Opinion
Last week the Trump administration announced Operation Midway Blitz, which extends the surge of ICE agents sent to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., into Chicago; additional ICE surges are happening in Boston and are planned for Memphis. This increased ICE activity follows an alarming Supreme Court shadow docket ruling that permits the administration to stop people on the basis of personal appearance, language, or type of employment. In other words, racial profiling is now explicitly permissible for immigration officials.
If your life is proceeding basically as normal—school drop-offs, daily commutes, medical appointments, visits with grandchildren, stressful jobs, or the daily rhythms of life—it can be hard to remember the fear that many of our immigrant neighbors now feel. Despite my job leading a social justice organization, I’ll confess that I’m not immune from the temptation myself.
Romans 13:1, much to my chagrin, reads, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”
I’ve been on the receiving end of a pointed quotation of this passage more than once; usually when I’ve questioned the governance of a particular leader or advocated for someone who has broken a law. But all too often, these words seem to vanish from my critics’ memories when their preferred leader is out of power. The Bible is decidedly nuanced in its opinions on this matter.
Last weekend, I visited my home state of Illinois to attend the Church at the Crossroads conference, which was held at Parkview Community Church in Glen Ellyn. Conference organizers estimated that 580 attended in person and 300 more joined virtually. The conference was convened to encourage American evangelicals to listen to Palestinian Christians and to confront and correct those who use scripture to “justify war, occupation, or silence” in the face of the escalating violence in Israel and Palestine.
Practically speaking, though, what was the point of this shindig?
A federal judge has ordered the closure of the notorious immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” citing environmental violations and opposition from the Miccosukee Tribe. Progressives are celebrating this as a significant triumph for Florida’s Everglades, Indigenous communities, and the migrants who have endured the detention center’s conditions. But is this court ruling truly the sweeping victory that advocates claim?
I read the news, stepped into my car, and let out a guttural scream.
Charlie Kirk, 31, had been shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University.
The brazen and reprehensible murder of right-wing religious movement leader Charlie Kirk, a co-founder of Turning Point USA and a key supporter of President Donald Trump, is as tragic as it is telling about the sad state of American politics.
The 31-year-old husband and father of two died after being shot while he conducted a popular debate-style event at Utah Valley University, south of Salt Lake City. Kirk had started answering a question about gun violence in America when a single bullet struck him in the neck. Republican and Democratic spokespersons, including Trump, asked for prayers as medical professionals tried to save Kirk's life, but he succumbed to his wounds shortly after the attack.
As part of the ongoing assault on essential services for the most vulnerable, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, includes $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over the next 10 years. As Emily Crawford noted for NPR in August, “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that these cuts could cause 10 million Americans to lose health insurance by 2034.”
As a caregiver for my disabled mother, who relies solely on Medicaid for health insurance, these estimates are terrifying. Also terrifying is that House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican and Christian, gave glory to God when the bill that created these cuts was passed.
In many headlines and on social media, the term “evangelical” is often conflated with “conservative,” “white,” “male,” and “American.” Many in the U.S. evangelical community are resisting that conflation, actively pushing for a new vision for evangelicalism that situates it within a global landscape. For these evangelicals, the future of evangelicalism is less James Dobson and more Botrus Mansour.
As such, Christianity Today often uplifts the multicultural face of global evangelicalism, suggesting that decentering the white American experience offers a new path forward for evangelicalism. Hence, the oft spoken refrain: The new face of Christianity is not a white man, but a woman in Africa.
When President Donald Trump announced a takeover of the nation’s capital in August, he justified the move by claiming that crime in Washington, D.C., was rampant. It wasn’t.
Many videos have surfaced on social media depicting law enforcement officers from multiple agencies targeting predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods while outraged bystanders berate the officers.
If you’ve ever attended a Christian music concert, you’ll likely remember the mid-concert missions pitch. Growing up in the evangelical tradition, I heard countless versions of this pitch from local nonprofit leaders admonishing us to give to their organizations. But there is one pitch I’ll never forget.
In high school, I went to see Remedy Drive at a small music venue in Northeast Wisconsin. At the time, they were a larger-than-life band with songs like “Daylight” and “All Along” topping the Christian music charts. The concert lived up to the expectation as their long-haired frontman, David Zach, danced around the stage, jumping off speakers and spraying water into the crowd.
Last week, I returned from vacation to find more than 2,100 National Guard troops in my city, our nation’s capital, deployed from the district and six other states at a cost estimated to be upwards of $1 million a day.
As I walked from Union Station to our nearby offices, I was filled with righteous anger—not at the National Guard troops who were milling around, simply following orders, but toward the Trump administration’s wasteful, political stunt of misusing emergency powers granted to the president with dire consequences.
It’s not just the optics of Humvees parked outside Union Station or soldiers in desert camouflage patrolling the National Mall; an ever-present sense of menace has settled over many parts of the city, especially for many Black and brown people and others whose identities or circumstances make them vulnerable to over-policing. It’s unmarked cars directly outside bilingual childcare centers, and nannies asking to be escorted to and from their jobs. It’s also the presence of vested, armed, and often masked federal agents on our streets—all too often, we see them because they are taking a person of color into custody. It’s hearing that a former colleague couldn’t worship at their church because ICE was parked outside the sanctuary doors. It means having to go through militarized checkpoints in some of D.C.’s most popular areas for nightlife, such as U Street, and in neighborhoods with a high concentration of Latinos and immigrants, such as Columbia Heights.
God is not up in heaven thinking up bad things to happen to you. He loves you so much and only wants the best for you. But sometimes that means you have to go through a little bit of pain and heartache. But if you trust him and you love him, he will not let you down.
These words of comfort were given by James Dobson to a young girl in an episode of a Christian radio drama created by his organization. Within these few short sentences, you can find the entirety of Dobson’s ideology: God’s love entangled with the necessity of His punishment.
James Dobson, the Christian family psychologist and media mogul who became one of the key architects of the Religious Right, has passed away.
At his height, Dobson’s influence was vast. His Colorado-based organization Focus on the Family helped build American evangelicals into a political monolith. He enjoyed access to the highest levels of Republican administrations—so much so that the New York Times dubbed him “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader” in 2005. He served on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board in 2016 and supported his re-election bid in 2020.
As a former strong-willed child, I’ve had the notion of James Dobson’s mortality in the back of my mind for the last half-decade or so.
I was not expecting a few tears to fall at the news of his death at age 89, but they showed up anyway. Even though this guy hadn’t hurt me for decades, it felt like a relief. I know he inflicted damage on millions of others that might never fade, but his death made it feel like Earth had just become a little less cruel.
When I am acclimating myself to my neighbors, one of the things I enjoy doing is asking them how they came to be my neighbors. You never really know people’s backgrounds, and it’s always interesting to see people light up at the opportunity to tell you a bit about themselves. Very often, both in Washington D.C. and my home state of Texas, I’ll run into people from Ethiopia.
When I went to college in Austin, I got to know a lot of people whose families came from Ethiopia. In getting to know them, I learned about the conflicts that have forced people to leave their homes and to obtain protection under Temporary Protected Status in 2022 due to the nation’s ongoing wars and humanitarian crises. The TPS designation allows migrants to temporarily live in the U.S. when they cannot return to their countries safely, often due to dire circumstances. For the people I met from Ethiopia, TPS offered an escape from physical danger and a chance to thrive here in the U.S. while working to end the conflict back home and caring for their loved ones as best they can.
“Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,” Scott Kupor, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, said in a statement last month.
Kupor was positively commenting on a July memorandum to federal agencies that explains that federal employees are allowed to, for example, hold prayer circles and discuss their religious beliefs with colleagues. The memorandum even goes so far as to say that civil servants can “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.” According to Kupor, “This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths.”
In July, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced an intention to revoke the Endangerment Finding. This 2009 ruling is the EPA policy that says greenhouse gases harm people—a finding that gives the EPA the authority to regulate climate-warming pollution.
If successful, the revocation would enshrine climate change denial as the official policy of the U.S. government and make it much harder to regulate fossil fuel emissions. The authors of the report cited to legitimize this move are a veritable all-star team of five climate-change-denying scientists, an extreme minority who contract the 97% of global scientists who believe humans are causing climate change. The absurdity is compounded by timing: Zeldin’s announcement came in the midst of the summer “Danger Season” when heat waves, floods, fires, and hurricanes leave millions reeling from weather crises exacerbated by climate change. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 98% of people living in the United States have faced an extreme weather alert since May 1, with over half of those alerts exhibiting clear, scientifically established connections to climate change.
“Have you seen the Sydney Sweeney ad?”
That was the caption of a post on X featuring President Donald Trump on the roof of the White House, shouting down to onlookers about a now infamous American Eagle marketing campaign.
It’s only the latest in an endless parade of very stupid events, most of which are barely worth the time it would take to recap. To boil this story down to the essential points threatens to dissolve the whole affair, but the long and short of is that Sydney Sweeney posed in an American Eagle jeans ad with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” The campaign launched a small culture war flare-up between those who saw something insidious in proclaiming that a pretty blonde, white girl has “great genes” and those who thought such criticisms were “woke.”
Immigrants are being disappeared. Journalists are being threatened. Protesters are being criminalized. The poor are abandoned. The sick are left behind. Wars still rage. Democracy is crumbling.
The world feels increasingly precarious, and various crises are compounding and multiplying. What moral responsibility do religious institutions—especially seminaries—have at this time?
Given Christianity’s sordid history when it comes to antisemitism, we have a responsibility to reaffirm our commitment to combating antisemitism. But we must be vigilant to resist the lie that this commitment requires our silence on Palestine or Palestinian human rights. As journalist Peter Beinart told Sojourners in April, there is a “sense of guilt and anxiety that exists about Christian antisemitism,” and it “is leveraged sometimes by pro-Israel leaders … It’s much easier to level accusations of antisemitism than to actually have an honest conversation about how you justify a system that the country’s own human rights organizations are calling apartheid.”
The way to address antisemitic violence is not, as our current and previous administrations have suggested, by silencing Palestinians or those advocating for a free Palestine.