governments, researchers—need to take on a sense of responsibility and obligation to one another”:

As my [Presbyterian minister] sister points out, a covenant—such as the one made in marriage—is open-ended and can change as life and circumstances evolve and unexpected challenges arise. More than statutory community standards imposed from on high and more than actual statutes legislated by governments, covenants should be living documents, open, collective, and collaborative, able to change in new situations but still hearkening and hewing to sets of principles that should govern us all with mutual consent.

These covenants would be created voluntarily, Jarvis writes, but companies that didn’t volunteer to make a meaningful covenant with users “might end up with rules imposed on them by legislators. A first step in regulation could be for government to expect companies to negotiate covenants in public.” So, maybe not so voluntary after all, for what is a governmental expectation if not regulation backed by force?

That question of compulsion aside, Jarvis’s understanding of covenant doesn’t square with the biblical context to which he appeals. God’s covenants with his creation are many things, but “open-ended,” “collaborative,” and responsive to unexpected challenges are not descriptors that come to mind.

A biblical covenant, as J. I. Packer wrote for CT in 1962, “is a defined relationship of promise and commitment which binds the parties concerned to perform whatever duties towards each other their relationship may involve.” Or, to borrow the words of Paul Eddy, a pastor and scholar of covenant at Bethel University, a covenant is a “committed, community-based, kinship creating, agape-love relationship.” It is “love formalized.”

Jarvis is right to distinguish covenant from contract and law, but he’s mistaken to imagine it can define the relationship between me and Mark Zuckerberg—or me and Jeff Jarvis. His closing line asks readers to hold him accountable to his self-set standards for his online behavior. But how? Some tweets?

A covenant for virtue is a good idea, but the accountability it entails can only happen in a real relationship. And real relationships can grow online, but their more natural habitat is the offline world, the flesh-and-blood world, the world beyond the internet.

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

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News

UK Regulators Investigate Barnabas Aid over Reports of Misused Funds

Kate Shellnutt

The charity is under an “unprecedented level of scrutiny on our financial processes” after founders and top leaders were suspended.

Charity Commission

One of the biggest Christian charities in the United Kingdom is being investigated by regulators following reports of financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and escalating internal tensions.

After opening a statutory inquiry into Barnabas Aid—a nonprofit that brings in £21.6 million ($28.3 million) a year to assist persecuted Christians—the UK’s Charity Commission announced last week that it had issued financial sanctions against the group.

“Due to concerns that the charity’s funds may have been misused in the past, and questions as to the trustees’ oversight, the Commission has used its powers to temporarily restrict any transactions the charity intends to make which are over £4,000,” said the regulators, who oversee charities in England and Wales.

Barnabas Aid, also called Barnabas Fund, was founded in England in 1993 by Patrick Sookhdeo, a convert who researched Christian-Muslim relations and advocated against the persecution of Christian minorities abroad. The group now operates internationally, with both a UK board of trustees and a global board overseeing various national offices.

Barnabas Aid suspended Sookhdeo and other senior leaders earlier this year when it launched an independent investigation to look into whistleblower claims against them. In August, Premier Christian News reported on the internal “chaos” at Barnabas Aid.

A statement posted on the Barnabas Aid site says its investigation has already found evidence of theft and misuse of funds, and the ministry plans to comply with the Charity Commission inquiry. The organization says it will be able to continue to fund projects, only with the additional administrative hurdle of getting the commission’s approval.

We welcome the Charity Commission's inquiry.
Read our statement here 👇 https://t.co/5TUFOB6yjH https://t.co/WTuaYVAjIU
— Barnabas Aid (@BarnabasAid) October 3, 2024

Financial concerns led Barnabas Aid to dismiss international CEO Noel Frost back in the spring. The Telegraph UK wrote that Barnabas Aid’s initial investigation found Frost used charity funds for personal expenses and transferred more than £130,000 to personal accounts. He denied the allegations of financial wrongdoing.

The chairs of Barnabas Aid in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and the UK went on to ask for the resignations of four additional senior leaders: Patrick and Rosemary Sookhdeo (international director and international director emeritus), Caroline Kerslake (international director of projects), and Prasad Phillips (deputy international director). They have been suspended while the investigation takes place.

Based on an interim report from the firm, Barnabas Aid said it has identified “serious and repeated” violations of its own financial safeguards as well as “significant payments made to the founders (and to others close to them—including some Board Members/Trustees), which cannot be readily explained.”

Barnabas Aid apologized to supporters in August, reported the issues to regulators, and commissioned a London law firm to investigate, but members of the UK board said they did not approve of the independent investigation.

The Charity Commission is currently looking into those claims.

“The Commission is investigating issues, including allegations of unauthorised payments to some of the current and former trustees and related parties, allegations that the charity’s founders have inappropriate control or influence over how the charity operates, and possible unmanaged conflicts of interest,” it said.

Kerslake said the suspended leaders are willing to cooperate with any impartial investigation. She told The Telegraph that the money transferred to the Sookhdeos came from donations made specifically for them “in lieu of salaries.”

The Charity Commission is also examining Barnabas Aid’s relationship with Nexcus International, formerly Christian Relief International (CRI).

Nexcus serves as an international office for Barnabas Aid and coordinates with the national offices in the UK, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. The Barnabas Aid website says going through CRI—which is registered in the US but operates in England—allows the charity to keep lower overheads and helps ensure its compliance with legal and financial requirements.

The chair of Barnabas Aid UK, Philip Richards, claimed in a letter to supporters that Nexcus “seized control of the operations of Barnabas Aid,” appointed its new CEO, Colin Bloom, and has been surreptitiously using its donor database.

Barnabas Aid countered to say Nexcus is “a Barnabas entity” since it was created by Sookhdeo, who served as its chair until April 2024, and since its board is made up of Barnabas Aid’s national leaders.

US watchdog site MinistryWatch reported on Barnabas Aid in 2022, interviewing Jeremy Frith, the CEO leading the US office.

“Frith admits the ministry’s websites and regular communication do a poor job of communicating its international structure. The Barnabas Aid, USA redirects to the Barnabas Fund in the UK,” the story said. “US gifts sent to Barnabas Aid go to CRI, which then distributes funds to partners around the world.”

According to MinistryWatch, Barnabas Aid finances projects in dozens of countries by awarding grants to ministries—mostly churches they’ve partnered with for decades—to conduct the work.

The suspended founder, Sookhdeo, was previously convicted in a sexual assault case in 2015 and found not guilty in another case in 2016. He denied the allegations and temporarily resigned before being reinstated into leadership as international director of Barnabas Aid.

The charity defended Sookhdeo and accused fellow evangelical organizations of excluding Barnabas Aid from cooperative international religious freedom efforts.

Full results of the current investigation, being conducted by the law firm Crowell & Moring, are expected later this fall. When the Charity Commission inquiry concludes, it will also publish a report detailing its findings and any disciplinary action.

Following the Charity Commission inquiry, Barnabas Aid has reiterated its commitment to transparency and cooperate repentance.

“There is now an unprecedented level of scrutiny on our financial processes to ensure transparency and accountability and you can trust that any money donated to us will be used to help persecuted Christians,” it said in a FAQ for supporters.

“While team members at Barnabas Aid did not know or participate in financial misconduct, we must collectively repent of any evil that has happened, placing our faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

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1. Our theology always has real-world implications.

2. The church’s confession must be centered on Jesus Christ alone.

3. An exclusive confession of Christ protects against ideological and political capture.

4. Theological declarations, apart from confessional community, are not enough.

5. We should not romanticize Barmen but seek to live out its spirit in our present age.

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In this series

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Responsibility and regulation

Tech as tool

A life online

Activist journalism and ‘AI boys’

A strange covenant

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