Mother Emanuel and the Witness of Black Christian Faith

Claude Atcho

A decade after the racist massacre at the oldest AME Church in the South, a new book explores the congregation’s deep history.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, WikiMedia Commons

When people walk through the doors of a church, they’re ushered into living history. This is true whether the church is an established pillar of a community or was recently planted, like the congregation where I serve. Visitors and guests who walk into the doors of our meeting place, an elementary school in Charlottesville, Virginia, often do not realize they’ve walked into one of the first schools in the state to be racially integrated. Like many other places, its history tells stories about race and belonging that run deeper than what meets the eye.

Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church, written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack, is a sweeping tale that bears witness to a living history of African American Christianity rooted in one singular congregation: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Best known as Mother Emanuel, the church catapulted into America’s consciousness through one of the most heinous acts of racial violence in the nation’s history. On June 17, 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered a Wednesday-night Bible study inside the church, by all accounts unaware of its historical significance. Roof, who had been radicalized by white-supremacist ideology online, sat silent during the meeting for roughly 45 minutes before taking out his gun and killing nine people: Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, and Myra Thompson.

In the aftermath of the callous evil, illusions of a post-racial society in the wake of President Barack Obama’s second term deflated. But something remarkable also happened. Two days after “the tragedy,” as it came to be known by congregants, the world witnessed several of the victims’ surviving family members publicly voice forgiveness for the unrepentant killer. Thus the tragedy bore witness not only to the evil of racial hatred but also to the strength of Christian faith. And through it, the world witnessed America’s unvanquished racial animus and the resilience of Black Christians in the face of unthinkable grief and persistent injustice.

In Mother Emanuel, Sack puts forth a gripping exploration into how centuries of white supremacy impacted the church and the witness of faith against a deluge of hatred. The book examines how forgiveness could be granted in light of shocking evil. And after centuries of Black suffering, is forgiveness radical or repressive?

Sack makes the case that the answers come only by “studying the church’s historical and theological origins” to “better understand the grace summoned” by those who pronounced forgiveness. Resistance, forgiveness, and race form the book’s subtitle, and rightly so. There is no accurate portrayal of the African American Christian experience without these three realities. The history of Mother Emanuel as a congregation can be summarized as resistance—of which forgiveness is a practice—in the face of centuries of racism.

A poetic and captivating storyteller, Sack details the birth of the church through a walkout of thousands of enslaved and free Black worshipers from a local Methodist church in 1818. He explains how adherents left to “protest indignities in [public] governance and worship,” including plans by the church’s white trustees to “build a garage for the church’s horse-drawn hearse” on the Black half of its burial grounds. The bulk of chapters narrate the church’s vital work and key figures through the pre–Civil War and Reconstruction eras, its pivotal role in the advancement of Black Methodism, and its advocacy for desegregation in the 20th century.

At the same time, the book paints an honest picture of the congregation in the lead-up to the tragedy, including its reputation as a church with a hard-to-manage vocal minority, resulting in a fair amount of pastoral turnover. “If we don’t like a minister, we know how to get rid of them,” one member admitted. The church saw declining membership and waning influence due to an aging congregation and forces like gentrification. But it sought to carry on its mission.

On the day of the tragedy, Myra Thompson, a member and aspirant for ordination, was prepared to lead Bible study, a responsibility that Sack writes “she took so seriously she had barely left home during two weeks of preparation.” Cynthia Hurd, a busy librarian and Bible study regular, had planned only to drop off an item at the church and depart. Sack reports that after being lovingly chided by a friend, Hurd gave in: “The weary librarian took a seat and grabbed a Bible.”

Such details, found throughout the book, provide a close look into the lives of the victims and add gravitas to the forgiveness pronounced by several of their family members in the aftermath. Their decision to forgive captivated many people but left others confused. Meanwhile, some didn’t want to hear it. One week after the shooting, the writer Stacey Patton wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post titled “Black America should stop forgiving white racists,” and she argued that “quick absolution” cannot produce real justice. But the forgiveness offered was neither cheap nor quick. It was formed by two centuries of trial, triumph, and resilient faith.

Forgiveness functions as the narrative frame of Mother Emanuel, anchoring its opening chapter (“The Open Door”) and epilogue (“On Forgiveness and Grace”). For Christian readers, the drumbeat of forgiveness is of course vital. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us our Christian life is framed at all points and junctures by forgiveness. Martin Luther recognized Christians as simultaneously righteous and sinful (simul iustus et peccator). As those made righteous in Christ, we have a continual duty to extend forgiveness in a world vandalized by sin. As those who are still sinful, we extend continually the very thing we need constantly—forgiveness from God himself and from others.

Culturally, it’s easy to see that forgiveness has fallen on hard times. It is viewed as a means of revictimizing sufferers and a loophole for evading true accountability. Far too often, the act has been distorted from its scriptural vision. Biblically, forgiveness is not the denial of accountability. Forgiveness names a wrong and releases it while seeking repair and reconciliation rather than resentment and personal revenge.

Part of the gift of Mother Emanuel is that readers, by entering the 200-year history of this church, will reckon with how those who have suffered greatly sought somehow to forgive freely. When forgiveness is offered without coercion and in the context of centuries of injustice, even secular audiences take note.

Readers will benefit from Sack’s refreshingly nuanced portrayal of the “idiom of forgiveness.” Mother Emanuel acknowledges the surviving family members who forgave—and those for whom such an act is a work in progress. Forgiveness is depicted as a discipline of spirituality, a reality forged in and from one’s heart, soul, and psyche through true human agency—but not powered solely by us.

Notably, Sack writes that the forgiveness displayed after the “tragedy” was in some form “mystical.” Nadine Collier, the first person to speak at Roof’s bond hearing, where she voiced her forgiveness, said, “[I] didn’t know what I was going to say” and “something just came over me.” Chris Singleton testified of a similar experience, akin to an “out-of-body” feeling. Singleton said he “knows it was God,” for he offered forgiveness with “zero premeditation.” “There is no way in a million years,” Singleton declared, “someone could tell me I would forgive the person who murdered my mom.”

Though Sack accurately notes these acts of forgiveness are described in “mystical terms,” it’s not entirely a mystery for theologically minded readers. In the face of heart-wrenching evil, the in-breaking grace of God shines mysteriously forth. The late pastor Tim Keller said it well: “Human forgiveness is dependent on divine forgiveness.” The type of forgiveness that is impossible with humanity is possible with and through God. It may flow forth in an instant or by a longer process. In either instance, Christians can grasp both manifestations as the prevenient work of the Lord.

Desmond Tutu, a famous South African bishop who led resistance to apartheid, asserted there is no future without forgiveness. In Mother Emanuel, the act of forgiving is widely described among family members as a power that releases bitterness, enabling them to move forward without being overcome by hate. Historically, for Black Christians forgiveness has been an act of resistance that preserves faith, dignity, and agency against the harsh winds of systemic racial violence.

The implicit challenge of Mother Emanuel is this: Ten years later, what future has forgiveness wrought? If the story of Mother Emanuel is a microcosm of America’s living history with the injustice of racism, has the forgiveness extended been met by accountability and works of righteousness? Although those from Mother Emanuel bore witness to forgiveness, one is right to wonder whether Americans have not quite received the message.

Far from sparking revival, this act of forgiveness and resilience has perhaps faded from national memory. In its place, America’s national touchstone has increasingly become resentment and resignation across the board—racially, politically, and culturally. In the wake of intensified racial hatred, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 book asked, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” In this radical act of forgiveness depicted in Mother Emanuel, readers see an option beyond chaos.

While the sweeping history of Mother Emanuel is honestly pessimistic about America’s racism, it is hopeful about the counterculture of Christ’s church, even with all its human imperfection. When Sack set foot in Mother Emanuel after the tragedy and attended services for his research, the church, despite its traumatic recent history, welcomed him. The people chose community over chaos. Even in grief, Mother Emanuel embodied a resistance to hate by the work of forgiveness and welcome.

If any retrieval of justice, mercy, and forgiveness will occur in America in the decades to come, the house from which such a revolutionary resistance will come is the church of Jesus Christ, particularly its Black remnant, which can teach us in theory and practice what it means to persevere in a sin-stricken world.

Claude Atcho is pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just and the forthcoming Rhythms of Faith: A Devotional Pilgrimage through the Church Year.

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Books

Review

Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs in a Spotify Age

Anna Broadway

A new book says streaming platforms have “broken” how we make and hear music. Can the church model a better way?

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Wikimedia Commons

There’s an old joke about the evolution of music technology that goes something like, “How many times do I have to buy the White Album?” Perhaps the move to streaming—the subject of Liz Pelly’s new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist—makes that question moot.

If Pelly is right that “music has been reimagined by streaming,” then despite her book’s focus on secular pop music, it has implications for the church and people of faith. And maybe we have something to offer to conversations about reinvigorating the culture of music.

At its heart, Mood Machine chronicles a music world Pelly deems “broken.” She assigns most of the blame to Spotify and the major labels. This broken system has fostered more broken ways of relating to music, which in turn breaks or hurts musicians and creativity. Pelly bases her story on “more than 100 interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians.” As she chronicles the shift from piracy panic to playlist culture, Pelly argues that Spotify’s roots as an advertising company in search of internet traffic have shaped its policies and payment practices in the nearly 20 years since its founding.

Pelly ties the shift to streaming—and Spotify’s dominance thereof—to a playlist-fueled propensity for increasingly passive listening. She says the company has spent years pursuing “an elusive vision … where the Spotify user could simply open the app, press ‘play,’ and instantaneously get the perfect soundtrack for any given moment or context, without having to search, click or think.” Pursuit of this Holy Grail has helped foster listening that’s more self-centered, utilitarian, and impersonal, Pelly says, while shifting fans’ focus from individual artists to the ever-changing prescience of playlists.

Aspiring to or expecting such perfectly personalized soundtracks must be a relatively recent historical phenomenon, given all the technological developments required. But this desire speaks to the eternal human longing to be known and understood. For Christians, such longings ultimately go back to our post-Eden alienation from God. We all long for the pre-Fall intimacy God intended humans to enjoy with one another and, most of all, their all-knowing Creator.

Pelly does not acknowledge Spotify’s possibly godlike ambitions as such. She does, though, lament how the company indirectly constrains the horizons for new music. Because of its app and payment structures, Pelly says, Spotify discourages both musical experimentation and collaboration. “One independent musician told me that she felt like [the app’s hidden classifications] made musicians hesitant to change their sounds,” Pelly writes. “So many factors in Spotify’s algorithmic systems were determined at the artist level, and not the track or album level.” This might explain some of Spotify’s more jarring suggestions for my gospel playlist, which sometimes included secular music and even one patriotic song.

Paltry payments create another constraint. If you make only $0.0035 per stream, a figure to which Pelly devotes a whole chapter, it makes more sense to share that pittance with as few people as possible. (She doesn’t cite a source for this specific number, but various music distribution sites show similar rates.) Pelly closes her largely damning account of the company’s impact in grand terms. “We can’t just think about changing music, or changing music technology,” she writes. “We need to think about the world we want to live in, and where music fits into that vision.”

For all her interviews and her impressive sleuthing of even Spotify’s internal Slack channels, Pelly tells an incomplete story. At the most basic level, she gives no demographic information on the musicians she interviewed. Because she strives to keep nearly all of them anonymous, the most we ever learn is an occasional pronoun or sometimes the genre of music. This opaque treatment echoes some of the secretiveness she criticizes Spotify for.

I understand Pelly’s desire to help artists speak without fear of blowback from a powerful entity. But giving so little detail about interview subjects obscures her reporting’s strengths and weaknesses. We never learn how representative her interviews are or why she speaks so little of certain genres and musical experiences.

In a chapter on “ghost artists,” Pelly describes Spotify’s push to pad playlists with songs attributed to fake artist profiles but actually developed by a relatively small group of musicians. This practice, according to an unnamed “Spotify affiliate” she quotes, meant that “spots for Black and brown artists making this music started getting cut down to make room for a few of these white Swedish guys in a studio.” That sounds really alarming, but she offers no genre specifics or corroborating details from musicians.

In journalism, it’s standard practice to report due diligence when one doesn’t include a statement from all sides. When you can’t reach a source or that source refuses to comment, you document this so readers understand why the resulting story excludes that perspective. Other times, researchers explicitly state the limits they chose or faced. In my book on singleness, for which I interviewed nearly 350 Christians around the world, I acknowledge that I, as a Protestant, struggled to include enough Catholic and Orthodox singles.

If Pelly’s book omits or underrepresents certain genres or types of musicians, that may be perfectly valid, as long as she can give reasons for those gaps. Yet without such disclosures, readers can’t know whether her broadest claims stand up to scrutiny.

Pelly says more-instrumental genres like jazz and classical tend to fare “well on playlists for relaxing, sleeping, or focusing,” but she doesn’t address the classical music listening experience on Spotify. That’s striking, because classical music particularly suffers under Spotify’s default setting, which allows nonpaying customers to hear only albums interrupted by frequent ads—including between symphony movements—or randomly ordered playlists. This makes it very difficult to enjoy multimovement works like symphonies or concertos. When I subscribed, Spotify also suggested movements divorced from a larger work. Even the ad-based classical station in Anchorage, Alaska, (where I live) would never play music like that.

Pelly’s relative silence on classical music also stands out given its place in the long history of Western music. She closes Mood Machine by inviting readers to consider the place we want music to occupy in our world, implying that recorded music largely dictates this. But despite all the past century’s evolution, recordings remain a very recent innovation.

Perhaps that’s easier to see for Christians, whose songs and hymnody focus on a story two millennia old: Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. When we sing the psalms, we draw on music even older than that, though only the words and occasional music notations remain. Because of that, music plays a profound role in reminding the gathered community who and whose we are. (Perhaps this is why songs re-encountered during exile to Babylon caused such pain for the Israelites, as Psalm 137 describes.)

Singing is one of the most basic and perhaps universal ways that humans make music. Corporate singing, in particular, provides one of our best opportunities to experience community in the unity and diversity that God intended. In communal singing, we both unite our voices and, when we sing in parts, demonstrate through harmony the great beauty created by our diversity.

The local church is probably one of the most enduring settings where people who vary greatly in skill sing and make music together. That arguably makes the church one realm where music hasn’t suffered as much. Yet church music plays no part in Mood Machine. (The only religious reference I found involves an “anti-Christian song.”)

It may be that, in many cases, “artists’ careers have become increasingly managed by algorithms, and listening has become more and more mechanized.” But that simply doesn’t account for the weekly musical life of churches all over the country and around the world, dozens of which I worshiped with during fieldwork for Solo Planet. From Handel’s Messiah to Jon Batiste, church music has long influenced the broader culture. Its exclusion from Pelly’s account limits the force of her argument.

At the end of Mood Machine, Pelly writes, “To address the root causes of our ailing music culture, we need to have deeper conversations about why music matters, why universal access to music matters, and what systemic political and economic realities currently prevent so many people from engaging deeply with music.”

Surely such a conversation ought to include more of the places where music thrives. Her conclusion lists some very interesting examples, especially of library-hosted music collections. But it’s worth considering others from the Christian music scene. Pelly might have reckoned with how Josh Garrels gives so much music away. Or she might have highlighted The Porter’s Gate, an arts collective responsible for a steady output of new songs, almost entirely digital, through an unusually large team of collaborators. How have these Christian musicians survived what seems like such risky generosity and collaboration?

By the same token, Christians could stand to heed the problems Pelly so meticulously chronicles. Many schools have ended or reduced music education in the classroom. But years ago, I attended a church whose worship minister believed the local church could help fill this gap, perhaps by teaching people how to sing parts. The church I presently attend (and play piano for) also supports broader cultural efforts to preserve and reclaim Indigenous languages by including some translated songs in our worship.

Churches can provide space to practice or perform as well. The Lutheran church where I worship rents its space to multiple community choirs for rehearsal. Others sometimes come to play one of the many pianos in the building—either for practice or just for fun. Historically, church support of musicians has also given some the financial stability to produce other work. Individual Christians have an important role too.

Reading Pelly’s book made me realize that for all the money I spent on Spotify the past few years, I had not bought a single song from my most-played playlists. When I first started using Spotify, I was doing international fieldwork and had almost no access to the music I loved. Like library ebooks, Spotify initially helped connect me to home, in some sense.

Once I settled in Anchorage but still had most of my huge CD library in storage, Spotify provided a way to stay connected to music. After discovering The Porter’s Gate in early 2020 and later building out my worship and gospel playlists, the app helped extend much older habits of compiling lists of recordings I might gradually acquire. Over time, I lost sight of that goal.

Today I finally changed that by buying a few of those songs as MP3s. Over time, I hope to buy more music again, while continuing to support local arts too. Although few of my favorite acts come through Anchorage, life here has taught me the importance of supporting local musicians. Unlike my prior stints in New York and San Francisco, Anchorage has far fewer concert options each week—particularly for ensembles like orchestras. Many community groups offer just a few concerts a year. That’s okay. In reality, I’ve rarely attended more than one or two per month, no matter where I lived. Now I just have to work harder at attending the concerts we do have.

These days, my biggest barrier to supporting music is low income. But I’m grateful to the church choir that lets me practice with them each week, despite rarely attending their services. Some secular choirs here charge singers to participate!

And when a compassionate house manager recently bought me a ticket to a concert I couldn’t afford to hear, it reminded me of another long-term goal. As my post-book career hopefully stabilizes at a higher income level, I want to be someone who introduces others—especially younger people or those who can’t afford it—to the music that’s brought me such joy. What could you do to bring more flourishing to the music and musicians in your community?

Anna Broadway is the author of Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling and Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity.

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Inkwell

Confessions of a Bad Host

Ben Christenson

Throw parties in a lonely world—deliberately, self-consciously, and a little bit fanatically.

"Le dance" by Albert Guillaume

It all started when I saw Footloose.

Though my Christian high school was not so strict that it banned dancing, I must have felt some subconscious spiritual connection to Kevin Bacon’s character. Shortly after watching it, I invited my entire senior class over for a dance party. I wanted to be cool, to party, to shout, “Let’s dance!!!”

As you might guess, absent the charisma of Kevin Bacon, the party left something to be desired. In a desperate attempt to ignite the dance floor, I struck up a vigorous “crisscross” step. But I was too vain, too inexperienced. I rolled my ankle so badly that I missed a month of basketball. I then had to tell my coach and teammates that the culprit was Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Those are the kinds of scars that never heal.

After the Footloose debacle and some rough events in the interim, I thought my problems were solved when I read The 2-Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray. It’s basically “Hosting for Dummies,” presenting scripts to invite friends and step-by-step guides to set up a drink table, and the author even gave free consultations. It literally could not be simpler.

Nevertheless, the first time I hosted a party using his method, it bombed. The guide said to offer wine and a self-serve bar, but no one seemed capable of making a drink for themselves. No one wanted to open a bottle of wine, so most people chose to drink sparkling water.

There weren’t enough people, so there were a few distinct conversation circles that you couldn’t leave. You could also sort of hear everybody else in the room, and everyone took turns speaking one at a time. Some guests came, made one lap around the room, and left. We never spoke again. Others had promised they would be there, and I treasured their RSVP only to watch the minutes and then hours go by, slowly realizing they weren’t coming. By the end of the night, I was itching to send everyone home. I wanted to put them out of their misery. Then I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.

This was my first and most important lesson. Hosting is a skill, and with our rampant loneliness epidemic, it takes a lot of effort to put together a successful, well-attended event. Your guests will not kiss your feet for taking on this public health crisis. A lot of hosting discourse almost sounds resentful about this: “Here I am, busting my butt to build community, and these ungrateful guests can’t even be bothered to honor an RSVP!”

While I wouldn’t advocate for creating a village while hating on all the villagers, the way Leah Libresco Sargeant said it to me was helpful: It’s not impossible, but it is hard. So you can either use your energy complaining and exonerating yourself, or you can work to overcome the well-documented impediments to community building. I choose the latter.

The second biggest lesson I learned is that there is no right way to host. Like so much of internet writing, the fringe on both ends is loud, certain, and allergic to nuance. Within the various schools of thought on hosting, the spectrum runs from what I call the “Planners” to the “Chillers.”

The Planners are represented by The 2-Hour Cocktail Party, The Art of Gathering, Building the Benedict Option, and many others. Planners are an articulate, intellectual, conscientious bunch who present a compelling case for how and why to host. This methodical, didactic approach gives them credibility. They’ve thought this stuff through.

Of course, their nuanced books end up dumbed down and radicalized for the algorithms. In my head, the voice of the extreme Planner is shouting something like this: Events need an explicit purpose! Guests need to RSVP ASAP so that subsequent invitees will be impressed with the cool people at your party. Events are for connections! In this room could be your future spouse, your next client, or your new chess partner.

The mentality that undergirds it all: This is serious business! We’re talking about the rebuilding of the infrastructure of the frayed, atomized, post-industrial, post-capitalist, post-Christian society, dang it! This is the village. This is what everyone’s whining about, but you’re doing it, you’re making a difference, you’re not like the rest of those pro-community keyboard warriors. You’re actually doing the work.

This approach pricks the conscience of other would-be Planners. Ask me how I know.

While the planners dominate the conversation, there is a vocal minority of Chillers. They are reacting against the barriers to entry that make hosting seem out of reach for ordinary mortals. You may have heard of “scruffy hospitality,” a concept popularized by the Anglican priest Jack King.

Come as you are, serve simple dishes, and host far more than you would if you were shackled by impossible expectations. Parents of young children do not have spotless homes, and they should not delay hosting until the day their floors are free of dirt and Magna-Tiles.

Chillers and Planners find some overlap on their acknowledgement of the need for third places, “calling culture,” and other social technologies that don’t require constant text messaging and rescheduling to maintain. But Chillers probably wouldn’t actually use terms like social technologies to describe wanting to hang out with friends more.

Of course, Chillers can still end up radical and sanctimonious. The militant Chiller in my head sounds something like this: When I go over to someone’s house and the Cheerios are on the floor and the diapers are piled in the corner and the dinner is spaghetti and meatballs, I’m not offended. I’m honored.

The undergirding mentality: I haven’t showered in three days, I wear John Cena T-shirts around the house, and sometimes, when we’ve run out of milk, I put water in my cereal. And I want to bring you into all of that unfiltered, unedited, unguarded life.

I kid, I kid. But only a little.

For all the talk about wanting “a village,” most Americans are atomized because they prefer it. At least, that’s what they choose when given the option. Suburbs grew out of consumer demand, and a lot of communitarian living of yore was actually an inescapable result of impoverished living conditions. If you wanted community bad enough, you could still find it. But you might have to give up your lawn, your privacy, your autonomy.

As Helen Roy reflects after a year abroad with her family, when your child cries on a bus in Budapest, a babushka materializes out of thin air to soothe the baby. By the same token, when your child isn’t wearing her winter coat, a babushka materializes to scold you. Most Americans have chosen the lawn over the babushka.

While everyone knows that relationships are important generally, it is easy, moment-to-moment, evening after evening, to choose the path of least resistance.

This is a broader trend of life in the digital age that Ross Douthat recently wrote about: “The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete. In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity.”

If you are unwilling to fight for more humane ways of relating, they will slip away.

I put no stock in hosts complaining about the flaking, the busyness, and the inconvenience of it all. Not because the complaints aren’t true, but because that’s the whole point. Other people infringe on us and inconvenience us, and so we withdraw, and that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. On a spiritual level, we shouldn’t be surprised that our culture seems to be accelerating in the wrong direction.

As Douthat concludes in that same column, the challenge is not merely to talk, perform, or post about the changes we want. Instead, it’s to “go out into reality and do” because if we are not “deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things [we] love are carried forward,” then they won’t be.

Deliberate, self-conscious, and a little bit fanatical—now that’s a hosting philosophy I could get behind.

While it might sound cliché or even self-aggrandizing, I try to think about hosting as something to offer up to God rather than something grand that I am doing. For my guests, I hope to carve out a very human space in a dehumanizing culture. And for myself, I accept that my ego will take some body blows. It’s not always pleasant, but like any hard experience, there are also moments of joy, growth, and satisfaction at a job well done.

You have to be prudent about what approach best fits your community and temperament, knowing that any strategy will require some ingenuity and grit. Going against the grain guarantees some resistance. While some throw up their hands in frustration, I see those challenges as a sign that I’m on the right track.

If you want greatness, you must struggle.

If you want a village, you must embrace the villagers.

If you want a dance party, you’ve gotta break some ankles.

Ben Christenson is a writer and editor who has written for Hearth & Field, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, and others. He writes while his (amazing) wife watches their three kids, three dogs, one cat, and innumerable chickens. You can read more of his work at benjaminchristenson.com.

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Theology

PEPFAR and the Uneasy Conscience of American Christianity

RUSSELL MOORE

It was Christianity that taught the world that every person ought to matter. Now is not the time to abandon or betray that truth.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

We are so accustomed to seeing every public argument as a cage fight that it can be genuinely surprising to see a mind changing in the course of a conversation. On The Joe Rogan Experience last week, songwriter Bono laid out for Rogan the very human results of the Trump administration’s drastic spending cuts that will put an end to one government program that has actually worked: that of saving people in Africa from dying with AIDS. Rogan seemed convinced—even concerned.

We all ought to be, especially American evangelical Christians.

Bono, of course, has been an advocate for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, since it was first developed in the George W. Bush administration. His argument to Rogan was—like his earlier work on this—bipartisan and balanced. He acknowledged that some foreign-aid programs have been badly managed and should be cut. But he also explained how recent cuts to PEPFAR and similar initiatives are shortsighted and will cost massive numbers of human lives.

Bono cited, among other things, the work of my Christianity Today colleague Emily Belz on what’s happening on the ground right now.

In a recent panel appearance, David Brooks argued that researchers at Boston University estimate that 55,000 adults and 6,000 children have died in just the four months since the dismantling of PEPFAR began. When you add to that the other disease-curing measures suspended by these cuts, the total reaches 300,000 deaths.

And Brooks’s New York Times colleague Nicholas Kristof reported from South Sudan with names and faces of specific people who have died or lost loved ones. He writes of Evan Anzoo, a five-year-old boy who was born with HIV. Through PEPFAR, this little boy was kept alive with antiretroviral medicines that Kristof notes cost “less than 12 cents a day.” After the freeze on aid, the medicines ended, and Evan died of an opportunistic pneumonia infection.

“How could a 5-year-old orphan possibly obtain medicine on his own?” Kristof asks.

Kristof also gives the image and name of an eight-year-old girl named Achol Deng, who died in similar fashion when the government freeze left her without antiretroviral medicines.

And evangelical Christian journalist Mindy Belz (Emily’s mother) witnessed to the “Coffin Row” she once saw in Malawi, the result of the staggeringly high death rate there from HIV/AIDS. She compared it to the scene now in a warehouse in Kenya where millions of antiretrovirals sit unused by order of the State Department. Belz cites the consensus of global experts that these cuts will result in 1.6 million deaths just in one year.

1.6 million deaths.

The horror of all this is magnified by its pointlessness. This does not bring down the budget deficit or the national debt, which is constantly reaching new heights. Meanwhile, it hurts American geopolitical interests around the world, leaving a void to be filled by China or some other rival. And the human tragedy involved ought to be especially poignant for American evangelical Christians, in every aspect of that phrase.

Let’s start with American. When Americans think of United States foreign policy over the past half century, often they think of negative images of moral or strategic failure: South Vietnamese people clamoring to get on helicopters that would leave them defenseless or Afghans who stood with the United States in a 20-year-old war only to be, along with some Americans, abandoned to the Taliban.

We think of these things partly, of course, due to negativity bias. No one sees the disasters that did not happen because of American global leadership—most notably, of course, a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. PEPFAR, though, was an immediately understandable example of something America did indisputably right. Not only was the cause unquestionably just; the execution of it was effective.

Now think about the evangelical part of this equation. The coalition backing PEPFAR has spanned the gamut, from Bono to Bush to right-wing North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, a Southern Baptist notorious for his hard-line segregationist racial stances.

One of the initial pioneers of the idea behind this project was my late friend Michael Gerson, an evangelical Christian and Wheaton College graduate. He was influenced by the moral example of evangelical revivalists who led the cause of the abolition of the slave trade in England and of slavery itself in the United States. The PEPFAR coalition came together and held not in spite of evangelical convictions but, for many key figures like Gerson, because of them.

When people suggest that evangelical Christianity is only about keeping the status quo for the powerful, about maintaining white supremacy or militarism or patriarchy or whatever, many of us have disagreed strongly, and we still do. We have said that evangelical Christianity has often failed to live up to its own gospel and its own morality—but also that often it has. PEPFAR is one example of this.

And most importantly, think of the word Christian. As I’ve argued here a thousand times before, the gospel does not come with a political policy blueprint. But our policy should certainly be shaped by those whose consciences are made alive to what is just and right (Luke 3:13–19). Perhaps there’s a better way than PEPFAR to save the lives of children and adults with AIDS and other deadly diseases. Maybe there’s an 11-cent solution instead of a 12-cent one. If so, let it be proposed and debated.

What’s happening now, though, isn’t that. It’s the denial, first, that vulnerable people are dying at all. But most of all it’s the ignoring of the whole matter. Christians in the Global South—where the gospel is spreading fastest in the world—see what is happening, but it is easy for North American Christians just to pretend people like little Evan aren’t there at all.

One Christian—a nonpolitical sort—told me that he had asked for prayer in his church’s weekly prayer gathering for those with AIDS who are in jeopardy due to these cuts. He made no further comment about them. Yet he was told that he should keep the “political speeches” out of prayer. “How is praying for ‘orphans and widows in their distress’ [James 1:27] a political speech?” he asked. If it is, what does that say about our politics? Or our prayers?

We Christians know that the values of human rights and care for the suffering that the secular world embraces didn’t come from Enlightenment atheism but from ideals first proposed by Christianity itself—a Christianity at odds with the pagan world in saying that the powerful should care about the vulnerable, that every person ought to matter. If we are right about that—and I think we are—we should speak up for our own legacy.

Above all, though, we should remember our own Bible. Those dying right now—those who will die over the next year—matter. As Americans, as evangelicals, as Christians, we ought not to leave them behind. Joe Rogan can see that. So should we.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

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Who Are the ‘Court Evangelicals’?

John Fea

These Christian leaders regularly visit the White House but rarely, if ever, criticize the president.

Donald Trump hosts the National Day of Prayer at the White House.

Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

When I coined the phrase court evangelicals during the first Trump administration, I compared these Christians to the court clergy of late medieval and Renaissance-era Europe. These courtiers were motivated by one goal: to gain access to and win the favor of the monarch. As I wrote back in 2020, access to the court brought with it “privilege and power and an opportunity to influence the king on important matters.”

Today’s court evangelicals want a “seat at the table.” They flatter President Donald Trump and praise him for appointing pro-life Supreme Court justices; removing the teaching of critical race theory and other diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from schools; and protecting their religious liberty from the secular forces trying to undermine the Christian nation they are trying to reclaim.

Many Christians in America share the concerns of the court evangelicals. They are pro-family, opposed to abortion on demand, opposed to biological men playing women’s sports, and concerned about religious persecution around the world. But the political witness of the court evangelicals and other Trump-loving evangelicals is incomplete.

Rarely, if ever, do the court evangelicals criticize Trump. They believe the Bible is the Word of God, but they seem to have little use for Nathan—the Old Testament prophet who rebuked David for committing adultery with Bathsheba, as recorded in 2 Samuel 12.

When these Christians enter the Oval Office, they trade their prophetic edge for group photos. They behave politically as if there are no points of contention between the United States of America and the kingdom of God.

Court evangelicals were largely silent when Trump supporters staged an insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. When Trump faced multiple felony charges in 2024, court evangelicals claimed that the Biden administration was on a “witch-hunt” to prevent No. 45 from becoming No. 47.

In Trump’s second term, it is hard to find any major policy issue—refugees, the cutting of American aid abroad, deportations, Elon Musk’s government efficiency cuts, the teaching of racial diversity in schools—in which the court evangelicals publicly oppose Trump. They’ve even figured out a way to baptize tariffs.

The court evangelicals are easily identifiable. Just look for evangelical leaders who regularly visit Trump at the court: Greg Laurie, Eric Metaxas, and Paula White-Cain, to name a few.

The latest court evangelical gathering took place on the Wednesday of Holy Week. Trump invited evangelicals to the White House for an Easter dinner. Christianity Today reported on the event here. Franklin Graham preached an Easter message, and the Liberty University student choir performed.

Some of the court evangelicals gathered in the Roosevelt Room and sang “How Great Thou Art.” From all reports, they were singing to God. And of course there were photos—plenty of photos.

In April, Trump-supporting evangelicals came to the White House to learn more about White-Cain’s Faith Office and how the government might fight antisemitism and anti-Christian bias in the United States.

Sean Feucht, an itinerant worship leader and former candidate for Congress, led the group in praise songs. “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has become a house of prayer today,” he announced.

Feucht even had time to pose for a shot of him walking in the middle of a road toward the US Capitol carrying his guitar case and sporting a black jacket. He posted the pic with a reference to Psalm 33:12, which says, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

On the same day, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias met to carry out Trump’s Executive Order 14202. Trump issued the order to correct what he sees as abuses of religious liberty under the Biden administration.

The witnesses at the hearing included Scott Hicks, the provost of Liberty University. He testified that the US Department of Education had unfairly targeted Liberty.

While the court evangelicals enjoyed Easter dinner, worshiped in the White House, and expressed their grievances about anti-Christian bias, other evangelicals in the United States and around the world were saving lives with vaccines, defending Christians in Ukraine, finding solidarity with the suffering, and bringing attention to the globally displaced.

John Fea is distinguished fellow in history at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Ideas

Sermons with Benefits

Justin Giboney

Contributor

Too many Christians, tired of ridicule and eager for social approval, have downplayed or abandoned the biblical sexual ethic.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

In Lupe Fiasco’s song “The Cool,” the master storyteller lyrically weaves a tale about a hustler obsessed with a fast lifestyle of money and street fame. He’s developed all the right sensibilities, slang, and fashion to fit the part. Just one problem: He’s dead—a putrid, rotting corpse that climbed out of the grave with no living flesh left to defile. Lupe implies that the hustler died “chasing the cool,” pursuing fulfillment through materialism, peer validation, and self-indulgence. Even after death, he never realizes the moral of his own tragic story.

Christianity has never been without those seeking surface-level relevance and self-satisfaction (1 Cor. 6:12–20). And today, when the time comes to publicly uphold unpopular biblical principles, some Christians seem to be chasing the cool. Christian compassion and justice are widely admired. But when it comes to an uncool subject like the Christian sexual ethic—which holds that sex is for marriage between one man and one woman—too many of us become silent, turn theologically ambiguous, or wholly embrace unbiblical positions.

With sexual ethics in particular, recent history matters: Many American Christians are still trying to scrub off the stain of legalism, harshness, and hypocrisy widely associated with the Moral Majority wing of evangelicalism. A family-oriented Christian response to the moral decay of the sexual revolution was needed. But right-wing lovelessness toward hurting people was never necessary or Christlike, and Christians are right to want to push back on long-standing caricatures—not always as inaccurate as we’d wish—of Christians as haters who can’t carry the heavy burdens we place on others.

Decades of ridicule from pop culture and academia had a lasting effect on the American church because ridicule is powerful. As Saul Alinsky, the godfather of progressive activism, said, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.”

So, as US culture shifted leftward over the past few decades, Gen X and millennial Christians in particular paid for the sins of the Moral Majority. We were guilty by religious association and grew tired of being the butt of the joke. And beyond cultural self-defense, we also understood that the heartlessness of the religious right truly needed correction.

Unfortunately, many overcorrected, discarding our faith’s hard teachings about sex and the body altogether (1 Cor. 3:16–17). This may have felt compassionate. Likely it opened up new avenues of pleasure and was also the path of least resistance, especially in academia and activist spaces. That is no excuse.

I understand the appeal of fitting in, of course. I understand why many Christians have developed a social inferiority complex and started seeking validation from our secular peers. Plenty of adults, whether Christian or not, never graduate from high school mentalities. There’s always a cool kids’ table, and nobody wants to be the finger-wagging hall monitor. Fashioning exceptions to the rules seems to win more friends than urging others to uphold them.

And for Christians who want to evade the biblical sexual ethic, our culture provides plenty of support. More than a hundred years ago, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung added sexual repression to the list of cardinal sins, and in the decades since, sexual freedom has become an article of faith for secular progressivism. Mainline churches are dying a slow death trying to align with secular standards. And in the 2010s, Christian leaders popular among evangelicals, like Rob Bell, twisted the Bible in knots trying to follow suit.

More recently, in a sermon posted online, progressive pastor Delman Coates claimed the Bible’s sexual ethic has been misinterpreted for over 2,000 years. According to Coates, Scripture doesn’t actually bar premarital sex; rather, it more narrowly forbids sex with a prostitute. He argued that the Greek term porneia was used exclusively in reference to prostitution and that therefore Christians shouldn’t feel shame for premarital sex as long as all parties consent.

For those without itching ears, the claim is unserious on its face. We’d expect a justification for carnality from Playboy or Teen Vogue, not from a pulpit.

Coates’s assertion is in clear conflict with the overall biblical teaching of holiness and love as self-sacrifice not self-indulgence (Lev. 20:26; Rom. 12:1; 1 Pet. 1:15–16; 1 John 3:16). If anything, Jesus raised the standard for sexual morality. He certainly didn’t abolish it (Matt. 5:17, 27). It’s faith in him that washes away our shame, not justifications made with human hands (Luke 19:10, Heb. 9:14). Moreover, as urban apologists Damon Richardson and Michael Holloway meticulously prove as they dismantle Coates’s claims, porneia in the Bible does refer to sexual immorality generally.

The practical effects of disregarding God’s guidance for our sexuality are grave. Christians eager to wave away biblical prohibitions usually fail to mention the STIs ravaging the country, the crisis of fatherlessness, the mental health consequences of promiscuity, and sexual assaults where consent gets lost in an alcohol-induced memory fog.

License for further sexual inhibition is the last thing our society needs to hear from the church. Disassembling a people’s family and sexual ethic is one of the most wicked things an enemy can do—let alone a pastor. Coates may be rejecting the Christian sexual ethic in an honest effort to be more compassionate, but good intentions aren’t penance.

I speak from painful personal experience here, not from my own righteousness. I philandered through college and early adulthood, partaking in all the debauchery enabled on America’s college campuses. The lies, broken hearts, and Plan B pills left me dead in sin. Finally, I repented and admitted that the Bible’s age-old truths were far more profitable than the “enlightened” teachings I received at an elite university.

My thinking about sexual ethics had to be redeemed as well. I once conveniently dismissed sexual morality as a white evangelical preoccupation. But that was intellectually dishonest. The African church father Saint Augustine was fighting against the British Pelagian heresy—which tried to “liberate” the faith from the concept of sin—centuries before the American religious right stepped onto the scene.

That lie also erases the legacies of Black Christian women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Nannie Helen Burroughs, who used their public witness to promote (among other things) the dignity of biblical obedience and moral discipline.

And there’s nothing new or evolved about permissiveness. The early church distinguished itself as an alternative to the hedonism of Roman culture. The first Christians refused to chase the cool of ancient Rome and “pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality” (Jude 4). They stood in stark contrast.

They knew what many in today’s church seem to have forgotten: that putting a Christian gloss on secular values is not Christianity, nor is it especially appealing. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently explained, “I think the persistent weakness of liberal forms of [religion] is that they are attractive to people on the way out of intense religious belief, but they don’t usually pull people in.”

The truth is that a religion telling broken people “Do what thou wilt” simply isn’t compelling. Those trying to resuscitate thin Christianity might find validation from secular society or temporarily clear their consciences. But Christianity that undermines the Word of God is dead. It does not deserve to bear the name of Christ. We need transformation, not an excuse for sin. We can love well without endorsing licentiousness. Faithful disciples lead with grace without letting go of the truth.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of And Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the author of the forthcoming book Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us out of the Culture War.

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Crackdown on Refugees in India Shakes Christian Rohingya Community

Surinder Kaur

Church members recall receiving calls from family members after India cast them into the sea, forcing them to swim to Myanmar’s shores.

Rohingya women in a refugee camp carry water to their homes.

SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty

For the past 13 years, the small Christian Rohingya community in Delhi—which numbers 150—has rented rooms to worship in three congregations each Sunday. The two pastors had been going through the Sermon on the Mount for the past six months.

They had reached Matthew 7 when the government began rounding up members of the community.

It began May 6, when police called 15 Christian and 23 Muslim Rohingya into police stations, claiming they needed to be fingerprinted due to a “failure in their biometric,” according to Sadeq Shalom, a church member whose brother was deported. The Rohingya complied, believing it was another routine check. Although the refugees have UN-recognized refugee status, India is not a signatory of the UN refugee law and treats them as illegal migrants.

Once the refugees reached the station, authorities moved them from one government office to another before transporting them by airplane and boat into international waters. Then, they ordered the refugees to jump into the ocean with life vests on.

David Nazir, another member of the church, said his elderly parents were also among those deported. On May 9, he received a phone call from them calling from inside Myanmar. They recalled their harrowing journey and the way Indian authorities had led them to believe they would be deported to Indonesia. Before throwing them into the ocean, the naval officers said they would soon be picked up, Nazir said, “but no one came.”

“My parents don’t know how to swim,” he said. “Those who could swim helped drag the others toward shore, but God only knew where they were going.”

Once they reached the shore, they realized they were back in Myanmar, the home they had escaped years ago.

The Christian Rohingya have been caught up in the Indian government’s crackdown on immigrants living illegally in the country. In February, Amit Shah, the minister for Home Affairs, began advocating for strict action against those who help illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya immigrants, claiming they are a threat to “national security.” Then, in early May, the government issued “revised instructions” to identify, detain, and deport illegal immigrants.

The policy has devastated Delhi’s close-knit Christian Rohingya community, as businesses are afraid to employ them and the refugees are struggling to support their families. They also fear the government will round them up and deport them back to Myanmar.

“Everyone is living in constant fear that they could be next,” said Nazir, who is currently on the run himself.

Yet the church continues. Three young men, including Shalom, have taken up preaching and pastoral care for the congregation. The past month, they secretly gathered in different homes for worship.

“We thought if the government wants to detain all of us, let them detain us from the church service,” said Shalom.

The Rohingya are an ethnic and religious minority group in Myanmar’s Rakhine state that has long faced discrimination from the Buddhist-nationalist junta. Before their mass exodus in 2017, the predominantly Muslim Rohingya made up an estimated 2 percent of the country’s population.

Fearful that Islam would take over the majority-Buddhist country, the junta stripped Rohingya of citizenship in 1982. In 2015, the government invalidated their temporary registration cards, eliminating their limited voting rights. Today the Rohingya represent the world’s largest stateless population.

In 2017, widespread violence by the Myanmar military forced more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Rohingya refugees now also reside in Pakistan, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Australia. An estimated 40,000 live in India.

Yet even before the genocide, Rohingya faced decades of severe persecution. Shalom remembers the desperate survival strategies people in his village developed as the Myanmar military began attacking his area in 2011. “All [the] villagers would gather in one person’s house,” he said. “Two to three people would guard the room at night, taking turns, and the rest of us would sleep peacefully there.”

Each morning brought fresh reports from neighboring villages that “people, including children and pregnant women, were slaughtered and killed and houses burnt with petrol,” Shalom said.

Although most Rohingya are Muslim, Shalom grew up in a Christian family. In 2004, some Rohingya came to Christ after missionaries from India’s Mizoram state arrived at Shalom’s village of Thaung Chaung and introduced villagers to the gospel. In addition to the persecution from the Buddhist authorities, Rohingya Christians also face discrimination from their own people group as Muslims do not allow them to fetch water from the wells or work alongside them, Shalom said.

In 2014, Shalom and other Rohingya families fled to India. Many have registered with the UN refugee office in Delhi, which offers limited protection but no legal residency under Indian law. While the government considers most illegal immigrants, a small minority were able to obtain long-term visas that need to be renewed annually.

When this group of about 150 Christian Rohingya arrived in Delhi, they started working as “rag pickers” collecting recyclables from Delhi’s streets. Yet families continued to prioritize their children’s education, Shalom recalled. Families would spread across the city at 5 a.m. to collect recyclables, then return home for evening study sessions. The community pooled resources to hire teachers for their children since local schools were often inaccessible, he said.

Nazir noted that their faith has helped buoy them through difficult times since arriving in India. The church became a support network.

“Our faith helped us rebuild our lives,” Nazir said. Churches “became centers of mutual support where families shared resources and information about jobs, legal issues, and safety concerns.”

Over time, about 20 of the children completed secondary (10th grade) or senior secondary education (12th grade) and eventually found work in private companies, including telecommunication, sales, and delivery services. Shalom became an educational content creator. Older members found jobs like pulling rented rickshas, farming leased land, or cleaning office buildings.

Yet things took a turn in 2017 when the Indian government ordered states to identify and deport all illegal immigrants and stopped renewing the Rohingya refugees’ long-term visas.

Since the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took control of India’s central government in 2014, Rohingya refugees have been targeted, according to media reports. Because Rohingya are predominantly Muslims, they have become targets of both physical assaults and verbal harassment as part of BJP’s broader pattern of anti-Muslim sentiment.

Recently, Shalom has became afraid that he and his family could be deported under the Foreigners Act. In May 2025, he decided to resign from his job, as he felt it was unsafe for him to continue to work. Others who employed Rohingya refugees let them go under pressure from the government.

“Our daily wages helped us survive each day, but now that is gone,” Shalom said.

To cope, the community adopted an “early church” approach by sharing their limited resources. “For example, I had a bag of rice, and I distributed [it] to the people who didn’t have,” he said. “This is how we have been surviving, but I don’t know now what we can do, for we are left with nothing to share.”

At the same time, they worry about their own personal safety.

Nazir first sensed that the Indian authorities were preparing to take action when the police began visiting Rohingya homes for address verification and taking community members to the police station in the early hours of February 26. Nazir was also taken and remembers authorities assigning each refugee a prison number and detaining them for several hours before letting them go.

Then came the roundup on May 6. From the police stations, the 15 Christians were taken to a hospital for medical exams before being moved to a detention center.

A Christian Rohingya told The Wire that police took him in while his wife was in the hospital recovering from a miscarriage. “They asked me to take off all my clothes and beat me repeatedly,” he told the publication. “After that they made me sit in a squatting position and beat me on the thighs.”

Shalom said that when the police couldn’t find a refugee they were looking for, “they threatened his wife despite her having no knowledge of his whereabouts,” and “police encouraged local passersby to join beatings, telling crowds that the Christians were Pakistani terrorists involved in the recent Pahalgam [Kashmir] attacks.”

On May 7, Shalom received a 17-second call from his brother, John Anwar, from an unknown number. Anwar told him the refugees were being taken to the airport and would be deported back to Myanmar.

According to media reports, the Indian authorities took the refugees on a military aircraft to Sri Vijaya Puram (formerly Port Blair) in the Indian-owned Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Upon arrival, authorities confiscated their UN-refugee identity cards, money, and personal possessions before forcing them aboard Indian naval vessels.

Shalom’s brother told him that the naval officers blindfolded them and tied their hands tightly together. After hours in the same position, Anwar’s wrists began to bleed. He also said that an officer beat him when the man learned he was a Christian.

The officers then offered the refugees a choice between deportation to Myanmar or deportation to Indonesia. Desperate to avoid Myanmar, the refugees chose Indonesia. Finally, on May 9, the officers took off their restraints, gave them life jackets, and ordered them into the water. As the refugees swam toward shore, they discovered they had been deceived. Local fishermen confirmed they had reached Myanmar, not Indonesia.

Several of the refugees struggled from health conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and two women were recovering from recent miscarriages. Nazir noted that his mother faints due to her diabetes and said, “It scares me to death that they are both without their daily medicines and prescription.”

Legal challenges to India’s stringent immigration laws continue with limited success. According to media reports, a May 8 Supreme Court hearing provided no immediate relief, as the court refused to issue directions stopping deportations. The case has been scheduled for a hearing in July, leaving the community in limbo.

For Nazir and his three other brothers, the uncertainty about their parents’ survival has left them wavering between despair and faith. “I don’t know how they are being treated in Myanmar. How will they survive? How will they earn, and who will take care of them?”

As the community fears deportations and struggles with what to do as food dwindles, they continue to hold on to their faith.

“I don’t know what we will do and what our future step is,” Nazir said. “Death seems to be better than the life I am facing now. But thank God that I have Christ, and because of that I have hope that God will do something and make a way.”

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News

A Palestinian Christian Saw Carnage at Gaza Aid Distribution

Jill Nelson

Israel claims it did not fire directly at civilians. Witnesses tell a different story.

Mourners gather after Israeli soldiers opened fire and killed Palestinians trying to reach US aid in Rafah.

Anadolu / Contributor / Getty

When Osama Sawarih arrived at one of Gaza’s new aid-distribution centers around 5 a.m. on Sunday, he encountered a scene he said he’ll never forget. A crowd had been gathering in the southern city of Rafah for hours, many with empty bellies after a 12-week Israeli blockade led to severe food shortages. Sawarih’s stock of food was running dangerously low, and his kids, who range from ages 2 to 17, often eat only flatbread and rocket lettuce for dinner. Like many others in Gaza, his entire family was beginning to show signs of malnutrition.

Some people did not comply with instructions from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and attempted to bypass the line, he said. Then, snipers in vehicles and quadcopter drones fired at the crowd, said Sawarih, a Muslim-background believer who came to faith in Christ a decade ago. (Christianity Today agreed not to use his real name, as converts to Christianity face danger in Gaza.) Some people fled while others dropped to the ground to avoid the incoming bullets. Sawarih stayed low and covered his head with his hands until the shooting stopped 40 minutes later.

As the distribution began, he saw frantic people jumping over the bodies of people who died from gunfire, and he heard injured people screaming in pain. Some of the injured had relatives who could transport them to hospitals, but others had no one to help, he noted. In desperation to secure food, no one tried removing bodies from the streets, he said.

“I will not repeat this visit, not out of fear but because human dignity was trampled underfoot,” Sawarih said.

The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said 31 people died and 170 others were wounded. Israel claims it is “unaware of injuries caused by IDF troops’ fire” in Rafah.

The IDF published a video of masked Palestinian gunmen throwing stones and firing at Gazans seeking aid in Khan Younis, a village five miles away from Rafah, on Sunday. “Hamas is a murderous and brutal terror organization that starves the residents of Gaza,” the IDF said.

Sawarih agrees with the IDF’s characterization of Hamas and has confirmed Israeli claims of Hamas theft. Yet he disagrees with Israel’s account of the events in Rafah. He saw the dead and injured, and he’s confident the gunfire came from Israeli drones and snipers. He learned to identify the distinct sound of drone gunfire when his family lived in a school used as a shelter and he saw the drones and sniper vehicles.

Sawarih knew one of the aid seekers who died—a teacher named Maha Qudaih. “Maha was an example of a patient and hardworking teacher, but she fell victim to hunger, injustice, and oppression,” he said.

The US- and Israel-backed initiative is an attempt to restore delivery of vital food and medicine to Gaza while preventing Hamas from stealing the aid. The United Nations has downplayed the extent of Hamas’s theft and boycotted the plan, warning of displacement and Israeli manipulation of aid.

The Rafah distribution site is one of four in southern Gaza that launched last week as part of the recently created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). US security contractors are overseeing the food distributions while the IDF secures the perimeter.

GHF claims it distributed 4.7 million meals at multiple distribution sites throughout the past week and denied the existence of any major incidents. Yet the organization Doctors Without Borders said its teams treated patients with gunshot wounds at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis who testified to Israeli drone, sniper, and helicopter fire in Rafah “from all sides.”

Khalil Sayegh, a Palestinian Christian and political analyst who lived in Gaza until 2009, said everyone he had talked to there confirmed the Israeli military had attacked those waiting for food.

The Times of Israel was among several news outlets that reported on the chaos plaguing the new distribution sites and included eyewitness accounts of IDF troops opening fire.

The report noted “giant crowds of tens of thousands of people [that] have overwhelmed the facilities, sometimes breaking fences to reach food boxes that they say quickly ran out.” Sawarih said the mechanisms for distribution did not account for the sheer number of people who flooded the sites and the shortfall of food. Many Gazans left empty-handed.

Despite the dangers in Rafah, Sawarih made it to the front of the line and took home ten pounds of lentils, three cans of beans, two pounds of flour, and one pound of pasta. He also found two hedgehogs outside his family’s tent and added them to Monday’s dinner—a feast according to wartime Gaza’s standards.

After dinner, the ground shook from an Israeli airstrike nearby. He could see black smoke even though the sun had already set. “God takes care of us,” Sawarih said. “I hope this war and suffering will soon end.”

Editor’s note: This report was updated to clarify Sawarih’s account.

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News

Sean Feucht Accused of Mismanaging Millions in Ministry Revenue

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

On a new whistleblower site, former employees call for the evangelist to be “removed from positions of leadership and financial stewardship.”

Sean Feucht

Rebecca Noble / AFP via Getty Images

For years, in city after city, Christy Gafford would invite Christians to come pray and worship with Sean Feucht.

“It’s time to take back this ground for the Kingdom!” she wrote on Facebook as Feucht toured state capitols in 2023 and 2024. She shared a picture of demonstrators waving flags on the capitol lawn in Salem, Oregon, and a clip of praise dancers twirling in the rotunda of the Austin, Texas, statehouse.

Gafford said she saw God on the move through Feucht and his ministry. She served for eight years leading a local chapter of Feucht’s Burn 24-7 prayer movement, eventually becoming a national director and communications director for the organization.

But this week, Gafford and four other former leaders denounced Feucht, saying they can “no longer encourage anyone to partner with him in any ministry capacity” and calling for him to be “removed from positions of leadership and financial stewardship.”

The former leaders published a report Sunday listing allegations of mismanagement and claiming that the preacher and right-wing protester avoided accountability as his ministries’ annual revenue shot up into the millions.

Feucht—a former Bethel Church worship leader whose Let Us Worship events took off during the COVID-19 pandemic—has founded multiple organizations over the years, including Sean Feucht Ministries, Burn 24-7, Let Us Worship, Light a Candle, Hold the Line, and Camp Elah.

The long-haired musician unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Republican in California in 2020 and has made conservative politics a prominent part of his ministry brand, repeatedly leading worship at the White House under President Donald Trump. Most recently, Feucht has been drawing crowds for pop-up “worship protests” in Boston and Philadelphia.

On the website truthandfreedomstories.com, the former employees shared details from financial records and firsthand accounts of mismanagement. They describe Feucht bringing in people in with his sense of evangelistic mission but underpaying staff, overstating attendance at his events, diverting donations, and failing to properly disclose spending.

Feucht has not publicly responded to the report and did not yet reply to CT’s request for comment.

As noted last year by MinistryWatch, Sean Feucht Ministries’ revenue jumped from $283,526 to $5.3 million between 2019 and 2020 as Feucht’s worship protests gained traction around the US. But because Feucht petitioned the IRS to classify Sean Feucht Ministries and Let Us Worship as churches, the organizations have not released income and expense reports since.

“The form 990 is an essential document that allows donors to evaluate the effectiveness of a ministry,” said Warren Cole Smith, president of MinistryWatch. “We have no idea how much Sean Feucht is making. It’s no surprise that we’re seeing former employees come forward with concerns.”

The former leaders accused Feucht of failing to track expenses or keep receipts, using ministry cards for personal expenses at times, and not reporting income from merchandise sales.

Richie Booth, who worked as a volunteer providing administrative support for Burn 24-7, Light a Candle, and Let Us Worship, claimed that workers were underpaid or not paid at all, blocked from viewing credit card statements, and treated as staff but not reported in tax filings.

A form 990 filed in 2020 for Sean Feucht Ministries, prior to the reclassification, lists Feucht as the only paid employee along with 36 independent contractors, though the whistleblowers said that several worked over 40 hours a week.

The whistleblowers’ site documents ten properties that Feucht personally owns in California, Montana, and Pennsylvania and millions of dollars worth of properties classified as tax-exempt parsonages owned by his ministries in California and Washington, DC.

Smith previously told The Roys Report that despite having over $5 million in revenue in 2020, Feucht’s ministry “spent only about $1.1 million on ministry expenses. That means the ministry’s assets ballooned to more than $4.5 million. There is nothing wrong with growth, but it seems reasonable to expect that a ministry with more than $4 million in cash should be spending more money on the ministry it has promised to do.”

Burn 24-7 has a three-member global board (which includes Feucht) and a four-member global leadership team. The organization accepts online donations on a landing page that assures donors “100% of profits go directly to our work around the world.”

The donation webpage for Sean Feucht Ministries says that donations “will be immediately invested back into the various needs of the ministry as we continue the mandate God has given us.” The site accepts donations of cash, cryptocurrency, or stocks.

Feucht’s humanitarian organization Light a Candle—which shares a P.O. box in Redding, California, with Sean Feucht Ministries—continues to post financial reports on its website. Its most recent 990 shows $1.1 million in revenue in 2022. The form lists Feucht as one of four trustees, with a salary of $48,000, but does not disclose any compensation from related organizations. It also indicates that Light a Candle has no volunteers, which the whistleblowers say is false.

Gafford, who worked for Burn 24-7 from 2016 to 2024, said Feucht would take the stage at events but didn’t engage behind the scenes.

“I have overlooked the gross negligence of the leadership, I have excused Sean for being apostolic or [director Adam Miller] for being at capacity and just simply taken on more responsibility myself,” Gafford wrote in her testimony. “Yet now I see things somewhat differently and know the deep impact that leadership has on someone.”

She wrote that Mike Bickle’s downfall at the International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Kansas City caused her to reexamine the culture of her own organization. Gafford lost her position last year over communication around Burn 24-7 UK’s decision to part ways with the global movement.

Another former Burn 24-7 leader and cosigner of the report, Liam Bernhard, alleges that Feucht called him “communist,” “fascist,” and “woke” when he asked questions about the organization’s financial practices.

For Feucht, his ministry platform has high stakes. He positions his worship events as a weapon or force to counter darkness in society, an idea that reflects his background at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, said Emily Snider Andrews, assistant professor of music and worship at Samford University.

“Bethel will use words like invading or infiltrating to describe their mission,” said Snider Andrews. “And worship becomes the means to carry out revival in our world.”

Peter and Amanda Hartzell, former directors whose leadership dates back to the early years of Burn 24-7 at Oral Roberts University, joined the ministry because of the urgent sense of mission and significance Feucht presented. They left in 2010.

“The stories coming out more recently reflect the same stuff we saw when we were working with him,” like people with full-time jobs working nearly full-time for the ministry as well, said Peter Hartzell. Only now, “the organization has more resources.”

Snider Andrews said that cult of personality is not unique to Bethel, IHOP, or charismatic Christianity, but she does see a connection between Bethel’s structure and an emerging “spiritual economy” that allows entrepreneurial evangelists like Feucht to gain prominence. “The people at the top of this spiritual economy are true ‘worship influencers,’” she said. “There is a way to look at this as selling worship.”

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Feucht has continued to hold worship events and post dozens of times on social media since the former employees’ report released on Sunday.

On Monday, he wrote, “The spirit of offense is entangling an entire generation in a perpetual cycle where victimhood becomes the highest virtue … Life is too short to live in constant offense. It makes you barren, mean and grumpy.”

His next Let Us Worship events take place this weekend in Los Angeles and Colorado.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Ideas

Q&A: Stanley Hauerwas on Alasdair MacIntyre

Interview by Carter Crockett

A conversation about the late moral philosopher’s life, work, and wit.

Alasdair MacIntyre

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Late last month, Alasdair MacIntyre passed away at the age of 96. Best known for his book After Virtue, he was one of the most significant moral philosophers of our time. Over the course of a career that spanned 70 years, he authored more than 20 books and 200 scholarly papers.

MacIntyre was born in Glasgow, was educated in England, and began teaching and publishing at the University of Manchester when he was just 22 years old. He taught at a variety of universities (Leeds, Oxford, Boston, Vanderbilt, Yale, Duke, and more) before settling as a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

His theological positions also varied. He once considered becoming a Presbyterian minister, later became Anglican, then became an atheist. Influenced by the writings of Thomas Aquinas, MacIntyre converted to Catholicism at age 55 and remained devout. He believed nature and grace were mutually enriching, yet his case for virtue could be made on secular grounds, available to those without theological convictions.

I was first introduced to MacIntyre’s case for virtue as a doctoral student in Scotland. Understanding his ideas required careful reading, but comprehending them felt like lifting a veil. MacIntyre’s moral framework helped me to see the world differently. His writing could be abstract and technical, but it held implications for ordinary life. He made me want to be a better chess player, a better craftsman, a better citizen. His work gave me the historical and philosophical credibility to speak of purpose and excellence for Christian and secular audiences alike.

His intellectual depth and consistency will reverberate well beyond the field of philosophy. MacIntyre’s work has broad implications for sociology, psychology, theology, and politics. He drew on sources from across millennia, reintroducing a moral paradigm from ancient Greece with profound implications for today.

Although many contemporary ethicists dwell on the personal choices of individuals, MacIntyre called for construction of local communities where wise individuals, meaningful practices, and community aspirations could simultaneously flourish. MacIntyre was both provocative and brilliant, and his legacy is immense. He offered practical hope by describing exemplars in contexts as diverse as a Scottish fishing village or the United States Supreme Court.

Those who knew him best also understood his acerbic wit and his kindness. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas was a close friend and colleague, and he shared his recollections and reflections with CT late last month. This interview has been edited and condensed.

When you met, what was your first impression of Alasdair MacIntyre?

I was scared s—less. He had mental powers that were unusual, but I was also so taken with his work.

We may have first met at the University of Notre Dame, where he was giving lectures. After one lecture, there was a reception, and I was talking with Alasdair, and he said, “You and I ought to edit a series of books.” I was dumbfounded that he wanted me to be a joint editor. But we did an anthology of essays, Revisions, and continued to interact after that.

When I first discovered his work, After Virtue had not come out yet, but in my dissertation at Yale, I had hit upon the work of Aristotle and the importance of the virtues. At that point, Alasdair hadn’t yet really started to develop the theme of virtue, but he was doing a lot of philosophy and social science, and the moral psychology he was developing was quite compelling for me.

He could be very funny—like in Whose Justice, Which Rationality, he jokes about The New York Times as the village newspaper.

Or I was once talking to him when he was at Vanderbilt University. I said, “The world is really in terrible shape, and I don’t know what to do about it.” And Alasdair said, “Well, I do: Blow it up!” I said, “Alasdair, there are some people out there with some very big bombs. Are you really sure you would do it? I don’t know how you would do it.” And he said, “With matches.”

MacIntyre believed every human being has a natural desire for happiness, which is only achieved by union with God. I suppose that was later in his career, though, after he had departed from some of his early Marxist ideas and aligned more with Thomas Aquinas.

Well, he once remarked to me that he thought one of his major accomplishments as a thinker was to get Marxists and Thomists in discussion again, because he thought that they shared much in common—and I believe it’s true—that the moral philosophies of both Marx and Aquinas owed much to Aristotle. Alasdair thought Aristotelianism had an understanding of practical reason that produced people capable of reasoning well in a way that few other traditions could. One of the important intellectual developments for Alasdair was his understanding of Aquinas as being more Aristotelian than Aristotle himself.

In After Virtue, there’s a passage where he says the “problems of modern moral theory emerge clearly as the product of the failure of the Enlightenment project,” and so on. What that is suggesting is that his work involves historical development—he’s trying to show how the everyday lives of people, in fact, exhibit an intellectual position.

MacIntyre was a philosopher, and the lives of philosophers exhibit the cultural possibilities of any moment. But he did what many philosophers don’t do, and that’s read books that are not philosophy. I was talking to him a few weeks before he died, and I asked him what he was reading. He said, “Dante.” I mean, what philosophers read Dante?

How did his work contribute to your own?

Well, I was developing accounts of virtue before Alasdair. That’s a silly thing to say, because what’s important is not who got there first but whether we have anything interesting to say.

One of his books that’s notable but too often ignored is Dependent Rational Animals . He challenges the Enlightenment presumption that what it means to be a human being is to be an independent entity in and of itself. That was a very important book for him.

He kidded and said that starting with A Short History of Ethics and running through After Virtue, Whose Justice, and Dependent Rational Animals, he had written a very long “short” book on the development of ethics. But each of those books has insights that are unique and need to be celebrated.

Also, every year, philosopher David Solomon had an event at Notre Dame in biomedical ethics, and every one of those years, Alasdair gave the keynote paper—and he didn’t publish any of them. So one of the things we have to look forward to is those papers coming out. I’m sure somebody’s thinking about it.

I think we also might call attention to his last book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity. He ends the book with small biographies of four people to show how you need to display the lives of people in order to discover what it meant for them to reason in terms of practical character. And the people that he chose to highlight, many people would be surprised.

Is there anything else you want to convey to those who have limited familiarity with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre?

Don’t ignore him. Don’t ignore him, even though you may be intimidated by him.

- More from Carter Crockett

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