Commentary
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE COVID-19 CRISIS has intensified food insecurity and hunger globally and exposed the failings of a profit-driven, industrialized agriculture and food system.
In August, an alliance of more than 500 African faith leaders and smallholder farmers delivered a strong message to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: “The Gates Foundation’s support for the expansion of intensive industrial scale agriculture is deepening the humanitarian crisis.”
Faith communities and farmers want the Gates Foundation to stop funding the so-called “green revolution technologies” through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). African faith leaders are witnessing the negative impact of industrialized farming to the land and the well-being of their communities. They are calling for a shift to sustainable and agroecological farming that works in local contexts for people and does not harm the land.
Illustration by George Michael Haddad
MY JOURNEY WITH the Uyghur people began in 1985 when I accepted a teaching position at Xinjiang University in Urumqi, a regional capital on China’s far western border. My wife and I made many friends during our seven years there. The Uyghur, an ethnic Turkic people of 12 million, are predominantly Muslim and live in the only Muslim-majority area in China, called the Xinjiang Uyghur Au-tonomous Region (by China) or East Turkestan (by the Uyghur and Kazakh peoples).
In 2017, we were greatly distressed to hear credible reports that the Chinese government was interning citizens in (what the government calls) “reeducation” camps. As many as a million people have been detained in 300 to 400 facilities in Xinjiang prov-ince, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, including “political education” camps (part of a 70-year program of forced cultural assimilation), pretrial detention centers, and prisons. Detainees are subjected to torture, cultural and political in-doctrination, and forced labor. The U.S. Holocaust Museum says this state-sponsored violence meets the threshold for genocide and crimes against humanity. Friends and colleagues have disappeared.
In May, I met Uyghur poet, linguist, and human rights activist Abduweli Ayup on a Zoom call. Ayup spent 15 months in Chinese prisons for his defense of Uyghur linguistic culture. On our call, he told the terrible story of his failure to save from the camps his 30-year-old niece, Mihriay, who taught Uyghur children in the Chinese education system.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
“HAY MÁS TIEMPO que vida” was my dad’s refrain every time I was stressed and weary. “There is more time than life.” His simple words had profound implications.
Being present to life is difficult. Life demands that we “rise and grind.” Reward comes to those who make the most of the time they’ve been given. Time is money. Time is a commodity we trade. The promise of life is the goal of all this grinding—or retirement, if we are privileged.
During the pandemic, I’ve pushed against beliefs that commodify time. I’ve cooked the foods that nourished my ancestors: tamales verdes, atole de tamarindo, and nopalitos. My senses have been awakened through mixing the nixtamalized corn flour with water and fat until it reached the right texture, peeling and deseeding each tamarind pod, cutting the nopal (cactus) and cooking it with a few tomatillo husks to remove the slime.
The preparation of these foods forces me to notice the rough spots on the cacti where thorns still make their home, to smell the acid scent of tamarind in the pulp clinging to my fingers; it invites me to play with the unruly dough that believes its place is on top of the corn husk and not inside. If death shows up in separation, life sprouts in connection.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
AFGHANISTAN HAS BEEN in conflict for more than 40 years. The former Soviet Union sent in more than 150,000 troops on Christmas Eve 1979 and left 20 years later. The U.S. began a massive bombing campaign in October 2001, the first stage of the war to oust the Taliban. Now, 20 years later, the U.S. has withdrawn the last American troops. It is hard to find a single Afghan, including myself, who hasn’t been a victim of the ongoing conflict.
As Afghans know, parties in these battles change, but the outcomes—devastation and killings—remain the same. Ordinary Afghans, as we have seen with the recent Taliban resurgence, pay an immeasurable price. They are killed, bombed, displaced, and disabled. However, the voices of these ordinary people are rarely heard. Perhaps they no longer raise their voices. What speaks loudly is their pain and sorrow.
Despite numerous formulas and prescriptions for ending bloodshed and oppression in Afghanistan, violence remains. Most solutions were formulated by the elite class. They are the ones in the driver’s seat. They make decisions as they please. The wishes of ordinary Afghans are nowhere to be found.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION has long been a bellwether for conservative politics. At its annual gathering, controversial resolutions often forecast the upcoming battles of our nation’s culture wars. For too many in the denomination, soul competency has given way to partisan loyalty. This transformation began in 1979 when Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson launched an unprecedented, highly orchestrated campaign to persuade members to vote for a fundamentalist SBC president, who then began a cascade of fundamentalist appointments at every level of the denomination. Being “moderate” on abortion, gender roles, and gay rights, among other issues, became deal breakers. Those who found themselves on the outs with fundamentalist extremists were, as they have described, exiled.
Gendered hierarchies are fertile ground for sexual abuse, and in 2018 Patterson was fired as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for mishandling sexual assault investigations. The toppling of this fundamentalist leader reverberated through the SBC, and a growing chorus of voices, most notably former member Beth Moore, called on the denomination to address this issue as well as restrictions placed on women in ministry. And the politicization of critical race theory, which David Theo Goldberg of the Boston Review called the “weaponization of colorblindness,” also perched high on the SBC agenda. Both issues figured prominently in the choice of a new SBC president this spring.
Candidate Ed Litton of Alabama conceded that there should be conversations about structural racism and investigations into the denomination’s handling of sexual abuse, while Mike Stone of Georgia doubled down on the fundamentalist position championed for years by Patterson and his acolytes. Thus, the 2021 election of the SBC president was seen as a referendum not only on these issues, but also on the Trumpian politics of political extremism and absolutism that underscore them. Stone took an early lead in the voting, which signaled to many observers that the bond between the SBC and Trump’s Republican Party would prove unbreakable. Moderates breathed a sigh of relief when Litton emerged as the winner; headlines noted that the SBC had pushed back against the denomination’s version of Trump extremism.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
INVISIBLE FORCES ARE disrupting housing markets in most metropolitan areas, fueling the most acute housing crisis in a generation. As pandemic protections are lifted, many communities are anticipating waves of evictions and foreclosures. By one estimate, the U.S. has a shortage of more than 5.5 million units of housing.
Among these invisible forces is an explosion in short-term rentals, a shift to corporate ownership of rental housing, and a plague of global billionaires looking to park money in U.S. real estate markets. Put this on top of inequality-fueled gentrification and many cities have a full-blown affordability and supply crisis.
In some communities, thousands of apartments and homes are being snatched up by anonymous corporations. Now a growing number of community leaders are pressing to know: Who is buying our cities?
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IN JUNE, THE SUPREME COURT held that a Catholic agency can exclude same-sex couples from its government-contracted foster care program, despite a city policy banning LGBTQ discrimination. Assertions of religious freedom carried the day in the narrow ruling of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia; at the same time, broader precedent remains, requiring religious groups to respect generally applicable anti-discrimination laws. The court deferred the deeper challenge of how to square vigorous claims of religious liberty with hopes of inclusion for LGBTQ people.
As people of faith, how do we make sense of these competing claims—for equality and nondiscrimination, bedrock human rights principles, and for religious freedom? For guidance, Christians can look to our own record on religious freedom, theological insight on human rights, and, above all, the ethics of Jesus and Paul.
Let’s begin by affirming that religious freedom deserves its place in the inner sanctum of basic rights. It is a hope that once emboldened persecuted communities to flee Europe and helped inspire the allied struggle against fascism. It remains indispensable for religious minorities the world over—like the Iranian Christian seminary student who fears grave persecution, or Sikh and Jewish communities suffering violence in this country.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
I REMEMBER HER green dress. She stood in center stage, shoulders barely clearing the pulpit. She was preaching, except the Southern Baptist Church didn’t call it preaching. As a missionary returning from two years in Jordan in the mid-1980s, Martha Bumpas was giving her “testimony.”
Bumpas was, I think, the first woman I heard speak from the pulpit. She sounded so full of hope. As her friendship with my family deepened, God’s calling on her life deepened too. She began to pursue a calling into full-time ministry.
Her timing proved poor. In 1988, Dorothy Patterson delivered a paper at the annual meeting of what was then the Southern Baptist Historical Association that articulated a “biblical theology of women’s submission to men’s authority,” as historian Elizabeth H. Flowers tells it. Patterson’s sharp wit—despite her historically inaccurate argument—won the Southern Baptist day. Ten years later she won again, this time on the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting as she fought for the inclusion of language on women’s “gracious submission” in the Baptist Faith and Message, the repository of doctrine for Southern Baptists. Patterson succeeded in narrowing options for SBC women like Bumpas: Baptist seminaries deterred women from master of divinity degrees and, by 2000, pushed them out of preaching classes. Only men were deemed biblically fit to serve as pastors.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IN BACKLASH TO historic voter turnout, as of late May state legislators had introduced 389 bills to restrict voting in 48 states in the 2021 legislative sessions. The barrage of suppressive bills has been different from previous years in various ways. The sheer number of bills, the sweeping nature of the proposals, the procedural shenanigans, and the brazenness of lawmakers’ intent makes this like few legislative attempts in memory.
“Restrict” means the legislation would make it harder for Americans to register, stay on the rolls, and/or vote, as compared to existing state law. Most of these bills take aim at absentee voting and expanding voter ID requirements. Some would make voter registration harder, expand voter roll purges, and reduce early voting. Others seek to undermine the power of local officials and, in some cases, establish new criminal penalties to target those who run our elections.
Several of the concerning bills are bundled—a big number of anti-voter bills rolled into one. Take Georgia for example. Lots of people have heard about Georgia outlawing the provision of a bottle of water or a snack to people waiting in line to vote. But there’s more. Polling sites on wheels (mobile voting) are now effectively illegal in the state. Many voters who plan to vote by mail will be required to provide a driver’s license, social security number, state identification number, or a copy of identifying documentation. Ballot drop boxes will have to be located inside elections offices or early voting sites, likely resulting in the loss of convenient voting locations. Some provisions may exacerbate existing cyber-vulnerabilities or introduce new ones. These laws will clearly have a detrimental effect on the political voice of voters of color, especially those in the Black community. Mobile voting in Georgia, for example, was only used in Fulton County. That’s the home of Atlanta, which has the largest Black population of any city in the state.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
TERRITORY. COLONY. COMMONWEALTH. “An island surrounded by water, big water.” Boriquén.
In 2017, when Hurricane María hit and Puerto Ricans were left without power for months, people around the world Googled: “What is Puerto Rico?”
A strip of land 100 miles long and 35 miles wide in the Caribbean Sea. Home to nearly 3.2 million people, “proud people,” as my abuela says. It is an island of people in la brega, an expression without a translation that encapsulates “a state of mind,” Alana Casanova-Burgess explains in La Brega, a WYNC podcast series. It’s the feeling of always being in the struggle, the hustle. “It shows us something about our ‘Puerto Ricanness,’ our history, our present,” she says. “And maybe where we’re headed.”
This year, Steven Spielberg will release his screen revival of the hit musical West Side Story. It’s been 60 years since Rita Moreno as Anita sang, “I like to be in America” from a staged New York City rooftop (muddying the waters as to whether Puerto Rico was “America”). As a new Anita emerges, Congress will debate the Puerto Rico Statehood Admission Act, introduced in March. If the act is approved, then a vote will be held in Puerto Rico on whether to become a state.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IF JESUS HAD been in Bessemer, Ala., he would have stood with the workers who tried and failed to organize the Amazon distribution center there.
That was the firm conviction of Joshua Brewer, a lead organizer for the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU). “It’s everything we’re told to do—to look out for our brothers and sisters in need, that a [person] should be paid for an honest day’s work an honest day’s wage, that we need to look out for the immigrant, that we need to look out for the widows and the children and the orphans, and we need to look out for each other,” Brewer told the Alabama Political Reporter in the heat of the campaign.
Brewer was hardly alone in his belief that the Bible offered clear sanction for RWDSU’s fight. On-the-ground reporting underscored that organizing meetings began with prayer, and that an instinctively pro-labor faith steeled many of those who participated in the campaign. In longer historical perspective, none of this is surprising. From the beginning, many workers who powered the labor movement did so with the confidence that Jesus, a lowly carpenter, had their backs.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
ONE OF THE most most frustrating times as a parent was when one of my toddlers would begin to cry and I was in the next room. Of course, I would rush right over. But once I got there, I wasn’t sure whether they were sick or had bumped into the couch. Between the pain, early language development, and their weeping, it was hard to diagnose the situation. I relied on a question my toddler could answer by pointing: “Where does it hurt?”
As we—adults, parents, faith leaders, and communities—rush to enter a post-pandemic reality, we would do well to pause and ask young people how the last year and a half has impacted them. Patient listening may lead to prophetic grief. As the prophet Jeremiah reminds, “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me” (8:21).
For 30 years, the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) has plumbed the best available research to answer this question for young people: Where does it hurt? CDF’s “State of America’s Children” report, released this spring, analyzes this data and paints a picture of child well-being and our challenges ahead. The information makes clear that our children have not been immune to the crises of public health and racial injustice we have faced. As of February of this year, 13 percent of the COVID-19 cases in the U.S. were children. They are hurting physically, socially, emotionally, and economically.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
DEADLY SHOOTINGS IN Atlanta this spring left eight dead, including six women of Asian ancestry. In the aftermath, Rev. Byeong Cheol Han, lead pastor of Atlanta’s Korean Central Presbyterian Church, exhorted his congregation to “not just pray, not just worry,” because “it’s time for us to act.” Han continued, “I’m going to urge people with love and peace that we need to step up and address this issue, so that ... our next generation should not be involved in tragic ... violence. ... That’s what Christians need to do.”
Han wasn’t alone. Similar calls to action have been amplified throughout Asian American churches. This heightened awareness of faith and culture’s entanglement with sociopolitical realities signals a call to redefine the essential meaning of Asian American Christianity.
For many first-generation Asian immigrants, ethnic-specific churches foster communities of care and cultural preservation essential for survival. For second- and third-generation Asian Americans, our faith provides spiritual resources for negotiating a cultural identity between a majority culture that never fully accepted us and a similarly foreign minority culture from distant shores. Some Asian American theologies focus on this liminality and how God’s presence is with those stuck between worlds.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
AMAZON FOUNDER JEFF BEZOS has never been seen in a top hat like the guy on the Monopoly board game, but, in every other way, he is a classic monopolist—the very model of a 21st century robber baron.
There’s at least one difference, however, between Bezos and robber barons of the past. While steel baron Andrew Carnegie became famous for building nearly 1,700 public libraries in small towns across the United States, Bezos has turned his wealth and power to strangling them.
One mark of the monopolist has always been predatory pricing—selling an item at a loss to force a competitor out of business. As the first company to perfect an online ordering and delivery system, Amazon used that advantage to destroy its independent, brick-and-mortar retail competition. As rival online merchants emerged, Amazon systematically underpriced them until they shuttered or fled to the “shelter” of the Amazon Marketplace.
Another classic monopolizing strategy is vertical integration—controlling the supply chain from production to point of sale. When streaming video became the next big thing, Amazon didn’t simply start a streaming rental service, it went into the movie production business.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC has claimed more than 3 million lives around the world and left tens of millions more with insidious aftereffects. It is reversing decades of progress in reducing child mortality, health inequity, poverty, gender inequality, illiteracy, and hunger. Immunization against COVID-19 is the single most powerful weapon we have to end the pandemic and reclaim lost ground.
More than a dozen safe, effective vaccines are now in use worldwide. The Global Health Innovation Center at Duke University estimates global production capacity to be 12 billion doses for 2021. This is sufficient to immunize 70 percent of the world’s population and achieve “herd immunity”—the level of protection sufficient to stop community spread and eliminate surges. Through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) program, more than 190 countries made a joint commitment to secure enough vaccines by the end of 2021 to immunize 20 percent of the population in lower-income countries.
Despite these remarkable successes, the world is headed toward two parallel realities: By late 2021 or early 2022 most high-income countries will have achieved herd immunity and made significant progress toward a new normal. In contrast, lower-income countries are not yet on track to even reach the 20 percent vaccination target. Despite $400 million in public and private pledges in April, COVAX is short more than $22 billion for this year’s budget. Rich countries have made purchase agreements with vaccine manufacturers that far outweigh the needs of their own populations. Based on the current trajectory, it will take several years to immunize enough people in lower-income countries to stop the pandemic.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
ON NOV. 3, 1979, five young labor organizers were murdered by Nazis and Klansmen in Greensboro, N.C. Ten were wounded. And a low-income, African American community was terrorized. The police knew the ambush plans and chose to be visibly absent. This tragic event eerily foreshadows what happened in our nation’s capital on Jan. 6. Our country is at a boiling point. We are closer than many want to admit to losing this developing republic.
To address together growing national divisions, we must struggle with three evils: white supremacy, massive economic disparity, and a significant decline in the moral fabric of this nation. These issues must be addressed concurrently if they are to be effectively addressed at all. To do this, we need to design a process in which people can walk toward each other and, ultimately, with each other out of this moment and into a more just and equitable future.
Truth must be foundational in the process we design. Attempting to advance policies to address the legacy of racism and segregation without first establishing the truth of the impact of that lived history at the community level risks exacerbating our divisions.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IN 2019, I met with leaders from the Nahla Valley in Iraqi Kurdistan whose eight villages are both Muslim and Christian. Entire villages had been forced to evacuate when they were caught in the crossfire between rocket attacks launched from Turkey against Kurdish militias in northern Iraq. Children and community members were traumatized.
This February, border communities in northern Iraq were attacked again, this time by militants using Iranian-supplied weapons. Several rockets exploded in Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. One rocket hit the U.S.-led coalition military base, killing a civilian contractor from the Philippines and injuring at least six others. Many interpret the Irbil attack as a test of the Biden administration’s Iran policy, which seeks to revive the nuclear deal scrapped under the previous U.S. administration. President Joe Biden retaliated with airstrikes targeting Iranian-backed militias on the border in Syria—killing 22 people. The minority communities, including Christians, living in the Kurdish regions of neighboring Turkey, Syria, and Iraq continue to be caught in the middle as geopolitical conflicts escalate.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE FIRST STAGES of parenting are sometimes called “the longest shortest time,” as an award-winning podcast on parenting attests. For a newborn and a new parent, the days are dense. Everything matters.
In the United States, many families’ caregiving-rich days of new parenthood are curtailed by work. A fifth of new mothers return to work within days or weeks of having a child, often driven by financial precarity. More than half of parents surveyed who were able to take some parental leave from work said they took less time off than they needed or wanted, the majority citing fear of lost income or jobs. As one mother, a call center employee with a newborn, said in an interview for a 2018 Center for Public Justice report, “My work doesn’t pay for maternity leave ... If I don’t go back to work in two weeks, we will not have enough money to pay our electric bill.”
From the biblical account of creation through the prophets’ visions of shalom, Christian tradition presents family life as fundamental to human life and society. Essayist Wendell Berry reasoned that a good human economy is one that “proposes to endure.” The nurture of children and care for loved ones, of course, is one way our society endures.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
THE TREATY ON the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first global ban on nuclear weapons, entered into force on Jan. 22. It is a bright spot in a bleak international landscape.
Negotiated by about two-thirds of the world’s nations, the treaty represents a remarkable step toward the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. Civil society, including faith communities, played a significant role in establishing the treaty and now can work to advance its reach—including persuading the United States to join. The Holy See, one of the first states to ratify the treaty, described it as “one more blow on the anvil toward the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.’”
The treaty bans all countries from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, threatening to use, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits countries from assisting, encouraging, or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities and requires signers to take certain proactive measures to implement the accord.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
FOR MORE THAN a century, evangelical Christians in the United States have frequently and variously imagined an apocalyptic upheaval that would usher in a new world. Evangelicals have had no shortage of appetite for cataclysmic stories, though they have differing interpretations of the biblical texts that describe the “end times,” as demonstrated by the popular appeal of the Left Behind series in the early 2000s. This craving is evident in the way that Christian visions of a final battle between the forces of darkness and light have been woven together with the conspiratorial narratives of QAnon.
In the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere, the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon is growing rapidly among New Age adherents and anti-vaccination communities. However, as religion reporter Katelyn Beaty has noted, there is explicitly Christian-sounding language in QAnon messaging. Explicit examples of the blending of Christian apocalyptic language and the QAnon conspiracies can be found in web posts and books published in the wake of the alleged “revelations” of the anonymous web poster “Q.” In these texts, Donald Trump is often presented as God’s anointed, an equivalent to King Cyrus, battling the diabolical forces of the “Deep State” (a conspiracy theory that posits a hidden government working within the legitimately elected government). The Deep State—supposedly composed of individuals such as Hillary Clinton, Pope Francis, and well-known celebrities who are often described as demonically controlled—is said to be guilty of the most savage crimes, including child sex trafficking and using their victims’ blood to extend their own lives.