Watching the Olympics as a French Christian

Interview by Morgan Lee

Evangelical leader Erwan Cloarec shares his reactions to the opening ceremony, why he is enjoying the games, and how he hopes the church is seizing the moment to live out its faith.

The Eiffel Tower with the Olympic Rings

David Ramos / Staff / Getty

On Sunday, at the start of the second week of the Olympics, France won its 44th medal, surpassing its previous record total for a modern Olympics. Few might have predicted either the country’s extraordinary athletic success or the this national joy, which seemed in short supply after contentious snap national elections in June and July.

But for some French Christians, negative feelings emerged again following the controversial opening ceremony. Erwan Cloarec, president of the Conseil National des Évangéliques de France (CNEF), noted this “distress” last week in a statement, adding that he and the director general of CNEF would be meeting with the Central Office of Religious Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior that day to advocate for a “secularism which makes room for everyone” and for “state guarantees that all, believers or not, will be respected in their essential convictions.”

Cloarec pointed out that many Christian ministries had spent months anticipating that the Olympics would offer them an opportunity to live out their faith to the thousands descending upon the city. Through Ensemble2024, evangelical congregations and ministries have organized community tournaments, a K-Pop worship service, an exhibition examining the intersections of body, sport, and spirituality, a day of surfing, and a praise festival, as well as handing out water bottles and hygienic products. They have also provided chaplains to athletes and offered opportunities for Christian athletes to share their testimonies.

“Let us see in the situation that has arisen a real opportunity to bear witness to our faith while the person of Christ has just been placed at the center of these games,” Cloraec stated. “Let us hear the cries of the heart and the need for reconciliation of our contemporaries, their quest for identity and belonging. They cry out in a pluralistic society; let us show them how to cry out louder to the one who invites them all to his table and offers true reconciliation, true identity and belonging.”

CT asked Cloarec to discuss French evangelical reaction to the opening ceremony, what he wants people to know about laïcité, and what he has loved about the Olympics this year.

How have you personally been a part of expressions of faith around the Olympics?

Ensemble2024 is really an evangelical Protestant initiative, but because of the spirit of the Olympic Games, we have connected with stakeholders of other faiths. There was an interfaith opening celebration in which I participated at the very beginning of the games. CNEF also attended another event that wasn’t an interreligious celebration, in that we didn’t have any type of religious service or acts but instead showcased the numerous religions in the city acting in service of the common good.

How did French evangelicals react to the Olympics’ opening ceremony?

People felt hurt and had a sense of being humiliated. I know that for many outside of France, the scene of the Lord’s Supper was wounding. There was this feeling that through this parody, this mockery of the Lord’s Supper, we were being targeted for our faith and that our faith was being mocked in a way, even if this wasn’t necessarily the real intention.

As the ceremony’s artistic director has explained—and we can accept—this wasn’t his intended meaning. But in any case, in the portrayal of this scene and the subversion of the Lord’s Supper in a contemporary and inclusive version, it felt as if certain symbols were being played with and Christianity was being targeted. So we reacted by acknowledging this feeling of humiliation that people felt and by denouncing the fact that in this ceremony there was an agenda to promote an ideology. Ideological propaganda wasn’t really appropriate during this ceremony.

How have any previous events informed the way in which French evangelicals responded to this one?

Obviously, this ceremony was quite unique. On the other hand, religious leaders and evangelical leaders in particular have been aware of what is referred to as the anti-separatism law of 2021 (renamed the Law to Uphold Republican Principles and the Fight Against Separatism). This law tightened the regulations for our churches and shifted France’s policy of laïcité [a distinctly French form of separation of church and state that has historically been viewed positively by French evangelicals] from a laïcité of freedom to a laïcité of surveillance.

This law brought new rules and regulations that make church organization more administratively complex, with new financial and legal constraints. So in this current moment, it’s possible that evangelicals, at least, are also expressing this larger, built-up feeling of despair that churches are being mistreated.

For our non-French readers, what is laïcité? Why did it come about?

What we call French-style secularism is indeed a specific system and one unfamiliar to those outside of France. The great fight we are waging is to ensure that secularism serves the objectives that it is called to serve—that is, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, and freedom of religion.

To that end, French secularism should be at the service of religion. It is not there to repress it. It is there to allow everyone to believe freely or not to believe, to live as they wish according to their own values and according to their faith, with the possibility of sharing one's faith or one's atheism or whatever you want. The law guarantees it and has done so since the 1905 Law of Separation of Church and State.

This is the form of secularism that should prevail, but frequently, we have another reading of secularism that is sometimes used by the media or certain politicians. This other version would claim that secularism exists to return the exercise of worship to the private sphere, and ultimately to ensure that religion is seen as little as possible and is either hidden or silenced. So our fight is about the true system of secularism. Secularism is there to allow faith to express itself, including in the public space, without having to apologize for believing what we believe.

On a positive note, we appreciate the great freedom to express our faith that we evangelicals have experienced around the Olympics.

Are there aspects of secularism that we appreciate?

Basically, secularism is good if it is in the service of the fundamental freedom of worship.

One of the things that displeased us about the opening ceremony was that it had the blessing of the head of state and represented the Republic of France, which meant that it had to ensure that no citizen felt excluded or singled out. Secularism, which guarantees the neutrality of the state, is a strong value in France of the government. And yet, we had the feeling in this opening ceremony that the republic did not respect this principle of neutrality but instead targeted one religion in particular, notably by evoking the Last Supper.

If we defend the liberty of all, this includes artistic freedom, freedom of thought, and freedom to criticize Christianity. Demanding that believers should be free to defend their faith is consistent with affirming that non-believers can say what they think. They can criticize Christianity, Islam, or anything they want to in society.

This is a freedom that must be protected—to believe or not believe, to defend your faith or criticize faith. These are all necessary guarantees. But the opening ceremony of the Olympics is something different—it’s a ceremony representing the Republic of France, and in the name of the principle of neutrality, they need to be careful in this context to respect each person.

What have you loved about the games?

Outside of this unfortunate episode in the opening ceremony, by all other measures it was a creative success, and the Olympic Games, according to what I hear in the media, seem to be a success. So, as French people, we are proud that the games are running smoothly. In Paris, so many well-organized venues have been integrated among the city’s historic monuments. This is beautiful and remarkable. It is a well-oiled machine. We can be proud that the first week of these games has been a success for France.

We are proud and enthusiastic for swimmer Léon Marchand and judoka Teddy Riner. [Marchand won four individual gold medals and one relay bronze, and Riner earned gold medals in both individual and team judo.] We had a great first week!

Finally, all the Ensemble2024 stakeholders and participants are grateful for everything that is happening, the contacts we have made, the expressions of the gospel throughout the games, and the hope we have for beyond the Olympics.

With additional help by Kami Rice and Landry Ndikumasabo.

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News

Died: Doris Brougham, Missionary Who Taught English to Taiwan

Yiting Tsai

For more than 70 years, Brougham used Studio Classroom and her trumpet to introduce Taiwan to Jesus.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Doris Brougham, an American missionary, who for 70 years used English and music to share Christ with millions of Taiwanese people, died Tuesday at the age of 98. Through radio, television, magazines, live performances, and in-person classes, Brougham’s organization Overseas Radio & Television (ORTV) taught everyone from dignitaries to middle school students how to speak English. At the same time, she held weekly English Bible studies and started a popular Christian singing group called Heavenly Melody.

Brougham’s contributions to Taiwan led her to receive its highest civilian award, the Order of the Brilliant Star with Violet Grand Cordon, in 2002. Last year, then-president Tsai Ing-wen made an appearance on ORTV’s show Studio Classroom to hand-deliver Brougham a Taiwanese passport, a special honor given 72 years after she first arrived in Taiwan.

“Her story brings tears to [my] eyes,” wrote former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou in the preface of the 1998 Chinese-language biography on Brougham. “She is the English teacher of 20 million people [the population of Taiwan], cultivating countless professionals in the English education field. … How many people have listened to her broadcasts and read her articles? Surely more than 20 million.” While, today, Brougham is the most well-known American in Taiwan—where Christians make up 7 percent of the population—she never planned to come to Taiwan in the first place. The missionary’s initial aim was to minister to mainland China, but the Chinese Civil War forced her to change plans and move to Taiwan (then called Formosa). Her love of music led her to start the first Christian radio station, the beginning of what became a popular media ministry.

“I was just here to serve because God led me here,” Brougham told CNA in 2023. “I just thought about doing that each day. Then days became months and then years, and, wow, here I am 72 years later!"

Doris Brougham was born in 1926 in Seattle, the sixth of eight children. Her father was a mechanic, while her mother stayed at home. Despite living through the Great Depression, her mother taught her and her siblings to think of ways to help the less fortunate, according to the biography.

Brougham’s parents passed down to her a love of music. One time, when Brougham was a child, her father’s client could not afford to pay for car repairs and begged to use his saxophone as payment. After her father gave the saxophone to Doris, she began practicing every day and joined her school orchestra. Later, she learned how to play the trumpet and the French horn, instruments that would accompany her the rest of her life. Even into her 90s, Brougham would play her trumpet onstage at rallies around Taiwan. The call to China came at a summer Bible camp when Brougham was 12. Chinese evangelist Ji Zhiwen asked the crowd of Americans, “Who would like to go to China and help the people there in their need?” As Brougham raised her hand, the adults around her laughed, thinking that she had no idea what she was signing up for, Brougham recalled in her biography.

Five years later, while debating whether to take a full-ride scholarship to the Eastman School of Music, Brougham remembered her promise to go to China. Psalm 2:8 came to mind: “Ask me, and I will make the nations your heritage, the ends of the earth your possession.” Brougham responded to God, “If you need me, I would go to the farthest ends of the earth for you.” After finishing Bible school, Brougham joined the Evangelical Alliance Mission and boarded a steamer for China in the spring of 1948. Shortly after arriving in China, the civil war intensified. Brougham and other missionaries made their way from Shanghai to Lanzhou to Hong Kong to escape the fighting. Along the way, she dressed soldiers’ wounds, led Bible studies in refugee camps, and preached to ethnic Tanka people. Eventually, the missionaries were forced to leave mainland China, so in 1951, Brougham moved to Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had established the Republic of China.

Unlike most missionaries who resided in the more populous western half of the island, Brougham chose to go to Hualien on the eastern coast. She soon found that her Mandarin was no help, as the aboriginals she ministered to spoke either local languages or Japanese, due to Japanese colonization. Still, she built friendships with local children by playing the trumpet and teaching them to sing, and slowly learned the language. During her time there, she taught music at Yu-Shan Theological College, trained Sunday school teachers, and started a small church.

Brougham learned that to reach people, “you had to do something to get their attention,” she told World magazine. “You have to connect, not just communicate.” She decided to start Taiwan’s first Christian radio program in 1951 to reach more people with the gospel. The show included choir singing, preaching, skits, and, of course, her trumpet playing.

Brougham told World that, at the time, she liked to ride her bike while the program was on and hear people on the streets and in the temples listening to it (at the time, Taiwan was about 99 percent Buddhist). Once, Brougham said a Buddhist nun called her over and secretly asked where she could find a Bible. Seeing her success, Far Eastern Broadcasting Company asked her to develop more Mandarin programs that were broadcast into mainland China. In a time when English resources were scarce, leaders in Taiwan, including then-president Chiang Kai-shek, asked Brougham to teach government officials. At one point, her students included members of Chiang’s cabinet.

In 1962, the Ministry of Education asked the state-run radio station to produce a radio program to teach English. The company asked Brougham to lead it, and Studio Classroom was born. Listeners asked for the show to print its on-air dialogues so they could follow along at home, which gave rise to the Studio Classroom magazine.

When the first TVs came to Taiwan that same year, Taiwan had only one station, and Brougham needed to compete with Buddhist and Catholic groups to clinch the solo slot available for religious programming. Because her show had music, producers chose it. She remembers people crowding around the rare television inside temples to watch sermons and choirs singing hymns. “How often can you preach in a Buddhist temple?” Brougham told World. “God had a plan for that to happen.”

Yet the new gospel broadcasting ministry, ORTV, lacked funds. Brougham considered selling the saxophone her father had given her in childhood. With a heavy heart, she thought, If I can’t part with my own belongings, how can I expect others to help us? She ended up selling it. To raise money, Doris returned to the US several times, sharing her vision with churches and Christian business owners. She encouraged her introverted self by saying, This is not for myself; it’s for God.

Her TV program featured a choir called Heavenly Melody Singers, which became the first Christian singing group in Taiwan. Heavenly Melody has since recorded more than 30 albums and toured in 36 countries.

Over the decades, the music and English teaching ministries continued to grow. Studio Classroom’s programs and magazines expanded to include Let’s Talk in English for younger students and Advanced. Today, the Studio Classroom TV show incorporates puppets, music, and on-the-ground travelogues in its English teaching, while its teachers travel around Taiwan holding rallies at public schools. ORTV also continues to hold English classes for government officials, as well as weekly Bible studies for students across Taipei. The late Christian artist Sun Yue stated that, in Taiwan, almost everyone under the age of 60 who can speak English grew up listening to Studio Classroom, especially as schools used the magazine and radio program to build up their students’ English skills. He said Doris’s life was “legendary,” because she held on to convictions she made at the age of 12 and maintained them throughout her life. “Everyone needs to learn about Teacher Doris’s life and her choices, which are completely different from the values of this society,” he added.

In 2001, heavy rains and flooding from Typhoon Nari severely damaged ORTV’s expensive production equipment and building. But Brougham encouraged the staff by saying, “Don’t be sad about what we’ve lost; these are just tools. The most important thing is that we are all here and can continue to serve God.”

Through the years, Brougham, who never married, worked tirelessly. She once recalled a conversation with Billy Graham, where she asked the evangelist whether she should retire at 65. He responded by saying, “Doris, [retirement] is not in the Bible.” Brougham took that advice to heart as she continued to work at the ORTV office until the age of 97, even as she relied on a wheelchair to get around.

During a Christmas concert last December, Doris shared with the audience: “I’ve been in Asia for more than 70 years, and I’ve always told people that God loves everyone so much that he sent his only son, Jesus, into the world to die on the cross for our sins, so that we could be forgiven of our sins and spend eternity with him.”

According to her will, she plans to donate everything she had and will be buried in Taipei.

With additional reporting by Angela Lu Fulton.

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News

Walz’s Brand Is More Left than Lutheran Among Minnesota Evangelicals

Harvest Prude

Despite his folksy Midwestern dad persona, conservative Christians say the governor has alienated the Right with his policies on abortion, transgender youth, and COVID restrictions.

Tim Walz

Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

Some Minnesotans don’t recognize Gov. Tim Walz in the vaunted coverage he’s received since becoming Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s pick for vice president this week.

Walz, 60, is a self-described “Minnesota Lutheran,” belonging to the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), according to Religion News Service. Profiles of the former teacher turned politician are punctuated with descriptors like folksy and avuncular.

“He’s touting himself as the everyday Midwestern dad,” but his administration has been far more polarizing in the state, according to Julie Johnson, a fourth-generation Minnesotan and a member of an Evangelical Free congregation in a Minneapolis suburb. She said that, under his leadership, Walz has swung the state to the left on basically every issue, alienating religious conservatives along the way.

Walz won the governor’s mansion in 2018. But rather than sticking to the moderate “One Minnesota” approach that he promised on the campaign trail and that characterized his time in the House of Representatives, Walz’s priority has been “more of a war on our culture,” Johnson said.

Johnson, an advocate for a Christian nonprofit, pointed to a host of progressive policies his administration enacted: signing a law that makes abortion a right in the state at any point in a pregnancy, legalizing marijuana, giving driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and making the state a “refuge” for those seeking gender transitions.

His COVID-19 era policies also earned chagrin from conservatives as he restricted church gatherings and set up a hotline for people to report those who breached social distancing policies.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, on behalf of the Minnesota Catholic Conference and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS, the more conservative Lutheran denomination), negotiated with the Walz administration after it initially prevented houses of worship from having services of more than ten people while allowing retailers to resume operating at 50 percent capacity. There was a lawsuit before the state allowed church services to be less restricted.

Other Christians in Minnesota said that while Walz could shore up Democratic enthusiasm for left-leaning voters, he wasn’t the kind of politician who could appeal to conservatives.

Walz’s parents were Catholic, according to the Star Tribune, and he has periodically posted about attending worship services, sometimes at Pilgrim Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in St. Paul. In Minnesota, 20 percent of the population identifies as mainline Lutheran, compared to just 2.1 percent of Americans overall, according to Pew Research Center polling.

While the denomination is progressive, the politics in the pews of ELCA churches present a more mixed picture. In 2020, a slight majority of ELCA Lutherans voted for Trump, noted researcher Ryan Burge.

Among the ELCA, around 43 percent identified as or leaned Republican, and 47 percent identified as or leaned Democrat, Pew found. Around 24 percent identified as liberal, 41 percent as moderate, and 32 percent as conservative.

The LCMS, meanwhile, identified as or leaned Republican by nearly 60 percent, with 27 percent identifying as or leaning Democrat. A much higher percentage (52%) identified as conservative, compared to only 33 percent as moderate and 10 percent as liberal.

If elected, Walz would be the second vice president to both hail from Minnesota and identify with Lutheranism: Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was raised Lutheran.

“His name does not come to mind when I think of a faith leader,” Julie Johnson said.

Lutherans who hail from the evangelical LCMS denomination don’t see Walz’s candidacy as a boon for more representation of their faith.

“For the average Missouri Synod member, both pastor and lay member, [Walz] absolutely will not be seen as one of us,” Hans Fiene, a Lutheran pastor in Missouri and creator of Lutheran Satire, a multimedia project to teach about the Lutheran faith, told CT. “So there won’t be any kind of situation like with Biden being a Catholic, where Catholics go, Well, he doesn’t really represent us, but he’s still a Catholic.”

“He’s really not representing our worldview,” Greg Seltz, director of the Lutheran Center for Religious Liberty in Washington, DC, an advocacy arm of the LCMS, told CT. “I’m not judging him by the official teachings of the ELCA, you know, I’m judging him by his policies, which is the way I think we should judge a candidate.”

Seltz mentioned Walz’s positions on abortion as disqualifying. He said that while Walz wasn’t a familiar figure to him initially, since the announcement, he’s heard numerous concerns from pro-life Lutheran groups and other conservative Christians.

“The whole way he’s being presented to us is that he’s just a moderate country boy from Minnesota,” Seltz said. “He’s a very, very progressive, very, very left-wing governor.”

It’s likely, though, that faith—and denominational schisms—will not be a focus for Walz as he goes about introducing himself to the public.

At a talk earlier this year, Walz hinted at his understated approach to religion: “Because we’re good Minnesota Lutherans, we have a rule: If you do something good and talk about it, it no longer counts.”

“So what you have to do is to get someone else to talk about you,” he added.

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Books

Review

What Churches Lose When They Fight like the World Fights

Kate Lucky

A journalist counts the cost of prolonged cultural conflict in the life of one fractured congregation.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

By now, you’ve seen the statistics. In the United States, churches are shrinking. Christian belief is waning. “Nones” comprise a greater share of the population than Protestants or Catholics. And the trendlines don’t look good.

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

Eliza Griswold (Author)

352 pages

$22.18

By now, you’ve also seen the explanations—many of them published in the pages of Christianity Today. Leadership crises, denominational tussles, and sexual-abuse scandals have depleted the trust congregants have in their pastors. Congregations have split over political candidates and masks and vaccines and critical race theory and LGBTQ inclusion and women in leadership.

These explanations are right. But to me at least, they increasingly feel like a set of abstractions. They’ve been repeated so many times over the past several years as to have lost their meaning—so rote, by now, as to obscure particularities.

In her new book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Eliza Griswold offers no such obfuscation. Through painstaking observation of one church over many years—Circle of Hope, a progressive evangelical community with “cells” across New Jersey and Pennsylvania—she reveals how the histories, gifts, and besetting sins of particular Christians in specific circumstances react to monolithic cultural pressures. Through her reporting—rigorous, expertly paced, never polemical—she also reveals what’s at stake.

Utter estrangement

Circle of Hope was founded in 1996 by former Jesus Freaks Rod and Gwen White. From the very beginning, the Anabaptist congregation ran counter to the predominant political and cultural conservatism of the Religious Right. Rod wore jeans and used a music stand as a lectern; congregants interrupted and asked him questions. An alternative music scene thrummed. In the years to come, the pacifist Christians at Circle would protest drone strikes and illegal gun sales; the church made reparations to its Black members, raised money for a bail fund, and lobbied for affordable housing.

These activities notwithstanding, Circle wasn’t meant to be a political project. Rod “considered himself an activist,” as Griswold reports, “but he also taught the risks of not keeping Jesus at the center of one’s life.” Circle read Scripture together, marked Easter with a sunrise service and cross-marked cookies, and baptized people in the filthy Delaware River. “Battling the forces of evil didn’t mean simply backing progressive political causes,” writes Griswold. “Jesus was calling for a far more radical transformation of society”—not just new policies but new creation.

But what’s the difference between a stance and a Spirit-led truth? Where can the church “agree to disagree,” and where must it dig in its heels? What’s woke—and what’s the gospel?

Over time, disagreement on the answers to these questions caused Circle of Hope to shut down. (No spoilers there; Griswold makes clear from the introduction where the 2020s are headed.) She documents the dissolution through the stories of four pastors: Ben, Julie, Rachel, and Jonny, as well as Bethany, a prominent Black member of the congregation.

The five of them disagree about plenty. In particular, they fight over race and racism, power and authority. Eventually, factions form. Members start leaving. Members stop giving. The church leaves its denomination over the decision to become LGBTQ affirming. The pastors disentangle themselves. “Both sides cast the other as the reason people were fleeing from Circle,” writes Griswold. “Jonny explained the emptying out as a result of the legacy of whiteness and abuse.” Those aligned with the founding family, the Whites, “saw people fed up with fighting, and with Jonny.”

In the hands of a lesser writer, the breakup’s bureaucracy—statements, Zooms, masked meetings, emails, a consultant—would be tedious. But Griswold sustains a lively narrative. This is a story not of hijacked agendas and out-of-line reply-alls but of utter estrangement. It’s riveting, and it’s painful.

It’s also actually inclusive. In Circle of Hope, Griswold manages to enact what her observed church could not, allowing different points of view to coexist in its pages. She brings equal parts scrutiny and grace to her flawed characters, offering their backstories not as an excuse for their often troublesome behavior but as context for understanding them as whole people. Ben, one of the White sons, yells at his colleagues in meetings. He’s also a hospital chaplain, a father taking his sons to look at the stars. Jonny sends bitter tweets and draws hard lines. He’s also a skilled chef, the child of evangelicals who fled persecution in Egypt.

But all the context in the world isn’t enough for the pastors and their congregants to find common ground. What’s wrong with church, it seems, is what’s wrong with the rest of American life: We’re angry. We’re stressed out. We’re lonely. Our polarization mirrors the divides elsewhere, across politics and geography and socioeconomic class. We’re no better, it seems. If this is how Christian brothers and sisters treat each other—with skepticism and rage and sneering—well, then … what’s the loss when a church closes down?

The work persists

Of course, there’s the loss of communal worship, which at Circle is admittedly hard to pin down. In the years since its founding, in ways obvious and subtle, it seems to have strayed from historic orthodoxy. It’s often hard to tell where “creative” ends and woo-woo begins. Griswold doesn’t try to make the distinction, merely describing the scriptural exegesis, “Creative Play,” and meditation practices she observes.

Ultimately, those splintering questions listed above boil down to spiritual ones. Is Jonny’s conviction just crass opportunism? Is Julie an ally out of cowardice or conviction? Is Ben really trying his best? Does “love your neighbor” mean calling them out, flipping the temple tables? Though Griswold can observe the fruit of the Spirit—who’s humble, who’s kind—it’s impossible for even the sharpest journalist to know the depths of a human heart. She can’t assess the sincerity of a prayer or the closeness of an individual’s relationship with Christ.

Easier to document is the loss of hands and feet, the absence of the body of Christ working together to make the kingdom come. Even where the Circle’s theology or polity is flawed, this loss is evident.

For years, members watched each other’s children and paid down each other’s debt. They ran community thrift stores and donated the proceeds. They served spaghetti to people on the street, inviting them into the warmth.

“There was an absolute kindness in this community, a living example of being ‘in the world but not of it.’ The depth of their devotion was inspiring,” writes Griswold. “And then the world banged its fist against the glass door.”

Even when Circle ends, its individual Christians persist. As the church comes apart, Rachel picks up a relapsed addict and delivers him to an emergency room. Once he’s no longer a pastor, Ben, in his capacity as a hospital chaplain, holds a dying baby and tells him to “Go into the arms of the Lord.”

The church, after all, isn’t a collection of buildings, a sheaf of paperwork, a name. As long as its people persist, its work goes on.

Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

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Theology

You Cannot Lie Your Way to the Truth

Russell Moore

Falsehoods are easy to tell in politics, and they can even creep into the church. But nothing takes us farther from the Truth himself.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

When Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate this week, some people took to social media to contrast him with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance. Lots of those contrasts were fair game—that of a former high school coach versus a Yale venture capitalist, for instance. Some people framed the contrast this way, though—Walz is a normal guy, while Vance is a weirdo who has sex with couches.

The past several years have required sentences I never imagined I would write. Here’s another: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. I believe the proposition I just wrote to be true, and my opinion of the politics or personality of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has nothing whatsoever to do with that belief.

Some might stop me at this point to note that everybody knows that J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. It’s a joke; a social media meme, started when someone posted a parody, allegedly from Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. These people know, however, that most people don’t follow the genealogy of memes back to their origins. Many people just start to think, “J. D. Vance is sort of a freak; people say he did something with a couch one time.”

The Vance couch meme-posters can have it both ways. They can kind of do what the Bible describes as deceiving one’s neighbor and then say, “I was only joking!” (Prov. 26:19). Beyond that, they can say, “Well, of course, Vance did not literally have sex with a couch. The point is that Vance is kind of weird; the couch just makes the point.”

If this were just this momentary meme, it could be passed over and forgotten. But it happens all the time. Sarah Palin never actually said, “I can see Russia from my house.” Barack Obama never advocated for death panels for grandma. That’s what happens in politics, especially in a social media era. And, after all, most people don’t really believe the Vance couch memes; it just helps with morale. It won’t actually hurt Vance.

The problem for those who belong to Christ, though, is when the fallenness of a fallen world starts to feel normal. The problem is when you start to think your lies can serve the truth as long as the vibes feel right and the outcome is what you want.

In her new book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum discusses the tactics employed by authoritarian regimes such as that of the Chinese Communist Party. These regimes have learned, Applebaum argues, the power of pro-freedom dissidents of the past, such as Václav Havel, who refused to symbolically lie (think of his famous example of the greengrocer who refuses to put the “Workers of the world, unite!” sign up in his store). To undermine such truth-telling, they employ social media “to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories” so as to “turn the language of human rights, freedom and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal.”

Applebaum cites Freedom House’s description of this kind of propaganda pressure as “civil death,” meant to sever those who do not lie the way the party commands from their communities, to inundate them with lies so that even their friends and families start to think, “Well, there must be something to some of this, since these controversies are always there.”

This does not have to happen in matters of big life-and-death political dissent and repression. I’ve seen it happen to countless pastors—especially those who dare to preach what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. It doesn’t matter that “He’s a Marxist” or “He’s a liberal” are absurd charges. The game is just to say them long enough that the people who know they are lies get tired of the truth—so that they will, if not embrace the lie, at least fear the liars enough to get quiet.

On the geopolitical level, the metaphor of “civil death” is appropriate—even when it doesn’t work—because the Bible ties lying so closely to murder. Of the devil, Jesus said: “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44, ESV throughout).

The first lie recorded in Scripture is that of the Serpent saying to the woman, “You will not surely die,” telling her the forbidden tree would grant her godlike powers (Gen. 3:4–5). This deception severed her first from the Word of God and thus from the Tree of Life (v. 24).

I suppose a (literal) devil’s advocate could try to say that the Serpent’s lie was for a good goal. After all, does not God, ultimately, want human beings to be able to discern good from evil (Heb. 5:14)? Even those too scared to give such justifications to the Devil’s lies are often able to make similar arguments for their own. This is why the apostle Paul denounces the one who might say, “But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?” (Rom. 3:7–8).

Jesus is not just the one telling us the truth; he is the truth (John 14:6). To distort the truth into a half-truth or a quarter-truth to advance a lie is a personal assault not just on the person you are lying about, or the issue you claim to support, but on Jesus Christ himself.

The problem, then, is not just what that does to whoever you’re lying about; the problem is what the lying does to you. Outside the gates of the kingdom, John tells us, are “everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:15). The grace of God is amazing, and can redeem into truth those who lie, but it doesn’t do so by leaving liars to their lies. Those who would tell us that evil can be overcome by evil are not just lying to you but to themselves (Rom. 12:21; 1 John 1:8).

In a politically idolatrous age, simply refusing to lie about one’s opponents will be viewed as an act of betrayal. It will make you vulnerable to suspicion that you are not really “one of us,” whoever “us” is defined to be. Lying, then, is easy. It fits with the pattern of the world, and it will protect you from the mob. Sometimes, the pressure is even stronger where the church takes a welcoming and affirming posture toward liars, as long as they lie about the right people.

But what if God is telling us the truth that there’s a judgment seat? In that case, it becomes far more consequential to stand on the other side of it and ask, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). After all, we already know the answer from the voice—once on the dock, now on the throne. His answer is what it always was: “I Am.”

News

Gordon College Loses Religious Liberty Argument for Loan Forgiveness

Daniel Silliman

Evangelical school sees discrimination in COVID-19 relief fund’s employee-counting rules.

Elizabeth Thomsen / Flickr

Gordon College could be on the hook to repay $7 million of COVID-19 relief funds. A federal court rejected eight of the evangelical school’s arguments that it should be eligible for loan forgiveness.

Gordon’s lawyers made the case that the religious liberty protections in the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act should allow the institution to count employees in a different way than the US Small Business Administration (SBA) said they had to be counted. The US district court in Washington, DC, rejected the argument, citing a lack of evidence.

“Plaintiff alleges no facts connecting its number of employees to any religious practice,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in a ruling handed down in July. “Plaintiff fails to identify any ‘exercise of religion’ that has been burdened, and thus plaintiff’s claims can be dismissed on this basis alone.”

According to the government, Gordon has 639 employees on its wooded campus on the North Shore of Boston. Some of those people only work part time, however. So the school calculated the full-time equivalent, which is a common way to track enrollment in higher education. If you don’t tally individual people working at the school, but instead count units of time worked, Gordon only has 495.67 employees.

Organizations with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loan forgiveness.

The government gave out nearly $800 billion as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020. The vast majority of recipients have since had their debt waived. Gordon is an exception.

“Gordon College followed the procedures given at the time of the loan application,” the school said in a statement, “and most importantly, used these funds completely in the manner in which they were presented by the SBA: to avoid layoffs of employees and continue to provide them with a paycheck even though the College was forced to shut down operations for months.”

In court filings, the law firm Gammon and Grange said the SBA’s decision not to forgive the school’s $7 million loan was “legally erroneous and arbitrary and capricious on the merits.” It was also, the attorneys claim, religious discrimination.

Gordon, which has about 1,300 students enrolled in undergraduate programs, requested a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan in April 2020. The application form asked for a count of employees, and Gordon gave the number: 495.67. The school’s lawyers say the method of counting the full-time equivalent was clearly indicated.

According to Gordon, more than 25 other colleges and universities also used the full-time equivalent to calculate loan eligibility. Most applicants, however, just counted people.

No one was sure if there was a “right” way, at the time.

“There was widespread confusion,” Gordon’s lawsuit says, “about what method to determine the number of employees should be used.”

At the end of April, the SBA put out a statement on its FAQ page about full-time equivalent counts. The government agency said the number of employees should be determined by a simple head count, treating full- and part-time employees equally. The SBA also clarified that the 500-employee cap only applied to loan forgiveness. Organizations with more employees than that would still be considered eligible for funding but would be required to pay the money back.

By that time, though, Gordon had already gotten its loan from Citizens Bank, a PPP partner, and was using the money to keep the 639 people who worked at the school employed.

Court records indicate that the school didn’t learn of the issue with its eligibility for loan forgiveness until November 2021, when Citizens Bank said in an email that the SBA needed an “employee count per location.” The school responded within a few days, giving the government a new number, based on a head count: 639.

In April 2022, the SBA notified Gordon that its application for loan forgiveness was denied.

Gordon appealed and then appealed again, taking the SBA to court.

The lawyers claimed that the “SBA Court refused to even consider an exemption or other relief from a cramped and unconstitutional interpretation of the ‘500 employee’ threshold.” Even worse, the SBA “discriminated against Plaintiff-Petitioner, an evangelical Christian college with religiously and socially conservative views, by treating other, similarly situated religious colleges better than it has Plaintiff-Petitioner.”

Gordon alleges that 25 other schools that counted employees the same way were forgiven loans of $5 to $10 million each.

Judge Howell ruled, however, that Gordon did not back up that claim with sufficient evidence. Many of the other schools that Gordon pointed to were, in fact, also Christian institutions. The lawyers mentioned Wheaton College, Trevecca Nazarene University, Drew University, and St. Mary’s College Notre Dame.

Gordon, Howell wrote, “offers no facts to support its conclusory allegation that these 25 other colleges are similarly situated—much less similarly situated in all respects except religious affiliation.”

Howell also found there wasn’t evidence to show that counting employees was connected to religion at all.

“No allegation is made that the 500-employee cap or SBA’s methods for counting employees were enacted to target or single out any religious conduct or institutions,” the judge wrote, “nor that the cap or employee-counting methodology employed have an adverse impact on religion.”

And according to Howell, there isn’t even evidence that SBA officials knew Gordon was a Christian school.

The Massachusetts college is not the only PPP loan recipient that has been told it will have to pay the money back. The SBA has manually audited about 2 percent of all PPP loans and denied forgiveness to about 0.2 percent. That works out to around 21,000 organizations that will have to pay back relief money.

According to some experts, the approval process was rushed in response to the fear of financial crisis brought on by the pandemic. That allowed for a lot of fraud—as well as many honest mistakes.

“A lot of the details were very unclear to businesses and banks,” Eric Lichatin, a commercial loan officer who handled PPP applications for a bank in Rhode Island, told NPR.

Steven Mnuchin, who was treasury secretary under Donald Trump and oversaw the program design, had said that the needs of small businesses were too urgent to set up a lengthy loan review process in 2020. But he assured a House oversight committee in 2020 that there would be more careful scrutiny when it came time to forgive loans.

“We are going to have a very robust process,” he said. “People will be required to provide much more data.”

One lawyer who advises PPP borrowers for a New Jersey law firm said that has happened, and now the SBA is “playing hardball” on loan forgiveness.

Some borrowers—including a car dealership in New Jersey and a fitness club in Missouri—are fighting back in court. Gordon appears to be the only one, however, making religious liberty claims for loan forgiveness.

Those arguments were rejected. The school’s other arguments will go forward, with lawyers arguing the decision to deny the loan was a legal error, “made in excess of SBA’s statutory authority, and constituted an abuse of discretion (to the extent it had discretion),” and that it was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

“We believe those do provide sufficient grounds for the Court to reverse the SBA’s denial of forgiveness,” Gordon said in a statement, “and hope to see a favorable resolution of this issue in the future. “

This story was updated with quotes from a statement from Gordon that was unavailable at time of publicaiton.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

How to Read the Bible in Color

Esau McCaulley

Why a group of multi-ethnic editors began working on a new commentary of the New Testament.

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

I was sitting in a coffee shop, books taking up too much space on the tiny table in front of me, bemoaning the lack of attention the academy paid to the Black church and the distinctive interpretative habits of African American church leaders and scholars. My time in religious higher education had signaled, in ways large and small, its belief that the tradition that shaped me had little to say to the rest of the world.

The important ideas and trends arose in Europe or white North American spaces—Black Christians, on the other hand, were historically deemed theologically simplistic or dangerous. But I longed for people to know the tradition as I experienced it: life-giving, spiritually robust, and intellectually stimulating. We had wrestled with God and found our way toward faith in the context of anti-Black racism often perpetuated by other Christians. I wanted to make that story and the fruits of our labor known. I still do.

While I sipped my coffee, I was struck by an idea that served as the genesis for The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Commentary on the New Testament. I often complained about white scholars neglecting African American voices, but I knew little about Asian American biblical interpretation, its theological and historical developments, and the gifts it offered to the body of Christ. The same was true regarding Latino interpretation and the Bible-reading habits of First Nations and Indigenous peoples.

In some ways, I was a hypocrite. I wanted people to attend to the contributions of my community without being similarly invested in others. I needed to spend less time complaining and more time listening. The New Testament in Color thus began with that insight. It was a hope that we might come together across ethnic differences and create something beautiful.

I wondered, What fruit might come from the various ethnic groups sharing space in North America working together to produce a commentary? What did I need to learn from my brothers and sisters in Christ beyond the Black-white binary that shaped my imagination in the American South?

It was natural that my lament was directed to where the power resides in the academy. In 2019, the Society of Biblical Literature, the largest body of biblical scholars in the world, did a study of its membership. That study showed that 86 percent (2,732 of 3,159) of its members who described themselves as college or university faculty were of European or Caucasian descent.

Given the demographics of the United States (and the world), it is more than fair to say that we experience a disproportionate white or European dominance of biblical studies. If God gives his Spirit without measure and equips the entire body of Christ to read and interpret the Bible, then it is a tragedy when the whole body of Christ is not engaged in the process of reading, interpreting, and applying these texts. No one part of the body has the right to speak for the whole. We need each other.

Does a lack of ethnic diversity matter? Isn’t biblical interpretation simply a matter of translating verbs and nouns, linking together ideas as they come together into sentences, paragraphs, narratives, or letters? I was told that the only thing we needed to be good interpreters was proper understanding of the historical context alongside requisite grammatical, text-critical, and linguistic expertise.

I do not want to push any of those important and vital skills aside. All the contributors to The New Testament in Color labored hard to gain the aforementioned tools of the scholarly trade. It is precisely because I believe that biblical texts are God’s Word to his people that we must do our very best to read them well and carefully.

But here is the rub. It matters that we have diverse representation in the process of biblical interpretation because it is always ourselves as persons with our experiences, biases, gifts, and liabilities that we bring to the text. We are not disembodied spirits without histories or cultures. We are not exegetical machines; we are interpreting persons.

We come from somewhere, and that somewhere has left its mark, whether we acknowledge it or not. When one culture dominates the discourse, we are closing ourselves off from what the Holy Spirit is saying among other cultures. Socially located interpretation, when rooted in a trust in God’s Word, is a gift from particular cultures to the whole church. Socially located interpretation reflects a trust that none of our experiences are wasted, that all of who we are is useful to God.

Our cultures are not something we are called to set aside in the Bible reading process, because our cultures and ethnicities have their origins in God (Eph. 3:14–15). Every culture and ethnicity, because it was created by people made in the image of God, contains within it both evidence of its divine origins (Gen. 1:28) and elements of the Fall (Gen. 3).

Stated differently, there are no perfect cultures. Every culture and people is challenged and made into the best version of itself through an encounter with the living God. Our cultures are restless until they find their rest in their Creator. None of them are left unchanged. God’s word to persons and cultures is always yes and no. He offers us all repentance for things that have gone astray and lauds our struggles toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Socially located biblical interpretation is nothing less than the record of the Spirit’s work through scriptural engagement among the different ethnicities and cultures of the world. Unfortunately, too often, the sanctification of culture has been confused with the Westernization of culture. That lie has done tremendous damage to the church. God’s transfiguring work is not done in comparison with the West. Ethnicities do not become more holy as they approach likeness to Europe but to God.

That attempt of each culture and group to find themselves as they struggle to examine their lives and culture in light of the Word of God is instructive not just for them; it is instructive to the whole body of Christ. We can, through listening to the voices of others, see the ways in which our own location has at times hindered our ability to read the text well. What we are aiming for, then, is mutual edification.

Due to the varied ways in which Scripture has been used to justify indefensible things such as colonialization, slavery, and the studied disdain for non-Western cultures, much socially located biblical interpretation has been rooted in a hermeneutics of suspicion in the effort to resist those evils.

We believe that it is right to push back on the misuse of Scripture to justify evil, but we also believe that socially located biblical interpretation can engage in a hermeneutics of trust, wherein we recognize that the God we encounter in biblical texts is in the end a friend, not an enemy. We want to honor the fact that the ecclesial communities from which we come found liberation and spiritual transformation through reading with the text, not against it. Some might consider this naiveté. I disagree. I consider it hard-won wisdom.

We agree that Scripture is God’s word to us that functions as the final guide for Christian faith and practice. Evoking Nicaea does not mean that we are privileging Western culture as defining Christianity for the world. Instead, it is an affirmation that God was at work among Christians of the past to tell us things that are true and good. We hope, in the generations to come, that despite our compromises and failures, Christians will find some lasting value in our theological contributions. There are no pristine histories.

In other words, we do not assume that our cultures stand over the texts, but through the interaction of person, text, history, and culture, truths that others might miss shine out all the more brilliantly. The chorus can create a beauty the soloist cannot.

In the end, the fruit will be seen in the ways we help churchgoers and Bible study leaders and students read the text more faithfully. Like any group of writers committed to serving the body of Christ, we welcome pushback given in good faith. Our goal is not to replace one form of hegemony with another or to close the conversation around these texts across cultures. We desire a shared pursuit to discover the mind of Christ and his purposes for his people.

Nonetheless, we do believe that these entries will indeed do what all good commentaries endeavor to accomplish: send the reader back to the text with fresh questions, answers, and a sense of wonder at the ways in which the ancient word remains ever new, challenging and inspiring us to follow our King and Lord more faithfully.

Taken from New Testament in Color edited by Esau McCaulley, Janette H. Ok, Osvaldo Padilla, and Amy Peeler. Copyright (c) 2024 by Esau McCaulley, Amy L. Peeler, Janette H. Ok, and Osvaldo Padilla. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

Esau McCaulley is the author of How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South and the children’s book Andy Johnson and the March for Justice. He is an associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College.

- More from Esau McCaulley

Church Life

Why Changes to India’s Colonial Criminal Code Concern Christians

Interview by Surinder Kaur

A Supreme Court lawyer on how recent legal reforms could affect the country’s minorities.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

On June 23, authorities arrested Sarju Prasad, a pastor in Uttar Pradesh, for conducting Sunday worship in his house. Earlier that day, two Hindu men, one claiming to be a journalist, had entered his house during the morning service and taken photographs.

That evening, two policemen detained Prasad on charges of plans to commit cognizable offenses. However, their explanations only came out later; at the time, they did not notify him of the grounds of arrest, a violation of India’s Code of Criminal Procedure. They also ignored the procedure’s requirement that the offender be brought before a judge within 24 hours of being taken into custody.

Instead, Prasad was only presented before a magistrate two days later and was released on bail on June 25. Shortly after, on July 2, while collecting his cell phone at the police station, authorities re-arrested him, saying that he had violated the state’s anti-conversion law. This time, he was denied bail and is now in prison.

Prasad’s case is just one of many where the local police have allegedly colluded with Hindu extremists and arrested Christians conducting peaceful prayers, tyrannizing their rights. Indian Christians are apprehensive about what might happen under the new criminal laws that have replaced their three British-era counterparts. Described as “draconian” by some legal experts, the legislation has elicited criticism and protests, and Christian, Muslim, and other vulnerable communities fear possible abuses of the new laws.

The Parliament of India approved the three new laws last December without following due process, according to the opposition. They replaced the Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the Code of Criminal Procedure with the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), and the Indian Evidence Act with the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), all of which came into effect on July 1.

Proponents argue that these long-overdue reforms aim to modernize the justice system, leveraging technology to improve efficiency and accessibility, such as allowing police complaints to be registered remotely or permitting the use of videos as court evidence.

Further, India needs legislation “not based on colonial prejudices and practices but on the principles of access of justice to all,” said Rajiv Mani, secretary of the Legislative Department. “The three laws have hence been enacted to overhaul the criminal justice system in the country to make it citizen-centric.”

However, critics contend that the new laws grant the government excessive authority through the police to restrict free speech and to crack down on those who express dissent or criticism of the government, potentially infringing on civil liberties and disproportionately affecting minority communities.

For instance, Father Stan Swamy, an advocate for the tribals and the Dalits, was arrested under the terrorist act. Father Swamy believed this was a deliberate effort “to put me out of the way, and one easy way was to implicate me in some serious cases.” Despite his deteriorating health conditions and being 84, Swamy was ultimately denied bail and died while incarcerated in 2021.

Christians in India, who in recent years have been subject to violence and other persecution at the hands of Hindu nationalists and the police, now worry that speaking out about their plight could lead to prosecution. They have witnessed several cases where the police have been mere spectators while Hindu extremists barged into churches, disrupting services, vandalizing church property, and assaulting the pastor.

Christians have also been falsely implicated in the past for desecrating Hindu idols, such as when Hindu extremists planted broken idols near the property of a Christian man. Ironically, the same law is not applicable to Hindu extremists who desecrate Christian religious symbols.

In a more recent instance, on July 27, Hindu extremists entered a Catholic school in Madhya Pradesh and objected to the Christian religious symbols on the school premises and in the classrooms. In the presence of the police, they removed Christian images and symbols from the classrooms and installed pictures of Hindu idols. Yet no action has been taken against the mob—instead, against the school. These stories of police officers acting sympathetically to Hindu extremists means that minority groups fear nearly any legislation giving law enforcement officers more power.

Many already believe that the criminal justice system has been stacked against minorities: 76 percent of prisoners sentenced to death in India between 2000 and 2015 were from “backward classes and religious minorities,” according to a 2016 study.

As India grapples with these significant changes to its legal landscape, CT spoke with Robin Ratnakar David, a Christian and a lawyer practicing at the Supreme Court of India, to understand the implications of these new laws, particularly for India’s minority communities.

Were these new criminal laws necessary?

The new criminal laws largely repurpose and consolidate existing ones. While there are some new provisions, the essence remains unchanged, raising questions about the necessity of such an extensive overhaul when amendments could have sufficed.

For laws to be effective and just, they must be shaped by inclusive dialogue with various stakeholders, including legal experts, civil society organizations, and the affected communities. On the contrary, when these bills were passed in Parliament, no proper debate was conducted, as many ministers had been suspended.

If the goal was to modernize and improve the legal framework, overhauling the Police Act of 1861 would have been more impactful. Viewed widely as unprofessional, insensitive, brutal, and corrupt, this measure was designed for colonial control rather than public service. The British instated it after the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, a rebellion against the British East India Company’s rule led primarily by Indian soldiers (sepoys).

The Indian government has previously recommended police reforms, and, in 2006, a Model Police Act was suggested, which was not fully implemented.

What aspects of the new criminal laws could pose problems for Christians and other vulnerable groups?

Previously, the laws concerning terrorism were only found in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA), which is not related to the recently enacted three laws and is still in effect. Under this legislation, the police require prior written permission from the designated authority before seizing the property of the accused. Terrorism now also falls under the new BNS law and gives the police a free hand in seizing any property associated with the crime. The BNS’s definition of terrorism is also broader. The UAPA requires an intention to strike terror, while the BNS includes acts intended “to intimidate the general public or disturb public order.”

This overlap creates legal ambiguity, allowing the police free rein to decide whether to book a case under the UAPA or BNS. If the goal was to expand terrorism laws, amending the UAPA might have been more appropriate than introducing parallel but contradictory definitions in the BNS. There is speculation that including these provisions under the BNS could lead to its use disproportionately against minorities, as has been the case with the UAPA.

What other sections would you call out?

The BNS has another section that states that anyone who “excites or attempts to excite secession or armed rebellion or subversive activities” has broken the law. The broad and potentially vague definitions raise concerns about potential misuses against dissenters, activists, and minority groups.

This section (305d of the BNS) punishes the theft of vehicles, government property, religious idols, and icons with up to seven years’ imprisonment. There’s already concerns that this may be subjectively applied and used to target the Christian community.

What should Christians know about the BSA’s new provisions regarding admission of electronic evidence in court?

In 2014, India’s Supreme Court warned that electronic evidence can be easily altered, potentially leading to unfair trials if not properly protected. The new BSA allows electronic records as evidence in court, such as website content, text messages, server logs, computer/laptop/smartphone data, emails, location data, etc. However, it fails to include measures to ensure the authenticity and integrity of digital evidence. This lack of safeguards raises concerns about the potential misuse or manipulation of electronic proof in legal proceedings.

Christians who are in the habit of streaming their Sunday church services live and uploading their sermons and messages, prayers and prayer meetings, should keep all of this in mind. Christians should monitor and moderate content responsibly, as failure to manage content can lead to liability.

Christians should take extra care while posting content, ensuring it is respectful and appropriate. They must share only accurate and verified information. They must obtain permission before they share someone else’s content. And they must not post any defamatory or illegal material.

How do you respond to claims that these laws give police broader powers that could be misused against vulnerable communities?

Since this act has been recently enacted, it may be too early to comment definitively on the potential abuse of police powers.

An area of concern is that BNSS Section 187 allows the police to detain and question an accused person for a total of 15 days. That was the case earlier as well, but that was 15 days in a row, unlike in this new law, where the 15 days can be spread over 40 to 60 days of the total detention period of 60 to 90 days. This means that instead of being questioned for a continuous 15-day period, the police can repeatedly detain, release, and re-arrest the accused.

This approach could prolong the accused’s anxiety and uncertainty for up to three months, potentially being used as a means of harassment. It could also lead to the denial of bail for the entire period until the police exhaust the 15-day custody allowance.

There is a legitimate concern that this provision could be misused by the police as a means of undue harassment without corresponding provisions to address police misconduct. Petitions challenging the implementation of these laws have been filed in high courts and the Supreme Court.

Are some critics exaggerating the dangers while overlooking the real issue of legal awareness among minorities?

While some critics may emphasize the dangers, it is also crucial to address the real issue of legal awareness among minorities. Ensuring that all citizens are informed about their rights and the laws can help mitigate potential misuse and promote fair enforcement. Increasing legal literacy and awareness can empower minorities and reduce the risk of discriminatory practices at the enforcement level.

Thus, while vigilance against potential misuse is essential, fostering legal awareness and education within vulnerable communities is equally critical to ensuring justice and equality for all.

- More from Interview by Surinder Kaur

Theology

The Evangelical Diploma Divide

Daniel K. Williams

How a new class division burst into American evangelicalism—and what it means for church unity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Pexels

The United States is now in the throes of the politics of class division, and American evangelicalism is no exception.

College-educated evangelical Christians may be the least prepared for this new class-based polarization, because it doesn’t break along old class fault lines. As recently as two decades ago, social class in the US was primarily determined by income or wealth, “haves” pitted against “have-nots.”

But today’s most intractable class divide is about education, and educated evangelicals are having a hard time navigating this split. After all, the college-educated are a minority among white evangelicals, only 29 percent of whom have four-year college degrees.

I say this—as an evangelical with not only a four-year degree but a PhD—not to seek pity for the new educational elite. We don’t need commiseration. But we do need unity in the body of Christ. So what should we do when our education divides us from our Christian brothers and sisters? What do we do when the values we’ve acquired from our schooling lead us down a political path that many non-college-educated evangelicals view as dangerously wrong?

It’s only in recent years that education has become such an important political predictor. “Among white voters, in particular, individuals with at least a college degree are now a much more Democratic constituency than people with less schooling,” The New York Times reports. Meanwhile, whites without a college degree are moving rapidly into the Republican Party.

This is a reversal of traditional patterns, because, for many decades, the GOP was the party of the affluent and upper middle class, while Democrats relied heavily on the support of working-class voters. That began to shift as divisions over the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and debates over affirmative action in the 1980s put the Republican Party in conflict with many liberal Protestant clergy and college professors.

For a long time, this dissent among PhDs seemed to have little effect on the rest of the college-educated population, evangelicals included. Ronald Reagan received strong support from white college graduates during his reelection campaign of 1984, and a majority of white college grads continued to support the Republican Party until the 21st century.

This meant that most college-educated evangelicals who voted for Reagan in the 1980s or supported the Christian Right in the 1990s didn’t have to worry about alienating their secular friends. Those friends might not have shared evangelicals’ views on abortion or sexuality, but they probably didn’t view voting Republican as immoral.

That began to change in this century, starting with the defection of many college-educated Americans from the Republican coalition during George W. Bush’s presidency. Some left because of opposition to the Iraq War. Others were fed up with Bush’s stance on cultural issues including embryonic stem cell research and same-sex marriage. One way or another, by the end of Bush’s presidency, the Republican Party was moribund in educated areas of the Northeast and West Coast, places where it had been reasonably strong a decade prior.

But that didn’t hurt the GOP very much, because it offset those losses with a rising appeal to non-college-educated Americans. As the Republican Party became more rural, Southern, and working-class, the party’s policy positions began to shift to reflect the interests of this new constituency. Its positions on immigration and gun control became more hard-line, and its commitment to free trade and entitlement reform started to soften.

At first, those differences received little attention, but the nation’s polarization over former president Donald Trump exacerbated this divide and brought it into the open, including in the evangelical church. Today, the core of Trump’s constituency is united by a strong opposition to the establishment, whether in government, the media, or education—or maybe even their own denominations. As Trump Republicans have taken over their party, this anti-establishment ethos has become part of the whole GOP’s identity.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is increasingly a pro-establishment party supported by college-educated Americans. Its agenda includes things that “establishment” evangelicals (such as the National Associations of Evangelicals) have also historically cared about, like efforts to fight climate change or honor the human dignity of undocumented immigrants. Both of those causes, which the NAE has endorsed in the past, incur strong opposition from anti-establishment Republicans, evangelicals included.

But the modern Democratic agenda also includes things that “establishment” evangelicals have historically opposed, especially abortion and an ever more progressive ethic on sex and gender.

Here’s where the position of college-educated evangelicals gets complicated. Most voters who share our educational class are uninterested in or actively hostile to biblical values on life and sexuality. It’s easy for them to wholly embrace the contemporary Democratic Party’s pro-establishment agenda, abortion and LGBTQ activism as much as immigration reform and environmental care.

On the other hand, most voters who share our faith are non-college-educated, anti-establishment Republicans. They find it similarly easy to reject that whole Democratic agenda, and perhaps also to dismiss anyone with any sympathy for any part of it as “woke,” “weak,” or “leftist.”

So what do we do? College-educated evangelicals could stay in the awkward middle forever, remaining aligned with fellow evangelicals on abortion and sexual ethics while continuing to partner with fellow college grads on immigration and climate policy. But recent polling data I’ve reviewed suggests that isn’t what’s happening. Instead, many college-educated evangelicals are reacting to this dissonance by turning their backs on the GOP and, in some cases, on non-college-educated evangelicals.

We’ve seen this at the individual level, of course. More than a few who made this choice have ended up leaving evangelicalism altogether and/or spending a significant amount of time battling evangelical Republicans online. But we can see it at the national scale too.

As late as 2016, there was no statistical difference between the voting choices of college-educated and non-college-educated evangelicals. That year, 81 percent of college-educated white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Trump, as did 80 percent of white evangelical voters without a college degree.

This changed by 2020. Then, 84 percent of non-college-educated white evangelical voters voted for Trump. But among college-educated white evangelicals, support for Trump markedly decreased to just 63 percent. That means a remarkable 21-point educational gap developed among white evangelicals over the course of a single presidential election cycle.

This class-based division in evangelical opinion continued after the 2020 election. An American Enterprise Institute study from March 2022 showed that only 51 percent of white evangelicals with a bachelor’s degree had a favorable view of Trump, compared to 77 percent of white evangelicals who had not attended college. The evangelical groups that historically have been the most suspicious of ecclesiastical and political establishments and the least likely to be college-educated—such as Pentecostals, for instance—have also been Trump’s strongest supporters.

And there’s every indication that divide will widen this year. A poll in early June 2024 showed that President Joe Biden’s support among voters (of all faiths) without a college degree had dropped by 10 percentage points since 2020, while his support during that same period had slipped by only 1 percentage point among college-educated voters. I expect we’ll see similar—perhaps even accelerated—dynamics with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Consequently, this November, college-educated evangelicals will face a choice. Like many of our educational peers, we could vote for the establishment, a choice that may well alienate us from fellow church members and the broader evangelical movement. Or we could vote for the anti-establishment party, burning bridges with our college-educated friends and colleagues.

Neither one of those choices strikes me as a particularly good one, and I want to suggest an alternative.

To begin, college-educated evangelicals must recognize that we’re a minority in our faith tradition. Most fellow evangelicals will make political choices that don’t line up with ours. This reality can be easy to miss if all our friends are college-educated and the only Christian books we’re reading are those written for us.

By the time of pastor Timothy Keller’s death last year, for example, all of his books combined had sold just over 2 million copies. That’s a lot, but Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series sold 80 million copies. Far more American Christians have encountered the apocalyptic good-versus-evil scenarios presented in those books than have ever read Keller’s apologetics.

Similarly, if we’re part of a congregation or denomination that disproportionately attracts college-educated members, we may greatly exaggerate the importance of trends among people in our own circles—like a move toward more liturgical worship or a rediscovery of the Reformed heritage or the early church fathers. Denominations well-represented among the evangelical elite, like the Presbyterian Church in America (where Keller pastored), the Christian Reformed Church (home of James K. A. Smith and Nicholas Wolterstorff), and the Anglican Church in North America (which includes Esau McCaulley, Tish Harrison Warren, and now Beth Moore) are smaller than many realize.

Those churches have national memberships of just 400,000, 200,000, and 125,000, respectively. Even put together, they’re far outnumbered by the Assemblies of God’s 3 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention’s 13 million members, or the 16 million who attend nondenominational churches. The educated evangelical bubble is very small.

If we exist in that bubble, we may come to find it incomprehensible that other evangelicals do things like flying Trump 2024 flags on their trucks. We need to learn to comprehend it. We need to acknowledge that our circles are politically unusual, and that’s okay. And when we see reports this November (as we surely will) that most evangelicals voted for Trump, we shouldn’t be shocked. In our current political climate, that’s exactly what we’d expect from such anti-establishment voters.

As for how we vote, this election—and each one after it—may be a moment of reckoning for college-educated evangelicals like me. We’ll feel forced to choose one major party or the other. But what if we’re convinced neither side sufficiently represents the values of Christ’s kingdom?

That should mean we won’t fully align ourselves with either, which will also mean continuing dissonance among our educated friends and fellow evangelicals alike. That might never feel comfortable, but discomfort doesn’t excuse us from maintaining a charitable disposition toward Christians who disagree with us, knowing that we’re all fallible. This new class difference may prove durable, but it needn’t divide the body of Christ.

If our education becomes a path to understanding rather than a component of our tribal identity, it can be a valuable gift in the kingdom of God instead of a marker of political division.

Daniel K. Williams teaches American history at Ashland University and is the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.

- More from Daniel K. Williams

Church Life

Yes, Fiji Olympians Are Singing Hymns

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Viral videos show athletes singing in four-part harmony, a practice with deep Christian and indigenous roots in the Pacific island nation.

The Fijian rugby team singing a hymn prior to a game.

Jan Kruger / Stringer / Getty

Viral videos of the Fijian Olympic team singing in Paris show a congregation of athletes raising their voices in four-part harmony, as if they had been rehearsing in addition to training for the games. In several videos, the group is shown singing the Fijian hymn “Mo Ravi Vei Jisu” (“Draw Close to Jesus”). One video on TikTok has over 3 million views and 660,000 likes.

The Fijian men’s rugby team won gold in both the 2016 and 2020 Olympic games; this year, the team earned silver. Videos of Fijian rugby teams singing have gone viral before, like this one from 2022 showing the team Fiji Bati huddled on the field, singing a hymn in full-throated harmony before a match against Papua New Guinea.

“There is an understanding that singing, harmony, is a way of expressing our connection to the world and to each other,” said Tui Nuku Smith, a Fijian Methodist minister. “And in Fiji, community singing is related both to indigenous culture and to the Methodist tradition.”

For many Fijians, especially Fijian Christians, community singing is built into the rhythm of everyday life. In videos taken during the Paris Olympics, the Fijian delegation sings in the Fijian language (also called iTaukei), sometimes a cappella and sometimes accompanied by a guitar. (The three primary languages spoken in the country are English, Fijian, and Hindi. English was Fiji’s official language until 1997, and Hindi is still spoken by the descendants of Indian laborers brought by British colonialists to work in the sugar cane fields. Most indigenous Fijians, who make up 54 percent of the population, speak the Fijian language.)

Many of the athletes in the Fijian coalition have likely been singing in four-part harmony since they were very young, said Smith. Starting with family devotions in the home, Fijian children in Christian families grow up hearing harmony and learn to participate.

“When I would walk through the village in the mornings or evenings, I would hear singing coming from the homes,” recalled Jerusha Matsen Neal, who spent three years at Davuilevu Theological College on the island of Viti Levu with the United Methodist Church’s Global Ministries. “You’d hear singing in four-part harmony, with children.”

This tradition, said Neal, is one that Fijian Christians carefully cultivate and preserve. The four-part harmony we hear in those viral videos is the result of generations of teaching and practice.

“You can imagine that when you have three- and four-year-olds learning, it can sound like a mess,” said Neal, now an assistant professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School. “But children get to sit and sing with their families, in a circle of love, twice a day. So by the time they’re seven or eight, they have a remarkable musical ear.”

The indigenous music of Fiji and Papua New Guinea is primarily vocal and unaccompanied. Similarly, much of the traditional music across Polynesia is vocal though noticeably more “word-oriented,” incorporating a blend of chanting and heightened speaking tones. Despite the significant regional differences in indigenous musical practices throughout Oceania, the prominence of choral music is nearly everywhere.

In addition to practicing singing during family devotions and in church services each week, congregations periodically host visiting choir directors for a week of workshops and rehearsals with different vocal groupings: children, women, men, youth. In this way, even small, remote churches take seriously the task of learning to sing as a community. The country’s annual hymn-singing competition draws thousands of Fijian Methodists each year, a gathering that occasionally heightens political tension in the country.

Although Fijian hymnody grew out of Methodist songs brought by 19th-century missionaries, it has become a deeply rooted tradition that makes space for indigenous practices across the diverse country. Christianity’s connection to the legacy of colonialism in Fiji (which was a British colony from 1847 to 1970) is undeniable, but Fijian vocal music stands as an example of the ways Fijians have been contextualizing Christian worship and integrating it into their communities for nearly two centuries.

When missionaries William Cross and David Cargill, sent by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, arrived in Fiji in 1835, they realized that the region’s hundreds of islands (Fiji has over 100 permanently inhabited islands) would make a centralized approach to evangelism impossible. As ethnomusicologist Helen Black has observed, early missionaries recognized that they needed to enlist Fijian converts in spreading the gospel from island to island, and that embracing the fusion of indigenous musical practices with Methodist hymnody would allow the gospel to spread more organically.

“Indigenous Fijian music, with its central role in Fijian culture, was a perfect vehicle for communication,” Black wrote. “Christians utilizing music of their secular meke [the generic term for Fijian music with poetic text] inserted Christian text in their particular poetic style, creating their own repertoire of religious music. Thus, this music became not only part of the liturgy of the Fijian Methodist Church, but also a vehicle for evangelization.”

Fijian Christians adapted their traditional call-and-response chants to teach and recite the catechism. A leader would call out a question, and the congregation would chant the answer. They also adapted chants to recite the Psalms communally. These practices are still widespread in Fiji’s Methodist churches. Western missionaries brought Methodist hymnals with them, but the hymnals in many Fijian churches today don’t include musical notation, only words. The music is an oral tradition.

The infusion of meke with Christian content and the local adaptation and alteration of Methodist hymns formed a uniquely Fijian body of sung music, tailored to the singing style and cultural practices of the region. In some cases, missionaries found that the hymnody they brought became almost unrecognizable as Fijian Christians took charge of the music and reshaped its rhythms and harmonies.

William Woon, a Wesleyan missionary, wrote in his journal in 1830, “Several of our excellent tunes are spoilt by the natives from singing them in a minor key; others are so completely metamorphosed that we scarcely know sometimes what tunes they sing.”

Some missionaries, like Woon, worried that the hymns they prized for both teaching and stirring the emotions were being stretched too far. But most seemed content, even eager, to allow Fijians to take ownership of their musical worship and forge something new.

“There’s a kind of contextualization that happens just by claiming that a song belongs to you,” said Deborah Wong, a worship leader and ThD candidate in liturgical studies at Duke Divinity School. “God’s family includes all people. These songs belong to the global church. They may have originated in one part of the church, but they still belong to all of us.”

In the centuries since Methodism’s arrival in Fiji, it has remained the dominant Christian denomination, constituting around 34 percent of the country’s Christian population. Methodism’s emphasis on hymn singing made it compatible with Fijian culture, in which singing functioned as a way of participating in and literally harmonizing with the natural world.

Indigenous religious practices in Fiji consisted of ancestor worship and animism, but today just over 60 percent of the population is Christian, 27 percent Hindu, and 9 percent Muslim. However, the connection between community singing, even in Christian worship, and the natural world remains strong.

“If there is a hurricane, we see that as a sign that we have angered God. We have awareness that we shouldn’t violate nature but should care for it. We acknowledge that interconnectedness,” said Smith. “Singing is an expression of harmony with God, with the community, and with nature itself.”

Neal noted that the sense of connection with the natural world was taken very seriously, calling to mind biblical images of nature participating in worship.

“Singing is an embodiment of interconnection with the world, with each other, and with God,” said Neal. “In Scripture, we see these images of trees clapping their hands, of rocks crying out. In some ways, we in the West have written off those images as hyperbole and metaphor.”

The physicality of singing and its effects on a congregation are sometimes lost in worship settings where the sound of a band drowns out the voices in the room. In the US, less than 20 percent of the population regularly sings in a choir, so many American Christians have lost touch with what it feels like to be in a vibrant singing community. Neal recalled that her first encounter with the sonic power of four-part harmony in a Fijian Methodist church moved her to tears.

“I began to weep. The sound filled the space,” Neal said. “I had a hymnal to follow along with the Fijian words, and it was vibrating in my hands. That’s how powerful the sound was. There was a profound sense of communal affirmation of faith through song.”

Although choral singing has become an important part of Fijian Christian identity, the practice is increasingly precarious in a globalized world. Churches in urban centers are more frequently using instruments and incorporating popular worship music from Western groups like Hillsong, which is influential in part because of its geographic proximity.

Church leaders are aware that new music and the use of instruments can help draw younger people to a church, especially those who did not grow up in Christian communities.

“Those who have access to instruments now might use them, probably not all of the time,” said Smith. But he added, “There is a suspicion about the use of instruments, even though the Bible is filled with references to them. There is such a strong tradition here, people have almost demonized musical instruments.”

Neal commented, “Some Fijians are concerned about unthoughtfully adopting musical traditions from the West that create a more individualist definition of what music is and what the human is.”

Navigating the growing influence of Western worship music is challenging Fijian Christians to find ways to preserve the singing tradition that they highly value and practice with pride. The Fijian Olympic team’s singing in Paris demonstrates the centrality of singing to Fijian cultural identity. Smith said that the Fijian rugby team often sings before or after a match, not because they want to make an evangelistic demonstration but because it’s just part of who they are.

“When there is singing in rugby, for example, whether for a loss or a win,” he stated, “they sing because it involves their whole life, their whole community, their whole being.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

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Utter estrangement

The work persists

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