South Africa and ‘The Art of the Deal’

Trump makes quick changes, but some consequences are fatal.

A shepherd managing his family farm in South Africa.

Marco Longari / Getty

This is the last article of a three-part series. See Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s articles.

It’s peculiar to see white South Africans as victims in need of refuge. They make up 7 percent of South Africa’s overall population but own 72 percent of the land, according to a 2017 land audit, while black people comprise 81 percent of the population and own 4 percent of the land. The Trump administration, however, recently put out an executive order that privileges white South Africans.

History underlies those statistics. The Natives Land Act in 1913 restricted black people from buying or renting land in “white South Africa.” Some faced forcible removal from their land. Others lost their land following passage in 1950 of the Group Areas Act, which amplified segregation by saying South Africa’s apartheid government could zone certain areas for use by a single race.

The expropriation of land also hurt the black church. One South African bishop, Josh Malebye, recently told Parliament that depriving black churches of land needed to build multipurpose centers hamstrung their ability to address social ills. Besides, as political analyst Sithembile Mbete told journalist Peter Granitz, “When people say they want land, part of it is also about wanting ancestral belonging and dignity.”

The end of apartheid in 1994 brought a plan to return 30 percent of this land to its previous owners by 2014, but only one-third of that has happened. So South Africa’s Parliament passed the new Expropriation Act, which allows the taking of land only when “the land is not being used and the owner’s main purpose is … to benefit from appreciation of its market value.”

The act does not force landowners away from their properties: It doesn’t reenact the events of 1913 and 1950, this time with “bottom rail on top.” Expropriation goes into effect “where an owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise control over it.” The underlying ethic is that waiting for the market price to go up while keeping others from obtaining land is unjust.

Fifteen years ago in Peru, I saw how a similar plan worked. Land uninhabited or unimproved for at least five years could be occupied by the landless poor. Hundreds moved onto one stony hillside at San Juan de Lurigancho. Families put up structures—initially straw or hay, then plywood, then brick or concrete with a stucco finish. City authorities provided electricity and water.

Peru, learning from the work of free-market economist Hernando de Soto, was providing a path for the poor to own land otherwise unused. South Africa could do the same. But the Trump executive order says such a plan is “unjust” and a reason to offer Afrikaners refugee status on explicitly racial grounds.

To punish South Africa for purportedly oppressing its white population, Trump’s executive order says, “The United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa. … [The US] shall, to the maximum extent allowed by law, halt foreign aid or assistance delivered or provided to South Africa, and shall promptly exercise all available authorities and discretion to halt such aid or assistance.”

In some ways, South Africa is the most public whipping boy for what the Trump administration is doing in all of sub-Saharan Africa, which received close to $13 billion in direct US foreign assistance in 2024. The goal of such aid was to save lives, fight poverty and terrorism, and win friends in the one continent where the population is surging. (Also surging in Africa: Christian belief.)

In his recent State of the Union address, though, President Trump attacked aid to Africa. He elicited laughter from some by claiming that America provided “$8 million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.” Lesotho is surrounded by South Africa. In the Zulu village of Loskop, not far from Lesotho, 20 years ago I listened to eight boys and girls ages 13 to 18 standing in a circle in a cold, dimly lit room, singing lines from a Ladysmith Black Mambazo song then popular across South Africa: “AIDS killed my father. AIDS killed my mother. AIDS is killing Africa.”

Unless the Trump administration disavows the ordered halt to South African aid, the biggest losers will be many of the 5.5 million South Africans who receive antiretrovirals: Through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), begun by compassionate conservative President George W. Bush and continued by his successors through two decades, South Africa funded one-sixth of its HIV/AIDS program. Helping those who contracted HIV decades ago is not popular, but an Annals of Internal Medicine analysis last month projected that the Trump decision could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Twenty years ago, 1 in 250 Americans had HIV, compared to 1 of 10 adults in South Africa. Some said the macabre stat would soon be 1 out of 2. Given the number of orphans, it’s no surprise that the World Bank reported high levels of malnutrition, with half of South Africa’s children facing stunted growth. Many children survived by working long hours, sometimes in prostitution.

PEPFAR, though, saved millions of lives. Its shaky future reminds me of what one of the eight teenage singers said 20 years ago, before PEPFAR help arrived in the village of Loskop. Bonga, insisting he could have sex without getting AIDS, claimed that “black people are not the same as white people.” Several years later, a missionary told me Bonga was dead.

Donald Trump’s 1987 bestseller, Trump: The Art of the Deal, includes this memory from when he was in elementary school: “I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. … Even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way.”

Tony Schwartz, who spent 18 months with Trump in the 1980s to ghostwrite The Art of the Deal, said in 2016 to The New Yorker that Trump “has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Trump may change his mind regarding South Africa, or he may follow his negotiating practice of punching first and then offering a deal.

Trump’s Truth Social post may be a leading indicator that he will drop his executive order’s racial discrimination. But some dropping of foreign aid will be hard to unwind. The Art of the Deal proudly describe show young Trump didn’t have enough blocks “to build a very tall building.” He asked his brother Robert, two years younger, “if I could borrow some of his, and he said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’”

Trump and ghostwriter Schwartz wrote, “I ended up using all of my blocks, and then all of his, and when I was done, I’d created a beautiful building. I liked it so much that I glued the whole thing together. And that was the end of Robert’s blocks.”

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

Gateway Church Founder Robert Morris Indicted on Child Sex Abuse Charges

Kate Shellnutt

Less than a year after resigning over allegations dating back to the 1980s, the former megachurch pastor faces a criminal case in Oklahoma.

Robert Morris

Alex Brandon / AP

The former pastor of one of the biggest churches in Texas now faces criminal charges over allegations of child sexual abuse that took place in the 1980s.

On Wednesday, a grand jury in Oklahoma indicted Gateway Church founder Robert Morris on five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child.

He resigned from Gateway last year after an Oklahoma woman publicly recounted how Morris molested her starting when she was 12.

“After almost 43 years, the law has finally caught up with Robert Morris for the horrific crimes he committed against me as a child,” Cindy Clemishire said in a statement to the press on Wednesday.

Last June, Clemishire told the abuse watchdog blog Wartburg Watch that Morris regularly stayed with her family while visiting Tulsa as a young evangelist and that he came into her room and touched her under her clothing. She said the incidents took place dozens of times over four years and included attempting to have intercourse with her as a teen. Morris was in his early 20s and married.

As of Wednesday evening, neither Morris nor his attorney had made a public statement responding to the indictment. Morris previously referred to what happened as “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady” and said that “it was confessed and repented of.”

Morris follows a steady string of church leaders who have been the subjects of allegations brought to light through the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements over the past decade. Such claims have resulted in many prominent pastors being removed from ministry—but few go on to contend with legal repercussions.

The mean age for victims who were abused as minors to disclose their abuse is in their 40s or 50s, so often the opportunity to involve law enforcement has passed. In Clemishire’s case, the statute of limitations is not applicable, according to the state attorney general, because Morris, who was a traveling preacher at the time, never lived in Oklahoma.

The chair of the elder board at Gateway said in a statement to the Dallas Morning News that the church is “grateful for the work of the justice system in holding abusers accountable for their actions” and that the elders “continue to pray for Cindy Clemishire and her family, for the members and staff of Gateway Church and for all those impacted by this terrible situation.”

A four-month-long independent investigation commissioned by the multisite megachurch didn’t uncover additional victims but did result in the termination of church elders who either knew that the “sexual behavior” from Morris’s past involved a minor or who didn’t do enough to question it, according to a church announcement in November 2024.

Morris founded Gateway in 2000, and the church grew in size and influence over the decades, with the rise of popular charismatic musicians like its former worship leader Kari Jobe and Morris’s involvement as a spiritual advisor to President Donald Trump during his previous term.

Morris’s departure—as one of several Dallas-area pastors to step down in scandal last summer—has left his church shaken. The Dallas Morning News reported attendance dropped 40 percent at its main Southlake campus in a matter of months, and the church continues to undergo a moment of reckoning.

The five charges against Morris, 63, carry a total sentence of up to 100 years in prison.

The Oklahoma attorney general said in a statement, “There can be no tolerance for those who sexually prey on children. This case is all the more despicable because the alleged perpetrator was a pastor who exploited his position. The victim in this case has waited far too many years for justice to be done.”

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Books

Review

A New Guide to What the Church Has Always Said About Sex

Kara Bettis Carvalho

A book for young adults from Louise Perry explores a third way on sexual ethics that rejects gender ideology and cribs from long-standing Christian teaching.

Cottonbro, Pexels / Edits by CT

The day of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed dozens of executive orders, including one that recognized only two sexes, male and female. And he reiterated that “there are only two genders” during his congressional address last week to a standing ovation by Republicans.

If the latter half of the 20th century was defined by the sexual revolution, then the first half of the 21st is defined by gender confusion. Our society is endlessly contesting the definitions of sex and gender, debating how many genders exist, and asking (or refusing to ask), So what is a woman?

Yet cultural revolutions often cause backlash—see Trump’s remarks, Americans’ increasing recognition that gender cannot differ from sex, and the growing impatience with gender ideology among conservatives. Sometimes, those opposing forces eventually settle into a new, stabilized cultural norm, as has arguably happened with same-sex marriage in the US and may be happening with girls’ sports.

Part of the backlash to gender ideology has come not from Christians or political conservatives but from secular feminists arguing against hookup culture and, simultaneously, for acknowledgment of differences between the sexes. One is Louise Perry, a journalist and self-identified feminist who recognizes the harms the sexual revolution brought, especially to women, and sees disparities in the way sexual “freedom” has been experienced by men and women.

Her latest book, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, is aimed at young adult readers and is a condensed version of her controversial 2022 volume, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. The earlier version garnered her attention in evangelical circles for affirming traditional norms.

For a book aimed at Gen Z, the only thing more radical than arguing against hookup culture might be arguing for the reality of sex differences. Perry’s New Guide is certainly not abridged in its adult themes; she discusses sexual violence (her experience at a rape crisis center formed her passion on this subject), pornography, and hookup culture in explicit terms.

But more shocking for many of Perry’s Gen Z readers might be her unashamed case for sex difference: “Once we recognize men and women are different, many other things follow,” she writes. Her reliance on evolutionary psychology is key to the whole book—she marshals evidence that men are more prone than women to commit rape, most women don’t enjoy violent sex, women are less likely to offer casual sex, and reliance on pornography distracts men from real relationships.

Perry attributes the ill effects of the sexual revolution to opposing evolutionary interests between men and women. How, she wonders, can we best promote the well-being of both sexes despite these differing interests? “Somewhere between sexual liberalism and traditionalism, it has to be possible to find another way,” she writes.

She’s a pragmatist in that quest and concludes by offering concrete advice, mostly to women: Avoid men who are sexually aggressive. Don’t get drunk in public. Listen to your moral instincts. Assess whether a man would make a good father before sleeping with him. Consider the stability of monogamous marriage. Despite her desire for some third way, much of Perry’s advice is simply traditional prudence and ethics. In fact, much of it is a diluted version of traditionally Christian guidance. In any case, Perry knows it’s not groundbreaking.

What’s more novel for younger generations, especially Gen Z women, is her larger message: Recognize the differing interests between men and women and especially the vulnerability of women. Perry’s gender stereotyping isn’t entirely helpful, but it acknowledges the elimination of difference—the reality-rejecting conglomeration of gender ideology—that is increasingly accepted in Western culture.

That acknowledgement for that audience would have been made markedly more radical had Perry embraced the Christianity she has praised and engaged. The church’s teaching on sex difference and chastity will always be radical, and it has new relevance as long-standing cultural norms continue to lose their power to restrain.

What does it mean to be a woman—or a man? Without biblical guidance, rightful rejection of gender ideology can go awry, landing us with unbiblical extremes of “trad wife” passivity and violent masculinity. Orthodox biblical teaching and real examples of faithful men and women in the church can help younger generations imagine a better way.

But if we’re honest, evangelicals sometimes struggle to do this well. We can and should celebrate the return of young men to churches, but young women are disappearing from the pews. Superficially gendered responses, like Christian man camps and wine and paint nights, while well intended, are a distraction from real spiritual formation around learning how to be a good brother or sister in the faith or a better father or daughter or husband.

Complementarian churches, which champion differing roles for men and women, too often overemphasize the negatives (Women can’t) rather than publicly embracing and celebrating the unique giftings and callings of each sex. In the worst cases, these congregations have handled sexual abuse poorly, responding in ways that undermine their testimony about God’s good will for men and women.

Churches with an egalitarian point of view, on the other hand, face other risks. They too often minimize the historic, biological, and biblical reality of sex differences. Rushing to insist that women may be called to ministry and other kinds of leadership is sometimes paired with inattention to why we God gave us these particular bodies or why women are more vulnerable to sexual violence.

For Christians of any conviction, the question is whether we truly understand sex difference. Beyond stereotypes and Perry’s evolutionary psychology, beyond ladies’ crafting nights and men’s campfires, do we have a biblical understanding of how God created us and how we can celebrate and disciple both men and women as members of the body of Christ?

To compellingly articulate this difference to a world that wants to know what it is to be a man or a woman, we must first understand what Scripture says: that we are all formed in the image of God (Gen. 1:27) and that, in Christ, there is no disparity between the sexes (Gal. 3:28). In his wisdom, God created male and female, both reflecting God’s image in the bodies we inhabit.

In a world that wants to erase this difference, the church must better understand and confidently articulate the beauty of God’s created order, male and female alike. It is perhaps the most valuable gift we can offer the next generation.

Kara Bettis Carvalho is ideas editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Kara Bettis Carvalho

News

Nixed USAID Scholarship Helped Christian Students Escape War

Kelly Ng

The $45 million diversity-focused program has so far provided 400 Burmese students—including Christian ethnic minorities—a chance to study away from conflict.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Thae Thae had just left war-stricken Myanmar and was still getting used to life in Thailand last December when tensions arose between her and her family members back home. Emotional distress, along with academic stress and difficulties adapting to a new country, prompted her to seek counseling.

Weeks later, she received an email alerting her that United States authorities had terminated the scholarship program that had allowed her to further her studies at Chiang Mai University.

“The news devastated me,” the 27-year-old said. “My problems came one after another. I couldn’t study and yet felt burned-out and just laid on my bed for a week.”

Thae Thae, a Christian from Chin State, said she had been pursuing master’s degrees in social science and development at Chiang Mai University so that she could help develop her rural hometown in Hakha, the capital of the beleaguered Chin State. Before moving to Chiang Mai last July, she started a library and hosted an English class at her home for children in her community. At the time, access to education had been hobbled by the civil war. [Editor’s note: Since publication, CT has agreed to use her nickname due to concerns for her security upon returning to Myanmar.]

Thae Thae was among 400 recipients of education grants from the Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship Program (DISP) funded by USAID, the US agency overseeing humanitarian aid to foreign countries since the 1960s. The program set aside $45 million in scholarships to students from Myanmar, providing young people refuge and educational opportunities as their country spiraled into civil war after the 2021 military coup. Many students and instructors participating in the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) against the military junta refuse to take part in the military-controlled public schools, leaving education options severely limited.

Yet in late January, the Trump administration cut DISP, describing it as wasteful and not aligned with national interests. In a post in X, the Department of Government Efficiency noted it had canceled “$45 million in DEI scholarships in Burma.”

Scholarship holders received vaguely worded emails in the end of January that said USAID “exercised its right to terminate” the program. DISP’s website and Facebook page have since gone offline, and program officials did not respond to CT’s request for comment.

Launched in August 2023, DISP offered Burmese students, particularly those from vulnerable communities, opportunities to study at universities in Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, as well as take online courses from the University of Arizona.

The marginalized populations include ethnic and religious minorities—many of whom are Christian or Muslim in the Buddhist-majority country—as well as women, people with disabilities, people who identify as LGBTQ, and people who are displaced. Currently, the fighting has killed more than 6,000 civilians and internally displaced 3.5 million people.

Thae Thae is among five DISP scholarship holders in her program and is in the second of four semesters. Without the scholarship, she said she would not be able to continue her studies. She noted that the funding freeze has challenged her Christian faith.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “God gave me this chance [to study]. And then the chance is gone, just like that. Sometimes I ask him, ‘Why did you let me face such a situation?’”

Hung Ling, another Chin student who received the DISP scholarship, took part in CDM in the early days of the coup but later fled across Myanmar’s border with India in 2022 when he witnessed peers getting rounded up by the junta.

“I stood up against the military because they disrespected our democracy,” the 30-year-old Christian said, referring to the junta’s deposition of the country’s democratically elected government in 2021. “But the persecution got so intense I fled.”

He graduated with a bachelor’s in theology from Mizoram Bible College before applying for the DISP scholarship. With USAID funding, he enrolled in a business administration program in India last year. He said he had hoped to return to his hometown in Chin State after he graduated to work in community development promoting education and business.

“It will be impossible for me to continue pursuing the MBA without the funding,” said Hung Ling, the youngest of eight siblings. “But I know that God is good all the time. The Lord wants me to draw close and trust him throughout this cutting of scholarship funds.”

The US-based nonprofit Institute of Chin Affairs (ICA) is seeking funding on his behalf for the final two years of his MBA program. If they can’t raise the money, Hung Ling plans to remain in India and find work to fund his studies.

Eventually, he hopes to return to Myanmar “when peace is restored,” he said.

Thae Thae said her family has also asked her to stay put in Thailand for now. Her family fears that, like many men and women her age, she would be forced to fight for the military regime if she were to return home. Last year, the junta announced mandatory conscription for men under 35 and women under 27.

Meanwhile, Thae Thae’s classmate, who asked not to be named due to fears for her safety if she returns to Myanmar, said the scholarship was her “lifeline.”

“In Myanmar, we cannot learn safely,” said the 28-year-old from Sagaing, a region in central Myanmar. “Many young people who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement to fight for the future of our country fled when the junta hit back. Many have gotten injured or killed.”

The student noted that the termination of the scholarship program had caught her off guard. She and other affected students have been looking for other funding opportunities, but they are not optimistic.

“We really want to complete our studies. There is just one more year,” she said.

Growing up in a rural, agrarian community, the student, who is Buddhist, attended a monastic college in Mandalay, Myanmar, for her undergraduate degree. She longed to experience the vibrant campus life she had read about in books.

“I was determined to study overseas and have worked so hard for the opportunity,” she said. “My admission to Chiang Mai University has been big for my village in Sagaing.”

Yale academic David Moe, who was born in Chin State, said DISP “filled a vacuum in Myanmar’s education space.”

He noted that studying overseas helps Burmese students “gain a critical perspective,” as students in Myanmar usually aren’t allowed to ask questions or challenge their teachers in the classroom. The loss of the scholarships is a blow to the future generation of Burmese leaders given the country’s current state.

“$45 million is a lot of money for Myanmar,” Moe said. “[The Burmese community] see it as an investment in the country’s democracy.”

Correction: An earlier version of the story misstated the month Thae Thae arrived in Thailand.

- More from Kelly Ng

Culture

‘Mickey 17’ Laughs at Hope

Paul Marchbanks

The new film from Bong Joon-ho smirks at scientific hubris, political corruption, and any attempt to make things better.

Robert Pattinson as Mickey 18 and Mickey 17 in the film, Mickey 17.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

The famous list of life events in Ecclesiastes 3 assumes an audience ready to supply appropriate situations for each pair. Of course, applying the maxim For everything there is a season proves much easier in some circumstances than in others. Most would place the “time to mourn” (v. 4) squarely amid loss. Surely the “time to mend” (v. 7) follows that playground mishap which tears a favorite jacket.

The “time to uproot” (v. 2), however, shifts according to genus, species, and climate. Marriage counselors know never to prescribe hard and fast rules for the “time to embrace” (v. 5) or “time to be silent” (v. 7). When conflict migrates from the bedroom to the battlefield, the consequences of claiming a “time for war” (v. 8) grow even more dire. One might hope that those who take seriously the call to love their enemies (Matt. 5:44) would seek opportunities to declare a “time for peace” (Ecc. 3:8)—but world events suggest consensus on such matters will remain elusive this side of eternity.

And what of “a time to laugh” (v. 4)? This may be the slipperiest fish of all. It’s not hard to find someone ready to justify laughter in every one of the situations mentioned by the poet. Joyful laughter that follows the pangs of birth (v. 2)? Check. Laughter in the face of death (v. 2)? Look no further than the Irish wake. And, if my ballroom lessons with my wife are at all typical, laughter most definitely belongs on the dance floor (v. 4).

Harder to stomach are those who chuckle at others’ pain—who gleefully hate (v. 8), kill with a smile (v. 3), and guffaw as others weep (v. 4). Not surprisingly, our increasing willingness to publicly laugh in the face of suffering has infiltrated our storytelling. I suggested that the time for mourning is self-evident, but the stories we tell and sell suggest this isn’t quite right.

I blame it on the bard.

Shakespeare wrote a few “problem” plays, including Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well—stage dramas that mix silliness with catastrophe, resisting the neat classification of a straight-up tragedy like King Lear or the uproarious comedy of a Much Ado About Nothing. Though such a mishmash confused the playwright’s contemporaries more than it entertained them, these plays have since become critical darlings. Today, many a modern pundit delights in genre mash-ups that require effort to interpret, thematically incongruous puzzles.

Enter the work of South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, whose filmography has won wide acclaim for decades. Five years ago, Parasite became the first film not in the English language to win best picture.

Like others uncomfortable with economic or political systems that place the livelihoods of thousands in the hands of the few, I appreciate Joon-ho’s determination to target abuses of power. He typically opens a tale by positioning working-class citizens against corrupt institutions whose greed and cruelty are painted in large, parodic strokes.

In Snowpiercer (2013), an emotionally detached, flamboyantly dressed elite governs the survivors of an apocalypse with cold malice punctuated by violent cruelty. Maintaining order involves doling out bare subsistence, regularly appropriating children, and maiming any resisters. The Mirando Corporation of Okja (2017) genetically engineers sentient “super pigs” as smart as they are tasty, then ignores the fraternal ties they’ve developed with human caregivers in the name of profit.

The line between villain and hero blurs in other films where Joon-ho’s narrative sleight of hand gambles with his viewer’s sympathies. Instead of setting up virtuous innocents victimized by the system, the writer-director sometimes inserts us into the lives of incompetent criminal layabouts, then demands that we reconsider our initial distaste.

The more realistic the film, the harder this is to do. The inept detectives attempting to track down a serial rapist and killer in Memories of Murder (2003) torture wrongly arrested detainees. A single parent in Mother (2010) burns evidence and kills to protect her guilty child. Parasite (2019) asks us to cheer for a hard-up family that lies, steals, and fatally attacks both working-class and wealthy individuals who get in its way.

Many viewers praise Joon-ho’s tonal complexity as an accurate representation of our absurd existence. Life does not have easy answers. Injustice has no neat solutions.

Though I accept that sin does compromise our ability to see clearly and act rightly, I also believe that our halting efforts matter (James 2:26). I understand the temptation to release responsibility for the world’s problems, but Jesus keeps calling me back to the struggle (Matt. 5:6–16). If my definition of truth extends beyond mere apprehension of what is to encompass a particular vision of what should be, my reaction to suffering should be inflected by concepts like justice and honor (Phil. 4:8).

Inserting comic relief into stories about class struggle, stories that involve assault and murder, can beg a viewer to dismiss real-world injustice as the inevitable product of an absurd existence. It can discourage us from fighting oppression, the product of a broken but ultimately redeemable world. These films ask us to laugh hysterically rather than mourn. Ultimately, they are an attack on hope.

This pessimistic outlook is nowhere clearer than in Mickey 17, which, at a glance, initially resembles another, much earlier Joon-ho film, The Host (2006). In both films, self-absorbed scientists refuse to weigh the likely harm of their actions—in The Host by dumping chemicals into the Han River (a ravenous monster results) and in Mickey 17 by creating a machine that can “reprint” a person from a digitally stored template of mind and body each time they die. The doctors and politicians of The Host treat those who survive contact with the monster as their own personal guinea pigs. So do the doctors and politicians who experiment on each new clone of Mickey Barnes.

The key difference between these intentionally preposterous films lies in where the laughter they provoke takes us. In The Host, the family members who seek to recover a kidnapped young girl from the monster ultimately overcome their status as losers—a label Joon-ho has applied in interviews—by risking their lives in heroic fashion. The sharp laughter which riddled The Host’s first half dissolves into sorrow for the heroes who don’t make it and gratefulness that love holds together the survivors.

There is no time to either mourn or love in Mickey 17. The comedy underpinning Mickey’s many deaths, the romantic partner whose inner life we never discover, and the comical threats over which this new “loser” (as he’s described in the film) continually trips defy any effort to care what happens to him.

To this unrelentingly goofy ride, Joon-ho adds a heavy-handed critique of religion absent from his prior films, a critique that burdens Christians with a host of negative stereotypes. The politician determined to create his own “planet of purity” far from Earth scatters biblical language casually throughout his public orations, confuses the corporation he leads with a church, institutes a moratorium on intimacy during space travel to limit caloric intake, and calls cloning being “born again.”

Laugh, the film tells us, at scientific hubris and political corruption, but also at every attempt to make things better—at efforts to “plant” (Ecc. 3:2), “search” (v. 6), “build” (v. 3), or “heal” (v. 3). Human inquiry and effort cannot forestall a death which apparently retains its horror even after 16 trial runs, so the only thing left is to laugh.

When confronted with suffering, I prefer to weep—and then do my best to love.

Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”

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Ideas

South Africa: Black, White, and ‘Coloured’

Dennis Cruywagen

A personal reflection on a country deciding between reconciliation and racism.

Cameron Spencer, Getty / Edits by CT

This is part two of a three-part series. Read part one.

South Africa needs men and women who live and embody reconciliation and not racial division. I have seen what reconciliation can do. While researching my book Brothers in War and Peace, my Afrikaner wife, Lianda, and I traveled to Lichtenburg, a rural town in the Afrikaner hinterland of South Africa, to interview political leader Ferdi Hartzenberg. Busts of apartheid prime ministers in his lounge stared down hostilely at us, declaring unequivocally where his political heart was: He was an apartheid (segregation) hard-liner.

At lunchtime, he took us to a restaurant in what was once the home of an Afrikaner hero in their war against the British, General Koos de la Rey. Before we ate, I asked if I could pray. When he gave his assent, I prayed, and this staunch champion of Afrikaner hegemony started to cry when I prayed not only over the food but also for him. It was probably the first time in his life that a person who was not white had prayed for him. It was deeply moving and felt like genuine reconciliation. God was present.

God is present in South Africa, but the country is buckling under criminal activity fueled by poverty and lawlessness. Black Economic Empowerment is a government policy aimed at redressing the injustices brought about by apartheid. Laudable though its intentions are, it has not worked in its implementation. It has largely enriched the new black elite and the politically well-connected while many among the poor have become even poorer.

Youth unemployment stands at more than 45 percent. Last year, 13.2 million South Africans lived in extreme poverty, with a poverty threshold of $2.15 USD daily. People starve to death here. Meanwhile, corruption is widespread, and government emphasis on racial division does not help. A new South African law that protects farms but allows the expropriation of unused property has brought to the fore among Afrikaners the underlying fear of land grabs and the ever-looming threat of Zimbabwe repeated.

I am not white, but I know that white farmers generally love our country passionately and should not be demonized. They should also not demonize others. They are not being driven from their motherland. I have seen beautiful initiatives in various farming communities where white farmers who know farming inside out are assisting black and “coloured” farmers.

One initiative came out of the brain and heart of white farmer Kosie van Zyl, who uses a term familiar to American readers: servant leadership. Van Zyl, in the town of Napier, 105 miles southeast of Cape Town, said, “My wife and I decided a long time ago that we want to build God’s kingdom and not our little kingdom. The only way to do that is to take people with you and build with them, change their circumstances, and together build wealth for all.”

The organization van Zyl founded, Agri Dwala, is a diversified farming operation owned by nonwhite people. Van Zyl started with five farm hands he had known since childhood, and he offered them and others a life-changing break on open land. Today, 14 of the original group are owners, and other land-reform efforts are also helping some among the poor become successful commercial farmers.

Nevertheless, racial divisions in the country remain immense. Scholarly research indicates that integrated churches are rare. As part one noted, the apartheid system not only divided black and white people but also separated nonwhite people into different groups. Coloured is an invented term to describe the people mainly descended from the Indigenous Khoi while also carrying through racial sexual subjugation and intermarriage with various other races. As one of these people, I reject this term: I am an African.

One of the nuances many Americans do not understand is that black and “coloured” people are often at odds, even among Christians, as a sad history shows. Early in 1994, as South Africa was preparing for its first-ever democratic election and the country was readying itself for a future without the political policy of apartheid, two groups of church leaders, black and “coloured,” met to discuss uniting.

They were from two separate denominations, both created by the white Dutch Reformed Church, which had ignominiously provided the theological justification of apartheid. That denomination created the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa for black Africans in 1859 and the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa for descendants of the Indigenous Khoi in 1881.

Then, in April 1994, amid the bonhomie inspired by Nelson Mandela, these church leaders came together to merge their two respective denominations into one Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa. This historic event took place 13 days before the election that led to Mandela’s ascendance to the presidency.

One of the “coloured” ministers, Llewellyn MacMaster, said, “We were filled with the spirit of unity in the country.” MacMaster, an erstwhile student activist at the University of the Western Cape, had led a revolt of young people in 1985 and was detained without trial, but he did not deviate from his goal of one day seeing an undivided, nonracial country replacing the apartheid state.

Yet in 2023, almost 20 years after the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa was formed, racism reared up again as black African Christians insisted that one of them should become the church’s leader. They accused MacMaster of being a racist when he objected to a church takeover based on the division between Africans and so-called coloureds. That accusation brought him to tears: “My biggest disillusionment occurred at that general synod of the Uniting Church, when I came to the conclusion—and it’s not nice to have to say it—that in South Africa ethnicity and race even trump the gospel.”

Now, according to the government’s Black Economic Empowerment policy and the Employment Equity Act, black Africans get preferential treatment in all spheres of life. That’s true even in a town like rural Williston, where “coloureds” form more than 80 percent of the population and job opportunities are few. There, black Africans have been brought in and employed at the expense of the local population. Racial tensions are rising, as is deep disenchantment with democracy.

Some could accuse me of special-interest complaining or lack of sympathy for the poor majority of my fellow African brothers and sisters. Not so. I have dirt-poor relatives. My father was an illiterate dock worker, and my mother packed shelves in a big grocery store. It was not uncommon in a family like ours for children to leave school for low-paying jobs to support the family. I escaped the cycle. The majority of my childhood friends and family did not. Crime, self-destruction, gangsterism, drugs, and a sense of hopelessness are major roadblocks for South Africa’s poor.

President Donald Trump seemingly knows much about what white South Africans have to endure. His ill-informed comments about the terrible things purportedly happening to them led to many jokes and memes on social media, especially in Afrikaner circles. South Africa is a complex country. Rather than the emigration of our valued Afrikaner farmers, what will heal our nation is genuine reconciliation and a recommitment to ending discrimination.

This is what our four Nobel Peace Prize winners—Chief Albert Luthuli, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and even F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, at the end of his life—had dreamed of.

This series concludes on Thursday.

Dennis Cruywagen, author of The Spiritual Mandela, was deputy editor of The Pretoria News.

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Books

‘Come as You Are’ Is Not a Slogan for the Church

Interview by Charles E. Moore

Stanley Hauerwas meditates on the necessity of the gospel, the politics of the kingdom, and the high demands of sanctification.

Illustration by Stephen Procopio

Stanley Hauerwas is perhaps the best-known Christian ethicist in America today and most recently the author of Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible, newly published by Plough with an introduction from writer Tish Harrison Warren. In advance of the book’s release, he spoke with Plough’s Charles E. Moore about the necessity of the gospel, the politics of the kingdom, and the high demands of sanctification.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Watch part of the conversation here.

In her introduction to your latest book, Jesus Changes Everything, Tish Harrison Warren mentions something many Christians are concerned about: that we live in a post-Christian world. She’s wondering if we actually are living in a pre-Christian world and whether that might not be such a bad place to be. What’s your take on the time in which we live and the opportunities in front of the church?

Well, the mainstream Protestant church is dying. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It makes us free. I mean, for some time people argued that the world would go to hell if it were not Christian. That may be the case. But being Christian doesn’t mean you need a Christian America.

What I think we’re experiencing is the ultimate working out of nihilism, which so often goes with liberalism. Liberalism is the presumption that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story.

The gospel is an alternative to that. I mean, let us tell you the story that makes you who you are that you didn’t choose. You learn to make it your own through discipline, but you didn’t choose it. God created the world. You didn’t choose that. We’re now in a position that we may be able to help people rediscover that the gospel is a story they cannot live without.

The gospel doesn’t need the state either. Many of the critiques of Christian nationalism presuppose a Christian nationalism that is on the progressive side of American politics, because the presumption that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story is a presumption that was embedded in many of the progressive views that were backed by Christians of the development in America.

How do you get cooperation between people who share nothing in common other than the story that they have no story? People are dying to have something worth dying for.

You don’t seem too worried about the public square becoming inaccessible to established Christianity, or the loss of religious freedom, or the secularization of our culture, where Christianity is getting increasingly squeezed or pushed aside.

Well, I don’t want to be stupid about it. I mean, as Christians we should be modeling a politics that is otherwise unattainable. So it’s not like I think it would be a bad thing for us to get concerned about appropriate housing for those who have to live in the streets.

There’s no reason that Christians cannot be concerned about secular politics and what the alternatives are. It’s just that it’s not our first priority in terms of what it means to be engaged in the politics of the kingdom.

Something in your book that seems to be quite contrary to one of the central themes stressed in today’s church is your claim that the church is not about being welcoming and affirming and accepting people as they are. That seems to have become a truism today: Come as you are; all are welcome.

I don’t want you to accept me as I am; I’ve got too many problems. I want to be challenged to be better than otherwise I would be able to be. And so this idea of Come as you are—there are a lot of people who I don’t think should come as they are.

I mean, what is baptism? It’s not coming as you are. It’s being drowned in the water of the faith that makes you a different human being than you were before baptism. So Come as you are is a slogan that might be good for self-help groups, but it’s not a slogan that’s good for the church.

In public you explain quite unabashedly that you’re a pacifist, but the reason for this is that, in private, you’re not.

I don’t like the language of pacifism at all, because it’s so passive. Somehow peace is a much more constructive, positive project.

But I say that I’m a pacifist in public, using the word that I don’t like, because I hope this creates expectations in the people who hear me. I’ve declared that I’m a pacifist so that they hopefully will keep me honest to what I think I should be. I have no hope of being a pacifist without people helping me be what a pacifist should be.

So to claim pacifism in public is to create the kind of community I think the church should be: a community that helps us to live as a Christian when it’s not all that easy. And I need that help.

If Jesus changes everything but doesn’t change us, there seems to be quite a contradiction there. You say that to be rich and a disciple of Jesus is to have a problem.

Well, the Sermon on the Mount clearly sees mammon as a problem. There are many different kinds of problems that mammon produces, but it seems to me the most singular is the presumption that I’m safe. A lot of money and safety so often results in lives of purposelessness. And other than being safe, money is another name for desire. And desires often corrupt. So to have money in a way that assumes it’s mine is always a problem.

Where did Christians get the idea that I can do what I want with my money? It’s not yours. Think about what God did to Ananias and Sapphira. They got knocked off for being unwilling to share.

You state that Jesus is the Sermon on the Mount.

To say that Jesus is the Sermon on the Mount is a way of saying that his life is embodied in every command.

In particular, I think people think that with “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” for example, you’re supposed to try to speculate about what it means to be poor in spirit. Well, each of the Beatitudes are to be determined in terms of how Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels. It is not like you’re supposed to try to be poor in spirit. But by following Christ, you’ll discover that some people are poor in spirit or are the meek and so on.

What I’m trying to resist is independent speculation about those kinds of descriptions or those kinds of commands in a way that makes them separate from the life of Christ.

It’s so easy to separate the teaching from the teacher and live as though we don’t really need Christ, we just need the teachings. Everything is actually embedded in the person and the story of Christ. His story needs to become our story.

I wish I’d have said that as clearly as you did.

Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian and Christian ethicist, is professor emeritus of theological ethics and of law at Duke University. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books, most recently including Jesus Changes Everything.

Charles E. Moore is a contributing editor and author for Plough, as well as coeditor of the Blumhardt Source Series. His published works include Called to Community and Following the Call.

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News

Confusion About American Policy Regarding South Africa

Marvin Olasky and Dennis Cruywagen

A three-part case study of how the Trump administration does business, with hundreds of thousands of lives—and hundreds of millions of dollars—blowing in the wind.

Marco Longari / AFP via Getty Images

An executive order from US president Donald Trump last month created one of the most discriminatory policies regarding refugees since the US privileged Western Europeans through the Immigration Act of 1924. That act privileged Western Europeans and made entry from the rest of the world difficult.

Last month’s directive said the US will “prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” Afrikaner equals white only—at a time when the US is turning away nonwhite refugees from all over the world.

Either because the executive order provoked criticism or maybe just out of confusion, Trump last Friday posted on Truth Social, “South Africa is being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country. … Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!”

So which is it? White people only, or any farmer with family? Do white farmers have it worse than others? Do black South African farmers have it worse than Latin American immigrants who are now turned away at the border or who have, at best, a very slow path to citizenship? What about “coloured” farmers within South Africa’s complicated racial classification?

To begin answering these questions, we need to know more about South Africa and its northern neighbor Zimbabwe, a country previously known as Rhodesia that in 1965 declared independence from Britian and became a white-minority-governed territory. That declaration made Rhodesia and South Africa brothers in apartheid (racial segregation) and white dominance.

In April 1980, white rule ended when Robert Mugabe gained election as Zimbabwe’s prime minister. He ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years, first as prime minister and then as president from 1987 to 2017. He started off impressively but turned into a cruel dictator who ruined his country by going on a vendetta against white citizens. Mugabe allowed members of his elite to drive white employers and their black employees from farms, which cronies could then seize.

Mugabe died in September 2019. By then, not only white people but also many black people opposed him because he relentlessly persecuted critics, more so if they were black. As a despot, Mugabe was the opposite of Nelson Mandela and jealous of South Africa’s global icon.

The ghost of Mugabe’s legacy hangs over South Africa. For years, the white population has feared murderous, Mugabe-type land grabs in South Africa. Many Afrikaners—the descendants of Dutch settlers—grew up on warnings of the swart gevaar (the “black danger”). Presidents such as Mandela and Thabo Mbeki reassured them that black South Africans would not take retribution for apartheid past. Afrikaners never fully believed them.

In 2004, at a Christian conference in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, Bennie Mostert stood up. An Afrikaner respected for his sincerity, he haltingly admitted that he didn’t trust black people and was scared of them. Mostert’s vulnerability was an act of reconciliation. Black people immediately reached out to him, embracing him. He spoke for many Afrikaners that day. South Africa’s history is full of profound mistrust, fear, and even hatred between racial groups.

Mandela—who attended a Methodist missionary school and read the Bible regularly during his 27 years of imprisonment—became president in 1994 and led the way to a democratic South Africa, yet the whirlwind of apartheid still has influence.

Race still largely configures communities. Black Africans constitute 81 percent of the population but own 4 percent of farmland, according to a 2017 land audit. White people constitute 7 percent of the population but own 72 percent of cultivatable land. The descendants of the Khoi—South Africa’s Indigenous population, referred to as “coloured”—are 8 percent of the population and own 15 percent of arable land.

A vocal black politician, Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters, is threatening white farmers, saying he and his followers will grab their land and kill them. Political parties that look to the white part of the electorate for votes based on their fears. Many perceive as weak the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and say he does not have the stomach to stand up to Malema.

Ramaphosa’s reluctance to act, along with the ever-present white fear of South Africa sliding into a Zimbabwe, has emboldened Afrikaner civic organizations such as AfriForum and Solidarity. They speak of brazen, violent attacks on farms that end in murder, sometimes preceded by torture.

In 2023, attacks on farms killed 49, AfriForum reports. Murders elsewhere in South Africa number around 27,000, resembling the statistics of a war zone, about seven times greater as a percentage of the population than in the United States.

The statistics suggest that statements about the particular targeting of white farmers—relayed by Trump and South African native Elon Musk—are overblown. In South Africa last month, Western Cape High Court judge Rosheni Allie ruled that “white genocide” in South Africa is “clearly imagined” and “not real.”

What are the deeper problems of South Africa, and can the United States do anything to help and not hurt?

Coming Wednesday: the personal perspective of Dennis Cruywagen, a South African journalist and the author of The Spiritual Mandela. On Thursday: consequences of President Trump’s executive order regarding South Africa.

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

Attack, Assault, Arrest, Repeat

Surinder Kaur

In 2024, persecution increased for Indian Christians due to growing Hindu nationalism and stricter anticonversion laws.

Christian activists display placards in a peaceful protest rally in New Delhi.

Arun Sankar / Contributor / Getty

When the police arrived at the door of a pastor in Uttar Pradesh in February 2024, the first question they asked was “What religion do you belong to?”

The police had received calls from Hindu right-wing groups claiming the pastor had lured locals to convert to Christianity, the pastor said. CT agreed not to use his name due to security concerns.

The pastor told the police that he was a Christian, and they arrested him.

When he arrived at the court, the district magistrate’s first question was the same: “What religion do you belong to?”

“I am a Christian,” the pastor responded.

“Do you have any idea that for this response, you will go to jail?” she said.

The pastor stayed in prison for six months until he was released on bail. Charged under Uttar Pradesh’s anticonversion law, he is currently going through trial.

The pastor’s arrest was one of the 640 verified incidents of targeted attacks against Christians in India in 2024, according to a new report by the Evangelical Fellowship of India Religious Liberty Commission (EFIRLC). The number is a 6.5 percent increase from a year earlier. The total number of incidents reported to the group, including those that haven’t been verified, was 840. In addition, “there might be several unreported incidents that never came to our knowledge,” said Vijayesh Lal, national director of EFIRLC.

These attacks against Christians take many forms: physical assaults, disruption of prayer gatherings, vandalized churches, social boycotts in villages, and arrests. The anti-Christian climate has increased as Hindu extremism spreads in the country, backed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and influential Hindu nationalist groups. These groups are increasingly using anticonversion laws to crack down on Christians.

Other reports by local and international groups verify EFIRLC’s findings, reporting that hate speech and the persecution of Christians have increased in the past year.

Through it all, the pastor in Uttar Pradesh remains steadfast in his faith. “Even now, I must be careful where I pray, who I speak with, and how openly I practice my faith,” he said. “But I cannot abandon what I believe. Many of us worship in secret now, but we still worship.”

The EFIRLC report categorizes the violence against Christians—who make up 2 percent of the population—into distinct types, with threats and harassment making up the largest category (255 cases). Arrests follow with 129 incidents, while cases of physical violence make up 76 incidents. Other significant categories include gender-based violence and disruption of church services. In 2024, Christians also faced vandalism, social boycotts, forced conversion to Hinduism, and murder.

Three main groups are driving this persecution, International Christian Concern’s 2025 Global Persecution Index found. They include the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political party that currently rules India federally and in numerous states; the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization promoting Hindu supremacy; and radicalized Hindu mobs that have developed significant social media traction by livestreaming their attacks.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has remained notably silent on violence against Christians. “Some of his supporters … are fomenting this type of violence,” said Arielle Del Turco, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Religious Liberty. “So it’s not politically advantageous for him [as] a part of a Hindu nationalist movement to really be speaking out against this.”

In many cases, the pattern begins with Hindu nationalists disrupting worship services, assaulting believers, then filing false police reports alleging forced conversions. For more than 50 years, forced-conversion laws functioned primarily as tools of intimidation without resulting in convictions.

This changed in April 2024, when a district court in the state of Madhya Pradesh sentenced pastor Ramesh Ahirwar and his wife, Sakshi, to two years in prison. They were also fined 25,000 rupees ($300 USD) each under the state’s anticonversion law. In Uttar Pradesh at the beginning of 2025, Jose and Sheeja Pappachan became the first Christians convicted under the state’s anticonversion law. They face five years of jail time and fines of 25,000 rupees each.

Police arrested the Pappachans at their home while they were line-drying their clothes on the terrace. The formal complaint claimed they were engaged in conversion activities at the time of their arrest, though no evidence was presented.

The government in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, tightened its anticonversion law in July by allowing anyone to report a forced conversion to the police. Previously, only the individual allegedly being converted (or that person’s relatives) could file the complaint. The law also increased the maximum punishment from ten years to life imprisonment. The EFIRLC report found Uttar Pradesh had 188 incidents in 2024, the most in the country.

Ten of India’s twenty-eight states have enacted anticonversion laws, which include provisions so broadly phrased that they effectively criminalize basic religious practices. These laws, typically framed to prevent conversions by force, fraud, or allurement, serve as legal cover for organized harassment campaigns.

The states with anticonversion laws include Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, and Haryana. All are Hindu-majority states, and eight are governed by the BJP.

Two additional states are working to enact their own laws: Rajasthan and Arunachal Pradesh, which is developing implementation rules for its dormant 1978 anticonversion law following a court mandate.

Christians arrested under these laws are often denied bail. The burden of proof typically falls on the accused, making it nearly impossible for them to defend against fabricated charges.

The spread of anticonversion laws has emboldened extremist groups to justify attacks on Christians. A disturbing trend has emerged in Chhattisgarh, a state with a significant tribal Christian population, where Christian families are told to renounce their faith or face expulsion from their village. Chhattisgarh saw the second-highest number of attacks in 2024 with 150, according to the EFIRLC.

The denial of burial rights is also an increasingly common tactic to humiliate and pressure Christian families. In many instances, villagers have prevented Christians from burying their deceased loved ones, instead threatening to cremate their bodies as a final act of Ghar Wapsi (forced reconversion to Hinduism).

Extremists often unlawfully revoke Scheduled Tribe status of tribal Christians by denying their tribal certificates, which affects access to government quotas in jobs, education, and political representation, according to Christian leaders. They also confiscate property and deny access to essential services like water, food rations, and medical care.

“The psychological toll is immense,” said a pastor in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “Christians live in constant fear, knowing that at any moment they could face violence or arrest simply for attending a prayer meeting.”

In addition, he noted, children from Christian families are bullied and discriminated against at school while their parents struggle to find employment.

Organized calls for violence also add to the heightening fear. In February, a video by Chhattisgarh Christian Forum (CCF) accused Hindu leader Aadesh Soni of instructing his followers to march to three Christian-majority Chhattisgarh villages and sexually assault the women and “kill all the Christians.” He claimed Christians had killed cows, a sacred animal in Hinduism. As CCF’s video went viral, people condemned Soni’s genocidal call. Soni quickly denied the accusations and alleged that the social media account that had posted the message wasn’t his account.

In response to Soni’s call, human rights activist A. C. Michael brought the situation to the attention of the National Commission for Minorities, and many Christian groups wrote to the chief minister of Chhattisgarh to request his intervention. Even though Soni persisted in his call for the march until February 28 and clarified that his group would not indulge in violence, the rally was ultimately canceled after interventions by local and national Christian leaders. Officials from the Church of North India and representatives of the Hindu nationalist group Bajrang Dal called for harmony between the two religions.

“Such inflammatory rhetoric creates an atmosphere of fear and insecurity for religious minorities,” said Lal of EFIRLC. “When hate speech goes unchecked, it emboldens those who wish to target Christians simply for practicing their faith.”

Despite the severity and frequency of these attacks, justice remains elusive for most victims. Law enforcement agencies often side with perpetrators, either by failing to register complaints or by detaining victims instead of attackers.

In February, a mob of 200 people interrupted a Christian worship service in Rajasthan state and beat congregants with iron rods, leaving three severely injured. The police accused the Christians of forceful conversion and brought the pastor and a few other members to the police station, Christian Solidarity Worldwide reported. They were later released as the attackers could not provide any evidence.

Despite these challenges, church and activist networks continue to provide support to persecuted believers. Legal-aid organizations work tirelessly to defend those falsely accused, and advocacy groups document abuses to raise international awareness.

“Our prayer is … that one day we can practice our faith without fear,” said the Uttar Pradesh pastor. “The Constitution promises us this right, but the reality is very different. Still, we hold on to hope that things will change, that India will remember its commitment to religious freedom for all its citizens.”

- More from Surinder Kaur

News

The Korean Evangelicals Who Want Their President Back in Power

Isabel Ong with Stephanie Beard and Jang Sooik in Seoul

At a recent rally, pro-Yoon Christians decried Communist infiltration and adopted MAGA rhetoric.

People taking part in a rally in Seoul, South Korea in support of impeached president Yoon Suk Yeol.

Anadolu / Contributor / Getty

When Lim Nara first heard that the South Korean parliament had voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol last December, she sighed in disbelief. She started praying more earnestly for God to intervene in a miraculous way, believing that this was still part of God’s good plan.

During Yoon’s impeachment trial in February, Lim knelt in the prayer room of her church, Joy Church in Yongin, petitioning for the president to “fight to the end” and to meet God while reading Scripture in prison.

On March 1, she brought her prayers closer to the heart of South Korean politics as she joined a “National Emergency Prayer Meeting” organized by the evangelical group Save Korea in front of the National Assembly in Yeouido, Seoul. The event, which attracted 55,000 people, was held on a national holiday that commemorates the push for Korean independence from Japanese colonial rule in 1919.

“Just like the day our forefathers risked their lives to defend our country, we must come together again to stand for freedom and justice in our country,” the organizers proclaimed on Instagram.

Lim, a 30-year-old housewife, got up at 7 a.m. that day. After gathering umbrellas, gloves, and heat packs to guard against the chilly 4 degree Celsius (40 degree Fahrenheit) weather, Lim set off for Seoul with her mother-in-law, husband, and one-year-old son.

When the family arrived in Yeouido after a one-and-a-half-hour car ride, Lim pushed her son’s stroller—packed full of toys, a blanket, and a bag of croissants—through the burgeoning crowd, eventually finding a row of gray plastic chairs at the back of the rally site. Young and old attendees waved Korean and American flags and held signs that read “Please Save Korea” as they sang worship songs, listened to sermons and speeches, and prayed for Yoon.

Lim said she felt surprised and moved by the sheer size of the crowd. “Since it’s March 1, we came with the same spirit as those who fought for our country during the March 1 Movement,” Lim said. “My mother, child, husband, and I are all here out of love for our country.”

The Yeouido rally was one of the larger evangelical gatherings organized by Save Korea since Yoon declared martial law in December, kicking off the national crisis that led to his impeachment. Evangelicals who support Yoon say that the impeached president is the last line of defense against Communist influences in the country. Those who support his impeachment did not agree with his move to institute martial law on December 3, viewing it as insurrection.

After the Korean government lifted martial law on December 4, the parliament suspended Yoon on December 14 after successfully passing a motion for impeachment. Yoon fled to his private compound, where he avoided prosecutors’ calls and the court’s detention warrants until he was formally arrested on January 19. After a South Korean court canceled his arrest warrant last week, Yoon walked out of detention last Saturday.

The political turmoil in South Korea has sharply divided Protestants in the country, who make up 20 percent of the population. More than two-thirds of senior pastors in the country favored impeaching Yoon, according to a survey last December that polled around 1,200 leaders.

The pro-Yoon camp has drawn parallels with the pro-Trump movement among evangelicals in the US, with some protesters at the March 1 protest donning red MAGA hats and toting signs that read “Stop the Steal.” They believe that North Korean and Chinese agents and sympathizers have infiltrated South Korea’s government and need to be eradicated.

Protesters against Yoon’s impeachment worshiping together at the Save Korea prayer gathering on Saturday, March 1 in Seoul, South Korea.

Save Korea is led by Busan Segyero Church’s pastor Son Hyun-bo, who has held regular prayer events in cities across the country since January. The group planned the event at the National Assembly to pray for the outcome of the court ruling of Yoon’s impeachment trial. Yoon, who will either be reinstated or removed from office, also faces the death penalty or life imprisonment if convicted of rebellion. On March 7, a South Korean court canceled Yoon’s arrest warrant and released him from detention.

Yoon’s supporters are typically older, like Kang Gwi Ran, a Presbyterian pastor in her early 50s who attended the Yeouido rally. In her view, if Yoon does not return, pro-China and pro–North Korea lawmakers will seize control of the National Assembly and turn South Korea into a socialist country as well as a “vassal state of China.” For significant periods in its history, the Korean peninsula was a tributary to China until the Sino-Japanese war erupted in 1894.

Yoon’s People Power Party and its supporters have heavily criticized Lee Jae-myung, chairman of the opposition Democratic Party of Korea and possibly the country’s next president, for adopting a favorable stance toward North Korea, China, and the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In February, Lee said that the country “can’t afford to alienate” China and that he would support Trump’s efforts to reengage North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. He also faces trial for allegedly coercing a businessman to send illegal payments to North Korea. Last January, a man stabbed Lee in the neck, claiming he wanted to “cut the head” off the country’s “pro-North Korean” left wing.

Most evangelicals do not support Yoon’s decision to declare martial law, said Sebastian Kim of Fuller Seminary’s Korean Studies Center. But they also do not want Lee to become president because “they strongly believe the opposition party’s policies and behavior have been harming the country’s economic progress, the welfare of people, and Christian moral values,” he said.

Since December, anti-Communist rhetoric has been gaining momentum among younger Koreans. Men in their 20s and 30s are increasingly supportive of Yoon: They made up more than half of the people arrested for the January 17 riot at the Seoul Western District Court. Protesters smashed windows and forced their way into the court building, assaulting police officers and destroying some judges’ private offices to oppose Yoon’s arrest.

Another Christian, Lee Ye Hwan, echoed Kang’s concerns about the rise of communism at the Yeouido rally. If a civil war between Korean nationalists and their opponents breaks out because of ongoing political and social instability, “China might take advantage of it and actually invade South Korea,” said Lee (no relation to Jae-myung), a 47-year-old graphic designer who worships at SaRang Church in Gangnam, Seoul.

Some of this fear is rooted in Cold War–era events that shaped Korean—and Korean Christian—history. During the 1950 Korean War, South Korea and the United States became “intertwined” in the fight against communism by seeking to “win a holy war through fulfilling the Great Commission” in the transpacific, Helen Jin Kim wrote in her book Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire.

Korean pastor Han Kyung Chik provided a firsthand account of Communist persecution of believers in a 1961 CT interview. “In spite of Communist persecution the churches in North Korea were going strong,” Han said. “They did fine until the Communist war. Then the Communists began to invade South Korea, and they arrested practically all of the pastors.”

Yoon tapped this cultural and historical nerve in the Korean social psyche when he declared martial law, claiming that North Korean Communist forces had snuck into the opposition party and were trying to overthrow South Korea.

Conspiracy theories from far-right YouTubers have amplified these claims. Jun Kwang-hoon, pastor of Sarang Jeil Presbyterian Church, has also become a prominent voice in this space.

The evangelical Christian Council of Korea expelled Jun, who had previously been the group’s president, in 2022 for making controversial statements that he had received a revelation from God that he was a prophet and king. He is also under investigation for allegedly instigating the January 19 court riot.

The National Council of Churches in Korea (NCCK), which is affiliated with the World Council of Churches, has spoken out strongly against the riot and called for believers to pursue peace and reconciliation.

“The violent and unconstitutional actions of some far-right Protestant forces have nothing to do with the gospel of Christ,” NCCK said in a statement last month. “Rather, they are false prophets who promote hate politics and violence, and they are only dividing the community and leaving wounds on countless people.”

Still, these critiques have not deterred believers like Lim and Lee from showing up to support Yoon on March 1. On that day, close to 65,000 people participated in another pro-Yoon rally—led by Jun—in Gwanghwamun, while pro-impeachment rallies in the area drew a smaller crowd of around 18,000 protesters.

The Yeouido rally kicked off with worship, with people raising their hands, closing their eyes, and singing with gusto. Political figures, like the conservative People Power Party representative Kim Gi-hyeon, and supporters from the US gave impassioned speeches.

Like at other anti-impeachment rallies, Korean Christian affinity with the US was strong. Kang noted that China is “constantly trying” to take over Korea. “But the US has protected us with Christian ideals and has never been greedy for our land,” Kang said. “We trust the US for that.”

Lee, the graphic designer, has participated in public protests affiliated with Jun’s group since 2020. He would often wave the Korean flag, the American flag, and the Israeli flag at the events. This time, he brought his Bible, a Korean flag, and a “Save Korea” poster.

“As a Christian, the most important thing isn’t who holds power,” Lee said. “What matters is whether the system itself is biblically sound. Supporting or opposing a political party is secondary.”

Lim, however, is clinging to Romans 8:28 as she continues to intercede for Yoon and the result of his impeachment trial. “No matter where I am, I will keep praying,” she said.

She also wonders what the future looks like for her son and the rest of his generation in South Korea. If Yoon is removed from office, his supporters say an influx of Communist principles isn’t the only potential devastating consequence. An antidiscrimination bill may also be passed if the liberal Democratic Party takes control, which Lim fears will challenge the traditional family unit and serve as a corrupting influence on children.

Last October, an estimated 1.1 million Christians participated in a rally in central Seoul to oppose the bill, which seeks to ban discrimination against a person based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, race, and academic background. Many also showed up to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage in South Korea, in response to a landmark court ruling that partners in such relationships were eligible for spousal health benefits.

“I want the next generation to be separated from these evil forces and cultures that go against the Word of God and become a holy generation that responds only to the Word of God,” Lim said.

As for who can accomplish this for her young son, her answer is clear: “I want a president like Yoon Suk Yeol for him … a worker who can be used for the next holy generation.”

- More from Isabel Ong

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