Hello, fellow wayfarers … Why American evangelical Christians ought to care about the dismantling of PEPFAR … How I’m both happy and sad that a brilliant friend is taking on questions of religion and science … What conversation was worth my getting hit last week by a delivery truck … For a Desert Island Playlist, I’ve gone to Carolina in my mind … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
PEPFAR and the Uneasy Conscience of American Christianity
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.
A Friend Tackles the Big Questions
The John Templeton Foundation—perhaps the most important nonprofit funder involved in questions of religion and science—announced this past week that their choice to be their next president is our CT colleague, CEO Tim Dalrymple.
In my selfishness, I’m sad about that. Tim has an unusual mix of attributes—intellectual brilliance, spiritual maturity, and polymathic organizational giftedness. He’s kind and wise and is the biggest reason why I was even willing to talk about coming here back in 2021. Watching him engage with Christians and non-Christians last year at his alma mater, Harvard, on matters ranging from astrophysics to prayer was, for me, the academic equivalent of watching Michael Jordan in his prime playing basketball, live and in person.
Plus, his wife, Joyce, is an amazing writer and speaker. Maria and I both loved learning from her about the women of the Book of Exodus in, of all places, Egypt, when we went together with some friends of CT.
But from the bigger viewpoint of the kingdom of God and the needs of the world, I couldn’t be happier. With the sorts of changes headed our way with the “Axial Decade” of artificial intelligence, networked humanity, and who knows what else, I can’t think of anyone more equipped than Tim Dalrymple to engage those questions and to lead the way for the rest of us. The John Templeton Foundation couldn’t have made a better choice.
A Conversation Worth Wrecking My Car
The other day I was over at my friend Andrew Peterson’s house when—as we were standing in his yard—I could see a delivery truck moving backward, at full speed, down the driveway, right toward my car, parked on the grass to the side of it. It took out the whole passenger-side back end of my car.
I called Maria (we live five minutes away) and said, intending to convey that I was fine because I was not near the collision, “I just got hit by a delivery truck; I wasn’t in the car.” Right at that moment, the driver came over, so I said abruptly, “I’ve got to go; I’ll call you back.” She heard that to mean the truck had hit me, walking (“I wasn’t in the car”). She immediately drove over and then told me I was like Michael Scott in the show The Office delivering the news about Meredith’s hospitalization after he hit her with his car (“The doctors did everything they could … and she’s going to be fine.”).
The whole thing was worth it, though, because the conversation AP and I had was fun and enlivening. We talk about the authors who “kept us Christian.” Now, I know that the Holy Spirit kept us Christian, so the title is kind of tongue-in-cheek. What I mean is the way God used certain books and writers at just the right times in our lives. We were influenced by a lot of the same people (Wendell Berry, Frederick Buechner, C. S. Lewis, etc.), and it was joyful to talk about how they changed us when we needed it.
We talked about how God uses stories, sentences, and even sword-wielding mice to reach us in moments of trial or doubt or suffering—disillusionment or despair. Along the way, we talked about what it means to read widely, to hold on to wonder, and to be the kind of Christians who can still be surprised by joy.
We also somehow ended up talking about Dungeons & Dragons, backward masking, and how ChatGPT was wrong and right about what books each of us would take to a desert island.
You can listen to it here. It was worth being hit by a delivery truck.
A Father’s Day Special
Lots of you liked the Mother’s Day special we had a few weeks ago, so let’s do one for the dads too.
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Desert Island Playlist
Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Bob Mayer from Charlotte, North Carolina:
- So, my playlist must start with Jimmy Buffett, the artist I’m listening to most these days. There are a ton of Buffet songs that could make this list, so I’ll go with “Take Another Road” off the 1989 Off to See the Lizard album.
- Jimmy saved his best for last with the posthumous 2023 Equal Strain on All Parts album. So, I’ll pick “Johnny’s Rhum” off this album. It’s one of my three favorite Buffet tunes.
- I’ve been playing Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry album for over 50 years and never tire of it. (An old friend and former student just gifted me an actual Tapestry gold record that proudly graced the walls of KROQ in Los Angeles for many years.) It’s hard to pick one tune, but I’ll go with “I Feel the Earth Move.”
- Before outlaw country, there was the 1968–75 Cosmic Cowboy era, and nobody personified it like Michael Martin Murphey. So many good songs to pick from, so I’ll choose my favorite: “High Country Caravan” from his 1976 album Flowing Free Forever. Kinda strange for a desert island, but hey, it’s my list.
- In 1968, The Beatles opened Apple Records, and one of the first albums released was Mary Hopkins’s Post Card.The 18-year-old (at the time) Welsh singer had an amazing voice, and one of the greatest 1960s songs was “Those Were the Days.” Indeed, they were.
- My all-time favorite album is Paul Simon’s 1986 Graceland. This is a CD that I pack on trips just so it won’t be far away. The title track, “Graceland,” makes me think of long drives through the American South, a region where, as Faulkner once wrote, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I heard Simon describe this as the best song he’s ever written, and I didn’t realize until recently that The Everly Brothers back him up here.
- James Taylor’s 1979 Flag album has a great Carole King tune, “Up on the Roof.”I got to hear James and Carole perform it live in 2010 (a true bucket-list concert), and the final 60 seconds where James invites us to climb the stairs and go “up on the roof” is one of music’s great moments.
- Since I was raised in Northern California and embraced the Christian faith in my San Francisco teenage years, I must include a Larry Norman song since he lived in SF at the same time I did. One of his lesser-known tunes off of the 1972 album Only Visiting This Planet is “The Great American Novel,” a haunting tune that reminds me that the current political situation now is much like it was then.
- Van Morrison has released so many albums since those mid-1960s days with his band Them. His 1990 album Enlightenment must be on the desert island with me. Ten great tracks, of which “In the Days Before Rock ’n’ Roll” is an incredible retrospective.
- The Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell writer/singer combination of the late 1960s and early ’70s led to some amazing music and my all-time favorite song, “Wichita Lineman.” It reminds me that the essence of our lives can often be found in the ordinary days of our existence and the calling that God gives each of us.
Thank you, Bob!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more children, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk’s contents to the young and never open it.”
—Annie Dillard
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (Random House)
- James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso)
- The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, eds. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Schocken)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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Moore to the Point
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