Human Trustees

On September 16, 2022, the Iranian morality police arrested a 22-year-old Kurdish woman visiting relatives in Teheran likely because her hijab had slipped a bit over her head, showing some hair. Three days later, Mahsa Amini died in police custody, presumably from the beatings she received. Within days, dozens of Iranian cities in all parts of the country exploded in protests. These demonstrations continue, though much smaller now, almost five months later.

It’s hard to believe for those of us living in democratic nations – however imperfect that democracy might be – that these protesters, often women, and as young as 15, with the majority in their twenties, will still venture in the streets, or engage in public acts of defiance to voice their anger, when by now . . .

• • 20,000 have been jailed
  • there are testimonies of people released saying that most all prisoners experience beatings, torture and rape
  • “more than 500 people killed by security forces, including 70 children.”
  • four protestors have been executed – all young men in their 20s or 30s who faced only a judge behind closed doors with no defense or jury in a trial that lasted between 5 and 15 minutes.

In this four-minute video in The Guardian from January 23, 2023, the journalist tells us that these executions have made protestors even more angry and even more determined to continue their fight for freedom, even if it costs them their lives. A protestor on death row put it this way, “What they’ve done, the regime with their executions, is that they’ve created this fire under the ashes.”

First, allow me to present some historical background. There’s a long genealogy of public resistance to the Iranian theocratic regime, but it flared up dramatically in this century.

The four protest movements since 2009

The first was arguably the greatest, in terms of participation. The Green Movement, named for the green sash previous President Mohammad Khatami gave to reform candidate Hossein Mousavi in the months running up to the June 12, 2009 presidential election. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was running for a second term and won, but from the start the opposition believed the vote had been fraudulent (it turns out that it was, as the UK’s Chatham House, among other studies, proved). Quoting again from the Iran Primer, “The Green Movement reached its height when up to 3 million peaceful demonstrators turned out on Tehran streets to protest official claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the 2009 presidential election in a landslide. Their simple slogan was: ‘Where is my vote?’”

But over the fall, under Hossein Mousavi’s leadership (a cleric, he had been prime minister in the 1980s), the movement “evolved from a mass group of angry voters to a nation-wide force demanding the democratic rights originally sought in the 1979 revolution, rights that were hijacked by radical clerics.” But by the beginning of 2010, the regime had cracked down so brutally, that Mousavi and his leaders had to call off any more public protest. Still, particularly among the students, protests had loudly called for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to step down. One often heard the crowd chant, “Death to the dictator!”

An October 26, 2022 interview with respected Iranian American sociologist Asef Bayat (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) was first conducted in Farsi and was “widely shared in Iran – and now banned by the Tehran authorities.” New Lines Magazine republished it in English under the title, “A New Iran Has Been Born – A Global Iran.” Bayat brings up the 2009 Green Movement and notes that it “was largely a movement of the urban modern middle class, though some other discontented people also supported it.” The uprising of 2017, by contrast, was more about the poor protesting their impossible life conditions, but they remained separate groups demanding better conditions, “like unpaid workers, creditors, drought-stricken farmers and others rose up in protest simultaneously throughout the country, but each raised their own sectoral demands.”

Two years later, this wave of discontent found greater unity. The uprising of 2019 was a more cohesive movement of middle-class poor and other marginalized people from cities and the provinces protesting “economic and cost-of-living issues.” And in some cases, the tactics they used were “quite radical.”

But, argues Bayat, “this current uprising has gone even further.” He explains:

“It has brought together the urban middle class, the middle-class poor, slum dwellers and people with different ethnic identities — Kurds, Fars, Azeri Turks and Baluchis — all under the message of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom.’ Significantly, this is an uprising in which women play a central part. These features distinguish this uprising from the previous ones. It feels like a paradigm shift in Iranian subjectivities has occurred; this is reflected in the centrality of women and their dignity, which relates more broadly to human dignity. This is unprecedented. It is as though people are retrieving their ruined lives, perished youth, suppressed joy and a simple dignified existence they have been denied. This is a movement to reclaim life. People feel that a normal life has been denied to them by a regime of elderly clerical men. These men, they feel, seem so separated from the people and yet they have colonized their lives.

The current wave, sparked by Mahsa Amini’s brutal death, is the fourth since 2009. It was not just set aflame by the death of a young woman; it was and continues to be a movement inspired and led by women.

The persistent role of women

Suzanne Kianpour, “an Emmy-nominated news reporter and producer,” is only 36 but has reported from Washington, Los Angeles, Beirut and London, and most recently produced the “Women Building Peace” series for the BBC. As a “Persian and Sicilian” American who speaks and writes fluently in Farsi, she has leveraged her intercultural background and journalistic experience to cover stories in over fifty countries and interviewing some high-profile leaders, including the Iranian foreign minister (see her website). I only mention this as background to the piece she wrote for Politico magazine (Jan. 22, 2023), “The Women of Iran Are Not Backing Down.”

She starts off by recalling an incident while visiting her cousin in Tehran in 2007 while a student. She witnessed a young woman being dragged off the street into a morality police van. Then she adds,

“Fifteen years later, the morality police took it too far. In September 2022, during what seemed a typical detention over an inadequate hijab, Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman visiting Tehran, was arrested and beaten. She subsequently died in custody. Two female journalists broke the story. They are now in prison. The country erupted in widespread protests not seen since the Green Revolution of 2009, demanding justice for Mahsa and freedom and civil rights for all women.”

Protests have taken place over the years in Iran, “over election fraud, economic woes, civil liberties.” Yet this time feels very different, Kianpour contends: “an unprecedented revolution led by women, with support from men, encompassing a wide variety of grievances, all laid out in the heart-wrenching Persian lyrics of Shervin Hajipour’s song ‘Baraye,’ or ‘because of.’ It’s become the anthem of the revolution, striking such a nerve around the world that backlash after Hajipour’s arrest led to his release.” This song won a Grammy award, in fact the very first for Best Song for Social Change Award (watch Jill Biden present it at the Grammys).

Catherine Z. Sameh, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Irvine, reminds us that the Islamic Revolution, unlike the Shah regime, noticeably benefited the rural, working class, and poor women who had been left behind. Through its comprehensive social welfare programs, literacy levels and life expectancy went up for women, as well as the number of women in Iranian universities. Women also began to have fewer children as the poverty rate was falling. However, she notes, “these improvements were exacted at a very high cost for women: a discriminatory legal structure that legitimizes patriarchal control over and violence against women and girls.”

What are some of these “discriminatory” laws”? Here are a few: a citizenship status conferred on children only through the father; custody of children more easily granted to the father; inherently patriarchal family laws related to marriage and divorce. Kianpour adds a few more: “Women are forced to cover their hair in hijab and bodies in loose clothing. They cannot dance publicly, cannot drive motorcycles and cannot travel without parental or spousal approval.” They are not admitted in sports stadiums either.

Women over the decades, at least in some circles, have often quietly resisted this oppressive system aimed at controlling their persons and bodies. But in the 2000s, they started to speak out. Sameh describes the 2006 One Million Signatures Campaign launched by women activists both inside and outside Iran. Both the Qur’an and the Iranian revolution promised equality for women but reality turned out quite differently. Hence, they presented 46 articles in Iran’s Civil Code and Penal Code that plainly discriminated against women. Going door to door, organizing both house and public meetings, they sought to build a movement of dialogue and consensus building starting at the grassroots. The signatures collected helped to show that anyone and everyone’s voice is counted.

The movement’s co-founder, Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani, explained their rationale: “The power of the civil and democratic movement of the Iranian people must come not from blood, clenched fists, bulging veins, and zealous revenge-seeking, but rather from life-affirming endurance, persistence, and thoughtfulness.” Sameh calls this “a politics informed by feminist principles and organizational practices of collectivity, dialogue, and a deep embeddedness in the ordinary lives of people.”

In fact, she argues, this “might well be the unfolding of a distinctly new kind of feminist revolution.” It’s extraordinary, really. Sameh is worth quoting here:

“In the streets, schoolyards, universities, restaurants, shops, and homes of Iran, women and girls are demanding their freedom and autonomy and, in the process, creating relationships based on mutuality, solidarity, love, and care. Unlike their predecessors, however, they are not interested in negotiating within the parameters set by a patriarchal authoritarian state. In the multiple and extraordinary acts of celebration and defiance—removing and burning hijabs, dancing in the streets, eating in restaurants without hijabs, graffitiing walls, kissing in public, creating art, singing, cutting hair, taping sanitary napkins over surveillance cameras—women and girls are occupying space with their bodies and creating a new world of political symbols, ideas, practices, and visions.”

Why the slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom?”

As quoted above, Noushin Khorasani described the One Million Signatures Campaign as women continuing the revolution very differently than the men had it in the past – “from blood, clenched fists, bulging veins, and zealous revenge-seeking.” Enough of that misapplied testosterone, she says. What is needed is an injection of “life-affirming endurance, persistence, and thoughtfulness.” Sameh had begun her essay with these words:

“The feminist uprising in Iran—sparked by the beating, arrest, and death in police custody of Mahsa (also known by Jîna) Amini, a young Kurdish Iranian woman accused of “improper hijab”—is generating previously unimagined ideas, images, and possibilities. The current movement, led by women and girls, has forced us all to rethink the glorified figure of the revolutionary as a militant, often militarized, and individual masculine subject. It also invites us to understand the complex history of women’s struggle in Iran—not as counterpoised to or lagging behind Western feminism, but rather on Iranian women’s own terms.”

Notice that Mahsa Amini’s other name is “Jina,” meaning “life.” The current revolutionary movement, as mentioned above, is about girls and women demanding their civil rights of “freedom and autonomy,” but only in a way that creates “relationships based on mutuality, solidarity, love, and care.” Recall that sociologist Asef Bayat had claimed, “This is a movement to reclaim life.” The quest for freedom is about life and human flourishing.

This reminds me of the time we lived as a family in the West Bank just outside of East Jerusalem in the 1990s. The Oslo Accords rolled in with great hope for Palestinians, but were soon dashed, as military checkpoints appeared out of thin air constraining Palestinian life even more than before. Already, it was clear that the Israelis had no intention to back down from their military occupation of Palestinian territories and that the establishment of the Palestinian Authority was only a sham, an insidious scheme to pacify a people in order to better subjugate them. Under those conditions, violence is bound to erupt. With horror, we witnessed several suicide bus bombings in Jerusalem (West Jerusalem, the Jewish side, much larger and more prosperous). At the time, we were actually part of a support group for parents of ADHD children, in which we were the only non-Jews. We saw up close the fear, anger and grief of Israelis.

We also saw women coming together from both sides, calling themselves “Woman in Black.” These Israeli and Palestinian women would stand at a busy Jerusalem intersection in West Jerusalem at noon on Fridays (Israelis are rushing to get ready for Shabbat so traffic is intense). They held up signs communicating the following message: “violence is not the way; we all mourn these senseless killings; only dialogue and mutual understanding will bring peace.” Since time immemorial, it is the men who start wars and kill. Today in many places, it is often the women who come together to seek reconciliation and peace (see my blog post about the 2019 women-led protests in Sudan).

Whence Iran?

I began this post with the sheer brutality of the theocratic state’s repression of this protest movement. Kianpour notes that “[t]he Islamic Republic’s atrocities have gotten global attention and led to Iran being kicked off the UN Commission on Women.” She also quotes the “Iranian-born British actress and activist Nazanin Boniadi” who in October “met with Vice President Kamala Harris and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House to discuss how the Biden administration can help protesters with internet freedom and hold the Islamic Republic accountable for human rights abuses.” Boniadi stated:

“The most unprecedented thing we’re seeing is people are fighting back against security forces. Women are not just taking off their headscarves in protest, they’re burning them. And young kids, young girls are protesting . . . Despite the brutal crackdown, they’re showing no signs of slowing down. I think this is a historic moment, I truly believe this is the first female-led revolution of our time.”

But will it topple the clerical regime of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei? In a short interview conducted by Ali Shapiro of NPR with Columbia Senior Advisor Kian Tajbakhsh, the latter had this to say about it:

“… authoritarian systems are remarkably resilient in the face of opposition. I mean, the experts who look at authoritarian regimes point to three pillars of regime strength – a cohesive ruling elite, a highly developed, loyal coercive apparatus and the destruction of rival organizations and alternative centers of power. Looking at those three, what is very striking is how these all seem to be intact. So unfortunately, it's hard to see them crumbling in the next six months or so.”

But when Shapiro asks him whether some image or moment sticks with him from these months of protest, Tajbakhsh seems more optimistic. That young men, he answers, stand publicly with these young women is “absolutely uplifting” for him. That kind of solidarity “bodes well for the future.” He adds, “It'll be very hard for them to go back into their families and into their houses and even to their own marriages, let's say, or their partnerships, and treat women in a more traditional and discriminatory way. So I think that these protests have thrown down a gauntlet. It's a moral challenge to this regime.”

I end with James Dorsey’s analysis of a recent poll among Iranians in Iran and abroad conducted by the Netherlands-based Gamaan Institute with the help of Voice of America and London-based and Saudi funded Iran International TV. The outcome was stunning, even if the participation of Iran International might have skewed some of the results: “an overwhelming majority of the 158,000 respondents in Iran and 42,000 Diaspora Iranians in 130 other countries, rejected Iran’s Islamic regime. The poll was published days before Iran commemorates the 44^th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution.”

To the question, “Islamic Republic: Yes or No?,” 80.9 percent in Iran said no. Among the diaspora, the figure was 99 percent. When respondents in Iran were asked whether they supported the anti-government protests, 80 percent said yes; when asked if they would change anything, 67 percent said they would.

Within Iran, it is striking to see the level of participation. If, as Kianpour puts it, it’s fair to say that Gen Z “are the true leaders of the revolt,” many others support it. Dorsey highlights the following from that poll:

“Twenty-two per cent of those in Iran said they had joined the protests, including participating in nightly chanting against the government; 53 per cent indicated they might. Thirty-five percent had engaged in acts of civil disobedience like removing headscarves or writing slogans; 44 per cent participated in strikes, and 75 per cent were in favour of consumer boycotts. Finally, eight percent said they had committed acts of ‘civil sabotage’ while 41 per cent suggested they might.”

Eighty-five percent of respondents believed the opposition should organize, preferably around some kind of “solidarity council or a coalition of opposition forces.” Then, in terms of next steps, “[f]ifty-nine percent expected the council to establish a transitional body and a provisional government.”

But it gets a bit murky when you go into details. It turns out that the top candidate to join such a council is “Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Virginia-based son of the toppled Shah.” Though 22 percent in Iran and 25 percent outside preferred a constitutional monarchy, 28 percent inside Iran and 32 percent outside leaned toward a presidential system. Fewer preferred a parliamentary system (say, like Britain).

In the end, we cannot say that the current wave of protests will actually topple the Islamic Republic, which requires that its Supreme Leader be an ayatollah. NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly just spent a couple of weeks in Iran and filed this report (Feb. 16, 2023). The street protests have been mostly tamped down, but students interviewed said they will start up again. One female student studying psychology said, “This kind of dissent . . . it doesn’t go away.”

But it’s worth emphasizing: this is not a revolution against Islam, like the French Revolution was against the Catholic Church (allied with the monarchy) and Christianity. Rather, it’s a revolt against the traditional, male-dominated interpretation of Islamic law that robs women of their civil and personal status rights. It is also a full-throated demand for democracy – in the way I was explaining it in the context of the UN’s Sustainable Development goal #16:

“A democratic system is one in which its institutions and the mechanisms that keep them functioning (including voting, which isn’t spelled out here) are actually considered “inclusive and responsive,” and one in which those serving in the legislatures, public service, and the judiciary, reflect the population as a whole ('by sex, age, persons with disabilities and population groups').”

Is this kind of holistic human flourishing that controversial? In many parts of the world ruled by authoritarian regimes, it seems out of reach. In Western cultures too, especially with their strong emphasis on individualism, whole segments of the population can be left behind. Clearly, this “inclusive and responsive” democracy is a challenge for all societies.

In this light, I urge people of faith in particular to get behind this kind of feminist-inspired, grassroots movement of “creating relationships based on mutuality, solidarity, love, and care.” It’s about human dignity, first and foremost. Maybe it will still take a while to get there in Iran (or in the US, for that matter), but as Kianpour concludes, these young people have sacrificed so much to call for a change. They won't stop: “This genie cannot and will not go back in the bottle.”

As you know, the G20 represents the twenty most powerful economies of the world and it meets every year. With a rotating leadership, Indonesia is the 2022 convener this month, and President Joko Widodo has insisted that President Vladimir Putin attend (he did not in the end). Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had walked out of the G20 ministers conference in July as a result of Western nations’ fierce criticism of the Russian war in Ukraine. So far, Widodo’s entreaty to the G7 leaders to join regardless of Putin’s presence has succeeded to keep the G20 on track.

But Widodo’s objectives are even more ambitious than that. For the first time, Indonesia’s powerful Nahdatul Ulama organization (NU) – by far the world’s largest civil society Muslim organization (90 million members) – has initiated a two-day parallel religious conference called the Religion 20 Forum (R20) (Nov. 2-3) and has allowed the Saudi-run Muslim World League (MWL) the chance to co-sponsor it. There is a lot to unpack here. Let me begin with Indonesia and the NU organization.

Indonesia and the Nahdatul Ulama

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-majority nation (231 million). The second is Pakistan (212 million); third, India (200 million); fourth, Bangladesh (154 million); fifth, Nigeria (nearly 100 million). And simply being part of the G20 makes Indonesia even more influential. Add to that an Asian culture that favors social harmony over ideology and creed, and an Islamic heritage that tolerated at least some room for its traditional mix of Hindu and native rituals and practices.

The twentieth century witnessed a revival of Islam, no doubt sparked by the harsh reality of colonialism and by other influences of global Islam at the time. Two reform movements were founded in the 1920s that are unique to Indonesia and remain very influential today. The Muhammadiyya movement borrowed many features of the Islamic modernism of 19^th-century pioneered by Middle Eastern scholars and activists Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. Their main insight is that Islamic law has to be reformed with more place given to reason. Its membership today is around 40 million.

The second organization remained until recently more traditional in its approach, while always seeking reform. Nahdatul Ulama means “Awakening (or Renaissance) of the Islamic Scholars.” Both organizations have established a network of pesantrens (residential religious schools for the youth) and universities, and continue to run multiple clinics and hospitals.

Yet in this century, NU has gradually paid more attention to the deradicalization of some of its youth and to the possible root causes of violent Islamic extremism, which has also been plaguing Indonesia. With the election of Yahya Cholil Staquf as chaiman of the NU Executive Council in 2021, NU took an even stronger stand against Islamic militancy and a bold push for democracy at every level of society. In a 2021 OpEd in the Wall Street Journal, Staquf tells of a recent speech he made at the United Nations on Islamic terrorism. He argued that the violence of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram and other terror groups finds support from some traditional Islamic teachings. In particular, . . .

“. . . the doctrine, goals and strategy of these extremists can be traced to specific tenets of Islam as historically practiced. Portions of classical Islamic law mandate Islamic supremacy, encourage enmity toward non-Muslims, and require the establishment of a universal Islamic state, or caliphate. ISIS is not an aberration from history.”

Staquf went on to explain that until the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 Muslim lands were ruled under the classical formulations of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), which many people wrongly conflate with Sharia. That is unfortunate, he said, because the scholars’ interpretation of the sacred texts (Qur’an and Sunna, hence Sharia, as opposed to fiqh) had created and reinforced over time a political ideology of Islamic supremacy that discriminated against religious minorities and glorified war as a way to expand political power and national borders. Fiqh, by definition, is a human interpretation and practical application of the Sharia in a particular context in a particular time. As such, it is fallible and in constant need of revision.

For instance, beyond the many rulings of fiqh that give more power to men and take away rights from women, “Classical Islamic orthodoxy stipulates death as the punishment for apostasy and makes the rights of non-Muslims contingent on a Muslim sovereign’s will, offering few protections to nonbelievers outside this highly discriminatory framework.” Then Staquf adds, “Millions of devout Muslims, including many in non-Muslim nations, regard the full implementation of these tenets as central to their faith.”

As mentioned above, this attachment to traditional Islamic jurisprudence is especially problematic when it can be used to justify violence done to non-Muslims and other Muslims. This is the core of his OpEd argument:

“The problem is that these tenets, which form the core of Islamist ideology, are inimical to peaceful coexistence in a globalized, pluralistic world. But we can’t bomb an ideology out of existence. Nearly 1 in 4 people in the world is Muslim, and many Muslims—me included—are prepared to die for our faith.

The world isn’t going to banish Islam, but it can and must banish the scourge of Islamic extremism. This will require Muslims and non-Muslims to work together, drawing on peaceful aspects of Islamic teaching to encourage respect for religious pluralism and the fundamental dignity of every human being.”

Catholics and Protestants routinely killed each other up until the 18^th century, Staquf notes. But then they reformed their theology to see each other as fellow human beings and, especially, as fellow Christians. Muslims today can to the same with their theology, which like their Jewish counterparts, is closely tied to their jurisprudence. NU is doing this very thing, discarding elements of fiqh that stand in the way of pluralism, “universal love and compassion,” and adopting the Nusantara Manifesto: “a theological framework for the renewal of Islamic orthodoxy—and abolished the legal category of “infidel” within Islamic law, so that non-Muslims may enjoy full equality as fellow citizens, rather than endure systemic discrimination and live at the sufferance of a Muslim ruler.” Staquf and his colleagues also call this “Humanitarian Islam.”

The Nusantara Manifesto (2018, see above link to download the 40-page pdf document) has a version of this in its opening and concluding paragraph:

“The Nusantara Manifesto represents a significant milestone within a long-term, systematic campaign—guided by the spiritual leadership of the world’s largest Muslim organization— designed to block the political weaponization of Islam, whether by Muslims or non-Muslims, and to curtail the spread of communal hatred by fostering the emergence of a truly just and harmonious world order, founded upon respect for the equal rights and dignity of every human being.”

How could such a radical reinterpretation of Islamic theology and law be in any way compatible with the puritanical and exclusionary ideology of the Saudi state (Wahhabism)? Mind boggles . . . and yet . . .

The surprising NU outreach to the Muslim World League

This “recontextualization of Islamic theology,” on the face of it, would be anathema to the Muslim World League (MWL), which since its inception was a propaganda tool of the ultraconservative Saudi religious ideology of Wahhabism. To be sure, the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (known as MbS), has embarked on some cosmetic reforms like allowing women to drive and attend public football matches, and the youth to experience some Western-style entertainment. He also put the moral police on a much shorter leash. But none of that amounted to religious reform. As James M. Dorsey, incisive commentator on global Muslim affairs, put it, “Instead, it amounted to long overdue social change by decree.”

This deceptive window-dressing campaign is likely why the MWL jumped on the NU’s offer to jointly chair the R20. Dorsey ponders the relative advantages both sides saw in this partnership:

“Persuading the League to endorse a genuinely moderate form of Islam would have enormous significance. It would lend the prestige of the Custodian of Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, to Nahdlatul Ulama's effort to reform Islam. That, however, is a long shot, if not pie in the sky.

More likely, the League sees reputational benefit in its association with Nahdlatul Ulama. The League also probably hopes to co-opt the Indonesian movement to prevent it from becoming a serious competitor for hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

Neither group may succeed in fulfilling its aspirations.

Nahdlatul Ulama has a century-long history of fiercely defending its independence and charting its moderation course.

At the same time, there is little reason to believe that the League can embrace anything but what Mr. Bin Salman authorises.

If the last two months provide an indication, Mr. Bin Salman and his loyal lieutenant, League secretary general Mohammed al-Issa, can, at best, be expected to opportunistically pay lip service to Humanitarian Islam.”

Dorsey’s comment about “the last two months” was a reference to the crown prince’s hard line when it comes to stamping out all political dissent in the kingdom. In fact, it seemed MbS saw President Biden’s July 2022 visit to him in Jeddah as a green light to quash even more fiercely any sign of protest under his de facto rule. To wit, 34-year-old mother of 2 young boys, Salma al-Shehab, was working on a PhD in Leeds, UK and decided to visit her family for the holidays in Saudi Arabia in December 2020. She was then arrested and handed down a 34-year prison sentence for following overseas Saudi dissidents on Twitter and retweeting some of their tweets. Apparently, this qualifies as threatening the integrity of the state. She is still in prison, alleging “abuse and harassment.” Since then, another Saudi woman, Nourah Bint Saeed al-Qahtani, was arrested and given a 45-year sentence for “using the internet to tear [Saudi Arabia’s] social fabric.” MbS is obviously seeking to make an example of these women and sow terror among his would-be detractors.

Then just last month three members of the Howeitat tribe were put on death row for resisting an edict that forced them to leave their land to make way for the construction of Mr. bin Salman’s US$500 billion futuristic Neom megacity on the Red Sea. Civil rights, it seems, shine by their absence in Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, Dorsey’s comment about NU’s pluralism and democratic ideals rubbing off on the MWL as “pie in the sky” is understandable. Yet the crown prince knows very well that oil money will be drying up and he has sought to diversify the KSA economy. He has not pursued tourism as aggressively as his ambitious neighbor, UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, but in order to attract more business capital, both neighbors promote a “moderate Islam” that supports autocratic regimes like their own. That said, the UAE is open to at least a degree of religious pluralism in its realm, permitting, for instance, the building of churches in Abu Dhabi. Its Saudi neighbor, by contrast has never allowed such a thing.

A quick side bar on the UAE is warranted here, because despite sharing with the KSA a mission to defend autocratic governance on Islamic terms, it competes with its neighbor for economic, political and religious soft power in the Arabian Gulf and in global capitals. But it’s a game the Emiratis appear to be winning so far.

Dorsey posted a recent piece on the UAE’s top religious cleric, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, whose global influence could be seen in the 2016 Marrakesh conference in Morocco, where over 250 Muslim religious leaders, scholars and even some heads of state spoke out against the persecution of Christians and Yazidis under ISIS. The Marrakesh Declaration was notable for its ringing endorsement of religious freedom. But as Dorsey rightly points out, democracy is not on the table for Mr. Bin Bayyah:

“In Mr. Bin Bayyah's mind, autocracy, uninhibited by religious jurists who do not know their proper place, is best positioned to ensure societal peace. Mr. Bin Bayyah remained silent when his Emirati paymasters rendered his theory obsolete with military interventions in Libya and Yemen. The interventions fueled civil wars while political and financial support for anti-government protests in Egypt that overthrew the country’s first and only democratically elected president in 2013 produced a brutal dictatorship.”

NU versus MWL: justice as rights versus traditional fiqh

Quoting from Yahya Cholil Staquf’s OpEd above gave you the impression that his main objective was dismantling the scourge of Islamic-related extremism and violence. But he also demonstrated that this ideology was fed in part by the traditional worldview of Islamic jurisprudence (the world being divided between the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War; hence, by military means—by using the “lesser jihad”—we can expand the borders of Islam until, God willing, it encompasses the whole world). Therefore, a bold and clear-eyed revamping of classical Islamic fiqh is in order. It includes not only eliminating any tacit support for military action in order to advance God’s cause, but also a number of issues that until now justify the discrimination against women’s rights, religious minority rights, and bolster autocratic regimes that suppress the rights of citizens to choose political leaders to represent them. In other words, the KSA and the UAE’s bid to spread their top-down, monarchical form of “moderate” Islam, with an ulama class subservient to the ruler’s every wish, will not succeed if the NU has its way.

So how did the inaugural R20 proceed? According to the British Religion Media Centre’s report, over 300 religious leaders came from around the world. Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah was one of several keynote speakers, but the article features MWL secretary-general Muhammad bin Abdul Karim al-Issa right from the start, indicating that he is also a Saudi politician, “widely regarded as moderate, challenging extremism and promoting peace, dialogue and respect.”

Words are cheap, as they say, but in an interview with the Religion Media Centre Dr. al-Issa offered a judicious remark about the passing of the baton to India, next year’s host of the G20 and now the R20. As many conflicts today have roots in religious identity, he noted, “conflict resolution and peace building must involve society’s moral and faith leadership.” Since the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was prominently represented in this conference, Shaykh al-Issa, while affirming clearly India’s right to select its own delegates for next year’s forum, he also cautioned that “it is better to communicate than create a void where misunderstandings accumulated.” Keep in mind that RSS people are the ones primarily responsible for attacks on Muslims, destructions of their homes and shops by bulldozers, with these tensions spreading into the Indian diaspora in the West. Here I can see the MWL playing a constructive peace building role.

But when it comes to democratic ideals grounded in the human rights of all human beings as stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its subsequent covenants, I am afraid that statements made by the likes of al-Issa and Bin Bayyah are more about gaining soft power and cleaning up their reputations. NU’s Humanitarian Islam, by contrast, has embarked on a courageous plan to reform traditional Islamic jurisprudence. That is not what these men have signed up for.

Still, after all this reading and pondering about the very first R20 and its launching by NU with the support of Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo (who spoke at the R20), I come away encouraged that this momentum will likely produce change in the long run. One reason is the clarity of the goals established from the onset by NU. The Final Communiqué (available in this article) bears this out. The final goal says it all: “foster the emergence of a truly just and harmonious world order, founded upon respect for the equal rights and dignity of every human being.” As I wrote in my book on justice and love, justice is about rights and it leads to a society in which everyone finds their place and are able to flourish – yes, and able to have a political voice.

Second, the most prominent speakers listed by the MLW on its news website. In order they are (notice NU comes after MLW):

1. 1. 1. Joko Widodo, President of Indonesia
      2. Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, Secretary-General of Muslim World League
      3. Yahya Cholil Staquf, General Chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama
      4. Cardinal Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (Vatican)
      5. Thomas Schirrmacher, Secretary General of the Protestant World Evangelical Alliance
      6. Archbishop Henry Chukwudum Ndukuba, Primate of the Church of Nigeria
      7. Reverend Yoshinobu Miyake, Chairman of International Shinto Studies Association
      8. Swami Govind Dev Giri
      9. Rabbi Silvina Chemen, Professor at Latin American Rabbinical Seminary
      10. Sheikh Abdullah Bin Bayah, Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies
      11. Bashar Matti Warda, Archbishop of Chaldean Catholic Church, Iraq

Pope Francis also addressed the assembly in a recorded statement. Bin Bayyah appears (with typo), but in his connection to an NGO he helped to found. There are no Orthodox Christian leaders, but we find the Vatican represented along with the Iraqi Chaldean Catholic Church, the top Anglican leader in Africa, the leader of the World Evangelical Alliance representing 600 million followers globally, and finally, a Shinto, a Hindu and a Latin American Jewish professor. Many others were there also. See in particular this short video promoting the participation of the Mormon leader. It will give you a better feel for the pageantry of such occasions. [See also this 45-second Instagram montage of the handover ceremony to India]

But one thing is for sure. We should all applaud any initiative that seeks to make religion a solution to our world’s many problems, while condemning the many ways it has contributed to violence and oppression. We are in the debt of Indonesia’s Humanitarian Islam.

On October 8, 2022, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Missiological Society. It was a joint session with the International Society for Frontier Missiology and the paper’s title is, “Caring about Global Governance for the sake of Human Flourishing.” This was an opportunity for me to put on paper some of the material I have been working on for my book on Christian mission and human flourishing. I had already posted a two-part blog post related to this topic (“The New Economy and the SDGs”), but this was the opportunity to ground this project more specifically in mission theology.

In particular, this paper highlights some of the interviews I have been conducting with Christians actually involved in some aspect of global governance. Following John Kirton of the University of Toronto, I have defined global governance as including the plurilateral summit institutions (PSIs like the G7/G8, G20, BRICS); the many United Nations summits on specific subjects, but especially the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Summit on Climate Change, both in 2015; intergovernmental and multilateral agencies like the World Bank and regional ones like the EU, the African Union, etc.; and finally, NGOs, both in the business and development communities, and more broadly, civil society. All are stakeholders trying in one way or another to eradicate poverty and build a more peaceful and just world.

Yale University Press has finally released this translation I made of Tunisian Islamic scholar, activist and politician, Rached Ghannouchi's classic work, Public Freedoms in the Islamic State.

I rarely get so absorbed by a book I’m reading. But I could hardly put down Ronald F. Inglehart’s 2021 book (Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing it, and What Comes Next?). An emeritus professor of political science at the University of Michigan, Inglehart is the “Founding President of the World Values Survey Association, which since 1981 has repeatedly surveyed representative national samples of the publics of 108 countries containing over 90 percent of the world's population” (from the Amazon page). This means he has been doing this kind of research with a couple hundred of other international social scientists for 40 years and has closely followed the evolution of people’s values and ethical norms around the globe. He died last year and this memorial page notes that according to Google Scholar he is the most quoted political scientist.

Inglehart’s findings surprised me – I’ve long known that people from all the major religions got more “religious” starting in the 1970s. In fact, I delved into that phenomenon using the sociology of religion in 2011, asking, “Is ‘Fundamentalism’ Still Relevant?” I stand by that still today.

But the general resurgence of religion last century began to reverse itself in the new millennium. The key year is 2007. In his first book on this topic, co-authored with Harvard University’s Pippa Norris (Secular and Sacred: Religion and Politics Worldwide), he hadn’t seen this dramatic change yet (first edition, 2004, second in 2011). What they did find is that for the 49 countries “for which substantial time series data was then available . . . more than two-thirds of [these] countries . . . showed rising religiosity in response to the question ‘How important is God in your life?’” (14).

[Allow me to insert a brief parenthesis here. Noted Baylor University historian of religion Philip Jenkins offered some thoughts about Inglehart’s book on his blog (Anxious Bench/Patheos) in May 2021. It’s a book “that I have been devouring,” he wrote. Just a year before, Jenkins had published a book offering very similar conclusions, Fertility and Faith, but from a different angle:

“High-fertility societies, like most of contemporary Africa, tend to be fervent and devout. The lower a population’s fertility rates, the greater the tendency for people to detach from organized or institutional religion. Thus, fertility rates supply an effective gauge of secularization trends.”

Jenkins is also struck by the similarity of their findings: “In the US context, we both highlighted 2007 as the critical transition point. The gargantuan economic crash of that time is an obvious culprit.” I end here the parenthesis, but in highlighting again how significant this convergence of views is from two scholars coming from different perspectives and disciplines.]

Now back to Inglehart. He and Pippa had found that among 49 countries two-thirds had become more religious from 1981 to 2007. That said, respondents in most high-income countries exhibited a decline in religious belief and practice, while those that exhibited the most growth in religiosity were six former communist countries (13 out of 15 of those nations showed at least some growth).

Now writing in 2021, Inglehart explains his surprising new findings:

“The results show that dramatic changes have occurred since 2007 in the same countries analyzed earlier. In sharp contrast with earlier findings, which showed the dominant trend to be rising religiosity, the data since 2007 shows an overwhelming trend toward declining religiosity. The public of virtually every high-income country shifted toward lower levels of religiosity, and many other countries also became less religious. The contrast between ex-communist countries and the rest of the world was weakening, but still the eight countries showing the largest shifts toward increasing religiosity from 1981 to 2020 were ex-communist countries” (14, emphasis his).

The year 2007 also proved a watershed for the United States and its hitherto status as the only high-income country to be significantly religious. In fact, the US “once constituted the crucial case supporting the claim that modernization need not bring secularization.” Advocates of the “religious market secularization theory” could point to a very diverse and competitive religious landscape – the one factor which for them explains religious vitality. But that now seems irrelevant: “The U.S. still has plenty of diversity, but it recently has been on the same secularizing trajectory as other high-income countries; indeed, since 2007 it has been secularizing at a more rapid pace than any other country for which data is available” (83). My title above (using “precipitous” instead of Inglehart’s “sudden”) applies particularly to the United States.

Here are some of the indicators (emphasis mine):

• • According to the 1982 World Values Survey, “52 percent of the American public said that God was very important in their lives, choosing a ‘10’ on a 10-point scale”
  • In the 2017 survey only 23 percent said this
  • “In 1982, 83 percent of Americans described themselves as ‘a religious person.’ In 2017 only 55 percent did so”
  • In 1982, 16 percent of respondents said they “never or practically never” attended religious services; by 2017, 35 percent said so
  • In 1982, 46 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” of confidence in their religious institutions; by 2017, only 12 percent said so
  • Another important survey tool (The General Social Survey) indicates that the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians went from 89 percent in 1972 to 71 percent; meanwhile, “the percentage who identified with no religion rose from 6 to 22 percent”

Why does Inglehart (and Norris – this book builds on the same theory as his co-authored book) believe this is happening?

Inglehart’s “evolutionary modernization theory”

Inglehart is a social scientist, and as such, he is careful to note that the presence of contextual factors also help to explain why a nation (or block of nations) waxes or wanes in its religiosity – including historical, political, religious and social factors. One example he gives is the much faster growth of capitalism in northern Europe compared to its southern Catholic counterpart in the three centuries after the Reformation. Partially looking at Max Weber’s work on the Protestant ethic, Inglehart surmises that Martin Luther’s emphasis on individual Bible reading, and thereby literacy and scientific study, were determinative in providing Protestant nations with a “remarkable economic dynamism.” By 1940, “people in Protestant countries were on average 40 percent richer than the people of Catholic countries” (22).

Yet his main point here is that even with a sharp drop of religious belief and practice, religious ethical norms can still remain dominant within particular populations. This seems to be at least a part of the success of “the Nordic countries”: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland (he adds The Netherlands and Switzerland in most charts and calls this bloc “Protestant Europe”). These nations rate consistently highest as a group according to many indicators, such as life expectancy, years of schooling, GDP per capita, and life satisfaction. But it’s more complicated than that, he explains:

“The Nordic countries seem to be at the cutting edge of cultural change, and their distinctive character seems to reflect a synthesis between the Protestant ethic and the welfare state. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, Protestantism left an enduring imprint on the people who were shaped by it. But the Social Democratic welfare state that emerged in the Nordic countries in the 20^th century modified this heritage by providing universal health coverage; high levels of state support for education, extensive welfare spending, child care, and pensions; and an ethos of social solidarity” (107-8).

He then adds, “These countries are also characterized by rapidly declining religiosity.” This brings up his central argument, which connects to Philip Jenkins’ linking of fertility and religious fervency. Two cultural shifts were underway in the 20^th century, but converged early in the 21-century to form a “tipping point” – meaning that this cultural change changed directions and accelerated dramatically:

• • • Rising existential security brings declining demand for religion because secure people have less need for the predictability and absolute rules of traditional religion and are far more open to new ideas. This has been happening for many years. But the second factor helps explain the recent acceleration of secularization.
    • All of the world’s major religions encourage pro-fertility norms, which help societies replace their populations when facing high infant mortality and low life expectancy. These norms require people to suppress strong drives, but with low infant mortality and high life expectancy, pro-fertility norms are no longer needed. After an intergenerational time lag, pro-fertility norms are giving away to individual-choice norms, eroding religious worldviews that had endured for centuries.

For an arresting case study, see this short piece by Philip Jenkins in The Christian Century: “How Quebec went from one of the most religious societies to one of the least.” In the 1950s, 90 percent of the population attended Mass. Today that percentage hovers around 4 percent. Inglehart would likely agree with Jenkins on some of the reasons the latter puts forward for this momentous shift: the confluence of cultural and political factors that were part of Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” seeking independence from Canada, higher levels of education, and the spread of new media. But too, there was a shift by which the state “took over many of the functions claimed by the church.” People were more prosperous and open to new ideas, and the Catholic Church now seemed backwards and irrelevant to most, particularly its pro-nativity norms.

Inglehart’s research found that the social norms of wealthier countries in general are starkly different from what they were in 1945. This is especially noticeable with regard to fertility rates, which “have moved from the high of the baby boom era to falling below the replacement level in most developed countries.” He has this to say about the changing social norms:

“The World Values Survey and the European Values Survey have monitored norms concerning sexual behavior and gender equality in successive waves of surveys from 1981 to 2020. Although deep-seated norms limiting women’s roles and stigmatizing homosexuality have persisted from biblical times to the present, these surveys now show rapid changes from one wave to the next in developed countries, with growing acceptance of gender equality and of gays and lesbians and a rapid decline of religiosity” (47).

The evolutionary nature of Inglehart’s theory also ventures into theology. He avers that among traditional hunter-gatherers around the world, it is rare to find a belief in a creator God, but rather the belief that “local spirits inhabit and animate trees, rivers and mountains” – in other words, animism. This is actually misleading, because among many indigenous populations, from North America to Africa to the Aborigines of Australia, the belief in a high creator god is quite common, but he tends to be distant and therefore people turn to intermediaries, from lesser deities, to spirits of various sorts, and to ancestors. But be that as it may, his point that agrarian societies, which are dependent on rain and sun for abundant crops, also prayed to god(s) for protection from plagues of locusts and disease, is more plausible. So is this paragraph leading into more widespread ethical norms today:

“Changing concepts of God have continued to evolve since biblical times, from a fierce tribal God who required human sacrifice and demanded genocide against outsiders, to a benevolent God whose laws applied to everyone. Prevailing moral norms have changed gradually throughout history, but in recent decades the pace of change has accelerated. The decline of xenophobia, sexism, and homophobia is part of a long-term trend away from tribal norms that excluded most of humanity, toward universal moral norms in which formerly excluded groups, such as foreigners, women, and gays, have human rights” (48).

I’m certain Jews, Christians and Muslims, particularly those on the conservative end of the spectrum, would want to push back against such a generalization. But it would be equally difficult to argue with the facts supported by such rigorous and comprehensive (both in terms of longitudinal and geographical) research. These World Values Surveys from 1981 to the present provide Inglehart with nine “hypotheses to be tested” – and having read the book, I believe they stand up rather nicely (pp. 51-2):

• • The pro-fertility norms that evolved over time have mostly called for women to produce and raise as many children as possible and prohibit any sexual activity that would endanger this nativist mission of survival and are the “polar opposite” of the “individual-choice norms” that include “support for gender equality and tolerance for divorce and homosexuality. Countries today are found all along this spectrum, with a several on both ends.
  • “Pro-fertility norms are closely linked with religion.” They are “strongest in societies with strong religious beliefs; conversely, tolerance for gender equality, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality will be strongest in societies where religion is weakest.”
  • High religiosity, coupled with support for pro-fertility norms, correlate to “relatively insecure societies, especially those with high infant mortality rates, and weakest in relatively secure societies.”
  • There is “built-in tension” between pro-fertility norms that demand a high degree of self-control and individual-choice norms. Historically, societies weak in pro-fertility norms were societies that did not survive. “But in recent decades, a growing number of societies have attained high existential security, long life expectancy, and low infant mortality, making pro-fertility norms no longer necessary for societal survival – and opening the way for a shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms.”
  • Norms deeply anchored in a society’s culture are very slow to change in normal circumstances. Most changes come, and then incrementally, when a new generation takes over (change “through intergenerational replacement”). Any noticeable change, therefore, “reflects the level of existential security that prevailed during the pre-adult years of people who were born decades earlier.” That is why “the strongest predictor of a society’s level of support for new values among the adult population will not be its current level of life expectancy, infant mortality, and per capita GDP, but the levels that prevailed decades earlier.”
  • “Although intergenerational population replacement involves long time lags, cultural change can reach a tipping point at which new norms come to be seen as dominant. Social desirability affects then reverse polarity: instead of retarding the changes linked with intergenerational replacement, they accelerate them.” This kind of tipping point is occurring “in a growing number of settings, starting with the younger and more secure strata of high-income societies.”
  • “In societies where religion remains strong, little or no change in pro-fertility norms will take place.”
  • “In societies where religiosity is growing, we will find growing emphasis on pro-fertility norms and declining acceptance of individual-choice norms.”
  • “In societies where support for individual-choice norms is growing, we will find declining religiosity.”

The interesting variance amidst the general trend

Inglehart presents a series of graphs seeking to map the evolution of various countries along two axes (see the latest version above). As you can see, the horizontal axis goes from “survival” to “self-expression,” or from the pro-nativity norms on the left to the individual-choice norms on the right. The vertical axis moves up from “traditional values” to “secular values” on top. This is similar to the impact of the Enlightenment on Christian Europe starting in the 18^th century.

What is fascinating here is that countries, by and large, fall into regional or religious groupings. I mentioned “Protestant Europe” (Nordic countries plus The Netherlands and Switzerland) and how as a group they have served as trend-setters since the late 1980s to the present: their standard of living and their top scores on the World Happiness Report (see this year’s). This score is based on “comprehensive Gallup polling data from 149 countries for the past three years,” and takes into account six categories: “gross domestic product per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make your own life choices, generosity of the general population, and perceptions of internal and external corruption levels.” Generosity here includes acceptance of foreigners and minorities, but this might not last. Inglehart’s ninth chapter, “At What Point Does Even Sweden Get a Xenophobic Party?”, begins with a look at the political backlash caused by Angela Merkel who in 2015 opened the doors of Germany to almost a million refugees, most of whom being Syrian Muslims.

Another discernible cluster regroups the “English-speaking” countries of Britain, the US, New Zealand and Australia, and in the latest version of the map (2017-2020), they are just below “Protestant Europe” (not as far on the secular-rational values end), and the US is behind its counterparts in terms of self-expression values. What is striking also, is that the “Confucian” cluster (China, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong) are around the middle of the map but on top (high secular-rational values), with Japan farthest along the self-expression axis. These nations, explains Inglehart, have in common a Confucian-infused culture which was mostly secular to begin with, so while they have become less religious, they have relatively always been so.

As you might guess, Muslim countries are by far the most religious. The World Values Survey has enough data over ten years for ten of them. They “show the highest absolute levels of religiosity of any major cultural group … But they are not becoming more religious” (85). Another factor setting them apart is that “age-linked differences are very small in Muslim-majority countries.” Younger people are only slightly less religious than their elders. This provides strong support for his hypothesis 7: “In societies where religion remains strong, little or no change in pro-fertility norms will take place.” But let me add that though the average birthrate in Muslim nations is the highest (2.9 per woman – replacement rate is 2.1), it is “down from 4.3 in 1990–1995.”

I would also inject that future polling and research will show that religiosity is waning in many Muslim countries. The example of Turkey for which we have research is not unique.

Finally, as “the publics of most ex-communist countries [now labeled “Orthodox Europe”]j showed steeply rising support for religion from 1981 to 2007 and (although this then slowed down) are still considerably more religious than they were in 1981.” In conformity with hypothesis 8 above, “a majority of the ex-communist publics show rising support for pro-fertility norms over the long term." Russia has been particularly vocal about stigmatizing gays, for instance.

What is the take-away?

This impressively researched and crafted book documents in granular detail the global shift in values over the last few decades. Inglehart’s analysis of the causes truly provides an illuminating explanation for what we witness today. But is it the last word on the matter? No book can claim this. Inglehart throughout acknowledges that there are other factors at play and he quotes other scholars on this. But his contention is that growing security, the erosion of pro-nativity religious norms, and the pull of individual-choice or self-expression values are the primary causes for the precipitous drop in religiosity in most countries since 2007.

Certainly in the US, he avers, factors contributing to secularization must also include the religious right’s “embrace of xenophobic authoritarian politicians,” the scandal of the Roman Catholic Church’s failure to deal with its child abuse problem, and for millennials and Gen-Z’ers, the failure of most religious establishments to recognize the validity of people’s choices in their acceptance or even adoption of other religions, their sexual orientation, their use of abortion, and drugs.

Nevertheless, I finished this book and said to myself, “well, the story of religion in America isn’t finished, and especially that of Christianity.” American history and the figures behind Christianity’s breathtaking growth in the 19^th and 20^th centuries tell us there is more to religion than this. One of the textbooks I use for my Comparative Religion course is Boston University’s Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World – and Why Their Differences Matter. A New Times bestselling author, Prothero has nothing to prove religiously. After belonging for over a year to a Christian group as a college student (InterVarsity Christian Fellowship), he left Christianity and religion behind because his questions were not getting answered. So, as he puts in this interview, he made it his profession to keep asking those questions.

I love Prothero’s chapter on Christianity. He calls the 19^th century “the Evangelical century.” Building on historian David Bebbington’s four marks of evangelicalism (biblicism, crucicentrism or centrality of the cross, conversionism, and social activism). He then explains:

“In the early nineteenth century these characteristics coalesced into a movement. Thanks to great revivals in England and the United States, and to the heroic missionary efforts of Methodist circuit riders and Baptist farmer-preachers, Anglo-America was rapidly missionized, and evangelicalism became the dominant religious impulse in the Protestant world …

In the nineteenth century, Christianity made a similar advance among English speakers, expanding even more rapidly than it had in the first Christian centuries. In 1800, less than one-quarter of the world’s population was Christian. By 1900, that figure had jumped to more than one third (34 percent). The most extraordinary growth came in North America, which saw the total number of Christians jump tenfold between 1815 and 1915. In the process, the portion of Christians among the overall U.S. population expanded from about 25 percent to about 40 percent. In Canada, the advance of Christianity was even more dramatic – from roughly one-fifth of the overall population to roughly one-half” (84-85).

Meanwhile, that evangelical missionary fervor produced an explosion of church growth in Africa. Prothero puts it this way, “There is no way that Christianity can keep up the growth it posted in Africa in the twentieth century – from 9 million souls in 1900 to 355 in 2000 – but thanks to a combination of that old-time revivalism and old-fashioned population growth, Africa and Latin America alike should bypass Europe by 2025 in terms of professing Christians” (96). He adds that the percentage of Christians in South Korea went from 1 percent to 41 percent in that same period.

Here from the Encyclopedia Britannica is a short summary of the great religious revivals in America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. If I take off my religious studies scholar’s hat and speak like the Christian that I am, I say that this is more than just cultural and socio-historical dynamics at play. I believe this is God sovereignly stirring up these populations at that time and calling people to himself. It has happened again and again in many different places around the world. From the 1906 Azusa St. revival in Los Angeles, the Pentecostal movement fanned out and exploded. Today there are more than 600 million Pentecostals (who usually also identify as “evangelicals”) in the world. That’s why Prothero calls last century “the Pentecostal century.” Why then, and why here and not there? Only God knows. But this could happen again in 21^st-century USA, and it is happening elsewhere as I write.

Religion’s Sudden Decline is a great read, and I recommend it heartily. I would just caution the reader that there is always more to the story. And for people of faith, there is more going on here than that which meets the eye of a social scientist.

In the first half of this post, the economist delegated by the US to last year’s G7 meeting in Cornwall, Felicia Wong, told us that she and her colleagues from the other 6 nations have noticed a shift in economic thinking. Call it the Washington Consensus of the 1980s giving way to the Cornwall Consensus. Neoliberalism with its mantra of free trade, privatization and deregulation (business interests first) was judged and found wanting. The coronavirus pandemic had exposed the futility of a model that led to obscene inequality and healthcare systems that were woefully inadequate for such emergencies, and the American one clearly more so than other advanced economies.

How do humans flourish? The international consensus on this question today is summarized in the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and as I tried to show, most of them cannot be reached without sustained, smartly targeted government investment. That is also what the “new economics” are saying. In order to achieve greater sustainable development on a global scale, we must prioritize common social goods above all. And they are all connected. Individual healthcare cannot be seen as detached from “environmental protections, affordable housing, living wages, and good public schools.” Science journalist Olivia Campbell quoted Sandro Galea, the dean of public health at Boston University, in her piece commenting on President Trump’s 2017 budget which called for reducing social welfare program funding by $272 billion:

“For the past 35 years, the U.S. has fallen further behind in health. This coincides with the Reagan policies of greater disinvestment in public good. We are now continuing along these lines — that’s what worries me.”

Trump’s healthcare policies followed the same reasoning that led to President Reagan’s drastic cuts to the programs initiated by President Johnson in the 1960s in order to create the “Great Society”: Medicare, Medicaid, substantial improvements to welfare, the National Endowment for the Arts, the national Endowment for the humanities, consumer protection measures, and a long list of environmental measures, including the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), and the Endangered Species Act (1966).

How did Reagan’s far-reaching cuts to these social programs affect Americans, asks Campbell?

“A million children lost reduced-price school lunches, 600,000 people lost Medicaid, and a million lost food stamps. Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) could only serve a third of those eligible. WIC provides low-income pregnant women and children with formula and healthy food staples. Nearly 500,000 lost eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (a less-stringent precursor to TANF). This caused a two-percent increase in the total poverty rate, and the number of children in poverty rose nearly three percent.”

As mentioned above, healthcare is affected by a host of other public policy domains. Campbell quotes Sandro Galea again: “although the public discourse around health focuses on medicine and health care, social, economic, cultural, and structural conditions have a far greater impact on overall health.”

Have we been bamboozled along the way?

Amy Laura Hall, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School, wrote an OpEd piece for Religion News Service last week, entitled, “The ‘thousand points of light’ switcheroo: how conservatives made social welfare the province of private faith.” None of the recent Supreme Court decisions surprised her, she says, but she was taken off guard by how quickly and suddenly they had come. Women, in particular, were left “breathless.” In her words,

“The justices legitimated public funding for religious schools; relegated complaints about coercive public prayer to the churlish fringe; and tossed out half a century of rulings that keep old men from dictating how we use our private parts.”

But this chipping away at the dividing barrier between church and state has been going on for decades, she adds. Significantly, however, it’s not so much “pro-religion” as it is “anti-government spending on social services.” It was President George H.W. Bush who launched the euphemistic slogan “a thousand points of light” as a way to encourage faith leaders to step up and serve their communities in any way they could. President Clinton continued this trend, and it was President George W. Bush who formally set up the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, calling himself a “compassionate conservative.” But all of this was simply a more palatable way to cut government spending by urging religious leaders to help fill the gap in meeting the needs of the poor. It was an exercise in branding, and it very much lined up with the overall Washington Consensus about shrinking government and give wider berth to corporations.

Still, people of faith with a more liberal bent also fretted that Christian spirituality and values were becoming irrelevant in a society awash in secularism. She notes that the Lilly Foundation has funded research that seeks to connect human thriving with “community” and “faith.” Other major donors have supported a program in which she participated, “Project on Lived Theology,” at the University of Virginia. I also know first-hand that major funding has made possible a robust program at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, where theologian Miroslav Volf remains the founding director (2003).

Yet these programs and the many wonderful charitable projects run by churches, synagogues and mosques around the country have made little progress in reducing the exorbitant rate of economic inequality and general indicators of dire poverty in this country. Hall leaves us with something important to think about in her conclusion:

“The whole shift from public to private, from material to spiritual, may appear not only normal, but part of a morally good, grand adventure.

In fact, it has been part of a grand strategy aimed at undoing the government’s involvement in what was once known as the Great Society. And it worked.”

Sadly, that strategy has also served to mask the real costs of structural racism. Why is it that, “According to the CDC, black mothers in the U.S. die at three to four times the rate of white mothers” (see here for more details)? So many indicators put the U.S. behind other high-income nations. That is why I am proposing to look at the SDGs – goals meant to enable poorer nations to catch up with richer ones and increase human flourishing all over the world.

Why democracy and sustainable development must go together

I promised I would bring up the topic of democracy in this second half. That word is absent from the 2015-2030 SDGs and their subgoals, or targets. But as I have been arguing so far, few, or perhaps none, of these goals can be accomplished without robust government intervention – yes, alongside business leaders and civil society. But what kind of government? Think about it: China and Russia and a host of other autocratic or autocratic-leaning states have signed on to these SDGs. The UN’s objective is always to “unite nations” around goals of peace and justice everywhere in the world, after all. So the UN’s job is always a delicate balancing act.

A British think tank started in 1983 as a foundation advocating environmental activism (“Environmental Foundation”). It was so successful (besides garnering the Queen’s Award for Industry and the EU’s Better Environmental Award) that it received funding for a series of high-level consultations at St. George’s House in the grounds of Windsor Castle in the 1990s and up to 2006. The result was an enlarged focus on “the challenges of sustainability in rapidly developing countries such as India and China.” By 2009, the foundation was renamed the “Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development (FDSD).

Not surprisingly, FDSD turned its attention to the SDGs. Had the UN betrayed that necessary connection between democracy and sustainable development? Not at all, we read on a page devoted to this question. Besides expanding the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs, 2000-2015), the SDGs “include universal goals of addressing unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, and protecting environmental resources.” Further on we read,

“The Goals, particularly through SDG 16, tackle another omission of the MDGs, that of governance, inclusion, participation, rights and security. The Goal’s aim is to “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”.

Each of the SDGs has targets, or subgoals, if you will – usually between 10 and 20. SDG 16 has twelve. These two are particularly relevant to the democracy/sustainable development issue:

16.6 Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels

16.7 Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels

The most granular level of making sure each SDG is accomplished is that of “indicators.” For SDG 16, each of the twelve targets has two indicators. One of these for 16.6 clearly reaches for a democratic structure, while both of those for 16.7 make crystal clear that transparency and inclusion for all in decision-making is essential:

Indicator 16.6.2: Proportion of population satisfied with their last experience of public services

Indicator 16.7.1: Proportions of positions in national and local institutions, including (a) the legislatures; (b) the public service; and (c) the judiciary, compared to national distributions, by sex, age, persons with disabilities and population groups

Indicator 16.7.2: Proportion of population who believe decision-making is inclusive and responsive, by sex, age, disability and population group

A democratic system is one in which its institutions and the mechanisms that keep them functioning (including voting, which isn’t spelled out here) are actually considered “inclusive and responsive,” and one in which those serving in the legislatures, public service, and the judiciary, reflect the population as a whole (“by sex, age, persons with disabilities and population groups”). No wonder that in a world in which many countries are becoming more autocratic, this SDG is seen as most “highly controversial.”

When democracy is slowly slipping away

So much more on this could be said, naturally. But I want to illustrate this with some thoughts on the situation in my country in this election year. I was listening to National Public Radio (also started in the 1960s!) in the car yesterday. It was the show “Here and Now” and Robin Young, the journalist, was interviewing Tom Verdin, the “first ever democracy editor” for The Associated Press. I don’t know about the New York Times, but they mentioned that the Washington Post now has seven journalists whose only assignment is to cover issues of democracy in the US. This is a brand-new development in the last two to three years, for reasons you might guess.

Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington are all holding primary elections today. Fifteen other states will follow between now and early November. Many candidates for the Republican Party, including those for governor or top election official in the state are running on the platform that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Some are even saying that if elected, they will annul the results of 2020 electoral races they deem were falsified. Add that fact to the violent storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the slate of laws passed by nineteen states in 2021 to restrict people’s voting in one way or another, and you can see why American allies are worried that the US is beginning to lose its democracy.

Robin Young near the end of the audio clip asks Tom Verdin what he is most worried about in this erosion of democracy. He answers,

“I think the fire hose of disinformation. If you have a country where people cannot agree on the same set of facts, essentially you’re living in two separate worlds. They can’t trust – or won’t trust – the institutions; they won’t trust the vote; they won’t trust the outcome of elections. And a lot of that mistrust is not based on any facts or any evidence. That’s worrisome. It’s very difficult to hold together a democracy in a society where people don’t have trust in each other, don’t have trust in institutions, and are being bombarded with misinformation.”

Target 10 of SDG 16 touches on this: “Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.” This is partially about transparency in the way government institutions operate – which of course is essential. But it's much more than that. The UN explains that this target has four components: press freedom, transparency, safety of journalists (over 800 have been killed while doing their jobs in the last decade), and right to privacy (see the one-minute video on this). This amounts to a bold statement that without a democratic system of governance, several important components of sustainable development will be scuttled.

Regarding the worrisome polarization of the American population these days, I recommend this recent column by Paul Krugman, “The Dystopian Myths of Red America.” We know that increasingly as a nation we have become politically divided into two parallel universes, as Tom Verdin was saying above. Krugman mentions Dave Weigel of The Washington Post reporting on political campaigns around the country: “many Republican candidates are claiming that Democrats are deliberately undermining the nation and promoting violence against their opponents; some are even claiming that we’re already in a civil war.”

There is also the widely held belief that “a lax attitude toward law enforcement has turned America’s big cities into dangerous hellholes.” Yet this has no basis in fact, despite a rise in crime in 2020, though it was about the same in the cities as it was in rural areas:

“In New York City, homicides so far this year are running a bit below their 2021 level, and in 2021 they were 78 percent lower than they were in 1990 and a quarter lower than they were in 2001. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has documented, New York is actually a lot safer than small-town America. Los Angeles has also seen a big long-term drop in homicides, as has California as a whole. Some cities, notably Philadelphia and Chicago, are back to or above early 1990s murder rates, but they’re not representative of the broader picture.”

Last words

I admit that it’s hard to be optimistic about our American democracy at the moment. I agree with Krugman that since “a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives,” and since armed militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are recruiting and arming themselves at will (left-wing militias exist, but they're fewer and smaller), some amount of violence is inescapable. We can only pray that enough leaders on both sides can to come together, truly work for the common good, and then recommit to the institutions that have kept this republic together for two and a half centuries.

At the same time, I find much comfort in the work of global governance spearheaded by the UN, many NGOs, and many multilateral organizations like the G7 and the G20, the World Bank, the EU or the African Union. I have been reading a book co-edited by two scholars, a Canadian (John J. Kirton) and a Russian (Marina Larionova), entitled, Accountability for Effectiveness in Global Governance (Routledge, 2017). John Kirton is “a professor of political science and the Co-director of the G20 Research Group, the Global Health Diplomacy Program and the BRICS Research Group, and Director of the G7 Research Group, all based at Trinity College at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto” (please listen to his 9-minute clip on YouTube, from which the picture above is taken). As part of my research for this book, I interviewed him on Zoom a couple of weeks ago. I had heard he was a practicing Anglican and I wasn’t disappointed. He had just come back from the G7 meeting this year, which was hosted by Germany. When I asked him what was becoming of his close relationship with many Russian scholars (about a third of authors in this book were Russian), he answered,

“They’re fine. Of course, with the war in Ukraine they have to be careful, but look, we cannot solve this world’s problems unless we all work together. The war with Ukraine will be over at some point. We need the Russians to solve the climate crisis. We also need the Russians’ cooperation in order to manage the Arctic region that is melting so fast.”

Human flourishing, as rightly defined by the 2015-2030 SDGs, in the end is determined by political leaders working together with all other stakeholders both locally and globally. My book is seeking to encourage Christians, and people of faith in general, to get involved in global governance. Much more of this to come . . .

This is the fourth review of my 2020 book, Muslims and Christians Debate Justice and Love. The reviewer is Joshua Canzona, who teaches at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. The journal in which it appears (Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology) is related to my publisher, Equinox Publishing in Sheffield, UK. That issue came out in February 2021, about when the other three were published. Of all the reviews, this one emphasizes the most the case study approach I used and notes that it goes a long way in avoiding any temptation on the part of the reader to "essentialize" either Islam or Christianity (meaning, to paint either faith with a wide brush). There is so much diversity of schools and currents in both of these top two world religions! Generalizing is a pitfall that can lead to a lot more tensions between followers of both faiths.

Canzona also welcomes the contribution of this book in our present, often polarized, context, and widely recommends its reading: "In its clarity and emphasis on real-world implications, this volume will be useful to a wide audience of students, scholars, practitioners, and interested readers generally." That said, I wrote it as a textbook I wanted to use personally, and I hope that many colleagues will do the same, whether at the undergraduate or graduate levels. Still, if you exclude the sometimes technical legal/hermeneutical details of Chapter 5 relative to Yusuf al-Qaradawi's work, this is a book most people could easily pick up and read.

This two-part post/essay is my way of introducing (and articulating for myself) one of the main themes of my present book project – human flourishing as defined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015-2030). These 17 goals are breathtakingly comprehensive (see my 2018 post “Ending Hunger” on this). They range from those more traditional development goals like poverty and hunger eradication, improved healthcare and education, job creation and economic growth to more specific ones like “clean water and sanitation,” “affordable and clean energy,” “sustainable cities and communities,” “responsible consumption and production,” “life below water,” and “life on land.” But even beyond this, some of these goals target good governance, both within states and between states in the international arena. In the following bullets, I’ll quote some of the wording of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for the SDGs that require some form of government intervention:

• • Goal 5 - Gender equality: research in the last few decades has demonstrated that the best way to promote development is to empower women. Among other things, this entails giving “women equal rights [to] land and property, sexual and reproductive health, and to technology and the internet.” The section ends with the hopeful sign that more women are in public office, but much more remains to be done in that area.

• • Goal 9 - Industry, innovation and infrastructure: with still 90 percent of the developing world without access to the internet, states will have to invest a lot more in this kind of infrastructure. Additionally, “Technological progress is also key to finding lasting solutions to both economic and environmental challenges, such as providing new jobs and promoting energy efficiency. Promoting sustainable industries, and investing in scientific research and innovation, are all important ways to facilitate sustainable development.”

• • Goal 10 - Reduced inequalities: income inequality has increased everywhere, but it’s lowest in Europe and highest in the Middle East. Political action is needed within nations: “These widening disparities require sound policies to empower lower income earners, and promote economic inclusion of all regardless of sex, race or ethnicity.” And political action is needed on a global scale: “This involves improving the regulation and monitoring of financial markets and institutions, encouraging development assistance and foreign direct investment to regions where the need is greatest. Facilitating the safe migration and mobility of people is also key to bridging the widening divide.”

• • Goal 13 - Climate action: here again governance is key, with political leaders pushing back against the fossil fuel industry, setting bold goals for developing clean energy and finding ways to subsidize this transition in developing nations.

• • Goal 16 - Peace, justice and strong institutions: on a global scale, this is obviously just as necessary for human flourishing as it is difficult to actually achieve. Arguably, the UN, as a more neutral arbiter, has a better chance of achieving peace, and partly because it was designed to work on this in a comprehensive way: “The SDGs aim to significantly reduce all forms of violence, and work with governments and communities to end conflict and insecurity. Promoting the rule of law and human rights are key to this process, as is reducing the flow of illicit arms and strengthening the participation of developing countries in the institutions of global governance.”

• • Goal 17 - Partnerships for the goals: in my reading about international relations these days, I see the US leveraging its economic and military hegemony to further its national interests, sometimes in line with its stated ideals of extending the “international liberal order” (human rights, democracy, rule of law, etc.), and many times in contravention of these ideals (like when it sides with dictators like Egypt’s Sisi, or the Saudi crown prince MbS, while turning a blind eye to the continuing war in Yemen; or its tacit support of Israel’s ongoing and illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, etc.). On the other side, China and Russia are the two powers, which in different ways oppose this US hegemony and pursue their own expansionist policies in opposition to “the liberal order.” In light of all this, this last SDG makes perfect sense: it’s the United Nations saying it needs more support, both in funding and in cooperation, in its work to achieve these development goals: working to make international trade fairer, “promoting investment for the least developed,” enhancing “North-South and South-South cooperation in order to achieve all the targets.” I believe the UN does have a crucial role to play, today perhaps more than ever.

With these goals in mind, I will look at two related issues in this first installment. The first is about the “new economics” in the title, based on a November 2021 piece in Foreign Affairs by Felicia Wong, who is president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute. Then I point out some obvious parallels between the “new economics” and the SDGs.

What are “the new economics”?

In her piece, “The New Economics,” Felicia Wong describes this new convergence of economic thinking as the Cornwall consensus that could potentially replace the Washington consensus of the 1980s.

Let me unpack that statement. Felicia Wong was chosen as the economist representing the United States to join representatives of the other six G7 nations (UK, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy) to draw up a report on “Global Economic Resilience” and thereby offer a series of proposals to the leaders assembling in Cornwall for the June 2021 G7 Summit. The UK, by virtue of holding the rotating presidency that year, indicated that on its agenda was “building back better” from the Covid-19 crisis, promoting “inclusive growth,” “supporting the transition to net zero carbon and supporting resilience to climate change and other environmental challenges.” Felicia Wong and her six co-authors of that report were rewarded by their report’s enthusiastic reception at the Cornwall summit. She calls it the “Cornwall consensus.”

By contrast, the Washington consensus (see here the Encyclopedia Britannica article on this) refers to a set of common policies that in particular the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the US treasury adopted in the 1980s in order to manage the debt of developing nations, while helping them to “develop” economically. This was called the “neoliberal” approach, and it was the model adopted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in their respective economies as well. Its three pillars were free trade, privatization, and deregulation. By prioritizing multinational corporations over workers, corporate profits over protection of the environment, economic neoliberalism exacerbated the gap between rich and poor globally (see my treatment of these issues in an excerpt from the first chapter of Earth, Empire and Sacred Text, pp. 1-13). An easy way to summarize the neoliberal approach is the adage: “A rising tide lifts all boats” – which might work for tides and boats, but much less for the poor when tax cuts and deregulation are seen as the panacea for growing the economy.

In the US, it wasn’t just Republicans who held on to these ideas, but Democrats as well, particularly in the area of trade: “international policymakers privileged trade openness and volume above all, seeking to deregulate markets and support the market-oriented rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO).” President Obama, in his effort to “pivot toward Asia,” promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (TPP), which later presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed she no longer supported because it had caused too many businesses to either move to countries where labor was cheaper or simply shut down, as cheaper products were now flooding the American market. These were some of the issues candidate Trump was able to exploit on his way to the White House. Though his policies mostly did not help the working class, his turning US trade policies upside down did open the way for a fresh look at trade. Here is how Felicia Wong puts it:

“Trump’s victory and his administration’s hostility to trade deals broke the long-standing bipartisan consensus on trade, and the lesson was not lost on Biden. The new administration, although it has departed from many Trump-era policies, has continued to move away from trade expansion itself as a primary goal of economic policy. Biden’s economic advisers have made clear that the United States will not pursue the TPP or any other trade agreement, for that matter, until Congress passes major new domestic spending legislation and international negotiators rewrite trade rules to include protections for workers and the environment.”

The last G7 common statement had been in 2016, before the Trump presidency. It was all about breaking down trade barriers between countries (i.e., against “protectionism”) and a good deal of hemming and hawing about climate change. The Cornwall declaration was completely different in tone and content, and it wasn’t just the pandemic that played into it. Wong writes that it offered a different conceptual framework altogether. Here are the main points:

• • “Unrestricted international commerce” is no longer an objective. Put otherwise, “trade liberalization should no longer be seen as an end in itself.” Research has shown that past trade agreements have mostly hurt workers across the board. Rather, governments should seek to build regulations into their trade agreements that achieve more sustainable production. She gives an example: “the United States and the EU recently announced plans for the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum, which will keep dirty metals out of their markets and produce common ways to measure the embedded emissions in these industries. Notably, the agreement makes no reference to WTO rules or processes. Rather, the two trading giants staked out a common vision and invited the rest of the world to join them. Japan and the United Kingdom reportedly are inclined to do just that.” Sustainability would also include lowering prices on medicines so that pandemics can be fought more effectively on a global scale. The same can be said about environmental sustainability.
  • The Cornwall consensus calls on governments to invest more heavily in “high-quality future growth,” like “supporting the energy transition, including public transportation infrastructure; high-quality education and training; and climate-focused research and development.” Instead of a focus on “immediate consumption,” states should increase the proportion of their budgets on this kind of public spending. The Washington consensus was always looking for ways to cut government spending, but economists see a direct causal line between those austerity measures and the breakdown of the supply chains that have sparked the current global inflationary crisis – exacerbated, no doubt, by the fallout of the pandemic.
  • Governments should also invest in new technologies that will allow industries to reduce their carbon emissions more rapidly. By helping to fund this kind of research and the launching of promising new technology, governments can not only speed up the needed technological innovation; they can “can work with communities in and around the new industrial facilities to ensure that they share in the gains.” Reducing inequality is a win-win for everybody, which leads to the last point.
  • The Cornwall approach calls for drastically overhauling “how top earners and corporations are taxed and regulated.” For too long, the superrich have had far too much influence on economic policy and, as a result, have found ways to almost completely avoid paying taxes. The same goes for quasi-monopolies like Amazon and Facebook, and European regulators have done a better job than American ones so far in holding them accountable. One of the economists that wrote this report, Thomas Philippon, “has found that decreased competition in many industries now costs the typical U.S. household more than $5,000 a year. This is at a time when nearly 40 percent of households struggle to pay for an unexpected $400 expense.”

A very encouraging development in October 2021 was when at the invitation of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 126 countries came together to discuss the taxing of multinational corporations. An article on this gathering explain the backdrop:

“With budgets strained after the COVID-19 crisis, many governments want more than ever to discourage multinationals from shifting profits - and tax revenues - to low-tax countries regardless of where their sales are made.

Increasingly, income from intangible sources such as drug patents, software and royalties on intellectual property has migrated to these jurisdictions, allowing companies to avoid paying higher taxes in their traditional home countries.

The global minimum tax rate and other provisions aim to put an end to decades of tax competition between governments to attract foreign investment.”

The Biden administration wants to sign on to this, but so far, the relevant provision which is part of his “Build-Back-Better” bill is opposed by Republicans in Congress. What is ironic is that, as the Pandora Papers have demonstrated, “at least five U.S. states have become major offshore havens for international wealth, shielding the assets of national and global elites from public scrutiny and financial accountability.” Then Wong adds, “Biden, who spent 36 years as a senator from one such haven, Delaware, could take a strong stand by ending the practice.”

The challenges in applying this new economics

Felicia Wong isn’t naïve. Such policy changes threaten a myriad of entrenched corporate and private interests:

“In the United States and many other countries, the elements of a robust new political economic agenda are in place. Yet translating the new approach into new rules will require confronting the vestiges of corporate capture, when large private sector interests gain sway over government policy, a phenomenon that just in the last few months has impeded ambitious efforts to keep the cost of medicines down. In the United States, powerful interests in Washington have resisted the Biden administration’s effort to enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices to make them more affordable, and the German government has opposed relaxing WTO intellectual property rules to facilitate global vaccine access.”

What this means is that citizens who want to empower workers – or, level the playing field for disadvantaged classes, disproportionately black and brown – and factor climate change mitigation into the drive for economic growth, will have to become more active in local politics and do better in getting out the vote every two years in state and federal elections (see my two-part blog post on Heather McGee’s excellent book, The Sum of Us All). But, as Wong notes, another great obstacle for this truly democratic process to expand and make our economy more robust, resilient and fair for all, is the rise of populism. One of the “significant obstacles to putting the new ideas into practice” is “the threat of right-wing populism in the United States and elsewhere.” She explains:

“[This brand of populism] seeks to provide its own, inward-turning and often nativist alternative to the status quo. The appeal of a more nihilistic, less racially and religiously inclusive populism has only grown in the last five years and has gained ground in major political parties in many countries.”

In the American setting, this is what I was describing in my post about white supremacy. If you have been following the current hearings expertly researched and put together by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, you have been given a front-row seat with a chilling view into what this kind of nationalist populism can lead to. An FBI mole planted among the Proud Boys, the most influential of the right-wing groups that led the assault on the Capitol, testified to the committee that they had every intention of killing Vice-President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi that day. The vice president was whisked away just in time to a secure location in the basement of the Capitol for over four hours, just 40 feet from the rioters. The riot could have ended much worse that day.

The new economics and the SDGs

Though without stating it directly, Wong infers that the new economics’ emphasis on “an inclusive economic vision” is likely influenced by and certainly parallel to the UN’s SDGs. The question at the heart of this new direction is a simple one: how can we build economic growth that empowers the working class and the poor more generally, and how can it be tailored to mitigate the worst-case scenarios of our changing climate, both now and for the next generations? How can we foster an economy that will in fact remain resilient in the face of all these challenges? The answer is that governments will have to take a more energetic and pro-active role in guiding nations toward achieving these goals, while working in tandem with civil-society NGOs and business partners.

In the next installment, I want to focus more on the role democracy plays in human flourishing. The SDGs are very explicit about that as well.

Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old shooter who killed ten people in Buffalo last weekend, posted a 180-page manifesto two days before. In it, he said he would target the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, because Blacks seek to “ethnically replace my own people.” The code word here is “replace,” and refers to the “great replacement theory,” which targets equally Black and Brown peoples, immigrants and natives, Muslims, and especially Jews, who allegedly are behind an international conspiracy to whittle down and disempower the white race through immigration and lower birthrates.

In a New York Times Op-Ed this week, historian Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, explains it in a nutshell:

“The great replacement is the latest incarnation of an old idea: the belief that elites are attempting to destroy the white race by overwhelming it with nonwhite groups and thinning them out with interbreeding until white people no longer exist. This idea is not, at its core, about any single threat, be it immigrants or people of color, but rather about the white race that it purports to protect.”

This fear is the central theme of the wildly famous Tucker Carlson Show on Fox News and it has been picked up in many Republican circles – most famously in a series of Facebook ads in September 2021 by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. One version reads,

“Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

Though Stefanik has tried to distance herself from these statements in the wake of the Buffalo shootings, there is no denying that this is a common sentiment among former President Trump’s base. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WYO), one of two lone Republicans on the Select Committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol (Jan. 6, 2021), boldly tweeted on Monday morning after the shooting: “The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”

Belew explains some of the interconnected political themes touching on this white supremacist anxiety:

“This belief transforms social issues into direct threats: Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population. Abortion is a problem because white babies will be aborted. L.G.B.T.Q. rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the white birthrate. Integration, intermarriage and even the presence of Black people distant from a white community — an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack — are seen as a threat to the white birthrate through the threat of miscegenation.”

University of Oklahoma professor of sociology and religious studies Samuel Perry has also specialized in White Nationalism. He explains that the fear that because white people aren’t fertile enough, it is “everybody’s responsibility to outbreed the negative elements we don’t want in our society.” This belief is at the core of many authoritarian movements that go back to Nazi Germany, and “It’s wrapped up in ethno-cultural outsiders: immigrants, Jews and Muslims. They are a threat to white hegemony.”

Perry notes that after some years of silence, the ideology resurfaced in the manifestos of Anders Breivik (who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011) and Brenton H. Tarrant (who killed 51 people in two New Zealand mosques). The latter warned of an impending “white genocide.” Twenty percent of Gendron’s manifesto is said to be plagiarized from Tarrant’s text. Gendron also praised Dylann Roof, who killed nine African Americans after spending some time with them in Bible study. He “fought for me and had the same goals I did,” wrote the Buffalo shooter. It’s impossible not to connect the dots.

With regard to Jews, they “are the biggest problem the Western world has ever had,” Gendron’s manifesto reads. “They must be called out and killed, if they are lucky they will be exiled. We cannot show any sympathy towards them again.” This is not so far-fetched. After Robert Bowers gunned down eleven worshippers in the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, he admitted that one of the reasons was that they welcome immigrant “invaders” into the US.

White nationalism is not just an American phenomenon, reminds us Professor Belew, at least with regard to the immigrant component of this deep-seated fear. It first made its appearance in a 1973 in a dystopian futurist French novel, The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail (1925-2020). In this future vision, Europe is overwhelmed with immigrants from the Third World, as the Pope and the World Council of Churches, in concert with the liberal media and political elites, fan the flames of white guilt. As one enthusiastic reader from 2017 comments on the book’s Amazon page, “Horror comes at the end of the book as a motley group of 20 or so whites who are still defending the south coast of France are killed in a bombing raid by the new multi-racial government.” They defended themselves valiantly against the hordes of Barbarians, but Western civilization had lost the will to resist and the white race was driven to the edge of extinction. By contrast, another reader who hated Raspail’s book said these immigrants were “only portrayed as a dehumanized plague.” Clearly, to describe immigrants as vermin is likely the only way to craft an authentic horror novel. The obvious message is that these people are less than human – and they’re coming after us!

Raspail wrote over forty books, but this was his most famous one; and it caught the attention of a younger French writer, Renaud Camus (b. 1946). Also a prolific writer, Camus won several literary prizes in France as a gay poet and novelist. But starting in the mid-1990s, while writing a book on some of the villages in the Occitanie region of southern France (he still lives in a castle he bought there, built in 1340), he had an epiphany. Immigrants from North Africa and beyond were changing the populations of many of those villages. That’s when the “great replacement theory” came to him. His book, Le Grand Remplacement (“The Great Replacement”) only came out in 2011 and was never translated into English. Yet its impact has been felt on several continents. The Nation published an article on Camus in 2019 under that title, “How Gay Icon Renaud Camus Became the Ideologue of White Supremacy.” Credit for his great replacement theory appears in the manifestos of the last three white nationalist shootings: the Australian Brenton Tarrant (Christchurch mosques shootings); Patrick Crusius (El Paso Walmart shooting, killing 22 people); and Payton Gendron.

“The Year 2021 in Hate and Extremism”

The best organization tracking hate groups and violent militia is the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their 2021 report on far-right extremism is a meticulously researched and nicely illustrated 64-page magazine (“The Year in Hate and Extremism 2021”). The main article (bearing the title of the magazine, pp. 2-17), written by Cassie Miller and Rachel Carroll Rivas, begins by noting that the storming of the US capitol in January 2021 proves “that extremist leaders can mobilize large groups of Americans to use force and intimidation to impose their political will” and that these groups have “coalesced into a political movement that is now one of the most powerful forces shaping politics in the United States.” Then follows a summary of what they intend to communicate in this piece:

“In the year since the insurrection, this hard-right movement – made of hate and extremist groups, Trump loyalists, right-wing think-tanks, media organizations and committed activists with institutional power – has worked feverishly to undermine democracy, with real-world consequences for the people and groups they target. Within the GOP, a radical faction is attempting to rout the few remaining moderates unless there is a robust counter-effort from democracy supporters.”

At the heart of this anti-democratic campaign is the ”big lie,” that is, that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Trump. It’s part of the platform all of the candidates he endorsed for this week’s midterm elections enthusiastically and vocally supported. But the authors point out that a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute reveals that Republicans voters “are drifting toward a greater acceptance of political violence.” This research shows that almost a third of Republicans, and 39 percent of those who claim the 2020 election was rigged, believe that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (8).

One illustration of this is the acquittal of young Kyle Rittenhouse who shot and killed two protesters and maimed a third at the protests following the police killing of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The jury found that Rittenhouse had solely acted on self-defense. Upon hearing the verdict, Rep. Thomas Massie tweeted, “There is hope for this country.” From then on, he was feted as a hero in these circles:

“Others have made a show of vying to hire Rittenhouse as their intern, while the right-wing campus organization Turning Point USA treated him like a celebrity at their America Fest 2021 event. In a bizarre carnival-like atmosphere, Rittenhouse received a standing ovation as he strolled onstage for a panel discussion accompanied by pyrotechnics and his own theme song” (8).

Though the number of hate groups diminished from 2018 to 2021 (1,020 to 733) – the same for antigovernment groups (from 1360 in 2012 to 488 in 2021), you can see this multi-pronged movement strengthening as you peruse the next sections of the article: “Proud Boys membership spikes,” “White nationalist and neo-Nazi groups continue to adapt,” “The Antigovernment Movement takes a hit, but gets back up bruised and battered,” “Mainstream hate reorients without the White House in its pocket.” Miller and Rivas put it this way, “In the wake of [Jan. 6], the hard-right is reorganizing, re-strategizing and planning to emerge stronger” (16).

Antigovernment groups and hate groups

Under hate groups (total 488), the largest category is “general” (266), but three in particular bear mention. First, the 92 militia are obsessed with FTXs (field training exercises), guns and military-like uniforms, and “maintain internal hierarchical command structures” (56). Second, the 75 sovereign citizen groups claim “they are not under the jurisdiction of the federal government” and need not obey US laws. They buy into a variety of conspiracy theories. In fact, their rise in numbers lately “was largely due to their participation in the QAnon movement, which has cross-pollinated with sovereign and other conspiracy theories” (58). They can be violent, as it was reported on national news: “On July 3, sovereign group Rise of the Moors had an armed standoff with Massachussetts police on their way to Maine for training. Group members did not have firearm or vehicle licenses. The standoff shut down I-95 highway.” Arrested and charged, the group is suing the Massachussetts State Police and several media outlets for $70 million, requesting their case be litigated in some international arena.

Third, the 52 million conspiracy propagandist groups typically resort to theories that “include ideas about door-to-door gun confiscations, martial law, supposed takeover of the U.S. by the ‘New World Order’ and demonization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)” (59). During the pandemic, many of these groups were claiming that mask and vaccine mandates were infringements on citizens’ constitutional liberties. As most groups on the far-right have turned to “alt-tech” platforms such as Bitchute, Odyssee, Gab, and the new start-up Chthonic Software, they can peddle their ideas free of any kind of censorship.

Finally, among the hate groups, besides the largest category (“general hate,” 295 groups), one should note the largest, the White Nationalist category (98 groups), then the Anti-LGBTQ one (65), closely followed by the Antisemitic one (61). Not far behind, we find the Neo-Nazi groups (54) and the anti-Muslim ones (50). The Klu Klux Klan at 18 is tied with the Anti-Immigrant groups.

Here we come full circle to the anxieties that haunt all these groups. The antigovernment animus is closely related to that of a variety of hate groups, and all share to some extent the fear that the country is changing. America is fast becoming more diverse, as the 2020 Census showed in dramatic fashion. Only 58% self-identify as “White non-Hispanic” (63.5% in 2010); it was the only demographic that shrunk (about 5 million less). Notably, “white Americans now comprise less than half of the nation’s under-age-18 population.” This old fear that white American Christian identity is threatened likely represents the greatest common denominator in all these right-wing extremist groups.

Hopeful signs

It looks like Donald Trump’s endorsements were followed closely in Republican primary voting, and particularly here in Pennsylvania. Doug Mastriano, with Trump’s backing, won the Republican nomination for the governor’s race. Yet few believe a candidate who openly supported the effort to overturn the 2020 election of Joe Biden could win this race against a relatively popular Democratic candidate (Josh Shapiro) who won his party’s candidacy from the start. The same could be said for many other places. But there could be surprises, naturally.

What is more important is that we can see plenty of people and groups coming together, like the grassroots community group BTV Clean Up Crew formed in July 2019 in Burlington, Vermont. Their mission is to build community, help all their neighbors feel loved and welcomed, and specifically to “confront hate and extremism” by removing bigoted flyers, stickers, and posters by hate groups in their area. In Burlington, it’s the white nationalist group Patriot Front that got them started. Since their interventions, the number of hate incidents has gone down. They have found ways to use the cleaned-up material to crowdsource donations on Facebook and thereby support local organizations such as Outright Vermont, Migrant Justice, and Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington.

Another community coalition building effort that this SPLC issue highlights is an initiative by the Muslim Association of Puget Sound (MAPS). They are spearheading a campaign to welcome Afghan refugees. As of Dec. 31, 2021, only 52,000 of the 75,000 brought into the US had been resettled. Though the overall effort received bipartisan support in Congress, there has been a good deal of local pushback in many places. This campaign, dubbed AMEN (American Muslim Empowerment Network) seeks “to get ahead of the hate.” In the words of executive director Aneelah Afzali, “We’re likely going to see, and we’ve already seen, a spike in xenophobia and Islamophobia with a number of new Brown Muslims arriving in different parts of the state. So, what we created are these welcome signs that just say we welcome our Afghan neighbors.” Afzali has joined with Washington state’s governor Jay Islee, community leaders and corporate partners to welcome arriving Afghan refugees (October 2021, see above photo) and “is also partnering with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services to provide support to refugees” (30).

White Anxiety and Jesus, the Jew

Jesus was no white European male. He was a Middle Eastern Semite, born in a Jewish village of Galilee in Roman Palestine. In today’s parlance, he was “brown.” Pilate, the Roman governor, found a passive-aggressive way of spiting the Jewish leaders that cornered him into condemning an innocent man. He put up a sign over Jesus’s cross that read, “King of the Jews.”

Jesus consistently welcomed the poor, the lepers, women; and he even gathered the children around him once and said, “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like these children” (Matthew 19:14). Among other qualities, children don’t naturally hate others. They’re innocent until they’re taught to do so. They’re also extremely vulnerable. Anybody who abuses a child, Jesus said, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied to his neck. The same applies to the powerless and marginalized in our society.

The Apostle Paul makes it clear in his letter to the Galatians that the predominantly Jewish church needs to welcome the recent believers from other populations – the “Gentiles” who were mostly polytheists before embracing Jesus as their Redeemer and Lord. Don’t require them to be circumcised or to follow the Jewish laws, Paul writes. In fact, “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

One of my favorite Bible passages is at the very end. In Revelation 21, we hear the Apostle John recounting his vision of the “new heaven and the new earth” (1). Then this, “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (2). The city had no temple, “for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. And the city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its light” (23). Now comes the most eloquent divine rebuttal to the current ideology of White Christian Nationalism (the American version):

“The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the world will enter the city in all their glory. Its gates will never be closed at the end of the day because there is no night there. And all the nations will bring their glory and honor into the city” (24-26).

God’s good creation, so long marred by human sin, will then be fully redeemed by the blood of God’s Lamb. And all of the wealth and beauty of human nations, tribes and cultures will sparkle and shine forevermore in God’s presence. Racism and prejudice of all kinds will have disappeared.

In this period of deep and painful polarization in the United States, this is a vision Christians must rally around, or they might lose their soul. Award-winning journalist and acclaimed writer Tim Alberta, now staff writer for The Atlantic, actually grew up in a small city in Metro Detroit called Brighton. His father was an evangelical pastor and he himself still identifies as one. His latest piece (just under 10,000 words) is entitled, “How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church.” In it, he contrasts two churches and summarizes lengthy conversations with their two pastors, while tying these findings with others he gleaned through his year-long research tour around the country. I’ll just offer you two quotes that best sum up his main point:

“Substantial numbers of evangelicals are fleeing their churches, and most of them are moving to ones further to the right.”

[His concluding paragraph which expands on what he sees as “a steady trend”] “More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.”

Frightening and alarming, indeed. But as people of faith, along with BTV Clean Up Crew, MAPS-AMEN, and many other groups working for community-building and the healing of this nation’s social and political fabric, we just have more work to do. The Qur’an has God addressing humanity in these words, “People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should get to know one another. In God’s eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware” (Q. 49:13, Abdel Haleem). We all have plenty of resources to work with in this call to work for human flourishing, and especially for “the least of these,” as Jesus put it. The best way to confront hate and bigotry is with love and solidarity. With God’s help, let’s do it.

This review by Martin Awaana Wullobayi, a Ghanaian scholar who teaches and writes at The Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI), was published in their journal in 2021: Islamochristiana 47. I take heart that an African scholar welcomes this work so enthusiastically. I hope with him that at a time when “hate speeches which divide and deprive humanity of all kinds of friendship and peace, the research topics discussed in Johnston’s book will be useful for reinforcing peaceful positive world view of coexistence between Muslims and Christians.”