We Have Never Been Deplorable

by | Oct 8, 2024 | Uncategorized

By the time Hilary Clinton “put half of Trump’s supporters” into “the basket of deplorables” in 2016, I confess I was frustrated enough to largely agree with her—even though she was talking about people I cared about in communities like mine. It seemed simple to me at the time: If you don’t want to be called “deplorable,” maybe don’t behave so deplorably. 

Eight years later, I don’t need to rehash all the reasons I’d come to feel that way. The excesses of Trump and his loyalists are widely recognized, even among many Trump voters. My experience through those years is also familiar to many moderate evangelicals, who, like me, grew increasingly baffled as our faith leaders, friends, and family wholeheartedly endorsed a man who reflected none of our shared values, values that for so long we’d loudly insisted were bedrock and nonnegotiable. How could this be happening?

Though I’m ashamed to say it now, my confusion hardened into cynicism as I consumed a steady diet of commentary about the danger posed by MAGA voters. I grew arrogant, sure of my intellectual and moral superiority over people I’d come dangerously close to dismissing as backwater boors, and less and less aware of my own hubris (Prov. 16:18).

Then came the pandemic. By August of 2020, I was astonished at my own quick pivot—taken aback by how quickly I’d grown thankful to live in a deep red town. I wrote dispatches from West Texas for The New York Times and The Atlantic describing how good it was to live in an area that didn’t kill small businesses out of “an abundance of caution” or sacrifice our children’s educations on the altar of safety.

The responses I got from readers of legacy media in more progressive enclaves (some hate-filled death wishes, some longing for the normalcy I enjoyed) were eye-opening. In the more negative exchanges, I was baffled time and again by my correspondents’ inability to see how they’d become the very thing they hate: bigoted, closed-minded, arrogant, and incurious about the lives of people who are different from them. I ate a slice of humble pie and saw how I’d become enamored with the polished speech and polite niceties of the ruling class, so enchanted that I’d missed both the failures of those I’d grown to admire and the complexity of those I was tempted to deplore.

I still live in a politically conservative community, and I haven’t stopped wrestling with the apparent mismatch between values and votes in the years since. But I’m leaving my impatience and cynicism behind. Though I still share many of the core concerns of the anti-MAGA crowd, I’m wary of the broad, flat brush with which sophisticated politicos paint conservative, religious parts of the country like mine. By the time Trump left office, I’d grown to understand that it isn’t fair—let alone permissible for Christians (Matt. 5:44)—to deplore those who voted (or will vote) for him. 

But finding critical yet nuanced writing about my neighbors has been a challenge. Much of what comes from the progressive left—usually some version of the claim that all evangelical Republicans are white Christian nationalists who pose a dangerous threat to democracy—is reductive and one-dimensional. It doesn’t match the reality I see in my everyday life, where, for example, a Trump-voting Hispanic pastor provides shelter and resources to countless migrants.

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, a new book from sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, is an illuminating exception to that rule. For anyone genuinely curious about why working-class, culturally conservative Americans, many of them evangelical Christians, remain so loyal to Trump, We Have Never Been Woke is required reading. 

In a book that’s both granular in its detail and panoramic in its perspective, al-Gharbi builds a tightly argued case for how the “Great Awokening” is neither particularly novel nor particularly helpful to the marginalized and disenfranchised of American society. Drawing on both his working-class background and the experiences and expertise afforded by his access to some of the most hallowed halls of American academia, al-Gharbi understands that we can’t reduce the current political moment to a battle of blue heroes and red villains.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer a road map out of our political predicament. Yet for Christian readers, Never Been Woke’s conclusions suggest the church is uniquely positioned to help repair our divided society—if we can return to our first love (Rev. 2:4) and the love Jesus commands of us (Matt. 22:34–40).

Core to grasping al-Gharbi’s argument is his concept of “symbolic capitalists.” This is a group he defines as the academics, bureaucrats, consultants, journalists, and other “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis.” That is, they are our culture’s elites, often (but not always) wealthy, well educated, and enormously influential, with insatiable appetites for the one sort of capital that might be more useful than cold, hard cash when it comes to getting ahead these days: social currency.

One way symbolic capitalists amass more social currency is to champion social justice and the oppressed. But the main effect of their activism, al-Gharbi charges, is the advancement of their own agendas and personal success. 

That’s not an accusation of deception or even cynicism. These elites sincerely (and loudly) believe in ideals like equality and justice, Never Been Woke contends. Yet there’s a “profound gulf between symbolic capitalists’ rhetoric about various social ills and their lifestyles and behaviors ‘in the world.’” To put it plainly, in the parlance of evangelicals: They don’t practice what they preach.

From this premise, al-Gharbi ranges widely. In some ways, the book reads as a “theory of everything,” arguing that underneath the discord so often pinned on the bad behavior of working-class Republicans—people who don’t use the “right” words or put their pronouns in their bios—is a simmering pot of resentment stoked by cultural elites. 

Those most skilled at playing the rhetorical “virtue game” are at the top of the societal heap, and their displays of virtue do far less to help the underclass than to protect their own comfort and power. The “Great Awokening” is all fervor and no self-sacrificing love. It turns even well-meaning adherents into hardened ideologues serving a small and capricious god in their own image. It’s legalism, secular-style. 

In practice, this looks like calls to defund the police coming mostly from people who live in low-crime neighborhoods. It looks like spending big money to hire DEI experts instead of materially—maybe even self-sacrificially—improving the lives of the poor. It looks like self-identifying into marginalized groups (Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s history as a “Native American” is a prime example) that just so happen to give you a leg up on elite college and work applications.

It looks like calling for pandemic-era lockdowns while ordering DoorDash; or renaming a school named for a confederate general while doing little to ensure the minority students within are learning to read; or thrilling with enthusiasm at a Black Lives Matter march while being irritated by the homeless Black man on your block.

Or, to borrow the apostle Paul’s words, it looks like speaking in the tongues of men or of angels without having love (1 Cor. 13:1).

So we live in a society ruled by symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi writes, but significantly populated by people they deplore. The result is polarization and mutual disdain, with each side unwilling to give the other a fair hearing or take responsibility for its own sins and errors.

It reminds me of nothing so much as my daughters’ sisterly conflicts. Though I will not name names, one of my children is fiery and hot-tempered, while the other is into covert ops. Though they’re each guilty of instigating arguments, over the years I’ve learned that some of the trickiest situations to navigate start with the quiet provocateur deliberately pushing her less-restrained sister over the edge. When I intervene, she’s all innocence: “What did I do? She should have better self-control.” 

It’s easy to exclusively blame the child with the explosive reaction. It’s also, often, a mistake. And the same is true on a much larger scale. Yes, MAGA fanaticism is a problem. Racism and storming the Capitol are wrong. But the “deplorables” have real concerns that deserve to be heard, not manipulated and inflamed by opportunistic politicians. To refuse to listen to the story beneath the noise of outrage—even when the outrage is offensive and crass—only drives us further apart. 

As Christians, we should know this. Jesus’ answer to the problem al-Gharbi describes is for us to take seriously his command to love the least of these and to lay down our lives for our friends, including the ones in the red hats. It’s to meet with Nicodemus and to dine with Zacchaeus.

Al-Gharbi is not a Christian. After a crisis of faith resulted in his “abandoning a calling” to become a Catholic priest, he entered a season of atheism before converting to Islam. Some Christians, to their peril, will dismiss We Have Never Been Woke on this ground alone. Others will read with misplaced glee, touting it as a masterful book that “owns the libs.” Either response would miss an opportunity to grow in wisdom and love. 

I had a recurring thought as I read this book: I cannot believe he’s writing this. I cannot believe it’s getting published.This book doesn’t reflect well on the gatekeepers of all the institutions al-Gharbi needs on his side to succeed in his field. For that reason alone, many people would not have written this book or at least would have picked a different, softer angle. 

After all, al-Gharbi isn’t a right-wing pundit lobbing bombs at the left from a safe perch at Breitbart. As he repeatedly acknowledges, he’s a symbolic capitalist, too. He’s asking his peers to be honest with themselves about their complicity in America’s social breakdown. He doesn’t question their motives or principles, but he does reveal the tension produced when those principles are paired with a very human desire to maintain one’s advantages and to pass them on to one’s children.

That gentle example deserves imitation. What might it look like if more of us—Democrats and Republicans, elite and working class—took the time in the lead-up to the election to admit how our own behavior has failed the test of 1 Corinthians 13? What if we confessed that we also have conflicting desires and betrayed principles? How can we better listen for God calling us to honesty about ourselves, repentance where we have ignored or maligned our neighbors, and real service to others?

Christians are also uniquely positioned to respond to al-Gharbi’s warnings about modern identity politics, in which some groups are encouraged to take great pride in their identities while others are strongly discouraged from doing the same. As al-Gharbi explored in a conversation with political scientist Yascha Mounk, this “asymmetric multiculturalism” is celebrated on the left, but it’s socially unstable. We should lean into what unites us, he advises, instead of emphasizing differences and valuing some while denigrating others.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that actually it’s a lot easier for people to [get along] if you start by foregrounding things that people have in common—like ‘we’re all Americans’ or ‘we’re all Christians,’” al-Gharbi said in his conversation with Mounk. “One important path forward is to find ways of appealing and justifying and affirming superordinate values, superordinate identities, common goals, shared interests,” he continued. “If you can’t build things up—if you’re only focused on criticizing and deconstructing and problematizing and tearing things down—it’s really impossible to meaningfully sustain [shared] identities and shared goals and shared values.”

This is where the church can shine if we turn away from our political idols and self-aggrandizement and turn toward Jesus. We can remind one another that what we have in common in Christ is far more profound and significant than what separates us. We can move from that common ground to be agents of social repair in our communities. With God’s help, we can live and serve and even engage in politics in humble, practical, other-oriented love.

Despite his deconversion, al-Gharbi concludes We Have Never Been Woke by quoting Jesus in Matthew 6 and warning against “performative displays” of righteousness. That’s a problem on the left, the book’s main subject for critique, but it’s also a problem on the right and in every group of fallen, sinful humans. It’s a problem in my own heart. “Ultimately, Jesus argued, people have to choose what’s really important to them,” al-Gharbi writes, “and it’s a choice they make with their actions, not their words. You know the tree by its fruit.”

As I came to better understand in the years between 2016 and 2020, conservatives can rightfully dislike the rotten fruit of our cultural elites. But if we’re to fully benefit from al-Gharbi’s message, we must turn this scrutiny on ourselves as much as our political rivals: What fruit are we bearing? Is it carefully arranged to make us look righteous? Or is it good and abundant and beautiful and life-giving fruit, bringing glory to God and nourishment to all?

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.

The post We Have Never Been Deplorable appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Internet’s Sins Are Our Sins. But It Shouldn’t Escape All Blame.

by | Oct 8, 2024 | Uncategorized

Americans tend to be optimists about technology. We see it as a means of progress, comfort, wealth, and discovery. And why not? Technology has treated us well, and very few among us would pooh-pooh the engine, the hot water heater, the refrigerator, the word processor, the text message.

In technology—it might be a mild blasphemy to say—we live and move and have our being. Technology shapes how we work, travel, and eat—even how we think and write and speak to one another. And technology is increasingly digital: The mass of hardware and software we commonly sweep together as “the internet” reaches into ever more parts of our lives, if only invisibly.

But in the last decade, the internet has rather lost its sheen for select segments of the American public. This change should not be overstated; though a Jonathan Haidt–style tech skepticism generally prevails within elite media, Americans still use the internet, oppose smartphone bans in schools, and, on average, give children their first smartphones at the tender age of 11.

Yet we do have a growing sense of unease. Certainly, the kind of excitement that existed in 2008—fueled by hopefulness about social media’s role in politics—is long gone. We have become the internet’s accusers, as long-time journalist Jeff Jarvis argues in The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic. We allege misdeeds, he writes, ranging from polarizing “society into echo chambers” to “robbing us of our attention, altering our brains, making us stupid, and electing Donald Trump.”

Are these accusations unfair? I wanted to read Jarvis’s book because I’ve leveled a version of several myself and could fairly be called a tech skeptic. (My kids won’t have smartphones at 11.) But maybe I’ve been swept along too far toward pessimism. Maybe I’m beholden to an overblown moral panic. Maybe I’ve made the internet a scapegoat for sins not its own.

So I came to The Web We Weave to encounter a more considered tech optimism than the basic American instinct and to give that optimism a fair shake. Jarvis does make vital, if occasionally inconsistent, points about individual responsibility and state regulation. But his defense of the internet also wrongly presumes that technologies are neutral tools, uncritically embraces online living, blurs the line between journalism and advocacy, and misunderstands the biblical idea of covenant.

Responsibility and regulation

The most important takeaway of The Web We Weave is this: The internet’s sins are our sins, and we can repent of them. We are responsible for the digital landscape we’ve created, but we can also change it. We aren’t fated to the futures of sci-fi doom or glory.

“What the internet is, good and bad, is made of human accomplishment and human failure,” Jarvis writes. “All the ills the internet is accused of fostering—racism, divisiveness, injustice, inequity, ignorance—are not the fault of the technology. The technology did not cause them—we did.”

In one of several dips into religious language, Jarvis examines “the internet’s seven deadly sins,” It stands accused, in his telling, of encouraging hate, lies, greed, the corruption of youth, addiction, excess, and hubris. In every case, Jarvis concludes, the internet “is blamed as the cause of [these] ills when often it is merely a conduit for them.”

Generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT is especially adept at channeling human vice, for it uses scads of human-made content as its raw materials. The Web We Weave describes this AI as a sort of structural sin detector, able to observe and sketch contemporary human evil on a grand scale.

Jarvis is careful to clarify that his call for responsibility here is not a call for state regulation. He understands the problem of regulatory capture and supports Section 230, a widely misunderstood law that functions as the “Internet’s First Amendment” by protecting online platforms from legal liability for what their users post. He’s an ardent advocate of free speech, attuned to the danger of drawing a “legal line between good and bad speech,” the risk of panic-induced legislation, and the foolishness of imagining we can eradicate disinformation. He even rejects secondhand censorship, noting that laws forcing platforms to take down “legal but harmful” speech aren’t meaningfully different from direct suppression.

Tech as tool

Jarvis is at his most sensible on those themes. He recognizes that the underlying issue is human behavior and that laws are “ineffective at regulating” behavior “except in the extreme.”

In consequence, The Web We Weave proposes “different strategies” to reform our online conduct: “education, moral suasion, social pressure, and the public negotiation of norms.” In its efforts in these directions, however, the book falls short.

Undergirding many of Jarvis’s recommendations is an understanding of digital technologies as morally neutral tools. Much “like the printing press and steam, the transmitter and the automobile,” he argues, the internet and AI are tools “which we may use to good ends and bad.”

In a bare sense that’s true—yet thinking of technology only or even primarily as a “tool we use to mold our culture” can blind us to how the tool molds us in turn. We do have agency. We do wield the hammer. But day in and day out, it works on us while we work with it. Our hands grow calloused. Our backs habitually bend, then strain to straighten. Our minds, as the old saying goes, begin to see everything as a nail.

The insufficiency of Jarvis’s take on how technology affects us is particularly evident when he engages with Haidt (along with fellow travelers Jean Twenge and Nicholas Carr). He accuses these thinkers of being self-interested “moral entrepreneurs” and “paternalistic prigs” chasing money, fame, and book deals. Brushing away Haidt’s reams of research documenting the ill effects of letting children online too much and too young, Jarvis subscribes instead to the Taylor Lorenz Theory of Why the Kids Are Not Okay, which he summarizes—not in so many words—as the existence of adult Republicans.

That concern set aside, Jarvis blithely welcomes AI into the classroom, inviting educational institutions to stop asking students to absorb facts and learn to write. They can “concentrate less on memorization and content creation,” he says, because these are “things machines can now do.” So eager is Jarvis to defend generative AI as a neutral tool that he pins all responsibility for problems on its makers, letting users off the hook.

And he either misses or misunderstands the Haidt-style case for getting children off social media, contending that this would leave them “no better off” because they’d be “more isolated.” They wouldn’t, because, as Haidt has explained, this is “a collective action problem: it’s hard for anyone to quit as long as everyone else is on a platform.” But if we all quit together, quitting isn’t isolating. Kids would relearn other ways to hang out.

A life online

Perhaps that relearning is difficult for Jarvis to imagine because, as he frankly admits, he is extremely online. In one passage, while conceding that real-life connections matter, he describes living a very internet-mediated existence. “I care more,” Jarvis says, “about the communities I interact with online” than about local relationships in his “suburban town where some of my neighbors are Trump voters.”

Thus, describing research in which algorithm changes on Facebook and Instagram led to users spending “dramatically less time on both platforms,” Jarvis doesn’t seem to see that result as especially welcome.

Or, when he describes Black women being “harassed, abused, surveilled, and doxed” on Twitter (now X), he never considers that they should log off, apparently accepting that Twitter is a big enough part of their lives to warrant enduring abuse. Ideally, of course, Black women (and everyone else) would be able to use social media without being harassed. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and suffering through digital attacks is not our best or only option.

Jarvis concedes that the “internet’s business model” involves “seducing and tricking people into diverting their attention from more important matters.” But his solution is not spending more of our lives offline. Instead, he foresees “develop[ing] new models to support creativity, reporting, education, and civic involvement online”—that is, moving those important matters outside the arena of embodied life.

What happened to our power to decide our own future? If humans can change the direction of the whole internet, surely we can also sometimes turn off our screens and engage out here in meatspace.

Activist journalism and ‘AI boys’

Much of that online education, if Jarvis had his way, would be conducted by an increasingly activist press.

Like Margaret Sullivan, another journalist of his generation, Jarvis is tired of “the old journalistic trope that newspapers just deliver the facts.” He wants journalists to “be advocates and activists for truth and understanding, equity and justice,” to “play the role of educator to place facts in the context of history, economics, and ethics.” It’s not enough for reporters to report on problems, Jarvis says. They must also “seek solutions,” “understand needs,” “see opportunities,” and “provid[e] leadership.”

Of course, we already have a kind of journalism to do all these things. It’s called opinion. For decades—and for good reason—opinion has been distinguished from straight reporting, but that distinction has become a point of contention in recent years.

Like many who want to blur the line between reporting and opining, Jarvis does so in pursuit of social justice, and he never ceases reminding the reader just how progressive he is. Jarvis is a white man, and he has even dared to become an old white man. But he makes sure we know he’s what left-wing writer Freddie deBoer has dubbed a “Good White Man,” the kind of progressive white man who shoulders “a special burden of helping to end injustice and to ‘center’ women, people of color, and other minority groups, to step back and let others speak.”

This is difficult to do when one is a white man writing a book. Jarvis coins the phrase “AI boys” and uses it throughout to reiterate his contempt for the predominantly male developers and entrepreneurs who create the technology he embraces—technology he says should be wrested from their control once they’ve launched it.

He suggests that the real motivation of those who raise concerns about “the internet, social media, and algorithms … might well be fear or bigotry directed at people who exploit a moment of technologically driven change to demand a seat at the table of power.”

And he has that increasingly common tic of invoking “women and people of color” as a magical monolith whose wisdom is perpetually neglected by a dastardly press. This might be a strong narrative were the mainstream press not so obviously interested in demographic diversity. The very day I wrote this review, a reporter asked me for an interview, casually mentioning her interest in including “other sources in my story than just white men.”

A strange covenant

For all that, The Web We Weave won me back a bit at the end. There, Jarvis returns to his theme of individual responsibility and even virtue, urging readers to hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior online and so make a small but realistic contribution to a more humane and truthful internet culture.

Curiously, he couches this proposal in the language of covenant, explicitly invoking the word’s biblical history to say “that we—users, companies, technologists, governments, researchers—need to take on a sense of responsibility and obligation to one another”:

As my [Presbyterian minister] sister points out, a covenant—such as the one made in marriage—is open-ended and can change as life and circumstances evolve and unexpected challenges arise. More than statutory community standards imposed from on high and more than actual statutes legislated by governments, covenants should be living documents, open, collective, and collaborative, able to change in new situations but still hearkening and hewing to sets of principles that should govern us all with mutual consent.

These covenants would be created voluntarily, Jarvis writes, but companies that didn’t volunteer to make a meaningful covenant with users “might end up with rules imposed on them by legislators. A first step in regulation could be for government to expect companies to negotiate covenants in public.” So, maybe not so voluntary after all, for what is a governmental expectation if not regulation backed by force?

That question of compulsion aside, Jarvis’s understanding of covenant doesn’t square with the biblical context to which he appeals. God’s covenants with his creation are many things, but “open-ended,” “collaborative,” and responsive to unexpected challenges are not descriptors that come to mind.

A biblical covenant, as J. I. Packer wrote for CT in 1962, “is a defined relationship of promise and commitment which binds the parties concerned to perform whatever duties towards each other their relationship may involve.” Or, to borrow the words of Paul Eddy, a pastor and scholar of covenant at Bethel University, a covenant is a “committed, community-based, kinship creating, agape-love relationship.” It is “love formalized.”

Jarvis is right to distinguish covenant from contract and law, but he’s mistaken to imagine it can define the relationship between me and Mark Zuckerberg—or me and Jeff Jarvis. His closing line asks readers to hold him accountable to his self-set standards for his online behavior. But how? Some tweets?

A covenant for virtue is a good idea, but the accountability it entails can only happen in a real relationship. And real relationships can grow online, but their more natural habitat is the offline world, the flesh-and-blood world, the world beyond the internet.

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

The post The Internet’s Sins Are Our Sins. But It Shouldn’t Escape All Blame. appeared first on Christianity Today.

UK Regulators Investigate Barnabas Aid over Reports of Misused Funds

by | Oct 7, 2024 | Uncategorized

One of the biggest Christian charities in the United Kingdom is being investigated by regulators following reports of financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and escalating internal tensions.

After opening a statutory inquiry into Barnabas Aid—a nonprofit that brings in £21.6 million ($28.3 million) a year to assist persecuted Christians—the UK’s Charity Commission announced last week that it had issued financial sanctions against the group.

“Due to concerns that the charity’s funds may have been misused in the past, and questions as to the trustees’ oversight, the Commission has used its powers to temporarily restrict any transactions the charity intends to make which are over £4,000,” said the regulators, who oversee charities in England and Wales.

Barnabas Aid, also called Barnabas Fund, was founded in England in 1993 by Patrick Sookhdeo, a convert who researched Christian-Muslim relations and advocated against the persecution of Christian minorities abroad. The group now operates internationally, with both a UK board of trustees and a global board overseeing various national offices.

Barnabas Aid suspended Sookhedo and other senior leaders earlier this year when it launched an independent investigation to look into whistleblower claims against them. In August, Premier Christian News reported on the internal “chaos” at Barnabas Aid.

A statement posted on the Barnabas Aid site says its investigation has already found evidence of theft and misuse of funds, and the ministry plans to comply with the Charity Commission inquiry. The organization says it will be able to continue to fund projects, only with the additional administrative hurdle of getting the commission’s approval.

Financial concerns led Barnabas Aid to dismiss international CEO Noel Frost back in the spring. The Telegraph UK wrote that Barnabas Aid’s initial investigation found Frost used charity funds for personal expenses and transferred more than £130,000 to personal accounts. He denied the allegations of financial wrongdoing.

The chairs of Barnabas Aid in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and the UK went on to ask for the resignations of four additional senior leaders: Patrick and Rosemary Sookhdeo (international director and international director emeritus), Caroline Kerslake (international director of projects), and Prasad Phillips (deputy international director). They have been suspended while the investigation takes place.

Based on an interim report from the firm, Barnabas Aid said it has identified “serious and repeated” violations of its own financial safeguards as well as “significant payments made to the founders (and to others close to them—including some Board Members/Trustees), which cannot be readily explained.”

Barnabas Aid apologized to supporters in August, reported the issues to regulators, and commissioned a London law firm to investigate, but members of the UK board said they did not approve of the independent investigation.

The Charity Commission is currently looking into those claims.

“The Commission is investigating issues, including allegations of unauthorised payments to some of the current and former trustees and related parties, allegations that the charity’s founders have inappropriate control or influence over how the charity operates, and possible unmanaged conflicts of interest,” it said.

Kerslake said the suspended leaders are willing to cooperate with any impartial investigation. She told The Telegraph that the money transferred to the Sookhdeos came from donations made specifically for them “in lieu of salaries.”

The Charity Commission is also examining Barnabas Aid’s relationship with Nexcus International, formerly Christian Relief International (CRI).

Nexcus serves as an international office for Barnabas Aid and coordinates with the national offices in the UK, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. The Barnabas Aid website says going through CRI—which is registered in the US but operates in England—allows the charity to keep lower overheads and helps ensure its compliance with legal and financial requirements.

The chair of Barnabas Aid UK, Philip Richards, claimed in a letter to supporters that Nexcus “seized control of the operations of Barnabas Aid,” appointed its new CEO, Colin Bloom, and has been surreptitiously using its donor database.

Barnabas Aid countered to say Nexcus is “a Barnabas entity” since it was created by Sookhdeo, who served as its chair until April 2024, and since its board is made up of Barnabas Aid’s national leaders.

US watchdog site MinistryWatch reported on Barnabas Aid in 2022, interviewing Jeremy Frith, the CEO leading the US office.

“Frith admits the ministry’s websites and regular communication do a poor job of communicating its international structure. The Barnabas Aid, USA redirects to the Barnabas Fund in the UK,” the story said. “US gifts sent to Barnabas Aid go to CRI, which then distributes funds to partners around the world.”

According to MinistryWatch, Barnabas Aid finances projects in dozens of countries by awarding grants to ministries—mostly churches they’ve partnered with for decades—to conduct the work.

The suspended founder, Sookhdeo, was previously convicted in a sexual assault case in 2015 and found not guilty in another case in 2016. He denied the allegations and temporarily resigned before being reinstated into leadership as international director of Barnabas Aid.

The charity defended Sookhdeo and accused fellow evangelical organizations of excluding Barnabas Aid from cooperative international religious freedom efforts.

Full results of the current investigation, being conducted by the law firm Crowell & Moring, are expected later this fall. When the Charity Commission inquiry concludes, it will also publish a report detailing its findings and any disciplinary action.

Following the Charity Commission inquiry, Barnabas Aid has reiterated its commitment to transparency and cooperate repentance.

“There is now an unprecedented level of scrutiny on our financial processes to ensure transparency and accountability and you can trust that any money donated to us will be used to help persecuted Christians,” it said in a FAQ for supporters.

“While team members at Barnabas Aid did not know or participate in financial misconduct, we must collectively repent of any evil that has happened, placing our faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

The post UK Regulators Investigate Barnabas Aid over Reports of Misused Funds appeared first on Christianity Today.

Global Methodist Bishops to Dance

by | Oct 7, 2024 | Uncategorized

Questions of bishops stirred controversy in Costa Rica. Amid the joy of the convening General Conference of the Global Methodist Church as the new denomination ratified and modified the provisional decisions of its transitional leadership, the episcopacy emerged as the one issue that could rouse serious disagreement. 

Who would be in charge of the new church? How many bishops would there be? How would they be elected, and how long would they serve? What would they do, specifically? How would the power and authority of the position be limited?

“There is a very collaborative spirit, but people have disagreements,” Asbury University professor Suzanne Nicholson told CT. “It’s always messy when you start something new.”

The Global Methodists debated the shape of the authority structure they would erect over themselves while they were in the process of figuring out and applying the lessons they learned from decades spent fighting in the United Methodist Church. There were, of course, theological and ideological reasons for their split. But for many of the people who left, the real problem, the deeper problem—the intractable, unresolvable, deeply frustrating, and hurtful problem—was the bishops. 

They didn’t defend orthodoxy, Global Methodist ministers told Christianity Today. They didn’t maintain order or unity. They didn’t seem to be in touch with the concerns of congregations or to care about small, struggling churches, and they used their power to punish ministers they saw as troublesome (or just conservative). 

Many ministers have stories about being exiled. And far-flung rural churches with 20, 30, 50 people attending regularly recount with pain their realization that they were the places of exile—assigned only ministers who were being punished by the appointment.

United Methodist leaders see all this very differently, of course. And those who stayed in the denomination can offer alternative accounts of what happened. 

But among those who left, there is a consensus: It was bad. And it was bad because of the bishops. 

The new denomination, meeting for the first time, desperately wanted to avoid any possibility of repeating those mistakes. They debated the way to shape and structure the episcopacy to ensure better leadership.

The goal—everyone who spoke to CT agreed—was to set up an episcopal structure where the bishops are not bureaucrats responsible for administration of an institution, but shepherds fending off wolves and leading the church into green pastures.

“The main thing was an episcopacy that focused on teaching and preserving the faith,” said David Watson, New Testament professor at United Theological Seminary and lead editor at Firebrand. “We wanted to reshape the office for theology. If we don’t do that and there’s not something specific in Methodism we want to preserve, we’ve all wasted a lot of time and money.”

The Global Methodists built on other broad agreements as well. There was no debate about whether bishops ought to belong to a separate order of clergy, the way they do in the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican communion. The Methodists see bishops and other ministers filling distinct roles but sharing the same ordination. 

The General Conference legislation stating the episcopacy is not a separate order passed 315 to 3.

There was also broad consensus that the role should be temporary. The Global Methodists don’t want people to be bishops for life. The delegates in Costa Rica decided instead that bishops would serve six-year terms and would be limited to two terms.

“The fail-safe is term limits,” Watson said. “That’s very popular.”

Delegates did disagree about other things. One group proposed that each region of Global Methodists, which is called an annual conference, should have its own bishop. Others objected that would give the bishops too many day-to-day administrative responsibilities and they’d end up running the denomination in their region. They suggested that job be given to a general superintendent hired by the region, while bishops took responsibility for preaching and teaching in four, five, or even six regions at once.

Responsibility for a broader area would also promote more connections between Global Methodists, advocates for that plan said. 

One person proposed an itineracy system as another alternative: assigning bishops to one region at a time but then rotating assignments annually. 

Matthew Sichel, a deacon from Maryland, pointed to the Methodist history of circuit riding. He said the new denomination should bring that model back in its episcopal structure.

“Itinerancy is a gift to Methodists,” he told the delegates during the debate. “It gives you a chance to see God work through leaders you would never have known.”

The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. The General Conference ultimately decided to support what they called the General Episcopacy Plan. Bishops will not be responsible for administration but will be tasked with spiritual leadership. They will be over the whole church but divvy up regions between themselves, each taking about five annual conferences.

Sichel said he didn’t like that plan, but losing the vote didn’t bother him at all.

“These are not essential issues,” he told CT. “I’m willing to trust the General Conference.”

Rob Renfroe, president and publisher of Good News, the leading evangelical Methodist magazine, said he heard that sentiment a lot at the Global Methodist gathering. People would articulate their preferences but acknowledge disagreements and submit the issue to the discernment of the General Conference.

“This is holy conferencing,” he said. “We agree on the bedrock theological issues. Jesus is Lord, Scripture is authoritative, and we want to reclaim our Wesleyan heritage. So we can trust the General Conference.”

Delegates also said they knew that they would have the opportunity to tinker with the authority structure in the future. They worried about the unintended consequences of the decisions they were making in Costa Rica but took comfort in the wisdom of delegates to come.

“The bishop thing is a work in progress,” said Jeff Kelley, pastor of a church in Nebraska. “I don’t think that this conference will settle it. We have to wade in the water.”

Since it is still a work in progress, the General Conference decided not to elect bishops to six-year terms just yet. They started instead with interim bishops who will work part-time and serve for two years.

The delegates spent a lot of time debating the details of the interim episcopacy, wrestling over how those candidates would be nominated and whether or not someone elected to a two-year term could be reelected in 2026. Some expressed concern that if more groups join the Global Methodists in the next two years when all the bishop’s seats are filled, it will be harder for those people to elect a bishop. The delegates decided that 50 percent of the interim bishops could be reelected but would have to receive a three-quarters majority vote.

The delegates then nominated 21 candidates, all present among the nearly 1,000 delegates and observers in Costa Rica, and started voting. 

Delegates elected three candidates on the first ballot: Kimba Evariste from the Democratic Republic of Congo; Carolyn Moore from North Georgia, who preached about Acts 19 the first night of the General Conference; and Leah Hidde-Gregory from the Mid-Texas region.

Balloting went on for multiple rounds after that without any names garnering enough votes to win. Ryan Barnett, pastor of First Methodist Church in Waco, Texas, went to a microphone and withdrew his name with praise for Hidde-Greggory, calling her the best Texas had to offer.

Then other candidates—mostly white men—started streaming forward to withdraw their names too.

“I thank God for the move of the Spirit,” said Stephen Martyn, professor of Christian spirituality at Asbury Theological Seminary, after seeing the vote totals for his drop in three successive rounds of balloting. “It has been obvious. And it is a joy to withdraw my name.”

Other people in the room said they were pleased to not even be nominated. Some of the ministers at the convening General Conference had been accused of joining the Global Methodists just to grab power.

Johnwesley Yohanna, for example, has served as a bishop in Nigeria for 12 years. He had heard rumors that he was maneuvering for a leadership spot in the new denomination and joined not because he was trying to be faithful but because he wanted more authority and thought the new denomination would give him whatever he asked for. He said electing someone else as bishop allowed him to prove his integrity. 

“It’s done. I’m done. I kept my word,” Yohanna told CT. “We praise God in everything.”

The fourth person to win an episcopal position was John Pena Auta of Nigeria. Then, delegates elected Jeff Greenway, who served as president pro tempore of the Global Methodist Church during its transition period. Finally, Kenneth Livingston, a Black pastor in Houston, was selected as the sixth interim bishop. 

The six newly elected bishops joined two men already serving in the episcopal role: Scott Jones, a former United Methodist bishop from East Texas, and Mark Webb, a former United Methodist bishop from Upstate New York.

The election of the interim bishops was greeted by jubilant pandemonium in Costa Rica. The bishops-elect embraced family, friends, and each other, while the nearly 1,000 people in the room sang “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” 

Whatever disagreements they had about the authority structure seemed to melt with the joy of greeting the six as they filed onto the conference room stage with their spouses for a group photo.

A number of delegates said they were specifically encouraged by the diversity. They said the election showed that the “global” part of Global Methodism was not just a mask for conservative white Americans but a reality. And the new denomination also demonstrated its commitment to egalitarianism and the Wesleyan belief that the Spirit is poured out on “both men and women” (Acts 2:18).

“I’m proud of how that went today,” said Asbury seminary student Emily Allen. “Electing women—that meant a lot to me. And two Africans and a Black American—that sets us on a good path.”

As the Global Methodists rejoiced and praised their newly elected leaders, however, the delegates also found a surprising way to reassert the authority of the General Conference. Two pastors, Natalie Kay Faust from Nebraska and D. A. Bennett from Oklahoma, came forward with a motion that had not been discussed in any of the debates on episcopal authority, nor in any legislative committee.

“We would like to propose a Bennett-Faust motion, in the spirit of historicity of this celebration,” Bennett said. “Schedule time in the 2026 General Conference of the Global Methodist Church for bishops … to perform a liturgical dance to all 17 verses of ‘O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.’”

More than dozen delegates shouted, “Second.”

“Can we call them ‘out of order’?” Mark Webb asked Scott Jones.

But Faust pushed on, calling the motion a fitting recognition of the “spirit of honor for one another” among the Global Methodists.

“We have seen how the Spirit can move when we set our own personal pride and barriers aside and open ourselves up to new expressions of his leading,” Faust said. “This motion is encouraging our episcopal leaders to lead by example of Christian submission and connection to the movement of the Spirit.”

Webb said it was out of order, but everyone in the room just laughed at him. Jones said it should be referred to committee, but no one agreed. Delegates, instead, called for a vote.

“Do I have any friends to oppose?” Jones said.

He did not. 

The delegates voted by show of hands and the motion passed by an overwhelming majority. 

The new denomination will meet again in 2026 and hold its first full episcopal election, picking bishops for six-year terms focused on preaching, teaching, and spiritual leadership. And the first bishops of the Global Methodist Church will perform a dance to all 17 verses of the beloved Wesleyan hymn “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

The post Global Methodist Bishops to Dance appeared first on Christianity Today.

Gordon Students Count Cells, Hoping to Unlock Cancer Mysteries

by | Oct 7, 2024 | Uncategorized

A lab at a small evangelical college in New England might not be the most obvious place for advanced cancer research, but Craig Story isn’t letting that stop him.

This fall, Story is teaching research students how to conduct immunofluorescence microscopy. Using stains, pieces of tumors taken from lab mice, and an extremely powerful (and pricey) microscope, Story and a team of undergraduate students at Gordon College are working to unravel the mysteries of why some people get cancer when others don’t, and why some respond better to treatment. 

“Immunofluorescence microscopy is when you are studying a particular protein and you want to literally see where it is,” Story said. “Is it found in the tumor? Is it found around the tumor? What could it be doing?”

As with all scientific research, there’s a real possibility that they won’t find the answers they’re looking for. If they do, their breakthroughs could help an untold number of people. But if they don’t, the work will still serve the Gordon College students working with Story, giving them invaluable experience and preparing them for careers in science and medicine.

Story says that alone would be a worthwhile accomplishment. 

He believes that medicine, by its very nature of addressing human suffering, is a pursuit that glorifies God. And the scientific method, with its commitment to truth and deep assumptions about the order of the universe, aligns with the Christian faith. 

“Christians definitely should be involved in medical research,” he said.

Story, who has a doctorate in molecular biology, has been working at Gordon since 2002. He has been involved in cancer research since his last sabbatical in 2016, when he was granted a break from the classroom and got to spend some time learning the latest research techniques in a lab. He went to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and collaborated with Stephanie Dougan on her research studying enzymes and cancer cells.

He returned to Dana-Farber in 2023 with the goal of finding a project on the cutting edge of current cancer research that would also be suitable for students learning their way around the lab. He settled on immunofluorescence microscopy. 

Microscopy—using a microscope to examine biological samples—traces its roots to the scientific revolution, coming out of the Reformation and Renaissance in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, Story said. A Dutch Calvinist draper named Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek—who used a magnifying glass to examine threads—and a British “curator of experiments” named Robert Hooke began unlocking the secrets of cells using microscopes in the 1600s.

One technique van Leeuwenhoek experimented with was putting a dye made from saffron on a sample to see if different parts of the cell looked different when stained. It didn’t yield much interesting information at the time, but that’s the same idea that Story and his students are using to do their research today. 

Microscopes, of course, have vastly improved in the last 400 years, and the techniques used to stain cells have gotten a lot better too. Now, when the Gordon College professor and students peer through their microscopes, they can see a nuclear protein associated with cell proliferation and ribosomal RNA transcription, known as antigen Ki-67.

“What we’ve been doing is sectioning tumors from mice from the Dana-Farber lab, and then staining them for Ki-67, and then enumerating the number of cells that are positive for this particular antigen,” Story said.

Ki-67 can be used to identify cancer growth. Seeing how it spreads and comparing different tumors from different mice, Story and other researchers hope to better understand different immune responses. Someday, that could help develop more and better cancer treatments. 

Today, however, they’re mostly counting cells. 

Yayi Zhang, one of Story’s students, says the work can be a bit tedious. But it’s also really exciting. She doesn’t know what they will find—or what the techniques she is learning with Story will help her discover in the future.

“I can apply these techniques and skills in future work,” Zhang said, “so it’s wonderful.”

Pavinee Chaimanont, another student working with Story, called the opportunity to do the research “a blessing.”

“I feel like the techniques that I’ll learn from this research and the knowledge that I’ll also get is definitely going to be helpful in future cancer research that I’m going to be part of,” she said. 

The students work together and have become good friends in the lab. They also appreciate the chance to be mentored by Story. 

Naomi Montgomery said she took a class on cancer biology with Story and was excited to find out there was an opportunity not just to learn about what others had discovered but also to participate in the discovery process herself and help people. She was inspired, too, by how Story connected the work to faith. 

“He taught the research on cancer in the light of how we look at this as Christians,” she said. “It was really cool. I think that it is a big blessing to have not only classes like that but experiences like this here at Gordon.”

The equipment necessary for the research does not come cheap. Gordon has received two Mass Life Science Center grants—one about seven years ago, and one about two years ago. Gordon has also designated funding to keep the equipment up to date.

“One thing about scientific equipment is that it can become obsolete or outdated pretty quickly,” Story said. “For example, the $10,000 camera on our fluorescent microscope needed to be replaced recently after only about five years.”

While his students are using the microscope to count cells, Story is also thinking up new research projects and other questions they could tackle. He’d like to work more on pancreatic cancer in particular since it is historically one of the hardest cancers to treat.

“They’re the worst tumors, which in and of itself is interesting,” Story said. “Why are different tumors different? Why aren’t they all the same?”

The Gordon College lab could play a critical role in figuring it out.

“To be able to contribute even a small part,” Story said, “is super exciting.”

The post Gordon Students Count Cells, Hoping to Unlock Cancer Mysteries appeared first on Christianity Today.