Why US Christians Must Wrestle with a Korea Divided in Two

Chris Rice

70 years after the country was split in half, Americans have a responsibility to assist in ending this unresolved separation.

Flags of North Korea, rear, and South Korea, front, flutter in the wind as pictured from the border area between two Koreas.

Yonhap / AP Images / Edits by Christianity Today

In 1992, the American evangelist Billy Graham flew to Pyongyang to meet face to face with Kim Il Sung, the founding leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Mounting tensions between the United States and North Korea did not prevent Graham from preaching in two of the city’s official churches, meeting with church leaders and seminarians from around the country, and presenting Kim one of his books.

Two years later, Graham returned against the wishes of the US government. “I was told that war could break out at any minute. That’s how dangerous it was,” he said afterwards.

Graham, a staunch anti-communist, was interviewed on national television and visited Kim Il Sung University, where he spoke in front of 400 students and faculty.

“One of my reasons for going at this time was to express my concern for peace in the region and to make whatever small contribution I could to better relations between our two nations,” he said later of his visit.

American Christians have a long and complicated history with this part of the world. For decades, the US has had a significant military presence in South Korea. Prior to the Korean War, which began in 1950, hundreds of missionaries spread the gospel throughout Korea, which was one undivided peninsula for centuries.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the 1953 Korean War armistice, an agreement which ended the military fighting but left the Korean people divided into two isolated countries without a peace treaty. Given the US history of intervention and presence in this part of the world, and following the lead of Korean people working for peace and gaining inspiration from Graham’s courage, American Christians have a responsibility to assist in ending the longest unresolved separation of a people in modern history.

Crossing borders of division

Korea has always been a part of my life. I grew up in Seoul, South Korea, the son of Presbyterian missionaries. From 2014 to 2019, I led six teams into North Korea for humanitarian work.

Hundreds of US missionaries like my parents worked alongside the Korean people before, during, and after the war. While at times complicated by serious failings and misuses of power, missiologists often regard these 140 years as one of the most effective periods of mission history.

Graham’s trips in the 1990s opened the door for Christian humanitarian agencies to serve in North Korea, many of which worked for decades after. Unlike the missionaries before them, these agencies don’t plant churches, don’t do evangelism, and don’t distribute Bibles. But for 25 years, these humanitarian agencies have been at the forefront of relief and development work in the country—from Christian Friends of Korea and its superb tuberculosis work to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), where I currently work, providing food and medicine to support children recovering in hospitals and bringing North Korean agricultural experts to the West.

The work of these faith-based agencies echoes the ministry of Bible characters who, sensing God’s tug, crossed borders of division with a willingness to take risks and engage face to face with a person or community their people feared or didn’t understand.

Jacob went to Esau seeking to heal their broken relationship (Gen. 32:3–33:17). Esther risked her life to plead the case of her people before the king. In Jesus’ most famous parable, the Samaritan crossed the road to a stranger in distress, regardless of his ethnic identity or religious affiliation (Luke 10). Following the call of the Holy Spirit, Peter went to the Roman military center of Caesarea to engage a commander named Cornelius (Acts 10).

These stories reveal not only courage, but a virtue rarely practiced in our time: empathy. Because news about North Korea largely focuses on the threat of nuclear attack or tense political relations, few Americans may see the country beyond the risk it might pose to the US. Meanwhile, with 70 years of no peace agreement, no encounters with North Korean people and few at the diplomatic level, Americans have had little opportunity to learn more from the 26 million people (a population around the size of Australia) living there.

A lack of empathy for the other side poses the greatest danger in the North Korea and US relationship, one US general told me, not military buildup. “North Koreans don’t understand Americans and the way we think,” he said. “And Americans don’t understand North Koreans and the way they think.”

As the Bible stories demonstrate, practicing empathy doesn’t mean pretending everything is okay. Meeting North Korea’s leader didn’t change Billy Graham’s mind about realities he disagreed deeply with. But empathy does mean doing more than condemning and criticizing. It requires curiosity about the dangerous “other” to engage them as human beings, to understand why they do what they do, and to meet face to face not only to speak but to listen.

Few American Christians will have the opportunity to personally travel to North Korea to serve people with vulnerabilities alongside the dedicated doctors, nurses, and kitchen workers there. But all of us can work to provide what Mennonite peacemaker John Paul Lederach calls “critical yeast,” small but powerful actions that interrupt histories of distrust and hostility.

Providing critical yeast

For many US Christians, the first step in embracing a role as “critical yeast” is by learning, lamenting, and praying. This starts by educating ourselves about the Korean War. Many of us know far too little about the conflict that falls between World War II and the Vietnam War. But for the Korean people and Americans with Korean heritage, the war changed their lives and those of their loved ones forever.

In 2020, 100 Korean American Christian leaders signed a statement of lament, asking American Christians to mourn the aftermath of the Korean War. Four million people died (including two million Korean civilians and 32,000 US troops) and millions of Koreans were separated from their families by the war and remain so even to this day, with the people of North and South Korea nearly completely isolated from each other.

Peter Cha at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Soong-Chan Rah at Fuller Seminary, and Eugene Cho at Bread for the World were among the statement drafters. “We believe that God is faithful, and that the arc of the universe in God’s victory in Christ bends toward justice, reconciliation, and beloved community,” they wrote. “We pray that someday all Korean people will be able to return to the birthplaces of their ancestors, to meet face-to-face across the peninsula, and to recognize each other as sisters, brothers and image-bearers of God.”

Second, US Christians can provide critical yeast through financial and prayer support to faith-based humanitarian agencies, which are a face of compassion to vulnerable people in North Korea. Such organizations worked in North Korea for over two decades until the COVID-19 closure of North Korean borders in 2020. Due to hostility between the US and North Korean governments, staff and volunteers from organizations like MCC, American Friends Service Committee, Samaritan’s Purse, and World Vision are among the few Americans who have regularly visited North Korea.

Through working alongside North Korean counterparts in areas such as health and agriculture, these Americans challenge the narrative that reduces the country to a hostile enemy by interfacing with North Koreans as fellow human beings, traveling through the country together and eating together. Supporting such individuals and their organizations in work with their counterparts is one way we can strategically extend our resources and compassion to people with vulnerabilities in North Korea.”

Third, US Christians can consider the American government’s involvement in the Korean peninsula and the responsibility we bear as citizens to influence public policy. As the Korean American statement drafters put it succinctly, “the prophetic call of the church is to speak truth to power, and that can call us to political action.”

Due to its role in the Korean War, the United States must be a signer of a peace agreement to end the war. Christians can pray for, raise awareness of, and rally around the signing of such an agreement. And we can support laws like the Divided Families Reunification Act, which supports family reunion opportunities for American families and their relatives in North Korea.

While isolation and punitive pressure efforts (including sanctions) on North Korea have been vigorously applied, especially regarding human rights and nuclear weapons, they have failed to change the situation. Diplomacy guided solely by pressure, which doesn’t seek to understand how the “threatening other” thinks, is dangerous and lacks moral imagination. As Nobel Peace Prize winner and Christian political leader Nelson Mandela of South Africa put it, “When we dehumanize and demonize our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.”

The fact that the United States and North Korea have no diplomatic relations—no ongoing channels of communication, negotiation, and trust—is dangerous. Disagreements, misunderstandings, and threats can easily escalate into conflicts and increase the risk of war.

Indeed, the US has diplomatic relations with many other nations it is in high tension with, such as China. One critical yeast moment occurred in 1971, when an American ping-pong delegation visited China. “Friendship matches” led to cultural exchanges and planted seeds for eventual diplomatic relations, like Republican president Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972 with totalitarian leader Mao Zedong. The leaders met at a time when China had nuclear weapons, and the relatively recent Korean War—which the Chinese call “Resisting America and Assisting Korea War”—had led to the deaths of 180,000 Chinese soldiers.

In 1995, just 20 years after the Vietnam War, the United States established diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which is still a communist state. Since then, Vietnam War veterans including the late senator John McCain have become leaders in reconciliation initiatives between veterans on both sides. If China and Vietnam, why not North Korea?

Fourth, we can provide critical yeast by following the lead of courageous South Korean Christians working across the divide. To be clear, just as American Christians disagree about how to address the history of racism, South Korean Christians deeply disagree about how to engage North Korea. For some the North is perceived as an enemy nation. For many in the younger generation, it is another country. Meanwhile, others view the North as a family member to pursue healing with.

One of my mentors in peacemaking work was Syngman Rhee (no relation to the first South Korean president) who served as the first Asian American moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Rhee grew up in Pyongyang, and after communist troops killed his father, a pastor, during the war, his mother sent him and his brother to the South, where he joined the military.

After later immigrating to the US, Rhee went to seminary and joined the civil rights movement. As a Presbyterian church leader influenced by Martin Luther King Jr., Rhee was one of the first Korean Americans to visit North Korea in 1978. His mission was not only to cross divides, but to see if his family was still alive after 28 years of separation and no contact. His mother had passed away only three months earlier, but Rhee was briefly reunited with his siblings. When Rhee returned to South Korea, some called him a traitor and “communist lover.”

Yet as Rhee said to me once, “Chris, reconcilers are called to be bridges. And bridges get walked on from both sides.”

Other South Koreans are following that call. For example, Bae, Min Jeong a young South Korean woman I know, didn’t grow up feeling the trauma of the divided Korean peninsula. For her, North Korea was another country.

In college, however, she joined an InterVarsity Korea visit to the China–North Korea border. During a boat ride to view the North, she was instructed not to reveal she was Korean, and was full of fear. Suddenly, for the first time in her life, she saw two North Koreans up close—two soldiers sitting on a beach. They put down their guns by the river, waved at the boat, and offered a greeting in Korean.

“One of them looked exactly like my younger brother,” she said. “Only then did I understand that we are one people.” Minjeong said she “just cried and waved my hand.” When she returned to the South, she redirected her life toward a passion for reconciliation.

Not natural, normal, or inevitable

When I was growing up in South Korea in the 1970s, two groups of Americans were ever-present: missionaries and military personnel. While the Western missionaries have since left and South Korean churches have for decades been sending missionaries across the world, over 28,000 US troops are still stationed in South Korea, including the largest US military base on foreign soil. The truth is, the United States has indelibly shaped the ecclesial, military, and economic landscape of the Korean peninsula. As some of my South Korean friends say, “We think of the United States as a Northeast Asian nation.”

My friend Sue Park-Hur, a Mennonite pastor with ReconciliAsian, often reminds me that the Korean divide should concern not only “Korean Americans, but all Americans; war is not just our past.” This 70th anniversary year of a divided Korean people leaves US Christians with a responsibility and call.

As the first US missionaries to an undivided Korea knew, that divide is not natural, normal, or inevitable. Pursuing humanitarian cooperation and constructive diplomacy doesn’t erase deep disagreements, but it connects us to a deeper call. As the Korean American Christian leaders put it, “We believe our deepest motivation to engage the Korean divide as followers of Christ is not political or economic but as peacemakers and agents of reconciliation, following Jesus’ costly way of the cross—of discipleship, forgiveness, and justice which restores broken relationships.”

Given its potential to trigger a devastating war, the situation on the Korean peninsula is one of the most dangerous peace and security issues facing our planet today. In 1994, when the Clinton administration was seriously considering war with North Korea, Graham’s visit helped defuse the situation because he was able to help North Korea's leader and President Clinton understand better what the other was saying.

Graham told reporters, “My prayer is that the trip might have made some contribution to peace in a complex and potentially dangerous part of East Asia.”

At this historic and volatile moment, it’s time for the American church to follow in Graham’s footsteps to take diplomatic and border-crossing risks.

Chris Rice is director of the Mennonite Central Committee United Nations Office in New York City, and was previously co-founding director of the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation. His new book is From Pandemic to Renewal: Practices for a World Shaken by Crisis (InterVarsity Press).

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Theology

The Latest Black Tragedy Is My Trauma Too

Nicole Massie Martin

Communal suffering has to be reckoned with. And so does God’s healing word.

This image taken from police body cam video shows a police dog attacking Jadarrius Rose in Circleville, Ohio.

Ohio State Highway Patrol / AP Images

A few weeks ago, I arrived at the airport a little early to pick up a friend and decided to pull over in the emergency lane to wait. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but there were 20 cars already there, so I figured my decision wasn’t too bad.

Moments later, however, I heard a siren and saw police car lights in my rearview mirror.

Without warning, my hands began to tremble, my breathing quickened, and my legs started to shake. I called my husband and told him what was happening. My body was going into full-fledged panic mode.

As the officer approached, I could barely catch my breath. Images of Black men and women shot for minor offenses raced through my mind. Would I be labeled as a criminal who broke the law, or as a mother, wife, and minister who served the Lord? Would I be lumped into the countless names of Black people who have died for misdemeanors, or would I be among the privileged few who escaped alive?

By the time the officer came near to my car, I could barely see. He stood at a short distance, asked me to breathe, and helped me to calm down. With my husband still on speaker phone, I finally found the words to say, “I’m sorry.”

What followed in my mind was, “Please don’t hurt me.” In that moment of panic, I could not distinguish the kind officer in front of me from everything I had seen on the news.

My traffic citation gave the other offending cars an opportunity to drive off and, when he finally left, I began to cry. I cried for all of the Black men and women who begged for their lives and still died. I cried for Manuel Ellis, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Alton Sterling, and so many more.

The list grows by the day. During a recent traffic stop near Circleville, Ohio, an unarmed man named Jadarrius Rose was pulled over for a missing mud flap and then attacked by a police dog. As I watched the horrific video, I wept again.

This time, the tears triggered pictures of Walter Gadsden being attacked by a police dog during a civil rights protest on May 3, 1963, in downtown Birmingham. A black-and-white photo shows a police officer holding a young Black high school student by his clothes as a dog rips at his flesh. This image is in my bones, in books on my coffee tables, and accessible to my children online. This story and others are in my head and in my body, passed down from generations of traumatized ancestors who’ve gone before me.

I’m left to ask: How can we understand things that simply don’t make sense? How can we find healing from generations of embodied pain? Most importantly, how do we change the system so that Black people don’t get choked during an arrest, shot for misinformation, suffocated for small crimes, or mauled over a missing mud flap?

The answer is neither in defending so-called “Blue Lives” nor in defunding the police. The answer is now and has always been in Jesus Christ.

By drawing on faith, I am not minimizing the deep social and political disfunctions that allow racism to persist, or the Jim Crow tendencies that continue long after laws are gone. Instead, I am tapping into the strength that empowered civil rights leaders to march while being blasted by fire truck hoses. I am calling on the power that drove my great-great-grandparents to transition from slavery to freedom for the sake of their children’s children. I am trusting in the presence of Christ and the great cloud of witnesses who believe in his name.

Standing up for justice is the calling of the church in times like these—and always. Those of us who are Black Christians are responsible for naming and tending to the pain that’s triggered every time we see racist tragedies in the news. Ignoring this moment in history only exacerbates the mental health problems that often plague our communities.

When communal trauma goes unaddressed, it hides in the recesses of our minds and turns into fears we knowingly and unknowingly pass on to our children. Instead, we need to speak God’s Word of healing over Black bodies and minds in ways that inspire action and revive hope.

“Statistics are unnecessary for those of us who carry in our hearts the experience of being black in this country,” writes Esau McCaulley in his CT cover story on Paul and police ethics. He continues:

The United States, historically and in the present, has failed to protect us. It has used the sword to instill a fear that has been passed down from generation to generation in black homes and churches. That dread, however, has never had the final word. Instead, black Christians have reminded themselves not to fear those who can only kill the body. At our best and most Christian moments, we have demanded our birthrights as children of God.

The same message of hope needs to be proclaimed in other churches as well, not just Black ones. They too will be suffering because of this news. They too are called to lament the brokenness of this world, tend to the pain of brothers and sisters who suffer directly, and demand accountability and change in our systems.

Sometimes it’s easy to overlook Black trauma as something that happens to “them” and not “us.” When this happens, Christians miss an opportunity to exercise the biblical language of communal lament. It draws us closer to others and most importantly to the suffering of our Lord.

As the church, we are called to stay in solidarity with those who grieve and carry the burdens of those who suffer. That means refusing to be desensitized by incidents of police brutality in Black communities and being willing to do something—anything—about it.

Nicole Massie Martin is the Chief Impact Officer at Christianity Today.

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Books

Review

I Write Algorithms for a Living. God Doesn’t Want Me to Quit.

Collin Prather

At a moment of career disillusionment, a new book gave me a biblical perspective on the blessings and dangers of big tech.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

In the last decade, our lives have become increasingly saturated with digital technology. Apps and platforms play outsized roles socially, professionally, casually, and corporately; in work, school, and church. It can be hard to remember how we used to carry on without the technological conveniences of modern life. Even many young adults feel a chasm between the tech norms they grew up with and the world they inhabit today.

God, Technology, and the Christian Life

Tony Reinke (Author)

Crossway

320 pages

$15.75

This shift seems even starker when we try to map our day-to-day digital experiences—instant news, AI chatbots, and the Metaverse—onto those we read about in the Bible. In his latest book, God, Technology, and the Christian Life, Tony Reinke outlines an incisive “theology of technology,” grounded in Scripture, which draws a clear connection between our lived experiences and those of our Old Testament heroes. In so doing, he sets a helpful foundation for a biblically-aligned worldview on modern technology.

I read this book at a timely moment, while dealing with a bout of disillusionment over my career. I’m a data scientist, a career technologist who spends his days writing algorithms that generate numbers and recommendations that populate the screens of millions of smartphones all over the world. My work involves the same techniques that large tech companies have exploited for more pernicious purposes, making them a focal point of cultural controversy.

I certainly appreciate the blessings that modern technology affords, and my tech-development day job brings real satisfaction. Yet I can’t help maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism toward ubiquitous tech use. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which our daily habits have grown dependent on the platforms of big tech. Given their pervasiveness, it’s jarring to consider how many of them have vaulted to social prominence not through careful deliberation, but because of the revenue-seeking, data-hungry, often myopic actions of capital-heavy corporations. As a Christian, this reality has weighed heavily on my conscience and led to serious introspection over my vocational path.

Some may be surprised to find that such ambivalence is common among workers in tech-heavy fields. Their honest reflections won’t be found in public-facing press releases or Tweet storms, but in the anonymous corners of online forums. Backed by one of America’s most exclusive and lucrative startup accelerators, Hacker News is the cool news curator frequented by founders, developers, and industry-insiders. Between IPO announcements and code-heavy how-tos, the site regularly features nervous posts by seasoned technologists, petitioning for help reconciling their disillusionment with technology, their careers, and their lack of happiness. A quick scroll through the responses confirms that there is no consensus on what the answers are, or even where to begin looking.

New clarity on old priorities

This is the conundrum that Reinke’s book steps into. He gives an end-to-end account of tech’s lifecycle, covering its inception by God, its inaugural biblical stewards, its growth and development in cities, its increasingly idolatrous pretensions, and its final judgment. When it comes to honoring God with our technology, Reinke asserts that contemporary innovations don’t raise new questions so much as call for new clarity on old priorities. It’s through this simple paradigm that he applies the Bible’s ancient wisdom to our modern technological experiences.

Reinke begins his narrative in an unlikely place, with a substance that covers our driveways, streets, and playgrounds: tar. He uses tar (some Bible translations call it “pitch” or “bitumen”) as a common medium to connect the stories of Noah’s ark (Gen. 6) and the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11).

This example points to one of the book’s prevailing themes: Technology can be used either to glorify God or humanity, yet God remains sovereign in either case. Noah faithfully obeyed God’s command to construct the greatest boat of his time, and dutifully waterproofed it with tar. Just a few generations later, the Babelites cleverly paired tar with baked bricks in a bid to build themselves up into heaven. The same technology led to two opposing outcomes, yet neither episode posed any threat to God or strayed outside his control.

This portion of the book calls into question whether we can assign sweeping moral labels to technology itself. Instead, Reinke emphasizes how God is more concerned about the motives we bring to technology and the spiritual consequences of employing it in self-exalting ways. The problem with the Tower of Babel, he writes, citing one Genesis commentary, “is not that it makes God insecure, but that it sets man on a new path of self-confining self-destruction. Man’s increasing ambition and power don’t threaten God; they threaten man himself, because, ‘the more power they are able to concentrate, the more harm they will be able to do to themselves and the world.’”

Reinke’s solution is not that technologists abandon their craft, but instead that tech producers and consumers alike learn to see God in their tech. As he explains, affirming God as the creator of all technology and the teacher of all innovation turns science and engineering into a divine game of question and answer—a sort of spiritualized Marco Polo. We ask God what is possible, and he answers through the material world. Further, these lessons are a gift he gives us to ameliorate the curse of sin on creation. It’s through this lens that Reinke relates the God of Isaiah 28:23–26, who mercifully doles out agricultural instruction, to the world of modern tech.

The book’s greatest contributions lie in the way it develops a vocabulary to reason about new innovations, and in a pithy phrase—the “Gospel of Technology”—used to set the good news of Jesus against the idolatrous tech propositions of our era. Most Christian discourse carries a latent uneasiness with the pervasiveness of technology, but it often fails to clearly articulate what we’re opposed to or why. Reinke gives a name to our unease and makes a strong case for a moderate, tempered, nuanced, faith-filled approach, which stands in stark contrast to the false promises of fulfillment, redemption, and control laid out by the Gospel of Technology.

Careful readers, whether weary of yet another tech book or dizzied by the endless supply of opinions on the topic, will appreciate that Reinke’s book brings needed context to our current state of affairs by taking stock of ideas and events from across human history. Ultimately, he reminds us of the close and profound parallels between our modern tech tensions and the challenges faced by previous generations. “This is the human dilemma,” he writes. “Human innovation is a wonderful gift but a disappointing god. We cannot save ourselves. In the end, our innovations leave hearts unsatisfied, souls lost, and bodies cold in the grave.”

God’s sovereignty over innovation

Christians should walk away from this book assured that however technology may advance during our lifetimes, we ultimately have only God to fear (Matt. 10:28), because, as Reinke puts it, his “sovereignty cradles our technological futures.” We’re reminded that no level of human innovation can satisfy the longings of man’s heart, which transcend the constraints of our time (Ecc. 3:11) and find their ultimate fulfillment in Christ.

Personally, the book left me feeling exhorted to press deeper into my search for God in data science. Reinke’s description of the biblical precedent for understanding God through his creation, and thereby through our craft, has heightened my attention toward God’s place in my work. Further, it has given me a firm footing to evaluate my tech habits and to navigate the ethical quandaries that come with working in the tech industry. Reinke’s insight that new technologies do not (and will not) stop to critique themselves offers fresh motivation to consider and communicates the risks of technology.

Thankfully, the book avoids and denounces the fear-stoking tone that’s typically associated with Christian writing on the topic. Instead, it lays out a compelling argument that both tech optimists and pessimists tend to sell God short. We’re not wrong, Reinke affirms, to have a “low-grade discomfort” with this age of innovation. But as we wait for Christ’s return, we can trust that our sovereign God reigns over even the most unsettling prospects we might face.

Collin Prather is a data scientist for iRobot, a firm based in Bedford, Massachusetts.

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Theology

The Two Holy Ghostwriters Behind American Christianity’s Charismatic Turn

John Maiden

Church life was booming in the 1950s. But where was the Spirit?

John and Elizabeth Sherrill

Illustration by Christianity Today / Photo Credit: John L. Sherrill / Courtesy of Baker Publishing Group

It started with an innocent-enough question: “Have you ever heard of the expression speaking in tongues?”

For the magazine editor who asked it, it was just a story idea. But it turned into a journalistic investigation that changed a reporter’s spiritual life, brought many Christians into a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, and blew through evangelicalism with a strong charismatic wind. They Speak with Other Tongues, the compelling 1964 account of John Sherrill’s journey from skeptical reporter to ecstatic, tongues-speaking spiritual autobiographer, has had a profound impact.

As I have researched and written my new book, Age of the Spirit, I’ve thought a lot about the kinds of people who brought charismatic renewal to Anglo-world Christianity. There were preachers, teachers, and evangelists; businessmen, hippies, and housewives; professors, faith healers, frauds, and lots of everyday people who just wanted more of whatever God had to give them. The vehicle for many of these people to experience the Spirit was through the “personal witness story,” and the authors of so many of these stories in the 1960s and 1970s were John and his wife, Elizabeth “Tib” Sherrill.

It’s been almost 60 years since they wrote They Speak with Other Tongues, and both authors have now passed—Elizabeth died earlier this year. But for those of us who live in a world where people sometimes pray in a language they do not understand, where God still speaks to individuals, and where the faithful expect to see the Spirit at work in their daily lives, it’s the world the Sherrills built.

The Sherrills’ books provided a “charismatic catechesis,” preparing readers for life as Spirit-filled Christians. Their literature not only endorsed “new” experiences—such as baptism in the Spirit—but also provided a relatable script for others to have the same. As CT news editor Daniel Silliman argued in his book, stories shape and organize modern Christianity. It’s hard to think of a better charismatic example than the authors of They Speak with Other Tongues, The Cross and the Switchblade, God’s Smuggler, and The Hiding Place.

With the magazine editor’s question, the journalist John Sherrill in 1960 embarked on research into a phenomenon which—it was whispered—was gaining ground in American churches. Sherrill chased the story enthusiastically. He visited Pentecostal congregations but, more surprisingly, also found people who had known the experience outside these churches. Sherrill became fixated on understanding tongues.

The decade before the publication of Sherrill’s book was, on the face of it, a wildly successful time for American Christianity. The 1950s was a period of Christian boom: church building projects, marketed revival crusades, high ecumenical ambition, and grand contraction of religious institutions. Some critics, however, asked what had happened to what might be called “enthusiasm”: the mystical experiences, ecstatic encounters with the divine, or the kind of transcendent experiences that marked earlier eras of intense religiosity.

Missing from this thriving, flourishing Christianity seemed all talk about the Holy Spirit. As the Sherrills wrote, the Spirit was, in a sense, a ghost—“an aspect of God, the third member of the Trinity, a concept you acknowledged every Sunday in the Creed; but a ghost just the same, as if He were the featureless remnant of someone who at one time in the Church’s life had been very real indeed, but now was little more than a memory.”

There had been, a little earlier, an explosive Christian movement to revive the spiritual gifts of the early church as recounted in Acts. These people were called Pentecostal, hearkening back to the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2, where Christ’s followers heard the sound of a violent wind, saw fire fall, and began to “speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”

That movement, however, prompted what historian Grant Wacker described as “a brawl fought without rules, in the mud.” Pentecostals separated from other Christians and built their own institutions.

Meanwhile, evangelicals became increasingly suspicious of any contemporary supernaturalism (even while, in their own minds, they took bold stands against modernist materialism, specifically Christians who rejected biblical accounts of the supernatural). Princeton theologian Benjamin Warfield, for example, wrote Counterfeit Miracles, arguing that the early church received spiritual gifts for “the authentication of the Apostles” but the contemporary church did not. Warfield’s view, known as cessationism, was widely popular.

During the post–World War II church boom, however, some Christians became restless. They were not convinced that Christian life in America—even with very high church attendance and broad cultural respect for ministers like Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham—was as vibrant as it seemed. They were seeking something more.

There was growing interest in inner healing, with mainline Protestants drawn to organizations such as Camps Farthest Out and authors such as Agnes Sanford. Small prayer groups, offering a great sense of intimacy and experimentalism, were quietly growing in various Christian communities. Catholics joined Cursillo discipleship groups. And then upwardly mobile Pentecostals started to be more ecumenical and less hostile, inviting everyone they met to groups such as the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship.

It was in this flux of piety that They Speak with Other Tongues became situated. The Sherrills’ book reported the experiences of Christians who had begun to find a new supernatural dimension in their lives. The book discussed, for example, Harald Bredesen, the minister of First Reformed Church, in Mount Vernon, New York, whose “religious life had no vitality to it” before a powerful experience of the Spirit.

It described the experience of Dennis Bennett, an Episcopalian priest whose resignation following a tongues controversy in his parish in Van Nuys, California, caused enough of an uproar to get reported in Time and Newsweek. It also included veterans of encounters with the Spirit, such as the Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones, who was “filled” while at Asbury College, Wilmore, Kentucky. The Sherrills’ book was written on the cusp of a shift in American Christianity: Charismatic renewal was about to explode.

The Sherrills chased the story enthusiastically. Trying to make sense of glossolalia, they went so far as to make tape recordings of tongue speakers to submit them to language experts for scrutiny. John Sherrill, in particular, became fixated on understanding tongues. He learned from his interviewees that to understand tongues, he should really pursue the experience from which they (often) followed: the “baptism” or “filling” of the Holy Spirit.

Then at a prayer meeting in Atlantic City in December 1960, he decided he wanted to explore this experience of the Spirit “from the inside.” Opening himself to this possibility, Sherrill had an encounter, and something happened: “From deep inside me, deeper than I knew voice could go, came a torrent of joyful sound.”

He became part of the story. The journalistic investigation blurred with spiritual autobiographic. The remarkable account of a spiritual movement became, at the same time, a personal narrative.

The Sherrills were, as a matter of fact, experts at these kinds of personal narratives, testimonies of religious experience, and the transformation wrought by faith. They honed the craft of these stories in their years at Guideposts, the magazine launched by The Power of Positive Thinking author Norman Vincent Peale. As I argue in Age of the Spirit, authors such as the Sherrills didn’t just seek to capture the charismatic renewal with these narratives. At a deeper level, they were the charismatic renewal.

It seemed that the wind of the Spirit blew with these books across the face of American Christianity.

The year before they published They Speak with Other Tongues, the Sherrills related the personal witness story of a Pentecostal minister named David Wilkerson in The Cross and the Switchblade.

The book, cowritten with Wilkerson, was an account of a “one-man mission to the asphalt jungle” of New York City and the birth of Teen Challenge. The city described in the book is a scary place—a city of darkness, a ghetto Gotham.

“The enemy lurked in the social conditions that make up the slums of New York,” the Sherrills wrote.

The book described how Wilkerson—empowered by the Spirit—offered unconditional love to street gangs. When one gang member, Nicky Cruz, threatened to stab and kill Wilkerson, the minister replied, “You could cut me in a thousand pieces and lay them out in the street and every piece would love you.”

The line was destined to be repeated from a thousand pulpits. The book caught the imagination of so many Christians. A generation imagined themselves daring to go to the scene of the worst social problems and relay the love of Jesus. They thought about what it would be like if they too were baptized with that fire from Acts 2, started to speak in tongues, and as a result could fearlessly testify to God’s love.

The book was a bestseller, with millions of copies distributed worldwide. The Cross and the Switchblade owed its success in part to the power of the narrative and the Sherrills’ arresting storytelling. But more than this, it tapped into a changing spiritual mood in the early 1960s. Many Christians were seeking a reanimated, authentic version of the faith. And The Cross and the Switchblade told a story that readers could use as a script to achieve that Spirit-filled transformation.

As one reviewer in England said, if you read the book, you could “breathe the same atmosphere as exists in the New Testament.”

Following the publication of The Cross and the Switchblade and They Speak with Other Tongues, the Sherrills rose a charismatic wave. They wrote God’s Smuggler, the story of the ministry of a Dutch Christian, Anne van der Bijl, or Brother Andrew, who snuck Bibles into Communist countries. It was an adventure story about someone moved to do great things by his faith.

Most who read God’s Smuggler probably did not think of it as a charismatic tale. Unlike Wilkerson, Brother Andrew did not speak in tongues at a hinge point in the plot or dwell much on the “second blessing” of the Spirit accompanied by a gift of supernatural power. But a charismatic message was there nonetheless. Brother Andrew prayed for modern-day miracles. They happened. And readers were told they could do that too, with a little faith.

There’s no big argument in the book about cessationism, whether Christians today live in the same kind of universe that the early Christians did, or if the world is somehow less supernatural. The Sherrills just matter-of-factly described God intervening at a Communist checkpoint—and like that, the evangelical imagination was transformed.

A few years later, the Sherrills came out with perhaps their best book, The Hiding Place. It tells the story of Corrie ten Boom, another Dutch Christian. She and her family defied the Nazis, hiding Jews to help them survive the Holocaust, but then were caught and sent to concentration camps themselves.

The Hiding Place is also not explicitly charismatic, but it presents ten Boom as a woman so transformed by the Spirit working in her that she can love not only her neighbors (Jews) but also her enemies (Nazis). The final challenge she faces in the story is forgiving one of the guards from the prison camp where her sister, Betsie, had died. This was a vision of spiritual life radically more vibrant than the 1950s picture of a big church with full pews.

The Sherrills’ stories dominated Christian reading lists in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, and American evangelicalism was extensively “Pentecostalized.” Even those who didn’t get baptized in the Holy Spirit had their imaginations renewed by the charismatic renewal. The story of that transformation is, in a deep way, a story about imagination. And it’s a story about the impact, as my friend University of Exeter literary scholar David Parry recently put it, of the Holy Ghostwriters of the charismatic movement.

John Maiden is a senior lecturer in religious studies at The Open University and the author of Age of the Spirit: Charismatic Renewal, the Anglo-World and Global Christianity, 1945–1980.

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Digital Hymnal’s Demise Is Delayed

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Lifeway still plans to end online music resource but apologizes for short notice.

colincollect / Lightstock

Update (July 24): Lifeway has decided to postpone the discontinuation of lifewayworship.com, the online Baptist church music resource that was once conceived as a digital hymnal without a back cover. The Southern Baptist Convention publisher announced it was shutting the site down last week, but backtracked after an outcry from a lot of surprised worship leaders.

“We are delaying the implementation of this decision until we have time to listen, allow for dialogue, and find out how we can best support churches’ digital worship music needs,” Ben Mandrell, Lifeway CEO, said in a statement. “We are actively considering alternatives to ensure minimal disruption and keep this essential catalog alive.”

Mandrell apologized the publisher “didn’t put the turn signal on soon enough.”

When Lifeway made its initial announcement, it was unclear whether the arrangements and materials available on lifewayworship.com would be fully preserved somewhere. Lifeway Worship director Brian Brown emphasized that music ministers needed to download what they wanted before September 30, raising questions about the fate of the vast catalog of musical resources maintained on the site. Brown told CT he had hoped to migrate all the content to Lifeway’s main website so it would continue to be available, but as he prepared to make the announcement, his team realized that wouldn’t be possible in the next few months.

“Each product has to be recreated individually, and it’s tens of thousands of products,” Brown said. “It’s not something that we are going to be able to accomplish by September 30.”

Lifeway still plans to shutter the online resource, but it will remain online until it can be made available elsewhere. The publisher said it is exploring partnerships with other organizations.

—–

Original post (July 19): Lifeway is closing the book on an online hymnal that was supposed to be the digital future of Baptist music.

The online resource lifewayworship.com, which provides church choirs and worship teams access to more than 3,000 songs as well as instrumental arrangements, sheet music, and chord charts, will shut down at the end of September.

Lifeway, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), announced the decision Tuesday. The publisher said it has decided to “focus its resources on areas where we can faithfully serve more churches in greater breadth and depth.”

When Lifeway launched the site in 2008, it was envisioned as a modern hymnal that would continually grow and expand, making Baptist music widely available. The website struggled to compete against other services, though, that did not have the same denominational limitations.

“The reality is the vast majority of churches have chosen SongSelect and PraiseCharts as their preferred services,” said Brian Brown, current director of Lifeway Worship. “We are prayerfully considering how we might continue to serve leaders.”

The previous director, Mike Harland, said the development of lifewayworship.com began with a conversation about the future of the Baptist Hymnal. Harland and his staff wanted to imagine a new, online future for Baptist church music.

“Our goal was to create a hymnal with no back cover,” he said.

They started with the 674 songs in the Baptist Hymnal, which was also revised in 2008, and started adding to and curating the growing body of music on the site. It grew well beyond the number that could have been included in a physical book.

Churches could submit suggestions for new songs to include in the site’s collection. But the staff also dug into the history of Baptist hymnody for older songs that might deserve a place in the expansive online resource.

“We weren’t trying to be prescriptive, we were trying to be responsive,” Harland said. “We would reach in both directions: we would reach back to songs we might have missed in the original hymnal and then we would be listening very closely to what was happening now.”

But from the beginning, lifewayworship.com was not intended to be a cutting-edge digital resource.

“We were a music company first, we weren’t a computer company,” Harland said. “There were certainly other companies that had more user-friendly platforms, but we aspired for our content to be the very best.”

The emphasis on musical quality over a more advanced interface is one of the things that made lifewayworship.com a beloved resource for many church musicians.

John Strickland, pastor of worship and media at Tabernacle Baptist Church in New Bern, North Carolina, says that the instrumental arrangements for piano, strings, and winds are unmatched by what is available on similar platforms.

“A lot of people don’t have the ability or time to write custom instrumental arrangements,” said Strickland. “Pianists who don’t read chord charts or improvise easily can read these realized piano charts.”

Strickland also said that he has come to rely on lifewayworship.com for parts for individual instruments when he doesn’t have the musical forces for a full orchestra. Until recently, sites like PraiseCharts did not make instrumental parts available à la carte; directors had to purchase full orchestrations, which are more expensive.

“If I had a clarinet and a violin and nothing else, I could buy parts for them,” said Strickland, who noted that small ensembles and solo musicians are common features in worship services for smaller churches, many of which do not have a full-time worship director with the time to compose and write out instrumental arrangements.

Some ministers were dismayed by the news and upset it came so suddenly.

“What a mess,” wrote a music teacher and volunteer music minister from Texas on Facebook. “I am going to have to work even harder to find good arrangements for church.”

Lifewayworship.com has generally been the more affordable option. A full orchestration of Chris Tomlin’s “Holy Forever” is available on PraiseCharts for $52.95. On lifewayworship.com, the full score costs $6.99. PraiseCharts offers packages of à la carte arrangements for instrument groups—saxophones, woodwinds, brass—but not individual instruments. Lifewayworship.com breaks things down: $1.64 for an alto sax part, $1.64 for a cello part.

Lifewayworship.com also allowed lay musicians to purchase music without a paid membership, unlike SongSelect, which best meets the needs of churches and organizational leaders and has memberships that start at $180 per year for copyrighted songs. An individual looking for piano music for a recent popular worship song or two won’t be able to purchase it without a membership.

Despite its reputation as a source of affordable and high-quality arrangements, however, lifewayworship.com lacked some of the in-demand features now provided by SongSelect and PraiseCharts. Integration with programs like Planning Center wasn’t as simple with the site, the interface wasn’t as intuitive, and it didn’t provide charts using the Nashville number system.

Brown at Lifeway Worship told CT that the company hopes to make its lifewayworship.com library available on its website in the future and that the publisher will continue to sell church resources such as hymnals, communion supplies, and sheet music. People who purchased any resources on the site will still be able to download them through the end of September.

Lifeway Worship also plans to partner with the music retailer JW Pepper to make its instrumental arrangements from lifewayworship.com available for purchase. JW Pepper already has received titles from Lifeway’s choral collection and the company can offer on-demand printing services for out-of-stock products.

Lifeway Worship has no plans, however, to continue producing new music or musical arrangements after August 2023. But Brown is quick to point out that discussions about the future of Lifeway Worship are ongoing, and new music hasn’t been ruled out.

Will Bishop, associate professor of church music and worship at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of a recent study on musical practices in the SBC, sees this as the end of an era for the 82-year-old Lifeway Worship, formerly the church music department of the SBC Sunday School Board.

“If a resource is not being used, it’s going to go away,” Bishop said.

Lifewayworship.com may have benefitted from the credibility of being affiliated with the SBC in its early days, Bishop said. But there has been a shift away from denominational musical resources. Lifeway stopped producing choral music in 2021. There hasn’t been a new printed version of the Baptist Hymnal since 2008, and there are no current plans for a new edition. The SBC publisher’s decision to stop creating new arrangements of contemporary worship music is another step away from denominational music production.

According to Bishop, the signs of this coming change have been visible for several years. The trend was already going that direction and the pandemic only accelerated it.

The director who led the development of lifewayworship.com is sanguine, however, about the future. Harland thinks the church music market still wants some version of the ever-evolving digital hymnal he and his staff developed.

“Other companies will step in to fill the void,” he said.

Since he’s left Lifeway, he and his church, First Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, have used lifewayworship.com alongside other tools. He anticipates some challenges as they adjust to the absence of the site he helped create, but he voiced overall optimism.

“The song will go on,” he said. “The church will keep singing.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

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Where Boomer Faith in God Is Low, Gen Z Belief Is Up

Samantha Saad

What nearly 20,000 people in 26 countries believe about God, Satan, and the supernatural.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Countries with more baby boomers who say they believe in God as described in “holy scriptures” (including the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah) are less likely to have members of Gen Z who do.

But countries with fewer boomers who hold this belief are more likely to have members of Gen Z who do.

In a recent Ipsos Global Advisor survey of nearly 20,000 adults from across 26 countries, the researchers found that in nine countries where less than one-third of adults believe in God as described in holy scriptures, Generation Z was more likely to hold these convictions than boomers.

In Northern and Western Europe, Gen Z was more likely than the boomer generation to say they believe in heaven, supernatural spirits, hell, and the Devil. In places like South Africa and India, however, boomers were more likely than Gen Z members to believe in these aspects of the spiritual realm.

Boomers were also more likely than younger people to identify as Christian in half of the countries.

This study was conducted via face-to-face and online interviews. However, only Australia, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the US numbers can be considered representative of their general adult population.

“Samples in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey are more urban, more educated, and/or more affluent than the general population,” explains Ipsos. “The survey results for these countries should be viewed as reflecting the views of the more ‘connected’ segment of their population. India’s sample represents a large subset of its urban population—social economic classes A, B and C in metros and tier 1–3 town classes across all four zones.”

Among the countries surveyed, the percentage of Christians as a portion of the population peaked at 76 percent. However, most of the countries had Christian majorities, and more than two-thirds of people in Peru, South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, Poland, Brazil, Italy, and Argentina identified as Christians.

The beliefs and practices of Christians in these countries, however, diverged sharply from one another.

Well over half (64%) of Peruvians surveyed said they pray outside a place of worship once a month or more; however, less than half (37%) said they go to a place of worship that often. And the percentage of people in Peru who believe that religion does more harm than good dropped from 38 percent in 2017 to 32 percent.

Colombia followed a similar pattern, where more people pray outside a place of worship (74%) than attend a place of worship (44%).

The same tendencies could also be seen in Brazil, where 70 percent of the population said they are Christian. Brazilians surveyed expressed strong positive associations with God’s role in their lives. The vast majority said that believing in God or higher forces allows them to overcome crises (90%), gives meaning to their lives (89%), and makes them happier on average (88%). The country’s rate of religious tolerance also increased from 70 percent in 2017 to 81 percent in 2023.

Of the 26 countries surveyed, South Africa expressed the highest levels of tolerance (92%) for other religions. It also had the highest percentage of people (78%) who pray outside a place of worship, although, much like Brazil and Colombia, only about half (51%) actually attend. The country had the most positive associations with God’s role in people’s lives, with more than 80 percent of respondents saying that their belief in God or higher forces helps in overcoming crises (89%), gives meaning to life (93%), and makes them happier (89%).

Religious tolerance in Mexico increased from 66 percent in 2017 to 73 percent in 2023. And the belief that religion does more harm than good dropped from 43 percent in 2017 to 37 percent in 2023. The number of people who said that religion defines them as individuals rose from 31 percent in 2017 to 42 percent in 2023.

While three-quarters of Polish people are Christian (75%), only about half (52%) believe in God as described in holy scripture. And although religious tolerance increased in Poland from 74 percent in 2017 to 80 percent in 2023, other religious metrics dropped in the same time frame.

For instance, there were decreases in the number of people who said they believe in the following categories: that religious practices are an important factor in the moral life of a citizen (62% vs. 48%), that religion does more harm than good (49% vs. 44%), that religion defines a person (54% vs. 45%), and that people with a religious faith are better citizens (36% vs. 26%).

A majority of Italians identify as Christian (68%), yet less than half pray outside a place of worship at least once a month (37%) and even fewer attend a place of worship at least once a month (23%). Similarly, a minority of people in Italy believe that religious faith makes someone a better citizen (34%), that religion defines a person (48%), and that people with a religious faith are happier (47%).

Much like Italians, less than half of Argentinians said they pray outside a place of worship (42%) and less than a quarter go to a place of worship (20%). Although a little over two-thirds of the population said they are Christian (68%), only about half said they believe in God as described in holy scripture (53%).

While Christianity in South Korea has historically been more robust than in other parts of East Asia, among the countries polled, South Korea had the highest percentage of people who claim to have no religion (53%) and the highest percentage of those who said they do not believe in God or any higher power (44%). From 2017 to 2023, South Korea’s religious tolerance also dropped from 65 percent to 53 percent.

Japan exhibited lower levels of religious interest as well. The country repeatedly had a low, if not the lowest, percentage for any religious affiliation across the board—with only 2 percent claiming to be Christian. From 2017 to 2023, Japan became 26 percentage points more likely to believe that religion does more harm than good, increasing to 52 percent.

In Hungary, whose leader, Viktor Orbán, has become a champion of Christian nationalism, Christians make up the majority (58%) of the populace, though 31 percent claim no religion at all. Less than a quarter of the population agreed that religion defines them as individuals (15%) and that people with religious faith are better citizens (16%). Six percent said they lose respect for people when they discover they do not have a religious faith.

Among Hungarians, some of these categories dropped significantly from the 2017 survey, including a decrease from 53 percent that year to 37 percent in 2023 for the number of people who believe religion does more harm than good. There was also a drop from 29 percent in 2017 to 15 percent in 2023 for the number of people who believe that religion defines them as individuals.

Half of the 26 countries surveyed had majorities who believe in heaven. But only 9 of those had majorities that believe in hell, 12 had majorities that believe in supernatural spirits, and 9 had majorities that believe in the Devil.

Of all countries surveyed, Peru had the largest percentage of people (79%) who said they believe in heaven. Majorities also said they believe in hell (60%), although this figure represented a nearly 20 percentage-point drop from those who believe in heaven.

While Brazil (79%), South Africa (78%), and Colombia (78%) also had high percentages of people who believe in heaven, they had lower percentages of people who believe in hell, with 66 percent, 61 percent, and 58 percent respectively.

Forty-four percent of Belgians identify as Christian. But of all countries surveyed, they had lowest number of people who said they believe in heaven (22%), supernatural spirits (26%), hell (16%), and the Devil (18%).

The survey’s most religious non-Christian countries included India, Thailand, and Turkey, with nearly 100 percent of people in India (99%) and Thailand (98%) claiming to be religious.

Despite such a high religious population, only 2 percent of India’s population claim to be Christian. A majority said they believe in heaven (54%), but less than half believe in hell (47%), supernatural spirits (43%), and the Devil (41%).

In the same way, only 4 percent of Thais surveyed said they are Christian. Yet Thailand had high majorities of people who have positive associations with God’s role in their lives—over 80 percent agreed that believing in God or higher forces helps them overcome crises (82%), gives meaning to life (85%), and makes them happier (88%).

Out of the 26 countries surveyed, Thailand had the lowest percentage (27%) of those who believe that religion does more harm than good. People in Thailand said they believe in heaven and hell, equally, at 63 percent, but under half of Thais surveyed said they believe in the Devil (40%).

Although 87 percent of Turks surveyed said they are religious, only 2 percent are Christian. Turkey also had significantly high majorities of people who believe in heaven (78%), supernatural spirits (72%), hell (76%), and the Devil (76%).

From 2017 to 2023, five countries saw declines in the percentages of people who believe their religion defines them as individuals and who believe that religious practices are an important factor in the moral life of their country’s citizens. Hungary, Germany, South Korea, Poland, and the United States were the nations that experienced this.

Overall, most people in all the countries surveyed felt comfortable around others with different religious beliefs. Religious tolerance rose in nine countries from 2017 to 2023, with France seeing the largest increase: 63 percent to 79 percent. Tolerance fell in just four countries, with South Korea having the most significant drop: 65 percent in 2017 to 53 percent in 2023.

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Extremists Are Destroying Indian Christians’ Homes and Shattering Their Lives

Surinder Kaur

For nearly two decades, mob violence has driven believers from their communities and upended their sense of security.

Delhi Relief Facility

Photo by Surinder Kaur for Christianity Today

Since the beginning of May, ethnic and religious violence in Manipur, a state in northeast India, has resulted in the deaths of at least 142 people, the destruction of over 300 churches and hundreds of villages, and one of the largest violence-driven internal displacements in recent Indian history. A fact-finding team that visited earlier this month reported that the clashes were “state-sponsored,” and the violence has uprooted more than 65,000 people from their homes and forced them to seek shelter elsewhere.

India records the highest numbers of internal displacements annually, primarily due to natural disasters. But recent communal violence and persecution against religious minorities has wreaked havoc in numerous Indian states, including Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha.

While the government has an official legal framework for helping communities displaced by natural disasters and development projects, it has none for those displaced by violence or manmade conflict. Instead, the level of response has varied widely depending on public sympathy for the victims, media attention, and protests by those affected. Rehabilitation, including the provision of permanent shelter, jobs, and education, remains a significant challenge for the government and the church.

More than two months after the violence began in Manipur, at least 1,000 families are sheltering in Delhi, says L. Kamzamang, a pastor working with internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Manipur.

“Not only are most of the IDPs scattered in various cities and towns in India not wanting to go back to their homes, but young people who are in Manipur are planning to come out of Manipur,” said Kamzamang. “There is nothing to do there. There are no jobs, no source of income. Everything stands still. How will these young people support themselves and their families there?”

A lack of numbers

Regardless of the reason, displacement causes immense and lasting suffering and upheaval for the affected individuals and communities. It can uproot entire populations from places they have called home for up to hundreds of years and destroy livelihoods, social networks, and economic stability.

IDPs and refugees often lose their connection to the land, historical sites, sacred places, and cultural artifacts, all of which hold deep meaning for them. Displacement disrupts the transmission of cultural knowledge, traditions, and languages from one generation to another and can result in the erosion of cultural practices, customs, and beliefs that have been passed down for centuries.

When a community is dispersed and its members are scattered, the collective memory and shared experiences that form the foundation of a cultural identity can be fractured, besides disrupting education, healthcare, and basic services, and exacerbating the vulnerability of those affected. Displaced individuals may also face discrimination, marginalization, and further violence in their search for safety and stability.

India records some of the highest figures for internally displaced persons each year, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The country’s large population and socioeconomic vulnerability contributes to the scale of displacement, a situation often provoked by natural disasters.

In the last seven years, an average of over 3 million people per year have been displaced in India. In comparison, fighting in Ukraine has resulted in a total of 1.7 million IDPs between 2014 and 2021.

As for those who have been internally displaced due to violence or conflict, systemic data on those affected is virtually nonexistent due to the absence of a legal framework and the lack of government data. But in 2022 the IDMC recorded 1,000 IDPs primarily resulting from localized incidents of intercommunal (sectarian) violence.

As of late 2022 and prior to the Manipur conflict, approximately 631,000 Indians are still displaced within the country. Many of these communities have been displaced for several decades, including 108,000 people from northeastern India, due to conflicts in northeast states Assam, Mizoram, and Tripura, and 321,000 people from northern states Jammu and Kashmir. Currently, 18 of India’s 28 states are home to IDPs.

A growing terror

Displacement due to religious persecution and conflict in India dates back to the early days of the country. The Partition of India in 1947 changed the political borders that formed India and Pakistan, spurring the killings of more than a million people and causing a massive displacement of at least 20 million. Millions of Muslims migrated from the Indian side to the Pakistan side, while Hindus, Sikhs and others moved towards present day India. Since then, sectarian strife—or communal violence, as it is better known in India—has pushed minorities and underprivileged communities to seek refuge both inside and outside the country.

For years, large-scale religious violence mostly spared Indian Christians, while Muslim minorities were regularly targeted—and continue to be today. Then in the 1990s, those influenced by Hindu extremist ideology, which justifies violence toward religious minorities, began to systematically target Indian Christians.

In 1998 extremists burned down 35 churches between Christmas and New Year’s in the Dang district of Gujarat. Some Christians permanently left the area over this attack, says Jimmy Damore, a Christian leader in Gujarat.

In 2003 and 2004, extremist mobs and leaders associated with Hindu right-wing movements and political parties attacked Christians in the Jhabua and Alirajpur districts of Madhya Pradesh. The government was slow to secure the situation, leaving Christians away from their homes for months.

The worst post-independence violence against Christians in India took place in 2008 in Kandhamal, Odisha, where mobs killed at least 100 people and drove at least 75,000 people from their homes.

Unlike earlier Christian IDPs, a large number of Kandhamal residents did not return—attackers had destroyed their homes. After months in under-resourced and neglected relief camps, many moved to cities where they struggled to find long term, secure employment in other cities in the state.

“Well-settled people with property and homes now had to embrace poverty,” said John Dayal, who led an independent fact-finding team to Kandhamal in January 2008. “Emerging from poverty is not easy; it has to do with long term employment, and not instant charity that may follow violence or a natural disaster. Charity did build some houses [for the victims], but the move out of poverty came for those who could get employment.”

Since the Kandhamal attacks, there have been multiple reports of Christians being threatened, beaten up, socially boycotted, and forced to flee their homes from states like Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.

Last year, violence broke out in Chhattisgarh against the tribal Christian community and displaced more than 2,500 people. Fleeing believers left behind animals, crops, and numerous belongings inside their homes, says Akhilesh Edgar, bishop of the Milap Community Episcopal Church and a resident of Chhattisgarh.

“Their homes were looted, animals were stolen, and crops were confiscated,” he said.

Since then, many previously economically stable community members have been forced into “abject poverty,” with little ability to provide for their families beyond seeking out work as daily wage laborers.

“Life for the displaced does not continue to remain the same and is in a way worse than the violence unleashed against them, as they are forced to start from scratch all over again and in a place that is not familiar to them,” said Edgar.

The lack of security and severe loss of property forces victims to make hard choices, says Vijayesh Lal, general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India.

“Most end up in poverty and stare at a future that is uncertain for them and their families. The struggle to survive takes precedence over the struggle for justice,” he said. “There is no time for reflection, for mourning, or even to address the deep-seated mental and emotional trauma that is irreparable.”

The new normal

Generally, India’s state governments, in collaboration with the central government, undertake the rehabilitation of displaced communities through diverse assistance schemes and programs. But because there is no specific law for people displaced due to violence or conflict, there is also no uniformity in the compensation, as Outlook highlighted last year .

Instead, authorities’ responses to victims depend on IDP protests and media coverage of the attacks. Last December, more than 1,500 Christians fled from their homes due to violence in Chhattisgarh. They were forced to spend two days and nights outside in harsh weather conditions in front of a government office in Narayanpur, begging local leaders to provide a safe place for them to shelter. Only after media began highlighting these victims’ plight did the local authorities open an indoor stadium for the IDP community.

However, due to likely pressure from higher-ups and Hindu right-wing groups, within days the government insisted that the Christians return to their villages. Without other housing options, some returned to hostile environments where they continue to face violence, opposition, pressure, social ostracization, and discrimination, and are regularly forced to recant their faith.

On the other hand, according to local leaders, only a fraction of the internally displaced persons in Chhattisgarh have gone back. Others chose to stay in district headquarters or nearby towns where they could periodically check in on their ransacked village homes.

“Everything that I owned has gone, I do not know how we will face tomorrow. We are back in our village, for we could not afford rentals in Narayanpur town, but the villagers have told us that they are waiting for the right opportunity to kick us out of our own home once again,” one visibly disturbed resident, who did not want to give their name for security reasons, told CT.

As Chhattisgarh Christians grapple with this new normal, Edgar remembers that this was not always the case. Religiously-diverse tribal communities have been living together on very good and friendly terms for decades, he points out.

“People in this region have been following the Christian faith for a long time. Some are even third or fourth generation Christians and have lived in peace and harmony for decades with fellow villagers and neighbors. It is only when groups with vested interests and ideology enter the area and mislead the people, only then this violence and atrocities started,” said Edgar. “To initiate peace and to rehabilitate people in their own homes, the government must make sure that the organizations that polarize people are stopped, and that a message of trust and tolerance is spread.”

But for many Christians in Manipur, preventative measures are too late.

Thousands are still living in relief camps or with their relatives or friends in Manipur and in other states. There are reports of armed groups attacking relief camps, raising concerns over the security and safety of those being sheltered there.

Weeks after violence first forced people from their homes, Lal worries about what will happen to this displaced community when the resources run out or another disaster grabs the public’s attention.

“Then Manipur may be forgotten, like Kandhamal has been. But the broken lives of the victims take a long time to mend and heal. The church and NGOs have limited resources and they can only do so much,” said Lal. “The government must compensate the victims whose homes have been lost and lives shattered. Churches must be rebuilt by the government, but will they? Many victims of Kandhamal are still waiting for their just compensation even after nearly 15 years.”

- More from Surinder Kaur

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Bishop’s Elevation May End Kenyan Methodist Turmoil

Fredrick Nzwili - Religion News Service

Isaiah Deye is elected to replace Joseph Ntombura, who was accused of mishandling church funds.

Isaiah Deye

Courtesy of Methodist Church in Kenya

The Methodist Church in Kenya elected a new presiding bishop on July 20, three months after the last one was forced from leadership.

Isaiah Deye, 61, was elected with 76 percent of the vote at the 58th Annual Conference of the Church in Nairobi, raising hopes that recent turmoil and threats of schism will come to an end.

“I am greatly humbled and yet highly honored to be elected as the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church in Kenya and accept your decision that I should ascend to the office of the Presiding Bishop,” Deye said in his acceptance speech on Friday. “I pledge to be a leader who will seek to serve rather than to be served, and a role model for all the clergy and laity.”

The bishop has led the church in an acting capacity since April, when Bishop Joseph Ntombura was removed from office due to allegations of mishandling church funds and investments in a hospital, a resort, and a national university.

The allegations had put Ntombura in conflict with other church leaders. Methodist churches across the country had begun to make moves to create their own autonomous conference.

Deye garnered 281 votes, a majority of the 366 ballots cast. The race included three other candidates. His closest rival, Catherine Mutua, garnered 35 votes.

Deye is the second presiding bishop from the country’s coast region, which includes the region’s capital, Mombasa. Most church leaders have come from Meru, a region of Eastern Kenya.

Deye has said he hopes to be an example of Christian love and service in the church and asked for the church to unite behind him. “To succeed, I need your help in my efforts to bring unity in the church. For unity to take root there has to be harmony in the church,” the bishop said.

Earlier this month, Deye welcomed back to the church clergy and members who were ex-communicated or had left the church due to the disagreements with the former presiding bishop.

The British Methodist Church established Methodism in Kenya in 1862. In 1967, four years after the country won its independence from the United Kingdom, the church, too, became independent and known as the Methodist Church of Kenya.

By 2019, the church had eight synods (each headed by a bishop), 205 ministers and 1,000 congregations, with 300,000 registered members amid a broader Methodist community of 800,000. It sponsors 200 schools, a hospital, agricultural training institutes, youth polytechnic and technical schools, special schools for the physically disabled and vocational schools.

The church had remained fairly stable until 2015, when Ntombura, two years into his 10-year term, changed its constitution and established new rules. He has been accused of defrocking more than 100 clergy, selling church property without approval and using other properties as security for loans.

But now, clerics and lay Methodists in Kenya hope the new leader can breathe new life into the church and unite and heal it following the bitter wrangles under Ntombura’s leadership.

“The Methodist Church in Kenya is at the verge of bouncing back,” former Bishop Paul Matumbi Muthuri told Religion News Service. “We came bleeding but the Lord has spoken. Brethren are now reconciled to each other. And moving forward we see a church that is one, embracing and in mission.”

Mischek Kobia Michubu, a steward of the Kawangware Circuit in Nairobi, said he hoped Deye would begin a process of healing and reconciliation and bring members who had left the church in the past decade back to the fold.

“I think he can easily unite the church,” said Michubu. “He has overwhelming support for strongholds. All the way to the grassroots, the church members are extremely happy about this election.”

- More from Fredrick Nzwili - Religion News Service

Theology

How Phylicia Masonheimer Became Every Woman’s Theologian

Seana Scott

She went viral blogging about beauty and yoga pants. Now she’s teaching theology.

Courtesy of Phylicia Masonheimer

Phylicia Masonheimer is a poster mom of Christian femininity.

Her morning quiet times include a toast and strawberry breakfast alongside her devotional basket before her kids wake. On Instagram, she wears a long bohemian dress as she wipes down the counter of her stylish, Anthropologie-worthy kitchen in northern Michigan, her skin glowing and her fashionable curls falling to the side of her face.

But Masonheimer has no platitudes to offer her 140,000 Instagram followers, no inspirational or aspirational life advice wrapped up in influencer Christianese. Instead, she dives into doctrine and discernment, Bible literacy and theology. She responds to queries about free will, tattoos, menstruation, and moralism.

She’s built a ministry—Every Woman a Theologian—answering the real faith questions weighing on fellow Christians and rejecting the shallow options for teachings directed to women.

“You go to a women’s event, and it’s cupcakes and Esther or Ruth and tea—and that’s it,” she sighed. “Young women are done. They’re not interested. They want something that is relevant to their life, not vague.”

Every Woman a Theologian is not alone in a recent development of online women’s ministries publishing their own Bible studies, Christian-living materials, and products sold directly to consumers, joining popular creators like She Reads Truth/He Reads Truth, Well-Watered Women, and The Daily Grace Co.

Their resources are part of a broader push to bring robust theology to the average churchgoer, to honor curiosity and strengthen spiritual understanding. (Along these lines, the latest book by Bible teacher Jen Wilkin, written with J. T. English, tells readers You Are a Theologian.)

Instagram has become another outlet for leaders like Masonheimer to challenge and teach. But her earnest, biblically faithful embrace of theology stands in contrast to other influencers who may appear in women’s feeds.

Author Leigh Stein examined the “empty religions of Instagram” in a 2021 New York Times article, noting that the “women we’ve chosen as our moral leaders aren’t challenging us to ask the fundamental questions that leaders of faith have been wrestling with for thousands of years: Why are we here? Why do we suffer? What should we believe in beyond the limits of our puny selfhood?”

Among her own followers, Masonheimer has seen the opposite: troves of women who crave deep theology and thoughtful, strong answers to tangible questions like “How can I study the Bible for myself? What does the Bible say about sex? How can I hear God’s voice?”

“Phylicia breaks down ‘pink fluff’ women’s theology that has infiltrated the church and then builds a firm foundation on the true gospel that sets us free,” wrote Gretchen Saffles, founder of Well-Watered Women, in her endorsement for one of Masonheimer’s books.

Masonheimer thinks women might be turning to the internet because of a lack of discipleship in some local church contexts in the United States.

“We fill a void in the local church,” Masonheimer said. “I have learned that people want specifics. They don’t want a vague sermon about sin; they want a sermon breaking down what Corinthians says about sexual sin and pornography. They don’t want a feel-good message about prosperity; deep down they really don’t. They want a message telling them how to trust God in suffering or how to hear God’s voice for real, how to actually walk by the Spirit. When the church doesn’t preach it, they find it somewhere else.”

Her lineup of resources—books, e-books, newsletters, blog posts, podcast episodes, and events—are reaching tens of thousands of women in a way she couldn’t imagine when she began years ago.

Masonheimer was a Christian blogger with a religion degree from Liberty University when she and her husband, Josh, closed on their farmhouse in northern Michigan in 2017. The next day, Josh lost his job.

In desperation, with $500 in the bank, she threw out a crazy idea: “Let’s launch a book about sex, compiling my blog posts, and see what happens.”

Christian Cosmo: The Sex Talk You Never Had e-book sold 800 copies in one week and financially supported their family for two to three months.

During nap times, the young mom continued to type out more e-books on the Bible, theology, and Christian living—focusing on questions her Instagram followers asked her—as Josh worked another project management job.

Masonheimer focused on sexuality and purity culture in her early years because of her own background. At 12 years old, while rummaging through books at a local garage sale, she stumbled upon an erotica novel.

“I looked for [The] Boxcar Children or something like that but found something unexpected,” she recalled. “At first I was interested, and then I felt shame—but I still sought it out more and more.”

She kept the secret from everyone because she felt pressure to present a good-girl image. Yet after a few years of struggling with pornography, she started to grasp for freedom.

“I knew I couldn’t do it. I eventually encountered the Lord through the Holy Spirit through his Word and began asking questions: ‘What is sin? Why does the Bible get to tell me what to do? How does God actually overcome sin? If I repent, how am I forgiven?’”

Her willingness to address sex and purity also garnered her traction in the blogsphere and then Instagram. Her first viral post, “The Day I Wore Yoga Pants,” received 90,000 hits in a single day about a decade ago.

“At the time I truly felt convicted of that issue, even though I parroted things I learned about in purity culture,” she said. “But, actually, I still wore yoga pants [laughs], just with a tunic or something over them.”

This viral post pinned Masonheimer on the map of Instagram influencers. She became known as Yoga Pants Girl.

“So many women, I think, were just [so] desperate to hear another woman talk about it (sex) that they resonated with it, even if they didn’t agree with my view on yoga pants,” she said.

It also strengthened her determination to say what needs said, regardless of people’s responses.

“I got horrible feedback. People said they wished my children would be abused, that they hated me, or they hoped I’d die—all because of yoga pants!” she said.

Studying at Liberty, she encountered more diversity in denominations beyond her nondenominational upbringing, and her time studying Scripture contributed to her freedom from sexual sin.

“We broke down Bible passages in the Gospel of John, and I received answers to the questions about my struggle with my besetting sin of pornography,” she said. “John 14 through 17 stuck out to me the most. If I loved God, I would obey him. If I abided in him, I would bear much fruit and prove to be his disciple.”

Another turning point came through another viral blog post. This time, the target was women’s conferences that lacked an ardor for theology and Bible teaching. “Dear Women’s Ministry, Stop Telling Me I’m Beautiful” ended up being a significant enough topic that she turned it into a book—Stop Calling Me Beautiful—released in 2020 by Harvest House.

It was then that Masonheimer’s ministry grew beyond writing. Her friend, Eric Novak, worked in marketing and suggested she sell products on her webpage.

“I thought about her heart for people to read the Bible for themselves and know what they believe, so I came up with Every Woman a Theologian,” Novak said. “Phy was driving when I mentioned it to her, and she said, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re making me cry!’”

Every Woman a Theologian launched its first shop with a mug and T-shirts. Masonheimer and her executive assistant, Novak’s wife, Hannah, posed as models for the products. They were a hit, so the store kept expanding.

The ministry now publishes theology booklets and children’s books under Verity Press, its printing label. It also sells home products (from posters to potting soil) through their Verity Home brand—a heartbeat of Masonheimer’s passion for home-centered discipleship.

At her annual Verity Conference, hundreds gather for robust teaching at a two-day event in Masonheimer’s hometown of Petoskey, Michigan. Its tagline about “connecting right where you are planted” directs participants to engage in their local bodies.

While there are many female influencers claiming to be Bible teachers, followers and fans say Masonheimer stands out due to her commitment to promoting deep study, providing clear communication, and presenting a variety of views on theology, cultural issues, and church history. (For example, even though she’s clear about her own Arminian view of soteriology, she shares other orthodox perspectives when she answers questions.)

“I’ve appreciated her dedication to seeing average folks have theological literacy,” expressed Sara Mannschreck, a homeschool mom of five. “She doesn’t water things down, honoring theological complexity while making it simple and accessible.”

One benefit of the interactivity and instant response of social media is that Masonheimer is able to answer questions in real time. In 2019, when Bethel Church in Redding, California, held prayer meetings in hopes of resurrecting two-year-old Olive Heiligenthal, women reached out to her on Instagram for help to understand and process their own faith crises in response.

“A lot of people were extremely confused and reached out to me with stories like ‘My daughter died,’ ‘I had a miscarriage,’ ‘I had a stillborn baby,’” she said. “They wanted to know if they should have prayed differently. I tried to talk about it as gently as I could from a theological and biblical standpoint.”

Addressing the #WakeUpOlive situation led to a significant expansion of Every Woman a Theologian and brought traffic to the Verity podcast.

“We are dedicated to showing multiple views and perspectives, being gracious to other denominations and traditions, and staying true to the Word of God,” she said.

Several followers of Every Woman a Theologian shared with CT the reasons why they enjoy the ministry’s Instagram content. They appreciate how Masonheimer encourages her listeners to study and decide what to believe on issues that may allow for varying views and how she shares her day-to-day life.

Recently on launch day for their summer product line, Masonheimer posted a “day in the life” reel. Her family slowly started the morning, several of them sick, including herself. At around 9:15 a.m., toast was served, dishes were washed, and the laundry was booted.

She then filmed herself sitting at her computer typing, wearing makeup and a gauzy white dress, with the caption “Feel like death. Dress as if you don’t.” Viewers saw her cuddling a knee-high blond child, a counter full of natural remedies—zinc and colloidal silver—and moments of her daughter playing with wood blocks outside with the backdrop of a weeping willow and mowed grass.

There’s an intentionality to her life and postings—hoping to stave off jealousy or judgment with regular reminders about setting boundaries and creating margin. Masonheimer has set up a system for productivity (you can sign up for her free email course) and relies on a small team, which includes her husband, who quit his job in 2020 when she was pregnant with their third child.

Josh took over much of the logistics of the small family business, such as managing the barn warehouse and finances. They work in partnership to homeschool, host discipleship relationships through their local church, and cook eggs from the chickens for breakfast.

“Some men in my life asked me if I would be fulfilled not providing for the family with my own career,” he said. “I guess I’m different than a lot of men. I don’t internalize cultural expectations. We each have our own strengths. Why should we ignore our strengths because of expectations?”

The kids had been homeschooling with Josh in the mornings while Phylicia worked on content creation, but she really wanted to homeschool, so they switched up the routine. “I think every season we will need to adjust how the household and work rhythms function best,” she said.

You can sometimes hear Adeline in the background with her siblings during her mom’s “Ask Anything Mondays” reels, where she responds to followers’ questions—ranging from disciplining children to the doctrine of the Trinity.

Accessible, public, free theology seems to be doing well for Every Woman a Theologian. While it’s still easy to find self-help platitudes dressed in Bible verses on Instagram, Masonheimer is part of a cadre of popular women sharing Bible teaching and theology, such as Ruth Chou Simons, Liv Dooley, and Portia Collins, among others.

“I’ve seen firsthand that it’s very hard for women with the gift of teaching to use that gift in a more scholarly way for everyday women, navigate the current climate being in the hot seat, while also wanting to maintain orthodoxy,” said Hannah Novak, Phylicia’s executive assistant. “You’re really battling the fact that hot takes and pithy social media posts are more culturally acceptable from women than sound teaching.”

The challenge with Instagram’s access where “anyone is a theologian” is the danger of unsound doctrine and every wind of teaching (Eph. 4:14) being offered as the Bible-based verified truth—sometimes from professing Christians untethered to theological accountability.

Masonheimer is aware of this risk and asks trusted pastors, ministry leaders, and theological scholars to vet her work. She invites the theological oversight of her local church leadership and employs editorial work from theologically trained editors.

It might be that social media is our culture’s Areopagus, where every kind of philosophy and theology are practiced in the public square—and where women turn for teachers when their tea and feel-good book studies don’t offer robust discipleship in their local churches (or they simply stopped going a while ago).

Yet women—and men—still need to be careful to live as Bereans, examining the Scriptures daily to see if what they hear is true (Acts 17:11). Examining the Scripture is indeed what Masonheimer hopes all women will do. Her dream is that every woman will study the Bible, know what she believes, and communicate it graciously.

- More from Seana Scott

News

Died: Stuart Epperson, Who Put Preachers and Political Talk on the Nation’s Radio Waves

Daniel Silliman

The cofounder of Salem Media Group built an “empire of influence” broadcasting religious and political conservatives.

Salem Media Group / edits by Rick Szeucs

Stuart Epperson, cofounder of a radio empire that brought Christian preaching and conservative talk to the largest media markets in the United States, died on July 17 at the age of 86.

Epperson went into business with his brother-in-law Edward Atsinger in the 1970s, pioneered a new financial model for radio in the 1980s, and grew their media company to more than 100 radio stations with 11 million listeners.

Today in the largest metro areas in the United States, Salem Media Group broadcasts the sermons of David Jeremiah, Tony Evans, Greg Laurie, Chuck Swindoll, and John MacArthur, as well as the preaching and teaching of the late J. Vernon McGee, the late Charles Stanley, and the late R. C. Sproul. Salem stations also broadcast the conservative and populist political commentary of Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, Sebastian Gorka, and Eric Metaxas. Previous shows featured Oliver North, Bill Bennett, Michael Medved, Alan Keyes, and Dinesh D’Souza.

Salem provides America with a “cultural bedrock of Christian and family-themed content and conservative values,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, which honored Epperson with an award in 2017.

“Very few people in the conservative movement have done more to shape the national conversation than Stu Epperson,” Perkins said.

Newt Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the House and an inveterate partisan fighter, said Epperson’s role in the ideological struggles of the late 20th century could not be underestimated; he did more than anyone to make radio the domain of religious and political conservatives.

“He is very intelligent,” Gingrich said at the Values Voter Summit in 2017. “He understood where the technology was going and he used that technology to help get our message of solid conservatism, of key values, out to millions and millions of people.”

Time magazine noted that reach when it named Epperson one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in 2005.

Epperson, for his part, was humbler about his accomplishments. When he looked back at Salem’s rise, he said he felt like he was there, but “God did it.”

As Epperson explained to a newspaper reporter near the turn of the millennium, he and his brother-in-law just made one decision at a time. They didn’t have a grand plan to build an influential media empire.

“As the doors opened, we felt compelled to walk through them,” he said. “It’s not exactly what we set out to do … but God has always made a way.”

Epperson was born in Southwest Virginia, about seven miles from the North Carolina border, on November 2, 1936. He was the youngest of Harry and Lula Epperson’s six children. His father’s mother, Margaret Epperson, served as midwife.

The family’s home was a shanty, with no electricity and no running water. The Eppersons made ends meet by growing tobacco and doing a whole host of side jobs, including carpentry, dentistry, and mortuary services. When they weren’t working, they were at Unity Presbyterian Church, a small congregation of self-proclaimed fundamentalists who met in a plain wood building made of lumber milled by the Eppersons. The family read the Bible and prayed every day.

Discovering the radio

Stuart Epperson’s lifelong interest in radio began when he was eight years old and his older brother Ralph learned about broadcasting at John Brown University in Arkansas. Home from school, the older brother built a windmill to generate power, wired the house for electricity, hooked up a radio set he’d ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog, invited the neighbors over, and tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry.

Within a year, Ralph had started his own radio station out of the family home.

“The whole community from the mountain there, Southern Appalachians, would come to our house,” Epperson later recalled. “They would bring their guitars, banjos, and fiddles. They would bring their harmonicas. And they would sing. And preachers would come with big black Bibles and they would preach. … He’d put them all on [the radio].”

Harry, the Epperson patriarch then in his 60s, decided radio was a better way to earn a living than growing tobacco and selling the occasional coffin. He put up the family farm for collateral, got a loan, and used the money to start three Appalachian stations, including one up in Lynchburg, Virginia. One of the breakout stars on that station was a then-unknown Baptist preacher with big ambitions named Jerry Falwell Sr.

Young Stuart learned all about the new family business. When he graduated high school at 16, his mom and dad decided he should go to Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Epperson didn’t like the school. But he liked the broadcast journalism classes and the job he got in Greenville at a radio station.

“He was a good radio man all the way,” his station manager later told a North Carolina newspaper. “Cool headed, had a good voice, was adept with the controls.”

Epperson earned a bachelor’s degree from Bob Jones in 1956 and a master’s in communications in 1959. His last semester, he met a girl he liked. Redheaded Nancy Atsinger was originally from Hawaii, but her family had relocated to Southern California after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was just starting school, though, so Epperson went off to Roanoke to start his first radio station.

He launched the station in 1961, when he was only 24. He adopted the format his brother had shown him, playing country music—which was sometimes called hillbilly music at the time—interspersed with local preachers who were happy to get on the air.

He went back to North Carolina, got married to Nancy in 1963, and then bought a station, WXBX, in Winston-Salem. It was not quite a one-man operation, but close. Epperson boasted he had the smallest staff in North Carolina, and the “studio” was actually a shanty he rented from a widowed woman named Erline Tate for $95 per month. For the money, Tate also made biscuits.

Trouble with the government

The shoestring operation ran into trouble with government regulations, though. In 1970, Epperson was fined by the US Labor Department for failing to pay his employees proper overtime. He said it was a mistake. He hadn’t kept business records as well as he should have. Then the Federal Communications Commission fined him the maximum possible amount for failing to keep proper records.

The experience may have confirmed Epperson’s suspicions about the evils of big government. The radio station owner decided to get involved in politics himself after being inspired by president Ronald Reagan. When Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, Epperson decided he would run too. He registered as a congressional candidate for North Carolina’s fifth district.

“I would like to say it was popular demand,” he later joked. “But it wasn’t.”

Epperson had no political experience, no name recognition, little party support, and he was shy. At the same time, he was passionate about his message and had money of his own he could invest. According to newspaper reports at the time, he put about $100,000 into the campaign.

Epperson’s incumbent opponent mostly ignored him, though, and the political newbie spent a lot of the campaign just trying to grab attention. He twice ambushed the 10-term Democrat, showing up at events and challenged him to impromptu debates. He carried a lantern around the district claimed he was looking for his opponent’s accomplishments. He announced his regrets that his opponent couldn’t be with him at an evening event—he had been kidnapped by Washington, DC.

“There are some things in this campaign I would not do under normal circumstances,” Epperson admitted, “but there is a cause involved.”

He lost the election by less than 5,000 votes. He ran again in 1986, but did worse than the first time, falling a bit more than 13,000 ballots short of victory.

When the door to elected office closed, the door to radio opened even wider. The same year he lost his second congressional race, Epperson decided to start Salem Media with his wife’s brother Ed Atsinger. The two purchased several stations together in the mid-1970s, and decided to go bigger in the 1980s. They bought one radio station in Bakersfield, California, and another in Oxnard, California, in 1986.

A new financial model

Oxnard was, as Atsinger later put it, “not the center of the world,” but it did have a signal that reached into Los Angeles. Epperson and Atsinger figured out how to use the signal and developed a new model for Christian radio called “block programming.” Instead of depending on ad sales for revenue, they would sell airtime to preachers who wanted to access the Los Angeles media market and were willing to pay to secure it.

At the time, a lot of small religious stations broadcasted sermons, and preachers frequently got free airtime in large markets. But the preachers found they were at the mercy of every station manager who wanted to shuffle a schedule or change formats, making it difficult to build and grow an audience with a lot of listeners. Some preachers would pay for that. And this would provide Salem with a firmer financial base than its competitors.

The innovation was not just good for business—it fit the new company’s mission.

“We said, ‘Let’s concentrate on the big cities,’” Epperson recalled. “We started Salem—I want you to really understand this, now—we started Salem because we had an opinion. First and foremost, we wanted to build radio stations and buy radio stations because we wanted to present the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ by the very best communicators of the gospel in the world.”

Within a few years, they had taken out loans to buy a station that broadcast in Boston for $1.8 million and another in New York for about $1 million, and they kept growing. By the mid-1990s, they owned stations in 31 major markets and Salem was earning about $50 million per year.

Many evangelical radio ministries found that they grew as Salem did. Focus on the Family’s daily program hosted by James Dobson, for example, became the most-listened-to religious radio show in partnership with Salem.

“We’ve benefited because we’ve been able to reach their audience,” Focus vice president John Fuller said at the time. “As Salem has grown, we’ve grown with them.”

“We’re in this to save America”

In the mid-1990s, Epperson decided to get back into politics, but this time via the radio. Salem launched its first nonreligious show, featuring commentary on contemporary politics, in 1995. It starred Oliver North, a Marine lieutenant colonel who had gotten in trouble for secretly selling weapons to the Islamic Republic of Iran in order to fund a right-wing rebel group in Nicaragua. During a congressional investigation into who had authorized the scheme, North became a hero to many conservatives who didn’t think the US was doing enough to fight communism around the world.

Conservative talk shows were booming at the time, and The Oliver North Show did well. Salem embraced the talk radio format, started broadcasting a growing number of conservative commentators, and syndicated the programs to other stations as well.

“There is something different about Salem that I think you need to understand,” one senior vice president said recently. “The difference with Salem is, even though we always want to make money—and we do make money—we’re in this to save America.”

Epperson also joined the Council for National Policy, a quasi-secret group of religious right leaders, and started a political action committee. The Salem PAC raised $14 million for Republican candidates in 1996. Twenty years later, it contributed more than $200 million to Republican candidates.

The Salem PAC threw its support behind Donald Trump in 2016, donating the maximum of $5,000 to his presidential campaign. Salem also sent its conservative talk show hosts on tour that year, holding pro-Trump rallies. The company’s avid support for Trump created a rift with some on the Religious Right, notably Salem talk show host Michael Medved, who said the reality TV star was not fit to lead the country. But Salem didn’t waver. The media company was happy to lend its “empire of reach and influence,” as talk show host Hugh Hewitt described it, to a candidate who would disrupt the political status quo.

When Epperson was honored at the Values Voter Summit in 2017, he said he and his brother-in-law didn’t know they’d have great political influence when they started buying radio stations in the 1970s. But over five decades, their true goal had pretty much remained the same.

“We built the platform for the gospel and the Judeo-Christian tradition,” Epperson said. “We ought to have people on the air who can ably present the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Epperson stepped down from Salem in 2019. He is survived by his wife Nancy and their four children, Kristine Pringle, Stuart Epperson Jr., Karen DeNeui, and Kathryn Fonville. A funeral service will be held in Winston-Salem on July 21, and Epperson will be buried the following day at the church his family built in Ararat, Virginia.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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