by | Jan 22, 2024 | Uncategorized
Even with the recent release of imprisoned priests, Ortega’s regime continues to target Christian organizations with an “absolute intolerance for dissent.”
Bad news has been the norm for Catholics in Nicaragua, where clergy and church groups have been frequent targets of a wide-ranging crackdown for years. But on January 14, 2024, they received a happy surprise: The government unexpectedly released two bishops, 15 priests and two seminary students from prison and expelled them to the Vatican.
Those released included Bishop Rolando Álvarez, a high-profile political prisoner who was detained in 2022 for criticizing the government and then sentenced to 26 years in prison for alleged treason.
They also included priests detained by President Daniel Ortega’s government in late December 2023 for expressing solidarity with Álvarez and other political prisoners. Days later, Pope Francis criticized the regime in his New Year’s message and then called for “respectful diplomatic dialogue.”
Nearly six years after mass protests erupted against Ortega and then were brutally repressed, these prisoner releases offer some hope to Nicaragua’s opposition. As my research has shown, however, the Ortega regime is unrelenting in trying to retain power, which suggests this is not necessarily a turning point. In fact, the government reportedly took yet another priest into custody on January 16.
Why target the church?
Ortega first led Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, after his left-wing revolutionary organization, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN, spearheaded the overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. In the 1980s, the FSLN clashed with the Vatican and church hierarchy over the group’s socialist politics, even as many poorer Nicaraguan Catholics embraced them.
When Ortega took office again in 2007, however, he did so with the blessing of …
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by | Jan 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
As a once-beloved president ends his term in controversy, church leaders don’t see a clear front-runner in February’s elections.
Last October, the reputation of Indonesia’s widely respected president took a fateful hit.
Led by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s brother-in-law, the Constitutional Court of Indonesia dropped the age limit for presidential and vice-presidential candidates if they previously held elected regional office. Conveniently, this paved the way for Jokowi’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36, to run as vice president for front-runner Prabowo Subianto in the February 14 presidential elections.
“That is the worst thing to happen to our democracy,” said Yonky Karman, a lecturer at Jakarta Theological Seminary. “This [upcoming] election is orchestrated by the incumbent to offer his preferred candidate, and the worst thing is that he made a way for his eldest son to run as vice president by changing the election law.”
Five years ago, 97 percent of non-Muslims voted for Jokowi. This time, Christians are divided in their support.
In the world’s third-largest democracy, Muslims make up 87 percent of the population while Christians make up 10 percent. For Christians, the most important issue when voting in an election is maintaining their rights as a minority religion. Because of this, they largely supported Jokowi in the past two elections.
Yet this time, the decision is trickier. Ex-general Prabowo is a former longtime rival of Jokowi, who later joined the president’s coalition and served as defense minister. Christians worry that, in the past two elections, he had the backing of radical Muslim groups.
Prabowo is running against Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo, both former governors. Anies is no stranger to the headlines either, after accepting support from radical Muslims who …
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by | Jan 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
The fifth annual index by a leading law firm finds that friendship is key to maintaining gains amid polarization and the shifting emphasis of Gen Z.
American support for religious freedom is trending in the right direction.
Rebounding from COVID-19 lows in 2020, the Becket Religious Freedom Index registered a new high in 2023 in its annual monitoring of “first freedom” resilience in the United States. Amid widespread political polarization, core support for the right of individuals to live according to their faith remains strong.
“Despite some efforts to turn religion into a scapegoat for our nation’s problems, most Americans believe that religion—and religious freedom—are key to solving them,” said Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of Becket. “As we celebrate Religious Freedom Day, we should remember that religious liberty remains the cornerstone of our effort to form a more perfect union.”
Results were released on January 16, marking Virginia’s 1786 passage of the statute for religious freedom which became the basis for the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Initially led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the day has been commemorated in the United States ever since a presidential proclamation in 1993.
Either three centuries or 30 years later, there should be no “sky-is-falling narratives about American culture,” summarized the report.
Featuring 21 questions across six categories, the annual index measures perspectives on the First Amendment. Now in the report’s fifth year, Becket polled a nationwide sample of 1,000 Americans in October, scoring their opinions from 0 (complete opposition) to 100 (robust support).
The composite score is 69, one point higher than last year and up three points from 2019.
Becket’s report asserts the religious impulse is natural to human beings, and …
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by | Jan 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
Rules and moral codes won’t save us in an era of judgment, hate, and superego. What will save us is mercy.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Years ago, I talked with someone who told me how hard it was to keep a moral grounding in the sex-fueled drinking atmosphere of his college. That’s not unusual, but then he told me more about his college.
Turns out it wasn’t a party school but a fundamentalist separatist Christian college, where holding the hand of a date would get a student suspended and dancing would get a student a ticket back home. It’s the kind of place where the student conduct manual is longer than the federal code for maintaining nuclear reactors.
I said, “So in spite of all that strictness, the people there were wild?” He said, “The people there were wild because of all the strictness.”
He went on to talk about getting in trouble for listening to a contemporary Christian music artist (the beat is too worldly) or for his hair being too long or for breaking some other regulation.
“After a while, you start to lose the sense of what’s really bad and what’s not,” he said. “Your conscience gets broken when you know you’re going to be a rule breaker no matter what you do. Once that happens, it’s—well, it’s party time.”
I thought of that man as I read Mark Edmundson’s book The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World. Like in that conversation, my first thought when seeing this book was, What age of guilt? This is an age of shamelessness. His argument, though, was different than what I expected, and it’s one that those of us who are Christians should take seriously.
Politico’s Michael Schaffer sums up the fractured nature of American life right now this way: …
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by | Jan 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
He’s an East African researcher for Open Doors. The work has counterintuitively affected his faith.
Nearly two decades ago, Fikiru joined a prayer and Bible study group in his hometown in East Africa, an experience that led him to accept Christ as his personal savior. But Fikiru soon found that other Christians in the area vehemently opposed his and the rest of his community’s conversions. Over a period of months, these Christians accused the others of blasphemy, forced their spouses to divorce them and their families to cut them off, and in some cases beat and killed them.
One Sunday, in the aftermath of this persecution, several staff members of the global Christian persecution advocacy group Open Doors stopped by.
“We’d never met them,” said Fikiru. “We’d never heard of them.”
But Open Doors had heard of his church and how it was suffering. They had a simple message for Fikiru: You are not alone.
Within a couple of years, Fikiru (CT is using his pseudonym for security reasons) took a job at Open Doors.
“I’m trying to pay back for the love and concern that was shown to me while I was a persecuted believer,” said the research analyst for East Africa, an area that runs from Eritrea to Mozambique. “I do this role with passion and spirit.”
Fikiru recently spoke with global managing editor Morgan Lee about how he fact-checks persecution claims, the surprising impact this work has had on his faith, and how he cares for staff members who are worn down from this work.
How do you help staff who get burned out or secondarily traumatized hearing so many stories of devastation, destruction, and violence?
Prayer. One of our core values emphasizes that we are people of prayer. We know that we are serving the Lord, and these people are suffering for their faith. They are …
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