The Top Christian Highlights of the Paris Olympics

How athletes are sharing their faith and pointing to God.

Odette Giuffrida of Italy (in blue) congratulates Larissa Pimenta of Brazil for winning the bronze medal in the women’s 52-kg Judo event. (See their story below, after the more recent posts.)

Michael Reaves / Staff / Getty / Edits by CT

For most spectators, the Olympics are a display of the highest level of athletic skill. But for many Christian athletes, they provide an opportunity to express their faith to each other and to the world.

A shared faith brings athletes together with teammates and across nations. This group of Olympians from Australia, Nigeria, Portugal, and other countries sang “Waymaker” in a video posted by Cindy Sember, a British hurdler, who praised God for the other Christian athletes she met at the Olympics.

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Elsewhere, gold medalist Yemisi Ogunleye (more on her below) and silver medalist Malaika Mihambo sang “Gratitude,” while their coach, Ulrich Knapp, played guitar and harmonized. The athletes posted the video shortly before the shot put and long jump events, crediting the song with preparing their hearts and minds for competition.

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Below are more of the most memorable moments of Christian expression at the Paris Olympics.

Gospel Music Invades Press Conference After German Christian Wins Shot Put

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German shot-putter Yemisi Ogunleye got off to a rough start in her competition on August 9, slipping and falling in rainy conditions on her first throw.

Despite a sore knee, Ogunleye recovered with an excellent second throw to qualify for the finals and was in second place entering her last attempt. She rose to the occasion with a throw of exactly 20 meters (65 feet, 7.5 inches), her best ever in outdoor competition, to win gold.

Asked how she approached that decisive final throw, Ogunleye replied, “Before the last attempt, I didn’t think about anything but just lifted my hands and prayed. And that might seem weird to some people, but that is really the source of my peace and joy. … After seeing where the shot landed, when I knew it was hopefully going to be enough for the gold medal, I just went on my knees and said, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’”

At the end of the post-event press conference, the moderator asked Ogunleye, “Is it true that you sing in a gospel choir? What song was going through your head tonight?” She responded with an impromptu rendition of “God Kept Me” by Harvey Watkins Jr.:

I was right at the edge of a breakthrough
But I couldn’t see it.
The devil really held me
But Jesus came and grabbed me
And He held me close
So I wouldn’t let go.
God’s mercy kept me
So I wouldn’t let go.

Surprise Winner Says God Pushed Him over the Finish Line

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One of the most classic track and field races in this year’s Olympics led to a grateful comment by a stunning—and perhaps a bit stunned—winner.

The men’s 1500-meter final on August 6 was expected to be a battle between Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Josh Kerr of Great Britain. Often, 1500-meter races are highly tactical, with the runners jockeying for position before a last-lap sprint. Not this time. Ingebrigtsen took off at world-record pace and challenged the field to keep up.

Ingebrigtsen held the lead until the last 100 meters, when American Cole Hocker snuck past and then outsprinted Kerr to win by 0.14 seconds. His time of 3:27:65 was an Olympic record and exceeded his previous personal best time by nearly three seconds.

Hocker, a graduate of Cathedral Catholic High School in Indianapolis who posted James 1:2–4 (“Consider it pure joy … when you face trials”) on his Instagram page at the end of his 2023 season, seemed as amazed as everyone else.

Hocker initially tried to pass on the inside but was blocked. When space opened up to Ingebrigtsen’s right, he explained afterward, “I just let God carry me through the finish line.”

He added, “It felt like I was being carried by the energy of the stadium and God. My mind was focused, and my body followed through with the strength and determination I had.”

One of Hocker’s Instagram posts offered a shorter explanation: “God did.”

Historic Gold Medal for Dominican Republic Sprinter

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Marileidy Paulino, who started her track and field career running barefoot because she couldn’t afford shoes, became the first woman from the Dominican Republic ever to win Olympic gold on August 9.

Paulino breezed to victory in the 400 meters with a time of 48.17 seconds, which broke an Olympic record that had stood since 1996.

Known for holding up a Bible after earning silver at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, this time, Paulino knelt in prayer on the track after her victory. In her comments afterward, she thanked God for her opportunity to excel on her country’s behalf. “I don’t come to compete for the money,” she said, “but because I love athletics, to help motivate the younger generations and because these achievements are also doors that are being opened for the future generations of Dominican people.”

“Queen of the Hurdles” Credits God, as Usual

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One hundred years ago, Eric Liddell declined to run the 100 meters on a Sunday at the 1924 Paris Olympics, made a last-minute switch to the 400 meters, and won a stunning gold medal. On August 8 of this year, one of the most visible evangelical Christians at the 2024 Paris Olympics delivered an equally stunning performance at the same distance—with 10 hurdles in the way.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, who qualified for her first Olympics while still in high school, broke her own world record in the 400-meter hurdles. Her time of 50.37 seconds won gold with 1.5 seconds to spare. Proportionally, that would be like winning a marathon by more than three minutes.

Video footage of the race shows McLaughlin-Levrone and her chief rival, Femke Bol of the Netherlands, virtually even through six hurdles. But while Bol stutter-stepped and struggled to maintain balance over the last three hurdles, McLaughlin-Levrone ran them in perfect stride, with alternating takeoff legs, as if not even fatigued.

McLaughlin-Levrone has made her Christian testimony widely known through numerous interviews and her book Far Beyond Gold: Running from Fear to Faith.

“I credit all that I do to God. He’s given me a gift, he’s given me a drive to just want to continue to improve upon myself, and I have a platform and I want to use it to glorify him,” she said at Thursday’s post-race press conference in response to an NPR reporter’s question. “So whenever I step on the track, it’s always the prayer of ‘God, let me be the vessel in which you’re glorified, whatever the result is’—how I conduct myself, how I carry myself, not just how I perform. So it’s just freedom in knowing that regardless of what happens, he’s going to get the praise through me. That’s why I do what I do.”

Rebeca Andrade’s Godliness and Grace Earn Competitors’ Love

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For much of the world, US gymnast Simone Biles has been the most visible face of the Paris Olympics. On August 5, Biles and teammate Jordan Chiles created a memorable Olympic scene when, in a gesture of sportsmanship, they bowed down to Brazilian competitor Rebeca Andrade on the medals podium.

Andrade had just taken the gold medal in the floor exercise competition, with Biles and Chiles standing on the podium silver and bronze, respectively.

The two US stars referred to Andrade as a “queen,” “icon,” and “legend,” while noting the international friendship they have shared through years of fierce competition.

Andrade, 25, who has had three ACL injuries that required reconstructive surgeries during her career, has not been bashful about directing her thanks to God. She broke into song during an interview after winning silver in the vault competition.

“God was preparing me so that I could achieve my goals today,” she stated. “And the song says, ‘I am preparing you for a new time that is about to come … hold on, I’m doing it perfectly, and you will see.’ And that’s exactly it, you know? He’s doing things that I could never have imagined.”

In an interview two years ago, Andrade credited her Christian upbringing for giving her resilience and said that, to deal with anxiety at the Olympics, “I always took the Bible to the competition and read it when I went to the bathroom.”

She also related how God encouraged her after her third surgery in 2019:

I was in the room I shared with a friend, and mentally I was asking for a hug—because I was far from my mother and my siblings. My friend, who is a heavy sleeper, got up without saying a word and gave me a hug. It was at that moment that I realized God was with me and that he had given me that hug. At that moment, I decided, “I’m not going to stop. If I had to go through this again, it’s because he has something bigger.”

If You Know God, You Can Smile Under Pressure

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The high jump is an emotionally intense event, requiring great precision and providing an immediate evaluation of success or absolute failure. That’s what makes this video so incredible. It shows Australian jumper Nicola McDermott flashing a broad smile before attempting to clear 2.02 meters (6 feet, 7.5 inches) at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

Maybe McDermott knew something in advance. She cleared the bar cleanly to earn a silver medal in Tokyo. On August 4 in Paris, now married and known as Nicola Olyslagers, she jumped 2.00 meters (6 feet, 6.75 inches) and took silver again.

Or maybe Olyslagers, age 27, smiles because she knows she will praise God no matter what. As she stated on Instagram, “Praise be to God my Rock! He is my strength and song!”

Olyslagers explains on her website, “The satisfaction that I jump and live by was once performance-driven, to bring meaning to life. Yet that all changed when I was introduced to Jesus.”

In addition to sharing her faith openly, Olyslagers has formed a ministry called Everlasting Crowns. She describes its purpose as seeing “fellow athletes transformed by Jesus’ perfect love, planted in churches, and discipled to be a blessing to every place they are sent. Our hope is that they rise up to not only have faith but compete with an eternal perspective.”

Little Countries, Big Hearts, Speedy Legs

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It’s been a great Olympics for little-known Caribbean nations. In addition to Shafiqua Maloney’s performance for St. Vincent and the Grenadines (described below), on August 3, Thea LaFond, competing for Dominica, won the women’s triple jump, and Julien Alfred of St. Lucia edged US star Sha’Carri Richardson amid pouring rain in the 100 meters, gaining the title of “world’s fastest woman.”

These were the first Olympic medals of any color for Dominica and St. Lucia. Alfred added a silver in the 200 meters on August 6.

Alfred, who cites Romans 8:18 on her Instagram page, commented in her postrace interview, “I told God that whenever I win, I will give him the glory always, so I thank God for bringing me through, for giving me the strength to come so far.”

LaFond, who achieved her winning distance on the second jump, described the weather conditions as God’s gift to her: “The rain was in my favor. It came down as soon as I was done with the second jump. Thank you, God, for working with me.”

She Overcame Homelessness for Track and Field Glory

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“I am a child of God,” reads Shafiqua Maloney’s Instagram bio. Yet this child of God battled homelessness as recently as 2023 on her way to the Olympics.

Last February, the 800-meter runner, who competed in college for the University of Arkansas but represents the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, shared that she had been homeless for several months during the previous year.

Maloney’s admission got the attention of her nation’s prime minister, and she received an endorsement contract from a Caribbean water company shortly afterward.

Maloney arrived at Paris ranked 27th in her event but sped through the first two rounds in personal record time to make the finals, where she placed fourth on August 5, just 0.24 seconds short of the bronze medal.

“I’ve been homeless—not having food to eat and all this stuff,” sportswriter Chris Chavez quoted Maloney as saying after she qualified for the finals. “God carried me through all of that and when I got here I had to believe that he didn’t bring me this far just to leave me and that he would carry me straight through.”

Diving Medalist Says, “I Let God Get to Work”

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British diver Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix said, “I give glory to God,” and quoted Joshua 1:9 on her Instagram page after earning bronze with partner Lois Toulson in the 10-meter platform synchronized diving competition on July 31.

“This is more than just sport,” she added. “I am proud to represent my country, my family, and glorify the name of Jesus.”

After struggling at the Tokyo Olympics and experiencing mental blocks similar to those faced by US gymnast Simone Biles, Spendolini-Sirieix, daughter of British television personality Fred Sirieix, considered quitting the sport. Instead, she regained strength from her Christian faith, which she has shared without hesitation.

She has described her faith as a “steadying force,” saying that she begins each day with prayer and ends it with Bible study. Asked if she had any superstitions when competing, she replied, “No, I let go and let God get to work. I pray and do Bible study before the competition.”

In Christ, Both Winner and Loser Can Be Victorious

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When Brazilian Larissa Pimenta and Italian Odette Giuffrida faced off for a bronze medal in the women’s 52-kilogram judo event on July 28, they already knew each other well.

Very well, in fact. Giuffrida had become a Christian through Pimenta’s influence during a visit to Brazil.

Pimenta won the bout. In her moment of joy and emotion, the first embrace she received was from the friend she had defeated. As she explained in an interview:

She is a special person to me. And what she said was incredibly meaningful. She apeaks Portuguese and we talk quite a lot. Odette came to know God through me—she came to Brazil and found God. And just a few days ago we were talking … about how we were going to give all honor and glory to him. So at that moment … she told me to get up because all honor and glory should be given to him … it was truly significant for me.

Not Your Typical Skateboarder, but He Loves God

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“Jesus is king!” shouted 19-year-old skateboarder and fan favorite Cordano Russell when the Olympic announcers introduced him at the men’s street skateboarding final on Monday.

Ranked 16th in the world, Russell, who lives in San Diego but competes for his native Canada, landed his biggest tricks but fell twice and finished seventh. He expressed thanks to his “heavenly Father” on Instagram and vowed to keep training for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

At 6 foot 3 inches tall and 230 pounds in weight, Russell is far taller and more muscular than the average skateboarder (and he breaks more boards than his smaller competitors). He began skateboarding at age four and convinced his family to move to Carlsbad, California, a hotbed for the sport, when he was eight. Russell displayed potential in high school football but chose pro skateboarding instead.

“It took a lot of praying, a lot of discernment to decide what to do,” Russell told a publication at the University of San Diego, where he will enroll this fall. “The reasoning the Lord showed me was that my love and my heart was set in skateboarding.”

According to the piece, Russell “credits his religious upbringing with instilling the work ethic and mental fortitude needed to excel in the demanding world of professional skateboarding.” He mentors young athletes—and when he misses a trick, you can expect him to yell, “Chicken nuggets!” instead of a swear word.

Fiji: Great Rugby Players, Great Singers for God

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The Pacific island nation of Fiji, with fewer than a million people and a total land area about two-thirds of Hawaii, has 33 athletes at the Paris Olympics, 24 of them rugby players. Fiji’s only Olympic medals ever have come in rugby sevens.

Their men’s team had been undefeated in the Olympics: gold in 2016 in Rio when rugby sevens was introduced and gold in Tokyo in 2021. But after 17 straight wins, they fell to the host nation of France in this year’s gold-medal game.

But that loss has not stopped the Fijian team from doing the other thing they’ve become known for: singing praise to God.

The Fijian team has gained worldwide attention for singing hymns with beautiful harmony in an Olympic Village courtyard. Australian water polo player Tilly Kearns posted a video with the comment, “Having the best seat in the Village being next to the Oceania building.”

A classical music website shared the video and explained that the team was singing “Mo Ravi Vei Jisu,” a Fijian hymn. The words translate as “Put your trust into the Lord and he will guide your way.” The website added, “Listening to the video, you might think you’re overhearing a rehearsal by a professional choir. The harmonies, rhythms, musicality and sheer beauty of their resonant voices make it hard to believe these aren’t formally trained musicians.”

Sharing the Gospel in Sign Language

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Brazilian Rayssa Leal, who won a silver medal in street skateboarding at the Tokyo Olympics at age 13, followed up with a bronze this year. Before a preliminary run, she turned to the camera and used sign language to communicate John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life

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Ideas

Homeschooling for the Common Good

Myles Werntz

Contributor

I never thought I’d be a homeschool parent, not least because I support public education. An improbable shift changed my perspective.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

I am an educator. I believe in the good of education for everyone and that public schools should be amply funded and resourced. I believe in contributing to the common good even when it doesn’t directly benefit me. And in the summer of 2020, my wife and I found ourselves in what I’d once have called a most improbable situation: We became homeschool parents.

Let me explain.

One of the attractive parts about moving to Abilene, Texas, five years prior was the well-loved public school system. We bought our house near one of the many excellent elementary schools and expected an ordinary educational path for our two children. We’ve long known public school teachers, happily paid taxes for schools our children didn’t attend, and looked back fondly on our own days of bus rides, locker conversations, and school cafeterias.

Then COVID-19 came. Suddenly, we realized our our oldest would be going to kindergarten masked, unable to see his teacher’s face, distanced from other children—or else staring at a screen for hours a day in virtual kindergarten. Guidance from the school board was minimal, and the deadline to register our child for COVID kindergarten ticked ever closer.

We couldn’t do it—but we realized we could handle homeschooling, at least for a while. Both my wife and I could do some of our work remotely, and we could convert part of our living room into a classroom. It would be hard, but we could make it work.

“One year,” we said. “We can do one year.”

Let me say, now, that making this decision was not a brave one. It was simply the only one we felt was available to us. Had COVID not forced our hand, I’m not sure we’d ever have gone the direction we did. That first year required an upheaval in our lives, and not only because of COVID. We never thought we’d be teaching someone how to read and do basic math without help.

But gradually, we quit making jokes about homeschoolers and dropped our unease over being the only homeschool family we knew. We began to embrace the freedom to take long weekends for camping. We found we enjoyed introducing our kids to literature, music, history, and philosophy. We found a rhythm of work and instruction that meshed with our family’s goals. When the most intense COVID era eased, we began to connect with other homeschool families. We enrolled our children in a three-day-a-week co-op run by licensed educators. We even attended a homeschool convention.

Many times, I’ve wondered who we are becoming. But one year turned into two, and, four years later, I can’t see us turning back.

Still, the one lingering question for me is that of the common good. Here in Texas, property taxes are used, in part, to fund the schools, but each school’s enrollment also affects its funding. The lower enrollment drops, the less funding a school gets. By choosing to not enroll our children in the public school around the corner, in other words, we’ve taken money out of that school’s coffers—more money than my school supply donations will ever replace.

By homeschooling, then, maybe I’ve taken away from the common good. But money is not the only measure, and not all of what public schools offer as common is necessarily good.

As an educator, I think standardized testing is a bad way to organize instruction. As a parent, I have concerns with how much time my kids are away from home, how many hours rote homework takes from play and individual interests.

One need not be a Christian to share these concerns. But as a theologian and ethicist, I have other questions too: Is participating in common rites like voting and public education the only or best way for a Christian to contribute to the good of society? And is it possible that in saying no to the concrete, flawed version of a public good, we may say yes to the common good it aims to serve?

In the first century, Justin Martyr offered this account of Christian participation in the common good:

And more than all other men are we your helpers and allies in promoting peace, seeing that we hold this view, that it is alike impossible for the wicked, the covetous, the conspirator, and for the virtuous, to escape the notice of God, and that each man goes to everlasting punishment or salvation according to the value of his actions.

Justin is one in a long line of Christians taking this approach, a line that runs through Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the Reformation, and into the present. To support the peace of the city is not, Justin argued, the same as using the means of the city: By pursuing the common good in a uniquely Christian way, he said, Christians bear witness to what cities are meant to be.

Today, we can hold with the apostle Paul that it’s good to live at peace with all people as far as we are able (Rom. 12:18), and with Jeremiah that we should seek the welfare of the city (29:7). But that doesn’t require us to pursue these ends only through the means provided by the state. It doesn’t mean people of good will can’t disagree about the form of the common good while agreeing on its value.

At its best, homeschooling orders education around the common life of the family first and, from there, the life of the world. For Christians, it brings education, vocation, family, and spiritual formation into an integrated whole.

Homeschooling certainly can be—and often is—done in a spirit of resentment, as its detractors tend to charge. But it can also be an opportunity for Christians to help children pursue a vision of wisdom, citizenship, and goodness differently.

What if homeschooling offered an alternate vision of education that might even have resonance in the public school system?

What if homeschooling illuminates what Christians should desire for all families: time to educate, freedom to make choices about what is good for our children, and civic resources that help our citizens grow in charity and goodness?

What if, as my family has found, it is possible to homeschool for the common good?

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

- More from Myles Werntz

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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The Olympics’ Most Iconic Photo Has a Christian Message

Franco Iacomini

The raised index finger of levitating surfer Gabriel Medina is the latest sign that sports success has made Brazilian evangelicals less marginalized and more confident.

Brazil's Gabriel Medina reacts after getting a large wave in men's surfing during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

Jerome Brouillet / Contributor / Getty

There’s a hidden Christian message behind what may be the most celebrated image of the 2024 Olympics.

On July 29, in round three of the shortboard surfing competition, Brazil’s Gabriel Medina faced off against Japan’s Kanoa Igarashi, who eliminated Medina in the last Olympics. In his second wave, Medina emerged from a tube exuberant, with both palms open, suggesting that the judges should offer him a 10 for his performance. (Two of the five judges agreed; his final score was 9.9).

Medina then pivoted left, toward the surf, and jumped off his board, raising his right hand and pointing his index finger upward. This was the image that Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet captured.

Brazilian evangelicals recognized the sign immediately.

“It’s like he’s saying, ‘It’s not me you should be looking at, it’s God. This moment of glory is not mine, but his,’” said João Guilherme Züge, a resident historian of religion at Museu Paranaense, in Curitiba.

In contrast to the United States, where baseball players often point to the sky after hitting home runs for different reasons—some to express gratitude to God, others to honor late loved ones—the gesture among Brazilian athletes has become closely associated with Christian players.

The raised finger, pointing to the sky, has been the trademark of Brazilian evangelical athletes for more than 40 years, one of numerous public displays of faith following competitive glory that have helped to affirm and establish evangelical identity, especially when the movement was still in its infancy.

No one seems to remember who initially created the gesture, but it gained popularity in the 1990s, primarily through soccer players, such as Kaka, who raised their index fingers after on-field heroics, knowing that the camera would be trained on them after they scored a goal.

Despite its ubiquitousness, the spiritual intent of the message hasn’t necessarily made its way outside of evangelical circles. “[Medina] really has the right and authority to consider himself number one,” Renata Vasconcellos, an anchor with Jornal Nacional on TV Globo, Brazil’s most-watched news program, commented on air last week, giving the raised finger a very different interpretation.

But its low-key, almost generic nature has also helped to make it so popular. Like the World Cup and other international competitions, the Olympics forbids any “kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda … in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

These regulations have forced athletes seeking a platform to share their faith to do so discreetly, or to express their gratitude to God in interviews or social media posts. For his part, Medina uploaded Brouillet’s photo accompanied by the text from Philippians 4:13: “I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”

Evangelical Brazilian athletes have been creative in their expressions of faith during this year’s Olympics. Skateboarder bronze medalist Rayssa Leal and silver medalist Caio Bonfim used sign language to refer to Jesus.

Medina, after losing in the semifinals to Australian Jack Robinson, shared a black-and-white photo of himself captioned “Josué 1”—referring to the chapter of the Bible in which Joshua admonishes the Israelites to be “strong and courageous” no less than four times—accompanied by the song “Ousado Amor,” a Portuguese version of Cory Asbury’s “Reckless Love.” On August 7, he uploaded a picture of himself outside the Louvre recreating his iconic photo, once again holding up his index finger.

Back in the 1980s, when evangelicals represented only 6.5 percent of Brazil’s population, “God’s goalkeeper” João Leite and striker Baltazar began Atletas de Cristo, a ministry with the goal of mobilizing athletes to share the gospel around the world. From the beginning—and spontaneously, says Züge—the finger pointing to the sky in goal celebrations became a mark for the movement.

Atletas de Cristo equipped athletes to see themselves as an ambassador for their faith and encouraged them to preach and share their testimonies wherever they went. (One fruit of this strategy: Brazilian goalkeeper Alisson Becker baptizing his Liverpool teammate Roberto Firmino in 2020.)

Atletas de Cristo was also enormously successful in raising Brazilian evangelicals’ self-esteem. A key moment came during the Brazil-Italy final in the 1994 FIFA World Cup. When neither team scored during regulation or overtime, the game went to a shootout. Brazil won on the final kick.

“The greatest image of that World Cup was when Italian star player Roberto Baggio missed his kick and Brazilian goalkeeper Taffarel, who had saved a previous shot, fell to his knees in prayer, pointing to the sky,” said Züge.

Brazilian goalkeeper Taffarel (right) celebrates after Roberto Baggio of Italy (left) misses his kick at the FIFA World Cup.

Such testimonies had an impact on Brazilian evangelicals.

“When Christians were watching the player make a beautiful move, score a goal in an important match and then celebrate with his finger pointing to the sky, they felt represented,” said Reinaldo Olécio Aguiar, sociologist and pastor of the Primeira Igreja Presbiteriana Unida de Vitória. “Even knowing they were part of a minority [at that time], they could see themselves as victorious.”

Taffarel had likely received some instruction on how to use this achievement of athletic triumph as a missional moment.

“From the start, Atletas de Cristo knew how to use the media,” said Züge. “Athletes were trained in how to give a testimony in 30 seconds and to take advantage of a live TV interview.”

This moment also changed how evangelical athletes were perceived by their fellow teammates.

“Before that, everybody mocked us,” said Anselmo Reichardt Alves, a former player who became a pastor and Brazilian team chaplain. “They used to say that we were babies, because we didn’t drink with them. Our masculinity was also questioned because we didn’t date several women at the same time.”

Watching superstars express their faith openly also inspired evangelicals who faced criticism for trying to live out their own faith and eschewing popular traditions like Carnival.

“Our actions were like a mirror to other Christians; by watching the games they also learned to demonstrate their faith fearlessly,” said Züge. “People became more open to talk about God. If the players can do it, why not me?”

This boldness also may have inspired contemporary athletes to be bold in their faith.

“Sportspeople thanking God for their wins is nothing new, but the sheer number doing so at this Olympics is noteworthy—especially so in France, which has insisted on its own athletes upholding the country’s secularist laws,” wrote The Guardian commentator Emma John.

Atletas de Cristo has received criticism at times for encouraging victorious athletes to share their faith in ways that can insinuate that their achievements are a result of having more faith than others. Some have noted that they may tend to overlook the stories of losers, many of whom also often have personal relationships with God.

“What would I say when there are faithful Christians on both sides?” said Aguiar.

This was the case at the Paris Olympics during a bronze-medal match in 52-kilogram women’s judo between Brazil’s Larissa Pimenta and Italy’s Odette Giuffrida. (CT highlighted their story in its coverage of Olympic highlights.)

After Pimenta won the fight and clinched the bronze, she stayed on the mat crying. Giuffrida approached and hugged her. “Get up,” she said to Pimenta, as both athletes recounted later.“All honor and all glory you have to give to him.”

Giuffrida later shared on social media that she remembered the night Pimenta first took her to a church service after they began training together. “From that day on, our lives have changed. And today, here we are, regardless of what happened on that tatami, regardless of victory or defeat, thanking him in an Olympic final, in front of the world, for everything,” she wrote.

“And that is the beauty of it. I can feel sincere, I can feel myself with Him by my side.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

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.

Here's Trump's vote share in the 20 largest majority white Protestant denominations in 2020.

He earned at least 55% of the vote in 12 of them.
He earned at least 47% in 19 of them.

There's only one denomination that was strongly for Biden – the Episcopal Church. pic.twitter.com/wo33GLkA8w
— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) April 21, 2024

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

$24.56

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.”

Ideas

The Evangelical Diploma Divide

Daniel K. Williams

Contributor

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

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

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