Human Trustees

At the turn of the new millennium, David Kuo was rapidly climbing the ladder of influence in the Republican party. He had come ten years before at age 24 to work for the most powerful pro-life organization, the National Right to Life Committee. Yet when he graduated from college, this could not have been farther from his mind.

David’s father fought the Japanese for eleven years after they invaded Shanghai in 1937 and then emigrated to the US. He never associated with religion, but his European American wife was a church-going mainline Protestant who read the Psalms to young David before going to bed and told him Bible stories. While David was in high school, his United Methodist church just north of New York City hired an evangelical youth pastor. As a result, he and several friends had personal and life-changing encounters with Jesus. But David at that stage was just as passionate about politics as he was about his newfound faith. And like his parents, he was a staunch Democrat. In fact, he interned with his idol Bobby Kennedy for a summer in college.

Abortion turned out to be the issue that drove him into the Republican Party. He and his college girl friend had an abortion and he came to regret it. With time this became one of two burning issues for him. The other was caring for the poor, a passion he inherited from his mother, so he jumped at the opportunity to become deputy-director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the first term of President George W. Bush. Yet the initial rush of power that comes from working in the White House soon turned to frustration, as the “compassionate conservatism” of the president got whittled away almost from the start. And no, you can’t blame it on the 9/11 aftermath either. You can read about this in his New York Times Bestseller, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction (watch him explain it in October 2006 as it was coming out).

A friend sent me this book over a decade ago and because of the present topic, I finally read it last week. It was hard to put down. Fourteen years later, it’s just as relevant today. Because of his reputation as a speech writer, George W. Bush had invited Kuo to his ranch in Texas when he was contemplating a presidential run. Then during his presidency, Kuo became Special Advisor to the president from 2001 to 2003. Nowhere in the book does he say or imply that the president was insincere in his promoting “compassionate conservatism,” and he plainly liked him as a person. But he became increasingly upset that the Bush administration used conservative Christians (evangelicals and Catholics) for political gain and that even money earmarked for the faith-based charities found its way into the 2004 campaign coffers.

I will come back to Kuo’s misgivings and theological lessons at the end of this piece, but in the meantime, allow me to highlight just a few of Katherine Stewart’s main themes in her 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.

Stewart’s qualitative and longitudinal study

Katherine Stewart, an acclaimed journalist, first started researching the Religious Right in 2009 after she discovered her children’s elementary school sponsored an after-school club meeting dubbed a “Bible study.” As the book cover to her 2012 book The Good News Club puts it, “Stewart soon discovered that its real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity.” That the Supreme court could deem such religious activity in public schools legal is what sent her to investigate the wider political implications of this.

By now, some readers might be thinking, “Here’s a flaming secular liberal on a witch hunt.” Clearly, Stewart is not sympathetic to the political agenda of the Religious Right. But nor is she on an angry campaign to smear these people. They have a right to free speech as everyone else, but she strongly believes that their goal continues to be the gradual erosion of the First Amendment which guarantees the separation of church and state in America. Her book, then, is a wake-up call to take this movement seriously because it threatens our democratic freedoms as a nation.

For those of you who want more details from her book, watch John Fea interview Katherine Stewart in an online discussion sponsored by a bookstore in Harrisburg, PA (March 25, 2020). This also conveniently pulls together the two parts of this blog post on religious nationalism.

In my subtitle I called her study “qualitative.” By this I refer to how many anthropologists and sociologists spend time embedded in their subjects’ lives and context. Stewart has been going to several Christian Right conferences a year since 2009. She not only knows the issues debated first-hand. She’s also made quite a few friends in those circles. I’m sure she’s made some leaders wince when they see her coming too. Yet several times she insists that these are good and sincere people for the most part. Furthermore, the book documents her own feelings as she went through this process, with detailed descriptions of personalities she interviewed and leaders she has observed.

I also put “longitudinal” in the subtitle. That refers to time, of course (ten years of immersing herself in this evangelical Christian milieu), and also to the breadth of the movement. At 277 pages of text, she covers a lot of ground. I will only highlight four points, since there is necessarily overlap with Fea’s book.

It is all about power

The first chapter introduces the main themes by describing a “Pastors’ Briefings,” not coincidently a month before the 2018 elections in a swing-state, North Carolina. Traveling to this church near Charlotte with a friend who was a Southern Baptist pastor, Stewart describes this one-day conference sponsored by “one of the most powerful and politically connected lobbying organizations of the Christian right,” Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington, D.C. More specifically, the event is organized by its affiliate, Watchmen on the Wall (referring to the book of Nehemiah when the first returnees from exile rebuild the wall of Jerusalem). Apparently, Watchmen claims nearly 25,000 pastors as members. Vice President Mike Pence declares on their website, “Keep being a ‘Watchman on the Wall.’ Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s making a difference.”

Perkins himself was speaking that morning. “Folks, we’re headed in a new direction as a nation. And that’s what this battle over the court is about.” Then he lists some of the common themes of the movement: “the Court has been used to impose a godless set of values on America”; they took the Bible out of schools and in its place called for “abortions on demand”; it “made us all complicit with the taking of innocent life”; “Folks, is this an evil day?” (15)

Then Perkins gets to the reason for the gathering: “Christians need to vote. The members of your congregation need to vote. As pastors, you need to – I’m not going to say ‘challenge them’; you need to tell them to vote.” And though the word “Republican” is never uttered, Perkins leaves no doubt what he means. On one side is the “party of life”; on the other is controlled by “the rulers of the darkness.” His parting challenge, then, is this: “My question to you this morning is: What will you do? What will you do with this moment that God has entrusted to us?”

But how do these organizations get around the ban on clergy using their pulpits to promote political candidates if their churches want to keep their tax-exempt status? The FRC created an “elaborate architecture of Culture Impact Teams” (CIT) who then set up in each participating congregation a “Cultural Impact Center” (notice the smart switching of “political” to “cultural”), whereby a congregation takes the initiative to inform itself politically. Each of these CITs is given close to 200 pages of information in a three-ring binder. Stewart notes some of its talking points:

• • • “Scripture opposes public assistance to the poor as a matter of principle – unless the money passes through church coffers”;
    • Environmentalism is an anti-Christian movement, a “litany of the Green Dragon” and “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today”; it recommends the resources supplied by the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which on its website tells us that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming”;
    • The Bible opposes gun regulations;
    • The Bible “favors privatization of schools through vouchers”;
    • It teaches that “same-sex relationships are an abomination”
    • It teaches that women should not “have access to comprehensive, twenty-first-century reproductive medical care” (17)

Additionally, the FRC has two red-and-blue “Values Buses” crisscrossing the country, and one of them was outside the church that day. As Stewart puts it, it obviously serves as a “mobile get-out-the-vote unit.” There were North Carolina voters guides on every seat at this event, dispersed throughout the fellowship hall, and thousands of them neatly stacked in the middle of the room for pastors to load up their trunks upon leaving.

What fuels this grassroots activism, besides its Christian veneer? Looking at some of the afternoon speakers and their extreme social conservatism, Stewart offers this hypothesis: she senses “an undercurrent of rage,” which speakers can adroitly channel into “a kind of political therapy.” She goes on:

“Here the anxieties over shifting gender roles and the resentments over fading economic privilege are transmuted into personal salvation – and political gold. Setting aside the big money, the key to hard-right Republican power in this state is an army of volunteer activists, people with the time and energy to canvass voters, run for minor political offices, and do whatever it takes to save the country from ‘the humanists’ and ‘the ‘homosexual agenda’ and take it back for God” (21).

I cannot move on from the power topic without mentioning perhaps the most dramatic speaker – retired Lieutenant General William Boykin, the famous commander of the raid in the movie Black Hawk Down. I mentioned him in one of my first posts on my human trustees website (August 2011, “Sharia Conspiracy Theories”). In the late 2000s he was one of the prominent communicators in the lucrative network of American Islamophobes. Besides his multiple speaking engagements, he contributed to a book with several other security analysts at the conservative Center for Security Policy in 2010, Sharia: The Threat to America. As I wrote in my blog, his views showed more penchant for conspiracy theories than any knowledge of Islam.

Here I invite you to connect the dots. One of President Trump’s signature immigration policies was the “Muslim Ban,” in its several iterations, forced on his by the courts. But this high-level military officer had also come “close to the heart of American military power” (24). From deputy director of special activities at the CIA, to a similar post in the Army, to deputy undersecretary for intelligence and war fighting in 2003 under President Bush, it was Boykin’s experience with the military in Iraq that colored his views of Islam.

Yet there is another layer here, one that touches me on a personal level. Stewart notes that in his work in Iraq “he worked with contractors with strong links to dominionist groups, who believe that Christians should seek to occupy all positions of power in government and society” (24-25). Though the indisputable theological father of the Christian Right is R. J. Rushdoony (1922-2001), starting in the late 1990s one influential thinker promoted the idea that Christians are called by God to influence all seven areas of civilization, “including government, business, education, the media, the arts and entertainment, family, and religion” – the seven “mountains” (25).

It turns out that this person, C. Peter Wagner, was a former missionary to Bolivia who taught mostly “church growth” at Fuller Theological Seminary when I was there working on my PhD there from 1997-2001, in Pasadena, CA. Besides taking a class with him in that area, he was the teacher of an adult Sunday School class my wife and I attended at Lake Avenue Church (6,000 members at the time). While we were there, he taught mostly from the book of Acts, since he was writing a commentary on it at the time. It was only near the end of our stay that he started to mention his new project of linking together various “apostles” worldwide to form a movement called “the New Apostolic Reformation,” based at the Wagner Institute he was founding in Colorado Springs.

From his 2008 book, Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World, Stewart quotes Wagner’s teaching that apostles (influential, Holy Spirit-empowered leaders) are responsible “for taking dominion” over “whatever molder of culture or subdivision God has placed them in,” which he casts as “taking dominion over Satan.” Knowing Wagner personally as I did ((he died in October 2016), I doubt he would approve of Paula White-Cain’s role of “personal pastor” to President Donald Trump, though her neo-Pentecostal theology has some clear affinities with his (here's an amazing OpEd in Chrisitanity Today explaining the unlikely support for her by virtually the male leaders of the Christian Right). If you listen to Wagner's 2011 interview with NPR Fresh Air hostess Terry Gross, you realize that “dominion” for him is more about influence than power, more to do with spreading the love of Jesus than with political power. He’s very clear that the pluralistic, democratic nature of the US is something Christians, along with all other US citizens, of whatever religious or non-religious background, should respect. Of course, that doesn’t stop others from interpreting “dominionism” in more aggressive and authoritarian ways.

Add deceit to the power mix

Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at the Massachussetts think tank Political Research Associates literally hit the jackpot in early 2018: following a tip, he “went fishing in a conservative website and reeled in a 116-page manual for a campaign called Project Blitz” (153). This discovery laid bare “the movement’s legislative strategy,” which is “to flood the zone with coordinated, simultaneous bills in the hopes that they will, eventually, become law” (read his article in Religion Dispatches here)

And all aimed to further “religious freedom.” Launched in 2015, the steering committee of four is led by a woman, Lea Carawan, who obtained a master’s in theology from Regent University (founded by Pat Robertson), cofounded and directed the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, which aims to “protect religious freedom, preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and promote prayer” (154). The interviewer of a Christian TV show in 2018 said to her, “Our country was founded by Christians on Judeo-Christian principles, and they intended for this to be a Christian nation.” “That’s right,” she replied. “It simply means that our laws will reflect Judeo-Christian or biblical values and concepts” (155). Apparently, this restricts “religious freedom” to Christians (and perhaps Jews).

Another steering committee member, Lindy M. “Buddy” Pilgrim, is the founder of Integrity Leadership. Stewart quips, “Pilgrim is an avid proponent of the merger between the Christian far right and the economic far right.” Quoting from an interview with him, Pilgrim stated that the “only way to make freedom work,” [is to have] “Godly men and women assuming positions of power and authority in business (and politics)” (155). Pilgrim does indeed know about business. He served as president of his uncle Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim’s firm, Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, listed in the Fortune 500. He later “worked as CEO of Simmons Foods and founded start-ups in residential housing, food distribution, and agribusiness. He also established businesses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia” (155-6).

You should also note that Buddy Pilgrim has been on President Trump’s Evangelical Leadership Council, a name often given to the circle of evangelical leaders who regularly meet with him. Let me quote Stewart on an interview Pilgrim gave in a Point of View radio interview in November 2018:

“Pilgrim glowingly recalled a dinner he attended at the White House for evangelical leaders, including James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Kenneth Copeland, and Franklin Graham. ‘And here’s what was so special about it,’ he said. ‘This was the first ever dinner like this, and the dinner was literally named, “A celebration of Evangelical Leadership.”’ Not ‘a celebration of faith leadership in general,’ with a mix of Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and all these other groups” (156).

The next person on Project Blitz’ steering committee is David Barton, whom Stewart dubs the Where’s Waldo of the Christian Right” (173). He has his hands in literally dozens of keys projects and institutions, including the Washington Museum of the Bible. His epiphany came at age 33 (1987), while a math teacher and principal of a small Christian school in Aledo, Texas. He sensed God telling him to research the connection between the Supreme Court’s decision to ban prayers in public school and the drop in SAT scores. It turns out, those scores were rising steadily until 1963, a year after the case of Engel v. Vitale, which ruled that prayers offered in public schools violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. This was followed the next year by the case of School District of Abington Township, PA v. Schempp, “in which the Court declared that school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional” (130).

Stewart is right: to argue for a causal relationship between the two events while totally disregarding “the massive changes” occurring in US education in that decade and ignoring the social scientific research on the issue is irresponsible. Besides the fact that whole sections of disadvantaged and marginalized populations were integrated in the school system at that time, “the majority of the nation’s school districts had minimized or ceased the practice of school-sponsored, sectarian prayer” long before this.

Since then David Barton has made documentaries and written books about American history that have been forcefully rebutted by secularist and evangelical historians alike. For instance, in a 1990 video, he recognizes that in Jefferson’s own words the First Amendment erects “a wall of separation between Church & State.” But then he argues “that Jefferson meant only to prohibit ‘the establishing of a single denomination,’” and that the wall was only to be “a one-directional wall protecting the church from the government” (133). His definitive work on the subject (recall that he has no training as a historian) is found in his 2012 book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. The History News Network called the book “the least credible history book in print” (134). John Fea’s 2016 revised edition of his book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, was partly a rebuttal of Barton’s shoddy, and frankly, deceitful work.

I don’t have the space to mention the fourth player in Project Blitz, Bill Dallas, a man who did prison time for embezzling money but who found God in his San Quentin prison cell and later founded a state-of-the-art “data firm that turns out the conservative Christian vote” (156, see her Ch. 8, “Converting the Flock to Data”).

What I can say is that these four highly connected individuals have crafted a tool of enormous reach and success. Only three bills found their way in 2017 in state legislatures seeking to put to use “In God We Trust” in various public forums. But then by April 2018, over 70 bills churned out by Project Blitz appeared across the country. Many were defeated, but in at least five states some were adopted. Stewart comments, “‘It’s kind of like whack-a-mole for the other side; it’ll drive ‘em crazy that they’ll have to divide their resources out in opposing this,’ David Barton explained on a conference call about Project Blitz with state legislators from around the country” (157).

How is this strategy deceitful? On the surface it just seems like normal politics, albeit with a lot of money and grassroots support behind it. Stewart argues that the documentation of Project Blitz that was uncovered “shows that Christian nationalists have self-consciously embraced a strategy of advancing their goals through deception and indirection.” There are three phases: 1) introduce “symbolic or ceremonial gestures that can be fairly easily passes; 2) with their foot in the door, so to speak, phase II “consists of bills that propose to inject Christian nationalist ideas more directly into schools and other government entities; 3) phase III will seek “to legalize discrimination against those whose actions (or very being) offends the sensibilities of conservative Christians” (160). Declaring “Christian Heritage Week” in public schools, for example, accompanied with the appropriate Barton-inspired teaching on American history, is a recipe for “spreading the message, among children especially, that conservative Christians are the real Americans and everybody else is here by invitation.”

The Libertarian gospel

I mentioned that the master thinker behind today’s Religious Right was R. J. Rushdoony, a prolific writer who had graduated from UC Berkeley fully disgusted with his study of classical literature. It was all “humanistic garbage,” “classics of depravity,” he said. Stewart summarizes his mindset from the beginning: “a resolutely binary form of thought that classified all things into one of two absolutes; a craving for order; and a loathing for the secular world and secular education in particular. He promoted the pro-slavery writings of 19^th-century theologian Robert Lewis Dabney, agreeing with him “that the Union victory was ‘a defeat for Christian orthodoxy’” and emphasizing that “Dabney’s adversaries, the abolitionists, were the archetypes of the anti-Christian rebels – the liberals, the communists, the secularists, the advocates of women’s rights – who continued to wreak havoc on the modern world” (112).

One wonders how the son of Armenian refugees who had escaped the 1917 genocide could hold such racist views. In his magnum opus, Institutes of Biblical Law, you can read, “Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so” (113). Yet this racist screed also had economic policy implications. The post-Civil-War Christian South, gradually coming under the new slavery of an atheistic federal government ended up advocating a “social gospel,” that is, the view that the state is delegated by God to take care of the poor, and in this case the Blacks. Whites should never should have had to pay taxes to uplift them economically, he opined.

David Barton liberally quotes from Rushdoony in his writings and aligns himself also with James W. Fifield Jr., a Congregational minister who in 1935 cofounded an organization called Spiritual Mobilization. It was laser-focused on dismantling the New Deal. As Stewart has it, the message was simple: “business has a friend in Jesus, and government is the enemy of God and man,” and theologically, the welfare state violates God’s Ten Commandments, and especially, “Thou shalt not steal.” To have the government muzzle business and “take from the rich to give to the poor” is stealing, plain and simple. Thus, Rushdoony wrote, “capitalism is supremely a product of Christianity,” and “socialism is organized larceny; like inflation, it takes from the haves to give to the have-nots” (118).

I cannot respond to this here, but I posted a three-part Lenten series in 2012 on Muslim and Christian poverty alleviation that attempted to cut through right and left ideological lines and show that the mainstream in both faith traditions is surprisingly aligned on the issue of social justice. ["A Muslim and Christian Holistic Approach to Poverty"; "US Poverty Growing, Values Eroding?"; "US Poverty Growing, Values Eroding?; "Zakat and Poverty Alleviation"]

Nowhere is this libertarian gospel more in evidence than in the Christian nationalist view of the role of government in education. I do not believe Stewart’s characterization of the movement’s goal is exaggerated: “to convert America’s public schools into conservative Christian academies, even as they weaken or even destroy public education altogether” (186). As I write, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, whose marriage cemented the union of two like-minded billionaire families from Holland, MI (DeVos and Prince), has managed to handsomely further her movement’s misleading slogan, “school choice” (195, see above photo with the Texas Capito in the background).

You can catch a glimpse of what our national education would look under such policies by observing what has happened in Michigan “with the DeVos money flooding the arteries of the state’s political system” (196). It has now become “a paradise for for-profit charter operators, most of them concentrated in urban areas.” Amazingly, over “half of Detroit’s children now attend charters – second only to New Orleans (and possibly Flint, MI) – and 80 percent of these are for-profit.”

The first element in this winning strategy is to establish for-profit charter schools. The second is that this multiplication of charter schools is fueled by “lucrative tax breaks.” How so? “Charter operators who own the property that they lease to their own schools demanded – and received – a tax exemption on that property, an arrangement that has become increasingly common around the country” (197). Finally, this boom could never be possible in Michigan without state laws that “are either nonexistent or so lenient that there are often no consequences for abuses or poor academics.” “School choice,” in the end, is a race toward the bottom, especially for minority children.

The global conservative movement

Katherine Stewart attended the World Congress of Families in Verona, Italy in March 2019. In its thirteenth iteration, this congress gathers pro-life, “pro-family” (meaning anti LGBTQ rights) Christian Right supporters mostly from Europe and Russia. The worldwide enemy is “global liberalism,” a hydra with “multiple faces,” in the words of Ignacio Arsuaga, “founder and president of the ultraconservative Christian activist group CitizenGO” in Spain. In a familiar refrain he lists the enemies: “radical feminists, the abortion industry, and the LGBT totalitarians” (249). Migrants are the other enemy. As several speakers intoned at the congress, with these hordes breaking down our borders, “soon we will be extinct.”

As you might suspect, President Trump is revered by all in this gathering. In the words of a Georgian leader “who doubles as a private equity investor with interests in Russia,” Trump has marked “a turning point in the march against the global liberalism” (250). Then too, the interests of the religious Right and the Alt Right have converged, mostly in the person of Steve Bannon (251). As Ed Martin, one of the coauthors of the book, The Conservative Case for Donald Trump, put it in his speech, the vision can be summarized in three points: “Brexit, border, and Bible.”

Possibly the most worrisome development is the aura that Russia’s Vladimir Putin holds for this movement. The same Republican leader who in 1979 successfully urged an undecided group of religious and political leaders huddled around Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority to choose abortion as their central issue (62-64), Paul Weyrich was “among the first to grasp the potential for an alliance with religious conservatives in Russia and Eastern Europe” (270). But as the 2015 Republican nomination was heating up, “Russian oligarchs, having effectively deployed religious nationalism to gain control over their own populations, readily grasped that it could be used to shape events in other countries too.” They realized that these “pro-family” issues could be leveraged to mobilize religious nationalists elsewhere, “an excellent way to destabilize the Western alliance and advance Russia’s geopolitical interests.” Maria Butina’s arrest in the wake of the FBI’s scrutinizing the Trump campaign is now history, but Russia is already trying to use the current racial protests in the US to advance its own agenda and is poised to try and tip the balance in the 2020 election as well.

David Kuo’s important lesson

Ten years into his political activity in Washington, DC, Kuo found himself for the first time with a job at the White House – only a summer job, he had said to himself. Yet on his first day, after listening to the head of the White House Political Affairs brief the Domestic Policy staff on how they were “to understand the political world,” he had a sinking feeling. In his words,

“Listening to all of this I realized I had passed to the other side. I wasn’t just a Christian trying to serve God in politics. Now I was a Christian in politics looking for ways to recruit other Christians into politics so that we would have their votes . . . In my best moments I feared I wasn’t representing Jesus. Now it was different. Now I had to ask if I was a corrupting force in other people’s faith. Chuck Colson inspired me to tackle the great moral issues. Was I doing that, or was I part of an effort to get people to support a political leader? There were enormous differences between the two possibilities. One sought to serve Jesus’ concerns for people through political ends. The other sought to serve a political end by using Jesus’ concern as justification” (Tempting Faith, 168-9).

Kuo ended up staying three more years in the White House, doing his best to suppress this internal tug-of-war. A brain tumor in April 2003, which the doctors said would probably kill him, became the occasion for some soul-searching. Yet, miraculously, three weeks after brain surgery he returned to work, but in a different frame of mind. He was now telling himself the truth: the faith-based project was a “sad charade,” a ploy “to provide political cover to a White House that needed compassion and religion as a political tool” (242). He soon left politics, followed his dream for a while to become a professional bass fisherman (he still does this on the side). He’s now a contributing editor for beliefnet.com to the beliefnet.com website.

I kicked off this two-part post on Christian nationalism by framing it within the wider question of religion and politics. For Christians and Muslims, and by extension for people of any faith, this American Christian movement from 1979 to the present should cause all of us to take a deep breath – at least those of us who believe that democracy, human rights, human dignity, and the equality of all before the law are values worth fighting for (peacefully!). Today, Juneteenth 2020, is also the 23^rd day of street protests across this nation for racial justice. Multigenerational crowds from every race and creed are marching with increasing determination to end the structural injustice that has oppressed African Americans for 400 years in America. And it looks like this time, substantial change will take place. Right now the people are voting with their feet. In November they will vote with their ballots. And that gives me hope.

I hope this infamous image will go down in history as a cautionary tale: President Trump’s photo-op brandishing a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House, minutes after the police and national guard teargassed the demonstrators that had stood in his path, including at least one Episcopal priest and a seminarian in the church courtyard. They were cleaning up after a day of providing water and other help to the protesters. Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde of the Diocese of Washington registered her “outrage” at the event, mostly because of “the president’s use of the Bible and the backdrop of St. John’s Church for his political purposes.” Had he opened the Bible, she mused, he could have read aloud about love of God and neighbor, about seeking “God in the face of strangers,” about the call “to the highest standard of love, which is justice.”

Leave Trump aside now. Focus instead on what happens when religion mixes with politics, and here specifically, when religion gets hijacked to bolster the power of a particular regime. As most of you know, I’m a Christian theologian and an Islamicist (Islamic Studies scholar). One of the topics I’ve written about is twentieth-century Islamism, or political Islam. From the 1928 founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – a grassroots revival movement that quickly got involved in politics – to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, to the Taliban and all manner of Islamic parties worldwide, the temptation to mix religion and politics in Muslim-majority nations has seemed irresistible over the last hundred years.

You might object, “But haven’t Islamic polities always espoused some version of mosque-state integration since the Prophet Muhammad ruled in Medina (622-632)?” That is certainly true, just as it has been for Christians, from the Emperor Constantine until the modern period. In fact, the UK and Germany, among others, still have state churches. But for both Muslims and Christians, the God and politics formula has spawned authoritarianism. As Emory University professor Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im argued in his classic book, Islam and the Secular State, if they care about democracy and the equality of all before the law, governments in Muslim countries must be secular so that one version of Islam is not weaponized to oppress citizens of another religious school or persuasion.

That is what we had on display near the White House. An American president who was elected largely because he managed to secure 81 percent of the evangelical vote used tear gas to clear a path to a church from which he could remind his base that he was their champion in their fight to make America “Christian” again (note that his approval rating among this group has recently slipped from 80 to 62 percent). Trump was appealing directly to the nationalist ideology of the Christian Right that has been with us since at least Jerry Falwell’s founding of the Moral Majority in 1979.

I hope to unpack this notion of Christian nationalism following historian John Fea in this post, and in the next, I’ll lean on Katherine Stewart’s acclaimed book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Both books are finely researched and argued. In this instance I look at the phenomenon from the perspective of an evangelical historian. In the next, I dive into a wide-angle study of the movement here and abroad.

John Fea’s historical perspective

Professor of American history at Messiah College (an evangelical liberal arts college), Fea has bravely waded into political waters before. In 2011 he wrote a book that pushed back against the view that the United States was “founded as a Christian nation” (see the second edition here). He comes back to this theme in his 2018 book, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. That theme resurfaces in the third part of this book. Fea’s overall thesis is that starting with Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1979, the so-called Christian Right hitched its wagon to the Republican Party and unashamedly pursued political power. In several instances, it did gain access to the Oval Office, though never as completely as in the Trump administration. Yet that is precisely what allows Fea to show why this is a fool’s errand: the edifice is built on three pillars that go against the way of Jesus: a) fear instead of hope; b) power instead of humility; c) nostalgia instead of historical truth.

Let’s start with fear, which is no stranger to American politics since the beginning:

“In 1800, the Connecticut Courant, a Federalist newspaper that supported President John Adams in his reelection campaign against Thomas Jefferson, suggested that, if the Electoral College chose Jefferson, the founding father and religious skeptic from Virginia, the country would have to deal with a wave of murder, atheism, rape, adultery, and robbery. In the 1850s, the anti-Catholic and anti-immigration Party, commonly known as the ‘Know-Nothing Party,’ was infamous for its American-flag banner emblazoned with the words ‘Native Americans, Beware of Foreign Influence’” (15).

Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win over his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, was in large part due to ads painting the latter as likely to drag America into a nuclear war. Sometimes, the fears are pure fabrications, like the “Pizzagate” incident when some Republicans alleged that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager was operating a child sex ring in a Washington DC pizzeria. Fortunately, the three shots fired by the man with an assault rifle who had traveled from North Carolina to exact justice didn’t harm anyone in the restaurant. Clearly, fear can be a strong trigger.

The same applied to Barack Obama, “the perfect foil for the evangelical purveyors of the politics of fear.” He embodied pretty much all that made white evangelicals tremble:

“. . . he grew up in Hawaii and spent time as a child in a predominantly Muslim country; he was the son of a white woman and a black man; he not only had a strange name, but he had the same middle name as a well-known Muslim dictator whom the United States had waged war against. Obama’s embrace of Christianity took place in a liberal African American congregation with a pastor who was not shy about calling America to task for its past sins. But most importantly, Obama embraced policies on a host of social issues that alienated him almost immediately from most American evangelicals” (18).

Those kinds of fears naturally give rise to conspiracy theories. The so-called “birther controversy” (stating that Obama was not born in the USA) took hold of the Republican electorate to such an extent that still in July 2017, 72 percent of registered Republicans doubted Obama’s citizenship. Many of them believed he was secretly a Muslim too.

But they also feared plenty of Obama policies: his pro-choice stance, and especially his signature health care plan, which for them infringed upon their “religious freedom” – namely, that Obamacare “required employers, even religious employers, to provide coverage for preventative care that included abortion-inducing contraceptives.” Here, most evangelicals made common cause with conservative Catholics. Then the final straw in the culture wars was the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized gay marriage (which was legal in 36 states already). More than ever, this landmark case galvanized the Christian Right’s opposition.

The politics of fear were also evident during the Republican debates in 2015-2016. “People are crossing our borders,” one could hear, “and the media won’t talk about how they’re security threats, carrying Ebola and bringing in ISIS terrorists – people who will steal, rape and kill.” Trump learned quickly how to tap into evangelical fears. Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat spoke at Messiah College in September 2016. Fea remembers, “In one of the more stinging lines of the talk, Douthat suggested that evangelicals seem to need Trump, a man with no real Christian conviction to speak of, to protect them in the same way that Syrians needed the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad to protect them against the threat of ISIL” (39). Have no fear: Trump, the strongman, is in the wings.

Another common fear of Americans, and evangelicals in particular, relates to Islam and Muslims. A Pew Research Center report in July 2017 found that “72 percent of white evangelicals believed that Islam and democracy were in conflict, prompting Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of anti-Trump white evangelicalism, to run an article entitled ‘Most White Evangelicals Don’t Believe Muslims Belong in America’” (39-40). Speaking in the spring of 2016 at Liberty University (Jerry Falwell Jr. remains its president), Trump promised to “protect Christianity” and to dismantle the policies of President Obama.

These, then, are some examples of the legacy of fear still very much in evidence among American white evangelicals. The second pillar on which Christian nationalism rests is hubris and the pursuit of political power. I will have much more to say about that in the next installment, but suffice it for me to mention here historian Daniel Rodgers’ analysis. He calls the 1980s the beginning of “the age of fracture”: the Reagan era was friendly to evangelicals while at the same time a chasm was forming between conservative Christians (including many Catholics) and the courts that seemed to move ever farther to the left. The former saw these fractures “as a threat to the nation’s moral core”:

“After they awoke to these changes, they organized politically and sought to put the American Humpty Dumpty back together again, with their own religious narrative at the core of the national origin story. Newly awakened to their political power, feeling spurned by the progressive policies of Jimmy Carter [ironically the first self-proclaimed “born-again” president], and deeply afraid of the direction the national culture was going in, they abandoned their earlier reluctance to become involved in politics and mobilized to fight back via politics. The political attempts to mend these fractures are still with us today. Evangelicals voted for Trump because they have been conditioned to a way of thinking about political engagement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a direct response to these cultural changes” (47).

“The earlier [white evangelical] reluctance” Fea mentions here can be illustrated by their aloofness, at the very least, to the 1960s civil rights movement. More than anything at the time, “they were far more concerned about – and opposed to – the way the federal government used its power to enforce desegregation and oppose Jim Crow laws in their local communities. Historian Mark Noll has argued that race and civil rights served as an entry point for the white conservative evangelical critique of government” (54).

Shamefully, it was the 1972 Supreme Court Green v. Connally decision that spurred the creation of the “Christian Right.” The court ruled that private schools and colleges that discriminated on the basis of race would lose their tax-exempt status. In 1975, the high court removed the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, a conservative evangelical school in the South, which had “banned interracial dating and denied admission to unmarried African Americans.”

In hindsight it seems surprising that the 1973 Supreme Court decision to allow specific kinds of abortion (Roe v. Wade) did not provoke much reaction in evangelical circles. As Fea puts it, “Most evangelicals thought abortion was a moral problem, and they believed that the pro-life movement was a distinctly Catholic crusade” (55-6). More than anything, they were irked by the rising tide of feminism and the attempt the year before to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. A woman’s choice to abort was both to endanger the child in the womb and to threaten the patriarchal structure of the family they assumed was God-given.

Influential Republican operative Paul Weyrich, a close friend of Jerry Falwell, told Dartmouth College historian Randall Balmer in 1990 “that the Christian Right was originally founded, not on evangelicals’ opposition to abortion, but rather on opposition to the attempts of the IRS to desegregate Christian academies” (59). In the next blog post, we will see how effective they were. The likes of Falwell thankfully lost on the issue of segregation (see the two images above), but as we are now witnessing in the federal courts and the Supreme Court itself, Trump has now amply fulfilled his promise to the “court evangelicals,” as Fea calls them. In his first three years in office, he has appointed 194 federal judges and two Supreme Court justices, all apparently to their liking.

Clergy were often seen in the courts of medieval monarchs, but Pope Pius II admonished his clergy to stay away from the kings’ courts, because it would be difficult for them to “rein in ambition, suppress avarice, tame envy, strife, wrath, and cut off vice, while standing in the midst of these [very] things” (117). Fea gives an example of how court flattery was on “full display” when President Trump invited his evangelical courtiers to the Oval Office on the occasion of the announcement of “a National Day of Prayer for the people of Texas and Louisiana who were hit by Hurricane Harvey”:

“Those in attendance used the opportunity to praise Trump for all he was doing for evangelical causes. Ralph Reed commended him for ‘acknowledging that God is our source of unity as Americans.’ Gary Bauer compared Trump to Washington and thanked him for defending the Judeo-Christian roots of America, alluding to the passage in the Declaration of Independence about rights coming from ‘our Creator.’ He then proclaimed America to be a ‘shining city on a hill.’ Paula White expressed gratitude for Trump’s practice of ‘calling our nation to God’ and for ‘always’ putting ‘God first.’ Trump sat at his desk, occasionally nodding his head in approval, and soaked in the adulation. [Robert] Jeffress closed the meeting in prayer. He described Trump as ‘a gift to the country’ raised up by God to bring ‘healing’ to a divided America” (119-120).

The last pillar of American Christian nationalism is its goal to “make America Christian again,” which nicely dovetails with Trump’s slogan to “make American great again.” In both cases, you might ask, why the nostalgia? My family and I, along with many members of our congregation, joined a crowd in front of our county seat in Media, PA, for a vigil lamenting the brutal killing of George Floyd and dozens other people of color killed by racist police brutality in our nation. The hour-and-a-half vigil was sponsored by the local chapter of the NAACP and the Media Fellowship House, an interfaith initiative founded in 1944 in reaction to a local restaurant refusing to serve two African American women and a baby. One black speaker expressed perfectly the sentiments John Fea reports in his book when he attended an evangelical conference on racial reconciliation as a keynote speaker. Having listened to a number of black pastors, he admitted, “I came face to face with the reality that African Americans have very little to be nostalgic about.” He explained,

“When African Americans look back, they see the oppression of slavery, the burning crosses, the lynched bodies, the poll taxes and literacy tests, the separate by unequal schools, the ‘colored-only’ water fountains, and the backs of buses. Make America great again?” (155).

John Fea’s theological perspective

Once those pillars are laid out in this fashion, it isn’t hard to imagine how Fea might critique them from a Christian perspective – or from any other faith perspective, for that matter. When it comes to fear, throughout the Bible God calls people not to be afraid but to trust in his love and care for them. Though God nowhere promises us a safe and prosperous life (contrary to what the purveyors of the prosperity gospel might teach), he does promise to always be with us, particularly as we follow his call to bring his love and peace in areas of conflict, poverty and pain.

Put otherwise, “The ‘proper conclusion’ to the Christian story – the direction in which history is ultimately moving – is the return of Jesus Christ amid the new heaven and the new earth. But in a world filled with distractions, it is easy to let this glorious hope become smothered by fear” (43).

With regard to political power, besides the fact that, as seems the case with the Trump administration, access to power gives little opportunity to actually influence policy, it is a weapon that often comes back to strike the people trying to wield it. Two of the Moral Majority’s most influential agents in time became disillusioned with the project. Journalist Cal Thomas and pastor Ed Dobson co-authored a scathing book in 1999 about their experience: Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America? The answer was a definitive no. Power is “the ultimate aphrodisiac.” It’s seductive, and it clouds a person’s judgment. Worst of all, for Christians it hinders them from spreading the love of Christ, as they are called to do.

Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, James Davison Hunter put to pen his own vision for how the church should seek to impact the world (To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World). In an “exclusive” interview with Amazon, he explains the reason why he wrote this book: “I saw a disjunction between how Christians talk about changing the world, how they try to change the world, and how worlds—that is culture—actually change. These disparities needed to be clarified.” In his conclusion, Fea quotes Hunter as he articulates his own prescription, “faithful presence.” Yes, we can and should be concerned with issues across the globe. He goes on:

“But with that said, the call of faithful presence gives priority to what is right in front of us – community, the neighborhood, and the city, and the people in which they are constituted. For most, this will mean a preference for stability, locality, and particularity of place and its needs. It is here, through the joys, sufferings, hopes, disappointments, concerns, desires, and worries of people with whom we are in long-term and close relation – family, neighbors, co-workers, and community – where we find authenticity as a body of believers. It is here where we learn forgiveness and humility, practice kindness, hospitality, and charity, grow in patience and wisdom, and become clothed in compassion, gentleness, and joy. This is the crucible in which Christian holiness is forged” (253 in Hunter, 186-7 in Fea).

John Fea’s book ends with lessons learned in June 2017 as he led his family and several colleagues from Messiah College “through the American South on a civil rights movement bus tour.” In the eight cities they visited they were able to interview a number of personalities who had been involved in this movement during the 1960s. Theirs was a message of hope, not fear; of humility, not power; finally, they had “a clear understanding about the difference between history and nostalgia” (188). In fact, “History was a means by which they challenged white Americans to collectively come face to face with the moral contradiction of their republic. As King said in his April 1968 sermon in Memphis [the day before he was killed], ‘All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you say on paper’” (188-9). King was well acquainted with his nation’s checkered history. But he and his followers “desperately wanted to be grafted into this imperfect but hopeful story, and to contribute their gifts and talents to the writing of future chapters of that story” (190).

In the second half of this blog post I will fill out in more detail a couple of the points made here, but I will especially highlight what for me constitutes this religious nationalism’s most destructive aspect – its early alliance with the libertarian political ideology at the heart of the Reagan administration. If anything, the current coronavirus pandemic and the wave of anti-racist protests demonstrate how unfortunate those directions were. Racial injustice is plainly exacerbated by the rising economic inequality that has its roots in the early 1980s.

This concludes a trilogy of blog posts on the 2019 global street protests. In the first one, I focused particularly on Sudan, where women had been in the forefront. Then I moved to Algeria, where a year of bi-weekly protests produced spectacular results, at least on the surface: toppling a president, imprisoning many of his cronies for corruption, postponing a presidential election twice, and mostly boycotting said election while shouting to the army, “You are no longer in charge!” For the time being, that’s wishful thinking, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the last post, I offered a synopsis of Algerian history and emphasized the crucial role the army has played even before independence. Then the year 1999 marked a turning point in two ways. First, the army-picked candidate for the presidency (a civilian, for only the second time), Abdelaziz Bouteflika, was elected and managed to mostly put an end to the 7-year-old civil war. A second element is related to the first one. The Algerian-French political scientist I’m consulting for this analysis, Amel Boubekeur, called this the 1999 “tacit social contract”: the army promises to fend off the terrorists, as long as the people rally behind President Bouteflika and the political status quo, while the state promises to expand social benefits.

What I haven't mentioned yet is that Algeria is one the top oil and gas producing nations (11^th for natural gas, and 16^th for oil, both representing 80% of exports). That explains why the leaders of the war of independence (1954-62) were able to manipulate the political cards to their advantage for over 40 years and divide among themselves much of the spoils of this lucrative industry. It explains too why the army has been the “big brother” behind the scenes pulling the strings to make sure the military and political elites remain on top. Bouteflika, as noted in the last post, had a nasty record of corruption himself but knew how to open the state’s financial spicket enough to create new jobs, embark on ambitious infrastructure projects and build a million housing units.

Meanwhile, Bouteflika was amassing more power: he had named himself editor-in-chief of the state television station, and Algeria’s state of emergency dating to the beginning of the civil war (1992) was not lifted until 2011. And yet street demonstrations were still banned (though a bit of Arab Spring fever briefly touched Algeria in Feb. 2011 with 2,000 protesters clashing with police). An Algerian blogger who had taken part in the demonstration told Al Jazeera that hundreds had been arrested, mostly “human rights activists and syndicate members.” He added that “this is a police state, just like the Egyptian regime,” and that it’s “corrupt to the bone.”

But it would be eight more years before the Algerians exploded en masse, as the Egyptians had done in 2011 – eight years during which the president was largely absent from the political scene, either being treated for illness in France or very debilitated after his 2013 stroke. Understandably, when he announced he would run for a fifth term in February 2019, civil society now coordinated a nation-wide movement of protest that only the coronavirus could interrupt a year later.

Snapshots of the hirak movement

Much as it was the secular, social media-savvy youth who started the protests downtown Cairo in January 2011, the hirak (“movement,” referring to the 2019 wave of protest movements from Morocco to Lebanon) was launched by the youth. In his lengthy piece in Le Monde Diplomatique, Arezki Metref quotes a reporter for an Algerian paper in French, Mustapha Benfodil: “Young people had just one word on their lips, ‘humiliation.’ They could no longer tolerate the image of Bouteflika, a man close to death, being used as a puppet by what has since been referred to as the essaba or gang.”

On the Tuesday before the first mass protest on Friday, February 22, 2019, the students staged a demonstration downtown Algiers, angrily reacting to General Gaid Salah’s morning speech. That sequence became a pattern. Students would march on Tuesdays in protest of official speeches and actions, and on Friday afternoons throngs of people stream in from several corners of the city to its center, raising signs and chanting slogans like, “Civil state, not military state,” “By God, we will not stop,” “No dialogue, no elections with the mafia,” “Cowards, free our children,” “Throw out the generals, Algeria will have independence,” and the like. Metref gives an idea of a typical Friday protest:

“The night before there will be a pot-banging protest in support of detainees, then in the morning the first groups assemble around the Place Maurice-Audin or the Place de la Grande Poste. In the early afternoon, after Friday prayers, marchers converge on the city centre — the group from Bab El Oued is one of the biggest — and the city resounds with protesting voices. In the evening, the media, lawyers and NGOs count the arrests, some of which last only a few hours, and the disappearances. Demonstrators are often taken away by men in plain clothes and their location and charges only revealed days later.”

Algeria has known riots and protests over the decades, but this is a completely different phenomenon. First, it spans the political spectrum: islamists, seculars, socialists, feminists, Berbers and Arabs – everybody comes out. In June, in an attempt to divide the civil protests, General Gaid Salah banned the raising of the Amazigh (Berber) flag. A veteran journalist told Metref, “That touched a nerve. It could have caused clashes between Berber and Arabic speakers, but it did the opposite. In Arab-speaking towns, people you’d never suspect of having Berber sympathies have been waving the outlawed flag.”

Second, the protests are peaceful. Ali Brahimi, “a Marxist activist and Berber advocate,” told Metref that if the youth are tempted to respond violently to police provocations, the crowd immediately reminds them, “Silmiya!” (“peacefully”), or “Khawa!” (“brothers”). ‘In 2017 the official figures recorded 13,000 riots across Algeria. We’ve gone from violent demonstrations to a calm, self-disciplined movement. That’s because of regular discussions about rejecting rioting and the uselessness of violence to oppose a regime that is itself violent.”

One of the giants of the 1980s Afghan jihad against the Soviets, the Algerian Abdullah Anas, who after spending twelve years assisting its leader Abdullah Azzam, found refuge in the UK from where he has been broadcasting on satellite TV a message of peaceful resistance and dialogue to his fellow Algerians and Arab brethren throughout the Middle East. Carlotta Gall of the New York Times caught up with him in January 2020. He declared, “Really, I can say with full confidence, it is a new chapter for the Algerian people. In one year not one drop of blood was lost, praise be to God.” Throughout 2019 he used his satellite channel Al-Maghribia TV to livestream the protests, adding his own commentary.

I should mention a third unique feature of the hirak, and that is the decisive appearance of the Algerian Arabic dialect, the derdja, as a symbol of national unity. Middle East Eye, French edition, did a fascinating interview with an Algerian social scientist and linguist, Mahdi Berrached, who published a dictionary of the specific Algiers version of this dialect. On the streets, one could see signs in English, French and classical Arabic, but the slogans that stuck with the crowds over time were in derdja – as were the songs mostly composed for the movement. As a sociologist pointed out, this comes directly from the chanting of the poor suburbs’ youth at popular soccer tournaments. It’s like the social outcasts have been ushered to center stage!

To sum up these different snapshots of the hirak movement, let’s turn again to Amel Boubekeur’s analysis. Though the protesters themselves call this a “revolution,” it actually builds organically on years of opposition to the regime:

“It is also the product of past political and social movements’ techniques for pressuring and constraining the regime. By gathering several generations of frustrated citizens, demonstrations every Tuesday and Friday (as well as Sunday among the Algerian diaspora) have created an independent political space in which non-violence and popular unity come before ideology in the push for regime change (p. 11).”

The hirak boldly pointed to the real power center of Algerian politics, that is, the army, and it exposed the unspoken deal represented by Bouteflika’s 1999 election. Instead of the people blindly and powerlessly submitting to a rule that guaranteed the political elites’ perpetual hold on state levers, they stood up and said, “Enough is enough!! We want a true democracy!”

Who leads the hirak, and with what agenda?

As mentioned above, this is a very broad-based initiative that also “extends beyond the demonstrations: workers and executives at public companies, students, academics, journalists, and lawyers have refused to follow instructions from ministers and disturbed their public appearances, regarding them as illegitimate because they are overseen by a government not chosen by citizens (p. 12).” Thus, a number of civil society organizations which specialize in highlighting injustices in order to redress them have joined the hirak: unions representing public servants, students and the unemployed; human rights organizations, including those that represent victims of the security forces in the civil war (including families of the 20,000 disappeared persons); and a variety of marginalized people who have “personal experience of the state’s abuses,” as Boubekeur has it.

Here I must interject a related issue, but also one dear to my heart. In my nine years of residence in Algeria (1978-87), I was assistant pastor in the only English-speaking Protestant church (Holy Trinity Anglican) and then for five years in the Eglise Protestante d’Algérie (EPA). I witnessed a growing number of Algerian young people interested in Christianity. Since Algeria is 99 percent Muslim, this is unusual, to say the least. Much of this interest, at least at the time, was in the Berber mountainous region south east of Algiers (Kabylia, capital Tizi Ouzou).

In the mid-1980s, I would often travel to an EPA compound near Tizi Ouzou with my head pastor, Hugh Johnson, to teach Bible courses to these new Christians. Soon after we left Algeria in 1987 (my wife and I were married just the year before in Algiers; see this post for more details), and especially during the “Black Decade” of the 1990s, this variegated movement of Muslims embracing Jesus multiplied from several hundred to somewhere between 50 to 80,000, mostly in Kabylia, but also among "Arabs" in various parts of the country. One article put the total of Algerian Christians at 125,000 (including Catholics). The majority of congregations joined the EPA, now completely run by Algerians and officially recognized by the government in 2011. Its current president, Salah Chalah, pastors the largest church in Tizi Ouzou (over 1,000 attend services).

The link here with the hirak is that a number of churches were closed by security forces in October 2019. Chalah’s church organized a peaceful sit-in which was violently broken up. He himself was literally beaten with a stick and a video shows the police violently pulling people away (see the video in this article). In the end, 17 people were arrested and no one fought back. The vice-president of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights had this to say about the regime:

“The regime chose the most dangerous path in stigmatizing this Kabyle region. It started in June with the arrests of those who carried Berber or Amazigh flags. This attack on churches is part of the same strategy that stigmatizes minorities, particular regions, and divisions among the Algerian nation. And all of this to weaken the national protest movement.”

In the case of this high-profile church, it was the local Muslim population that stood up to defend them. The Algerian writing this article for a news outlet in Paris sees this attack in the same light as the human rights activist above. In his words, “this regime is maliciously exploiting everything it can to remain in power. Divide and rule is the only motto recognised by Algeria’s military regime!” But his other point was this: “For the first time in Algerian contemporary history, Muslims support Christians.” This was in evidence when several Muslim lawyers went to the police stations where these Christians were being held and they succeeded in freeing all of them. Then in the afternoon a crowd of Muslims “reopened the church.” Finally, on the Facebook page of these hirak activists on could read,

“We will not forget the main demands of the People's Revolution; we will not accept to deviate and focus on other business. At the same time, we have no right to be fooled by the actions of those in power who deprive our fellow Christian citizens of their right to individual freedom and worship.”

Clearly, the hirak is a deeply democratic movement, but as mentioned above, it is not entirely new. Drawing from past movements of resistance, “Participants in the hirak have gradually tailored it to not only their need for a way out but also the reinvention of channels of political participation – outside those the regime uses to dominate state institutions and marginalise ordinary citizens.” For this reason various political opposition parties have also joined the hirak, hoping along with the other demonstrators that this “will produce new mechanisms that allow citizens to weigh in on genuine negotiations (p. 15).” Boubekeur sums up the positive role of the hirak in these words, “In just a year, the Hirak has deeply transformed the country’s political culture, remodeling Algerian society’s post-civil war dividing lines [between the islamists and the military regime] and reducing the regime’s control over citizens’ participation in politics (15).”

But that is the movement’s weakness as well. By virtue of its great diversity, it has produced “dozens of road maps for a transition” but none of these factions claim to speak for the hirak. And then there is the fact that perhaps a majority of Algeria’s forty plus million people are afraid of state repression and reticent to openly support the hirak. The next and last section looks at where all this might go.

What are some likely post-covid scenarios?

First, Boubekeur’s analysis offers three obstacles that the hirak must overcome in order to be even considered a valid negotiation partner by the military regime:

• “agree on a transition road map and a redistribution of responsibilities that plays down divergences between them”; there seems to be “an emerging consensus” that includes replacing parliament, the current government, the FLN and its state-sponsored union (UGTA), and forming a High Council of Transition, which would then supervise the work of a National Constituent Assembly that would in turn write a new constitution aiming to “reduce the power of the presidency and create greater political and media freedoms”;

• “reflect on the kind of concessions they will accept from the military, as well as the conditions required to demilitarise the state”; this has been complicated by General Salah’s death in December 2019; his replacement, General Said Chengriha (also implicated in some of the army’s worst brutalities during the civil war) has kept a low profile and seems reluctant to speak to Hirak representatives;

• “create a plan for gaining the support of the parts of society who fear political change”; over a hundred leaders of the hirak have been arrested and many fear the regime’s continuing repression; it will be difficult to convince them to join a movement that appears leaderless at this point, and especially now as the country is in lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The current stalemate, therefore – between a military-backed regime that has systematically barred the people from any meaningful engagement with the existing political institutions and a broad-based civil society now supercharged and eager to cast it aside in favor of a true democracy – cannot go on forever. The best-case scenario, of course, is that General Chengriha and President Tebboune agree to negotiate with the hirak and begin to lay out a road map for a transition to civilian rule. In the worst of cases, the army, taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic, re-applies a form of martial law that forbids any kind of protest, including via the internet. As we have seen in many other parts of the world, autocrats have been using the pandemic to further their grip on power (see this VOA article on Algeria during the pandemic, and how the hirak is using it to its advantage). One thing is certain, though. However long it takes to return to some version of normalcy, the hirak as a movement has already exposed the illegitimacy of the postcolonial regime still in place. It’s just a matter of time before some form of civilian rule overthrows the old political elites and seriously refashions state institutions to make them accountable to the people. This seems to be the refrain of many grassroots protest movements worldwide these days.

As a follow-up to my last post, “The Rise of Global Protests,” I begin a more in-depth look at the phenomenal street demonstrations that lasted just over a year in Algeria before they were halted by the coronavirus. Perhaps this OpEd in the Washington Post (Feb. 2, 2020) by M. Tahir Kalavuz and Sharan Grewal is the best summary to get us started:

“Over the past year, the leaderless protest movement (known as the Hirak) succeeding in toppling [President] Bouteflika and triggering the imprisonment of major figures from his regime, including several prime ministers. Peaceful mass protests have continued across the country every week even in the face of provocation and repression from the regime.

The Hirak is entering its second year with a new president, a new prime minister, a new parliamentary speaker, a new cabinet and a new army chief of staff. But Algeria’s political system remains fundamentally unchanged.”

That’s because the army is still in charge, and not the people. That said, Algeria is not unique in this regard. James Dorsey begins a recent blog post on this theme with a provocative statement, arguing that the 2011 “Arab Spring’s” resurfacing in 2019 showed us that this bubbling of discontent under the surface has actually achieved more than meets the eye:

“A decade of anti-government protests in the Arab world have thrown popular trust in the military into the garbage bin and undermined the military’s position as one of the most trusted institutions.”

This represents a sea change in the composition of the postcolonial states, not just in the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) but in South East Asia as well (see my 2016 post, “Comparative Politics: From Juntas to Democracy”).

The first big crack in the army-led state, as we saw in the last post, came in 2011 when the wall of fear created by Middle East’s autocratic rulers started to come down. But then new boldness suddenly appeared and multiplied in 2019. Dorsey adds, “In 2019 and 2020 those barriers have been further reduced with protesters refusing to back down despite the use of brutal force by law enforcement and security forces in Lebanon and Iraq and occasional violence elsewhere in the Arab world.”

What is new is the realization that, far from being an ally of the people as was still believed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, the military has become the biggest obstacle on the road to democracy. Again, as Dorsey puts it, “Increasingly, the military is seen at best as positioning itself to salvage what can be salvaged of an ancien regime and at worst the enforcer of a hated regime.”

For instance, a protester in Baghdad had this to say this the day after hundreds of protesters (mostly young men) were killed, “Iraqis broke the shackles of fear and reached the point of no return. The movement will not stop, and the Iraqi people will never be silenced.” Beirut protests too were becoming increasingly violent in February, yet they were not able to persuade the security forces that it was in both of their interests to get rid of Lebanon’s political elites, whether they be Christian or Muslim, Sunni or Shia. For them, behind these corrupt politicians stands the army, and in this case the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. As a masked protester exclaimed to a journalist, “Our backs are against the wall. We have nothing more to lose. We are fighting a regime with a history of 40 years of corruption and their armed defenders.”

Yet despite the similarities across the MENA region, each context is unique. And in the case of the Algerian Hirak movement, what I say in the next and last post will not make any sense to you unless you first have a crash course of Algerian postcolonial history. To that we now turn.

The one-party ball and chain

The modern story of Algeria, until then a backwater province of the Ottoman Empire mostly ruled by the “Barbary Pirates” (who profoundly impacted the young American state, as I described in this blog post), really begins with the 1830 French invasion. Here we had colonialism on steroids. The French were not content to make Algeria a protectorate, which typically gives indigenous puppet rulers a bit of power while from behind they pull all the strings that guarantee maximum financial benefits for themselves. No, the French simply annexed the whole northern provinces of Algeria and laid their hands on the most fertile and productive part of this vast land.

This resulted in five or six generations of French colonists who skimmed the wealth off this bountiful soil with impunity. I quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

“French colonists modernized Algeria’s agricultural and commercial economy but lived apart from the Algerian majority, enjoying social and economic privileges extended to few non-Europeans. Ethnic resentment, fueled by revolutionary politics introduced by Algerians who had lived and studied in France, led to a widespread nationalist movement in the mid-20th century.”

That ticking bomb did in fact explode, and the 1954-1962 war of independence was incredibly fierce, leaving over a million Algerians dead in its wake. The negotiated settlement in the end was made possible because of international pressure bearing down on the French. The combined political and military forces that had guided the Algerian resistance was called the National Liberation Front (FLN) and it represented Algeria in the negotiations that led to the Evian Accords in 1962.

But because independence came as a result of eight years of bloody conflict, it had two other consequences. First, just about all the European colonists left, and in particular a million “French Algerians,” dubbed “les pieds noirs” (“the black feet,” presumably because they mostly worked the dark, fertile soil), relocated to the French mainland – a trauma that is still not entirely healed today. Second, the FLN was a fairly diverse coalition of revolutionaries who had fought the guerilla war against France, and at independence, it had to settle its internal differences, which could often turn violent. In 1965 Colonel Boumédienne toppled President Ahmed Ben Bella by means of a coup d’état. He ruled mostly by decree until his death in 1978 (right when I settled down in Algiers). His successor, Colonel Chadli Benjedid reorganized the FLN party, but it amounted to no more than window dressing. The military retained its strong presence in the FLN Central Committee.

Then in 1988 the façade of a stable regime, in fact held together by its one party under the firm tutelage of the army and the security forces, started to crumble. Massive crowds poured into the streets protesting the price of bread and other daily commodities and calling for political participation. Benjedid grudgingly accepted a multiparty system. To the shock of many observers, the political opposition coalesced for the most part under the islamist banner. The largest and most influential party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), won spectacular results in the 1990 municipal and provincial elections.

The next year, the FIS called for a general strike to protest the government’s redrawing of district lines in favor of the FLN. As civil unrest grew in the capital Algiers, the regime arrested and imprisoned the two FIS leaders, Abbas Madani and Ali Belhadj. Despite this and other acts of political repression (or maybe because of them), the FIS handily won 48 percent of the popular vote in December’s first round of parliamentary elections. The FLN and other parties were left far behind. The army, however, saw this as a red line and decided to intervene. It canceled the election and forced President Benjedid to resign. Moreover, it arrested 40,000 FIS militants and elected officials and guarded them under tents in the Sahara Desert. Unsurprisingly, this sparked a brutal civil war, as thousands of young men took to the mountains to fight their own guerilla war against the regime. With over 200,000 people killed and 20,000 disappeared, this is now referred to as the “black decade.”

The tacit 1999 social contract

Lasting eight years just as the war of independence had, the 1990s civil war, however, did not end with negotiations. Rather, its end was dictated by the army through a clever political maneuver. President Liamine Zéroual was in his second term but apparently had a falling out with the military brass, likely due to his desire for reconciliation with the islamist insurgency, and he resigned in April 1999 and called for early elections. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, an army officer in the war of independence serving as top aide to Colonel Boumédienne and later Foreign Minister for many years, was seen as the army’s choice to replace Zéroual. Despite his early army ties, his long career was as a civilian FLN politician, and this fact made him a good choice for the powers-that-be. Winning 74 percent of the vote in an election many considered fraudulent, he came to embody what Algerian-French political scientist Amel Boubekeur calls “the tacit social contract [the Algerian people] established with the army in 1999.” In a 21-page paper, “Demonstration Effects: How the Hirak Protest Movement Is Reshaping Algerian Politics” (Policy Brief, European Council on Foreign Relations, February 2020). She introduces it in these words,

“The arrangement that emerged in 1999 involved informal power-sharing between a president chosen by the generals (and endorsed through a sham election), a security service (Department of Intelligence and Security, or DRS) that was determined to check the influence of the regime’s civilian clientele, and a military that claimed to be above politics but largely controlled the distribution of economic and institutional resources” (3).

This tacit agreement, argues Boubekeur, is between the army and the people: the state (via the army) protects the people from further terrorism in exchange for political quietism. The following points help to unpack this formula.

• • The military and the DRS leverage the president’s civilian status to quiet any political opposition from the various parties to the civil war (especially the islamist-leaning ones) “through a narrative centering on the relaunch of the electoral process and a transfer of authority to a supposedly civilian president who had restored peace and security” (3). Other tools in the military’s tool box: rigged elections and a muzzling of parliament and other representative bodies.
  • The other goal here is to avert any investigations in the war crimes committed by the army and DRS in the 1990s; these allegations were made by several international bodies.
  • Prime Minister Ali Benflis takes advantage of a large protest movement in 2001 in the Berber (Amazigh) province of Kabylia to forbid all demonstrations. Algerians in general, still very nervous about the extreme violence of the 1990s, mostly fall in line.
  • The FLN/army rule from the beginning was based on corruption. Bouteflika had been convicted of embezzling around 60 million dinars during his years as a diplomat. He had repaid 12 million, but he was now forgiven of that debt in order to run for president. Then Bouteflika returned the favor in 2005 (his second term): he “enacted a presidential ordinance of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation that repealed or blocked prosecution – and criticism – of members of the security forces for their role during the civil war.” (10). She then explains that this is a much wider pattern:

“Since then, the army, the security forces, and civilian members of the elite have mainly bonded over not a shared ideology but the mutual neutralisation of judicial cases and fear of prosecution. The regime mainly distributed rents through its patronage networks to tamp down any kind of conflict within them and avoid discussions on the need for reform” (10-11).

The Hirak is born

With this background in mind, it is not difficult to imagine that the pent-up anger many Algerians entertained with regard to the Bouteflika regime was about to boil over during his fourth term in office – especially considering he had been mostly bedridden since a stroke in 2013! However, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was the announcement on February 9^th, 2019, that he was seeking a fifth term. Arezki Metref, writing for Le Monde Diplomatique, notes, “Social media exploded and on 16 February 2019 the Hirak began.” He describes what followed:

“Young people in Kherrata — a small town in northeast Algeria where the French army and its European auxiliaries massacred the Muslim population on 8 May 1945 — took to the streets to protest against Bouteflika’s re-election bid. On 19 February a crowd destroyed a giant portrait of the president displayed on the front of the town hall as part of Algeria’s enforced personality cult. On Friday 22 February, in response to an anonymous call on social media to demonstrate, a countrywide movement began that reached even remote villages and led to Bouteflika’s resignation and the cancellation of the election scheduled for 18 April.”

This is where we will pick up in the next post to analyze the Hirak protest movement and ponder what is likely to follow.

First, a very belated wish: a peaceful and prosperous 2020 year to all! By “prosperous” I don’t only mean freedom from financial woes. I mean a deep sense of flourishing and thriving in your soul. You can find any number of signs around you pointing to this year as a harbinger of stress and grief -- and above all, being in the throes of the worst global pandemic in a century! No matter. God’s peace is yours to experience deep down in your inner person whatever the turmoil around you.

I spent many more hours than anticipated this past fall putting together a quranic Arabic course online for Fuller Seminary. The course finished this week and, thank God, it went well. Yet besides the two online classes I’m teaching (one was an in-class course before the COVID-19 outbreak), I should soon be able to start my new book project that was tentatively accepted for publication by Brill in its series “Theology and Mission in World Christianity” (thanks to Fuller’s Kirsteen Kim, co-editor of the series). It’s a departure for me – away from Islamic Studies – and on to theology of mission. The tentative title is, The City Where All May Flourish: Christians Engaging Global Currents of Humanitarian Activism and Solidarity.

I’ll refrain from giving any details about that now, but allow me to say that last year’s explosion of peaceful mass protests – in Hong Kong, Sudan before that; then in Algeria and now Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere – definitely caught my attention. In most cases, it is not primarily economic concerns that have propelled these crowds of people into the streets of their big cities, sacrificing pay checks and braving a police force that could turn violent quite easily. What they want above all is better governance, less corruption, more of a say in public policies, and yes – less inequality and more opportunity for all. But in most cases, the key gripe is about corrupt, authoritarian regimes run by the same elites since independence. Apparently, human flourishing cannot happen only on an individual level. It's also very much connected to community and governance.

I must say that the massive protests in France and even more so in Chile do have economic issues at core, and I agree with this article (English version) of the January Monde Diplomatique that there is wider and even global discontent with the prevailing model of neoliberalism, where the rich continue to get richer at the expense of the poor and wield almost command over the political levers in so many countries. It’s unmistakably a case of neocolonialism as well. As always, economics are tied to politics. So in 2019, protests became “the new normal.”

Protests in the Arab World

Now to the MENA region, where we see the poignant demands of protesters in Lebanon and Iraq for an end to sectarianism, which they rightly see as a direct sign of foreign interference manipulating their divided political elites. Demonstrators want the various political factions to play by the democratic rules and set up a government to respond to their needs and their perspective as citizens with equal rights and aspirations. The Iraqi situation is particularly tragic, as at least 500 mostly young male protesters have been killed in less than three months. A young scholar from Gaza now studying at New York University writes that it’s “the regional actors like the US, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states” that each ally themselves with this or that faction and expect loyalty in return. The result is that “Entire groups of Iraqi citizens were subsequently disenfranchised and pitted against each other, resulting in bloody civil wars.” They want their nation back. In the words of the Gazan scholar, Jehad Abousalim,

“These protests cannot be forgotten. As the world moves from one crisis to the next, the Arab world and wider region remain the beating heart of social movements fighting against the world’s oppressive structures. From the calls of “Bread, freedom, and social justice” during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, to the chants of “All of them means all of them” in Lebanon today, these movements are a reminder that oppressed peoples cannot give up their demands for far-reaching change.”

It is true that the Arab revolts of 2011, quickly dubbed “the Arab Spring,” benefited from international media attention and support. Not so much these days. But as James M. Dorsey explains, today’s crowds have learned some valuable lessons from those mostly failed uprisings. Egypt ended up with a dictator even worse than the one they ousted. Why? The army had been in charge starting with Gamal Abd al-Nasser. The “October Revolution” of 1952, after all, was a military coup. The “January 25 Revolution” of 2011 toppled Hosni Mubarak in spectacular fashion, and for a couple of years it looked like democracy was finally taking hold. Parliamentary elections were held that year, a new constitution was drawn up, and the 2012 presidential elections went smoothly.

Unfortunately, Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood president was not a skilled politician. He took on the army in a heavy-handed manner and bolstered his own power using questionable tactics, which only served to alienate him even more from the secular elites. After just a year in power, he was removed by the army and the responsible general, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, managed to handsomely win another round of elections.

At least Egypt didn’t fall into a civil war like in Syria or in neighboring Libya. Still, the lesson was: beware of the army!

The Case of Sudan

Sudan, by contrast, has now provided a hopeful model. The protests were well organized and civilian leaders kept up the pressure from December 2018 to April 2019, leading to the deposing of Omar al-Bashir, a convicted ICC war criminal in power for thirty years. And as the picture above illustrates, the Sudan protests were to a great extent driven by women. Dorsey summarizes it thus (without mentioning the women, however):

“To many protesters, Sudan has validated protesters’ resolve to retain street power until transitional arrangements are put in place.

It took five months after the toppling of president Omar al-Bashir and a short-lived security force crackdown in which some 100 people were killed before the military, the protesters and political groups agreed and put in place a transitional power-sharing process.

The process involved the creation of a sovereign council made up of civilians and military officers that is governing the country and managing its democratic transition.”

But just like in Tunisia, the one bright spot of the Arab Spring, where democracy’s twists and turns amidst a fragile economy and a powder keg next door (Libya) have nearly capsized the ship several times, Sudan’s halting democracy could self-implode at any time. In an opinion piece in Foreign Policy, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, describes the situation after visiting Khartoum this month with a delegation. First of all, he writes, we should celebrate the fact that after fourteen years, the Sudanese state has allowed a foreign human rights delegation to meet with their local counterparts and that “the ruling sovereign council,” a hybrid military-civilian collective presidency, is still promising to hold elections for a truly civilian government in eighteen months. Add to that the council’s cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in rewriting laws that violated basic civil rights and the prominent role played in this process by democratically elected civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok.

At the same time, Roth warns, this democracy is teetering on the edge of the precipice. Already Prime Minister Hamdok was nearly assassinated and fingers are pointing to Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, the deputy to Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the chair of the sovereign council. Dagolo, nicknamed “Hemeti,” is also the leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who, once known as the Janjaweed, notoriously committed atrocities in Darfur, and in the states of Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile. The reason he is a prime suspect is that the ICC is investigating the killing of over 100 protesters last June and Hemeti’s RSF was at least partially involved. Arguably the most powerful man in Sudan, Hemeti has a lot to lose if the ICC gets its hands on him. Yet he has managed to portray himself as the only leader capable of eradicating the potentially resurgent Salafi-jihadis and thereby seem indispensable to some opposition leaders.

Two other dangers also threaten Sudan’s democratic experiment: the economy is in tatters following years of mismanagement and corruption, and the African peacekeeping forces in Darfur finally left Darfur in May 2019, but without resolving the violent conflict between the Arab and Massalit communities in West Darfur.

In light of this, Roth pleads with the international community to do two things. First, Sudan urgently needs financial aid – donations, loans, and investments – but that has not materialized. Second, the United States should lift the sanctions tied to its designation of Sudan as a “state sponsor of terrorism” (SST). Only then does this fragile democracy have a chance of establishing a viable democratic rule.

The colonial legacy of military regimes

In a 2016 post on this website, I looked at a study on this topic (downloadable here) that compared Southeast Asia and the MENA region on the role of the military in the postcolonial era. This was my summary:

“[The authors] argue that if you compare these nations’ militaries and their impact on political change in both regions, you discover that although all these countries came out of the colonial period in similar shape – “The military was either the government or propped up a dominant political party” – the Asian nations succeeded for the most part in transitioning from military-backed (or security force-backed) regimes to democratic ones, whereas after the popular uprisings of 2011, apart from Tunisia, the MENA states failed to do so.”

Sudan, as we just saw, will hopefully be joining Tunisia in successfully sidelining its military’s dominance in political life. God willing, I will lead you in the next two-part blog post to discover a similar process now unfolding in Algeria.

In the first installment of this post I showed how the extreme secularism imposed on his nation by Kemal Attatürk, borrowed from the French ideology of laïcité, could not hold forever. The world dramatically became more religious starting in the 1970s (see my blog post on this) and social science scholars began to describe a wave of “fundamentalism” sweeping over Christians (think of the global Pentecostal movement), Jews (e.g., the ideological settler movement in the Occupied Territories), Buddhists, Hindus, and others. The so-called “Six-Day-War” in 1967 seemed to awaken a deep and radical soul-searching among Muslims. Besides, the pan-Arab socialist regime of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was quickly losing steam, and his successor, Anwar As-Sadat, initiated an opening with the Muslim Brotherhood and the growing popular religious movement in general, while also liberalizing the economy.

In fact, the Turkish economy is where I want to start. I mentioned in the first part how the dramatic expansion of Tayeb Recep Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its influence on Turkish society in the 2000s coincided with economic policies which very much played to his political base initially fired up by the “Anatolian Tigers” and helped to lift the working class. His erstwhile alliance with the Gulenist movement was a powerful way to leverage the support of the small business class – at least until 2013 after Ergogan realized that the Gulenists who were widely represented in the army, police and lower levels of government, were actively investigating the corruption in his administration. To what extent they were involved in the failed 2016 coup attempt is a matter of debate, but what is sure is that it provided Erdogan the perfect pretext to purge the top army brass, higher education, and state institutions in general of its Gulenist elements. Yet on the economic front, Turkey, which was admitted into the club of G-20 countries in the mid-2000s, is now facing an economic crisis.

Erdogan’s “unorthodox stewardship of the economy”

A New York Times article written after the 2018 referendum on the presidency had this title, “The West Hoped for Democracy in Turkey. Erdogan Had Other Ideas.” Perhaps Peter S. Goodman’s rhetoric is a bit overblown: “Whatever was left of the notion that Mr. Erdogan was a liberalizing force has been wholly extinguished.” Still, there is much truth in his seeing him as “another autocrat whose populism, bombast and contempt for the ledger books have yielded calamity.” And this despite the AKP’s efforts to align Turkey with many democratic standards which had been urged by the European Union in the 2000s: “To win European favor, Turkey abolished notorious state security courts, elevated human rights and scrapped the death penalty.”

On the economic front, however, Erdogan “has run the economy like a patronage network, lavishing credit on companies controlled by cronies, while yielding growth through debt.” Let me explain. The state went on a spending spree, building hospitals, road infrastructure, and huge projects like Istanbul’s gigantic new airport. In effect, all these “government credits and guarantees” lured large companies to take on unsustainable levels of debt. And ominously, this coincided with a precipitous drop in the Turkish currency’s value, thus multiplying the debt incurred in US dollars.

Following the 2008 Great Recession, Turkish banks eliminated all interest on bank loans, fueling in part a boom in construction across the nation. But all this free money also created another vulnerability. Erdogan’s use of state money for political advantage also meant that the global market place would dictate its conditions on Turkey; and especially after the Federal Reserve and other central banks raised interest rates, Turkey’s was facing a debt crisis.

Add to that two other headwinds: the flow of refugees from Syria streaming in and the Trump administration doubling the tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum. Now the Turkish lira was plunging. But instead of reigning in the spending, Erdogan doubled down on his populist policies and proceeded to blame his economic woes on foreign enemies. Goodman writes that Erdogan’s economic philosophy is “unorthodox,” to say the least:

“As of June, Turkish private companies carried foreign currency debts reaching $220 billion, according to government figures, or roughly one-fourth of the overall economy. Persuading international investors to extend these debts and spare companies from bankruptcy requires that the central bank lift interest rates. But Mr. Erdogan has refused to go along, claiming — contrary to basic economics — that inflation is caused by high interest rates.”

But either way, a Turkish economist notes that since last year Turkey’s GDP has shrunk by 1.5 percent. The second quarter of 2019 was the third one in a row showing a contraction in economic output. The jobless rate is now over 14 percent with no end in sight, especially because foreign investment has plunged – 23 percent less in this second quarter than a year ago. Something has got to change.

Turkey’s ambitious foreign policy

Turkey’s most pressing issue is resolving the Syrian civil war now in its eighth year. The issue of its 3.6 million Syrian refugees has become a serious domestic liability for the AKP. When the secular candidate for mayor of Istanbul won the election in March, the AKP cried foul and insisted on another election in June. But that second election handed the secular party a decisive victory. This is bad for Erdogan, if only because he once was mayor of Istanbul and this has always been home turf for him. What turned the tide? Likely a combination of frustration with the high number of refugees, high unemployment and a sluggish economy.

The next issue is the Kurdish one. Turkish Kurds, about 18 percent of the population, or around 14 million people, have several groups that have resorted to violence to oppose the Turkish policies which have consistently repressed their language, culture, and people. By far the strongest group is the PKK, which has a military presence inside the border of Iraq and which has been repeatedly been bombed by the Turkish military. Since the open hostilities in 1984, two ceasefires were declared by the PKK (most recently in 2013), but fighting has been ongoing since 2015 (see this Wiki article). Since the 1980s, over 40,000 have been killed, most of them Kurdish civilians.

This fight has spilled over into Syria, especially when the Obama administrating teamed up with the Syrian Kurds to fight the Islamic State. These are the People’s Protection Units (YPG) which is an alliance of mostly Kurds, but including Arabs, predominantly Christian (the Syriac Military Council).

With regard to Syria, Turkey has been involved over the last two years in trilateral talks with Iran and Russia. The UN says up to half a million refugees are massed on the border with Turkey, which has threatened Europe with opening the floodgates if they don’t increase their aid to them inside Turkey. Yet Ankara’s involvement with Russia and Iran is crucial, if only to counterbalance their unconditional support for the Asad regime. Erdogan, a Sunni islamist, has called for Asad to step down from the beginning.

Russia, which supported Asad from day one, intervened militarily in September 2015, quickly turning the war to Asad’s advantage. One hopes Turkey can keep pressure on Russia and Iran to ensure a more peaceful and just transition to a new Syrian postwar reality, despite Asad still being in charge. But the presence of al-Qaeda-related terrorist groups in Idlib province on its border is still a big challenge for Turkey.

Just now President Trump announced that the US would be pulling out its troops from Syria (and likely will also leave the 200 spec. ops originally sent in by Obama). Middle East scholar Juan Cole argues that the only winners in this abrupt change of policy is Turkey (definitely not Russia or its protégé Bashar al-Asad, nor Iran). Why? Erdogan has long wanted to create a "safe zone" on the Syrian side of its border in order to ... 1) invade and neutralize the YPGs militarily, whom he considers allied with the Kurdish PKK fighters in eastern Turkey; 2) more or less force a million Syrian refugees to resettle there ... 3) thereby easing the number of refugees at home and diluting the Kurdish population so as to stave off their independence quest both there and in Turkey. Many fear with reason that this will kill many civilians as well as YPG fighters. Also tragic is the way the US used the YPGs to get rid of ISIS and now feel completely betrayed. Finally, ISIS is sure to regather in some form in Syria.

So far, this is all defensive foreign policy. But Turkey has long looked to expand its influence far beyond its region. A background paper written by a Turkish scholar appointed to Georgetown University’s Berkley Center, Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, calls it “An Ambivalent Religious Soft Power.” Erdogan, for instance, visited Cuba in 2015 and is competing with Saudi Arabia for building its main mosque, mostly for students from Africa. Similarly, Turkey has built a large mosque in Albania’s capital Tirana which bears a striking resemblance to mosques in Istanbul. But like in Austria where Chancellor Sebastian Kurz shut down seven mosques run by the Turkish Diyanet (Ministry of Religious Affairs) because of their political Islam or islamist orientation, some Albanians also fear that Turkish money comes with strings attached.

But it isn’t just propaganda. It’s also setting up beach heads to spy on and subvert Gulenist influences in the area. In Germany where the Diyanet built and runs 1,000 mosques for the Turks and other Muslims, the government has launched an investigation into the spying in which many of these imams have been engaged. These kinds of investigations are ongoing in several other European countries “from Bulgaria to France, where Turkey has been successfully serving Muslims and trying to remain an influential actor since the late 1970s.” The mosques and their imams combine with other Turkish institutions to project Turkish “soft power” in over 50 countries, asserts Öztürk.

In fact, the Turkish Diyanet has exercised religious soft power for over four decades, mostly exporting its secular brand of Islam. But since 2002, notes Öztürk, together with its unofficial partner, the Gulen movement, it has initiated a pro-democracy agenda paired with humanitarian aid, which as he shows, has translated into some spectacular influence worldwide:

“With its ascendant economy, domestic reforms aimed at the EU accession process, and a global climate proposing the compatibility of Islam and democracy, Turkey rose as a soft power with religious tools at its disposal. In this, Turkey has become publicly almost more visible than the other Islamic soft power actors in continental Europe, in the Balkans, and in some particular countries like Somalia. The Diyanet has used its attaché offices in Turkish embassies and the Diyanet Foundation to forge agreements with the authorities of many different countries, Austria included, to train imams and provide other religious services. It has opened branches in more than 40 countries, publishing and distributing Qur'ans and religious books in more than 25 languages. It also provides financial support to official Muslim representative institutions in the Balkans, continental Europe, and Africa. Furthermore, the state-run construction companies TOKI and TİKA have been constructing mosques around the world.”

On the flip side, Öztürk documents some of the “ambivalence” of Turkey’s projection of religious soft power since about 2010, particularly as it is perceived in Europe, partly due to Erdogan’s move toward authoritarianism and his brutal repression of the Gulen movement. Still, considering “the increasingly competitive market of Islamic soft power,” Turkey has done very well. But it would do better, he concludes, if it returned to a more “moderate” version of Islam coupled with a stronger commitment to democracy.

I offer one last foray into Turkish foreign policy: Libya. Erdogan had taken a conciliatory attitude toward Muammar Gaddafi, even receiving the 2010 Al Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights (I won’t even touch that profoundly ironic prize name!). Naturally, there had been significant trade relations between the two nations and as a result 20,000 Turks were working in Libya.

Today, eight years into the profound instability Libya has been experiencing (which is why Turkey opposed NATO’s intervention in 2011) and five years into the civil war between the UN-sponsored government in Tripoli and the forces of General Khalifa Haftar in Libya’s west, Turkey, Qatar and Sudan back the former, while the Emiratis (and by implication the Saudis) back the latter. But it’s much more complex than this. [The Wiki article” is very helpful]. Yet what is relevant here is Turkey’s support to the Government of National Accord (GNA) backed by the UN and its strong opposition to General Haftar and his Libyan National Army (LNA). Add to that Turkey’s military involvement by proxy, as it provides weapons to the GNA and logistical support from its military bases in Qatar and Somalia.

A little-known fact in the low-level battles between the GNA and LNA is that they are mostly drone battles since June 2019. Neither side possesses any sophisticated aircraft (several dozen antiquated models with not enough qualified flight crews). The UAE supplied Haftar with Chinese-made Wing Loong drones, which he began using in April 2019. But then in May Turkey delivered a number of its Bayraktar TB2 drones to the Tripoli government. Most of the action has consisted in either downing each other’s drones or bombing each other’s airports and destroying valuable aircraft. Ukraine, which has been working closely with the Turks, had one of its Russian transport planes destroyed on August 6th, for instance.

That this is a proxy war between Turkey and the UAE is not a hidden fact. On June 10th, Erdogan acknowledged to twenty journalists, “We have a military cooperation agreement with Libya. We are providing to them if they come up with a request, and if they pay for it. They really had a problem in terms of defense needs [and] equipment.” Think about it. Just like in Yemen where the KSA and UAE (which seems to be pulling out these days) have been fighting the Houthis backed by Iran, these are Muslim nations fighting other Muslim nations. But here the sectarian element is absent, that is, Sunnis are fighting Sunnis. Here we are bumping up against the KSA, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt which all decided to blockade Qatar in June 2017. The biggest disagreement is Qatar’s (and Turkey’s) support for a democratic political Islam. These are all autocratic regimes that stand too much to lose from an open political field in which the people are free to choose between them and a party based on Islam.

Here’s a sign that Erdogan has been in power too long (17 years and counting): he has two daughters, the oldest of whom is married to the current Treasury and Finance Minister, Barat Albayrak and the second daughter’s husband is a star in the defense industry that could grow up to 20 percent this year. This son-in-law is the CEO of Baykar, the company that develops drones, among other weaponry. They are about to sell a more developed one (named Akinci, or “Raider”) and already have secured orders from Qatar and Ukraine. Turkish drones, after all, are a “family affair.” If this all smells like nepotism to you, perhaps it is …

Turkey’s quest for “whiteness”

I end with two related pieces on Turkey and the ideology of whiteness. Perhaps I’m naïve, but I thought discrimination based on skin color was limited to North America and Europe. Admittedly, after several visits to West Africa I do know that it’s an issue there too, but still, it’s not “white supremacy” question. This is where history is useful guide. The first piece is an essay by Murat Ergin, sociology professor at Koc University in Istanbul, also author of the 2016 book, “Is the Turk a White Man?”  Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity (Brill). The question in the title is an actual title of a 1909 New York Times article which reported on a decision made by the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati on a case involving a Turkish immigrant. The journalist put the yes and no answer this way:

“The original Turks were of the yellow or Mongolian race [and they] are a cruel and massacring people … But they are also Europeans, as much ‘white’ people as the Huns, Finns, and Cossacks.”

So Ergin’s essay (“Turkey’s Hard White Turn”) sets out to highlight the Turkish case of modernization by whiteness as part of a wider trend in the colonial era:

“In the late-19th and early 20th centuries, modernizers from Iran to Afghanistan, and from Japan to Turkey, turned to Western race science to bolster their efforts to establish the whiteness of the their nations in Western eyes, inject a much-needed confidence to their population in anticolonial struggles, and strengthen their bid for civilization with racial credentials. While race science aimed to classify the world into the superior races of the West and the inferior races of the rest, modernizers around the world appealed to these same scientific precepts as authority for their campaigns. The Turkish case is a compelling one because of the magnitude of the whiteness campaign.”

Though I cannot go into any detail, the story starts with the 1839 Ottoman edict to modernize the Empire (the Tanzimat mentioned in the first part), which started a flurry of (pseudo) scientific activity seeking to bolster the claim that “Turkishness” was what united a very diverse Empire, both ethnically and religiously. Istanbul, in fact, was half non-Muslim until around 1900. Turkish scholars drew much of their inspiration from European Orientalists. A French one in particular Léon Cahun) asserted in a lecture in 1873 (“Life and Prehistoric Migrations of the People Called Turks”) that indeed, “Turks are native Europeans.”

That lecture would be republished years later in 1930. But this is because, writes Ergin, Atatürk sent his adopted daughter, Afet Inan, to do a PhD in history at the University of Geneva under a scholar “friendly to the idea that Turks are white.” Just one of the “fantastic proportions” and “truly creative turns” Turkey’s search for whiteness assumed over the decades is illustrated by Afet Inan’s speech at the 1937 History Congress in Istanbul. Among other things, Inan asserted the following:

“The obvious characteristic of this Central Asian race is brachycephalic; its corporeal formation, despite fabricated legends, is proportional; and its skin has no relationship with the colour of yellow; it is mainly and generally white.”

From the start, Inan was involved in the forefront of this Turkish quest for whiteness. The official book came out in 1931, The Central Themes of Turkish History, and Inan was one of several authors. Ergin notes that a number of its hyper-nationalistic themes were incorporated in the curriculum of Turkish schools of the time:

1) Turks are the original white race;

2) Turks are the descendants of an ancient, central Asian civilisation, which is the oldest and most advanced in the world;

3) Turks spread civilisation to the rest of the world when they migrated out of central Asia, their mythical homeland;

4) when they encountered other races, ancient Turks assimilated and Turkified them.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Turks deemphasized their Ottoman past as well as their Islamic civilization. After all, that was the main premise of Atatürk’s Kemalist, secular ideology. But also, in the light of this blog post, you are guessing that when the islamist opposition, present since the early 1980s, finally came to power in 2002, the Turkish elites turned their eyes again to their Ottoman and Islamic heritage. Or as Ergin has it, “The whiteness campaign that went along with modernisation had repudiated the Ottoman empire as an aberration in Turkey’s long history. The rise of ‘Ottomania’ today rehabilitates the Ottoman past, and roots Turkish identity in it.”

That said, not all Turks believe the same thing. That 2019 mayoral campaign in Istanbul laid bare some of those stark differences. In a fascinating essay, University of Notre Dame Turkish American scholar Perin E. Gürel connects the dots between modern Turkey’s quest for whiteness, the clash of civilization thesis made popular in the 1990s by Samuel Huntington, and the resurgence of white nationalism and sexism in the West. In particular, the Australian who massacred worshipers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, wrote in his rambling manifesto: “Until the Hagia Sophia [a Byzantine Church, later a mosque under the Ottomans, and now a museum] is free of the minarets, the men in Europe are men in name only.” Besides the flagrant sexism of that statement, this threat later become more precise: all Turks must flee to the Asian side of Istanbul “or face violence.” Gürel, a female scholar who grew up in Istanbul, sees this obsessive patrolling of the “white” borders, the limits of “Western civilization,” as particularly ominous.

However distasteful and alarming that kind of vitriol is, it is not entirely surprising. It has a long genealogy. What was more surprising, at least until I read Ergin’s essay, was the clash of ideologies in the mayoral race of Istanbul this year. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” as they say. Gürel offers two viral memes from the CHP campaign [secularist party of the candidate who eventually won, Ekrem Imamoglu] to illustrate her point:

This meme translates as, “Bro, look at the family! In one instance, we progressed 100 years. We became like Finland, Sweden and Norway!” Plainly, northern European whiteness guarantees all kinds of other qualities! We couldn’t imagine this kind of imagery or rhetoric in the US, at least not in public. The second one is just as racialized, and with its light versus darkness trope, even more egregious.

 This reads, “Wait for us Istanbul.” One cannot miss the secularist trope of white European as light and progress, and the Ottoman and Islamic identity as a sign of darkness and backwardness.

With this I end my collage of Turkish modern history, and in particular the transition from the hard secularism of Kemalism to the soft islamism of Erdogan’s AKP. Perhaps its loss of Istanbul’s mayoral seat is a foretaste of changes to come. But then Turkey’s growing economic woes might also point in the same direction. What is certain, however, is that Turkey’s key geopolitical location between Europe and Central Asia and its rich historical and cultural heritage will guarantee its continued influence both in the Middle East and in the Islamic world. To be sure, like any other society, issues of national identity are often shifting, evolving, depending on both domestic and international conditions and pressures.

I just hope and pray all of us – and I might sound hopelessly naïve – will link up with the elements of civil society worldwide committed to mutual listening, to a dialog of civilizations, and to actively working for peace. Together with God’s help we can model love of neighbor and continue to work for greater peace and understanding.

I begin here a two-part blog post on Turkey. What has captured the headlines is the Trump administration love affair with Saudi Arabia (apparently uninterrupted by the grisly murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggji) and its support of its proxy war against Iran in Yemen, now in its fifth year. But it is not just the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Iran battling for preeminence in the wider Middle East. You have to add Turkey to the mix, the heir of the Ottoman Empire, and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who would like to revive some of its past glory.

So much could be said about Turkey, about the Syrian civil war next door, and especially about its 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees. That is almost four times the total number of Syrian refugees now present in Europe. Despite the agreement with Europe in March 2016 to halt the flow of refugees in its direction in exchange for a substantial aid package, Turkey is now moving to expel many who were not registered and who may lose their lives once back in Syria. There are no good or even foreseeable solutions to the human disaster caused by Russian-backed dictator Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria.

The purpose of my blog is always to look behind the news headlines and consider the wider context, and in most cases as it touches on contemporary Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. So here and the next installment, I want to look at …

1) The meteoric rise of a moderate islamist party in the Muslim world’s most secular nation;

2) The evolution of President Erdogan from a staunch defender of democracy and human rights to a decidedly more authoritarian ruler

3) Erdogan’s foreign policy seeking to increase its influence in the ME and beyond

4) The curious phenomenon of white supremacy amidst a revival of a “clash of civilization” campaign by some of Turkey’s ruling elites

The last two points I will reserve for the second half, but here allow me to start and give you a skeleton version of Turkish history, from Ottoman Empire to the fierce secularism of modern Turkey’s father, Ataturk, to the soft islamism of Erdogan and his AKP party.

How religion gradually crept back into the Turkish republic

My last duty (I hope) as translator of Rached Ghannouchi’s classic book, The Public Freedoms in the Islamic State, is to be one of its proof readers. As I was in the second chapter the other day (“Human Rights and Freedom in Islam”), I reread this section:

“In the West, they [human rights] originated in the struggle against the Church and the absolute rule of kings, who both had a share of political authority, though it was later entirely snatched away from the former and given to the people; still, one source of authority remained. This marked the Western state with an individualistic stamp and with a nationalist, secular, and legalistic spirit. The situation in Islamic countries, however, is different, as they did not experience this avoidance of religion nor for the most part the split between political power and the religious community. Even in periods of oppression, the Shari‘a continued to constrain the political ruler in two important areas: the authority to enact laws and the imposition of taxes.”

If you read my trilogy of blogs on “The Impossible Islamic State,” you will know that Ghannouchi’s last sentence has some historical truth to it but also that the reality is more complex. Historically, there was indeed a tug-of-war between the religious scholars (ulama) and the rulers who derived a good bit of political legitimacy from their good relations with the former. But there were always tensions between them, and no two regimes – from large empires to local petty dynasties – were alike in this regard. Still, his main point here is valid, namely that democracy in the West grew out of a long history of autocratic rulers using Christianity to keep their realms under control. Think of the Emperor Constantine, or of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, or of the medieval popes who until the Reformation held sway over the kingdoms of Europe.

Ghannouchi as a Tunisian likely sees the breaking point as the French Revolution. That would be true. Marie Antoinette and her husband King Louis XVI were executed by the revolutionaries and the French Catholic Church suddenly lost all political connections. The division between religion and state in France is the most extreme among all Western nations (laïcité). Unlike Britain and Germany, for instance, it has no national church, and unlike the US, religion is completely banned from the political arena, except when it comes to blackballing Muslims. But as you know, the relation between religion and state, and indeed the origin of human rights before and during the Enlightenment is much more complicated than Ghannouchi lets on here.

That said, Ghannouchi’s point is that religion and politics have always comingled to some extent in Muslim lands is true. But then Turkey is the great exception, or is it? And that matters too, because Ghannouchi saw Turkey’s AKP as a model Islamic parties elsewhere could emulate. In this part of my post I quote from a very readable piece written by liberal Turkish Muslim writer Mustafa Akyol who resides in the US. He is most famous for his Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (now only available as an Audible Audiobook – see also this intro from the New York Times). I encourage you to read the full text of his essay https://tcf.org/content/report/turkeys-troubled-experiment-secularism/ , which was a policy report part of a project launched by The Century Foundation supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, “Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East.”

His first main point is that in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had embarked on series of reforms, partly under Western and Russian pressure, aiming to give all of its Muslim and non-Muslim peoples equal citizenship rights, including “more rights and opportunities for women, and the annulment of some of the illiberal aspects of sharia, such as the death penalty for apostasy.” Yet these reforms (“Tanzimat”) were imposed from the top down, without any participation from the traditional Islamic scholars (ulama). The result was a bloated, “overempowered state,” which in the hands of Attatürk, the general who by dint of military conquest reclaimed some territories from the Greeks in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s humiliating defeat in WWI as one of the Axis Powers.

So this legacy of bureaucratic centralization and state overreach was passed down from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, which Akyol calls “revolutionary.” Why? It was an all-powerful, autocratic state that sought to transform society through and through. The caliphate was abolished in 1924, and “Atatürk’s ideological blueprint, which came to be known as ‘Kemalism,’ rested on two main pillars: Turkish nationalism and secularism.” This was completely new: “Nationalism implied a nation-state built for Turks, in contrast to the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. And secularism implied that Islam would not be allowed to have any significant public role in this new, modern, Western-oriented republic.”

Secularism for Atatürk meant dismantling most all of the institutional structures of religion: he dissolved the “ministry of Sharia” and banned the Sufi brotherhoods and schools of religious learning (madrassas). The Turkish language from now on would no longer be written in the Arabic script but in the Latin alphabet and the Islamic calendar was replaced by the Gregorian one. Men had to adopt Western clothing and women had to uncover their hair. All of this was in the name of progress and it was called laiklik, a version of the French laïcité.

Kemalist nationalism (“We’re a Turkish nation”) met with mostly approval and still does – except of course, for the large Kurdish minority, which has taken up arms multiple times to claim its independence, or at least a larger measure of autonomy.

Kemalist secularism, by contrast, has consistently been opposed by most Turks, who have remained on the whole quite religious. Akyol lists several Center-Right political parties since the 1950s that have pushed at minimum for a more religiously-friendly secularism. But then you have those who outright opposed it, those in favor of a state run by religious principles, or the islamists who consistently polled between ten and fifteen percent of the electorate. They hail from several currents:

“These Islamists consisted of Sufi orders; the popular “Nur” movement led by Said Nursi (1877–1960), along with its various offshoots, including the Gulen Movement; intellectuals, some of whom got inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979; and ordinary pious Turks who felt humiliated by a Westernized elite.”

The political founder of this movement was “Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011), who first appeared in the late 1960s with his National [here, code word for ‘Islamic’] Order Party.” He founded various parties, which the military (always in charge up to the 2000s) closed down one after the other. But in 1996, he managed to be named prime minister. But this was too much for the military, which forced him to resign. This event is recalled in Turkish history as the “post-modern coup.” But these secular ruling elites, particularly in continuing to back the ban on women wearing the hijab in public buildings, including the universities, were by this time overplaying their hand. This kind of imposition of laiklik was, as Akyol puts it, was clearly “about the state’s duty to secularize society by imposing a “way of life” that had no visible trace of traditional religion.” Or put differently, “The main concern of Turkish secularists was freedom from religion, and almost never freedom of religion.”

Here I have to add a little known fact about the Shia-related sect, the Alevis who make up over 15 percent of the population. Distinct from the Alawis in Syria (also about 17 percent, including dictator Bashar al-Asad), they trace their teachings and practice from the 13th century Sufi saint, Haji Bektash Veli. But they have also incorporated insights and practices from Buddhism, Shamanism, Zoroastrianims and though self-identifying as Muslims, they worship in cemevis instead of mosques, do not pray five times a day nor fast during Ramadan. Staunch supporters of Turkey’s secularist state, like other religious factions they too found their religious activities curtailed but were also persecuted by the majority Sunni Muslims. Under Erdogan (see next section), they have enjoyed more security but they have also suffered from the ruling party’s deliberate “Sunnification” of public education. Then in 2013, when state subsidies were expanded for Sunni institutions, they were deliberately overlooked. Turkish Alevis, more than ever, feel not just discrimination but the total erasure of their distinct and proud identity. The history of Turkish secularism, to say the least, has many twists and turns!

The soft Islamism of the AKP

At the turn of the new millennium, two movements coalesced to craft a message that appealed to the majority of Turks: the Development and Justice Party (AKP) and the Fethullah Gulen movement (a quasi-Sufi movement under Gulen’s leadership which by then had followers in the millions mostly in small business circles). These two remained close allies till about 2013. They defined their position as followers of the British and American versions of secularism, obviously in opposition to French laïcité.

The year 2003 marks the beginning of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rising star, first as prime minister in 2003, then after successfully pushing through a constitutional amendment, as president since 2014. His platform from the start was full acceptance of a secular constitution with an emphasis on democracy and the respect for human rights. The latter, however, include religious rights, so gradually the Turkish culture wars tipped to the advantage of the religious. Here are some of those signs:

“In the early 2010s the headscarf ban gradually vanished in all state institutions. Sufi orders and other Islamic communities found more freedom—and in fact, privilege—than ever before, at least as long as they supported the government. . . . The Sunni majority keeps enjoying the blessings of state support for their faith—evident everywhere from the huge budget of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, which finances all mosques with taxpayer money, to the education system, which includes compulsory pro-Sunni religious education.”

Notably absent from the AKP’s agenda is any tampering with the state’s laiklik ideology. He doesn’t need to, says Akyol. Kemalist secularism has been essentially “defanged.” This is largely because of the amazing success of Erdogan and the AKP, which reinforced Turkish democracy and liberalized the economy. Emmanuel Karagiannis from Kings College London explains in his recent book, The New Political Islam: Human Rights, Democracy, and Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), that the AKP’s rise can be credited to the “Anatolian Tigers, namely the small to medium-sized export-oriented businesses based on family networks in Anatolia [central Turkey].” In essence, you had “a class of entrepreneurial Muslim bourgeoisie” that was “seeking political emancipation.” They represented “a kind of Islamic Calvinism that urges devout Muslims to work hard while abiding by Muslim values” (87). But then after winning the 2007 parliamentary elections by garnering 46.6 percent of votes, the AKP “was able to expand its support base and reach middle-class and professional Turks from urban centers.” The next year Turkey joined the Group of Twenty (G-20) major economies and seemed even closer in its official bid to join the EU.

Creeping authoritarianism

The AKP’s nearly fifty percent win in the 2011 parliamentary elections apparently signaled a green light in Erdogan’s mind to begin settling scores with political enemies. The 1997 military coup mentioned above was the third such military intervention in Turkish politics. Erdogan had already begun using evidence of a fourth coup, this time aimed at him, in a series of trials beginning in 2008 uncovering a military plot known as the Ergenekon case. Guney Yildiz for the BBC in 2013 writes that “[f]ollowing five years of legal proceedings, the court delivered 17 life sentences to formerly prominent figures of the military establishment, along with politicians, academics and journalists.”

During this struggle to limit the power of the military in the late 2000s, the powerful “Hizmet” (“Service”) movement, founded and spearheaded by the Sufi-like cleric Fethullah Gulen (living in Saylorsburg, PA), had become an ally Erdogan firmly counted on. In fact, Gulenists helped to fill many government positions of people sacked by Erdogan without due process. But already in 2010, the AKP “discovered” some heavy-handed investigations into their affairs by a police force largely in the hands of Gulenists. Erdogan then began accusing Hizmet of being a “parallel state.” The official split didn’t come till 2013, but with that in mind, the reaction to the attempted military coup of July 2016 makes complete sense.

Written a year later, this article sums up nicely what we know about the coup attempt. The bloodiest of all previous coups, a section of the Turkish army coordinated attacks in Ankara and Istanbul, with explosions coming from tanks and even fighter jets bombing the parliament building in the capital. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was even kidnapped for a while. Yet, miraculously it would seem, Erdogan slipped through unscathed, warned by his brother-in-law (to this day no one knows how or why Turkish intelligence didn’t manage to alert the president). Then too, crowds supporting the government flowed into the streets of Anatolia, Ankara and Istanbul. The dramatic end came swiftly:

“The crowds resisted tank fire and air bombardments and, with the help of loyalist soldiers and police forces, they defeated the coup attempt in a matter of hours. The government swiftly declared victory and scores of troops that had taken part in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul.”

Yet in those few hours, 241 people had died and 2,194 others were injured. Erdogan’s reaction was just as swift. He blamed the coup on Hizmet, though Gulen has denied any involvement in it, and then embarked on an unprecedented crackdown on perceived political enemies, while declaring a state of emergency. Almost two years later, just before the referendum on the presidency, the BBC offered some numbers: over 107,000 public employees (soldiers, police officers, teachers and judges) were forcefully dismissed from their jobs; over 100,000 appealed via the state of emergency commission; 19,600 cases were reviewed, but only 1,010 were reinstated. According to the main opposition party, the Republican’s People Party (CHP), over 5,000 academics and 33,000 teachers lost their jobs. A New York Times article from March 2018 chronicles the sentencing of 24 journalists to prison for their alleged role in the coup. More were sentenced before and after that as well, so that Turkey has the highest number of any country of jailed journalists. Altogether, Turkey now has over 50,000 political prisoners pending trial.

The Washington Post’s Editorial Board had this to say after last year’s presidential election and referendum on the expansion of presidential powers: “President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory means a five-year term in an executive presidency of expanded powers. How he will use those powers has been amply telegraphed by his actions in recent years, especially after the failed coup attempt of 2016, when he imprisoned or silenced his critics and attempted to neuter civil society. The strongman just got a new lease on a bigger place.”

Much more could be said about this, naturally, but I will end the first installment here and begin the second one with Turkey’s foreign policy aspirations.

I confess to being surprised that I haven’t touched this topic more than once, and that back in January 2012 (though I do have a ten-page paper on Christian Zionism and the I/P conflict in Resources, the ideology without which President Trump could not do what is doing with this issue). We lived there for three years as a family in the mid-1990s; I spent five weeks there doing some research in Hebron for my doctoral dissertation in 1999; my last visit, however, dates back to 2002. Still, I closely follow the political situation and keep in touch with some people. Lately I wished I could attend one the international conferences hosted at the Bethlehem Bible College (where I used to teach), called “Christ at the Checkpoint.”

I have never been very optimistic about a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinians peace deal, and the recent one by the Trump administration, reportedly to be announced in June 2019, is likely dead on arrival. The chief negotiator on the Palestinian side, Saeb Erekat, made it clear that “the constant position of the Palestinian leadership that any solutions ruling out the international resolutions and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital will be rejected.”

In this post, I will first give a couple of examples of how Israel grievously violates Palestinian rights as enshrined in international law, and then argue that the winning strategy that finally brought down the apartheid regime in South Africa is the only possible path to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Military occupation and home demolitions

I’m borrowing part of this material from the case study introducing Ch. 2 of my upcoming book, Justice and Love (5 out of 6 chapters start with a case study, while Ch. 1 is itself a case study on racism in the US). So what do I mean by “military occupation”? What Israelis call the “Six Day War” in 1967 ushered in an era of Israeli control over the Gaza strip (previously under Egypt), the West Bank (under Jordan) and the Golan Heights (under Syria), an era that continues until today. Many books have been written about various aspects of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, but here I only highlight one aspect of this overall campaign of ethnic cleansing (a term used by noted Israeli historian Ilan Pappe).

Don’t take my word for this. Have a listen to one of the oldest and most established Israeli human rights organizations focused on these issues. The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories in 1989, better known as B’Tselem, Hebrew for “in the image,” from the creation story on the first page of the Torah, “And God created humankind in his image” (Gen. 1:27). Its mission as seen on its website is clearly formulated in terms of human rights: “Israel’s regime of occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations. B’Tselem strives to end the occupation, as that is the only way forward to a future in which human rights, democracy, liberty and equality are ensured to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

Here is the kind of discourse B’Tselem used in a special report from February 2019 (“Fake Justice: The Responsibility Israel’s High Court Justice Bear for the Demolition of Palestinian Homes and the Dispossession of Palestinians”):

“The planning apparatus Israel has instituted in the West Bank serves its policy of promoting and expanding Israeli takeover of land across the West Bank. When planning for Palestinians, the Israeli Civil Administration endeavors to obstruct development, minimize the size of communities and increase construction density, with a view to keeping as many land reserves as possible for the benefit of Israeli interests, first and foremost for the expansion of settlements. Yet when planning for settlements, whose very establishment is unlawful in the first place, the Civil Administration’s actions are the very reverse: planning reflects settlements’ present and future needs, aiming to include as much land as possible in the outline plan so as to take over as many land resources as possible. Such planning leads to wasteful infrastructure development, loss of natural countryside and relinquishing open areas.”

When B’Tselem uses the word “unlawful” for the construction of settlements, they are referring to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbids the building of settlements in militarily conquered territory. So while bankrolling the expansion of these Israeli communities in the “Occupied Territories” (UN language), Israelis strictly limit and impede Palestinian natural population growth. One way they do this is to deny 96 percent of building applications (B’Tselem’s figure covering the period of 2000-2016). Another way is to demolish homes that have been built “illegally.” From 1988 to 2017 the [Israeli] Civil Administration issued 16,796 demolition orders. Out of those, 20% were carried out and 18% are still pending in the courts.

What is certain, however, is that the pace of home demolitions has accelerated in recent years. From 2006 through 2018, B’Tselem documented the destruction of “at least 1,401 residential units in the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem), causing at least 6,207 people – including at least 3,134 minors – to lose their homes.” At least 1,014 of these people saw their homes razed more than once!

Incarceration of children

Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) highlighted in 2018 the issue of child detentions in the West Bank. Israel as an occupying power is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions but human rights organizations working in these territories (B’Tselem, UNICEF, Defense for Children International) “have extensively documented reports of mistreatment of Palestinian youth within the Israeli military detention system. Such allegations include both unreasonable use of force (such as threats, intimidation, long-term handcuffing, beatings, and solitary confinement) as well as lack of due process of law.” Here are some troubling figures cited by a 2016 U.S. State Department Human Rights Report for Israel and the Palestinian Territories:

• • • 1.3 million Palestinian children in West Bank.
    • 500-700 Palestinian children detained annually.
    • 84% of detained children have not been read their legal rights.
    • 75% of detained children report experiencing physical violence. 
    • 66% of detained children are held in solitary confinement for average of 13 days. 
    • 41% of children are arrested during the middle of the night.
    • 33% of detained children sign confessions not in their native language.

As you might guess, these figures – both the home demolitions and the incarceration of children – are only the tip of the iceberg of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. From the construction of the “security barrier” which cuts off many Palestinian farmers from their olive groves or fields, to the many checkpoints which make travel within the West Bank painfully slow and unpredictable (and worse yet for the very few who are able to secure a job within Israel), to all the heavy regulations that routinely cripple the Palestinian economy – all these and many more daily injustices explain why Palestinians even in the West Bank wholeheartedly support the international campaign to boycott Israel as a means to end this occupation (I wrote “even,” because life is much more grueling and dangerous in Gaza where even potable water is almost impossible to get and power is on for less than two hours a day!).

The BDS movement

As the Wikipedia article on BDS makes clear (I’m guessing it may have been watered down by some pro-Israeli hands), the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign does not command universal support among those who actively support the two-state solution as envisaged by the Oslo Process of the early 1990s. Though historians disagree about the exact antecedents of the movement, they do agree that the first BDS conference was held in Ramallah (West Bank capital of the Palestinian Authority set up by the Oslo Accords) in 2007. It established the BDS national committee to be the organizing body of an international movement.

According to the BDS website, its goals are threefold:

1. 1. 1. 1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
      2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
      3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their home and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

The movement’s main reference and source of inspiration is the original boycott of South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1980s. As you might expect, the movement has met with mixed success internationally (see again the Wikipedia article). But my goal here is to highlight the Christian support in Israel/Palestine and the US (though admittedly not in most evangelical circles, that is, in the so-called Christian Right). But first let me circle back to the rumored peace plan put forward by Jared Kushner and his father-in-law, President Donald Trump.

The European Union’s support for the two-state solution

The British newspaper The Guardian published a letter by thirty-seven “high-ranking former European politicians” urging the European Parliament to stand behind the two-state solution and refuse any peace initiative by the US that undermines “the multilateral, rules-based international order” – an order which has opened up an unprecedented era of peace and stability in Europe itself.

The current American administration has taken steps to distance itself from some important building blocks of that system of international law:

“It has so far recognised only one side’s claims to Jerusalem and demonstrated a disturbing indifference to Israeli settlement expansion. The US has suspended funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and for other programmes benefitting Palestinians – gambling with the security and stability of various countries located at Europe’s doorstep.”

You can read the trepidation of these seasoned leaders between the lines. The letter further clarifies where these leaders draw their red lines in the sand:

“European governments should further commit to scale up efforts to protect the viability of a future two-state outcome. It is of the utmost importance that the EU and all member states actively ensure the implementation of relevant UN security council resolutions – including consistent differentiation in accordance with UN security council resolution 2334, between Israel in its recognised and legitimate borders, and its illegal settlements in the occupied territories.”

Then this statement that almost certainly refers to the BDS movement: “Furthermore, recent escalating efforts to restrict the unhindered work of civil society have made European support for human-rights defenders in both Israel and Palestine, and their critical role in reaching a sustainable peace, more important than ever.”

Why again is this important support for the two-state solution? Look no further than what is likely to be unveiled by the Trump administration in June 2019, as explained here. The most likely scenario is that with the support of Israel and Saudi Arabia Trump’s plan is about flooding the Palestinians with money in exchange for their civil rights.

Some Christian voices in support of BDS

Rev. Naim Ateek, a Palestinian Anglican clergyman with whom I worked while teaching at the Bethlehem Bible College founded the Palestinian Center for Liberation Theology (or Sabeel – meaning both “the way” and “the spring” in Arabic) in the late 1980s. We attended his Arabic services at the St. George’s Cathedral in East Jerusalem. I would also help out leading the liturgy with him and we cooperated in his youth ministry endeavors. His landmark book was Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1989). Sabeel is also a co-sponsor of the Christ at the Checkpoint conferences (CATC).

In a recent letter by Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), the executive director Tarek Abuata wrote the following: “As we set our gaze on the liberation of Palestine, we are building a movement that reflects Jesus’ multiple and vibrant forms. The stakes are high and the struggle is long, but we are not deterred. It is our task to work with stubborn endurance to that end.” Then this statement: “We are pushing BDS campaigns in denominations, congregations, and local cities. We are uplifting Palestinian voices through our Palestinian Narrative Training program . . . We are leading ethical pilgrimages to occupied Palestine.”

Here are two contrasting articles on the last CATC biennial conference (June 2018). One was written by a journalist friend of mine, Jayson Casper, who attended it for Christianity Today. His tone is appropriately balanced and seeking to give voices to both supporters and critics. But you can tell that the old fortress of unconditional evangelical support for Israel is developing serious cracks, and especially among the millennial generation. Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Seminary, was a plenary speaker (pictured next to the Bethlehem Bible College president, Jack Sara, a former student of mine), and so was Eugene Cho, who is the lead pastor of the urban, multicultural Quest Church in Seattle.

No mention of BDS in that article … But it was plainly mentioned in an article in Israel Today strongly critical of CATC. Likely a messianic Jew himself (that is, a Jew believing in the Jesus of the New Testament), Arthur Schwartzman wrote that most of the Palestinian discourse put nationalism above Christ despite the theme of the conference, “Christ at the Center.” The Palestinian foreign minister gave a speech, he complained, and nothing critical of the Palestinian Authority was said by anyone. Then he adds, “Support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement was also heard.” I know for a fact that far and away most Palestinian evangelicals see the boycott movement as the only nonviolent tool capable of pressuring Israel to change the status quo.

Finally, the NGO Monitor (a pro-Israel think tank in Jerusalem), indicates that CMEP supports the Kairos document, which calls for participation in the BDS campaign. That 2009 document is a carefully crafted theological statement by a coalition of Christian churches on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One article under the heading “Resistance” argues that the BDS movement integrates “the logic of peaceful resistance.” Then this statement:

“These advocacy campaigns must be carried out with courage, openly sincerely proclaiming that their object is not revenge but rather to put an end to the existing evil, liberating both the perpetrators and the victims of injustice. The aim is to free both peoples from extremist positions of the different Israeli governments, bringing both to justice and reconciliation. In this spirit and with this dedication we will eventually reach the longed-for resolution to our problems, as indeed happened in South Africa and with many other liberation movements in the world.”

A new wind among house Democrats?

The young female freshman congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, has been repeatedly attacked and smeared by Republicans for her outspoken support for the BDS movement. Her Palestinian-American colleague from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, holds the same position though manages to raise less controversy.

Nevertheless, both of them raised more than eyebrows over this past weekend, as armed hostilities between Israel and Gaza flared up once again. Newsweek spotlighted Omar and Tlaib for bucking the Democratic consensus by condemning neither side but by focusing on Gaza’s human suffering. In particular, Omar tweeted:

“How many more protesters must be shot, rockets must be fired, and little kids must be killed until the endless cycle of violence ends? The status quo of occupation and humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unsustainable. Only real justice can bring about security and lasting peace.”

I cannot say that better (with one caveat: I would have deleted "rockets must be fired," though I know she condemns this kind of indiscriminate killing). The fight for justice for Palestinians must go on in earnest, except only in peaceful ways. The international campaign for Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions on Israel, realistically, is the only way to nudge the party that holds all the cards to dismantle its military occupation of 52 years. Admittedly, Palestinian divisions have nicely played into the Israeli colonial strategy – divide and conquer.

But this year especially, Israel is dreading a potentially bruising blow to what is left of its international goodwill. Its long-desired hosting of the immensely popular Eurovision song contest in June 2019 could be marred by protests. And though all 42 participating countries will come, many artists are boycotting the event. The pro-Palestinian social media are calling for “A Week of Action against Eurovision in Tel Aviv” with “loud, visible, mass nonviolent protests.” Though leaders known to the Israeli intelligence services will certainly be banned from entering Israel, there is much angst about unexpected protests among the crowds or even from the stage. We shall see.

What is certain is that Israel fears the BDS campaign more than any acts of terror. One of the most vocal and influential backers in the US, Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, has endured first hand an operation of threats and intimidation run by ex-Israeli intelligence agents. The sophistication of these methods betrays the level of anxiety among Israeli leaders regarding the BDS movement.

They too know that the kind of peaceful, direct mass action as practiced by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. worked powerfully to bring down apartheid. We hope and pray it will bring down the Israeli occupation and usher in peace and prosperity for those two nations side by side.

This was a paper delivered at a the Society of Vineyard Scholars which in 2014 was held in Columbus, OH. Stanley Hauerwas is one of America's most influential theologians and public intellectuals, and it struck me when I was reading him that he could see no theological justification for human rights. In his view, they are the product of the secular Enlightenment and now also the symptom of all that is wrong with market capitalism and its attendant consummerist society. It is a sign of our postmodern hyper-individualism. In this paper I examine his views of human rights, and those of influential lawyer and writer Steven L. Carter, who as a Christian takes Hauerwas to task on this issue, but from a different angle. I end with a brief look at Pope Francis' first public document Evangelii Gaudium and its teaching on human solidarity. I conclude (unsurprisingly for those who follow my blog) that the Chistian doctrine of creation (Muslim and Jewish too) provide ample grounding for a theology of human rights.

This is the longer version (about twice the length) of a case study that begins my fifth chapter in Justice and Love: A Muslim-Christian Conversation. Having taught an introductory course in Islam at the West Africa Theological Seminary as a two-week intensive course on three occasions, I have been eager to read more about the history of that nation's sectarian tensions. This is a very brief introduction to the question, but one I believe will be useful for anyone trying to grasp how the 1999 Sharia controversy irrupted and why it has been somewhat resolved since then. That is the focus of this paper and not the issue of Boko Haram. It is mentioned in passing, but that would be a separate topic.