AI and Faith: Can New Tech Be a Blessing or a Curse?

The e-mails can be alarming.  

Over the last several months — especially with the launch of OpenAI products like ChatGPT — the number of messages I’ve received from colleagues in religious studies and religion news about the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence (AI) has steadily increased.  

Some of them read like dystopian novels, full of prophetic warnings and puzzled worry about how these technologies spell the inevitable doom for everything from college essays to news copy, commentary features to podcasting. Others percolate with positivity, promising increased productivity, better bibliographies or more robust conversations around technology and ethics.  

Whether welcomed or spurned, the general opinion is that AI’s transformation of our work, relationships, and religions is inevitable.  

As President of the Religion News Association, Editor of ReligionLink, and a scholar of religion, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about the technologies that could shape our spiritual futures and the expected effects of AI on religion reporting. 

Questions I’ve wrestled with lately include: What, if anything, might AI reveal to us about the act of reporting, the nature of religion news and journalists’ role in the public sphere? Is there anything distinctive about religious traditions and the ways they will creatively encounter AI and its impact on humanity? What issues arise as AI becomes less distinguishable from human intelligence? How might religious notions of humanity evolve to address AI?  

Certainly, AI presents particular challenges to religion newswriters and religious practitioners alike. But before we get too caught up in the computers-will-take-over-the-world chaos, I’d like to offer a few reflections that might help us chart a way forward.  

Holy divestments: Evangelicals rejoice at Church of England’s fossil fuel divestment

Sometimes, late at night, when her two boys have gone to bed and Eleanor Getson is doing the dishes at the end of the day, she is hit with an almost crippling fear.

“During the day, I can’t stop scrolling through stories about climate change,” said Getson, a 40-year-old evangelical living in Bradford with her husband and two kids, “glaciers melting, islands of plastic in the Pacific ocean, forest fires wiping out millennia of history.”

Sometimes, Getson says, the concern consumes her, “it’s too much to think about and I get this anxiety about what my children will suffer because of us.”

That’s why Getson was delighted to hear the news that the Anglican church she grew up in made the momentous decision to divest from fossil fuels last month. On June 22, the Church of England’s Church Commissioners and Pensions Board announced their divestments from all oil and gas companies.

Pressure on the Church of England to divest from fossil fuel companies has been building for several years as an increasing number of clergy, bishops, and dioceses have made divestment commitments and called for fossil-free pension schemes.

Among them have been evangelicals bringing their own distinctive arguments and motivations to the campaign.

In the beginning, we argued over origins

At the most recent meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination upheld its policy of not ordaining women as pastors.

After voting to finalize the expulsion of churches with female pastors, Southern Baptists voted to further expand restrictions on women in church leadership, potentially opening up hundreds of new churches to investigation and expulsions.

The SBC's policies state, "While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture."

As gender studies professor Susan M. Shaw wrote for The Conversation, such “battles over women in ordained ministry in the SBC are not new.” The matter of women’s roles as preachers, teachers and leaders at large have been debated by Southern Baptists since the convention’s founding in 1845.

One of the points used to undergird the argument to exclude women from ordination is a doctrine known as the “orders of creation” (or “order of creation”), which affirms God’s role in establishing social domains in the family, church and society through the very “order” of creation of the world, as recorded in the book of Genesis.

Shaw wrote:

In 1984, as fundamentalists gained greater control, the SBC passed a resolution against women’s ordination. The resolution said that women were excluded from ordained ministry to “preserve a submission God requires because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.”

Indeed, the discourse around origins can be powerful.

In this post from “What You Missed Without Religion Class,” I explore the conflict over origins and show how dealing with the genesis of the universe isn’t necessarily about what happened (or not) in the past, but very much about ordering life, traditions and communities in the present.

Of αιτία and the κόσμος

For word nerds, etiology – when used within the realm of religious studies – refers to a quasi-historical or mythical description of origins. Drawn from the Greek term αιτία, these stories have to do with the cause or why of something — that which is responsible for a present condition, the reason for today’s state of affairs.

One type of etiology is a cosmogony, which is a myth on the origins of the cosmos (κόσμος) – a story that tells us how the grandest system of them all came into being in the first place.

When I first started studying religion, I was fascinated with cosmogonies.

I devoured stories like that of Rangi the Sky-father and Papa, the Earth-mother from the annals of Maōri teachings (akoranga), perused narratives about humanity’s creation from reeds (uthlanga/umlanga), as told among the Nguni peoples of Southern Africa (Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi), and dove deep into Ancient Near Eastern origin myths like the “Enuma Elish,” the Hindu “hymn of creation” from the Rig Veda, and Maya myths like the Popol Vuh.

Coming from a Christian household, my original intentions were to compare these cosmogonies to that with which I was raised. I wondered what different traditions had to say about the origin of everything that ever existed and what these stories had to say about the relationship between humans and the cosmos.

Why origin stories matter

But my early investigations were plagued by a fatal problem: I was searching for an essence, archetype, or sacred thread that would link these various stories into one grand narrative or speak to some fundamental truth about how the Divine is related to life in the world today.

Today, some two decades after I first heard the story of the Rainbow Bridge — a Chumash narrative about how people came to the mainland from Limuw (Santa Cruz) Island after being created from the seeds of a magic plant by Hutash, the Earth-mother — I’ve come to view these texts from a very different perspective than what my previous lens could offer.

These texts matter, but less because of what they have to say about the essential nature of things (which I was in search of) or whether or not they are historically verifiable.

As a point of fact, the interpretation of creation myths has changed over time. Take, for example, how the “Creation story” in Genesis has been seen as everything from a poem to a quasi-scientific textbook concerning earth’s origins and used as a prooftext to support views ranging from “young Earth” creationism to evolutionary creation, “old Earth” creationism to intelligent design.

Instead, cosmogonies and etiologies matter because they provide a window into how communities, or the students and scholars who study them, utilize such stories to situate themselves in the world and in relation to others.

The search for origins always comes from a specific place, interested in defining truth from its own position. And, in doing so, establishing the otherness between “us” (placed perfectly in the perspective of eternal history) and “them” (hopelessly askew in the etiology of things).

As the SBC example shows, these accounts use some narrative from the past (i.e., the world’s creation, a nation’s origins, the conception of a community, or the genesis of a particular place or geological formation) to authorize a position in the present.

In other words, these origin discourses are not actually about how something came into being, but instead about legitimizing or benefitting the position of the one who is telling or hearing the tale today.

Comparing cosmogonies, evaluating etiologies

There are innumerable etiologies floating around the world. The student of religion is welcome to read and study them. In fact, it is critical that the student of religion pays attention to origin stories. But not for the reasons we might think. 

Rather, we should approach them as just-so stories that authenticate contemporary discourses or positions of power in the fertile soil of a past beyond our reach and understanding.

In the case of the SBC, that means reminding women that they come after men. And, further, because of that “fact,” they are not meant to serve as pastors.

The student of religion’s task in studying cosmogonies like that is to make sense of alternative orders of reality and how they shape social realities in contemporary contexts.

Above all, as we compare cosmogonies and evaluate etiologies, we should be careful to approach them as very human attempts at producing a comprehensive vision of ultimate importance. Even describing them carries the risk of uncritically reproducing them and therefore, legitimizing them.

We must always remind ourselves that as these stories are told and retold, studied and deciphered, they are meant to not only remind hearers of their place in the cosmos, but to form persons for a particular kind of religious, social, political, or economic life.

And finally, a humble student of religion will remember that’s as true of our evaluations as it is of the origin stories we study.

The Library of Forgotten Wonders

In a small, eastern German city, a treasure trove of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian manuscripts invites visitors to explore the longstanding and ongoing connections between Europe and the Middle East.

You could walk by every day and not know it was there.

That is, if you could ignore a sprawling, white-walled palace perched high upon a hill, overlooking the town of Gotha’s bucolic environs in central Germany.

Known as Friedenstein Palace, it is one of the best-preserved examples of early Baroque European architecture. Established in the mid 17th-century by Duke Ernst I (1601-1675) of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the building survived World War II and the Cold War, but the signs of its age are showing. With orange stains dripping from its windows, rotting support beams in its vaulted roofs, scaffolding clinging to columns in the courtyard, and the detritus of renovation strewn about its gardens, Friedenstein might look like a palace long past its former glory. But inside are resplendent rooms reflective of the riches of a dukedom at the height of its power and, in the east wing, a world-famous collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts and artifacts.

PHOTO courtesy AramcoWorld/Fabian Brennecke.

Altogether, the Gotha Research Library holds about 1 million objects, including nearly 362,000 books, manuscripts, and print materials. Among them are 800 years of Islamicate scholarship, comprised of 3,500 manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. This “Oriental Collection” — featuring reams of legal, literary, grammatical, philosophical, geographic, theological, and other texts — sits side-by-side on the floor-to-ceiling shelves with paragons from the history of Europe, including a UNESCO World Heritage first print copy of the German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther’s "On the Freedom of a Christian,” published in 1520.

Each book and every manuscript has a story: from a famous hadith collection possibly pulled out from under a murdered mufti’s corpse during the siege of Buda in 1684 to an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great in Turkish, featuring a richly colored depiction of the Greek king’s mythical “flying machine” — a set of gryphons chained to a throne with rods of meat above. As they traveled, these texts survived numerous, disruptive epochs in European and Middle Eastern history — including two world wars, the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Today, scholars across the globe travel to Gotha to explore its almost encyclopedic collection of treasured documents.

The library’s history tells a tale of scientific adventure and of a contemporary renaissance in the study of Middle Eastern manuscripts. More than that, it reveals how such a significant treasury made it to a somewhat forgotten, small city in the former East German Republic.

*Corrections: the lead image on the website is of the Herzogliches Museum of Gotha, not the Palace with the library. Also, Kathrin Paasch did not become director until after the tenure of its previous director, Rupert Schaab, ended in 2005.

Religion at work: How does faith fit in the modern workplace?

There are multiple aspects of life that people may feel comfortable discussing around the water cooler at work — politics and sports, friends and family.

Religion, however, is not only often overlooked — it can be intentionally avoided.

Talking about religion at work can be tricky. And given the status of religious freedom in different regions, in some cases carry real risk to life and liberty. 

But beyond awkward interactions, faith traditions and spiritual practices shape the way we labor, our relationships with co-workers and popular perspectives on the vocations we should pursue. 

Religion can also become a central point of contention in discussions around labor law, employee-employer relations and other issues of import to workers and their managers. Take, for example, how SCOTUS unanimously ruled in favor of an employee seeking exemption from work on his Sabbath.

The latest ReligionLink Source Guide offers background, resources and sources to help you understand the many intersections between religion and labor.

From Mecca to Mount Kailash: The Enduring Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World

As the summer travel season starts and the annual Hajj — the Islamic pilgrimage to holy sites in Saudi Arabia required of all Muslims who are able — is expected to begin on June 26, it seems a good time to reconsider the concept of “spiritual travel” or, more specifically, pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage is generally defined as a journey with a religious purpose, often taken to a place of spiritual significance involving certain rituals or paths.

More broadly, pilgrimage can be any journey and its associated activities, undertaken by people to and from one or more places made meaningful by the pilgrims themselves.

Though long associated with European Christianity in Western academia, or perhaps with significant sacred shrines like Mecca or Mount Kailash in Tibet, pilgrimage can also include trips to seemingly mundane places or movement to and from otherwise unexceptional locations.

Furthermore, pilgrimage is not restricted to institutional religions. Some pagans and others with a focus on old traditions (i.e., Reconstructionists or "Recons") travel to lands where they believe original gods were from or to ancient sites of significance. For example, a Greek Recon may go to Greece; Celtic practitioners to standing stones in the United Kingdom; heathens to Iceland; African traditionalists to significant sites in South Africa or Uganda.

Visits to nonreligious sites have also become increasingly popular as a form of pilgrimage in recent years. Large numbers of people find meaning in traveling to memorials of suffering, pain and bloodshed like the 9/11 Memorial in New York City or the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia. There are also pilgrimages to places linked to such pop culture icons as Elvis Presley, Susan B. Anthony, Steve Prefontaine or Taylor Swift.

With all these varying expressions, pilgrimage — like other religious rituals and phenomena — is what we make it. Less than looking for the transcendent meaning or chasing after miracles, the student of religion should pay attention to the human elements of spiritual travel: Things like tourism and economics, politics and place.

The importance of place, people and politics.

Journeys to holy sites and major religious celebrations can be shot through with multiple meanings, personal motivations, and traveling trajectories.

Take, for example, the pilgrimage experience of those who make the expedition to Tepeyac hill in modern-day Mexico City. There, each December, pilgrims from all over the world gather to celebrate the annual feast of the Virgen de Guadalupe, joining a centuries-old Catholic tradition of celebrating what is known as “the miracle on Tepeyac Hill.”

According to celebrants, it was at that spot that May, the mother of Jesus, appeared to a Nahua villager named Juan Diego. The cloak she gifted him included an image of herself as a radiating, brown-skinned goddess robed in stars. Despite its linkages with Spanish colonialism and forced conversion, the image and festival have enduring cultural importance in Mexico. After 500 years of devotion, the annual celebrations are some of the most robust in all of Catholicism.

But each year, it is not only Catholic devotees who make the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. So do some of the city’s Sufis. According to religion scholar Lucía Cirianni Salazar, members of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi tariqa in Mexico City join millions of others to commemorate the Virgin’s apparition. Justifying their presence from a universalist perspective, the leader of the group — Shaykha Amina — told Salazar that the location represents one of the most powerful places for connection to the “one God.”

This example reminds us that far from removing people from the world, pilgrimage is all about places in the world. Less about the world beyond, pilgrimage is often very much about places we inhabit and fill with meaning.

This means that although often associated with the extraordinary and faraway, pilgrimage sites can be local and surprisingly unremarkable. What matters is context and the meaning people give such locales.

Pilgrims frequently journey with the expectation of miracles or receiving spiritual blessings from contact with significant religious figures, symbols and artifacts (e.g., relics or icons). Or they expect the travel itself will provide some transcendent benefit. Even so, pilgrims' progress and practices are intimately tied up with the worldly dynamics of tourism, local economies and the embodied experience of bumping up against fellow pilgrims with blood, sweat and tears along the way.

Pilgrimage also has powerful political overtones. For example, the disputed site of Marian pilgrimage in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is suffused with symbols of Croat nationalism, featuring prayer beads in national colors and Mary set against the backdrop of a Croatian national flag on everything from pillows to pillboxes. Still, despite its contentious place in the civil war of the 1990s and ongoing tensions in the Balkans, Medjugorje has become a huge draw for pilgrims drawn to its calls for peace and the renewal of faith along with prophecies of divine intervention.

Other pilgrimages such as the Hajj become playgrounds for political football, with nation-states and power brokers fighting over everything from logistics and management to the miracles and blessing associated with sacred sites.

The politics of pilgrimage are also at play around physical boundaries and borders that some spiritual travelers must contend with. Beyond visas and travel quotas, pilgrims must navigate the vicissitudes of state power and the various impediments that are put in place to deter, capture, or otherwise manage and control traveling bodies.

Those journeying to and from pilgrimage sites are often on the margins of official religious communities. Instead, their motivations for movement are linked to personal spiritual trajectories, frequently with little or nothing to do with institutionalized religion.

The physicality of pilgrimage must also be taken into consideration. To return to Tepeyac, Elaine Peña talks about Marian pilgrims’ “devotional labor.” Peña writes of “the moments of pain and discomfort” for pilgrims making their way to offer devotos to the Virgin of Guadalupe every December — “walking on blistering feet, proceeding on injured knees and cramped legs, with growling stomach and salty saliva, with too much light and too little sleep.”

Enjoy the journey.

As I write this blog, I am already starting to plan for my own travels this summer, including a visit to the largest mosque in the United Kingdom and some off-the-beaten-track churches in Berlin, Germany. While not explicitly pilgrimages, these trips will be filled with divine intimations.

This means I will be looking out for some of the very things mentioned above: The importance of place, the role of politics and economics and the position and plurality of bodies that inhabit a space or move around, through and within it.

Perhaps you too are getting ready for a trip. Maybe, you are embarking on a pilgrimage of your own this summer. As you do so, try to not only savor the spiritual importance of such travel, but the very human aspects of how these journeys are made holy in the midst of the mundane.

FURTHER READING:

•Read “A pilgrim’s progress: Resources for reporting on religious journeys,” from ReligionLink.

•Explore the Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism book series.

•Read Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement, by Simon Coleman (2022).

•Explore the Oxford Bibliography on Pilgrimage for numerous resources, studies and possible sources.

Belarusian Evangelicals Fear Growing Isolation

Pastor Vitaly Chichmarev doesn’t hesitate to use the word persecution.

“Yes,” he told CT, “the Belarusian church is persecuted.”

Chichmarev, who leads Light of Hope, a Baptist congregation in Minsk, recently spent seven months in prison. He was arrested in front of his teenage daughter in early 2022 for his participation in the massive 2020 protests against the controversial reelection of Belarus’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko.

He is back serving his congregation in the nation’s capital now. He’s happy to return to church work, be at home with his family, and release an EP of some new music with his rock band AntiVirus. But he hasn’t forgotten the big picture in his country, Belarus. He believes the situation for Christians there is dire.

“We are not able to rent rooms for meetings,” he said. “New churches are not allowed to register. Catholics have had buildings taken away from them. Among the Protestant pastors, some, like me, have been in jail.”

The Norway-based human rights organization Forum 18 agrees. The group has documented a tightening web of restrictions on the free exercise of religion in Belarus. Secret police surveil evangelicals and other religious groups, raid their churches, contrive evictions, and detain religious leaders. Authorities require extensive bureaucratic paperwork to approve church buildings, to allow any meetings outside of church buildings, or to permit foreign visitors, who are frequently denied entry into the country.

These restrictions have grown more serious as Lukashenko has cracked down on every part of civil society that might challenge his control. He has been in power since 1994 and is frequently called a dictator by international observers.

The US government is also “concerned about the constraints on religious freedom in Belarus, as part of the whole-of-society human rights repressions committed by the Lukashenko regime,” according to a spokesperson at the Department of State. US officials, including embassy representative Ruben Harutunian, have met with Belarusian authorities to advocate for more freedom. In particular, the US urged the regime to ease state pressure on clergy for participating in political life in Belarus.

The challenges have deepened because of the international situation. Belarus is sandwiched between Russia, Ukraine, and European Union member states Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. It has become a close ally of Russia and supports its eastern neighbor in the war with Ukraine. Because of the conflict, Belarusian churches have found themselves cut off from global partners.

This has taken a toll on churches like Chichmarev’s. Light of Hope had around 100 members in 2020. About 45 remain, with more than half of the congregation fleeing to Poland, Georgia, and other countries to avoid military mobilization and escape the ongoing repression.

Article 31 of the Belarusian constitution provides accommodations for church gatherings and the public profession of faith. According to the government, there are 3,563 registered religious institutions in Belarus, representing 174 religious organizations.

Evangelicals, however, account for less than 2 percent of the population. And they are treated as second-class citizens under the law, according to Leonid Mikhovich, president of the Baptist Union in Belarus and rector at Minsk Theological Seminary. Even so, Mikhovich is ambivalent about using the word persecution.

What One Man Learned About Religion Visiting Every Country In The World

May it be Your will, Lord, our God and the God of our ancestors, that You lead us toward peace, guide our footsteps toward peace, and make us reach our desired destination for life, gladness, and peace. … May You send blessing in our handiwork, and grant us grace, kindness, and mercy in Your eyes and in the eyes of all who see us.

The Traveler’s Prayer — also known as the Wayfarer’s Prayer, or Tefilat Haderech in Hebrew — is an invocation said at the onset of a journey. Customary to recite when one embarks on a long trip, the prayer is a request for safety and protection but also that the traveler would be a blessing to those they meet in the course of their voyage.

Daniel Herszberg, a 30-year-old doctoral student from Australia, said the prayer is a common one among Jewish travelers, and the “beautiful text” traveled with him as he visited all 197 countries around the globe over the last 10 years.

As he finished his feat after setting foot in Tonga in March 2023, Herszberg became the 145th most travelled person in the world. Along the way, he also amassed 79,000 Instagram followers at @dhersz. He also became an unofficial student of humanity, treasuring the opportunity to learn more about the world’s religions and connect with Jewish communities scattered across the globe.

From Addis Ababa to Tehran, Herszberg visited synagogues, schools, cemeteries and Sabbath services in hospitable homes. In Suriname and Poland, in Pakistan and Sudan, Barbados and Brazil, Herszberg not only discovered cherished archives and legacies but connected with locals who shared their stories — both lived and long forgotten. In some instances, he was the first person to have visited Jewish heritage sites in decades.

It’s a responsibility the 30-year-old global citizen is quite philosophical about, whether in terms of what it means for the diaspora as a whole or who he is as a modern Jewish traveler.

“No matter how far you travel,” Herszberg said, “you always return to where you began — home.”

What is Hindu nationalism and how is it impacting the U.S.?

In August 2022, the township of Edison, New Jersey, celebrated the 75th anniversary of India’s independence with a parade through its central business district. Many in attendance, including local and statewide politicians, wore and waved India’s tricolor flag.

One of the floats in the procession was a bulldozer bearing photos of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, Yogi Adityanath.

The bulldozer’s symbolism was lost on many in attendance.

But, as Reuters reported, for Indian Muslims at the parade, the “baba bulldozer” – a blunt instrument used to demolish Muslim homes in India — was a “symbol of division and discrimination.”

In January 2023, after months in court, the inclusion of the bulldozer in the procession was declared an “act of bias“ after a joint investigation by the local county prosecutor’s office and police department. But they said there was insufficient evidence to pursue charges against parade organizers.

The incident highlighted the global relevance of Hindu nationalism, a political ideology that views Indian national identity and culture as inseparable from Hinduism as an ethnic category.

With origins dating back to the 19th century, Hindu nationalism — or Hindutva — encompasses a broad range of groups in India, but also among the Indian diaspora, from Europe to Edison.

The latest edition of ReligionLink provides background on what Hindu nationalism is, stories that show how it is influencing politics across the globe and experts to help you better understand its heady mix of ideology and national identity. 

Barely Anyone Reads the Bible in Germany. So Why Are Luther Bibles Selling So Well?

From “better an end with horror than a horror without end” to expressions like bloodhound, baptism of fire, and heart’s content, the German language is peppered with idioms from a source that’s more than 500 years old: the Luther Bible.

A translation by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, the Bible continues to be a touchpoint for German culture, politics, and language. And in 2022 — over 500 years after its initial publication — it was a bestseller yet again.

According to the German Bible Society (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft) in Stuttgart, they circulated 130,000 copies of the Luther Bible in 2022, accounting for almost half of their total distributions that year.

“After five centuries, it remains the most popular Bible translation in Germany,” said the German Bible Society’s General Secretary Christian Roesel (Rösel), “it is and will remain a classic.”

While the Luther Bible may remain a definitive example of German literature and hold a special place in its national psyche, ordinary Germans often know its catch phrases better than its contents. According to a 2017 opinion poll conducted by Insa-Consulare (Erfurt) and the German Christian magazine “Idea,” only four percent of German adults read the Bible every day. 70 percent say they have never read it once.

That begs the question, at a time when Bible sales are generally falling — related to a decline in Christianity’s share of the overall German population — why do so many Germans keep buying it?

Lessons Learned Reporting on Religion and Climate Change

“The road,” wrote Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “is made by walking.”    

Often adopted as a metaphor for pilgrimage, Sarah Moring, a climate activist living in Manchester, England, said she walked with this quote every day as she joined the Young Christian Climate Network (YCCN) — an advocacy community of young Christians in the U.K. — on its relay before the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), in September 2021.  

Stretching over 750 miles and cutting through Cardiff, London, and Oxford, YCCN participants joined a “crusade for climate justice” by walking the route between the end of the G7 meeting in Cornwall on June 13 and COP26’s opening ceremony on October 31 that year.  

When I covered the pilgrimage for Christianity Today, I had not done much reporting on people like Moring. But over the last two years, I have reported from India and Israel, Lisbon, and London, where people of faith are coming together to respond to climate change and demand action based on their religious beliefs.  

It was with a desire to see more widespread coverage of faith actors advocating for environmental justice that I teamed up with abby mohaupt to write a “Reporting Guide on Religion and Climate Change” for ReligionLink, a nonpartisan, monthly newsletter with source guides and story ideas for journalists reporting on religion.  

Developing the guide, I learned how diverse faith groups view climate change and are coming together to address it.  

BorderLine Impossible

As Hamza starts tellling his story, tears roll slowly down his cheeks.

Sitting on the back of a white pick-up truck with other Ghanaians, Hamza and his fellow countrymen are within eyesight of the rusted steel bollard fencing that demarcates the dividing line between San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, Mexico.

On the other side of la linea, Hamza hopes to claim asylum in the United States.

It’s been a long, laborious journey to get this far. Hamza left Ghana for Brazil the day after his only daughter was born, which also happened to be Eid al-Fitr. That was May 2, 2022. It took Hamza another three, arduous months to make his way by foot, truck, train, and bus across the Amazon and then through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala to Mexico. Along the way, Hamza said he saw dead bodies hidden in the bush, witnessed multiple assaults, and suffered the pangs of frequent hunger without adequate access to halal food. He spent another one and a half months in Mexico, bouncing from shelter to shelter, struggling to maintain a halāl diet and keep to his daily cycle of prayers.

Then he heard about Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), a sanctuary in Tijuana for Muslim migrants run by the Latina Muslim Foundation (LMF) of San Diego, California.   

Sitting outside the shelter, tantalizingly close to his goal, he is filled with hope and fear, expectation and exhaustion. “Next week, insha’Allah, I will be in the U.S.,” he said.

Hamza is far from alone.

Described as a “waiting room” for “thousands of migrants who try to reach the border between Mexico and the US every month” and a principal landing point for deportees, Tijuana has taken center stage in the ever-unfolding drama of migrants’ journeys to the U.S.

Among them are Muslims like Hamza, from places like Chechnya and Afghanistan, Syria and Ghana. According to Eduardo Campos Lima, writing for Arab News, “thousands of people from Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa try to reach the US-Mexico border every month.” Although there are no firm statistics about these “Muslim migrant flows,” organizations in the region report that more-and-more are making their way north from Brazil to the U.S./Mexico border.

For Muslim migrants, the “normal” stresses of labor precarity, family separation and potential imprisonment, deportation, or death are compounded by additional complications. Arriving in Tijuana, Muslim migrants face added challenges of finding shelter where they can consume halāl food, access facilities for prayer, and procure information about asylum in a language they can easily comprehend. If they are able to cross over, a triple bind of Islamophobia, anti-migrant sentiment, and a host of American fears about crime, disease, and a loss of cultural privilege await.

To provide a humane, and helpful, place for Muslim migrants to land in Tijuana Sonia Tinoco García and LMF constructed a purpose-built Muslim shelter. Opening in the border city’s Zona Norte neighborhood in March 2022, the shelter features separate men’s and women’s facilities, a prayer and wudu area, halāl food, Quran classes, and legal services to assist migrants. In the first year of operation, they served over 1,000 asylum seekers, deportees, and others seeking shelter.

Is SCOTUS Too Religious?

Last year’s slate of religion-related cases taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court was … a lot. 

Coverage around Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District came hard and fast last spring and summer. Not only did landmark decisions around a woman’s right to choose and freedom of religious expression in schools cause cultural and political shock waves, they also raised the question of how religion itself functions on the Supreme Court and the current Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment.

Pundits and experts used Supreme Court verdicts to reexamine the role of law and the relationship between religion and the state. These conversations are ongoing, as the Supreme Court deliberates on First Amendment cases, specifically around establishment vs. expression, and analysts consider how the current justices’ decisions relate to precedent established by previous Courts.

In the wake of last year’s momentous decisions, and their significant reactions, some wondered what role religious faith plays in Supreme Court decisions and whether it should feature in the bench’s decision-making process at all.

According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, a notable number of U.S. adults (35%) think the Supreme Court is “friendly” toward religion (compared with just 18% who thought so in 2019). Furthermore, people in the U.S. “are more likely to say the court’s recent decisions have helped (rather than harmed) the interests of U.S. Christians, and harmed (rather than helped) the interests of people in the U.S. who are not religious.”

But, as with most things in the U.S. these days, Americans are fairly split on whether justices should bracket their religious beliefs when making Court decisions. Around 44% say justices have been letting their faith have too much a say in their deliberations, while 40% feel the influence of religion on the current Court is about right.

The question of whether the Court is too religious depends on what perspective you come from. For example, religious conservatives might think SCOTUS is finally getting things right with what some read as a more traditionalist, Christian reading of the Constitution. Religious minorities, on the other hand, might feel the court is violating their religious freedom by favoring a particular tradition — or traditions. The non-religious and those that advocate for a strict separation between church and state are showing particular concern around what they see as the justices’ faith driving their decisions, as revealed in public comments.

And what faith do the Supreme Court justices identify with? Six of the current Supreme Court justices are Catholic (Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas), two are Protestant (Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson), and after Stephen Breyer’s retirement, Elena Kagan is the only Jewish justice.

This mix is “not reflective of the U.S. population,” according to Gallup’s statistics:

… about 22% of the adult population identifies as Catholic, as opposed to the 67% Catholic representation on the court. Two percent of the population identifies as Jewish (Kagan represents 11% of the nine justices). The biggest disproportionality comes in terms of Protestants. About 45% of Americans are non-Catholic Christian, or Protestant, compared with what will be 22% Protestant representation on the court. There is also a completely missing constituency on the court, the “nones,” or those who when asked say they have no formal religious identity [who make up about 21% of the population] …

That overrepresentation has some concerned. Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, wrote that the court’s religious persuasions have led justices to issue “orders to public officials based on [their] gut feelings, seemingly undisturbed by exposure to evidence.” In other words, Koppelman thinks SCOTUS is going against several decades of decisions regarding the balance of establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise in the First Amendment. For his part, he feels the Court is ignoring the First Amendment altogether and making decisions based on their personal faith.

Whether or not this has led to a certain “lawlessness” on the court, as Koppelman argues, the “Roberts Court” (under the leadership of Chief Justice Roberts) “has ruled in favor of religious organizations far more frequently than its predecessors,” according to research from the University of Southern California’s Lee Epstein and University of Chicago’s Eric A. Posner.

In their statistical analysis, Epstein and Posner found that the Roberts Court ruled in religious organizations’ favor 81% of the time, compared with around 50% for all previous eras since 1953. They wrote:

In most of these cases, the winning religion was a mainstream Christian organization, whereas in the past pro-religion outcomes more frequently favored minority or marginal religious organizations. … this transformation is largely the result of changes in the Court’s personnel: a majority of Roberts Court justices are ideologically conservative and religiously devout—a significant break from the past.

All of this suggests the justices’ faith will continue to play a role in the Supreme Court’s pending cases and impending decisions — in 2023 and beyond. It might also encourage some plaintiffs to appeal to the nation’s highest court, feeling they might have a bench stacked in their favor.

The latest Source Guide from ReligionLink explores these issues — and this term’s religion-related cases — in more detail. Click below to read more…

What Hath Religious Studies To Do With Interreligious Dialogue?

When I moved to Germany, I was invited to take part in a pioneering project to map interreligious dialogue (IRD) efforts across the country.

In the aftermath of the 10th World Assembly of Religions for Peace in Lindau in August 2019, a group of colleagues got together to pursue the idea of an interreligious cartography in Germany. The goal was to make a comprehensive survey of local, national, and international interreligious initiatives and actors in German municipalities to serve as a reference for future research.

Through our investigation, we gained a clearer picture of what IRD looks like in Germany and who is taking part. From Bonn to Berlin, Flensburg to Freiburg, one of the things that became evident was that many of the local initiatives involved, or were led by, religion scholars and academic theologians. Based on my own research and experience, this holds true in the U.S. and elsewhere, with scholars often actively involved in IRD efforts at the local, regional, national, and international levels.

As I reflected on this, I pondered a few questions: Are religious studies and IRD natural companions or should they be carefully delineated and divided? Should those who study religion lead the way when it comes to multi-religious responses to the world’s pressing issues? Or, as some argue, should IRD remain an object for critical study and not participation?

Protect and Accompany: European Evangelicals Organize Against Abuse

When Fabian Beck volunteered to help with the children’s ministry at his small, evangelical church on the outskirts of Hanover, the largest city in the German state of Lower Saxony, he imagined he’d be singing songs, telling Bible stories or doing puppet shows.

He did not expect to be talking about sex.

But, as he prepared to join the team, he came across resources provided by the Federation of Free Evangelical Churches (BFeG) on the subject of violence against children and adolescents in the context of Christian communities like his own.

“Believers have to face the fact that our congregations are not safe just because they are full of Christians,” Beck said, “safe places for kids don’t come naturally and too often, we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Andreas Schlueter, the BFeG’s Federal Secretary for the Young Generation, said the program Beck discovered — known as “Protect and Accompany” — is part a much larger trend among free evangelical churches organizing against abuse, developing programs to face the reality of violence against children and adolescents, and seeking to prevent it from happening in the future.

“On the one hand, free evangelical congregations should be, or become, safe places for children and young people,” he said, but on the other hand, churches have to make intentional choices to make them safe.

In recent years, child sex abuse cases have been extensively reported across multiple Roman Catholic dioceses in Europe. Spurred by these revelations, Catholic initiatives in France and Portugal, Germany and Italy, have aimed at preventing and addressing abuse, with Pope Francis removing the applicability of pontifical secrecy in cases involving the mistreatment of minors or other vulnerable persons in December 2019.

Myriam Letzel, coordinator for the French organization Stop Abus, said that the Catholic Church in France’s groundbreaking investigations (the so-called “Sauvé report”) into clerical abuse not only highlighted the systemic nature of sexual violence, but put evangelicals on notice about dynamics in their churches that might also lead to inappropriate and illegal behavior. Not only that, but broader cultural conversations around #ChurchToo and revelations of widespread abuse among Southern Baptists in the U.S. have led European evangelicals to reckon with the fact their churches are not immune.

“We have to question ourselves on the theological bases which have, in the past, favored inappropriate sexual behavior: A misunderstanding of the relationship between men and women and a distorted relationship to sexuality.”

That is why, in September 2022, the National Council of Evangelicals of France (CNEF) started a listening service called Stop Abus to help its members remain vigilant in the fight against sexual violence. The service includes a commission of ten experts in the fields of social work, psychology, medicine, law, and pastoral care. There is also a team of 35 “listeners,” Letzel said, spread across France who connect with people who call their service. In its first six months, Stop Abus received 15 disclosures that are now being processed.

Letzel said this is just the first step. “What was happening elsewhere served as a warning: We could not pretend that such things did not exist in evangelical protestant churches, and above all we did not want to pretend that they did not exist,” she said, “on the contrary, the mission entrusted to us by Christ obliges us: as Christians we have a duty to be exemplary in our conduct and in our way of caring for the most vulnerable.”

Other evangelical groups in Europe have launched their own efforts too.

“I have come to serve, not to be served”: the World Evangelical Alliance’s permanent representative at the UN puts focus on serving others

Gaetan Roy goes to the United Nations building in Geneva with an unusual question: “How can I serve you?”

Roy is not a waiter or a salesperson but the new representative from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) to the UN. Ever since he first got involved in politics, this is the question he’s led with. Back in 2015, when he went to the German parliament to lobby on behalf of evangelical organizations, he couldn’t get the words of Mark 10:45 out of his mind: I have come to serve, not to be served.

So Roy asked the first politician he met on his first day, “How can I serve you?” He’s continued asking it ever since.

“I thought this was really simple, but I felt God was unrelenting in this regard,” Roy told CT. “If Jesus came to serve and not to be served, then I will do the same by asking diplomats and politicians we engage with how we can serve them.”

With this question, Roy has become one of the primary evangelical voices at the world’s largest intergovernmental organization, speaking on behalf of 600 million believers in more than 120 countries. He takes over from Michael Mutzner, who helped establish the WEA’s office at the UN in 2012, and joins Wissam al-Saliby, director of the WEA’s Geneva office. Al-Saliby focuses on public statements about human rights violations while Roy works behind the scenes, brokering deals and developing official proposals for the UN representatives to consider.

Whether he’s promoting peace in Nigeria or working with the Coalition for Minority Rights in India, Roy said he hopes service will lead the way as he represents evangelical concerns and advances the cause of religious freedom for all.

If Roy’s approach to high-level negotiations and political diplomacy seems unorthodox, so was his pathway to such a high-profile position.

Religion at the 2023 Academy Awards

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the 95th Academy Awards in January, contenders included several movies with religion angles and numerous actors with faith backgrounds.

A short list for the ceremony, to be held March 12, 2023, includes the eco-spiritual themes of Avatar: The Way of Water, revivalist roots in the Elvis biopic starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, themes of “faith and fatness” in The Whale with Brendan Fraser, the Bible Belt cultural cues that are felt but never fully seen in To Leslie’s melancholic storyline, and confessions and questions of whether God cares about miniature donkeys in The Banshees of Inisherin.

That’s not even to mention Stranger at the Gate. Directed by Joshua Seftel, the film is about an Afghan refugee named Bibi Bahrami and the members of her Indiana mosque, who come face to face with a U.S. Marine who has secret plans to bomb their community center. That’s when the Marine's plan takes an unexpected turn. The moving real-life story is considered a favorite in the best documentary short film category.

Beyond awards season, 2023 has a slew of new religion-related releases sure to catch audiences’ attention.

It’s safe to say that if you head to the movies – or catch the Academy Awards ceremony – this year, you’re likely to run into religion. But what might we learn about religion and culture from this year’s many intersections between faith and film?

Religion in Your Face: Ash Wednesday and the Practice of Religious Facial Marking

Several years ago, when I was living in Houston, TX, a man walked up to me at a local café and kindly said, "Excuse me sir, you've...um...I think you have dirt on your face."

He was half right.

It wasn’t exactly dirt, but ashes. Ashes smudged on my forehead in the shape – if you looked at it just right and from a 43-degree angle – of a cross.

One could not blame the man for mistaking my visible marker of inward penance and outward allegiance to a particular strand of religiosity…for dirt.

These days, in places like H-town, you don’t see too many people wearing their religion on their face.

Nonetheless, later this month (February 22, 2023) millions of Christians across the world -- Catholic, Lutheran, Anglicans, others – will also don gray smudges on their brows to commemorate Ash Wednesday.

Traditionally viewed as the start of Lent – a 40-day penitential season of fasting and preparation preceding Easter – Ash Wednesday is most widely associated with the "imposition" or "infliction" of ashes on practitioners’ foreheads.

Christians, however, are not alone in marking their faces with religious symbols. There are traditions in India, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere that involve religious symbology born on foreheads, cheeks, and chins.

While such outward signs of devotion may seem an extreme in our seemingly secular age, more often than not, these religious facial markings tell us relatively little about the “inner religion” of the devotee and much more about spiritual symbols’ social function(s).

Church Planting After the Fall (of the Berlin Wall)

Three generations after East Germany rejected Christianity, a small group of prayerful believers see an opportunity.

The contrast could not be clearer.

On one side of a thin yellow line marking the old East-West German border (1949-1990) is a striking black and gray mass that used to constitute former East Germany. On the other, West German, side of the map is a kaleidoscope of multi-hued blues and reds, with some grayish zones mixed in. The red represents degrees of adherence to Catholicism, the blue Protestantism, the blacks and grays, “None” or “Other.”

The map, produced by social media account Nerdy Maps and based on data from the Statistical Offices of German States in 2011, was tweeted out by Andrew Wilson, Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London and Christianity Today contributor, on October 4, 2022.  

“This is staggering,” he tweeted, “it shows a) the catechetical power of state ideology and b) the importance (and challenge!) of slow, patient, long haul church planting in eastern Germany.”

Multiple missionaries, pastors, and ministry leaders responded, echoing Wilson’s sentiments and sharing their own hopes to plant churches and “reach the lost” in eastern German cities like Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Berlin.

As the “dark side” on the map intimates, church planters and missionaries face an uphill battle in a post-church landscape where some people don’t even know that the Christmas holiday has Christian origins.

According to Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung), a 2018 survey found that 64.2% of Germans surveyed nationwide identified as Christian. The second largest group (27%), were atheists and agnostics. But it was the differences between western and eastern Germany that were truly remarkable: while only 16.6%  in western Germany described themselves as non-believers, in eastern Germany the figure was 68.3%.

Simon Tarry, originally from the United Kingdom and now a church planter with Newfrontiers, a network of evangelical, charismatic churches, near Frankfurt a.M. said, “the barriers to the Gospel are different across regions, but any assumption that Germany is a Christian nation is really flawed.

“The stats are sad enough, but the reality is even starker,” he said. “Germany is equivalent to an unreached people group. You might think of the 10/40 window, places in Asia or the Middle East. But a lot of places in Germany and Northern Europe as a whole are much more ‘unreached’ than elsewhere in the world,” said Tarry.

That’s especially true in the former East, where Tarry said the reality might even be bleaker than what the map shows. “The scales of measurement are membership where people pay their church tax for marriage and baptism purposes, but beyond the taxes, there’s no living faith.

“It’s incredibly hard work to plant a church in Germany. It’s incredibly discouraging at times. It feels like really really hard ground,” he said.

What is Christian nationalism? And how has it gone global?

The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol brought the Christian nationalist movement into sharp focus.

Christian symbols prominently displayed on banners and T-shirts as well as faith-filled messages that fueled the fire that day forced many to consider the role that white Christians’ religiously motivated rage plays in U.S. politics. 

But Christian nationalism exists beyond U.S. borders. It is a global phenomenon. 

In Europe and the Americas, far-right leaders are invoking a heady mix of racialized, religious rhetoric to rally support, upturn elections and threaten the democratic order. From Hungary to Italy, Brazil to Russia, Christian nationalism plays an increasingly critical role in the far right’s growing power and appeal.

The latest edition of ReligionLink provides background on what Christian nationalism is, stories that show how it is influencing politics worldwide and experts to help reporters and readers better understand its heady mix of ideological politics and national identity.