by | Jul 30, 2024 | Uncategorized
Presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed a month before the 2018 election. Polarization and Christian nationalism has only grown since then.
On September 6, 2018, the eve of Brazil’s Independence Day, a crowd of people was carrying Jair Bolsonaro through the streets of Juiz de Fora when a man approached and stabbed the then-presidential candidate in the abdomen.
Bolsonaro was rushed to the hospital; the knife had damaged his small intestine and a nearby vein, causing heavy internal bleeding. The injuries kept him in the hospital for more than three weeks during the heat of the presidential campaign.
“God acted and deflected the knife,” said Bolsonaro’s son Flávio within hours of the event.
Though Bolsonaro didn’t exit the attack on his life with a fist pump and look of defiance, his recovery from the assassination attempt nevertheless energized his base and grew his supporters, including among significant numbers of evangelical Christians, who would propel him to the presidency a couple months later.
Just weeks before the attack, polls showed 26 percent of Brazilian evangelicals, which includes both mainstream Protestants as well as neo-Pentecostals, backing Bolsonaro. After the stabbing, that number rose to 36 percent. By the first round of elections on October 7, 48 percent of evangelicals voted for Bolsonaro, a number that increased to 69 percent during his winning November run-off.
Prior to the incident, Bolsonaro had not been shy in his attempts to court the evangelical vote. Journalist Ricardo Alexandre notes in his book E a Verdade Vos Libertará: Reflexões Sobre Religião, Política e Bolsonarismo:
In August 2018, during an interview with GloboNews, the then-candidate declared, “I am a Christian,” and, suggesting the supernatural nature of his success, continued, “Look at the popular …
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by | Jul 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
As he prepares for the Paris Olympics, wrestler Kyle Snyder talks about how faith helped him loosen up and love his teammates.
Kyle Snyder, the youngest US wrestler to ever win Olympic gold in 2016, is competing in the Olympics again this year with Team USA, now as a more veteran member of the team.
He has many other accolades, including three NCAA championships, two world championships, and a silver medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The top wrestling competitors are the US, Russia, and Iran, which adds geopolitical zest to the bouts, Snyder noted.
Snyder and I met in Philadelphia—he lives and trains in State College, Pennsylvania—before he headed out to France. Olympic wrestling events begin August 5.
Your faith came about through wrestling, right?
I’ve always been addicted to sports. I wanted to be in the NFL. And then I stopped growing. So I thought, I guess I’ll try to be the best wrestler. I had a lot of success and I won, but I wasn’t wrestling to my potential because I was afraid of losing. I felt like if I lost, then I wouldn’t be as valuable a person, and I’d be embarrassed. I would get tight and not be able to compete even near to the way I could practice.
I moved to the Olympic training center my senior year of high school, and the coaches asked me to start coming to a Bible study with them. I said, “Yeah, I’ll go.” I would jump off a bridge if they told me to. I just wanted to win world and Olympic titles, and if they thought studying the Bible would help, then I’d do it. So I went to the Bible studies. Never read a Bible before. I used to think, How can anyone read it? It’s so big, and the words are so small. But I started enjoying the stories from the Bible. And then I moved to Ohio State and started going to Bible studies there.
But I wasn’t fully committed. I …
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by | Jul 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
Ayetoro was founded to be a city on a hill. Now it’s facing a watery apocalypse.
Thompson Akingboye is old enough to remember a time when the ocean was not a threat to his home in the coastal town of Ayetoro in Nigeria’s southwestern Ondo State. That was back in 1997, when he was just nine years old.
But in the 2000s, the storm surges began, and then everything changed.
Homes, factories, schools, and maternity clinics built up over the town’s long history began to be slowly consumed by the water.
Ayetoro, meaning “happy city” in Yoruba, is home to more than 10,000 people. It is a theocratic Christian fishing community. Since it was founded in 1947, it has been run by the Ogeloyinbo, or traditional ruler, who is also the head of the town’s charismatic Holy Apostles Community Church.
Today, even that church, around which much of the town’s communal life revolves, has been impacted. It has had to be moved three times in recent years, and the waves are lapping ever closer to its present location.
“Our common prayer in the church is seeking God’s intervention to touch the heart of the government to answer our plight,” Akingboye, now 36 and the spokesman for the town’s youth congress, told CT.
That intervention would involve reclaiming the land that has already been lost to the sea and building up levees, dikes, and seawalls that can withstand the waves, experts say.
Ayetoro’s people are historically self-sufficient, but a project this big is beyond the abilities of even its most able artisans, Akingboye said. Appeals have been made at every level of government: local, regional, and state.
“No tangible respite has come,” he said. “The land continues to be eroded, houses continued to collapse into the sea, people continued to die.” …
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by | Jul 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
At the Paris Olympics, songs from South Africa to Peru will call for divine protection and blessing.
Often, the most moving moments of the Olympic Games are when athletes climb onto the podium to receive their gold medals as their country’s anthem plays. When Hidilyn Diaz won the women’s 55-kilogram class in weightlifting at the Tokyo Olympics in July 2021, it was the Philippines’ first-ever gold medal in any sport. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she heard her country’s national anthem, “Lupang Hinirang,” play for the first time at the Olympics.
The pageantry around today’s Olympic award ceremonies are a 20th-century invention. The Olympic podium debuted at the Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games in 1932, and the tradition of raising the flags as the champion’s national anthem plays began at the Summer Olympic Games later that year in Los Angeles.
As the Paris Olympics progresses and national anthems sound in living rooms around the world, CT has put together short explainers of five anthems full of Christian references and themes. While the most well-known Christian anthem in the world—and the oldest—is the UK’s “God Save the King,” little is known about its origins, so we instead featured anthems from New Zealand, Suriname, Peru, St. Kitts and Nevis, and South Africa.
“God Defend New Zealand”
God of Nations at Thy feet,
In the bonds of love we meet,
Hear our voices, we entreat,
God defend our free land.
Guard Pacific’s triple star
From the shafts of strife and war,
Make her praises heard afar,
God defend New Zealand.
The New Zealand Saturday Advertiser published Irish journalist Thomas Bracken’s five-stanza poem “God Defend New Zealand” in 1876. Declaring it a new national hymn, the newspaper asked readers …
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by | Jul 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
Leader explains why members of the World Evangelical Alliance visited leaders of China’s government-sanctioned Three-Self churches.
Anyone wanting to bring together the more than 100 million Chinese-speaking Christians around the world must deal with the thorny issue of the church in China. There, Christians are split between unregistered house churches and the government-sanctioned Three-Self church. Additionally, heated differences in political views make it difficult for the global Chinese-speaking church to unify.
Nevertheless, global evangelical leaders want to bring this community together. Last week, a delegation from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) traveled to China to meet with the leaders of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and the China Christian Council (CCC)—which are both overseen by the Chinese Communist Party—and offered them an invitation to collaborate.
The WEA launched the World Chinese Christianity Alliance (WCA) a year ago to serve the Chinese-speaking church with a think tank, publishing house, and media center, along with academic exchanges, resource sharing, and trainings.
Ezekiel Tan, general secretary of both the WCA and the Evangelical Alliance of Singapore, spoke with CT about the WCA’s aims, its current progress, and the unique challenges it faces as it brings together ethnic Chinese from around the world. (In the article, the term Chinese refers to all ethnic Han people regardless of where they reside.)
The WCA is the WEA’s first language-based network, instead of its typical location-based network. Why was Mandarin Chinese chosen to pioneer this?
Mandarin Chinese is our first endeavor because Chinese speakers are unique: They are overwhelmingly ethnically Han Chinese and share the same ancestry from China. Other international language groups, such as Arabic and Spanish, include people from …
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