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EVERY WEDNESDAY night, Sam’s youth group met in a darkened gymnasium dressed up as a rock concert: decorative fabrics, professional sound equipment, and a light show. A thin, attractive youth pastor with a soul patch and skinny jeans would deliver a message about the evils of sex, drugs, and alcohol.
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” This was a favorite verse of Sam’s youth pastors, who wielded it to warn kids against even thinking about sex. If lusting after a woman was just as bad as committing adultery, their logic held, then even thinking about sex is a sin.
“The weird thing,” Sam told me, “was that it wasn’t date rape or sexual harassment or even treating people disrespectfully that they were worried about. It was ‘impure thoughts’ and lust.”
There are two problems that I see here: One, these were teenagers, whose bodies are designed by God to become sexual, and two, the Greek word for lust, epithymia, is about general desire, not thinking sexual thoughts. If epithymia was a term for sexual desire, it would make some other things Jesus said super weird. (For example, Luke 22:15: “And he said to them, I have had sexual thoughts about eating this Passover with you before I suffer.”)
IT IS CRUEL TO PUNISH people for their poverty, but at every level of government, poor people are targeted for unfair treatment under the law. There is perhaps no clearer example of this than the growing criminalization of homelessness in the United States.
The criminalization of homelessness refers to a broad set of policies that punish people for having no indoor homes, such as local laws that prohibit sleeping, sitting, or lying down in outdoor public space. Since 2006, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (the Law Center) has tracked the explosive growth of these laws, including a 143 percent increase in those that outlaw living in vehicles. This is often the last refuge for poor families, the elderly, and disabled people who have been priced out of the rental market. Today, for example, half of the U.S. cities surveyed restrict sleeping and sheltering oneself outdoors, even when there are no alternative places to go.
Rather than address the root causes of homelessness, such as low wages that have not kept pace with rapidly rising rents, these policies merely punish people for living outside. Meanwhile, people who are sleeping in tents, lying down on sidewalks, and living in their vehicles are doing so because they are too poor to afford other housing. To jail, ticket, or threaten them for it only makes the problem worse.
People brought to jail for living in public often cannot afford cash bail, so they frequently accept criminal convictions to temporarily regain their freedom. They are then released back to the same streets, with the same lack of options, but with new fees and criminal records that make it even more difficult to get into housing and out of public space. This cycle is expensive and wastes community resources that would be better invested in permanent housing and other proven cost-effective solutions to homelessness.
IT'S EASY to get discouraged. The Paris climate accord is the most significant multinational agreement yet to address climate change. Every country in the world, and Palestine, signed it. “That’s a lot of countries!” said former President Obama.
But on June 1, 2017, President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. By abdicating U.S. presidential leadership, Trump left it to the rest of the world’s governments to address the greatest crisis humanity has ever seen.
The depressing actions of the current administration are legion. Using federal agencies and executive orders, Trump is dismantling the climate progress so many have worked for. In September, federal agencies deregulated the release of methane gas, which traps about 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide does. The Trump administration has allowed land set aside as national monuments to be pillaged for oil and gas drilling and mineral extraction. A fossil fuel corporate lawyer now working for the Environmental Protection Agency has dismantled our clean air regulations. The EPA has established incentives to encourage more than 300 coal plants to continue polluting our air and land.
If human-induced atmospheric warming continues at the current rate, the world will cross the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold of global temperature increase around 2040, much earlier than previously estimated, according to an October 2018 report from the International Panel on Climate Change, the first update since the Paris Agreement. Without aggressive action, food shortages and wildfires will worsen, water shortages will hit urban areas, killer heatwaves and violent storms will be more frequent, coastal areas will experience sea level rise, and populations will migrate. Humanity must become laser focused on achieving net zero emissions if creation as we know it is to survive. In other words, it’s now or never on climate change.
AT THE BORDER between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, people come together once a week for communion across the dividing line. El Faro: The Border Church/ La Iglesia Fronteriza is held every Sunday on both sides of the border. For some families, it is their only opportunity to see loved ones who have been separated from them by immigration status.
The service is at Friendship Park, or “El Parque de la Amistad,” the piece of land that lies between the mesh border fence and the larger border wall that keeps the United States separate from Mexico. Usually, the outer wall is closed, cordoning off any opportunities for people on opposite sides of the border to connect. But for four hours each weekend it opens. For most people, the border is a place of division. But for Pastor John Fanestil, the borderland, or “la fronteriza,” is “a place of encounter.”
Fanestil, who preaches at First United Methodist Church of San Diego, has been running El Faro: The Border Church for almost a decade. He meets me at the trailhead of Border Field State Park, the 1,000-plus-acre San Diego nature preserve that borders the sprawling metropolis of Tijuana. In the summer months, you can drive all the way down to the border, but the trail floods when it rains and is often closed to vehicles in the winter. Today, it’s shut because of a sewage spill from Tijuana, so we hike down.
Fanestil was raised in La Jolla, an upscale neighborhood in San Diego, but says that his first real introduction to Spanish culture was in Costa Rica, where he did a year of seminary. His first appointment after ordination was in the inland border town of Calexico, Calif., which is adjacent to its Mexican sister city, Mexicali. He fell in love with the border culture, and after serving congregations in Los Angeles and Orange Country, he was placed in San Diego in 2004.
FOR HER FIRST FEW WEEKS as pastor of Los Angeles First United Methodist Church, Mandy McDow forgot to collect the Sunday morning offering. It wasn’t because she was holding worship under a tent in a parking lot across from LA’s 20,000-seat arena. It wasn’t because a group of NBA All-Stars drove by and distracted her. The offering just didn’t cross her mind.
“After my first service, people said, ‘Where do we put our money?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ We didn’t even bring out an offering box or anything. We had to go find it.”
Los Angeles First United Methodist Church—known simply as “First Church”—owns the parking lot at the corner of Flower Street and Olympic Boulevard in LA’s South Park neighborhood. On Sundays, the parking lot collects the members of one of LA’s oldest Protestant churches, a crowd that includes people experiencing homelessness, Filipino immigrants, and LGBTQ folks. On Monday, the 100-spot parking lot goes to work holding cars for people rushing to meetings at the convention center by day and concerts and sporting events by night. “We have this amazing gift of a perpetually regenerating source of revenue that we never have to ask anyone—none of our congregants—for another dime as long as we live,” says McDow.
First Church operates on what McDow calls an “inverted business model”; instead of asking the congregation to support the church, McDow runs a business—the parking lot—to support the congregation. “Churches sit empty 80 to 90 percent of the time, and they drain your resources, and then you’re asking for money from people who desperately need their money for other things,” says McDow. “Every church I have ever served had property issues. All the money goes back into the facility, and you can’t do ministry because you’re too busy maintaining the temple.”
Reynolds arrived at an early morning protest in St. Paul, Minn., a few hours after Philando’s death. I heard her tell her story to a small crowd gathered on the street. Weeping, she shared how impossibly stuck they felt in the 74 seconds between stopping their car for the police and Castile being shot multiple times.
Castile was never given a chance to show identification because he was shot as he reached for his wallet. He tried to tell the officer about his legally licensed handgun, but the screaming officer didn’t seem to hear.
As Castile, Reynolds, and her young child ran errands on that summer night, civil rights laws did not protect their “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 allowed for Castile’s employment at an elementary school and made legal their right to move through town. But these rights were not enough to protect Castile’s freedom to live.
What is democracy?
As U.S. Christians and others fight to defend the space for justice created by civil rights movements of the past, another theme rises: What does freedom mean in America today? What does Reynold’s rage require of people of faith?
At a minimum, it requires moving beyond a Sunday school version of democracy, as Southern Freedom Movement leader and historian Vincent Harding put it in 2002. “A solution of the present crisis will not take place unless ... [we] work for it. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle. ... This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action,” Harding said, quoting Martin Luther King’s Stride Toward Freedom.
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson gives the keynote address at the closing reception for the SNCC Digital Gateway Project in March 2018. Photo from SNCC Vimeo
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, an organization founded in the 1930s as a “folk school” to train labor organizers throughout Appalachia and the South. In the 1950s, Highlander was an incubator for the civil rights movement, with trainings led by Septima Clark and Ella Baker. By the 1990s, the center supported anti-strip-mining battles in Appalachia and linked mountain organizers with anti-globalization efforts around the world. Today, Highlander draws on the strengths of immigrants, students, and other local leaders in the rural South to build popular education programs that advance cultural organizing for justice. Former Sojourners editorial assistant Faith Zamblé interviewed Henderson in July.
Faith Zamblé: How would you describe your work at the Highlander Center?
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: I describe it as a grand inheritance. I was 31 or 32 when I became the first black woman to be co-executive director of the Highlander Center. And I inherited 86 years of people’s stories and experiences and movement legacy. But with that legacy comes a great responsibility to make sure that the Highlander Center isn’t just a living museum, where people come to study what was; it should also be a place where people can learn how to do things now. It’s living in the past, present, and future at the same time, every day, all day.
WHEN JONATHAN MCGUIRE leaves his driveway, he has a choice. Turn right, and the pastor of Rockaway Beach, Mo.’s Bridge of Faith Community Church will hit the state highway with a clean shot into the thriving tourist mecca of Branson. Turn left, and he’ll find himself in downtown Rockaway Beach, a community left behind in Branson’s tailwinds.
Early on, McGuire’s neighbors gave him some sardonic, not-quite-tongue-in-cheek advice. They told him: “Never turn left.” Turning left, says McGuire, means “you have to acknowledge that there’s a problem.”
And yet, despite the difficulties, McGuire and his congregation have turned left into the heart of the uncomfortable messiness of poverty, but also into the heart of their community.
They’re not alone. I went looking for congregations living a vision for biblical social justice along the unique contours of rural America. I spoke to leaders seeking a just and hopeful future for their communities and discovered stories of people who are building relationships, advocating for the common good, and agitating for culture change.
Mobilized by love of neighbor
The economic reality of rural America is diverse. Pockets of robust growth exist within driving distance of vibrant cities and gorgeous natural amenities. Yet many towns face profound challenges. They’re communities fractured by generational poverty, addiction, and—perhaps surprisingly in breadbasket regions—food insecurity.
In places like this, it’s often the rural church that takes on the role of change agent. Social justice runs deep in the scriptures, given voice by the Old Testament prophets, embodied in Jesus’ life, and lived out in the upside-down economics of the early church (see Micah 6:8; Luke 4:18; Acts 2:44-45). And yet, as Jordan Rasmussen with the Center for Rural Affairs (CFRA) in Lyons, Neb., explains, social justice “can be an off-putting term for rural residents.”
From ‘war on poverty’ to ‘war on drugs’
The Lord has appointed me to bring good news ... to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners. —Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:18
APRIL'S BIRACIAL DAUGHTER Erin has a drug problem. Heartbroken, “April” has watched “Erin” negotiate the prison system for the past 17 years. Now age 44, Erin has been in and out of five prisons and four jails, totaling almost eight years—all on drug-related charges.
On any given day in the United States, at least 137,000 men and women are in prisons or jails for drug use or possession, with thousands more spending extended periods on probation and parole. Why have rates of drug use (excluding opioids) not changed significantly despite more than four decades of the so-called war on drugs? Why are so many punished by incarceration for an activity that does not directly harm others?
In fall 2016, I was looking for volunteer opportunities in retirement. Having worked with a prisoner-release program in Canada, I wanted to pursue criminal justice issues again. In Harrisonburg, Va., I discovered the Valley Justice Coalition, a local group concerned about reducing incarceration and recidivism in Harrisonburg and surrounding Rockingham County.
With 2.2 million inmates, “no other country in the world imprisons its citizens like we do,” says Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California. Currently, 670 per 100,000 persons are incarcerated in the U.S., compared with 60 to 200 persons per 100,000 in other Western countries. This prison boom has led to annual spending of $72.5 billion on corrections.
Brother Fink received his 87-year sentence in 1990, when he was 34. The former parole system had offered incentives so that a sentence could be reduced. With cooperative behavior and attending educational programs, prisoners could earn “good time credits,” so Brother Fink diligently complied. But by the mid-1980s, many states had passed “truth-in-sentencing” laws that required prisoners to serve higher percentages (typically 85 percent) of their already long sentences, followed in the ’90s by “tough on crime” policies.
Now state prisons in the U.S. face an exploding elderly population. Between 1993 and 2013, the number of prisoners 55 years or older, serving sentences of one year or longer, increased 400 percent, to 131,500. If this trend continues, by 2030 a third of all inmates will be elderly, escalating the need for geriatric facilities and staffing, with costs twice that of younger inmates. The Osborne Association, which works with older prisoners and their families, estimates current annual spending at $16 billion for inmates aged 50 and older, warning that without decisive action the criminal justice system is at risk of collapsing under its own weight.
After serving 28 years, might Brother Fink be eligible for parole? Sadly, the Virginia parole board denies most releases, currently approving only 6 percent. Brother Fink has had 11 parole interviews, receiving three-year deferrals, including two geriatric turndowns.
As of October 2016, the backlog of prisoners eligible for parole in Virginia numbered 2,765, costing the state more than $77 million annually. Given this backlog and the seriousness of Brother Fink’s crimes, what are his chances for release at his next parole hearing? Then multiply Brother Fink by more than 100,000 elderly prisoners across the nation, who are some of the most rehabilitated and most infirm in the system, thus posing the least threat to public safety.
The wry 20th century theologian saw the “radical and wondrous splendor” of the big top as an image of the kingdom of God: miraculous, death-defying stunts; an impending sense of both calamity and delight; parodied pantomimes of social convention—all enacted by a company of the “freaks” snubbed by polite company. “The circus is eschatological parable and social parody,” wrote Stringfellow. “It signals a transcendence of the power of death, which exposes this world as it truly is while it pioneers the kingdom.”
Drawing inspiration from the biblical covenants between God, people, and land—as well as Stringfellow’s beloved circus and other resistance traditions, including Brazilian Carnivale parades, Burning Man, West African drumming, and the warnings of Indigenous elders—the members of Holy Fool Arts pitched their tents in Philadelphia this summer to stage the seventh Carnival de Resistance, “a traveling carnival, village, and school for social change bridging the worlds of art, activism, and faith.”
During the week, the troupe partnered with local groups to paint murals, work in gardens, teach Bible studies, and join creative acts of protest. On weekends, they staged ceremonial theater performances (with a bike-powered sound system), demonstrated fossil-fuel-free living in their eco-village, and hosted an interactive carnival midway, complete with sideshow attractions, art installations, crafts, and games.
“Carnival traditions are about simultaneously subverting the dominant order while temporarily inhabiting an alternative world of festive celebration, playful mockery, and embodied community,” director Tevyn East told Sojourners. “We at the Carnival de Resistance seek to honor these long-standing traditions and spark the prophetic imagination through acts of resistance and incarnation.”
A Deeply Moral Act
Voting is a decisive statement of Christian faith that I matter, justice matters, and others matter.
by Richard Rohr
Low voter turnout is generally a sign of a demoralized society, and people of power feed on that demoralization, knowing that they can then easily gerrymander, suppress and limit voting rights, and give elections to the rule of money and lobbyists—and there will be little outcry, because there is so little trust or even interest in the whole system anyway.
Yet this is largely where the U.S. is today.
The powers that control society are quite happy that it is always minorities of all stripes that first feel this powerlessness and this demoralization. Since the early days of representative government, it has been believed that democracy would only work if there was a truly free and informed citizenry. We presently seem to lack both in the U.S. This is why voting is a deeply moral act for me—in rebuilding confidence and encouraging an intelligent and hope-filled society. It is also a decisive act of Christian faith that I matter, society matters, justice matters, and others matter.
Not to vote is to hand our power and our dignity over to people who fear actual freedom, honest intelligence, and faith in the very goodness of humanity.
Voting for Change
I vote because many of my brothers and sisters can’t.
by Myrna Pérez
I vote for a lot of reasons. I love joining my fellow citizens in a community-minded act. I love having a say in picking the leaders who get to decide on things that matter to me. Increasingly, I love to vote and feel compelled to vote because I know there are about 4.5 million Americans living and working in communities across the country who cannot because they have a criminal conviction in their past.
MOST OF US KNOW that there is something drastically wrong with the American economy. In 2017, the richest 10 percent of the population owned 77 percent of the nation’s wealth and the 20 richest Americans had more wealth than the entire bottom half of the American population. What is worse is that the new tax bill passed by President Trump and the Republican Congress will increase this imbalance. By 2027, according to the Tax Policy Center, 90 percent of its benefits will go to the richest of Americans. Because the changes will be incremental, they are not likely to be noticed by the vast majority of citizens until it is too late.
Financing these tax breaks for the rich is being accomplished in three ways. First, there will be cuts in benefits for the middle class, which that will mean less money for higher education, medical programs, and social security. Second, there will be dramatic cuts made to the programs that have heretofore provided a safety net for the poor, including cuts to the food stamps program, Medicaid, and housing subsidies. Third, there will be a huge increase in the national debt.
CHRISTIANITY IS THE ONLY religion in North Korea that is considered to be strictly a foreign religion. North Korea considers Christianity to be the forefront of American imperialism. The country is taught that Christian missionaries in the 19th century came to Korea to indoctrinate the people with Western civilization. Then, in the Korean War, the U.S. soldiers who massacred their people were depicted as Christian crusaders. To fan these flames, the largest group of Koreans who opposed communism when the government was established in 1945 was the Christians. Therefore, in North Korea, Christians are likened to spies, foreign imperialists, and anti-government traitors.
Despite this, Christianity has been allowed to persist in North Korea. The vast majority of churches were destroyed during the early years of communism in North Korea, but in 1989 Kim Il Sung brought life back to Christianity by rebuilding the home church of his mother. Since then, two other state churches have been erected: one additional Protestant church and one Catholic church.
They were U.S. “torture taxis” in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Playing a key role in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition,” detention, and interrogation program, the two aircraft flew at least 34 separate “rendition circuits” that resulted in the kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture of at least 49 individuals, according to the U.K.-based Rendition Project, a coalition of academics, human rights investigators, legal teams, and investigative journalists who waded through reams of data, including falsified and redacted flight plans and other reports, to uncover the truth about the CIA program and its victims.
A typical flight circuit, according to The Rendition Project, went like this:
- A jet would take off from Johnston County Airport, about 30 miles south of Raleigh, and fly to Washington, D.C., to pick up the CIA “snatch team.”
- It would then fly across the Atlantic and stop for refueling somewhere in Europe.
- The next stop would be the pick-up location, often in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but also in Egypt, Gambia, Morocco, Malawi, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Djibouti, Macedonia, and elsewhere.
- Dummy flight plans would often be filed to obscure the true drop-off destinations, which included the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, CIA “black sites” in Poland, Romania, Afghanistan, and Lithuania—and one in Thailand that was run by now CIA director Gina Haspel.
- After delivering the prisoner, the plane would fly to a “rest and relaxation” location to refuel and to allow the CIA team to recover before being flown back to Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C.
- The final leg took the plane and flight crew home to Johnston County.
The commission against torture is following the lead of previous truth commissions, including its own state’s Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and another focused on the 1898 Wilmington race riot—both of whose members and staff provided advice. The independent, nongovernmental torture commission held public hearings in November and December to investigate and encourage public debate about the role North Carolina played in facilitating the U.S. torture program between 2001 and 2006.
TWO-THIRDS OF A CENTURY after the Korean War, most Americans do not know what happened in that conflict or how it impacts the Korean Peninsula even today.
In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. The U.N. intervened, and in the three years that followed the U.S. Air Force dropped more tonnage of bombs on North Korea than were used in the entire Pacific theater during World War II, including more than 30,000 tons of napalm. The U.S. destroyed 80 percent of the North’s infrastructure and 50 percent of its cities. The capital city of Pyongyang was wiped off the map.
“Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,” said Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War. Historians believe that between 70 and 80 percent of the deaths were civilians.
Nearly 40,000 U.S. soldiers died and more than 100,000 were wounded in what has been a “forgotten war” in the United States. North Koreans, however, have never forgotten the war that resulted in millions of casualties in their country. For 65 years, they have lived under that war’s vivid memory and evolved into one of the most militarized states in the world.
The root causes of the problem
Technically, the Korean War never ended. The armistice treaty signed in 1953 reinstated the government of South Korea, suspended open hostilities, created the Demilitarized Zone, and allowed for the release of prisoners of war, but it was not a permanent peace treaty between nations. No peace treaty has ever been signed. “We have won an armistice on a single battleground—not peace in the world. We may not now relax our guard nor cease our quest,” said President Dwight Eisenhower.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner
AMERICA HAS A CRISIS of mass incarceration, and it has little to do with crime rates. The system is broken: America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Even though the United States contains just 5 percent of the world’s population, the nation has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. At every point, from the laws on sentencing to policing practices and health conditions in prisons, impersonal forces exact a very personal toll on incarcerated persons and their families.
Many citizens have started to work on solutions by raising awareness, legalizing drugs such as marijuana, and passing laws that require police officers to wear body cameras. But one critical function of our legal system has received too little attention from Christians and the rest of the public: local prosecutors.
Local prosecutors, or district attorneys, as they are formally known, hold enormous influence. These 2,400 individuals nationwide have the authority to determine when, how, and how severely to charge a person with a crime. They help determine when someone goes home and when someone goes to prison for decades. Their decisions could mean the difference between an innocent person going free or going on death row.
I first became aware of the issues related to local prosecutors while attending a lecture at the University of Mississippi in fall 2017. I was there to hear James Forman Jr. talk about his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which describes how black Americans, for complex reasons, supported the “tough on crime” policies that led to mass incarceration. During the Q&A that followed Forman’s lecture, one student asked Forman how nonlawyers could join in the effort to reform the criminal justice system. A part of Forman’s response remained with me.
“Get involved in local races,” he said. “Local prosecutors are the most powerful people in the system, but nobody votes in these races.”
MY THROAT STARTED to feel tight a few days before I went to Montgomery this April. I had been planning this pilgrimage to Alabama with my teen children for months but, as the days grew closer, I questioned my body’s ability to walk into the grief that was awaiting us at the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
As a biracial African-American woman putting down roots in the rural South with my white husband and our four children, daily life can feel like an act of resistance. Every day we are faced with Confederate flags and memorials that celebrate an era and mindset that would have made our marriage and my equal ownership of our property a crime. But we love our home, the land, and our neighbors. We want, in the words of Gwendolyn Brooks, “to conduct [our] blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
I was determined to bring my older children to the state of my birth, to take an unflinching look at our racist past and present, and to give them courage to walk the unfinished path toward justice. But still, I found it hard to breathe.
I gardened with a single-minded ferocity in the days before our trip, pulling weeds and digging up long taproots as though I could purge the evils from our land with my bare hands. Red dirt began to lodge deep beneath my nails and in the dry creases of my fingers, my forearms bore slashes from the thorny vines that whipped me as I tore them from the earth. There were flowers, thick with the hopeful scent of spring, trying to bloom beneath the tangle of weeds. I yanked and tore in every spare minute I had, stopping only when I noticed blood pouring from a deep slice on my right forefinger.
It felt right to come with dirty, bloodied hands into those sacred spaces in Montgomery.
Palestinians at the Gaza-Israel border react to tear gas during a protest of the Trump administration's recognition of Jerusalem.
EVANGELICALS IN THE United States and Christians in the Middle East had vastly differing responses to President Trump’s actions on Jerusalem that sparked the explosion of violence this spring on Gaza’s border with Israel.
In the United States, 53 percent of evangelicals supported the decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, according to a Brookings Institute poll, and it was greeted with unadulterated joy by prominent leaders of the Religious Right. A wide range of church leaders in the Middle East were decidedly less positive about Trump’s actions, pointing to the potential threat not only to peace in the region but also to the very presence of Christians in the Holy Land.
How could an action so many U.S. Christians supported elicit such opposition from Christians across the denominational landscape of the Middle East?
There are, of course, deep divides within Christianity about the place of the Holy Land and role of the Jewish people in eschatology that in part explain the divergent reactions, but there are pragmatic reasons as well for why Middle Eastern Christians would oppose the Trump administration’s actions on Jerusalem. The U.S. government’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel—absent a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians—will certainly threaten the Christian presence in the city and increase the risk of violence, according to church leaders there, owing to the unilateral nature of the decision.
Supporters of U.S. recognition of Jerusalem might ask how this seemingly symbolic act could harm Christians (or anyone, for that matter). The Trump administration, after all, denies that the recognition of Jerusalem will have any detrimental impact on the peace process. They argue that Jerusalem has served as the physical location of Israel’s government since 1950; it makes no sense, they say, to deny the reality that the city is “in fact” Israel’s capital.
IN THE FIGHT against gerrymandered electoral districts in Pennsylvania, Carol Kuniholm is a rock star.
A former English professor and youth pastor, Kuniholm now spends much of her time traveling the Keystone State, explaining to hundreds of listeners how politicians have deliberately redrawn Pennsylvania’s voting districts to favor their own party. Using charts and graphs, Kuniholm shows, in lucid detail, how the disfigured districts chill democracy. “Democracy means voters choose their politicians,” explains the website of Fair Districts PA, an anti-gerrymandering organization Kuniholm co-founded in 2016. “Current Pennsylvania law lets politicians choose their voters.”
Plain-spoken and precise, Kuniholm hasn’t changed her demeanor since taking charge of the state movement, though she did make one concession to her newfound fame: “I bought a suit,” she confesses.