by | Aug 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
How a new class division burst into American evangelicalism—and what it means for church unity.
The United States is now in the throes of the politics of class division, and American evangelicalism is no exception.
College-educated evangelical Christians may be the least prepared for this new class-based polarization, because it doesn’t break along old class fault lines. As recently as two decades ago, social class in the US was primarily determined by income or wealth, “haves” pitted against “have-nots.”
But today’s most intractable class divide is about education, and educated evangelicals are having a hard time navigating this split. After all, the college-educated are a minority among white evangelicals, only 29 percent of whom have four-year college degrees.
I say this—as an evangelical with not only a four-year degree but a PhD—not to seek pity for the new educational elite. We don’t need commiseration. But we do need unity in the body of Christ. So what should we do when our education divides us from our Christian brothers and sisters? What do we do when the values we’ve acquired from our schooling lead us down a political path that many non-college-educated evangelicals view as dangerously wrong?
It’s only in recent years that education has become such an important political predictor. “Among white voters, in particular, individuals with at least a college degree are now a much more Democratic constituency than people with less schooling,” The New York Times reports. Meanwhile, whites without a college degree are moving rapidly into the Republican Party.
This is a reversal of traditional patterns, because, for many decades, the GOP was the party of the affluent and upper middle class, while Democrats relied heavily …
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by | Aug 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
Evangelical school sees discrimination in COVID-19 relief fund’s employee-counting rules.
Gordon College could be on the hook to repay $7 million of COVID-19 relief funds. A federal court rejected eight of the evangelical school’s arguments that it should be eligible for loan forgiveness.
Gordon’s lawyers made the case that the religious liberty protections in the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act should allow the institution to count employees in a different way than the US Small Business Administration (SBA) said they had to be counted. The US district court in Washington, DC, rejected the argument, citing a lack of evidence.
“Plaintiff alleges no facts connecting its number of employees to any religious practice,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in a ruling handed down in July. “Plaintiff fails to identify any ‘exercise of religion’ that has been burdened, and thus plaintiff’s claims can be dismissed on this basis alone.”
According to the government, Gordon has 639 employees on its wooded campus on the North Shore of Boston. Some of those people only work part time, however. So the school calculated the full-time equivalent, which is a common way to track enrollment in higher education. If you don’t tally individual people working at the school, but instead count units of time worked, Gordon only has 495.67 employees.
Organizations with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loan forgiveness.
The government gave out nearly $800 billion as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020. The vast majority of recipients have since had their debt waived. Gordon is an exception.
In court filings, the law firm Gammon and Grange said the SBA’s …
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by | Aug 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
Why a group of multi-ethnic editors began working on a new commentary of the New Testament.
I was sitting in a coffee shop, books taking up too much space on the tiny table in front of me, bemoaning the lack of attention the academy paid to the Black church and the distinctive interpretative habits of African American church leaders and scholars. My time in religious higher education had signaled, in ways large and small, its belief that the tradition that shaped me had little to say to the rest of the world.
The important ideas and trends arose in Europe or white North American spaces—Black Christians, on the other hand, were historically deemed theologically simplistic or dangerous. But I longed for people to know the tradition as I experienced it: life-giving, spiritually robust, and intellectually stimulating. We had wrestled with God and found our way toward faith in the context of anti-Black racism often perpetuated by other Christians. I wanted to make that story and the fruits of our labor known. I still do.
While I sipped my coffee, I was struck by an idea that served as the genesis for The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Commentary on the New Testament. I often complained about white scholars neglecting African American voices, but I knew little about Asian American biblical interpretation, its theological and historical developments, and the gifts it offered to the body of Christ. The same was true regarding Latino interpretation and the Bible-reading habits of First Nations and Indigenous peoples.
In some ways, I was a hypocrite. I wanted people to attend to the contributions of my community without being similarly invested in others. I needed to spend less time complaining and more time listening. The New Testament in Color thus began with that insight. It was a hope …
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by | Aug 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
A Supreme Court lawyer on how recent legal reforms could affect the country’s minorities.
On June 23, authorities arrested Sarju Prasad, a pastor in Uttar Pradesh, for conducting Sunday worship in his house. Earlier that day, two Hindu men, one claiming to be a journalist, had entered his house during the morning service and taken photographs.
That evening, two policemen detained Prasad on charges of plans to commit cognizable offenses. However, their explanations only came out later; at the time, they did not notify him of the grounds of arrest, a violation of India’s Code of Criminal Procedure. They also ignored the procedure’s requirement that the offender be brought before a judge within 24 hours of being taken into custody.
Instead, Prasad was only presented before a magistrate two days later and was released on bail on June 25. Shortly after, on July 2, while collecting his cell phone at the police station, authorities re-arrested him, saying that he had violated the state’s anti-conversion law. This time, he was denied bail and is now in prison.
Prasad’s case is just one of many where the local police have allegedly colluded with Hindu extremists and arrested Christians conducting peaceful prayers, tyrannizing their rights. Indian Christians are apprehensive about what might happen under the new criminal laws that have replaced their three British-era counterparts. Described as “draconian” by some legal experts, the legislation has elicited criticism and protests, and Christian, Muslim, and other vulnerable communities fear possible abuses of the new laws.
The Parliament of India approved the three new laws last December without following due process, according to the opposition. They replaced the Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the Code of Criminal …
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