Author: Shalem John

When members of Iglesia Bautista Refugio de Generaciones go out to evangelize, pastor Esaú Aguilar knows they will have company. Los halcones (“the falcons”), young men working for local drug cartel bosses, flock right behind them.  In El Refugio, a small town west of Guadalajara, Mexico, the halcones alert criminals when police, rival gangs, or any other group could threaten business. The 7,000-person town is located in the center of the Mexican state of Jalisco, home to one of the smallest evangelical populations in the country (just 4.7%) as well as to the powerful Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, considered a…

When I coined the phrase court evangelicals during the first Trump administration, I compared these Christians to the court clergy of late medieval and Renaissance-era Europe. These courtiers were motivated by one goal: to gain access to and win the favor of the monarch. As I wrote back in 2020, access to the court brought with it “privilege and power and an opportunity to influence the king on important matters.” Today’s court evangelicals want a “seat at the table.” They flatter President Donald Trump and praise him for appointing pro-life Supreme Court justices; removing the teaching of critical race theory and other…

For the past 13 years, the small Christian Rohingya community in Delhi—which numbers 150—has rented rooms to worship in three congregations each Sunday. The two pastors had been going through the Sermon on the Mount for the past six months. They had reached Matthew 7 when the government began rounding up members of the community. It began May 6, when police called 15 Christian and 23 Muslim Rohingya into police stations, claiming they needed to be fingerprinted due to a “failure in their biometric,” according to Sadeq Shalom, a church member whose brother was deported. The Rohingya complied, believing it…