Evangelical Colleges Join Effort to Promote Faith in the Vaccine

Maria Baer

A campaign to educate campuses about COVID-19 vaccination shifts from persuading the hesitant to making it easier for the willing.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Last week, as President Joe Biden was announcing a new vaccine mandate for large workplaces, students at more than 100 Christian colleges were trying to persuade their communities to get the shot voluntarily.

Since those between the ages of 18 and 29 are among the least likely to be hospitalized or to suffer serious illness or death due to COVID-19, swaths of young people didn’t get the shot as soon as it became available earlier in the year.

Dozens of evangelical schools belonging to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) have joined an interfaith effort called Faith in the Vaccine, designed to recruit students and faculty to help inform their communities about vaccination and recognize the role religious identity might play in people’s hesitation.

“This was not about hounding people into getting the vaccine or shaming them if they were hesitant,” said Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Corps (IFYC), which launched the effort last spring and has disbursed $4 million to fund the campaign so far. “It was very much about engaging with great respect and sensitivity … and helping them kind of talk their own way into vaccination.”

Nearly 50 CCCU member schools signed up for the program. IFYC, along with medical professionals from the Rush University Medical School, trained campus ambassadors in conversational tactics and medical information about the vaccines.

But what started out as a campaign to promote education around vaccination within these faith communities has shifted to efforts to actually get shots in arms. The Faith in the Vaccine ambassadors, according to IFYC, have helped promote or host hundreds of clinics and events across the country, accounting for an estimated 10,000 or more vaccinations.

Persuasion, not Pressure

Organizers saw the campaign as a way to make sure people had the information they needed around vaccination. Aaron Hinojosa, a faculty ambassador for the program at Azusa Pacific University, said participants aren’t using religion to pressure or shame people.

“It’s not to the point where it’s like, ‘You have to do it,’” Hinojosa said, “But, ‘Here’s what we know, here’s what it is, and you have to make a good, informed decision.’”

Some found the conversational approach was a little too hazy to be motivating.

“A lot of the goal, it seemed at beginning, was trying to have these conversations with people that are vaccine hesitant or vaccine rejectors, and almost change their minds,” said Joel Frees, faculty ambassador at Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma.

He said it was difficult to find ways to encourage college students who saw that their age put them at a very low risk for severe illness. Frees said he struggled to energize his team of ambassadors over the summer, when outbreaks fell.

Hinojosa’s team at Azusa Pacific hadn’t reported much activity last spring, either, other than a series of Instagram Live videos about why they chose to get vaccinated and personal conversations between ambassadors and their loved ones.

Surveys conducted by IFYC along with the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) tracked attitudes toward the vaccine. Between March and June, “vaccine refusal” held steady at around 14 percent, while vaccine hesitancy diminished from 28 percent of respondents to just 15 percent. So IFYC announced in July that instead of focusing on persuading the former, they’d work to help the latter.

The change in approach came just as the delta variant was emerging as the most active strain in the US. With delta, young people have suffered more than earlier in the pandemic; Americans under age 50 now account for roughly a third of COVID-19-positive patients in hospitals.

Campuses have seen delta’s impact in contrast to the earlier months of the pandemic. Several Christian colleges, including Liberty University and Cedarville University, had the first few weeks of the school year disrupted by outbreaks among the student body.

Few CCCU schools—including Seattle Pacific University and Pepperdine University—required vaccination for this school year, allowing for exemptions due to medical, religious, or philosophical reasons.

From Conversations to Clinics

According to PRRI’s survey, the three most-cited reasons among all Americans for not yet getting vaccinated were the inability to get time off of work, trouble finding childcare, and transportation issues.

After those survey results were in, Faith in the Vaccine ambassadors began working with local health departments and other institutions to host, organize, and publicize vaccine clinics.

Frees said Southern Nazarene’s ambassadors have worked with the Oklahoma City Health Department to host two vaccine clinics on campus, administering a total of 74 shots to mostly students. They’ve also hosted educational seminars for students about the vaccine and how it was developed.

Hinojosa at Azusa Pacific said ambassadors helped the university’s inconveniently located health department set up a temporary vaccine station in the middle of campus one day.

Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, organized a mobile vaccine clinic for local migrant workers who may not have been able to access the vaccine otherwise, Patel said.

PRRI found in March that Hispanic Protestants were the most hesitant to get vaccinated, followed by white evangelicals. Some ambassadors reported the hesitation about getting the vaccine among the Latino community stems from fear that if they show up at a clinic, their immigration status may be exposed.

At an online rally this week, IFYC shared several video testimonies from other Faith in the Vaccine student ambassadors about their successes.

In one video, Tori Wootan from University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio said they’d hosted a clinic in the tiny nearby town of Natalia—population 1,200—where 56 people were vaccinated.

Irene Kuriakose from Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, said her group encouraged community members to get vaccinated by giving away grocery gift cards and raffle tickets for a $500 prize. Others set up information tables with swag outside popular campus events, like move-in week or athletic competitions.

“You’d be surprised how many people are interested in scheduling or reporting their vaccines if you provide them a super cool bucket hat,” said Anu Agbi, student ambassador at Baylor University.

At Emory University in Atlanta, Rachel Lewis said a homeless man had been hanging around multiple vaccine clinics, where ambassadors were also handing out hygiene items and toiletries. At the fourth clinic, he finally agreed to get the vaccine.

“We’ve been able to provide a lot of vaccines to a lot of people, and our community members now trust us,” Lewis said.

Patel said sharing these stories at their rally this week was a way to motivate Faith in the Vaccine teams across the country to continue their “fall push.” It’s up to IFYC donors now, he said, to continue funding the program into the winter and spring.

- More from Maria Baer

News

Wire Story

Religious Exemption Requests Spike as Employers Mandate Vaccine

Colleen Long and Andrew Demillo – Associated Press

Some white evangelicals, the faith group most likely to refuse to get the shot, join thousands in citing “sincerely held” religious beliefs.

Seth Wenig / AP

About 3,000 Los Angeles Police Department employees are citing religious objections to try to get out of the required COVID-19 vaccination. In Washington state, hundreds of state workers are seeking similar exemptions. And an Arkansas hospital has been swamped with so many such requests from employees that it is apparently calling their bluff.

Religious objections, once used sparingly around the country to get exempted from various required vaccines, are becoming a much more widely used loophole against the COVID-19 shot.

And it is only likely to grow following President Joe Biden’s sweeping new vaccine mandates covering more than 100 million Americans, including executive branch employees and workers at businesses with more than 100 people on the payroll.

The administration acknowledges that some small minority of Americans will use—and some may seek to exploit—religious exemptions. But it said it believes even marginal improvements in vaccination levels will save lives.

It’s not clear yet how many federal employees have requested a religious exemption. The Labor Department has said an accommodation can be denied if it causes an undue burden.

In the states, mask and vaccine requirements vary, but most offer exemptions for certain medical conditions or religious or philosophical objections. The use of such exemptions, particularly by parents on behalf of their schoolchildren, has been growing over the past decade.

The allowance was enshrined in the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says employers must make reasonable accommodations for employees who object to work requirements because of “sincerely held” religious beliefs.

A religious belief does not have be recognized by an organized religion, and it can be new, unusual or “seem illogical or unreasonable to others,” according to rules laid out by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But it can’t be founded solely on political or social ideas.

That puts employers in the position of determining what is a legitimate religious belief and what is a dodge.

Many major religious denominations have no objections to the COVID-19 vaccines. But the rollout has prompted heated debates because of the longtime role that cell lines derived from fetal tissue have played, directly or indirectly, in the research and development of various vaccines and medicines.

Roman Catholic leaders in New Orleans and St. Louis went so far to call Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 shot “morally compromised.” J&J has stressed that there is no fetal tissue in its vaccine.

Moreover, the Vatican’s doctrine office has said it is “morally acceptable” for Catholics to receive COVID-19 vaccines that are based on research that used cells derived from aborted fetuses. Pope Francis himself has said it would be “suicide” not to get the shot.

In New York, state lawmakers attempted to make the vaccine mandatory for medical workers, with no religious exemptions. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the rule because it lacked the opt-out.

An August AP-NORC poll found that 58 percent of white evangelical Protestants, 72 percent of white mainline Protestants, 80 percent of Catholics and 73 percent of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated say they have been vaccinated. Seventy percent of nonwhite Protestants say they have been, including 70 percent of Black Protestants.

Among white evangelical Protestants, the religious group least likely to have been vaccinated, 33 percent say they will not get the shot.

Across the US, public officials, doctors, and community leaders have been trying to help people circumvent COVID-19 mask and vaccine requirements.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, pastor Jackson Lahmeyer is offering a “religious exemption” form on his church’s website for download, along with links for suggested donations to the church. The 29-year-old is running for the US Senate.

Anyone interested can get the form signed by a religious leader. He said on Twitter that more than 14,000 people have downloaded it. He wrote that what was amazing was “how many pastors refuse to sign the form for members in their church.” He said he can sign if someone joins the church and donates.

https://www.facebook.com/jacksonrlahmeyer/posts/834146087466986

But obtaining a religious exemption is not as simple as producing a signed form from a religious leader. Measles outbreaks in schools over the past decade prompted some states to change their policies. Some now require an actual signed affidavit from a religious leader, instead of an online form. California got rid of nonmedical exemptions in 2015.

Erika Cole, a Maryland-based attorney who serves as a senior editorial advisor with ChurchLawAndTax.com, a CT sister site, previously told CT employers shouldn’t require church leaders to verify religious exemptions.

“Currently, there are two legally recognized exemptions from a mandatory vaccination: medical reasons and sincerely held religious beliefs. When presented with notice of a religious exemption, some employers have requested the employee provide support from the church he/she attends. This, of course, is troublesome for a number of reasons,” Cole said. “…according to the EEOC, the individual, not the church he or she attends, holds the ‘sincerely held religious belief’ that may be the basis for refusing vaccination. As such, it is the individual’s right to advise his/her employer of that belief, and not a requirement of the church he/she may attend.”

Some private employers are taking a hard line. United Airlines told employees last week that those who obtain religious exemptions will be put on unpaid leave until new coronavirus testing procedures are in place.

In Los Angeles, Police Chief Michel Moore said he is waiting for guidance from the city’s personnel department regarding the exemptions. The city has mandated that municipal employees get vaccinated by Oct. 5 unless they are granted a medical or religious exemption. A group of LAPD employees is suing over the policy.

“I can’t and won’t comment on the sincerity level” of people claiming a religious exemption, the police chief said. “I don’t want to speculate. Religion in America has many different definitions.”

Ten LAPD employees have died of COVID-19, and thousands in the department have been infected.

In Washington state, approximately 60,000 state employees are subject to a mandate issued by Gov. Jay Inslee that they be fully vaccinated by Oct. 18 or lose their job, unless they obtain a medical or religious exemption and receive an accommodation that allows them to remain employees.

As of Tuesday, more than 3,800 workers had requested religious exemptions. So far, 737 have been approved, but officials stressed that an exemption does not guarantee continued employment.

Once the exemption is approved, each agency has to evaluate the employee’s position and whether the person can still do the job with an accommodation while ensuring a safe workplace. Seven accommodations so far have been granted.

Inslee spokeswoman Tara Lee said that the process “may help distinguish between a sincerely held personal belief and a sincerely held religious belief.”

In Arkansas, about 5 percent of the staff at the privately run Conway Regional Health System has requested religious or medical exemptions.

The hospital responded by sending employees a form that lists a multitude of common medicines—including Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol, Preparation H, and Sudafed—that it said were developed through the use of fetal cell lines.

The form asks people to sign it and attest that “my sincerely held religious belief is consistent and true and I do not use or will not use” any of the listed medications.

In a statement, Conway Regional Health President and CEO Matt Troup said: “Staff who are sincere … should have no hesitancy with agreeing to the list of medicines listed.”

- More from Colleen Long and Andrew Demillo – Associated Press

News

Died: Marilyn Laszlo, Bible Translator Who Inspired Missionaries to ‘Come By Here’

Kate Shellnutt

The passionate storyteller spent nearly a quarter century developing written language and Scripture for a Papua New Guinea village.

Courtesy of Laszlo Mission League / Edits by CT

Marilyn Laszlo always considered herself a “Hoosier farmgirl.” The 88-year-old died last week just a few miles from her family’s nine-acre property outside Valparaiso, Indiana. But the news of her death was felt most deeply in a village on the other side of the world.

A missionary and Bible translator known for her bold faith and powerful storytelling, Laszlo spent 24 years living in the Hauna Village in Papua New Guinea. There, she formulated a written language and translated the Bible for the once-unreached Sepik Iwam people, starting by carving words into banana leaves.

When she passed away from Alzheimer’s on September 9, village leaders launched a five-day mourning ritual called a “house cry” in Laszlo’s honor, covering themselves in mud, grieving, and planning commemorations for a woman who changed their community forever.

The ministry efforts she began in Hauna more than 50 years ago—including a church, school, and clinic—continue to this day. They have turned the riverside village into a hub for the region. Up until the COVID-19 outbreak, Lazslo’s sister and ministry partner Shirley Killosky taught and served in Hauna full time.

“Marilyn’s legacy is still touching lives in Hauna Village and across the world,” said John Chestnut, president and CEO of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Laszlo was sent to Hauna through Wycliffe in 1967 and later served as a speaker for the ministry, before launching her organization, Laszlo Mission League, in 2003. “Praise God that this faithful servant is now in the presence of her Savior.”

Laszlo’s story of persistence in the face of a challenging mission field was retold in documentaries, memoirs, and, most poignantly, her own speaking appearances in churches and colleges. It was used as a testimony of God’s work in faraway places and as inspiration for Christians to dedicate their lives to the Great Commission.

“The number of people who are on the mission field today because of Marilyn’s story? Who knows,” said Topher Philgreen, president of Laszlo Mission League, which estimates that she inspired thousands to become missionaries. “We need to carry on what she started. The need is still very large in places like Papua New Guinea.”

When she was young, Laszlo would often get asked about the risks of living in a remote jungle community and responded, “I have learned that the safest place in the whole world is to be at the center of God’s will.”

For her, that was the Hauna village, where she lived to see God “meet these people in their own culture and in their own language.” Laszlo prayed that God would “touch the hearts” of believers at home so they could serve the unreached villages around hers.

Laszlo shared the story of her Bible translation work at Urbana ’81, where she spoke and played her film Come By Here. In it, Laszlo recounts how leaders in a distant village up the river from Hauna had erected a building with a cross to serve as a church, but they had no missionary or pastor. They just wanted to be ready for when someone like her would come to tell their people about God.

During later visits to Hauna—Laszlo took her final trip there in 2013, before her memory worsened—she would meet with members of the original team who helped create the New Testament translation decades before, as well as American missionaries who moved overseas after hearing her story.

Andy Keener, now executive vice president for partnerships at Wycliffe, first met Laszlo on a mission trip to the village in 1985. He said that God used her example to call him to his lifelong work in Bible translation. He described Laszlo as a “passionate and skilled storyteller” who was “committed to the story of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Laszlo completed the Sepik Iwam translation in 1990, bringing men from her translation team to speak in the US the following year, including at a Billy Graham Crusade.

For the rest of her ministry career, she spoke and promoted mission work, retiring due to her health in 2012.

Audiences laughed when Laszlo quipped that all her Bible translation training didn’t prepare her to be greeted by a group of villagers wearing “zero clothes.” Laszlo shared that when she and her missionary partner first arrived, the village gathered to debate whether they were men or women, only to decide these white strangers must have been neither.

She’d walk across the stage, animated, acting out what it was like to try to get them to tell her the word for “house” or “tree,” only for them to say “finger” because she was pointing so much.

“Marilyn Laszlo was tough as nails and had guts for Jesus; and she will be greatly missed,” said Franklin Graham, who got to know Laszlo through her work in Papua New Guinea in the early 1980s and authored the foreword to her book Mission Possible. “To know Marilyn Laszlo was to know a woman of good humor, grace, and grit. She wasn’t afraid of anything and her compassion for people was the hallmark of ministry throughout her life.”

She was born in Gary, Indiana, as one of four sisters in the Laszlo family and grew up helping her dad on the family farm in Liberty Township. A graduate of Bryan College and Indiana University, she taught high school prior to following God’s call to missions and studying at the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Wycliffe has said that more than half its translations had been conducted by single women like Laszlo, and Laszlo Mission League plans to launch a scholarship in her name to support women in the field.

Philgreen said, “If she could do anything, she would love to see a women get a clear path into Bible translation ministries” and for such ministries to reach the goal of getting a Bible into every language and to every unreached people group.

When Laszlo first arrived among the Sepik Iwam, they had no written language and no knowledge of Christianity. And within her lifetime, the villagers were able to communicate with fellow believers in the US almost daily through WhatsApp.

Philgreen messaged last week to let them know Lazslo was in her final days. The day they heard the news, the Bible training school in Hauna celebrated eight more graduates from its program—eager to teach the same Good News she brought half a century before.

Her memorial service will take place October 5, 2021 at 6 p.m. central, at Liberty Bible Church in Chesterton, Indiana, and will be livestreamed through the Laszlo Mission League site.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

News

Died: David Yonggi Cho, Founder of the World’s Largest Megachurch

Daniel Silliman

The Korean Pentecostal promoted cell groups and gifts of the Holy Spirit for church growth.

Courtesy of David Yonggi Cho / edits by Rick Szuecs

David Yonggi Cho, the Korean Pentecostal who founded the world’s largest megachurch, died on Tuesday at the age of 85.

Cho and his mother-in-law started a church in Seoul in 1958 in a tent pieced together from bits of US Army tents. Yoido Full Gospel Church, affiliated with the Assemblies of God, grew to a weekly attendance of about 800,000 people in seven Sunday services, with hundreds of licensed ministers and thousands of laypersons leading weekly small groups of 10 to 15 people.

Cho popularized the idea of cell groups, arguing they are key to discipleship and to fostering the intimate connections that tie individuals to a large and growing church. He also promoted Pentecostal practices of prayer and healing as essential to dynamic church growth.

“I myself was devoted to praying with a do-or-die desperateness,” Cho told the journal Church Growth. “When we apply God’s word in our lives and experience God’s dispensation, we are empowered by God. Christians who believe in Jesus receive the Holy Spirit. … One only finds empty pews in many European churches. What caused it? The reason is that European churches have betrayed the Holy Spirit.”

Billy Watson, president of Oral Roberts University, called Cho “one of the great leaders of the Spirit-Empowered movement” and predicted his legacy would impact Christians for generations.

Cho was born on February 14, 1936, in the rural county of Ulju. His father owned a glove and sock manufacturing company, but it went bankrupt during Cho’s childhood, forcing him to make his own way in the world.

He learned English from hanging around American military bases, and by the age of 15 began to work for the troops as a translator.

His life changed at 17, when tuberculosis sent him to the hospital coughing up blood and rethinking his understanding of the universe. As a Buddhist, Cho later explained, he had been taught that he must suffer to “become Buddha through hardship.”

Jesus, it seemed, offered an alternative. Christians told him that “Jesus the living God is your friend, mentor and guide here and now.” After reading a Bible given to him by a young woman, Cho decided to reach out to the Christian God.

“As a last resort,” he wrote in his 2019 memoir, “I decided to look to the God I did not know. I cried out, ‘God I want to live! I want to live! Please help me!”

When he was later released from the hospital, cured of tuberculosis, he gave the glory to God and claimed a miraculous healing. In 1956, he started attending the Full Gospel Bible College in Seoul, preparing to become a minister.

Two years later, he and Jashil Choi, his future mother-in-law, started holding services in a tent. Only four or five people came to the first service, but within three years, regular attendance had grown to 600.

By the early 1960s, Cho harbored ambitions to grow his congregation into the largest church in Korea. He later told Church Growth that this was because he wanted to be rich and famous, and he had a competitive spirit.

“The Lord had to let me fail so that I would turn to him in my need and allow him to build his own church—in his own way,” Cho said.

The church grew into the thousands but then plateaued for several years at 2,400 before Cho developed the idea of cell groups. He started by empowering 20 deaconesses to develop groups in 20 districts in the city. Cho refined and reorganized the groups and the training for leadership as he went, and by 1973, the church had about 18,000 members.

The congregation built a new building in Yoido, the financial district of Seoul. Three years later, Cho founded Church Growth International to teach the principles he had learned internationally.

While many churches around the world adopted and adapted Cho’s cell group model, his ministry was not without controversy. He was frequently accused of preaching the prosperity gospel, telling his followers that faith will produce profit, fame, and material luxury.

Cho, however, said Christians do encounter suffering, but they know that God is causing them to suffer for their benefit.

“Fundamentally, God wants us to be healthy, spiritually and physically. He also wants to give us hope. Sometimes God wants us to change, which often comes with pain,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “It is critical for us to keep our faith that he has good intentions and that he would give us what may seem bad at the moment but will turn out to be good eventually.”

In 1981, two Assemblies of God leaders accused Cho’s church of accommodating ancestor worship. Some in the church continued cultural practices of lighting candles in front of deceased relatives and bowing to their pictures on important days. Cho said it was possible to distinguish between ancestor worship and honoring your father and mother, but many Christian leaders in Korea and the larger Pentecostal world saw that as heretical.

Cho stepped back from full-time ministry in 2008, passing leadership to Young Hoon Lee, the current pastor of Yoido Full Gospel Church.

In his retirement, Cho faced his most serious scandal. He was found guilty of embezzling funds from the church and was given a three-year suspended sentence. He had directed leadership of the church to buy unlisted stocks owned by his eldest son. The value was inflated, and the church reportedly lost about 13 billion won, the equivalent of about $12 million. He was also found guilty of evading taxes in the stock deal.

Cho told his church that the conviction was the hardest day in his life of ministry. But he also said his conscience was clear before God, and the church allowed him to continue in part-time ministry.

His supporters said Cho was really guilty of being too naive about his wayward son and argued Cho has not personally benefitted from the stock scam or his many years in ministry. He continued to preach at the church on occasion until his health deteriorated in 2020.

“All I did was offer my life just like the boy who gave the five loaves and two fish,” Cho is quoted on the church’s website. “I simply held on to the dreams that the Lord gave me.”

Cho is survived by his three sons, and the church is planning a funeral for Sunday.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Theology

Christian Marriage Demands that We Study Our Desires, Not Hide Them

Hannah Anderson

Being faithful to a spouse requires living in community, seeking God daily, and learning from our celibate brothers and sisters.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Alexander Krivitskiy / Jake Pierrelee / Roksolana Zasiadko / Unsplash / Pexels

This summer, my husband and I celebrated two decades of marriage. We’ve been together now almost as long as we’ve been apart—a feat made possible by the fact that we married right out of college.

In the not too distant past, couples who married young laid a foundation for a life together. Cultural, religious, and personal values meant that these “cornerstone” marriages would eventually pass through silver, ruby, and golden anniversaries as a matter of course. Whether the marriage was happy, faithful, or even safe was often beside the point. By now, however, our cultural views on divorce have changed, as well as our understanding of marriage. Whereas in the past, social and cultural bonds held a marriage in place (sometimes trapping the vulnerable in abusive and dangerous unions), today the weight falls on the individuals. Couples must now want to be together in order to stay together. We’re not asking whether we are happy in our marriages but whether we could be happier outside of them. To make matters even more difficult, the changing nature of marriage means we expect more from our spouses. Famed relationship therapist Esther Perel notes that we ask the same person to give us belonging and identity, continuity and transcendence, comfort and edge, and predictability and surprise.

“We are asking from one person,” says Perel, “what once an entire village used to provide.” And when our expectations are this high, we’ll inevitably be disappointed. Perel calls this conundrum a “crisis of desire,” because in modern marriage, desire plays an outsized role in not only our couplings but in their permanence. So what are we to do? How do we pursue faithfulness in a culture that elevates desire above everything? The question is not whether we will be attracted to someone other than our spouse but rather what we will do when that happens. How will we respond—not when we are unhappy—but when we think we could potentially be happier? Do we cultivate and entertain such attractions, allowing them to simmer on a “back burner”?

“To walk in a holy, healthy sexual ethic,” writes Dorothy Greco in Marriage in the Middle: Embracing Midlife Surprises, Challenges, and Joys, “we must refute misguided teaching and recognize when culture is leading us astray.”

But rather than grit our teeth and hang on until the end, Greco suggests that the path to long-term fidelity runs through a better understanding of desire and attraction. “We will also need to acknowledge the power of our God-given sexuality,” she continues, “become aware of our areas of temptation, and find the balance between self-control and sexual expression.” Unfortunately, many of us are caught off-guard by temptation, in part because we don’t understand our own attractions and desires. Rather than learning to examine those feelings, we often opt for repression and avoidance, only to be surprised when we are swept off our feet by an unexpected connection or attraction to another person. “Repression and avoidance have a Christian name but a pagan lifestyle,” writes Rachel Gilson. They rely on the will to suppress desire rather than on Christ to transform it. One of the greatest indictments of these approaches, in Gilson’s opinion, is that “one does not need Jesus Christ to practice them.” And “a system that doesn’t need Jesus is not meaningfully Christian.” In this respect, it’s essential that we learn to face desire head on, not to undermine faithfulness, but rather to pursue it. For guidance, we can look to Christians who are already walking this road of self-awareness, especially those whose experience of attraction hasn’t been seamless and simple. People of sexual minorities, for example, are often profoundly aware of their attractions precisely because they don’t align with those of their peers. And this awareness grants them perspective and knowledge that the rest of us need. The evangelical community has expended a lot of conversational energy debating and even policing how faithful members of sexual minorities define their experience of attraction. Can they call themselves gay, or does that elevate sexual identity above identity in Christ? (Both the Southern Baptist Convention national gathering and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America took up some form of this question this summer.) Although these debates matter, perhaps our time would be better spent learning from brothers and sisters who are sacrificially committed to traditional Christian teaching on marriage. Their experiences of attraction (or lack thereof) won’t culminate in marriage or sexual coupling, which means they’re the very ones suited to teach the rest of us how to live faithfully with our own.

Their lives testify to the fact that being attracted to someone doesn’t mean we have to be with that person, any more than experiencing attraction to someone other than your spouse means the end of your marriage.

Learning to examine our desires and attractions—and how to distinguish between the two—has the potential not only to bridge the gap between LGBT and straight believers but to equip couples for lifelong fidelity. That clarity and nuance will go a long way when you find yourself attracted to someone other than your spouse.

But pursuing lifelong marriage requires even more than a study of desire. We must understand that while yearning to be known and loved is God-given, wanting to have a single person satisfy those needs is not. Perhaps it’s time we recovered the village. When the New Testament authors speak about people’s sexual lives, they do so in context of the community of believers. Unlike our modern notion of marriages and nuclear families as discrete building blocks of society, the Epistles reflect a vision of a larger community in which our marriages and families exist. And this community is made up of many different members, all joined together as the body of Christ. In this sense, healthy community supports lifelong marriage, not by peer pressure or expectation, but by expanding the kinds of relationships each spouse can access. Here in the family of God, we can learn to relate to each other as fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers. Out of these relationships, we learn to be better husbands and wives while also mitigating how much we expect of each other. But here, too, we have to be careful. A group of people cannot become our ultimate source of life, love, and transcendence any more than one other person can. Living faithfully in both community and marriage means learning what many of our unmarried brothers and sisters already know.

In the words of writer Vivian Warren: “The love of Jesus will never fail as human loves often do, and it will take me into the other world when the time comes.” Out of this love, we can return to our unions as whole people, committing ourselves again to the calling of marriage. We do not trust our desires or even the years we’ve already invested. Instead, we take up our vows daily and trust that he who promises to keep us faithfully to the end will also keep us faithful to each other.

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

News

RZIM Donors Fight to See If Their Funds Enabled Abuse

Daniel Silliman

A federal judge declined to expedite discovery, but lawyers will ask for 17 years of financial records and hundreds of thousands of documents.

Mike Stewart / AP Images

Lawyers in Georgia battled over access to the financial records of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) on Monday.

In the first hearing of a proposed class-action suit, representatives for donors Derek and Dora Carrier argued they needed “expedited discovery” to allow them access to the hundreds of thousands of financial documents they say will prove that “RZIM allowed donated funds to be diverted for use in Zacharias’s schemes to perpetrate sexual abuse.”

The federal judge denied the motion to expedite the process, but the legal team is expected to make their case for access again after proving the grounds for the suit.

The Carriers’ attorneys are asking for records of all donations made to RZIM since 2004, when Zacharias became part owner of Touch of Eden, a massage therapy spa located in a shopping center near RZIM headquarters. They also want documentation of how those donations were used, particularly if they went to payments made to defend Zacharias against allegations of sexual abuse, to pay off accusers and hush up allegations, or to hire public relations and crisis management professionals to protect RZIM’s reputation.

“RZIM is sitting on a pile of money, and no one knows how RZIM is spending that money,” Drew Ashby, of the firm Ashby Thelen Lowry, told CT. “Our clients view this as God’s money, not their money, and they want that money back to invest in legitimate ministry purposes to build the kingdom of God.”

In a brief filed ahead of the hearing at the federal courthouse in Atlanta Monday, the Carriers’ attorneys urged the court to remember that RZIM leaders have “shown themselves to be deceitful.”

“They defended Zacharias in the face of accusations of sexual abuse, failed to investigate those accusations, used donated funds to finance sexual misconduct, and continue to use donated funds for personal and other purposes that fall outside of their stated missions,” wrote attorneys Michael McGlamry, Brad Sohn, and Graham and MaryBeth LippSmith. Four firms are representing the Carriers and other potential members of the class.

RZIM has acknowledged Zacharias sexually harassed women in multiple countries. The RZIM board took some responsibility in a public statement in February.

“We were trusted by our staff, our donors, and the public to mentor, oversee, and ensure the accountability of Ravi Zacharias, and in this we have failed,” the statement said. “We regret that we allowed our misplaced trust in Ravi to result in him having less oversight and accountability than would have been wise and loving.”

The lawsuit, however, alleges that RZIM didn’t just fail to keep its famous founder in check, but gave him the resources necessary to cover up sexual abuse and continue abusing women.

According to the investigation paid for by RZIM, Zacharias used money designated for “humanitarian effort” to pay four massage therapists. He paid for their school and living expenses and provided one with an apartment near his writing retreat in Bangkok. One therapist told investigators that after Zacharias arranged for her financial support, he demanded sex, and she felt obligated to comply because she had accepted the money.

The report did not find any evidence that anyone within RZIM or on its board knew about sexual misconduct. It was not, however, an exhaustive investigation and did not focus on corporate complicity.

RZIM hired Guidepost Solutions, a management consulting firm that has specialized in sexual abuse cases, to evaluate “structures, culture, policies, processes, finances, and practices” and to propose reforms. The evaluation appears to be ongoing.

On Monday, the Carriers’ attorneys asked for quick access to records of “payments and/or transfers” to Guidepost, “and/or any other consultant, victim-advocate, or person who is engaged in public relations, crisis management, marketing, or rebranding.”

Sarah Davis, who replaced her father Zacharias as CEO of RZIM in 2019, told the court it would likely cost more than $100,000 to give the Carriers’ attorneys everything they’re asking for. She estimates the process would take 45 days and require her, her executive team, and some of RZIM’s downsized staff to devote their full attention to the requests. (Earlier this year, RZIM laid off more than 60 percent of staff.) The ministry would probably have to bring in additional accountants as well.

Davis also said in a written statement to the court that some of the information the Carriers’ lawyers want to see is confidential and people who give unrestricted gifts have no legal right to object to how RZIM uses the money. Each donor, when thanked and given a receipt for their tax-deductible donation, is told that, according to IRS guidelines, “contributions are solicited with the understanding that RZIM has complete control over the use of donated funds.”

After listening to the arguments from both sides for about an hour, Judge Thomas Thrash denied the motion for expedited discovery. The Carriers’ attorneys will be allowed to ask for access to RZIM’s financial records again, but first they have to prove there are grounds to go forward with the lawsuit and convince the court to certify a class of plaintiffs represented by the Carriers.

“We were asking for leeway, but the judge chose to stick with the rules,” Ashby told CT. “We are going to get to those books. The question is how long can … RZIM keep us from looking behind the curtain.”

RZIM’s lawyers, from the firm Watson Spence LLP, did not return calls requesting comment.

RZIM has filed a motion seeking to have the case dismissed. The ministry’s representatives say the Carriers and other donors who gave to RZIM were not harmed by Zacharias’s abuse.

“Their claims are based upon the faulty premise that Mr. Zacharias’ misconduct transformed the Carriers’ gift into an injury, Mr. Zacharias’ life into a nullity, and RZIM into a fraud,” the lawyers argue. “This is not reality and the deficiencies in the Carriers’complaint are fatal, open, and obvious.”

The Carriers gave RZIM $30,000 in 2020. Derek Carrier plays professional football for the Las Vegas Raiders, and he and his wife, Dora, were regular listeners to RZIM podcasts.

RZIM’s attorneys also say that even if the Carriers or other donors were harmed, the federal court has no jurisdiction over the matter because RZIM is registered as a church and thus protected from government interference by the First Amendment. RZIM’s lawyers say the dispute is over “purely ecclesiastical assertions” and the court is not entitled to rule on whether Zacharias conformed to the “moral standards of ‘real’ Christian leaders” or RZIM exercised “appropriate ecclesiastical discipline.”

The court will rule on the motion to dismiss next.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Verdict Nears for Palestinian Accused of Diverting World Vision Funds

Ken Chitwood

Mohammad el-Halabi has refused plea deals that would “pollute” the image of Christian aid organization, lawyer says.

Momen Faiz/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Mohammad el-Halabi believes the truth will set him free.

The former Gaza director of World Vision has now spent more than half a decade in prison, and according to his lawyer, the Israeli government has offered him plea deal after plea deal. He could potentially go home if he would only confess that funding for the Christian humanitarian aid organization was diverted to support terrorism.

But Halabi has refused.

“He is saying he will not admit to things he never did,” Maher Hanna, who represents Halabi, told CT. “He will not pollute the image of World Vision just to get a personal discount and go home to be with his children.”

Hanna, himself a Christian, said this is one of the remarkable things about this case that has not been noted in the international headlines: A Muslim man who worked for a Christian organization is refusing, under severe pressure and at great personal risk, to betray one of the largest evangelical charities in the world and harm its future work.

“We should admire that position that Muhammad is taking for himself. It’s a high Christian value,” Hanna said.

Close observers and insiders say Halabi’s trial looks like it will conclude this fall. The Israeli court could reach a verdict as early as this month.

The case has been making its way through the Israeli justice system—tediously and obscurely—since Halabi was arrested by the state security service while attempting to pass through the Erez checkpoint between Gaza and Israel on June 15, 2016.

Halabi was subsequently accused of using his position with World Vision to aid Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist militant group that has governed Gaza since 2007. Israeli officials allege he was diverting funds meant to feed and educate children to instead help Hamas prepare another surprise attack on Israel.

If the accusations against him are true, Halabi is responsible for what The Guardian reported would have been “the biggest aid money heist in history.”

Founded in 1950, World Vision is one of the world’s largest charities, operating in nearly 100 countries, with an annual budget exceeding $3 billion. It sometimes hires non-Christian administrators, such as Halabi, and receives lots of support from international governments and secular institutions. But World Vision also has clear Christian commitments and a mission “to follow our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed” and “promote human transformation, seek justice, and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God.”

When Halabi was arrested, serious suspicion fell on the humanitarian work the group was doing in Gaza. Evangelical donors in the US—a significant part of World Vision’s support—started asking tough questions. Some governments, including those in Australia and Germany, immediately halted funding for World Vision projects.

World Vision leaders took the allegations seriously. The organization did not immediately put out a strong statement in Halabi’s defense, but instead expressed its commitment to cooperating with authorities and said, “World Vision is committed to the highest standards of accountability, and conducts regular internal and external financial audits.”

The group suspended its Gaza programs indefinitely in August 2016. Then it contracted one of the world’s largest multinational law firms to conduct an external, independent forensic investigation. After examining over 280,000 emails and documents, interviewing 180 people, and forensically examining every aspect of the Gaza operation between 2011 and 2016, the law firm delivered a 264-page report.

A person with firsthand knowledge of the investigation said, “The investigation did not find even a hint of funds being diverted to Hamas or any schemes or collusions involving other World Vision employees or third parties.” Investigators also couldn’t find “any material evidence suggesting [Halabi] was affiliated with, or worked for, Hamas.”

Although the law firm made suggestions for improving financial controls—a normal outcome of any financial review—the investigators actually found Halabi was diligent in assuring World Vision avoided any entanglement with Hamas, even inadvertently.

That report was finished in 2017; prosecution against Halabi continued for another four years and counting.

Additional reporting from the US Agency for International Development and the Australian and German governments corroborated the results of the independent audit, finding zero evidence of diverted funds.

Without credible accounting evidence, sources familiar with the prosecution told CT that the case against Halabi rests on the testimony of one former World Vision employee and a fellow prisoner who claims he heard Halabi confess to the crime.

However, the prosecution—citing national security concerns—has presented most of its case in closed hearings. At the several open hearings that have been held, no evidence of guilt appears to have been presented. Hanna has also not been allowed to see all the evidence against his client, and when he was shown some documents, he wasn’t allowed to see the originals, make copies, or take notes.

Representatives at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have condemned the secretive process, saying it is “not worthy of a democratic state.”

Hanna said it is like being thrown into the ocean with one’s hands and feet tied. Nevertheless, he says Halabi’s innocence has been established beyond a reasonable doubt.

“The charges against him are ridiculous,” he said. “They limited me from accessing important material because it would just be embarrassing if they allowed me to see it all or put it out in the public.”

Now Halabi waits for the courts to reach a verdict, trusting that the truth is enough to set him free.

His father, Khalil el-Halabi, said Mohammad is confident because he is innocent.

“They offered him several deals to get out of prison in three or five years, to be released to hug his wife and children in Gaza again,” the elder Halabi told CT, “but he has always told them the truth—‘I am innocent, my work was humanitarian, I served the poorest families in Gaza.’”

Khalil said he has been encouraged that as his son refuses to tarnish the reputation of a Christian aid organization, Christian communities in Gaza, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem have shown Halabi their support. Catholic and Orthodox churches rang their bells during his court sessions and “still today, many Christian brothers send gifts to his children and messages of solidarity to his family,” he said.

Sara Bach, a World Vision supporter from Hildesheim, Germany, said it does not matter to her whether Mohammed el-Halabi is Muslim or not. She supports World Vision because it “has embraced causes and policies that address real world issues and injustices for the poor and vulnerable.”

The human suffering in the Palestinian territories is one cause she doesn’t think evangelicals should ignore.

For more than half a decade now, though, World Vision’s work in Gaza has remained suspended while the Muslim former director sits in prison and rejects plea deal after plea deal.

“That means that the case isn’t just against a single man,” said Bach. “Children and families are suffering because of the loss of trust and support from World Vision in Gaza. That’s a real tragedy.”

- More from Ken Chitwood

Ideas

Why 9/11 Brought Neither Unity Nor Revival

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

Many Christians think spiritual renewal followed the terrorist attacks, but the record shows otherwise.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source Images: Gerd Altmann / Pixabay / Wuhua / PngTree

The immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was a strange and fearful time, but it also seemed a hopeful time.

“A massive shift in perspective happened to our country on September 11,” wrote Philip Yancey in 2001. For a little while, he mused, the sense that everything had changed in a single morning “made us look at our land, our society, and ourselves in a new way.” It made us “live in conscious awareness of death,” made us notice that “many of us fill our lives with trivialities,” and forced us to “turn to our spiritual roots.”

Talk of unity was everywhere. Church attendance spiked, and Christian leaders began predicting a national revival. In a 2001 speech, President George W. Bush praised Americans for our decency, kindness, and commitment to one another. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with the US military withdrawn from Afghanistan, we should ask: Were those hopes fulfilled?

We certainly didn’t maintain that sense of unity. Quickly, Christians got into heated discussions about whether we could support military invasions, torture, the Patriot Act, and more. Since then, our political divisions seem even more embittered, and polarization is on the rise. And as for the policy—well, wherever you land on these things, my guess is you aren’t too happy with how it’s gone, and our current political discourse is awash with talk of treason and even civil war.

Our lack of unity isn’t the only disappointment. The foretold revival never came, either.

For a few weeks after 9/11, people packed the pews, but it soon became apparent there was not a “great awakening or a profound change in America’s religious practices,” as Frank M. Newport, Gallup Poll editor in chief, told The New York Times in November of 2001.

Barna Group confirmed that conclusion in 2006. It tracked “19 dimensions of spirituality and beliefs” and found “none of those 19 indicators [were] statistically different” from pre-attack measures. In other words, the 9/11 attacks didn’t put American Christians on a trajectory toward more orthodox beliefs or more consistent habits of prayer, church attendance, or Scripture reading. Insofar as we can measure matters of faith, the decline of American religiosity continued apace.

Almost as quickly as the new perspective on life Yancey saw in 2001, Americans turned away, back to trivialities and escalating antipathies, like a dog returning to its vomit (Prov. 26:11). As a culture newly aware of mortality, we embraced the recklessness of YOLO, not the care of memento mori. “Spiritually speaking,” said Barna’s David Kinnaman, “it’s as if nothing significant ever happened.”

Still, the myth that the 9/11 attacks catalyzed a spiritual awakening lives on. A 2013 Barna Group survey found Americans—and particularly born-again Christians—believe 9/11 “made people turn back to God.”

Why were our hopes for ourselves so wrong? Why did we not live into our own ideals? I have two answers to suggest—and one reason to hope anew.

My first suggestion is that what we thought was hope wasn’t hope at all. It was less Christian trust in the character and redemption of God than American optimism coated with not-quite-biblical bromides that when there’s bad, good will follow.

Americans love to believe that “everything happens for a reason,” and that after a short period of time, sorrow will always turn into joy and suffering into sanctification. We quote Romans 8:28—“we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him”—and incorrectly interpret it to mean that everything that happens to us will somehow work out okay.

And it will—on the eschatological scale. God promises that one day we will live in perfect joy and justice with him, and “there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain” (Rev. 21:4, NASB).

But God does not promise us lives that reliably get nicer, either for us as individuals or even for our society. Sometimes evil happens and then just keeps on happening for centuries. Sometimes things don’t work out okay and there’s no perceptible reason for what happens to us.

Nor does suffering “naturally or automatically lead to growth or good outcomes,” as pastor and author Tim Keller has observed. “It must be handled properly or faced patiently and faithfully.” A couple extra Sunday services in the fall of 2001 is not a commitment to the long, slow work of sanctification.

The second answer to our disappointed hope is about how we preserved 9/11 in our memory. “Never forget,” we said, over and over and up through today. Part of what we meant was “Never forget the people we lost and the heroism of ordinary Americans who helped amid the horror.” Yet another part was vengeance. In his September 2001 address, Bush promised the American people he would “not forget the wound to our country and those who inflicted it.” He swore never to yield, rest, or relent in the “mission” our country had found in our “anger.” Too many Americans, including some Christians, adopted this response in a vengeful way.

We were right to be angry at the great wrongs of 9/11, but at some point, rehearsing that anger year after year doesn’t move us toward justice, love, or the forgiveness Jesus commands of his followers. It moves us toward resentment, hostility, and bitterness, with all the trouble it brings (Heb. 12:15).

How we remember is as important as that we remember, as theologian Miroslav Volf has argued, and we should discipline ourselves to remember “both with the desire for knowing truth and with the desire of overcoming enmity and creating a communion in love.”

As we remember 9/11 again this year, it is not too late to change that memory. It is not too late to begin to seek the goods of unity and revival we wanted in 2001.

We can still become more peaceable and prudent in our politics. We can still draw near to God, and he will draw near to us, for “now is the day of salvation” (James 4:8; 2 Cor. 6:2). We can still learn real hope—not ahistorical American optimism, but the weightier hope that comes through perseverance, character, and the love of God.

The Lesser Kingdom: A prophetic, eclectic, and humble take on current issues, public policy, and political events with thoughts on faithful engagement.

- More from Bonnie Kristian

News

Colorado Christian School Faces Shutdown Threat Over COVID-19 Response

Kate Shellnutt

After a recent outbreak, leaders say they’re prioritizing parental decision-making over county protocols on masking and social distancing.

Courtesy of Resurrection Christian School

When students at Resurrection Christian School in Loveland, Colorado, returned on Wednesday from a four-day Labor Day weekend, school leaders were there at the entrances to welcome them, masked and unmasked, and to keep an eye out for county health officials.

Last week, following a COVID-19 outbreak that infected around 35 of 1,600 students, the health department directed Resurrection Christian to adopt a universal mask mandate and social distancing for at least 14 days, but the school—which required masks last school year and lifted the rule over the summer—refused.

The Larimer County Department of Health had scheduled a site visit on the school’s first day back to monitor the response, telling school administrators in a letter that if the measures were not taken, the county would “pursue further action, including possible closure of the school.”

The clash between Resurrection Christian and Larimer County is an example of the the broader pushback against COVID-19 protocols by those claiming conscience freedoms or religious freedoms. It also echoes debates among Christians over the responsibility to mask and take other precautions to slow the spread of the virus.

Though Resurrection Christian is a private and religious institution, state law allows public health agencies to regulate COVID-19 responses in all schools and order compliance if necessary, the Fort Collins Coloradan reported. The county health department website says it consults with “districts, private, and charter schools” while also “intervening in outbreaks.”

Kori Wilford, county health department spokesperson, told the Coloradan that at Resurrection Christian, “if additional measures such as wearing masks, increased distancing and improving ventilation are not effective in stopping an increase in cases, a closure would be the next step to protect public health.”

Health officials, though, did not show up this week at the school, and Resurrection Christian has continued operations under its own COVID-19 response, including amping up cleaning and air circulation after the outbreak.

On Wednesday, the energy on campus was exciting. “I had kids getting out of their cars, thanking me for keeping school open,” said Jerry Eshleman, the school’s superintendent.

While the school began the pandemic with remote learning, then required masks and other precautions last year, Eshleman said he’s concerned about the mental health strain on students and was eager to return this year without the mask mandate and social distancing. School began on August 17. Then came the delta variant.

“When you look at our school statistics, I see firsthand how it has traveled through our school. I do believe the hype,” the superintendent said in a 30-minute video shared with the school last week. “I don’t believe the fear, but I do believe that it spreads quickly.”

Most of the families at Resurrection Christian—affiliated with nearby Rez.Church, an Association of Related Churches congregation—agree with the administration’s COVID-19 response.

“The response from our parents has been absolutely, overwhelmingly positive,” Eshleman said in an interview with CT. “But among the folks who are not happy about it, they cite examples from the Bible about obeying those in authority over you, the whole Romans 13 thing. While I respect that, I think it’s a misapplication of the context that we’re dealing with here.”

“At what point will the government, will the state so to speak, ask things of you that you’re going to have a problem with?” he said. “To a handful of parents that I’ve responded to who have cited that to say basically, ‘You’re not being a good Christian, you’re not loving your neighbor as yourself, you’re not doing Romans 13,’ I say, ‘Ok, then help me understand Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. That’s not obeying the authorities over them.’”

Romans 13, the passage from Paul that begins, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities,” has been invoked by Christians throughout the pandemic, including by Christian colleges establishing COVID-19 policies and by pastors shepherding congregations with conflicting views on reopening.

“I think we as Christians and as Americans need to have these two balancing influences, Romans 13 and Revelation 13, in our minds,” theologian Russell Moore said, in a discussion of religious liberty in the early months of the pandemic. “The government has a legitimate role in order and authority, and we need to be the best citizens that we can be (Romans 13), and it is possible for a government to overstep its bounds and to become a destructive force (Revelations 13).”

As the pandemic has gone on, especially after the drop in cases and then the current spike, some Christians eager for a return to normal have become more concerned about whether the government requirements represent overreach. Others continue to hold to precautions, emphasizing masking and vaccination as a form of protecting and loving their neighbors.

During the health department’s initial visit to the school in late August, administrators argued that the layout of the school, with separate buildings and no interaction between lower-grade and upper-grade students, did not necessitate a schoolwide mask requirement even after an outbreak (defined as five or more students infected) or a pre-outbreak (two to three infected).

But the school has another reason for not enforcing the requirements. Leaders say they prioritize allowing parents to make medical decisions for their children, rather than taking a stance on whether to mask or whether to vaccinate. The school has encouraged compliance but says it does not want to overstep parental decision-making in this case.

“To me, philosophically, when God’s law and man’s laws run parallel to one another, that’s fine … but this is not that. This is the state coming in between me and my child, telling me the medical advice that I have to do for my child,” said Eshleman, citing scriptural teaching that a parent is responsible for their children. “The larger issue in Deuteronomy 6, to me, it’s talking about: Parents, it’s your J-O-B to take care of that child. God gave you that child to raise. Not the school. Definitely not the state.”

Legal counsel for Resurrection Christian is currently in preliminary discussions with county attorneys, but it’s too early to say if the school will take legal action.

During the pandemic, churches have been successful in winning exemptions from lockdown mandates on First Amendment grounds, particularly when they argued that neutral or “generally applicable” laws were being used to target religious institutions or that comparable activities by secular entities had been permitted.

“The states that had their policies upheld were applying them consistently,” said Daniel Bennett, political science chair at John Brown University. In a case like Resurrection Christian, “I think it would be real easy for the government to say, ‘Look we have a compelling interest in this. It’s being applied to all schools, and it’s a temporary order.’”

Last year, after granting injunctions in New York and California, the US Supreme Court ordered Colorado to reexamine its worship restrictions, and congregations like Rez.Church have been gathering at full capacity and without mask requirements for months.

But there is not the same precedent for religious schools fighting coronavirus precautions, and several have lost in court. In some cases, their legal fights extended beyond the terms of the COVID-19 precautions, rendering their cases moot.

A judge in Michigan ruled in August against a Catholic school in Lansing—also called Resurrection—that challenged a statewide mask mandate, saying masks hide faces made in the image of God. The decision said the state order was neutral and applied to both public and private religious schools, and that the state was “well within its jurisdiction” since masking is “a measure by which we can better protect public health.” Earlier in the summer, an appellate court upheld New York City’s random COVID-19 screenings in private and parochial schools.

In a Wisconsin case where all schools, including private religious schools, were closed for in-person education due to COVID-19, the policy was ruled unconstitutional since it violated students’ free-exercise rights to practice their faith through religious education.

There have also been an uptick in cases of individuals claiming exemptions from school and workplace mask mandates and vaccine requirements for religious reasons. Paul D. Miller and Andrew Walker, writing at The Public Discourse, suggested that Christians should not claim religious exemptions from mask mandates but instead challenge them “on the basis of whether masks are a prudent public health measure consistent with America’s liberty rubric.”

“The Bible is utterly silent about masks one way or the other,” they write. “We can safely conclude that the wearing or not wearing of masks is not part of religious worship or religious activity. Thus, it is not protected by religious freedom, and it is rightfully within the government’s jurisdiction to mandate or forbid.”

Administrators at Resurrection Christian see their position as remaining neutral on COVID-19 issues and politics and allowing parents to decide what is best for their families. Faced with the threat of a possible shutdown by the county health department, they have assured parents they will continue to fight for and advocate for the parents’ rights.

“For the school, you have to look back and ask, ‘Is this the hill you’re willing to die on?’” said Bennett. “As Christians, there are going to be moments where there are things that we can’t in good conscience abide by. If this is such an important issue that you’re going to say we have to defer to the parents’ judgement, there’s going to be consequences. You may have to shut down and say, ‘We’ll see you in two weeks.’”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Theology

Good Riddance to the Robert E. Lee Statue

Russell Moore

The Civil War pitted principles against community. A Christian vision ties them together again.

Pool / Getty Images

This week, Robert E. Lee at long last retreated from Richmond. The statue of the Confederate general on Monument Avenue in Richmond was removed from its pedestal, as citizens of the city cheered from the streets. Watching the granite gray warhorse suspended in the air prompted me to think of a conversation I once had about whether a picture of Lee in a seminary dorm room should stay or go.

A student had written to me to ask about a painting he had of Lee—I believe the painting was a family heirloom and, if I remember correctly, there may have even been a family connection to Lee himself. He said that a fellow ministry student, an African American man, winced when he saw the painting in the hallway of the seminary apartment.

The white southern student asked me, “Should I take it down?” I responded that he should, and then I gave biblical and historical reasons as to why I didn’t think that Lee and other Confederate leaders were worthy of honor.

There was one person, though, whose opinion I wanted to seek, and that was the bard of Henry County, Kentucky: Wendell Berry.

Around the time that I had sent my response to the student, I was out at the poet and novelist’s farm, where at his kitchen table I awkwardly brought up the subject of Lee. I say “awkwardly” because I was quite sure that Berry would disagree with my counsel. After all, I had just read a defense he’d made of Lee, and I was sure he would think that the picture’s removal was one more example of a mobilized and rootless modern society that refused to even remember the past.

Other than the one essay, however, I really had no reason to guess his response. Berry, after all, is an agrarian writer but decidedly not in the strain of “moonlight and magnolias” Southern agrarianism, which at best whitewashes and at worst romanticizes the violent white supremacist caste system of old Dixie. To the contrary, he has written poignantly on the “hidden wound” of white supremacy and the damage it has done.

Still, I found the author’s 1970s-era essay on Lee inconsistent. He portrayed the general as an exemplar of someone facing the choice between principle and community, when he resigned his commission in the United States Army to join the Confederate cause. To Berry, Lee’s motivation was not a defense of slavery but rather a refusal to go to war against his relatives and his home of Virginia. The author concluded the General was right.

“As a highly principled man,” Berry wrote of Lee, “he could not bring himself to renounce the very ground of his principles. And devoted to that ground as he was, he held in himself much of his region’s hope of the renewal of principle. His seems to me to have been an exemplary American choice, one that placed the precise Jeffersonian vision of a rooted devotion to community and homeland above the abstract ’feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen.’”

Berry was right, it seems to me, that morality is grounded best in what he would call “membership” rather than in abstractions. Where he was wrong, though, was in seeing the boundaries of that membership. The precise evil that Lee fought to maintain was a community in which some people were seen as members and others were seen as property to be exploited and tortured.

Lee’s place in this story can be seen in his decision to take up of arms against the Union in defense of a slave system. But it’s even more evident in the way his image has become iconic of the “Lost Cause” white backlash against Black civil rights.

The reason white nationalists streamed into Charlottesville at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally was over Confederate monuments. Those with tiki torches were not motivated by broadening a vision of community but rather by restricting it. “You will not replace us; Jews will not replace us,” they chanted. The definition of the word “us” is key.

By contrast, a Christian vision of membership is a repudiation of “blood and soil” community-over-principle. It replaces that not with a set of principles apart from community but with a new sense of community altogether.

After announcing his ministry in his hometown synagogue, Jesus’ first act was to redefine the community as one that included Gentiles—the widow of Zarephath, and even dreaded Syrians such as Naaman the warrior (Luke 4:25–27). In the short run, this decision fractured the community, as “filled with wrath,” they sought to thrown him off a cliff (vv. 28–29, ESV throughout).

But that fracturing was necessary for a kingdom in which “there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11).

When Simon Peter refused to eat with the Galatian Gentiles, he might have believed he was choosing community over principle, since to eat with that group would have offended his own Jewish people. In reality, though, he was acting “not in step with the truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:14)—not only by betraying a Christian principle but also by betraying a community of Jews and Gentiles whom the Spirit defined, against all odds, as brothers and sisters.

Elsewhere in his work, Berry fully understood and prophetically envisioned that sort of principled community. He wrote, for instance, of the valor of coal country people who stood up—sometimes alone—against mountaintop removal and other ecological devastations. And he noted that change most often comes from the margins—from those who are distant enough from established orthodoxies (that is, established communities) to come back with a renewed vision of other possible futures.

In that context, to revere the myth of Robert E. Lee is to claim membership in a Lost Cause. But it is also to deny membership in a community that is broader and richer—where the whole body suffers when one person is maimed or raped or kidnapped or enslaved or lynched.

When I asked Berry about the Lee picture, he became quiet for a moment and then started talking about other related issues until the conversation was far away from the student’s question about the portrait. Soon enough, we were talking about various other matters. But as I was about to leave, the essayist leaned over and said, “I’d take that picture down; wouldn’t you?”

He was right that time. And I would like to think that when Berry sees a city free from a monument used to hurt others, he will see those cheering crowds—Black and white and Asian and Hispanic—for what they are and what he’s hoped for all along: a community.

Russell Moore is a public theologian and director of the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.

- More from Russell Moore

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Persuasion, not Pressure

From Conversations to Clinics

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