Missionary Pilots Fly Endangered Gazelles to Safety

Christian group works with conservationists in Chad to help antelope on the brink of extinction.

Becki Dillingham / Mission Aviation Fellowship International

There are only about 100 dama gazelles left alive in the wild. One of the critically endangered animals is named Becki, after Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) pilot Becki Dillingham, who is helping to save the strikingly beautiful creatures with long legs and short curled horns from extinction.

Becki the gazelle was flown across a vast and mostly roadless expanse of desert in a Cessna 182, with her horns sheathed in rubber tubing to keep her from damaging anything during the flight. She was delivered to Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve, a protected grassland roughly the size of Scotland, where she will can thrive and reproduce.

Becki the missionary pilot said she didn’t know she would be doing jobs like this when she arrived in Chad with her husband and two children in 2017. But the UK-trained physicist who had her first flying lesson at age nine nevertheless sees transporting endangered animals as a core part of her calling as a Christian missionary pilot.

“We have what are called five marks of mission, which are pointers as to where we should be going with all of the work that we do,” Dillingham told CT from the MAF base in the Chadian capital N’Djamena. “One of those is creation care—looking after the environment and wildlife.”

Dama gazelles certainly need care. Seen in Africa as symbols of elegance, they once lived in abundant numbers across the Sahel, the arid grasslands that fringe the southern border of the Sahara Desert from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.

But hunting, regional wars, and habitat loss have driven this antelope species dangerously close to extinction. They now live in only four isolated pockets in Niger and Chad. And those pockets face new dangers and further encroachment all the time.

A dwindling group living in the Manga region near the town of Salal, for example, was quickly losing habitat and then threatened in 2019 by local hunters on motorbikes. Sahara Conservation Fund (SCF), a Paris-based nonprofit that has a dama gazelle program, leaped into action and orchestrated a plan to rescue the animals and move them to the reserve.

SCF got approval from the Chadian government and organized six international conservation groups and MAF to help. MAF pilot Phil Henderson joined the team. After days and days of searching, they tracked three female gazelles in the expansive Manga, tranquilized them, and flew them to safety.

“Every gazelle matters,” John Watkin, the SCF chief executive, told CT.

The three gazelles, including Becki, were put in a large protected enclosure at the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve. A male was added so they can breed and raise offspring. Becki has had three fawns since the rescue: a female named Shaika, a female named Hiti, and a male named Kallé.

“They will be released back into the wild once they are old enough not to be threatened by jackals and dogs from the nomad camps,” Watkin said.

Some dama gazelles are also being bred in Abu Dhabi, at the Delaika Wildlife Conservation Center. Getting them back to Chad is a challenge, though. It’s a 10-hour flight from Abu Dhabi to Abeche, Chad, and then a difficult 10-hour drive north from there to the reserve.

A veterinarian hold the head of a sedated dama gazelle aboard an MAF plane in Chad.

In March, MAF stepped in again to help, transporting three more gazelles in a 35-minute plane ride. Those animals have also been added to the breeding program, which conservationists hope will produce 20 to 30 fawns per year, increasing the total population to about 150.

MAF was formed by World War II veterans who wanted to put their flying skills to good use in peacetime. Most of their work involves supporting evangelists, church planters, and Bible translators in remote places that would otherwise be inaccessible.

But they’ve always helped other people too—whether that’s sick locals who need to fly to an urban hospital or conservationists in need of supplies.

Watkin recalled a time back in the 1990s when he was working on a conservation project in Garamba National Park, in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo, when the country was still known as Zaire. The MAF pilots flew in with regular supplies of fresh food and mail. They provided “a lifeline” to him and his colleagues in the park.

“MAF as an organization has been extraordinarily useful for conservation projects throughout the world,” he said. “It’s always a joy to have them in camp, to be able to share our stories with new people and collaborate.”

MAF has helped conservationists more recently by conducting aerial surveys of endangered animals. In November, the Christian pilots helped conduct a survey of the wildlife in Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve. In addition to dama gazelles, they counted more than 200 scimitar-horned oryx, a species that died out in the wild 30 years ago but has been reintroduced in the reserve.

MAF has also helped with aerial surveys in Zakouma National Park, in the wetter, more forested south of the country, where conservationists protect the elephants that were nearly exterminated by ivory poachers in the early 2000s.

MAF International’s chief executive, Dave Fyock, said wise stewardship of God’s resources has been a value since the beginning of the organization. But the shape of that calling has changed over the years.

“Exactly how one goes about best living out that responsibility is one of regular debate and discussion,” Fyock told CT.

He says MAF pilots draw on God’s command in Genesis to care for creation and see it as one of the five marks of mission, alongside proclamation, teaching, compassion, and justice.

“Working with others to care for endangered animals demonstrates an understanding of who God is and what he has commanded us to do,” he said. “It allows us to celebrate when we help conservationists do something we believe was given to mankind to do.”

It also explains why one of the few endangered dama gazelles in Chad is named Becki.

- More from Ryan Truscott

Theology

The Pro-Life Conviction of the Hodge Brothers

Marvin Olasky

Experiencing death led Hugh and Charles Hodge to fight for the unborn, using science and systematic theology.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

This article is the final of a four-part series based on the upcoming book by Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas, The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022.

When two young boys in a family learn that their three older brothers and their father have died of yellow fever, how does that affect their thinking about life and death? In the Hodge family two centuries ago, that consciousness led one brother to become the 19th century’s pioneering pro-life doctor and the other to become a pro-creation theologian who wrote three volumes of systematic theology still read in seminaries today.

The older of the two survivors, Hugh Hodge, graduated from Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to became ship surgeon on a voyage to India. There, during a deadly cholera epidemic, he saw the Hindu “burning of a widow with her dead husband” atop a funeral pyre. She did not resist when the fire was lit, and he hoped she suffocated from smoke before feeling the flames.

Hodge almost died when the ship nearly sank on the way back to America. For most of the 1820s, Hodge served as doctor of the Philadelphia Almshouse Hospital in the poorest part of the city, where sometimes all went well and other times typhus raged: “Few escaped the poison. … The mortality in the house was great.” Hodge again almost died, but then recovered, joined a Presbyterian church, married, and had seven children.

In the 1830s, Hodge became professor of obstetrics and the diseases of women and children at the University of Pennsylvania. Each fall, Hodge presented an introductory lecture on obstetrics, but he did not speak about abortion until three deaths made him face that misery.

The first death: Hodge’s firstborn, whom he described as “active, cheerful, intelligent,” until “perforation of the bowel” led to sudden demise. Deaths two and three, which received wide newspaper coverage: Eliza Sowers and her never-born child, both victims in 1839 of a surgical abortion.

At a time when many thought of unborn children as lumps of clay during their first four months in the womb, Hodge in his 1839 introductory lecture emphasized that “human existence” commences “from the moment of conception.”

He emphasized pre-birth and post-birth continuity:

The child unborn absorbs nourishment from its parent through the medium of the uterus. After birth, it imbibes the materials for nutrition by means of the mammae, or breasts. There is essentially no difference in its physiological properties, or as to the independent character of its existence.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania / WikiMedia Commons

Hugh Hodge

While Hugh Hodge (1796–1873) was exegeting the unborn child, Charles Hodge (1797–1878) was teaching at Princeton Seminary and becoming known for his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Charles Hodge went on to write other commentaries on Ephesians and 1 and 2 Corinthians. He culminated his publishing career with a three-volume Systematic Theology (1872–3) still used in seminaries and What is Darwinism? (1874), a vigorous critique.

The two brothers ran on parallel tracks, with the older saying an unborn child pointed to intelligent design and the younger expanding that to all creatures great and small. Charles Hodge wrote that Darwinian theory “ascribes to blind, unintelligent causes the wonders of purpose and design which the world everywhere exhibits; and … effectually banishes God from his works.”

Hugh Hodge emphasized medical science but contextualized it in theology:

The existence commenced in the ovary of a woman, mysterious and wonderful as it may be, is but the commencement of a series of changes, each more wonderful and glorious than its predecessor, to which the same identical human being will be subjected, perhaps for eternity.

Death is not the end but the time “when changes will be effected infinitely greater and more mysterious than occur at conception, and during gestation.”

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Charles Hodge

Charles Hodge emphasized theology but contextualized it in a close examination of scientific claims. He wrote of Charles Darwin’s admission “that if one species is derived by slow gradations from another, it would be natural [to find] the connecting links,” yet “such are not to be found.”

What united the two brothers was faith in God’s works of providence, defined as his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing of all his creatures and all their actions. Charles Hodge described how biblical passages “clearly teach (1) That the universe as a whole does not continue in being of itself. It would cease to exist if unsupported by his power. (2) That all creatures … are continued in existence not by any inherent principle of life, but by the will of God.”

The Hodge brothers understood this as a macro-doctrine regarding the immense universe, and a micro-doctrine regarding tiny children. They did not see the beginning of the universe or the beginning of a child as, in the words of Charles Hodge, “ateleological … the result of random occurrences.”

That understanding led to Charles Hodge’s famous conclusion to his last book: “What is Darwinism? It is Atheism. This does not mean … that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic, that the exclusion of design from nature is … tantamount to atheism.”

Hugh Hodge also gave an emphatic declaration: Abortion “is a crime against the natural feelings of man—against the welfare and safety of women—against the peace and prosperity of society—against the divine command, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It is murder.”

How relevant is that to today? Depends on what we believe about creation and conception. Both big and little are either a product of chance, or—as the brothers Hodge believed—the work of a Creator. Why did their three older brothers and their father die? That was a mystery. What could they do to preserve life and a reason for living? This was their calling, and ours.

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

When Can a Ministry Count as a Church?

Daniel Silliman

In the case of the Family Research Council, it depends on if you ask the IRS or the US Religion Census.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins speaks in a church in Washington State.

Screengrab Westgate Chapel

The research team counting all the nondenominational congregations in America did not add any marks to their tally when a conservative Christian think tank in Washington, DC, declared itself an association of churches.

The reclassification might be meaningful for the IRS, but for the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB), it doesn’t count. Literally: The Family Research Council (FRC) will not be included in the US religion census, scheduled for publication this fall.

“We are looking for nondenom congregations/worshiping communities, many of which might not even be registered or 501(c)(3) entities,” said Scott Thumma, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and head of the team counting nondenominational churches for the 2020 US Religion Census. “Family Research Council as well as evangelists, singing groups, mission agencies, resource suppliers, etc., get stripped out even if they claim to be nondenominational. We are only looking for churches.”

The FRC, a family values advocacy organization that spun off of Focus on the Family in 1992, is one of an apparently growing number of parachurch organizations that has asked the IRS to reclassify it as a church or an association of churches. Focus on the Family made the change in 2016, along with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA).

Other evangelical organizations that have received reclassification include Cru, Gideons International, Voice of the Martyrs, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), most major televangelists, Liberty Counsel, the American Family Association, Frontiers, Ethnos 360/New Tribes Mission, The Navigators, and World Vision.

Thumma’s team did not include any of them in its count of 39,430 nondenominational churches in 2020, an increase of nearly 4,000 congregations and 6.5 million people from the 2010 religion census.

The IRS is counting them as churches for tax purposes, however.

Some Christian organizations that have historically been considered parachurch ministries have told the IRS they should be seen, legally, as churches. More started making this argument in the past five years.

In 2016, an executive at the tech company Mozilla was publicly shamed for a donation he made to a political organization opposing same-sex marriage. He was forced to resign, raising concerns among conservative Christian groups that donors could face stiff social consequences for unpopular associations.

“This was done primarily to protect the confidentiality of our donors,” a Focus on the Family spokesman told Ministry Watch in 2020. “In recent years there have been several occasions on which non-profit organizations—on both the right and the left—were targeted for information, including the names and personal details of their donors.”

Unlike many political organizations, religious nonprofits are not required to disclose the names of individual donors. But they are required to fill out and release most of IRS Form 990, which asks for information about the board of directors, leadership, and highest-paid employees.

The 990 can require disclosure of other information as well. The BGEA’s last 990, covering 2014, included an explanation of the evangelistic association’s policies on first-class airline tickets. It also had information about Billy Graham’s health care costs, the housing provided to longtime music director Cliff Barrows, and an additional $100,000 above base salary paid to Franklin Graham.

“You don't have to be a Chicken Little sort of person to be a bit concerned,” World Vision’s chief legal officer Steve McFarland told CT in 2014. “Where is this going to stop? Do we as a religious community want to continue answering ever-increasing questions?”

World Vision has voluntarily continued to submit 990 forms to the IRS, though it is classified as a church. Other organizations, like RZIM, have chosen not to disclose financial information or even the names of board members. Most, like the BGEA, have voluntarily shared financial information on their websites, but kept some details, such as salaries and compensation packages, private.

Reclassification can also protect Christian organizations from audits. The government has special rules limiting IRS agents’ authority to launch an investigation into a church, restricting investigations once they start, and prohibiting repeat investigations for five years.

The BGEA was audited in 2012. Franklin Graham said the Barack Obama administration was targeting the ministry to punish it for publishing ads urging voters to support “candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel.” A BGEA spokesman told The Washington Post that being reclassified as a church made the organization feel better protected from government interference.

Critics, however, say these nonprofits are abusing the system to avoid scrutiny. Senate Finance Committee chairman Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, told ProPublica he sees this as a problem.

“Form 990 filings provide valuable, and often the only, insight into a tax-exempt organization’s income and spending,” Whitehouse said. “But lax enforcement at the IRS and DOJ encourage more game-playing, which leaves the door wide open for enterprising dark-money schemes to exploit the system further.”

Politically active groups tend to really raise eyebrows when they request reclassification. The ProPublica report, for example, points out that FRC head Tony Perkins has claimed credit for pushing the Republican Party to the right and the organization hosts the Pray Vote Stand Summit, “one of the largest and most influential gatherings for those on the Christian right.”

As a church, the FRC cannot endorse candidates, according to IRS rules, but it can engage in issue advocacy.

Even observers who are basically sympathetic to these evangelical nonprofits have raised concerns about the lack of transparency. Ministry Watch president Warren Cole Smith previously served as the vice president of mission advancement for the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s not opposed to evangelicals getting involved in politics or promoting a family values agenda. Still, he’s concerned about the lack of transparency and the lack of credibility when parachurches claim to be churches.

“I don’t believe that a lot of the organizations that have filed for the church exemption are in fact churches,” Smith told ProPublica. “And I don’t think that they think that they are in fact churches.”

According to the IRS, though, they are, based on 14 “marks” for what the tax revenue agency considers a church.

The IRS used to have a stricter definition. Before 1970, IRS rules said a church was any organization engaged in religious worship and “sacerdotal functions,” the details of which would be specified by the religious organization.

In 1974, the IRS considered clarifying the meaning of “sacerdotal functions.” One proposed definition—never adopted—said the “activities of the organization must include the conduct of religious worship and the celebration of life cycle events such as births, deaths and marriage.”

Ultimately, however, the government decided not to legislate a single definition of “church.” As the Supreme Court explained in St. Martin Evangelical Lutheran Church v. South Dakota in1981, “the great diversity in church structure and organization among religious groups in this country … makes it impossible.”

The IRS, instead, ended up using 14 marks, apparently based on a 1959 IRS ruling on whether or not the Salvation Army was a church. No. 1 is a “distinct legal existence.” Other marks include a written creed or summary of beliefs, regular worship services, distinct ecclesiastical government, trained ministers, and religious instruction for children.

An organization doesn’t have to fit all the criteria, though, and the IRS guidelines also say other factors may be considered.

“The 14 criteria clearly are vague and inadequate,” wrote Richard R. Hammar, senior editor of Church Law & Tax, a Christianity Today publication. “Some apply exclusively to local churches, others do not. And the IRS does not indicate how many criteria an organization must meet in order to be classified as a church. The vagueness of the criteria necessarily means that their application in a particular case will depend on the discretionary judgment of a government employee.”

According to Hammar, the IRS’s main concern has been so-called “mail order churches”—individuals who get ordinations through the postal service, start a church of one, and then try to avoid paying their taxes. At least a dozen people tried to do this in the late 1970s, including a nurse, a boilermaker, and a Presbyterian minister’s son. In each case, the courts decided these were tax-avoidance schemes and not churches, based on the established criteria.

The IRS has accepted the nonprofits seeking reclassification, though, even when the arguments that they fit the definition of a church might seem unusual. Focus on the Family, for example, argued that it has an established place of worship in its combined chapel and cafeteria, called the “chapelteria.” And while the ministry’s lawyer acknowledged that all its employee-ministers were encouraged to participate in other churches besides Focus on the Family, he wrote that “participation in more than one congregation is integral to the idea of Christian fellowship.”

The FRC argued that, as an association of churches, it didn’t have individual members, but affiliated congregations, and the organization itself does have monthly religious meetings.

The IRS approved both organization’s requests for reclassification as churches. The 2020 US religion census, scheduled for publication this fall, won’t count them, though.

The ASARB census takers who count nondenominational churches have had to wrestle with the definition of church over the years. Counting grew complicated as they watched the emergence of multisite churches and discovered congregations that meet in different locations each week or develop other experimental ways of coming together.

Thumma and his team decided that the simplest definition would be “a worshiping community.” For each church on their tally, they tracked down evidence that the congregation met in the real world, really wasn’t connected to a denomination, and “offered worship, or were a worshiping community,” Thumma said.

So for them, Christian think tanks with monthly prayer services don’t count.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

The British Are Coming: UK Takes Religious Freedom Torch from US

Jayson Casper

London ministerial and DC summit highlight transatlantic commitment by governments and NGOs to freedom of religion or belief.

Rashad Hussain, US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom (IRF), speaks at the Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) in London.

FCDO YouTube screenshot

The epicenter of advocacy for international religious freedom (IRF) has crossed the pond. Last week, the United Kingdom hosted the first in-person government ministerial on the issue to be held outside the United States.

Under the Trump administration, the US State Department inaugurated the Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in 2018. The event reconvened in Washington in 2019 and the following year moved to Poland, which was forced to conduct proceedings online due to COVID-19. Pandemic distractions prevented Brazil from hosting the ministerial in 2021, but civil society and religious groups rallied to organize the first IRF Summit in DC instead.

In 2020, 27 nations seized the ministerials’ momentum to create the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance (IRFBA), centered on Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Declaring that “everyone has freedom to believe or not believe, to change faith, to meet alone for prayer or corporately for worship,” IRFBA has since grown to include 36 countries, an additional five national “friends,” and two observers—including the UN-designated special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), the preferred terminology for IRF in Europe.

As IRFBA chair, the UK hosted the Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief on July 5–6 in London.

“Millions of people are being deprived an education or a job or a home or access to justice or liberty, even to life itself,” said Fiona Bruce, the UK prime minister’s special envoy for FoRB, “simply on account of what they believe.”

The UK demonstrated leadership on the issue in 2021, when as chair of the Group of Seven—a political forum of the world’s leading democratic economies—Britain secured the first-ever mention of FoRB as a priority within the G7 official communique.

“The ministerial helped create a heightened global consciousness on FoRB, a cornerstone of all human rights,” said Godfrey Yogarajah, ambassador for religious freedom for the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA). “Where FoRB is violated, all other human rights suffer.”

Hosted at the Queen Elizabeth II Center in Parliament Square, the 2022 ministerial included remarks delivered by Prince Charles and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis spoke on behalf of Britain’s Jews.

Regional foreign minister Tariq Ahmad, a Muslim, delivered a statement welcoming the 500 delegates from more than 100 countries. Sources told CT the UK did an exceptional job integrating the dozens of civil society and religious groups into the official proceedings.

With better coordination—and a wider berth from Americans’ July 4 observance of Independence Day—attendance might have been even larger.

Only a few days before the UK ministerial, the second IRF Summit again invited advocates to Washington. More than 1,000 delegates, representing more than 40 faith traditions, gathered at a DC hotel. With IRF being one of the few issues to transcend the American political divide, video remarks were delivered by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his predecessor Mike Pompeo, as well as by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D) and Senator Marco Rubio (R).

IRF Summit executive director Peter Burns said the second gathering wanted to do more than recreate past collaboration. Beyond the many plenary sessions and niche side events, a civil society congress was created and an authors’ track organized to promote topical resources. NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom received an IRF advocacy award and auctioned off his size-16 shoes.

The UK ministerial was a “huge step forward,” said Burns, who served as special assistant to Ambassador Sam Brownback when his IRF office hosted the State Department ministerials.

“Going on the road was always the dream,” said Burns. “Long considered the orphan of human rights issues, concern for religious freedom is finally forcing itself into the international system.”

Bruce, appointed to her envoy position in 2020, apologized via video that she could not attend the DC summit in person due to final preparations for the London ministerial mere days away. But the UK had been “inspired” by the American efforts, and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss paid homage—while noting British seniority.

Calling out abuses in China, Nigeria, and Afghanistan, she cited the Magna Carta and Franklin Roosevelt—whose wife Eleanor was a chief UDHR author—as champions of FoRB.

“Authoritarians and oppressors feel threatened by the freedom of religion or belief, fearing it will encourage people to think freely and question their authority,” she said. “We cannot allow them to win.”

Civil society advocates pledged to hold her and other friendly governments accountable. All attendees were asked to sign a petition for their countries to appoint a FoRB envoy or special ambassador, adequately resourced to ensure national commitment.

Following the gathering, the European Union designated an Italian professor and former MP, Mario Mauro, as its third envoy after a 10-month vacancy.

“Religious freedom must be a central plank of all governments’ domestic and diplomatic policies,” said Danny Webster, director of advocacy for the UK Evangelical Alliance. “But words can only ever mean so much until they are backed up by substantial action and long-term commitment.”

Such sentiments were frequent at both gatherings.

“Religion is the one entity that can stand up to government, that government cannot subdue,” Brownback said at the DC event. “This is a friendship summit—pick a project and work together.”

There were several to choose from.

Wade Kusack, senior fellow for Central Asia at the Institute for Global Engagement, participated with Kazakh politicians at both meetings. He touted the nine cities in Kazakhstan hosting religious freedom roundtables, as well as reforms in the once-derided nation.

The IRF summit was a bottom-up approach, while the UK ministerial was top-down. Both are necessary, he said, but the latter can open doors.

“The blending of government and civil society provides a platform for cross-sectoral relationships,” said Kusack. “It was a great opportunity for foreign officials to gain meaningful and nonthreatening exposure to the FoRB world.”

Taking advantage for the first time was Attalaki, a Tunisian human rights organization founded by evangelical Christians. They spoke with dignitaries about the National Charter for Peaceful Coexistence, signed in February with many of Tunisia’s religious groups, including Sufis, Shiites, and Jews. The three-year, nonofficial document was observed by the North African nation’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, which earlier created a department for minority religions.

“Countries showing improvement have governments who are engaged but also robust civil society activities,” said Nadine Maenza, former chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). “All countries in IRFBA should work together in a super strategic way to incentivize the others.”

Neither Kazakhstan nor Tunisia are members.

The “broad statement” of the UK ministerial was signed by 30 nations. Of note, it did not follow the civil society pledge to appoint special IRF envoys. And there was a distinct orientation: Only three non-Western nations (Israel, Japan, and Kenya) and two Muslim-majority nations (Albania and Bosnia) affixed their signatures.

There was some sentiment that a unique role existed for the two transatlantic hosts. One panel convened in Westminster Abbey queried how the “special relationship” between the US and the UK could advance religious freedom around the globe.

Speakers included Brownback; Rehman Chishti, the former UK special envoy for FoRB; and Philip Mounstephen, the bishop of Truro whose 21 religious-freedom recommendations to the UK government—published in 2019 and evaluated last April—were welcomed by Truss in her opening speech.

Maenza said her closest international partners are mostly from the UK.

Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican bishop of Rochester and now a prelate to Pope Francis, asserted an even closer bond. English and American commitments to religious freedom developed organically, he said, producing the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Too many continentals, however, are heirs of the “radical Enlightenment.”

While “mere reason” can be contested, a mindfulness to tradition has provided a basic of cooperation across the swath of civilizational heritage, he said.

“The European idea is pure rationalism, from which they try to derive human dignity,” said Nazir-Ali. “Our organic tradition comes from the Christian faith.”

The result of the former is a truncation of religious values and culture, he said, which the Anglo-Saxon idea can help overcome. But without it is confusion.

Is FoRB an abstract value or the protection of individual conscience and community belief—public and private? Muslim nations might better participate, he said, if a robust commitment to religious freedom is encouraged from within their faith. (The 2019 ministerial explored “human dignity” as a potential avenue.)

Among the demonstrable unity of advocates were clear points of divergence. Yasonna Laoly, Indonesia’s minister of law and human rights, argued at the IRF summit in favor of his Southeast Asian nation’s blasphemy laws. He was preceded on the DC mainstage by President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, who complained of Western criticism—including from the State Department—for his nation’s pro-life commitments.

And alongside the ministerial’s broad statement were seven other documents of thematic concern. The one advocating for “diverse sexual orientations or gender identities” garnished 22 signatures—with the US absent—before it was removed from the official list.

Overall, however, sources praised the success of both events.

“You can’t find another stage in DC shared by the Family Research Council, the Aspen Institute, Meta, and BYU Law,” said Burns. “This just doesn’t happen, but it can when it comes to international religious freedom—because we can all agree on this fundamental human right.”

As the epicenter moves from Washington to Warsaw to London to Brazil in 2023, sources celebrated the demonstration of diverse commitment. And in keeping with the increasingly blended IRF world, last week the United Nations appointed Nazila Ghanea as its new FoRB special rapporteur.

A professor of international human rights law at Britain’s Oxford University, Ghanea is an Iranian citizen with a focus on the oft-oppressed Bahá'i religious minority.

“It is wonderful moving the ministerial around the world, giving other countries the opportunity to lead on religious freedom,” said Maenza, newly appointed president of the IRF Secretariat, which oversees 26 roundtable groups around the world.

“This is not an American or a British right but a global cause.”

Q+A with Mervyn Thomas, founder president of CSW:

What is your assessment of how the ministerial went and what was accomplished?

I was very pleased to see the ministerial bring together a wide range of policy makers, members of civil society, and others from such a broad spectrum of countries. If we are to achieve our goal of a world in which everyone is free to believe, we need this level of international collaboration and communication. It is not enough for us to operate as isolated countries or organizations; we need to coordinate our efforts.

While I do believe the ministerial was an excellent testament to that, I was disappointed that more countries in which freedom of religion or belief is under threat were not at the table. This is something that I hope can be addressed in future without compromising our commitment to this fundamental human right.

Civil society was fully integrated into this ministerial in a way that has not happened before. It was great to see so many religion or belief groups represented in the panels and seminars, and for the message that freedom of religion or belief is a fundamental human right for everyone, everywhere, to be reiterated time and again throughout the conference.

What did CSW do for the ministerial?

CSW organized and participated in multiple events and seminars, both as part of the main ministerial program and in the Ministerial Fringe, which drew attention to issues in China, Cuba, Eritrea, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, and other nations. We also facilitated the attendance, either virtually or in person, of speakers from these countries wherever possible in our events. CSW worked closely with the UK FoRB Forum, of which I am currently the chair, in the planning of the ministerial, and was honored to be one of the 12 civil society organisations chosen to have a physical stand at the Fringe.

How did the London ministerial build upon the US ministerials?

The London Ministerial was the first in-person ministerial since 2019. In contrast to previous ministerials, efforts were made to include young people in the main program—in recognition of the vital role the younger generation can play in advancing and maintaining the right to FoRB in the future. The UK Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on freedom of religion or belief championed three key recommendations, among others: to see envoys appointed in other nations to champion FoRB throughout government policy; for FoRB to be mainstreamed in government policy through education of officials and in legislation; and for FoRB literacy in schools to inspire the next generation and to spur change in wider society.

What could still be improved by future ministerials?

I think one of the most important aspects of the global FoRB movement is that we need to engage a new, younger generation of FoRB defenders, those who can carry the torch and keep the momentum going. Further increasing access to the ministerial for civil society and young FoRB defenders will be key to making progress in this area.

More time will also have to be spent encouraging states with mixed records on FoRB to attend. There were definitely times where we were speaking to those who are already in total agreement with us and have worked on FoRB for years and even decades. We now need to be engaging with those who are completely ignorant of FoRB, having conversations with those who may not even agree with our cause, or who may even seek to restrict it, in the hope that we can go from being a movement to a mass movement. The right to freedom of religion or belief is one that every country in the world has recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other treaties and covenants. So it’s not a matter of watering this down in rhetoric or practice, but perhaps a focus on sharing what has worked in different regions and what can be learned from one another might be the way to engage reluctant states in some solutions-driven discussions.

In instances where the very word

religion

gives rise to primordial sentiments that tend to militate against FoRB, perhaps an emphasis on the role of this right with regard to respect for human dignity, ensuring equality of citizenship, peace, security, and achievement of the sustainable development goals may provide a more successful approach.

It would also be good to see a more even gender balance at future ministerials, as a large number of panels and plenary events were male-dominated, even though we did have several high-profile female speakers like the UK Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on FoRB Fiona Bruce, the UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, former USCIRF Chair Nadine Maenza, and the newly appointed UN Special Rapporteur on FoRB Nazila Ghanea.

Would you like to see UK civil society host its own summit like in the US? What are the odds?

Civil society participation at the ministerial was essential. It is often civil society which has the clearest picture of the situation of FoRB issues on the ground, which can greatly assist parliamentarians and policymakers to formulate effective responses to such issues. So yes, it is vital that civil society organizations like CSW carry on in this spirit of community and cohesion by meeting regularly to share ideas and coordinate strategies. A parallel UK civil society summit would only be effective, however, if policymakers commit to attending and engaging with what civil society has to say. The concept is more established in the US, but there is no reason why the UK could not embark on something similar. However, efforts must still be made to draw civil society ever more into the main ministerial, as it is only by governments, legislators, and civil society working together that these problems can be tackled.

Thoughts on the EU appointing Mario Mauro as special envoy?

There has not been an official confirmation of the appointment of the new EU Special Envoy, so until this occurs I’d prefer not to comment on any possible appointees. However, what I can say is that we at CSW hope there will be some institutional reconfiguring of the role so that it is embedded within the European External Action Service, as an indivisible element of the EU’s wider human rights policy. Alongside proper resourcing of the role so that the envoy can carry out his or her duties effectively, such an institutional change would serve to maintain the focus and prioritisation that FoRB so urgently requires, while also ensuring it is mainstreamed in the EU’s human rights agenda.

Anything else you’d like readers to know about the ministerial and what it leaves CSW thinking about?

Ultimately, while the ministerial was illustrative of the high level of political awareness of FoRB at the moment, it is essential that we do not neglect the many recommendations made in the various seminars and plenary sessions. It would be completely unacceptable for such an event to be forgotten as some kind of talking shop, so now the work of turning this awareness into action begins. It was therefore good to see an extra day added for around 100 members of civil society, parliamentarians, and government to strategize about the way forward. We must maintain pressure on our policy makers. We must continue to work in community with others, and especially with those who come from different nations or adhere to religions or beliefs different to our own, to demonstrate a united front in the pursuit of FoRB for all globally.

- More from Jayson Casper

News

Evangelical Covenant Church’s First Female President Likes a Challenge

Interview by Rachel Pfeiffer

Tammy Swanson-Draheim speaks to CT about the mission ahead for the diverse denomination.

Tammy Swanson-Draheim

Courtesy of ECC

When Tammy Swanson-Draheim began serving in the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC), it was difficult for women in ministry to find lead pastor roles in the denomination. Twenty-three years later, she became the first female president in its history.

Over her ministry career, Swanson-Draheim said she was drawn to challenging circumstances that have forced her to rely on God.

“It’s going to sound strange, but I’ve always enjoyed challenges because I think they’re really God’s opportunities,” said Swanson-Draheim, who was elected at the ECC’s 136th annual meeting last month.

“In the challenges, you can’t rely on yourself, but it’s a time to get on your knees. God has always provided, so one of the things that’s poignant about my call is just being attracted to places where there are challenges and being used of God to be part of what he’s doing to resolve them.”

Now, the North Park Theological Seminary alumna will return to the ECC’s headquarters in Chicago to lead the denomination that renewed her faith and inspired her call to ministry.

“Tammy’s appreciation for the diversity of the church and her outstanding leadership skills, heart for relationships and relational health, and belief in our mission are essential qualities that are needed now,” said Steve Dawson, chair of the presidential nominating committee.

Founded in 1885 by Scandinavian immigrants, the ECC spans 850 congregations in the US and Canada and has long been devoted to the mission of making disciples and building a multiethnic, intergenerational church body.

Swanson-Draheim served as a lead pastor in the ECC for eight years and has been the superintendent of the denomination’s Midwest Conference since 2011. She’s the second woman to hold a superintendent title and chaired the Council of Superintendents for the past four years.

Swanson-Draheim, who lives in Omaha, will step into the presidency in September, taking the reins from John Wenrich, who served in that position for the past four years. CT interviewed Swanson-Draheim about her new role and her vision for the denomination’s future.

How did you feel called to go into ministry? Was it a specific moment or more of a gradual realization?

It was a little bit gradual. I really tie it to discipleship. When I had sort of a renewing experience in my life spiritually and the importance that God had in my life rose, I heard from God in a kind of unique incident. I had started attending church and experienced some rejection, and in the midst of that, I just really sensed God speaking to me and saying that I could live with those hurt feelings, or I could decide to do something about that so no one else had to experience it.

I was just coming back to faith after a season away, and I heard God say, “This is something I have for you.” I followed that and enjoyed ministering to people, so I see that as sort of the initial call as a layperson.

I look back at that, because to me when you commit your life to Christ, you have a role in his kingdom ministry. That kind of transpired over time to more opportunities to serve and responsibilities; then it became apparent I was being called into seminary.

What stands out to you as a formative experience or relationship that has prepared you for this new position as president?

Many of the women that came before me, who really paved the way for women in ministry, in a general sense are very formative. One specific person who has been a tremendous mentor to me is Evelyn Johnson.

In my current role as superintendent, I was the second female to be a superintendent. Evelyn was the first. She’s worked across many executive roles in the denomination, and she has graciously poured her life into me, and we talk pretty much every week. She’s just been one of those women who have really poured into me and made it possible for me to be in this position today.

What has it been like to serve as a woman in ministry? Do you feel that being the first woman to serve as president of the Covenant is significant?

I have long been used to paving the way in some of these areas. My predecessor Evelyn Johnson was no longer on the council when I became superintendent. The reality is when God gives me a role that he’s calling me into, I never step into the room and go, Okay, now, I have to remember that I’m female. I walk into the room and think, Well, this is what God’s called me to do.

I think the same is true for the presidency. I am the first president who happens to be female. I say that because I’ll be a president for all the people. It’s very exciting to think that there are boys and girls who will grow up and understand that this is normative in Christ’s church. Women can serve in every capacity, and what a beautiful thing that will be. It’s so tied to my theology of the kingdom and how God created us.

It means a lot because women are encouraged by it who are female clergy, but I think it will reorient some of the thinking of even those who are now young in the pew, growing up and experiencing that. It’s exciting to me that I could be in any way, shape, or form a part of demonstrating that for the whole church.

What are you most excited about as you go into this new role?

Historically we as the Covenant Church are really strong in mission. But like most people in this season, it’s been exhausting with the pandemic and even some of the polarization of things happening in our culture and in politics. Frankly, it’s been exhausting, so I think there’s some need for some healing. I also think it is a prime time to lead out strongly in mission—hit the refresh button on our commitment to God’s mission and make sure that remains a strong priority for us.

I don’t come in with a game plan; I come in with the ability to listen. Listen to people, listen to the movement of the Holy Spirit, and then together collaboratively figure out the best way forward that’s going to really be for God’s glory and neighbors’ good. I’m very much looking forward to how we can continue to move forward with strength and mission.

I’d also say—and this is not necessarily separate but part of it—that we’re a part of a church committed to the multiethnic mosaic. As we go about mission, we do that with the multiethnic mosaic [and] gender equality in mind. Those aren’t add-ons. They’re part of our kingdom theology.

- More from Rachel Pfeiffer

Can Prayer Breakfasts Change Politics? UK Resignations Suggest Yes.

Danny Webster

Days before UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and 50 other politicians in the Conservative Party stepped down, they’d gathered to pray.

Justin Tallis / Getty

On July 5, more than 700 MPs, members of the House of Lords, and church leaders met to pray at the National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast in Westminster, England.

The Reverend Les Isaac spoke to the assembled group: “At the center of our lives is Jesus, and a desire to be like him and to fulfill his purpose here on earth. Many men and women are quietly demonstrating service, humbly and compassionately, for the common good of the community, of society, of their city and their nation.”

At the front table, directly beneath the lectern, was an empty chair. Boris Johnson, the UK’s prime minister, had joined the breakfast but left after the opening song. News had broken that morning of a former senior official contradicting Johnson’s previous denial about whether he knew about allegations of inappropriate behavior from a government minister.

That evening, two of the most senior ministers in the government resigned—Sajid Javid, secretary of state for health, and minutes later Rishi Sunak, chancellor of the exchequer. And within 48 hours, Boris Johnson announced that he would be stepping down as leader of the Conservative Party and therefore also as prime minister.

My colleague sat at a table with Sajid Javid at that breakfast, who stayed throughout. In a statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday, Javid opened by saying, “Yesterday, we began our day together. You, I, my right honorable friend the prime minister, and members from right across this house—when we broke bread together at the parliamentary prayer breakfast.”

“And we listened, all of us, to the words of Reverend Les Isaac, who spoke about the fact that responsibility comes with leadership. The responsibility to serve the interests of others above your own and to seek common ground of your party, your community, and, above all, your country.”

Javid, who has described himself as being of Muslim heritage but not practicing, has since confirmed that it was while listening to this sermon that he decided to resign from the government. This seemed to set off a chain reaction, after which more than 50 other members of the government quit.

While we cannot say for certain whether a single sermon was the catalyst for bringing down a government, it seems to at least be a contributing factor. That said, Javid’s motivations for resignation may well have also been political, as he is currently contesting to replace Johnson for the role of PM.

Most of the politicians who stepped down cited the need to restore integrity in our government. Ever since the criminal investigation into breaches of COVID-19 regulations at the center of government, Boris Johnson’s premiership has frequently seemed on the brink of collapse.

In the UK political system, prayer holds a vital place. Each day, prayers are said at the start of sessions in the Commons and the Lords. In the central lobby, laid into the tiled floor are the words of Psalm 127:1 (in Latin): “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.”

As an evangelical advocate in the UK, I believe Christians have a particular responsibility to pray for our nation.

I’ve attended several prayer breakfasts over the years, in Westminster and other parliaments of the UK. In March, I joined with many in the Welsh parliament as we prayed for revival in the nation—a prayer that needs answering even more than who is our current prime minister.

We now await what comes next in the UK after the resignations. The UK political system does not directly elect its prime minister; that is simply the person considered best able to command a majority within parliament—in effect, the leader of the largest party.

So, the choice of the next prime minister is in the hands of the Conservative Party. Members of the parliamentary party will vote among themselves and decide the top two candidates, who will then be voted on by the wider party membership over the summer.

This political crisis was unusual because it was not really about policy priorities. Instead, it was a widespread feeling that integrity had seeped out of those leading in the highest offices of public life.

Over the last nine months, a series of political crises have put under scrutiny the motives and integrity of those in the highest political offices. An attempt to change the rules relating to misconduct in public life in autumn 2021, followed by the revelations about parties in Downing Street by those organizing rules prohibiting them, all contributed to a precipitous decline in trust.

Therefore, as we look ahead to the coming leadership election, we should focus on restoring trust and reestablishing truth as a foundation. Isaiah 59:14 says, “So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter.”

In times of immense political upheaval, even the most modest statements risk echoes of partisan favoring. But standing for justice, advocating righteousness, speaking for truth, and relying on honesty should be a threshold we refuse to dip beneath.

Along with their policy platforms, I’m expecting leadership contenders to make significant plays on how they will lead differently and work to restore trust in government. Words can be incredibly hollow. We’ve all heard apologies that are heavily caveated or subtly shift blame elsewhere.

In the same way that meaningful apologies need to be substantive, commitments to improve how the government operates need to be backed with evidence that is more than just words.

Trust begins with a commitment to truth. It is a sad indictment of too much of public life that we have accepted a dichotomy between the public and private—where someone’s private actions, indiscretions, unfaithfulness, and dishonesty are not considered relevant to their public roles. But someone who can lie to the person closest to him or her can lie to the public.

Integrity is demonstrated by long-term action, not simply by one’s words. We should care about the policies that political leaders advocate and their track records in delivering them. However, just because leaders are effective and hold to political stances that we agree with should not be a free pass for them to behave however they want.

Christian social critic Os Guinness has often spoken of doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way: We undermine our witness to Christ if we back expediency and efficacy over integrity. And after all, it was in apparent defeat that Christ triumphed over death.

I suppose we’ll never know the full impact of the words spoken during the recent parliamentary prayer breakfast, whether from the stage or around the tables. Regardless, prayer is a powerful weapon, and we should never underestimate its impact on the life of our nations.

Danny Webster is director of advocacy for the UK Evangelical Alliance, working to represent evangelical Christians to government and inspire them to engage in all areas of public life.

- More from Danny Webster

Theology

The Masculinity Debate Needs Johnny Cash

Hannah Anderson

America’s young men are disaffected and lonely. But lack of manliness is not the problem.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Archive Photos / Stringer / Getty

As I write this, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison spins on the record player, filling my living room with the driving, train-like rhythms of one of America’s greatest storytellers. Originally released in 1968, it’s one of the dozen vintage Cash albums we inherited when a friend from our small working-class community moved to be closer to her children. Moments into the eponymous “Folsom Prison Blues,” a lyric catches my attention:

When I was just a baby my mama told me, “Son,
Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns.”
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.

And there it is: a voice from the past describing the past few weeks of horror in the United States. From Buffalo, New York, to Uvalde, Texas, to Highland Park, Illinois, we are once again grappling to understand what has become an all-too-common atrocity: senseless mass shootings by disaffected, violent young men. As a mother to a 16-going-on-37-year-old son, I think a lot about the state of manhood in American society and the evangelical church. Much has been made of the excesses of John Wayne masculinity, but I wonder if it’s time for a conversation about Johnny Cash masculinity.

While The Duke is synonymous with true grit, masculine bravado, and dominance, The Man in Black offers an alternative vision—and perhaps a way forward in these deeply fragmented times. Cash’s roots ran deep in the American South, and themes of poverty, religion, and all things Americana informed his music. His biggest hits include sentimental ballads about riding the rails, the mythical Wild West, and hard-working, hard-living men who miss their mamas. But while Cash celebrated a kind of rugged masculinity, he was also a deeply-flawed man. His life was marked by infidelity, alcoholism, and drug abuse. He was no pastor. And yet, Cash had a singular advantage—something the current rhetoric around masculinity misses. He knew he was a deeply flawed man. He knew he was a man in need of grace. So while he sang about the temptations that are common to all, he didn’t justify or excuse his own participation. Instead, his discography rings with confession, grief, and cries for redemption.

In the aforementioned “Folsom Prison Blues,” the narrator speaks of his criminal sentence as just and good. He confesses, “I know I had it coming, I know I can’t be free.” And just listen to Cash sing Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” a song about the spiritual alienation and deep loneliness of hard living, and try not cry. Cash’s vision of masculinity is not a clean, controlled manhood. It is not even moral by classic definitions, but it holds the seeds of virtue because it is humble and self-aware. With King David, another broken poet-warrior of a man, Cash sings in so many words: “I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me” (Ps. 51:3). This juxtaposition of a rough-around-the-edges manhood that is also deeply humble challenges what David French terms “The New Right’s Strange and Dangerous Cult of Toughness.”

In a recent essay at The Dispatch, French notes that “The debate [around masculinity] is corrupted by politics, with different versions of masculinity now so thoroughly identified as Red or Blue that you can quite often guess how a man votes by the clothes he wears, the vehicle he drives, and the way he describes what it means to be a man.” But Cash throws a wrench into the politics of American manhood. He is not tame or domesticated—after all, he cultivated an outlaw image. But he also didn’t toe the party line, and by contemporary definitions, he would likely have been considered woke. His music reflects a deep compassion for those on the margins. It’s almost as if knowing his own faults made him slow to judge the struggles of others.

While would-be populist leaders claim to be fighting for the little guy, Cash knew that the little guy was more likely to be found in a prison, at the front lines of war, on the factory floor, or neglected on a reservation. And he wasn’t afraid to say so. His 1964 recording of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” challenged the US government’s treatment of indigenous people and was initially blackballed by both Cash’s own record label company and radio stations across the country. And in perhaps the most quintessential Cash song of all, the 1971 “The Man in Black,” he sings of social injustice that holds people back:

for the poor and the beaten down
Living in the hopeless, hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he’s a victim of the times. …

for the sick and lonely old
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold
I wear the black in mourning for the lives that could have been
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men

And I wear it for the thousands who have died
Believing that the Lord was on their side
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died
Believing that we all were on their side.

Today, over 50 years later, swagger and bravado too often masquerade as masculinity, and folks will tell you there is a war on manhood. But take it from me, someone who grew up surrounded by salt-of-the-earth, flawed-but-humble men: The problem isn’t masculinity. The problem is a version of manhood that refuses to take personal responsibility and celebrates a win-at-all-costs triumphalism.

These vices are what make conversation and cooperation impossible. These vices are what wreck families, churches, communities, and countries. If we’re to make any progress on gun violence, or a host of other issues tearing our country apart, we must identify the real source of the problem. The conflict is between pride and humility. The conflict is between those who own their faults and confess them and those who refuse to admit wrong. It’s between hearts that are softened by the plight of their neighbor and those that are hardened.

Later in his life, Johnny Cash had something of a come-to-Jesus moment. Although he’d been raised and baptized in a Southern Baptist church, he rediscovered personal faith after his marriage to his second wife, June Carter Cash.

He eventually toured with Billy Graham, made several gospel albums, and in an ultimate expression of grassroots evangelical culture, took a trip to the Holy Land. The front of the album commemorating this trip is emblazoned with a holographic image of Cash standing on the Mount of Beatitudes. It’s hard to know how much of Cash’s public persona translated to his private life, and if you read through his body of work, you’ll likely find more than one objectionable lyric. Like the United States itself, he was a man of deep challenge and contradiction. But what you will also find is a vision of masculinity that is honest and humble. You’ll find a vision of masculinity that embraces the complexity of the human condition while refusing to blame-shift, whine, or deflect responsibility. You’ll find a vision of masculinity that knows its need of grace. In a word, you’ll find a real man.

Hannah Anderson is the author of Made for More, All That’s Good, and Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul.

- More from Hannah Anderson

Church Life

‘Domestic Abuse Was Worse than Death Row’

Kate Shellnutt

Naghmeh Panahi and Mariam Ibraheem came together when the leaders that fought for escape from persecution failed to help them escape from domestic violence.

Mariam Ibraheem and Naghmeh Panahi

Courtesy of Naghmeh Panahi

When Naghmeh Panahi and Mariam Ibraheem describe each other, they start in contrast. Panahi is from the Middle East; Ibraheem from Africa. Panahi is Protestant; Ibraheem Catholic.

Despite their different backgrounds, the two women endured similar plights and ended up with a shared calling—but not the one either expected.

Panahi and Ibraheem were first brought together in the mid-2010s. Their families had been put in the spotlight by American evangelicals fighting Christian persecution abroad. Evangelical advocates rallied for Panahi’s ex-husband, Saeed Abedini, while he was imprisoned for his ministry work in Iran and for Ibraheem herself while she was on death row in Sudan for apostasy.

After a few years out of touch, the women reconnected in 2018 over a desperate, early-morning Facebook message. Ibraheem, now living in the States, had been secretly struggling to endure a difficult marriage like she thought a good Christian wife should. It was getting harder to bear the abuse, and she didn’t know where to go for help.

Even when locked up in Sudan, Ibraheem hadn’t questioned the Lord like this. “God, I’m really done. I need an answer,” she prayed. “I demand an answer.” Ibraheem said God brought Panahi to mind. She remembered that years earlier Panahi had disclosed her famous husband’s abuse.

The two women spoke with CT about how that message led them to years of prayer, assistance, encouragement, and partnership. Because Panahi and Ibraheem knew how powerful it was to have the church come together around the issue of religious persecution, they found themselves crushed by the lack of attention toward domestic violence. They felt convicted to help.

“Both of us got millions of supporters when it was about persecution and silence when it was about abuse,” said Panahi. “Processing how the church has handled it was shocking for both of us.”

Last month, a Washington Post investigation reported how advocates who promoted her ex-husband’s case, including Franklin Graham, urged Panahi to reconcile with Abedini despite his physical and verbal abuse. At one point, Panahi said, they even asked Ibraheem to encourage her to stay.

Over the past year, Panahi has spoken up about the details she said she was pressured to keep to herself while #SaveSaeed trended among evangelicals, sharing more of her story at the Restore Conference, with the Religion News Service, and on The Roys Report podcast.

Panahi and Ibraheem also continue to raise concerns about the global threat of Christian persecution; Ibraheem spoke last month at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington and recently released her autobiography Shackled, focused on her willingness to face a death sentence for her faith.

“The persecuted church is told by the bullying government what to believe. That’s so similar to being in an abusive home and church—it’s control,” said Panahi, who is Iranian American and has ministry ties to the underground church there. “You see the similarity and the heart of God for both.”

While those targeted as a minority faith can recognize the government as the enemy and feel justified and supported in their suffering, domestic abuse is a much lonelier, more confusing prison to be trapped in, the two survivors told CT.

Even more so when your family is in the public eye, with happy photos and triumphant headlines hiding the distress at home.

Ibraheem said her home became “worse than death row.” The abuse by her ex-husband even echoed what she endured during her time behind bars in Sudan. “I didn’t teach my children Arabic because I didn’t want my children to know the names I was being called” during their fights at home, she recounted. It’s the same thought she had as guards insulted her while imprisoned with her newborn.

“In prison, I know why I am here. In my home, I’m asking, ‘Why is this happening?’” said Ibraheem. “You want to have peace at home.”

Instead, the place she expected to be safe became dangerous; the person she expected to care for her was hurting her; and the faith she leaned on was telling her to stay.

Panahi recognized how Ibraheem had exhausted her patience trying to make an abusive marriage work, and she’s seen that pattern with other Christian women she’s helped over the years. Even when abuse persisted, they believed that marriage is for life, kids should grow up with both parents, and God could redeem the brokenness in their relationships.

A mother of two, Panahi had some of the same thoughts when married to Abedini, who had pleaded guilty to domestic battery in the US prior to his detention in Iran and was subject to protective orders after his return.

Panahi’s perspective shifted as she studied Scripture. She began to see that God cared about her well-being more than preserving a marriage at any cost, and that institutions like marriage existed for the good of people and not the other way around. “The life of the person is more important than the institution,” she said. “One sheep is more important than the whole institution.”

That understanding was the key to Panahi’s escape. The God who saved her life when she was arrested at gunpoint in Iran made a way for her to find freedom from an abusive marriage in America.

“I started living, thinking for myself, reading the Bible, and it was God who rescued me,” Panahi said. “I’ve seen God’s rescue again and again and again. I couldn’t deny that God’s our lifeline.”

Panahi ended up helping Ibraheem find safe housing, legal representation, and counseling, leading to another testimony of rescue.

“God answers my prayers though people,” Ibraheem said. “God really worked miracles. When I prayed, God sent someone to help me.”

While their faith in Lord hasn’t wavered, their trust in the church took a hit.

The teachings that led them to justify remaining in abusive marriages as “biblical” remain widespread, they say. When believers abroad are suffering religious persecution, Christians want to help them escape; when they’re suffering in a violent home, the message from the church too often is to stay.

“I needed someone who could have told me this is what abuse was and this was not the heart of God,” said Panahi.

While more leaders are speaking up to address domestic violence from the pulpit and to condemn abuse in marriage, Panahi notes they often stop short of assisting a woman with legal fees to get a divorce.

She and Ibraheem lead the Tahrir Alnisa Foundation, advocating for women who have suffered abuse. They speak at conferences and church events, Panahi a couple times a month. Because they are public with their stories of survival, people in their network refer them to women who need advice or urgent help.

Panahi hears from fellow Middle Eastern immigrants as well as pastors’ wives and missionaries’ wives in the midst of abuse. She consults with pastors on how they can get involved to help—knowing when a situation needs more than in-house marriage counseling and requires an expert in domestic violence.

She sees a “tiny bit of movement” bringing abuse to the evangelical forefront, “but not at the scale of seeing how bad persecution is.”

Persecution brings the church together for a cause, but abuse, Panahi worries, is a bigger issue that’s doing more damage within the church. “Persecution is close to the heart of God, but what Jesus was most outspoken about was where religion is used to oppress,” she said.

Panahi, who lives in Boise, Idaho, and Ibraheem, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, have come to see their decision to take a stand against the abuse as not just permissible but God-honoring—as much as standing against religious persecution.

Ten years ago, Ibraheem never planned on ending her marriage. She never imagined herself advocating for abuse survivors. But now she says, “God has equipped us to be here and do this. My life is in a place where God wants it to be. His hand is always over us.”

“We didn’t want to be in this position,” said Panahi. “I feel like God has raised up women, and we’ve been able to use that platform to speak out.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

News

Native American Pastor Leads Southern Baptists to Decry Forced Conversions

Interview by Aiden Hobson

“Burdened and broken” by the federal investigation into Indian boarding schools, Mike Keahbone drafted the denomination’s first resolution in support of native peoples.

Mike Keahbone, pastor of First Baptist Church of Lawton in Oklahoma

Adam Covington / Baptist Press

Southern Baptists took a historic stand last month to acknowledge the trauma suffered by Native Americans and to officially offer their support and prayers.

“When you look at the long history of Southern Baptists, there was not a resolution in our history that ever took a stand with Native American people,” said Mike Keahbone.

A Native American who leads a church located near the headquarters for the Comanche Nation in southwest Oklahoma, Keahbone knows firsthand the need for gospel witness and for healing among native peoples.

The First Baptist Church of Lawton pastor proposed that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) speak out on the issue following a federal report, released in May, that investigated the history of Indian boarding schools.

The SBC resolution—approved at its annual meeting in June—condemns forced assimilation and conversion as “contrary to our distinctive beliefs as Baptists in religious liberty and soul-freedom.” The statement also recognizes how this painful history continues to affect native peoples, particularly after new report.

“For Native American people, this is opening up a pretty significant wound and one that we’re having to process and work through,” said Keahbone, who served both on the committee that drafted the slate of 2022 resolutions and on the SBC Executive Committee.

“Just to be able to say to everyone who was affected by this, to every Native American, to every Alaska native, to every Hawaiian native, ‘We see you, we understand this is painful, and we want you to know that we’re standing with you.’”

The federal report found that half of over 400 federally funded Indian boarding schools were run with the help of churches; Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches are mentioned, but not Southern Baptist. The historic approaches of the church and Christian missionaries continue to shape how native communities see the faith—and represent a barrier to contemporary evangelism, Keahbone said.

He developed the resolution with fellow members of the resolutions committee, including pastors J. T. English and Jon Nelson, and recently spoke with CT to discuss its significance.

How did this resolution come about?

When this report came out on the boarding schools, as a Native American—I’m Comanche; I’m a member of the Comanche tribe, but I’m also Kiowa and Cherokee—and having heard lots and lots of stories of my own family being a part of these boarding schools, I was very anxious to see the outcome. … I read every bit of it. I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know the depth of how bad it would be.

After I read it, my heart was obviously very burdened and broken. It took me a few days just to even process and think through it. Once I did, part of that report discusses how missionaries from different denominations were a part of that process [of abuse]. You got to see reports on forced conversion, to go along with the forced assimilation, and it just broke my heart.

I immediately contacted Brent Leatherwood with the [Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission], and he was already working on it, which I was so proud of. I was really glad to hear that. One of the things that he was looking for was to see if Southern Baptists were a part of that report. That was a blessing to me, to see that he was already ahead of the game there.

It turns out that as far as denominations go, Southern Baptists were not named in the report, but I still had a burden on my heart to acknowledge it. I thought it would be really important for us as a convention, because of our history in dealing with racial reconciliation, especially Black and white reconciliation. I thought that this would be a great opportunity for us to stand as a convention with Native American people in a pretty dark moment in our history. …

This wasn’t just important to me, but it was important to our entire resolutions team and something that they believed would be important for our convention as well.

Is there any specific language or wording in the text of the resolution that you think is especially important to highlight?

I think the second “Resolved” is probably my favorite part: “Southern Baptists stand in support of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians—especially those who are a part of our own family of churches—as they process the findings of this report and discern next steps toward healing.” That’s just huge.

Probably equally as important is the “Resolved” where we stand against forced conversions and distorted missiological practices. Those two I think are equally important.

It’s historical for us to take a stand as a convention for these people, for my people. That was just huge. It was super meaningful for me, personally, and so that got in my feelings a bit. But also, I think it’s important for everyone to know that we were not a part of the forced conversion movement.

The reality is, forced conversions are a primary reason why it’s so difficult to share the gospel with Native American people. It is primarily why Native Americans call Christianity “white man’s religion,” and it’s not because they don’t understand that Jesus was Jewish, that he was a Galilean—it’s not about that at all. It’s because of Native Americans’ experience with white culture, forced conversion, and forced assimilation that has built a huge barrier between Native Americans and the gospel.

So, for us, as one of the largest Protestant denominations, to say something like this and to make it a part of our history now is significant. As a Native American, when I’m sharing the gospel with Native American people, to be able to say, “We were never a part of that movement; we were never a part of forced conversion,” that’s a big deal.

How does the legacy of abusive treatment by missionaries and other religious figures at these schools affect Native American views of Christianity and Christian evangelism today?

I think it’s important for people to understand the history of Native Americans. Even before slavery, Native Americans were dealing with these issues for 400 years. Even before we became a nation, white European settlers came in and decimated our people.

One of the issues that I’ve been pretty bold about in Baptist circles is when you look at our convention, we have a specialist for African American ministry, we have a specialist for Hispanic ministry, we have a specialist for Asian ministry, and what’s missing is a specialist for Native American ministry.

When you look at the convention in 2021, I think we did a great job of putting someone from every nation, tribe, and tongue on the platform at some point, either to pray or speak or preach, but there was one missing group from that entire convention in 2021, and it was Native Americans. So, to see that that’s going on, it begs the question “Why?” And it’s not intentional; it’s not a racial issue. It’s just that typically Native Americans aren’t seen, and it’s because people don’t understand the history behind it.

In some pretty candid and private conversations, when I bring this up, the feedback that I get sometimes is “The Native American population is so small. You know, you have a large African American population, a large Hispanic population, a large Asian population.” And my response always is “How do you think that population got so small?” This was our homeland; this is where we came from; this is the motherland for us. And for us to have one of the least populations in this country points to a huge problem that has never really been addressed.

I’m not asking for reparations; I’m not asking for special attention. I just want us to have equal opportunity and equal representation in ministries that we have.

What should Christians today know about the history of Native Americans and these boarding schools?

My encouragement for people is to look at Native American history and look at what has happened to the Native American over the centuries, and it’ll help give you some perspective on the kind of trauma that we deal with. I think it would help a lot if people would just learn, just do a little bit of work, and see what Native Americans have been through.

It was noted in the report why we were even dealing with forced assimilation, and the primary culprit was that the government wanted it to be easier to take Native American lands. The way that they could do that was to [first] drive them and force them off their lands, and [then] they targeted children. They wanted to limit their education and limit their capability.

If you take the future generations of a people and you give them a limited education, you force them more into a workforce environment. Then they don’t become leaders; they don’t get put into positions where they can make a difference or see what’s happening to them and understand it and do something about it. The ugliness and the heart behind it—and the strategic movements of it—is an awful ugly part of our history.

I’m not trying to throw around racial cards or trying to look for some sort of handout because of what we’ve been through. In my heart, I want to learn how to live in this system and in this way of doing things, and I want to be successful in that. And I want to help other native people be successful in it, to be in positions to have influence, and give a voice where we can give a voice. I think you’re seeing a little bit of a culmination in that even in the birth of this resolution.

- More from Interview by Aiden Hobson

My CT Article on Dorothy Sayers Led to a Book Contract

Why supporting CT’s work around the Christian imagination is vital to reaching the next generation.

Kelsey Bowse

Photo Courtesy of Marion E. Wade Center

Crystal Downing, codirector of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, wrote an article for CT magazine four years ago that launched her most recent book on Dorothy L. Sayers, the renowned English playwright and crime writer.

Her essay for CT titled “Dorothy Sayers Did Not Want to Be a Prophet” led to a book contract with Broadleaf Press. She argued that Sayers “prophetically challenged the signs of her times,” and her book Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 2020. The book was honored with a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which selected it as a “Pick of the Week” when released: quite amazing for a book emphatically endorsing Christian orthodoxy. “This is an author’s dream,” she said.

She and her husband, David, sold their house in Pennsylvania to move to Illinois for their role as codirectors of the Wade Center on the same day she turned in her CT essay.

They moved in 2018—and around that same time, they received a subscription to CT.

“We appreciate having a reasonable voice like CT that represents orthodox Christianity. It’s not reflective of a particular denomination,” David said. “We like to read CT articles because writers are always knowledgeable, thoughtful, and write in a civil tone.”

Crystal cited two CT articles in her book: a Lifeway Research report about Americans with evangelical beliefs, and an article from 2018, recounting the sins of CT’s past.

“I used that confession from CT to talk about contemporary political sins and I think that’s why this book is doing so well,” Crystal said.

Her essay recounts a series of BBC broadcasts Sayers wrote between 1941 and 1944. “Sayers’s BBC broadcasts, in fact, incited one of the biggest religious controversies in England since Henry VIII broke with Rome,” it argues. Sayers told Jesus’ story in these plays, without using King James Version English. This was extremely controversial at the time.

Because of the deadline, “I had to write about Sayers from the top of my head. It forced me to write for a more popular audience, not an academic audience,” Crystal said. When CT published the essay, she received emails from all over the world.

“An editor reached out to me and said, ‘I read your Christianity Today article about Dorothy Sayers. I want you to write a whole book on this woman.’

“It was wonderful!”” Crystal said. “Not only being commissioned to write an article on Sayers but being able to use reports and essays and an editorial from CT, which made it a better book.”

Crystal had written 18 articles for CT’s former imprint Books and Culture (which was published for 21 years), before she wrote her CT article on Dorothy Sayers.

“I was a regular contributor to Books and Culture, and that inspired me to write a book on film and religion [Salvation from Cinema: The Medium is the Message].” She also explained that this book is now required reading at many secular universities in the US.

“Many of the film I analyze in the book were inspired by reviews published in Books and Culture,” she said.

She met David at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.

“I was struggling to come up with a more emotionally satisfying faith,” he said. The apologetics course he was enrolled in was making him feel discouraged. But his literature course proved to be a saving grace, as he read Perelandra, the second book of the space trilogy by C. S. Lewis.

“Here was a work of fiction that appealed to my imagination and addressed some questions I was struggling with.” He wrote a paper for his literature professor at Westmont titled “C. S. Lewis, Apostle to the Imagination.”

His paper grappled with man’s search for meaning and Lewis’s keen awareness that the human imagination can lead people to God. His essay says, “One of Lewis’ primary goals in the space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) is to instill a profound sense of the reality of the supernatural in the minds of his readers.”

His professor said, “I have a friend who’s an editor at Christianity Today, and I’m going to send it to him and see what he thinks.”

David’s parents had subscribed to CT when he was a teenager. “It was one of the few things I thought was edifying,” he said.

Fifty years ago—when David was still struggling with his faith—a college friend of his suggested he read an article about C. S. Lewis to help him with his thinking.

“He handed me a copy of CT, and I looked up the article on C. S. Lewis. It was my paper that I had written,” he said. “I felt ministered to by my own article.”

That was David’s first introduction to CT as an author.

“It’s hard to find the middle ground, what Lewis called Mere Christianity. One critic said of Lewis, ‘He makes righteousness readable.’ I might say the same of CT,” he said.

He also appreciated how CT is reaching people through podcasts, like The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, telling the story of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church and its spiraling collapse in 2014. In its first year, the podcast had more than nine million unique listeners.

“I’ve appreciated CT’s podcast for a willingness to be candid about where we as a Christian community are succeeding and being a light to the world, while also exploring areas in which we need improvement and falling short of what Christ would have us to do,” David said.

David and Crystal recently became Sustaining Partners of CT to show their support of the important voice CT has in the church and the world

The Downings said they appreciate CT’s new addition of Ekstasis magazine and its focus on the Christian imagination. David said, “I have some former students who wrote for Ekstasis. It’s beautifully produced, and it appeals to the senses and the imagination, not just the intellect.”

“The End of Desire” was Crystal’s favorite essay in Ekstasis, because it drew attention to Charles Williams, one of the seven British Christian authors archived at the Wade Center.

“We [at the Wade Center] also have a museum. We have Lewis’s writing desk where he wrote Mere Christianity and the Narnia Chronicles, Tolkien’s writing desk where he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And, best of all, we have the wardrobe from C.S. Lewis’s childhood home,” David said.

Other authors spotlighted at the Wade Center include Sayers, Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, and George McDonald.

“It’s wise of the people at CT to try to understand how we convey the message of salvation to a new generation. We can’t simply assume that the way the gospel was passed to us can be transmitted to the next generation,” David said.

Kelsey Bowse is a UX Strategist at Christianity Today. Follow Kelsey on Twitter @ kelseybowse

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Q+A with Mervyn Thomas, founder president of CSW:

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