Deseret Magazine - April 2023

by

Painting

Jeffery Pugh

Painting by Paige Anderson

A CRUCIBLE OF DREAMS

A PARISH IN COLOMBIA PREPARES MIGRANTS FOR THE JOURNEY NORTH.

by kyle dunphey

GRACE ON WHEELS

VOLUNTEER DRIVERS TRANSCEND ETHNIC DIFFERENCES TO AID PALESTINIANS IN NEED.

by mya jaradat

FROM THE ASHES

AFTER A VOLCANIC ERUPTION, TONGANS RELIED ON COMMUNITY AND FAITH.

by ethan bauer

“I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them

strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left.”

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

EDITOR

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

MANAGING EDITOR

DEPUTY EDITOR

SENIOR EDITORS

POLITICS EDITOR

EDITOR-AT-LARGE

STAFF WRITERS

WRITER-AT-LARGE

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

ART DIRECTORS

DESIGNER

COPY CHIEF

COPY EDITORS

RESEARCH

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

HAL BOYD

JESSE HYDE

ERIC GILLETT

MATTHEW BROWN

CHAD NIELSEN

JAMES R. GARDNER

LAUREN STEELE

SUZANNE BATES

DOUG WILKS

ETHAN BAUER

NATALIA GALICZA

MYA JARADAT

MICHAEL J. MOONEY

LOIS M. COLLINS

KELSEY DALLAS

KYLE DUNPHEY

JENNIFER GRAHAM

ALEXANDRA RAIN

IAN SULLIVAN

BRENNA VATERLAUS

CHARLIE WRIGHT

TODD CURTIS

CHRIS MILLER

SARAH HARRIS

VALERIE JONES

TYLER NELSON

ETHAN BAUER

ISABEL BOUTIETTE

NATALIA GALICZA

LAURENZ BUSCH

ANNE DENNON

ALEXANDRA RAIN

GENEVIEVE VAHL

TWIGGY BOYER

DAVIDE BONNACI

ALEX COCHRAN

SPENSER HEAPS

MAR HERNÁNDEZ

KYLE HILTON

NICOLE L A RUE

ROBERT NEUBECKER

GREG NEWBOLD

CHANELLE NIBBLELINK

LINDA REYNOLDS

DANIEL ROLLIDER

ELLIOT ROSS

IAN SULLIVAN

BRENNA VATERLAUS

DANLIN ZHANG

DANIEL FRANCISCO

VICE PRESIDENT MARKETING

HEAD OF SALES

NATIONAL SALES MANAGER

PRODUCTION MANAGER

OPERATIONS MANAGER

DIRECTOR OF CIRCULATION

SALLY STEED

CYNDI BROWN

MEGAN DONIO

BRITTANY M C CREADY

SYLVIA HANSEN

Deseret Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 23, ISSN PP324, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in January/February and July/August. The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Ste 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret.com/subscribe. Copyright 2023, Deseret News Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

Lantos Swett is president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice and a professor of human rights and foreign policy at Tufts University. A former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, she co-chairs the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and serves on the advisory board of UN Watch. Her commentary is on page 15.

Singh is the executive director for the Aspen Institute’s Religion and Society program. In 2020, he was awarded Time Magazine’s recognition of people fighting for a more equal America. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. An excerpt from his book “The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life” is on page 68.

An award-winning poet and storyteller, Atsitty’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Florida Review, New Poets of the American West Anthology and other publications. A book of her poetry, “Rain Scald,” was published in 2018. A doctoral student at Florida State University, her poem, “Bird Dance,” is on page 78.

Vaterlaus is a graphic designer focused on branding, digital design, typography and print. She is the recipient of the 2021 Graphis New Talent Annual gold award and the 2020 The Young Ones merit award. Her clients include Cove, Sprezzature Skates, E.L.F. and Rodan + Fields. Vaterlaus’ work can be seen on page 16.

Zhang is an illustrator and adjunct illustration professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has won awards from the Society of Illustrations, the Art Directors Club and DNA Paris Design. Her clients include The Wall Street Journal, TED, Politico and The New York Times. Zhang’s illustration is on page 44.

Cochran is an editorial illustrator and graphic designer for Deseret News. Her work has appeared in past issues of Deseret Magazine, as well as in The Atlantic. She has also done design and illustrations for Snowbird resort and FamilySearch. Her work in this issue appears on pages 58 and 72.

ALEX COCHRAN

KATRINA LANTOS SWETT

TACEY M. ATSITTY

DANLIN ZHANG

SIMRAN JEET SINGH

BRENNA VATERLAUS

A LEAP OF FAITH

In one of his most famous lectures, the philosopher William James invited listeners to imagine an alpine climber in a precarious position. The climber has gotten into a spot from which the only escape requires a “terrible leap.” Making the jump to safety is uncertain, and if the climber doubts “in a moment of despair” failure is almost guaranteed. But, James contends, if the climber instead believes she can make the leap, her feet may very well be “nerved to its accomplishment,” helping her to safety and justifying her faith.

This issue of Deseret Magazine is dedicated to leaps of faith.

Early this year, just such a leap of faith occurred in Washington, D.C., when two members of the U.S, House of Representatives from opposite sides of the aisle shared a stage to champion religious liberty. Michael McCaul — a Texas Republican — and Jim McGovern — a Massachusetts Democrat — modeled what bipartisanship looks like in an era that seems to have ceased rewarding it. The event, the third annual International Religious Freedom Summit, was organized by the former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom during the Obama years, Katrina Lantos Swett, and the former United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom during the Trump presidency, Sam Brownback. An essay from Swett, partly inspired by the recent conference, opens this issue of the magazine.

But it’s not just in Washington, D.C. where leaps of faith are helping change the world.

Staff writer Ethan Bauer takes us to Tonga — one of the most religious nations in the world — where faith helped islanders as they rebuilt in the wake of one of the nation’s most devastating

volcanic eruptions. And, on the other side of the world, staff writer Mya Jaradat chronicles Project Rozana, a volunteer effort spanning the Israeli-Palestinian divide aimed at ensuring Palestinian children receive life-saving medical care. We also go inside a tiny, little-known parish in Columbia with writer Kyle Dunphey and photojournalist Spencer Heaps. It’s there where many asylum seekers stop before braving the Darién Gap, a treacherous 60-mile stretch of mountainous terrain that’s “become a migrant highway” over the past decade.

Additionally, Brian Grim, the founding president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, takes us on his personal journey to build a world in which diverse religious traditions are protected and flourish, while Simran Jeet Singh, executive director of the Religion & Society Program at the Aspen Institute, draws on his own religious faith to encourage us to rid the world of religious bigotry and live up to our highest ideals. Finally, 60 years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” writer Paul Kix explores King’s profound discovery that “God’s companionship does not stop at the door of a jail cell,” and how this realization inspired the civil rights leader to march on even in his darkest hours.

The acclaimed New York Times columnist David Brooks has observed that the kind of religions that are able to “succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service” are usually “rigorous, arduous in practice, and definite” in their convictions. Such religions, I’ve found, are also full of brave souls who took great leaps of faith and changed the world. And now they’re beckoning us to follow.

OUR READERS RESPOND

FOR OUR January/February cover story (“Twitter and the Fight Over Free Speech”), author and researcher Lee McIntyre used the controversial reaction to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter to explore the question of whether speech can ever really be free. “The terms misinformation, disinformation, harmful, hate, dangerous are subjective in their meaning. If we shared values, it would be easy to agree on the limits of free speech,” reader Andy Frank wrote. And Jebediah Atkinson added, “Free speech has always been intended to mean that you could freely express your political, philosophical and religious opinions or ideas without government interference. Those constitutional protections are extended to public squares and communication platforms.”

The millions of people displaced by the war in Ukraine has become Europe’s largest movement of refugees since World War II. Reporter Kyle Dunphey wrote about the journey for one family to find a new life in the American West (“The Way Home”). Many readers, like Katie Boland, encouraged their Twitter followers to “take a few minutes to read this story about a family from Ukraine. It’s heartbreaking what they are going through.” Writer Genevieve Vahl took readers to the origins of political friction and violence: the decline of civics education and an understanding of American government (“Starting Line”). Justin Stapley, research fellow at Utah Valley University, shared the story on Twitter, saying, “The shift away from civics centered education has been

disastrous. We need to reorient our educational goals back towards graduating responsible and prepared citizens.” The Twitter account 50 x 2026, a national initiative to elevate education policy in every state, also shared the story and added, “Regardless of our political persuasions, we can all agree that civic literacy through comprehensive civics education is fundamental in ensuring our pluralistic democracy remains intact and continues to function despite our ideological differences.” Reader Steve Cates pointedly stated, “Ignorance is such a handicap! The September issue, The Fate of the Religious University, was featured at a summit hosted by the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C. The summit included the presidents of Notre Dame, Brigham Young University, Yeshiva University and other university presidents and thought leaders in higher education, including Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and Elder Clark Gilbert, commissioner of education for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “The crisis of our generation is a crisis of meaning,” said Rabbi Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University. “Our students are looking for meaning and you don’t have that often in a (broader) society where many have turned their back on these generations of tradition. What we’ve found is that our students are seeking meaning and purpose.”

CORRECTION: AN ARTICLE IN THE JANUARY/FEBRUARY ISSUE INCORRECTLY STATED THAT 4.5 BILLION MONTHLY VISITS TO MINDGEEK’S PORNOGRAPHIC WEBSITES IN 2020 WERE DOUBLE THOSE OF GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK COMBINED. IN 2020, GOOGLE’S MONTHLY VISITS WERE 92.5 BILLION AND FACEBOOK’S WERE 25.5 BILLION..

“Ignorance is such a handicap!”

In Cambodia, infant mortality is high, but students from Brigham Young University are saving infants’ lives by partnering with local doctors and Neonatal Rescue to deliver a low-cost ventilator. What began as a student project is now helping newborns breathe, and the spirit of service is at the heart of it all.

Learning by study, by faith, and by experience, we strive to be among the exceptional universities in the world and an essential university for the world.

HOLY WATER

PARYING FOR RAIN IN COLORADO’S SAN LUIS VALLEY

framed by rows of corn, carefully planted by hand, Devon Peña holds a devotional painting of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers. Peña believes that God lives all around us, especially in the soil where Peña resurrects century old corn variants from kernels he’s found in the dusty collections of neighbors.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

ELLIOT ROSS

AN ORPHANED RIGHT

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS A BEDROCK RIGHT. WHY IS IT GIVEN SECOND-CLASS STATUS?

BY KATRINA LANTOS SWETT

Freedom of religion, conscience and belief is, in my view, one of the most profound of all human rights that are sheltered and given form in our shared international architecture of rights. The blueprint for this soaring edifice of rights and liberties is found in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a remarkable document that has, over the past 74 years, attained the status and honor of other revered documents of freedom, including the Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Magna Carta.

Article 18 of the U.N. declaration lays out a capacious and inclusive understanding of religious freedom that equally protects the rights of traditional believers and atheists, alike. The drafters understood that one of the most important ways to uphold individual dignity is by allowing people to live their lives in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. So many precious liberties flow from this bedrock right, including freedom of speech, the press, of assembly and more. That’s why I have always been baffled at the near second-class status that religious freedom has had within the broader human rights community. A few years ago, the British All Party Parliamentary Group on International Religious Freedom issued a report titled “Article 18: An Orphaned Right.”

Why would this fundamental freedom be sidelined? And what are the implications for the broader human rights movement when this happens? There is no single answer to the first question. Perhaps it is because many voices in the human rights world are uncomfortable dealing with matters of faith. They feel more at ease focusing on goals that feel more relevant and concrete. Some have suggested that defending freedom of religion can lead to sticky situations in international affairs. This is particularly true when dealing with countries where religious belief is severely constrained by

ideology, like in China and North Korea, or where the majority faith does not permit or welcome religious pluralism, such as in Iran and Saudi Arabia. But advancing human rights is all about making abusive governments uncomfortable. If ever there was a cause that “speaks truth to power,” it is the cause of religious freedom.

As for the second question, the evidence is unequivocal. We know from research that a nation crushing the conscience rights of its people invariably denies them a whole host of other basic human rights. Conversely, societies that do a robust job of protecting conscience rights are more peaceful, more prosperous, more democratic, and women in such societies enjoy a higher socioeconomic status. It turns out that defending religious freedom is not just good for the soul, it is also good for the whole of society.

And yet we face the sad reality that roughly 75 percent of the world’s population live in countries that significantly restrict and repress freedom of religion. There are the usual suspects: China, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan. Perhaps even more alarming is countries that claim to be democracies, like India and Nigeria, have been recommended by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom for inclusion on the State Department’s list of “Countries of Particular Concern.”

The U.S. government has a range of tools to encourage countries to strengthen religious freedom protections. But unfortunately both Republican and Democratic administrations have been reluctant to fully deploy either their soft or hard power levers. I am optimistic this will change.

Earlier this year, the third annual International Religious Freedom Summit convened in Washington, D.C. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and USAID Administrator Samantha Power both underscored the link between foreign policy and religious freedom. Congressmen Mike McCaul, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Jim McGovern, a Democrat and co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, together spoke about their commitment to international religious freedom. As governments recognize that religious freedom is the proverbial canary in the coal mine when it comes to threats to our national security and global stability, they start to embed the defense of religious freedom more robustly into their foreign and defense policy strategies.

At the summit, one could sense the momentum and passion of a growing movement. More than 1,200 participants from dozens of countries and faith communities gathered to educate, advocate and stand in unity for each other. Networks were established, initiatives launched and bridges built. This noble cause — “religious freedom for everyone, everywhere, all the time” — is worthy of our most determined and faith-filled efforts. As the growing international religious freedom movement presses on, I hope and believe we will begin to see progress around the world.

KATRINA LANTOS SWETT IS PRESIDENT OF THE LANTOS FOUNDATION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND JUSTICE AND FORMER CHAIRWOMAN OF THE U.S. COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

ENTER THE FOREVER RENTERS

BUYING A HOME HAS NEVER FELT THIS OUT OF REACH

Owning a home has been central to the “American dream” ever since historian James Truslow Adams coined that phrase in 1931. But a convergence of seismic economic events and social upheaval in recent decades has changed young Americans’ relationship to this symbol of prosperity and lynchpin of family wealth. Many millennials are entering prime home buying age, but they are increasingly opting out or simply giving up. Who are these forever renters and why aren’t they buying homes?

24.7 PERCENT of millennials expect to rent perpetually. A 2022 study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that renters’ confidence in future homeownership is at an all-time low. Most respondents plan to continue renting, either because they prefer it or because they’re holding out hope that home prices will fall. From 2013 to 2022, the percentage of millennials expecting to rent for the rest of their lives nearly doubled from 13.3 percent.

THE NEW AMERICAN dream may not be built around settling down and finding a steady career job in an office or a factory. For today’s workforce, in an economy shaped by the flexibility of gig work and work-from-home opportunities, career advancement often comes by frequently changing jobs. Renting offers these upwardly mobile folks a new ideal to build their lives around: flexibility and freedom of choice.

BY MARC NIELSEN

HOME PRICES have ballooned 30 percent in the last decade, raising a significant obstacle for new potential homeowners. This increase is driven by factors like low housing inventory, the cost of building materials and high inflation. Prices have rapidly outpaced family budgets, as median income rose just 11 percent in that same time frame.

MILLENNIALS

ARE SADDLED with debt, which renters cite as a significant reason they can’t afford to buy a home. According to the Real Estate Witch Millennial Debt Survey completed in June 2022, three-fourths of millennials owe more than $100,000, most of it nonmortgage debt. They owe on things like credit cards, medical bills and student loans — including 30 percent of the $1.5 trillion in national student debt.

A NEW CLASS of wealthier renters was spawned by the proliferation of remote work since the pandemic. Many white-collar workers in industries like tech or finance from expensive markets like New York City or the Bay Area can now live anywhere without losing their big city salaries. The flexibility of renting seems to appeal to folks who are free to move across the country and relocate whenever they please.

RENTERS ARE still missing out on one of the keys to generating family wealth. The average net worth of a homeowner in 2019: $255,000. A renter? $6,300.

“A lot of American renters want to buy a home, but they’re stuck renting because it’s simply too expensive to break into the housing market. That’s especially true since they’re often competing against investors or other deep-pocketed individual buyers”

— REDFIN CHIEF ECONOMIST DARYL FAIRWEATHER

AN ALGORITHM is resetting the market. Rent-setting software from RealPage allows landlords, especially large ones with multiple properties, to accurately set rental rates as high as the market will bear. These algorithms squeeze rents harder than humans typically would, driving the value of rentals and properties higher. Per ProPublica, a neighborhood in Seattle saw properties using the software raise rent faster than others. This can contribute to rising prices across the tough housing market. $255,000 $6,300 Average net worth in 2019: Homeowner Renter

THE AIRBNB effect is subtly reshuffling the deck. Higher rental rates are motivating landlords and homesellers to move their properties from long-term renting and sale markets to the short-term rental market, reducing the housing supply for young families. A study found that a 1 percent increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018 percent and 0.026 percent increase in rent and house prices, respectively. These are small amounts on the surface but, when combined with other factors, can add up quickly.

ENTER THE NEW corporate landlords. Wall Street investment firms have billions set aside to invest in buying and building homes, drawn by rising prices and profit potential from higher rents and short-term rentals. While Wall Street owns just 3 percent of single-family rental homes right now, MetLife Investment Management predicts that these investors will own 40 percent of the market by 2030.

Single family homes owned by Wall Street:

SENDING PARENTS HOME

EXPLORING PAID FAMILY LEAVE, A POPULAR POLICY THAT CAN’T SEEM TO PASS CONGRESS

PAID FAMILY LEAVE is a political mystery. Most voters support a policy that would allow any employee time away from work to bond with a newborn child or care for a sick relative — as is largely the case throughout the industrialized world and in states like California. But the closest it’s ever come to being written into federal law was as part of the original Build Back Better Act championed by the Biden administration — where it became so contentious, it ultimately led to that bill’s demise. Here are two arguments detailing the pros and cons.

LET STATES COMPETE > < FOCUS ON FARM WORKERS

HIDDEN COSTS > < A FAIR SHAKE

THE GREAT IMMIGRATION challenge of our era is not at the borders but inside them. It’s not who gets in, but what happens once they’re here. As Congress remains gridlocked, why not let states decide how the foreign-born get to belong? Consider education, abortion, health care, gun control and marijuana. States blue and red are going their own way on all these issues, often in conflict with one another and sometimes with Washington.

SOME ARGUE THAT paid family leave is necessary to bring United States into alignment with other industrialized counbut that would simply mimic a policy that has already backfired elsewhere.

In 2018, Cato Institute analyst Vanessa Brown Calder reviewed the literature on the impact of paid leave. Trade-offs for these policies vary depending on specific cases, but they include discrimination against workers of childbearing age and perhaps in favor of older workers, resulting in fewer leadership roles, higher unemployment and lesser pay for women.

It is already happening, but the question is how much power over immigration will eventually devolve to the states. They can create a fragmented landscape of places that welcome immigrants and others that close their doors. And within that patchwork, we might eventually end up with a federal policy that works.

Advocates often argue that paid family leave will reduce gender inequality in the workplace. A recent study from Denmark suggests that this is hardly the case. The researchers found that while pay grew at roughly the same rates for men and women before they had kids, mothers saw their earnings rapidly reduced by nearly 30 percent on average, compared to the trajectory they were on before. It also found that women may become less likely to work, and if still employed, work fewer hours.

States differ in the access to health care and safety-net programs they make available to immigrants. Dreamers — unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children — are welcomed into public higher education in some states but shunned in others. Some make it easier for professionals trained abroad to get licenses; others make it harder. As states diverge further, immigrants would choose to settle in welcoming places and avoid unfriendly places.

Besides, the absence of a federal mandate doesn’t mean that American women don’t get paid leave. As Brown Calder writes, “Over the past 50 years, the private sector has substantially increased paid leave offerings; this suggests the private market responds to employee demands.”

According to her analysis, between 45 and 63 percent of workers reported they already had access to paid leave.

The United States can have only one form of citizenship, but states can compete over access to the world’s best brains, to the people who will care for aging boomers and to young adults with years ahead of them to pay taxes and bear children. Americans and their marketplaces have a way of sorting these things out.

ADAPTED FROM AN OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BY ROBERTO A. SURO, A PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AND PUBLIC POLICY AT USC ANNENBERG, SPECIALIZING IN IMMIGRATION AND THE LATINO POPULATION.

The women who don’t receive this benefit are mostly less-skilled workers with part-time and hourly jobs employed at small businesses. Mandates will likely harm them. Here’s why: Paid leave is costly, and when firms provide this benefit they change the composition of their employees’ total compensation by reducing the value of workers’ take-home pay to offset the cost. While some prefer this mix in their pay packages, others don’t. In particular, mandated leave would be a hard trade-off for many lower-paid women who would prefer as much take-home pay as possible.

NATIONAL PAID LEAVE represents a real step forward in gender equality, especially for working women of color, like myself. Though it has its limitations, it would address gender wage gaps that potentially occur at two key moments in life — childbearing and caregiving. Many men and women do each of these things with grace. It’s natural to expect that many of us would experience one or both at some point in our lives, and we may already know someone who does.

THE GREAT IMMIGRATION challenge of our era is not at the borders but inside them. It’s not who gets in, but what happens once they’re here. As Congress remains gridlocked, why not let states decide how the foreign-born get to belong? Consider education, abortion, health care, gun control and marijuana. States blue and red are going their own way on all these issues, often in conflict with one another and sometimes with Washington.

It is already happening, but the question is how much power over immigration will eventually devolve to the states. They can create a fragmented landscape of places that welcome immigrants and others that close their doors. And within that patchwork, we might eventually end up with a federal policy that works.

Research suggests that racial and gender discrimination, harassment in the workplace and long gaps from work because of family caregiving obligations have all contributed to a gender wage gap that women still feel today. Federal paid leave wouldn’t solve all these problems, but it would meaningfully chip away at them.

States differ in the access to health care and safety-net programs they make available to immigrants. Dreamers — unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children — are welcomed into public higher education in some states but shunned in others. Some make it easier for professionals trained abroad to get licenses; others make it harder. As states diverge further, immigrants would choose to settle in welcoming places and avoid unfriendly places.

When women do not have paid time off after having a baby, nearly 30 percent drop out of the workforce within the first year. However, in states that have implemented paid leave, women are less likely to leave their jobs in the first year and are more likely to see an increase in earnings. Paid family leave helps fathers as well. Having men at home gives them an important time to bond with their child, while equalizing household work and allowing women to continue to thrive in the workforce.

The United States can have only one form of citizenship, but states can compete over access to the world’s best brains, to the people who will care for aging boomers and to young adults with years ahead of them to pay taxes and bear children. Americans and their marketplaces have a way of sorting these things out.

ADAPTED FROM AN OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BY ROBERTO A. SURO, A PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AND PUBLIC POLICY AT USC ANNENBERG, SPECIALIZING IN IMMIGRATION AND THE LATINO POPULATION.

And then there’s caregiving. Nearly 50 million unpaid caregivers live in the U.S., and most are women. As a doctor working in the hospital, I frequently encounter caregivers who are vital in shaping a patient’s support system once they’re released from our care. Nevertheless, only 13 percent of workers in the U.S. have access to employer-based paid family leave. It’s a policy that would help protect caregivers from choosing between attending to a loved one and maintaining job security.

Paid leave would begin to level the playing field for women across the span of their careers. Let’s undo the false choice between family life and financial stability and start recognizing the importance of both.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR FOR REASON, FROM WHICH THIS ARTICLE WAS ADAPTED, AND A SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW AT THE MERCATUS CENTER AT GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY.

SPLIT DECISION

THE IMPACT OF DIVORCE IS REAL — HOW DO WE HELP CHILDREN?

BY ALEXANDRA RAIN

Divorce isn’t easy. But I didn’t know any better, at age nine, when my mom broke the news that she and my father were no longer going to be together. I was relieved. I naively interpreted the announcement as an end to their fighting and stress. What came instead was a messy separation, complicated by addiction, spanning over 11 years.

It’s estimated that there is one divorce in America every 33 seconds. Snuggle up on your couch to watch your favorite romantic film — which almost always ends with a version of happily ever after — and know that once the credits finish, an estimated 194 divorces have occurred.

Those who have longer marriages these days are the products of the most-divorced generation in America. To be fair, adults are currently waiting longer to get married than they have in generations past, so there’s something to say about marriage and divorce rates declining together. But just how much does divorce impact children? Or to be more precise: How much does it impact the adults these children will become?

Almost 30 years of research indicates that children living with their married parents show increased physical, emotional and academic health, and that in most cases, divorce causes some level of trauma for children. The same goes for parents, who

often see divorce as a devastating failure, and carry guilt about the way it impacts their children.

But in examining other studies of divorce and its impacts, it seems that children who aren’t exposed to any hostility during a divorce are able to process the end of their parents’ marriage in a healthy manner — and are able to go on and have lasting marriages for themselves. Researchers Christy Kleinsorge and Lynne M. Covitz found, “the

WHEN A MARRIAGE ENDS IN DIVORCE THE BIGGEST NEGATIVE IMPACT ISN’T NECESSARILY THE DIVORCE ITSELF, BUT HOW THE DIVORCE IS CARRIED OUT.

fact that a child experiences the divorce of (their) parents does not in and of itself doom that child to significant adjustment problems.” When a marriage ends in divorce studies have found the biggest negative impact isn’t always the divorce itself, but how the divorce is carried out and how the parents treat each other — and their children — once the separation is final.

MARRIAGES NOT WORKING out is nothing new. The earliest known divorce laws were written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia 2038-1990 B.C. By the French Revolution, new divorce laws allowed several grounds to separate a union, including adultery, violence, desertion and mutual consent. When European colonists arrived to the rocky shores of the East Coast, they brought divorce with them. As divorce was a legal process that was recognized or not on a state-by-state basis, certain states quickly became destinations for couples looking to dissolve their unions. First, there was Connecticut. Then Illinois and Ohio. As the U.S. expanded westward, divorce destinations moved westward, too. By the second half of the 19th century, the Utah and Nevada territories became a hub for those looking to become divorcées, with lawyers from eastern cities like New York and Chicago establishing offices in the frontier for divorces only.

In the late 1960s, as Elvis sang “Heartbreak Hotel,” then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law. This evolved into the story of divorce as we know it today. Sleeping on the couch while the other sleeps on the bed. Marriage counseling. Separation. “This isn’t going to work anymore, please just sign the papers.” And with it, divorce rates

soared. By 1980, there was a historic spike in divorces in the U.S., with one divorce occuring for every two marriages between 1970 and 1980.

Despite the legal acceptance of divorce and its prevalence, a cultural distaste for ending marriages prevailed. During the peak of divorce rates, the term “broken home” was replaced by the more-palatable nomenclature “single-parent home.” And then came the backlash. The rhetoric became: “If you get divorced, your kids will be damaged.” As the millennial generation entered the world after 1981, research papers about the negative impacts of divorce on children and families showed that children of divorce had lower measures of “academic success, conduct, psychological adjustment, self-concept and social relations.”

But at the turn of the millennium, research began to show that it wasn’t always divorce that was causing negative impacts on children, but the circumstances that occurred around the process.

PSYCHOLOGIST AND FAMILY therapist Constance Ahrons introduced the idea of a “good divorce,” to combat the stigmatization and shame of separation. In the first pages of her book, “The Good Divorce” Ahrons makes a case for co-parenting, “In a good divorce, a family with children remains a family. … The parents — as they did when they were married — continue to be responsible for the emotional, economic, and physical needs of their children.”

According to this logic, parents should maintain healthy relationships and continue the healthy structures they’ve (hopefully) built with their kids prior to the divorce, such as bedtime routines and other practices kids rely on, like predictability, residential stability and minimal exposure to conflict. When done successfully, children can thrive.

“It’s in the best interest of the child to have positive relationships with both parents,” Leslie Silva, a family and matrimonial lawyer, says. And that understanding seems to be widely coming into practice for families experiencing divorce. “For the most

part, we are seeing a trend where folks are saying, ‘I’m prepared to co-parent, I want to co-parent positively, and I want what’s best for my child.’”

That doesn’t mean that divorce isn’t tough on kids. Just like divorce can create a negative experience (as can an unhealthy marriage) so can co-parenting, if it isn’t done right. “Negative co-parenting behaviors have been shown to be harmful to children’s development,” writes researcher Catherine K. Buckley. Children who are at risk for high levels of ongoing parental conflict will likely have various emotional and behavioral problems. In one of her final interviews prior to her death, Ahron clarified

THE FACT THAT CHILDREN EXPERIENCE THE DIVORCE OF THEIR PARENTS DOES NOT DOOM THOSE CHILDREN.

to Slate magazine, “I would never want to minimize how difficult it is for children to go through (the) transition (of divorce), but it doesn’t mean they are damaged.”

Recent research shows that divorce does not necessarily cause behavior problems in children, nor does it manifest adjustment issues in academic performance, self-esteem, expression of emotions, well-being and social relations. Those impacts, cited in the 2017 research paper Children of Divorce, are correlated to the other circumstances divorce can expose family members to, such as changes in routine, emotional dysregulation and high conflict.

Research published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family found behavioral problems were not limited to children of divorce; high levels of conflict in those who stay together can be just as damaging. Researchers Donna Ruane Morrison and Mary Jo Coiro concluded that “separation

and divorce are associated with increases in behavior problems in children, regardless of the level of conflict between parents. However, in marriages that do not break up, high levels of marital conflict are associated with even greater increases in children’s behavior problems.” Reasonably then, ending high-conflict marriages can have positive effects.

“I was relieved, to be completely honest, when my mom finally broke the news to us,” Asia Bown, a 23-year-old writer in Salt Lake City, says. Bown was 13 when her parent’s decision to divorce was delivered. “She reinforced (to us kids) that the divorce was absolutely not our fault and had nothing to do with us, which in my mind was obvious. Even though I was 13, I knew not to feel responsible.”

In the cases where parental divorce provides relief to the family, it makes sense to consider divorce a solution, rather than a threat to interpersonal adjustment. Researcher Paul Amato found the overall psychological health of adults with and without divorced parents overlapped 90 percent. In other words, 10 percent of adults with divorced parents demonstrated negative impacts and poor mental health. And 42 percent of children whose parents divorced and who are now adults surpassed the average psychological health of adults with married parents.

Divorce served as a solution in my life, rather than shattering the ideals of a happy marriage. I never fantasized about a “Parent Trap” triangulation plot, but the same can’t be said for children who are caught in the middle of conflict and a custody battle. There is the dividing of time (“whose house are you at this holiday?”), the duffle bag that gets shuffled around on weekends, and, well, the witness to an end of something that wasn’t supposed to end. But the split decision, which seemed to threaten an egregious impact may only be just that: a split moment of distress in time. More so than the sustaining of a marriage or the decision to divorce, the greatest threat to a child’s well-being is what the relationships around them show them.

THE ONES WHO WATCH

THE TREES OF THE WEST CAN TELL US ABOUT OUR PAST. THEY CAN ALSO TRANSFORM OUR FUTURE

BY NATALIA GALICZA

If Methuselah was capable of memory, the nearly 5,000-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine would recount a different world. The tree first sprouted from arid ground at the tail end of the Stone Age. Few visitors posed any threat to the tree or its neighbors. Civilizations had just begun to transition from tools made of rock to those of metal. Sawmills and cranes and the felled forests to follow were millennia away. Methuselah had started its life at an opportune time — and from a fortunate vantage point. With a view almost 10,000 feet above what would someday be called the Owens Valley — one of the eponymous basins that form the Basin and Range region — the tree would bear witness to the waves of humans who’d eventually crash into the country’s intermountain terrain, and all the ways the West would irrevocably change as a result.

The name Methuselah is biblical, taken from the son of Enoch who lived the

longest life of anyone depicted in the Old Testament. But even at the described 969 years, that storied Methuselah couldn’t come close to outliving this tree. Great Basin bristlecone pines are the oldest living

ONE IN SIX TREES NATIVE TO THE CONTIGUOUS UNITED STATES FACES EXTINCTION. THIS LEVEL OF THREAT HAS BEEN LONG OVERLOOKED.

organisms on Earth. They are only found in the most parched pockets of California, Nevada and Utah, born of conditions considered uninhabitable for most other species. Even when faced with abysmal amounts of water and carbon dioxide, the minimalists

thrive. Harsh winds hurtling at 100 miles per hour shape them into gnarled knots of sun-bleached bark that could be mistaken for driftwood were they not still attached to their roots. That dense exterior doubles as a coat of armor resistant to pests and rot. Against almost all odds, they live.

Bristlecones are in good company in the West. OldList, a database kept by the nonprofit organization Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research, records a total of 65 ancient trees in the western United States. Many, like Methuselah, have stood for thousands of years. Sentries in the soil. Yet, none are immortal. Methuselah is currently listed as the oldest living tree, but up until some 60 years ago, it ranked second. In 1964, a geologist cut down Prometheus (another bristlecone, this one named for the Titan responsible for sharing fire with humans in Greek mythology) with permission from the United States Forest Service. Human error seems the most lethal force

in the world.

Humanity’s relationship with trees is complicated. There’s reverence, with names inspired by holy texts and powerful gods. But there’s also negligence and plant blindness — a term coined by two botanists about 20 years ago that speaks to how desensitized humans have become toward members of the plant kingdom. What they are, what they’re called, what their purpose is, how they got here. But last August, the scientific journal Plant People Planet published the first comprehensive study of the country’s native trees. The results showed as many as one in six trees native to the contiguous United States face extinction. And that level of threat has been long overlooked.

Of the 881 known tree species native to the contiguous United States, nine are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act. But this new research has found that more than 100 native species are currently threatened. While the scientific community is coming to terms with what humanity stands to lose in the years ahead, this is still news to many. “The world is going to greatly change over the next 100 years,” says Wesley Knapp, a botanist and co-author of the study. “It’s probably important we get reconnected to nature because we’re not apart from it. We are a part of it. And until we connect to that and we realize our decisions do make an impact in the world, we’re going to have a hard time.”

A closer look at what native trees can do for the West is long overdue. Though we might not like everything that we see.

THERE WAS ONCE no choice but to care about trees. Before Europeans colonized the country and before American settlers pushed westward, trees dotted prairies and climbed mountainous faces in forests dense enough to put what we see today to shame. Spruce, pine, aspen, willow, juniper. Elder women of the Ute Tribe in the Great Basin would ride up mountains on horseback to spend days peeling bark off of ponderosa pine trees. It could be pounded or boiled for its sap, which helped preserve meat

and treat infections. It could be made into tea. It could be julienned, plucked, frayed or chopped into a textile used to weave baskets or build cradleboards for parents to carry their babies in. These trees were a cornerstone of life, and are remembered by the name of Utah’s Uinta National Forest, derived from the Ute word for pine.

Ute people seldom killed trees, only taking the amount of wood they needed. You can still find many pines with centuries-old scars standing in western mountain ranges today. Some marks stretch eight feet high; unmistakable reminders of how possible it is to take from the Earth without taking it apart.

In 1806, two years into Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s journey as the first white explorers to cross the Continental Di-

THERE WAS ONCE NO CHOICE BUT TO CARE ABOUT TREES.

vide and behold the West, the explorers saw some of these trees for themselves. Clark wrote in his journal that the team had traveled three miles up a mountain along Idaho’s Clearwater River on horseback. Up to 12 feet of snow obscured their paths. There was no map for colonizers to follow — they were the ones tasked with creating one. The only waymarks to help Clark navigate were “the trees which had been peeled” by Indigenous people. The pines became their guides. Word of the region’s natural beauty and promise traveled quickly after Lewis and Clark returned to the East. It launched a new American dream: go west.

Sentiments changed once settlers actually went. The influx of people and resulting government policies devastated the Indigenous communities who maintained the forests and the forests themselves. John Muir, a famed naturalist who helped found the National Park System and the Sierra Club,

wrote of that change in an 1897 issue of The Atlantic. The trees he had once described as “lordly monarchs proclaiming the gospel of beauty” were clear-cut, burnt, and largely reduced to ash. Settlers saw western trees as resources and tools — a way to build communities and create livelihoods. But they also saw them as disposable. Muir wrote: “... when the steel axe of the white man rang out in the startled air their doom was sealed. Every tree heard the bodeful sound, and pillars of smoke gave the sign in the sky.”

Forest fires took the sky hostage. The thick haze of smoke erased the moon, stars and mountains from view. Black stumps lined the lowlands. Yet despite how disastrous the damage had been, it also proved hopeful. People began to realize the role native trees play in the West’s environment. Because once so many had perished, farmers noticed how the mountain streams dried up in summer and thrashed out of control in spring. It became clear that the native trees knew best; they effectively filtered and conserved water by preventing runoff. It made sense. This was their home first. They knew how to maintain it.

Realizations that resulted from years of pillaged forests paved the way for monumental leaps in environmental preservation. About 20 years after Muir wrote of all that deforestation, the federal government founded the National Park Service. In 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act became law and ensured the government would play a larger role in preventing abuse of the nation’s natural resources. The common belief went from assuming that trees were expendable to understanding that they are a finite resource. One that humanity cannot afford to lose.

NATIVE TREES ARE necessary to unlock otherwise inaccessible knowledge — tools to revisit the past and predict the future.

The tissue that lies just beneath a tree’s bark grows thicker by a single ring each year, save for rare instances when environmental stressors become so severe they

stall growth altogether. Those rings store data, keeping the score of a year gone by. The same way forensic anthropologists can study human skeletal remains to decipher a specimen’s age, sex or ancestry, dendrologists study a tree’s rings to understand climate. Core samples of native trees can tell a researcher what the weather was like at each year of a tree’s life. Wider rings are won in warm, wet years while thinner rings result from the cold and dry.

These findings help piece together past climate patterns, and may predict future ones, too. Maybe even the ones we’ll see take hold of the Colorado River. As the 40 million people dependent on the river still have no end in sight of the drought that’s already plagued the basin for 22 years, trees offer a look into what might be next. Samples of more than 60 Great Basin bristlecone pines show that the current megadrought mimics one that took place more than 1,800 years ago. It impacted the river for 10 to 24 consecutive years at a time, pausing only for short periods before it returned in full swing. The pattern implies that communities ought to prepare for worse than what’s currently anticipated. Megadroughts may have existed for millennia in the West, but the presence of harmful greenhouse gasses and record-breaking rising temperatures could make future droughts unprecedented in scale. Core samples act as warnings, maps for what’s to come, but not unless we preserve them. And there are a few hurdles currently standing in the way.

“What we’re facing in the mountainous regions of the West are long-term drought and other effects of climate change coupled with invasive plants and insect species and diseases,” says Abby Meyer, executive director of Botanic Gardens Conservation International’s United States branch. “It’s a multifactored situation.” Meyer also co-authored the same study as Knapp. She’s found that threats to native trees are spreading rapidly in the West — primarily pests and diseases — exacerbated by climate change, which induces new conditions within environments that lead to

more favorable circumstances for them.

Not all trees are created equal. Many, like the Russian olive and the Tamarisk tree, can contribute to droughts by sucking up water from soil or watersheds to cool themselves down. Yet many others actually reduce desertification. They prevent the ground from desiccating under harsh, dry conditions by shading it with their canopies; they moderate water intake; some are even thought to attract rainfall. Juniper trees siphon off water access to a single branch while in a drought, sacrificing a part of themselves in order to survive. Douglas fir can withstand drought and wind erosion with extensive

WE ARE LUCKY ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT AN ENVIRONMENT WITH NO SHORTAGE OF NATIVE TREES LOOKS LIKE. WHAT WE’RE STILL LEARNING IS HOW IT COULD FEEL TO LIVE WITHOUT THEM.

root systems, which reach deep into the earth for water most others can’t access and anchors the tree firmly in place.

This ability to ease the blow of unfavorable conditions is where the distinction between native and non-native or invasive trees matters. Those that exist because of the environments they grow in have a better chance of maintaining a symbiotic relationship with all elements present in that landscape. Even fire. The Congressional Research Service found that in 2021, the West experienced more than 20,000 wildfires across six million acres of land. Rather than pulverize that land into mounds of ash, forests are still standing. Survival mechanisms achieved by native trees over time help them live even after burning. Ponderosa pines have thick bark that fits

tightly like puzzle pieces around the tree’s core. Lodgepole pines carry cones sealed shut in a thick resin that only melts and releases seeds in the event of a fire — replenishing the terrain with new growth. We are lucky enough to know what an environment with no shortage of these native trees looks like. What we’re still learning is how it could feel to live without them.

Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada and Montana have all seen a decline in the population of quaking aspen, a tree that survives by springing up clones of itself across massive root systems. A grove in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest is one of the largest living things on the planet, with nearly 50,000 sprouts spanning 100 acres. Called “Pando,” which means “I spread” in Latin, scientists and journalists can’t determine for certain what is causing the grove’s decline. Colorado alone has experienced a 13 percent loss of the species in less than 20 years, with older aspens falling victim to drought and higher temperatures, while young aspens compete for resources and are faced with overgrazing by large mammals.

Bark beetles are another culprit. The pests have long held claim to forests of the West, responsible for the death of countless trees across millions of acres in recent decades. Bark beetles have done enough damage in Montana that the trees now expel — rather than consume — 20 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. Warmer temperatures give the beetles a higher chance of survival and encourage reproduction, which have made recent outbreaks more severe. Those outbreaks impact more species than just the aspen. Whitebark pine trees are a meal of choice for mountain pine beetles, the most destructive of all bark beetles in the West. They’ve chipped away at enough whitebark pines — which ordinarily thrive in California, Nevada and Wyoming through harsh enough conditions to rival the resolve of bristlecones — to dwindle the population by more than 50 percent. It’s a keystone species, meaning an entire ecosystem depends on the trees’

THE COMMON BELIEF WENT FROM ASSUMING THAT TREES WERE EXPENDABLE TO UNDERSTANDING THAT THEY ARE A FINITE RESOURCE. ONE THAT HUMANITY CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE.

survival. It’s now listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Threats to the West’s native trees are also threats to its economy. A loss of trees can mean erosion, depleted soil, intensified droughts, landslides and even increased building costs due to material demand — all coming with big price tags. When it comes to pollution, the decrease in air quality that coincides with a loss of forest — as shown by Montana’s barren mountains — threaten people’s ability to make a living. Industries that depend on workers’ access to the outdoors are compromised. That’s a big sector to risk. Landscapers, farmers, construction workers, miners, ski patrollers — those who spend the majority of their workday outdoors — account for more than four percent of the nation’s workforce. With exposure to enough carbon dioxide, among other pollutants, any number of those laborers could wind up facing serious health concerns and diseases that affect the respiratory, cardiovascular, immunological, hematological, neurological and reproductive systems. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an international nonprofit focused on environmental advocacy, found in 2020 that hospitalizations and premature deaths due to environmental pollution come at a high cost: $3.8 trillion annually, along with the pricelessness of human life.

Losing native trees also means toying with the future of American agriculture. The West takes the lead in producing the country’s agricultural exports, with California alone accounting for more than 11 percent of food grown nationwide. Droughts have made dust storms more intense and more common over the past couple decades, leading to soil depletion and erosion. These intense winds uproot growing crops, send pesticides and other chemicals airborne and cut precious labor hours by obscuring visibility. More than 200,000 square miles of American land is vulnerable to soil erosion in the current climate than in the past. The majority of those square miles fall in the West. And the majority of trees built to withstand that erosion are native trees

familiar with the climate, like Douglas fir, with their anchors of roots. They’re a tried and true solution. Just as the shelterbelt of 100 million trees planted across the Great Plains acted as a windbreak to quell the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, more native trees in the West could shield one of its most vital industries from collapsing almost a century later. If we only let them.

WHAT WE KNOW of the next century’s effect on trees in the West — and across the country — is uncertain. But efforts that arose out of the 1800s prove that it’s possible to rescue native species from the brink. It’s rare to hear of such success stories. But when they materialize, they change everything. Michael Eason led a team of botanists out across Big Bend National Park in Texas last spring in search of a ghost. The lateleaf oak tree hadn’t been seen in 10 years. It was presumed extinct by the time Eason went looking. But, to his own amazement, he found it. The tree stood 30 feet tall with thick, fuzzy leaves and wildfire scars along its trunk. His discovery became the only living specimen of the rarest oak species in the country. “I personally think that we owe it to the generations that are going to follow us that we conserve the habitat that we have,” Eason says. As associate director of plant conservation and research at the San Antonio Botanical Garden, that goal of preservation guides his daily work. “When you recognize that we’re losing those things, it’s like you’re losing a part of humanity.”

The lateleaf, like most oak trees, can’t be banked in botanical gardens since its acorns cannot withstand the preservation process. That makes discoveries like Eason’s paramount to the possibility of conserving this family of native trees. And while the lateleaf Eason found is native to Texas, it’s become a point of inspiration for trees in the western United States. Of all the native families of trees in the West facing decline, Meyer says oak trees are faring among the worst with disease and insects. But if even the rarest oak on earth can rise from the ranks of the dead, it’s safe to believe others can, too.

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WORKIN’ MAN BLUES

HOW THE DEMOCRATS LOST THE WHITE WORKING CLASS

BY MYA JARADAT

He wasn’t a Southerner. But my paternal grandfather was a yellow dog Democrat. Born and raised on a farm in Hardin County — a small, tidy corner of northwest Ohio — Grandpa Nelson spent his life in overalls, out in the fields. He served in the Army during World War II (nothing too exciting — he was a cook), came home, got married, had four kids and went to the Methodist church in town every Sunday. And, as long as he was physically able to vote, he threw his lot in with the Democratic candidates.

In that respect, my grandfather was an oddity. Ohio has been called the ultimate swing state; it also has a gift for being a national bellwether — other than Joe Biden, no presidential candidate has taken the country without taking Ohio since 1960. As has gone Ohio in 11 out of the past 12 elections, so has gone the country. The state went blue when Clinton won in 1992 and 1996, but then went red for Bush in the two elections that followed. And then it went blue again for both of Obama’s terms.

But Ohio broke ranks in 2020 — when the nation handed Biden the win, the state went the other way. Hardin County exemplified the change. It went red in 2016 and

then even redder in 2020; Donald Trump got 75 percent of the vote there in the last presidential election, trouncing Biden by a 52-point margin.

There’s an easy explanation — Hardin is about as working class as you get. While 90 percent of the county has graduated from

THE SHIFT OF THE WORKING CLASS TOWARD POPULISM IS BECOMING A GLOBAL PHENOMENON AND WILL MEAN DIFFERENT THINGS IN DIFFERENT PLACES.

high school, only 16 percent have a bachelor’s degree. Manufacturing is the area’s single largest employer.

Hardin County is also very white: 95.8 percent of Hardin’s population, according to census data.

And this is exactly the group that the Democrats are increasingly out of step with — the white working-class voters

who were once a reliable part of the party’s base. Why did they migrate to the GOP? And what does the white working class’ political realignment mean for the future of both parties?

THOUGH THIS SHIFT might be most apparent in the last couple of election cycles — manifesting in the rise of Trump and populists like J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who won a U.S. Senate seat in November — the white working class’ transition away from the Democratic Party began decades ago, says Michael Pierce, a historian at the University of Arkansas and the author of the book “Striking with the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party.”

It started with economic policies: The 1970s and ’80s saw a group of centrists break from mainstream Democratic thought by embracing supply side economics, aka Reaganomics, says Pierce.

This group of Democrats found success “in the ’70s and ’80s embracing what had traditionally been Republican ideals,” says Pierce, such as “the way you get the country prosperous is by helping businesses, you cut taxes, you deregulate, you promote free trade.” Bill Clinton, who Ohioans voted for,

“is the perfect example,” says Pierce. “Him and his closest allies would say, ‘We’re social liberals but we’re economic conservatives.’”

Though there were differences between how much centrist Democrats embraced Reaganomics and neoliberalism, by and large, they moved the needle of the party’s economic policies to the right. “Once they did that, economically, there is no difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party,” Pierce says. “Clinton was closer to Reagan than he was to the Democratic Party of Roosevelt.”

There is still much working-class resentment around the North American Free

Trade Agreement, which Clinton signed despite wide opposition from labor unions.

“Protectionist views” — not racial resentment — accelerated the white working class migration to the GOP in the wake of NAFTA, according to a working paper by Jiwon Choi, a doctoral student at Princeton.

But Trump’s role in this migration is unclear.

While the GOP has positioned itself under Trump as the party of the working class — a narrative parroted by the mainstream media, Pierce says, particularly since 2016 — an analysis of survey data from 1980 to the present, conducted by Duke

University’s Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu of Vanderbilt University, shows that white working class voters have been leaving the Democratic Party for decades.

“The share of Republicans who are white and working class has increased slightly in the past few election cycles, but not under Trump. The biggest single-year increase in the white working class’ share of GOP voters came in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the party’s nominee,” Carnes and Lupu wrote in The Washington Post in April 2021. The proportion of white working-class Americans voting Republican hasn’t changed substantially since then. “Lower-income White voters without college degrees aren’t a majority of Republican voters, and they aren’t increasing as a share of GOP voters.”

Pierce echoes this, saying that the wealthiest Americans still tend to vote Republican while the poorest continue to go Democrat.

But Hardin County, in particular, and Ohio more generally, tell a different story, suggesting that Trump’s inroads with the white working class are real.

WITH SIMILAR ECONOMIC stances, something else had to distinguish the two parties from one another. From the 1990s on, party politics have “become overwhelmingly defined by cultural issues,” says Pierce, who adds this “alienates people, especially people who feel powerless like working-class voters.”

The Democratic Party has taken up the mantle of speaking out about racism, but analysts say that this has come at the expense of addressing the issues that many Americans are most concerned about.

“When you see progressives say things like, ‘It’s all about race,’ they effectively deny that something economically significant has also happened. And that’s sort of like saying (to the white working class) ‘The economic pain that you’re feeling isn’t real,’” says Lisa Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Progressives “are calling people racist by definition.”

THE WHITE WORKING CLASS’ TRANSITION AWAY FROM THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BEGAN IN THE 1970S AND ’80S WHEN CENTRISTS BROKE FROM MAINSTREAM DEMOCRATIC THOUGHT BY EMBRACING REAGANOMICS.

The Democrats’ intense focus on race also “runs the risk of completely obliterating the role of human agency,” she adds. Pruitt, who grew up working class herself, says that while she benefited from being white, she also faced professional challenges due to her gender and her socioeconomic background.

“If I had not worked, and worked and worked and worked, I would not be here,” Pruitt says. “I think there’s a fundamental desire — I think it’s just an aspect of the American dream that most people are raised with — to believe that we have some control over our destiny.”

Indeed, minorities sometimes balk about the victimhood that is part and parcel of the progressives’ structural racism narrative. I’ve experienced this at rallies like the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority where Black attendees told me that they had left the Democrats and gone Republican because the GOP offered a more hopeful message. Social programs entrap and breed dependency, one such Black Republican told me. “We need to return to a Black Wall Street mindset.”

The GOP offers that.

Though Black and Latino voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic, that could change. “I’ve long argued in my writing that white working class voters should be viewed as the gateway drug for minority voters,” says Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Washington Post columnist, who adds that the Democrats’ messaging problem stems from their policy problem.

Many immigrants, Olsen says, “see themselves as agents not victims. They’re here in the country because they see this country as a place where they can exercise their agency. They may have issues with the country but they don’t think that it’s systematically biased against them and they prioritize a number of things that Republicans talk about.”

In other words, the Republicans continue to offer the hope of the American dream — whether or not it’s attainable.

During his State of the Union address

in February, Biden positioned himself as someone who understands working class pain. “So many of you have felt like you’ve just simply been forgotten,” he said, his voice softening. “And you wonder whether a path even exists anymore for you and your children to get ahead without having to move away. I get it.”

Biden was attempting to bridge the cultural gap that opened up between Democrats and the white working class decades ago, but it’s going to be a challenge to woo the white working class without “tacking to the center on culture and immigration,” says Olsen, who added that the strategy might reflect less of an attempt to bring the whole demographic onboard and more of an attempt to pick up a few points in the Midwest.

The shift of the working class toward populism is becoming a global phenomenon and will mean different things in different places. In some European countries, they’re moving toward politicians who are Trump-like in their messaging but also want to expand spending. This reflects white working class voters’ love of both “opportunity and protection,” says Olsen.

But, in a two party system, we’ve yet to see a political party that has successfully straddled that fence. For the Democratic Party to do so — that is, for the Democratic Party to shift toward the center — they’d have to take on the more far left elements in their own party. And that’s a battle the Democrats aren’t willing to fight. In the meantime, the Republican Party is locked into a war for its soul, as well. Will the Mitt Romney-Liz Cheney Republicans win out? Or will it be MAGA?

“People choose extremes when they feel they have no choice. What we saw in the Great Depression is people chose extremes. That’s when you saw fascism come to power,” says Olsen. “Because the governing institutions and people have refused to respond reasonably to the pressures of the last 20 years. I think the only question now is: Will the populists be reasonable when they come to power?”

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A GUIDE CARRIES

THE CHILD OF HAITIAN MIGRANTS THROUGH THE DARIÉN GAP, FEBRUARY 2023.

Before migrants embark on what may be the most dangerous 60 miles in the world, a small parish in Colombia prepares them for the journey

BY KYLE DUNPHEY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SPENSER HEAPS

and as the roosters crow and his small coastal community stirs to life, Hernan Dario Loaiza Aguirre becomes the father of Necoclí. First, he puts on his alb, a flowing, white undergarment, before tying a cincture around his waist. Then with some help from the nuns, he slides on his final vestment, a piercing green robe. At 6:55 a.m., the church bells ring, and Father Hernan takes a seat before his congregation. Towering behind the 62-year-old priest is Jesus

nailed to a cross, lit up by red LED lights.

“We should be nice, and courteous and show mercy to the migrants here,” he tells those gathered inside Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish. This is Father Hernan’s second mass in Necoclí, Colombia, a new assignment that will test him, perhaps like no other in his decadeslong tenure with the Catholic Church.

A family of Venezuelans quietly slips in during a prayer and finds an empty row

of pews in the back. They are easy to spot, their tattered T-shirts and worn, dusty pants in stark contrast with the locals dressed in their Sunday best. Nervous. Sad. Anxious. They’re grown accustomed to being told they don’t belong.

They arrived in Necoclí about a week ago. Soon, they’ll be hiking to Panama via the Darién Gap, the one asphalt-less blank in the Pan-American Highway — the grand highway that stretches from the southern

A FAMILY OF VENEZUELAN MIGRANTS

JOINS MASS AT OUR LADY OF MOUNT CARMEL PARISH IN NECOCLÍ, ANTIOQUIA, COLOMBIA.

In Necoclí, the American dream that once seemed possible for many, festers. One parish stands between those dreamers and irrevocable destruction.

tip of South America to Alaska — that’s only accessible by foot. For years, the Darién was considered so dangerous that only the most desperate attempted to cross, most trying to make it to the U.S. border and request asylum. In the last decade, it’s become a migrant highway, starting with unrest in Venezuela and Haiti and worsened by economic turmoil caused by Covid-19. Just a decade ago, Panama reported 3,078 arrivals from the Darién in a year. By 2022, a quarter of a million people were braving the same jungle, 16 percent of them children. They come from all over the world, in a dogged pursuit of the American dream.

The Venezuelan family now taking in Father Hernan’s sermon can only pray they will not count among the unknown

number who will never make it out, suffering health complications, swept away by rivers or fatally injured from a fall. Something as benign as a sprained ankle can leave a person stranded, and they’ll succumb to starvation or disease. Night raids from criminal groups — one migrant called them “purges” — happen with such frequency that families will often sleep in separate tents so their children are left with one surviving parent. The United Nations confirmed the deaths of 36 migrants in 2022, but admits the data “presents only a small fraction of the true number of lives lost.” Guides claim the annual death toll in the Darién is over 1,000. Those who survive are often traumatized by the desperation, violence and sexual assault. The latter is so common that women routinely stain their hygiene products and undergarments with tomato sauce to dissuade predators.

As recently as February, about 5,000 migrants were living in Necoclí, the gateway to the Darién and the seductive promises of opportunity beyond. From there, boats take them across the Gulf of Urabá to Capurganá, a small, remote tourist village and the last semblance of civilization before the long march through the jungle. The ride costs money that many migrants don’t have. So they remain in Necoclí and work odd jobs, saving a few dollars each day in hopes to one day buy a ticket.

Many of those who remain camp out on the beach in squalid conditions — families of 10 living in cheap, four-person tents, while others simply sleep on the ground. Among the beach’s inhabitants on a recent afternoon was Manuel, a blind man abandoned by everyone in his group except his brother. Carlos

FATHER HERNAN DARIO LOAIZA AGUIRRE TOOK THE HELM OF OUR LADY OF MOUNT CARMEL LATE LAST YEAR.

THE NECOCLÍ MIGRANT CAMP.

WHILE MIGRANTS AWAIT PASSAGE INTO THE DARIÉN GAP, THE SISTERS FROM OUR LADY OF MOUNT CARMEL OFFER MORAL AND SPIRITUAL SUPPORT — AND PROVIDE AS MUCH FOOD, CLOTHING AND MEDICAL SUPPLIES AS THE PARISH’S SMALL BUDGET ALLOWS.

and Scarlett, a college-educated husband and wife, traveling with their 19-year-old pregnant daughter, had been stuck in Necoclí for months. Ester, a Haitian mother, feared the lump in her chest could be cancer. Sofia, an 11-year-old Venezuelan traveling with her family, dreamt “of being president when I grow up, so I can help all the poor people.”

In Necoclí, the American dream that once seemed possible for many festers. Many women resort to prostitution. Children go hungry. Families lose hope. In many cases, one parish stands between these migrants and irrevocable destruction.

and eyes intense. Father Hernan has seen the region’s violence and chaos firsthand.

He was a 26-year-old seminary student when, in the late 1980s, Marxist guerrillas kidnapped him and his peers, holding them in a small village in the mountains of northern Colombia. “You are the opium of the people, the scourge of the community,” they shouted at the group. “You are in charge of keeping people asleep, so that people don’t wake up.” They held the students hostage overnight, and questioned them. Father Hernan didn’t waver. “We are the ones who wake up the people and prepare them to claim their rights,” he told them. “We work to humanize people.” By 11 a.m. the following day, after a ransom was paid, the students were let go.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel is quiet, unless you ask the right questions. Solemn, unless he sees the right people. His face is weathered

It was an experience that would shape the young Hernan and embolden his beliefs. “As a church, our service is for the people,” he says now. “All people.”

His new assignment will put that philosophy to the test. A few months ago, he

replaced Father Henry Lopera, who, in 2020, pivoted the parish’s efforts to meet the global migration crisis, directing nuns to frequent the migrant camps to administer medical needs, help with housing and employment and serve hot meals as frequently as the church’s coffers would allow. Now it’s up to Father Hernan to navigate the local government and international organizations; act as mediator between local businesses, drug cartels and migrants; and take the reins of a church that runs on a shoestring budget. It’s a daunting task, with a responsibility that carries immense weight. If the church ceased its efforts today, families would go hungry tomorrow.

Even when migrants do get through the

Darién, their hardship is far from over. Recently, months after passing through Necoclí, an Ecuadorian family of three attempted to cross the Rio Grande, near Laredo, Texas. The U.S. was finally in reach. But as they crossed the river, the child started to sink.

“They didn’t know how to swim,” Father Hernan says, disheartened, like he watched the scene unfold himself. The father tried to rescue his son, handing him to the mother. She and the child lived. The father drowned. “They were being charged $28,000 by smugglers in Mexico. That’s enough to start a business and buy property in Colombia. But their connection to the American dream is such that they can’t be convinced.”

CHILDREN LINE UP FOR SANDWICHES AND HOT CHOCOLATE IN THE MIGRANT CAMP AT NECOCLÍ.

MIGRANTS MAY SPEND WEEKS OR MONTHS, AND SOMETIMES EVEN LONGER, WAITING IN CAMPS IN NECOCLÍ, UNTIL THEY CAN AFFORD TRAVEL INTO THE DARIÉN.

on a humid, overcast morning, the crowd descending on the docks of Necoclí has grown to over 400. Spanish, French, Creole, Chinese and Pashto from the few Afghans in the crowd blend together in a chaotic mix of languages and cultures. It’s a scene that plays out every day, and a few locals watch from across the street with indifference. Down the street, reggaeton music is still playing as a group of partygoers stumble home.

Some migrants wear nice backpacks, their tents and sleeping mats rigged to the outside, while others lug cheap, blue bags with the U.N. Refugee Agency logo plastered on the front. The majority carry their belongings in black trash bags duct taped at the top to keep water out. Vendors, many

of them migrants themselves trying to save up money for the boat ride, shuffle through the crowd selling last minute supplies — a waterproof phone case, machetes, rubber boots, tents and ponchos. Other migrants loiter, looking for a last-minute opportunity to sneak aboard.

What’s most jarring are the dozens, likely hundreds, of kids. There are infants wrapped up in blankets, unable to walk, sobbing toddlers and adolescents wiping sleep from their eyes. There are mothers breastfeeding, and fathers yelling out instructions to their sons. A young Haitian boy excitedly pets every stray dog that wanders his way.

A photographer and I had spent several days in Necoclí at this point, and the majority of the migrants we met knew what they’re getting themselves into. But there are hundreds of new faces in the crowd

today, some who arrived that morning. Dozens of people are wearing cheap flip flops or knockoff crocs that won’t last the first mile of the trail. I wonder how many people truly know what dangers lie ahead, and I can’t shake the same, grim thought: Who here will die in the jungle?

after a teeth-rattling ride across the Gulf of Urabá, the boat drops us at Capurganá. The tiny village is sandwiched between the dramatic mountains of the Darién and the turquoise waters of the Colombian Caribbean. Our guide meets us at the dock, his small Bose speaker blasting reggaeton and deep cuts from Bob Marley. He’s really a

human smuggler, but they prefer to be called “guides.” Tall and lanky with an unkempt afro and eyes constantly at half mast, he goes by Rambo, “because (of) what I can do in the mountains,” he says. A former soldier in the Colombian army, Rambo spent a few years scraping together a living by taking tourists on guided boat trips. Now he guides a different type of trip.

Today, we’re tagging along with 17 Haitian migrants, five of them children. As a guide gives the group instructions, a Colombian military helicopter buzzes overhead, a machine gunner hanging over the side watching our group. It’s a reminder that the area is still considered a conflict zone. Just two years ago, 22 helicopters and 500 Colombian soldiers descended on the jungle near Capurgana to arrest notorious paramilitary leader Dairo Antonio Úsuga, or Otoniel, who now sits in an American prison cell.

His cartel, the Clan Del Gulfo, still controls the Colombian routes into the Darién.

For years, the Darién was considered so dangerous that only the most desperate attempted to cross. In the last decade, it’s become a migrant highway.

It’s one of the most powerful and violent groups in the country, yet for the migrants, it offers a relative level of safety through its vast network of guides and camps. The cartel members we’re with today pay the helicopter no mind.

Soon we’re on a rocky path winding through the dusty slums of Capurganá and into the jungle. There are a lot of smiles at first. Most of the migrants have been anticipating this moment for months, scraping funds together with what little work they could find and sleeping in the miserable camp in Necoclí. Now, on the trail, America has never felt so close. But reality soon sets in.

Within 20 minutes, we’ve walked through two rivers, and by the end of the day, I’ll lose count. Within two miles we reach the first hill of many, so steep in sections that I find myself crawling on all fours. The trail is rutted from the thousands of migrants who came before us, creating a channel that comes to my waist. Just a few miles in, the tattered remnants of shoes litter the

MIGRANTS ARRIVE IN CAPURGANÁ AFTER CROSSING FROM NECOCLÍ.

trail. “That’s how it starts,” Rambo tells me, the “it” referring to death. “They lose their shoes, then they injure their feet.”

Rambo pushes us to the top in front of the group, giving him a few, uninterrupted minutes to smoke a joint in peace. He looks off into the jungle, and his smile fades. “There’s a Venezuelan mother and her kids who have been lost for five days in Panama,” he says. “Where are the helicopters and search parties for her?”

I ask how many times he’s hiked into the Darién. “My whole life,” he says. “I’ve lost count.” He looks down the hill, and barks at the migrants: “It’s just one more steep climb, that’s it.”

“One more steep climb.” What a lie. By the end of the day, we climbed well over 1,000 vertical feet. And over the next week, as the migrants go deeper into the jungle, more perils await. The mountains grow taller, the rivers deeper, the rain unrelenting.

The group moves slowly. Hours pass and the sun sinks below the treeline, casting a golden glow through the jungle in a beautiful yet stark reminder that light is fading fast. Soon, we’re on the final descent to camp, and at 5:45, the rudimentary infrastructure of a camp emerges, hidden in a lush, green valley.

It’s a surreal example of the cartel’s impressive organization in the Darién. The camp is roughly the size of a football field, covered almost entirely by a tarp shelter providing relief from the rain. For $1, you can purchase two hours of Wi-Fi. For $10, you can buy a massive plate of rice, beans and beef cooked over a fire. Gas generators hum, powering overhead lights and a refrigerator that sells bottled water, Gatorade and beer. In one corner, a group of cartel soldiers huddle around a large, flatscreen TV watching soccer.

In the Darién Gap, something as benign as a sprained ankle can leave a person stranded, and they’ll succumb to starvation or disease.

A YOUNG HAITIAN MIGRANT RESTS ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE JOURNEY THROUGH THE DARIÉN.

Everything is damp, and the bugs are relentless. I see a few centipedes that rival my middle finger in length, and later that night, a guide brushes a spider off my back. I don’t bother asking how big it was.

It’s 7 p.m. when I see lights appear on a mountain near camp. And in about 20 minutes, Marcos Perez, a Venezuelan, and his group stroll in. Perez and his wife and their two-year-old son, Isbel, are tired from the hike but happy to finally be on the move. They set up their tent, and Perez takes his boots off, hangs his shirt on a clothesline and lets out a deep sigh.

“Tomorrow is going to be very hard,” says Roberto Gomez, a fellow Venezuelan. He sets his hammock up next to the family. “Very, very hard.”

We talk. Gomez wants to get a commercial driver’s license when he makes it to the U.S. “Cars, box (trucks), even bikes,” he says in broken English. He’s traveling alone, but has a young daughter in Caracas that he hopes to bring to the U.S. someday. And Perez, a mechanic, wants to continue working on cars. At first, he had his doubts about the journey. But his cousin in New York City reassures him.

“He insists this is the best decision for my kid. And I know it,” he tells me, smiling as Isbel runs in a figure eight, circling Gomez’s hammock and the family’s tent.

“He is really into kicking balls. And he runs around like crazy,” says Perez. I ask, maybe he’ll be a soccer player in the U.S.?

“Nah. Fútbol Americano,” Gomez says with a sheepish grin and a wink.

“He’s going to be a field goal kicker, that way he can do both,” Perez replies. They both smile. Soon, the generators turn off, and the lights go dark. A few kids resist sleep and cry, while a handful of migrants stand around a small campfire all night, talking in hushed tones about the journey ahead. By 5 a.m. the generators sputter to life and the camp is awake. Thirty minutes later, a guide turns on a portable speaker, and reggaeton echoes through the camp.

Perez takes the tent down, and hastily packs the backpacks. The family skips breakfast — for most migrants, dinner is the only meal in the Darién. By 5:50 a.m., a guide paces through the tents yelling “Vámanos.”

I find Perez and Gomez before they

leave, shuffling anxiously, making sure every pocket is zipped and every strap fastened. Isbel is rubbing his eyes with one hand, and squeezing his mother’s arm with the other. “Good luck,” I tell them in Spanish. “Thank you,” they reply in English. In a few hours, the guides will hand them off to Indigenous groups at the Panamanian border, who will guide them through 60 more miles of hell. At 6 a.m., the migrants line up single file and enter the thick, verdant canopy that swallows them in seconds, like they were never there.

with the din of church bells still ringing in our ears, signaling an end to mass and the start of the day, Father Hernan had told me about the anxiety he feels for those who embark on that perilous journey. “We are talking about people exposed to the unimaginable dangers,” he says. The obstacles standing between the migrants and refuge in the U.S. seem insurmountable. He was referring to Venezuelan families in general, though he could have been talking about Roberto Gomez, or about Marcos Perez and his wife and little Isbel, or any one of the thousands who pass through town each year. Feeling cautiously hopeful despite those insurmountable obstacles, I stayed in touch with many of the migrants I met. One Haitian woman in our group through the jungle texted me from Panama, from the other side of the Darién, and described the rest of her trek. “A horror movie,” she said, “In the jungle we saw corpses everywhere … in the mountains, in the rivers. People who apparently couldn’t walk anymore and sat down to wait for death.”

Weeks later, I got a surprise WhatsApp message from Gomez. He was in Honduras, in good health and spirits, his dreams of becoming a truck driver in the U.S. getting closer by the day. What about Marcos Perez? What about Isbel, so destined to be a field goal kicker? “I separated from them in the jungle,” Gomez typed back. “I don’t know where they are or how they are.”

Seconds later, I messaged Perez. I still haven’t heard back.

FROM THE ASHES

WHEN A VOLCANIC ERUPTION SET A TSUNAMI IN MOTION LAST YEAR, THOUSANDS OF TONGANS TAPPED THE ISLAND’S DEEP RESERVES OF FAITH

BY ETHAN BAUER ILLUSTRATION BY DANLIN ZHANG

SISTER SESILIA ALAMOTI

Tonga is one of the most believing nations in the world. It’s also one of the most disaster prone.

arrived in the Tongan capital of Nuku’alofa on the morning of January 15, 2022. She’d come to prepare for the upcoming diocesan synod — a meeting where she and her fellow Marist Missionary Sisters, together with priests and other interested Catholics, could explore the future of their church. The hopeful gathering took place in an ominous shadow. Three weeks earlier, on December 20, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano had begun belching plumes visible from the shoreline of Nuku’alofa, about 40 miles away. It had been declared dormant by January 11, but on the 14th, it resumed with newfound fury, spewing ash and water vapor 12 miles into the sky and prompting Tongan authorities to declare a tsunami warning. By early the next day, though, the warning had been lifted, and when the meeting ended around 3:30 p.m., Sister Alamoti and a fellow nun decided to have lunch at a fancy spot along the northern shoreline of Tongatapu, the island home to 70 percent of Tonga’s population. Their food hadn’t yet arrived when a thunderous blast swept through the cafe, like a gust of wind across their feet. A second, larger blast followed, colliding with bodies and bones at a subatomic level and shattering windows across the nation. The volcano had erupted again, triggering, at last, the tsunami. Not that Sister Alamoti knew. Still sipping her beverage, she adjusted her rectangular transition lenses to get a better look. “The sea is strange,” she told her companion. “It seems to be — rising.” Glancing up and down the street, she could make out the faint, undeniable outlines of people running.

Lisala Folau, a fisherman, was among those running. Not on Tongatapu, but about four miles away, on a smaller outpost called

Atatā. He’d been headed to the bush to start cooking a Sunday feast when his family informed him of the unusual tides. At 57, with leather-like wrinkles in his knuckles and a pronounced limp from years of manual labor (and soccer), he couldn’t afford to wait and see. His family started moving, migrating from their home on the western side of the island, about a football field away from the shoreline, to higher ground in the east. But the water had already begun to overtake the land, so Folau, his brother and his nephew decided to climb the web-like branches of a tree and take shelter in the viny canopy. When the worst of it seemed to have passed, they climbed back down and plunged into the knee-deep tide. That, it turned out, was the prelude. The big wave was coming.

Neither Folau nor Sister Alamoti knew the extent of what had just been set in motion by a fusion of chilled seawater mixing suddenly with pressurized magma. The resulting eruption was later declared the most powerful in modern history, outmatching the force of the strongest nuclear bomb ever tested. And the tsunami it unleashed licked its way up shorelines across Tonga’s 36 inhabited islands carried away homes and livelihoods in its wake.

Folau and Sister Alamoti, like thousands of Tongans across the archipelago, knew that their faith could sustain them. Faith in God — and faith in each other. Like Lisala Folau’s faith that he’d see his brother again, even as that brother yelled obscenity-laden warnings at him from atop an elevated plastic water tank as the big wave approached. His words were too late. The 20-foot surge swept Folau off his feet and into the mercy of a fast-moving slurry of brown water and debris. He tumbled through the surf,

willing himself to the surface for air, bobbing up and down seven times in all. With the sky darkening, rock fragments falling and his family watching, Folau disappeared beneath the waves.

ON SUNDAYS IN Tonga, local radio stations hum Christian hymns, and streets empty of traffic aside from the Tongan faithful, wearing ta’ovalas — traditional, woven skirts — as they shuffle past shuttered restaurants and storefronts en route to their congregations. In some cases, they stand outside and listen to angelic harmonies an hour before services are scheduled to begin. Latter-day Saints are especially prominent; church estimates claim more than 60 percent of Tongans as members — the highest per-capita population of any country in the world by a whopping 20 percentage points. Their presence stretches back to 1891, while Wesleyan Christianity became established following the baptism of King George Tupou I in 1831. Whether Latter-day Saint, Wesleyan, Catholic or members of the Free Church of Tonga — a local Wesleyan offshoot — upwards of 99 percent of Tongans subscribe to some form of Christianity, making Tonga one of the most believing nations in the world.

It’s also one of the most disaster prone. Tonga was rated third-worst in the world, trailing only Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, in the 2021 World Risk Index. Throughout its history, it has suffered from eruptions (a big one called Kuwae in 1452 supposedly caused “climatic disturbances” worldwide), earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and cyclones. Tongatapu is especially exposed since it’s almost completely flat. Yet in spite of that instability, the Tupou dynasty continues to rule the Kingdom of Tonga, with the original’s 63-year-old great-great grandson, George Tupou VI, sitting atop the throne since March 2012.

Perhaps this combination of vulnerability and stability explains why much of the United States paid little attention to the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption and its aftermath. The severing of the nation’s undersea fiber-optic cable also didn’t help, forcing Tonga into complete isolation from the outside world.

It’s very rare, explains University of California, Santa Cruz volcanologist Ricky Garza-Giron, for a volcanic eruption to spew its contents more than 12 miles high. The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption, however, exceeded 35 miles, reaching the mesosphere and marking “the first time,” Garza-Giron says, “with modern geophysical instrumentation like satellite imagery, that we see a plume like this.” And the shockwaves created by the blast registered not just in the eardrums of Tongans, but on barometers throughout the planet. The scientific understanding of the eruption provided some clarity to the outside world, but it said nothing about the life-or-death situation on the ground. Shrouded by the eruption’s vale, Folau, for one, figured his eighth gasp for air would be his last.

Somehow, in the adrenaline rush of that moment, he grabbed hold of a small log big enough to keep him afloat. He called out EVEN A YEAR LATER, TONGANS WERE LEFT WITH REMINDERS OF THE TSUNAMI’S DESTRUCTIVE PATH, INCLUDING FALLEN TREES AND MASSIVE GAPS IN THE JUNGLE CANOPY.

into the darkening sky and heard a lone woman’s voice answer. He located her and saw she’d managed to climb atop a floating board. They tried to keep each other calm, shrieking across the waves: “Are you OK? Are you OK?” During their third exchange, they lost contact. Folau was alone beneath an ashen sky. He knew the tides; he’d spent his career turning to them for sustenance by harvesting fish, octopus, clams — whatever he could either feed to his family or sell at the market. That offered some hope. He was also a man with grated knees, little mobility and no way to call for help, adrift in an angry sea.

SISTER ALAMOTI KNOWS something of divine intervention. Born to a “staunch Catholic” mother in an outlying Tongan island, she moved to the Ma’ufanga neighborhood of Tongatapu at seven years old and attended a school operated by Marist Missionary Sisters. These women came from New Zealand and Australia and America, leaving their families behind in service to a higher power. Sister Alamoti found that inspiring, and her parents bolstered the message at home. Particularly her mother, who carried a tattered rosary in her purse to whip out at a moment’s notice. In Tonga, you never know when you’ll need a prayer.

Lisala Folau and Sister Alamoti, like thousands of Tongans across the archipelago, knew that their faith could sustain them.

As she approached her 21st birthday, the only life Sister Alamoti wanted was one of faith and devotion. She entered the convent shortly thereafter, spending a year in Tongatapu before completing training in New Zealand in the early 1980s. Her obedience to her order took her all over the world, starting with Fiji, the Philippines, then back to Tonga. She wanted to go to Madagascar, got assigned to Algeria instead, then couldn’t go there either because of friction between Christian missionaries and the country’s Muslim majority. Instead she was sent to Senegal, then New Zealand, then Vanuatu, and finally Tonga once more in 2014. “Auntie,” her niece often tells her, “where in the world haven’t you been?”

During her travels, she met many people of many creeds — including Catholics with distinct traditions and methods of worship. Tongans are not more faithful than any of them, she believes. But the Tongan faith is strong enough, she also believes, to be its own miracle of sorts. When disaster arrives, as it often does in Tonga, the key to the people’s resilience is as simple as her mother’s rugged rosary: “Their faith,” Sister Alamoti says. “Their trust in God.” It’s a deceptively simple answer. Surviving destruction requires supplies and funds and manpower and popular will. But to Sister Alamoti and many Tongans, it also requires surrender. An acknowledgement of how small we are; a brief, fleeting snapshot of the discrepancy of scale between us and everything beyond us; and a willingness to leap into that abyss anyway.

Folau took that leap when he accepted that, at best, rescuers would find him in the morning. He knew they wouldn’t be out

looking for him at night. The risks posed by reefs and debris were too great. So he did the only thing he could think to do. Like Sister Alamoti, he embraced surrender. And when he ran out of prayers to offer, he turned to a Wesleyan hymn: “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” In the delirium and uncertainty of the black water, still clinging to his log, Folau sang to himself until the words and the waves seemed to blend together.

WHEN SHE SAW people running, Sister Alamoti herself rushed to her residency beside the Cathedral of St. Mary, an imposing pair of twin graystone towers and a cone-shaped green roof. The plume of vapor had turned black. The cathedral’s neighborhood, right along the shoreline, had been deserted. She found a fellow member of her order tending their garden. “Sister, go inside,” Sister Alamoti urged. “There is a tsunami.”

Sister Alamoti sprinted up the stairs to make a better assessment. The water was already swamping the city. Across the street, in an asphalt lot normally home to a secondhand clothing market, imperiled boats took the place of cars, with trash swirling throughout as though atop an airport baggage belt. Sister Alamoti suggested the sisters move farther inland, toward the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua, where the order maintained a second residence. Her superior wouldn’t allow it. This residence was home to older sisters, one of whom was bedridden while another suffered from dementia. At first Sister Alamoti, as any devout member of a religious order would, accepted her superior’s judgment. But when she returned to the front of their living quarters, she saw the water beginning

to cross the road, heading right for their front door.

She and two other sisters decided to head toward the basilica, opting to drive up Queen Salōte — a back road — rather than the usual seafront strip, already submerged. The rockfall began as they reached their destination, prompting a new group to return to the cathedral for the stragglers. The ashfall started during their return, blinding their sedan on a street suddenly emptied — except one vehicle that appeared right in front of them. They used the lights from that vehicle to find their way, prompting the driver to declare a minor miracle upon returning.

As the night unfolded, Sister Alamoti leaned once more on the power of surrender. She would pray the rosary every two hours, she informed the gathering of some 15 people at their basilica-adjacent home. Anyone who wanted to could join. Most eventually fell asleep, but not her. She kept praying until 6 a.m. In between, she didn’t have much to talk about with those who remained awake. Everyone, it seemed, had succumbed to their own version of shock, which took different forms. For her, it meant thanking God for keeping her alive amid whatever was happening outside.

The next morning, the sisters and their guests woke to empty stomachs. “When we realized we were still alive,” Sister Alamoti says, “our hunger came back.” They found some bread around the house, and managed to secure porridge and bottles of water in Sister Alamoti’s hometown of Ma’ufanga. They stayed together, huddled in that house, for five long days. They didn’t want anyone checking on them. “We were much

better off than most people,” she says. Indeed, still adrift, Folau couldn’t even consider food. Shortly after sunrise broke on Sunday, he found himself run aground on Tufaka Island, an uninhabited outpost about a third of the way between Atatā and Tongatapu. It’s rocky, and he couldn’t really go onto the land. He also couldn’t alert a yellow police boat as it sped past toward what had been his home, leaving him bobbing in its wake.

For the next few hours, a different boat — red with twin outboard engines — made five or six trips between Tongatapu and Atatā, again within eyesight and earshot; again too far away and loud to see him. He knew those boats would be carrying his family and the rest of his village to safety, which offered some comfort — and new resolve. Knowing the tides as he did, he recognized low tide was approaching and figured a particular current might be able to carry him to the mainland. His family, meanwhile, badgered officials with questions about his whereabouts. About search parties and rescue missions. By then, his name was all over the radio airwaves — the only communications technology still working. He was presumed dead.

BY 6 P.M., Folau had ridden a new flotation

device — a torso-sized slab of plywood — to another small island, Polo’a, more than halfway to the shoreline of Tongatapu. He yelled for help, knowing the area was a popular clamming spot. No one answered. But, once more, he felt invigorated by his progress and decided the time was right for a final push, hoping to reach solid land before nightfall.

When he drifted into the rocky beach of the Sopu neighborhood around 9 p.m., he mustered all the strength he had left to say a prayer. Through the ashen fog, he also managed to spot a house in the distance. His legs were in no shape to get him there. He decided to crawl.

On his way, he found a sturdy branch that helped him get back onto his feet. Once more upright, he limped along a battered shoreline road. No one was home at the house, nor at a nearby Ministry of Fisheries office. He spotted a lone car, but it was driving in the wrong direction and couldn’t see him through the still-heavy ashfall; luckily the next car he spotted was headed his way. When Folau told his rescuers his name, they recognized him immediately. “They’re looking for you,” he was told.

They offered him a ride to his sister’s house, less than a mile away. Upon arrival, the driver screamed toward the two-story

THE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DESTROYED INFRASTRUCTURE ALL OVER TONGA, INCLUDING PUBLIC BUILDINGS AND PRIVATE DWELLINGS.

home: “Hello! We have the missing person.” No one called back. He tried again, still without luck. Finally, he used Folau’s name. The lights flickered on, and eyes poked out from behind the curtains. The front door opened.

In Tongatapu, funerals are very public occasions. Grieving families hang black sheets trimmed with purple outside their homes, alerting the neighborhood to their loss. Sometimes they parade through the streets on foot, the island’s traffic brought to a standstill by their processions. And they bury their loved ones in elaborate, colorful graves nestled right into their neighborhoods, right beside their homes. They’ll often erect a printed billboard to place atop the tombstone, featuring the deceased’s face. Funerals also require, by social obligation, a feast. Cows and pigs are slaughtered, butchered, roasted and served, alongside baked cassava and purple sweet potatoes and, perhaps, a kava bowl. In short, Tongan funerals are labor-intensive community events. They require planning and resources and input.

That process was already underway when Folau walked inside. Not only among members of his family, but members of the Atatā community. They’d all assembled to mourn him, and to decide what to do next. After 30 hours at the mercy of the tides, the man presumed dead had walked into preparations for his own funeral.

BEFORE THE MASS commemorating the one-year anniversary of the eruption begins, a video montage trots along on a projection screen near the altar. Few in the packed Cathedral of St. Mary appear to pay the images of destruction and mayhem

The 20-foot surge swept Folau off his feet and into the mercy of a fast-moving slurry of brown water and debris. The eruption was later declared the most powerful in modern history, outmatching the force of the strongest nuclear bomb ever tested.

much attention, opting instead for either quiet contemplation or Sunday morning chatter as pigeons coo in the rafters and barefoot children dart in and out of the main aisle. Until a few minutes past 10 in the morning, when solemn bells toll and a procession of more than a dozen priests, deacons and altar boys chugs along through the haze of humidity and incense. A choir directed by a sweaty, baton-wielding man in a gold tie belts traditional-sounding hymns backed by brass accompaniment. And at the front of the church, co-celebrants place three wreaths beneath the altar, commemorating the victims lost.

Remarkably, given the gravity of the eruption and tsunami, only four people across Tonga died. But the physical carnage still reveals itself in sheets of scrap metal wrapped around trunks of coconut palms in the western part of Tongatapu, or in the mangled, overgrown automobiles carried into forest clearings by the waves now rusting away in the tropical sun. To eulogize the lives lost and the destruction still clinging to the periphery of everyday existence, the pulpit belongs to Sister Alamoti.

Her speech, largely in Tongan with a few snippets in English, touches first on memorializing. On remembering. “Tonga was thrust into complete darkness,” she says. “Not only was there a physical darkness; power was also cut off, and our underwater communications cable destroyed, isolating Tonga from the rest of the world.”

Speaking beneath the outstretched arms of Christ, who hangs from the far wall on a giant crucifix, the question of why such a thing would happen here hardly needed to be spoken. “A lot of natural disasters are what we make ourselves,” she told

me later. “Look at global warming.” And though this particular disaster was not climate change-related, in her eyes, it still fits into a pattern. “A lot of countries in the world — especially first-world countries — seem to be showing off their might, their ammunition,” she tells the crowd in Tongan. She asks the congregation to pray that those countries might spend less on bullets and more on disaster prevention research; on childhood cancer treatments; on using the gifts and talents of the Lord to solve ailments, rather than exacerbate them. And more than anything, she tells the crowd, today is a day to embrace hope. To remember that even in the worst of times, small miracles abound. “We gather here today to offer God our prayers of thanksgiving. We thank him for protecting Tonga,” she concludes in English. “We have realized the immensity of what took place on the fateful day, but God has proven He is more powerful.”

Lisala Folau couldn’t argue. With every church on the island marking the date in their own ways, he spent the anniversary in Atatā Si’i, a new settlement in the western part of Tongatapu, where many of his former neighbors have been relocated into newly constructed homes. A year from his brush with death, he still returns to the sea to provide for his family. He still looks out toward his former home, where the scars of the tsunami remain visible in missing segments of canopy. And he still thinks about those harrowing 30 hours, though never for too long; he, like so many others, has to swallow his feelings whole. With few mental health resources available, the only option is to move on.

He’s started constructing a new home beside his sister’s, using money sent by

his son, a migrant fruit picker in Australia. He’d just begun pouring the foundation a few days before the celebration in Atatā’si, which didn’t mention or include him in any special way. That was fine with him. His story has already become a local legend, a sort of modern folklore. A local news segment on Pasifika TV a few nights earlier highlighted a radio program where families from all over the island called in to share their own stories of triumph and heroism. The segment ended with an observation shared by Folau and his family: “Today, after sharing their experiences,” the anchor said, “they can only say, ‘Thank you, Lord, for saving us.’”

LISALA FOLAU WAS MISSING FOR 30 HOURS, MOST OF THAT TIME ADRIFT AT SEA AND PRESUMED DEAD.

GHOFRAN AWAD, 8, AND SHAY COHEN, A VOLUNTEER DRIVER FOR “ROAD TO RECOVERY,” AN ISRAELI NONPROFIT.

BY MYA JARADAT

GR ACE ON WHEELS

IN WAR-TORN ISRAEL, VOLUNTEER DRIVERS SEE PAST ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES TO DELIVER PALESTINIAN CHILDREN TO THE HEALTH CARE THEY NEED

PHOTOGRAPHY B Y DANIEL ROLLIDER

ON A RECENT

thursday afternoon in a suburb of Tel Aviv, a black Kia pulls up to an apartment building next to a hospital. From the driver’s side emerges a Jewish Israeli named Shay Cohen, who knocks on one of the apartment doors. Cohen doesn’t speak Arabic, but he does his best to greet Ghofran, an eight-year-old Palestinian, as she dashes toward the small car. Her mother, Mona, trails behind, hair covered by a hijab. It’d be easy to mistake the kid wiggling into the Kia’s back seat for a healthy child — the quickness of her movement, the ready smile — but Ghofran has SCID, or severe combined immunodeficiency. And at Sheba hospital, she receives the treatment she can’t in the West Bank, where she was born.

That Ghofran and her mother are even here — in Tel Aviv, chauffeured by a Jewish Israeli, no less — is its own kind of miracle. Palestinians and Israelis have been at each other’s throats, via either in direct war or uneasy stalemates, for more than 75 years. The conflict, which centers in part on dueling claims to just whose Holy Land this is, has left Palestinians ghettoized in some of the region’s most desolate pockets — and many Israelis feeling distrustful. Violence between the factions is a regular occurrence. But thanks to Cohen and the approximately 2,000 volunteers who spend their spare time driving Palestinians to and from hospitals throughout the region,

patients like Ghofran receive lifesaving medical care.

Ghofran was a healthy baby, Mona recalls, until, at four months old, a mouth infection wouldn’t go away. Mona had already lost her first daughter to severe combined immunodeficiency at just six months old; a blood test confirmed the mother’s worst fears — Ghofran, too, had this rare genetic disorder. The quest to save her second daughter’s life began. The road led to Israel. After receiving permits from a special unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Ghofran and Mona were allowed to enter in 2015. Ghofran has since received various treatments, including a bone marrow transplant. For the last 18 months, the two have lived at Sheba hospital. Today, Cohen will drive the mother and daughter back to the West Bank, where they will spend the weekend with family.

Because Jewish Israeli volunteers like Cohen can’t take the patients door-to-door, they either pick them up or drop them off at military checkpoints that are near the Green Line, the armistice demarcation that separates Israel from the occupied Palestinian Territories. In the West Bank, the Palestinian drivers take patients from their homes to the checkpoint.

The drivers, for the most part, are motivated by Jewish and Muslim values. This is particularly true for the Palestinian

GHOFRAN WITH HER MOTHER, MONA AWAD, IN THE APARTMENT WHERE THEY RESIDE NEAR A HOSPITAL IN A TEL AVIV SUBURB.

THIS

SIMPLE ACT OF CLIMBING INTO THE CAR WITH SOMEONE FROM THE “OTHER SIDE” AFTER DECADES OF VIOLENCE IS A HUGE ACT OF FAITH FOR ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS ALIKE

volunteers in the West Bank who take patients from their homes to the checkpoint through a program called Wheels of Hope. When I accompanied one such driver, a medallion that read, in Arabic, mashallah, praise God, swayed from his rearview mirror. Asked if his volunteerism reflected a nationalistic commitment to the Palestinian people, the driver said no. He drives, instead, for “the people, for humanity.”

That the organizations — as well as other initiatives like it — reflect both Jewish and Muslim beliefs and help volunteers live out those values is something that funders are keenly aware of.

The men and women behind the wheel “talk about creating islands of peace in their cars,” says Kenneth Bob, a board member of Project Rozana, which provides funding to both Wheels of Hope and Road to Recovery, though the two are separate organizations.“It’s saving lives.”

Helping Palestinian patients access medical treatment fulfills the Jewish value of tikun olam, world repair, as well as pikuach nefesh, which holds that saving a life comes first and foremost, even above other commandments like keeping Shabbat. The work also reflects a central tenet in the Jewish tradition, a widely quoted line from the Talmud that goes, “Whoever saves one life saves the entire world.” The Quran, Bob notes, contains the same notion.

Project Rozana got its start in 2013, after Ron Finkel — a prominent Jewish businessman and the founding president of Hadassah Australia — heard the story of a four-year-old Palestinian girl named Rozana who, the previous year, had fallen from a ninth floor balcony while at home in a village outside of Ramallah, in the West Bank. Well aware of the disparities between Palestinian and Israeli medical facilities, Rozana’s mother, Palestinian journalist Maysa

Abu Ghannam, arranged to have a Palestinian ambulance take her daughter not to a local hospital but, rather, to a checkpoint; from there, an Israeli ambulance took the girl the rest of the way to a hospital in Jewish West Jerusalem, where an Israeli doctor saved her life.

THIS SIMPLE ACT of climbing into the car with someone from the “other side” after decades of violence is a huge act of faith for Israelis and Palestnians alike — both sides have suffered and interactions are often marked by mutual distrust and fear. While offering these patients transportation to their medical appointments is extremely important, in some ways, that’s almost secondary. “The transportation is just an excuse,” Cohen says, explaining that, in theory, organizations could just get funding

to hire small buses to shuttle Palestinian patients back and forth from checkpoints to their appointments.

But being together in the car — a small, intimate space that is separated from the outside world and, during long stretches on the highway, the conflict that comes along with it — offers “the opportunity to create some kind of closeness, some kind of understanding to bring down the fear barrier,” says Cohen. “Not every drive is full of conversation and full of understanding — it’s not like we’re trying to create world peace in a drive … but it’s something small that can make a difference.”

Cohen, who says he’s not religious like many of his fellow drivers, has been driving Ghofran and Mona for about six months. He also visits the pair in the apartment they were sharing with two other families

TWO PALESTINIAN PATIENTS, DRIVEN BY AN ISRAELI “ROAD TO RECOVERY” VOLUNTEER, ON THEIR WAY FROM THE JALAME-GILBOA CHECKPOINT TO THE RAMBAM HEALTH CARE CAMPUS IN HAIFA, ISRAEL, FEBRUARY 2023.

THE WORK REFLECTS A CENTRAL TENET IN THE JEWISH TRADITION, A LINE FROM THE TALMUD THAT GOES, “WHOEVER SAVES ONE LIFE SAVES THE ENTIRE WORLD.” THE QURAN CONTAINS THE SAME NOTION.

— two women from the Gaza Strip whose children are also receiving long-term treatment at Sheba Hospital. In the past half a year, Cohen’s relationship with Ghofran and Mona has become so much more than the drive. He recalls the time that a group of volunteer drivers, Palestinian patients and parents went to the beach.

“Ghofran jumped like crazy because she saw the sea for the first time,” says Cohen. “I fell in love completely — with her smile and the will to live and be happy. It pulls you over.”

Cohen frequently wears a colorful necklace Ghofran made for him. When people ask him about the jewelry, he tells them about Ghofran and his volunteer work with Road to Recovery. “The typical reaction,” he says, “is ‘Are you crazy? Aren’t you afraid?’”

To which he replies, “Afraid of what?”

The other pushback he often hears

from his countrymen is that he should be helping his own people first rather than Palestinians. “I don’t see the connection. I help whoever comes my way,” says Cohen, whose family originally came to Israel from Egypt and who happens to be the nephew of the famous Israeli spy, Eli Cohen, hanged in Syria in 1965 for espionage. While the younger Cohen admits today that his politics are far left and that is indeed part of the reason he wants to help Palestinian patients, he adds that he’s not representative of his organization. “There are quite a few that are right wing, there are quite a few who are settlers, who are religious, you have all kinds — many are relating to this on a humanitarian basis, not in relation to politics.”

In the car, on the road out of Tel Aviv, a sensor chimes. “Who doesn’t have their seatbelt on?” Cohen wonders aloud. Ghofran is moving around in the back seat. After some wrangling, her mother gets her buckled in — only to find, moments later, that she has wiggled her way out and is facing backwards.

“Turn around and sit correctly,” Mona admonishes her daughter in Arabic.

A GRAVELLY COUGH comes from somewhere deep in Ghofran’s chest. Concerned, Cohen glances in the rearview mirror and explains to me that fluid builds up in Ghofran’s lungs, which need to be drained on a regular basis. He says he’s approaching a nonprofit organization in hopes of helping Ghofran get another much-needed bone marrow transplant (one of her two elder brothers is a match, but their father has forbidden the donation; Cohen hopes to find a legal way to circumvent the father’s consent). He jokes that he’s going to just adopt Ghofran himself.

While the bond between Cohen and

Ghofran was nearly instant, Mona admits that it’s been harder for her to trust Jewish Israelis. The first time she brought Ghofran into the country for medical treatment, she recalls, “I was very afraid. … It was difficult to come here. We thought people would kill us.”

But between the doctors and Jewish Israeli volunteers, she now has a very good feeling when she comes in from the West Bank. “They’re just like us,” she says. That is, they’re regular humans.

Usually Cohen drives Mona and Ghofran to a checkpoint in the north because they go to Palestinian city of Jenin. Today, however, he’s taking them to spend the weekend with family in the Ramallah area and he takes a different route, 443, which, though it passes through the occupied West Bank, was off-limits to Palestinian drivers for a number of years until the Israeli High Court ruled that it had to be opened to Palestinians, as well.

Traffic slows and Ghofran peers out the window, looking into the car of a religious Jewish family next to us. As we draw near the checkpoint that stands at the end of 443, we all fall silent.“Here (in the car) we have

an illusion that everything is OK, that we’re living in the same kind of environment,” says Cohen. “But we’re not. And the checkpoint is a reminder of that — the checkpoint puts us back in the ‘She’s Palestinian and I’m Israeli’ position in a very strong way.”

Asked if those divisions ever disappear completely, Mona quickly answers, “No.”

We bounce over the tire spikes and then we’re through. But it’s clear that we’re lost. We pull over on the side of the road and Mona calls one of her brothers, asking for directions. Tension creeps into the car again. Wandering around the West Bank isn’t entirely safe for either Cohen or myself, as an Israeli, even if Cohen is ferrying a Palestinian family in the back seat of his car.

After multiple phone calls, puzzling over road signs, a wrong turn or two, and a chat with a Palestinian truck driver, we eventually find Qalandia checkpoint. Cohen has never been here at all and though I’ve been to and through Qalandia many times, I’ve only ever been through by bus; I’ve never approached the checkpoint on foot, nor from this particular road, which doesn’t actually lead all the way to the crossing.

We’re stuck at a cul de sac, a roundabout that slingshots traffic back the way it came. Cohen gets as close as he can to the checkpoint and idles. I follow Mona out of the car. We can see the crossing, on the other side of a field of dirt, we just can’t make out an entrance.

Mona flags an elderly Palestinian woman down and asks how to pass. The woman points at the pedestrian bridge and says Mona and Ghofran can come with her.

Suddenly, it’s a flurry of activity. Cars are piling up behind Cohen, Mona hustles Ghofran out of the vehicle and the drivers behind us honk their horns. It’s stressful, but despite the pressure, Cohen gets out, too, grabbing Ghofran’s hand and kissing it.

The old woman, in a white hijab and a long, olive green overcoat, urges Ghofran and Mona forward and they join the other Palestinians making their way towards the checkpoint. As they merge into the crowd headed towards concrete, steel and barbed wire, I lose sight of them.

And just like that, Ghofran — with her red glasses and pink scarf and her exuberance — is gone.

WHILE THE BOND BETWEEN DRIVER SHAY COHEN AND GHOFRAN WAS NEARLY INSTANT, IT TOOK GHOFRAN’S MOTHER, MONA, LONGER TO TRUST JEWISH ISRAELIS. BUT AFTER YEARS OF MEDICAL TREATMENTS FOR HER DAUGHTER — AND MONTHS OF RIDES WITH COHEN — SHE SAYS, “THEY’RE JUST LIKE US.”

THE FAITH THAT STARES THROUGH DEATH

SIXTY YEARS AGO, MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. MARCHED IN BIRMINGHAM. IT CHANGED AMERICA. AND DEEPENED KING’S FAITH IN GOD

BY PAUL KIX

Idon’t think it’s grandiose to say that one moment of one day from the last 60 years shaped America in ways that no other day, or year, or decade has. That day was April 12, 1963. Good Friday, as it happened, which is telling because the moment in question on that day found the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wondering why God had forsaken him.

He sat in Room 30 of the Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama, puffing on a cigarette, jittery and frail from the previous night’s insomnia, looking at the two dozen aides and executives of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference who’d crowded into his room, asking them if any had a solution to the greatest problem they’d faced.

They didn’t. Which was almost to be expected, given the circumstance in which he had placed them. King and the SCLC had decided a couple weeks earlier to stage the largest civil rights campaign in the movement’s history in Birmingham, Alabama, and to either break segregation there or be broken by it. Birmingham in those days wasn’t so much a city as a site of domestic terror. Cops raped Black women in their patrol cars. The Klan castrated Black men in their homes. Local elected officials gleefully, and often publicly, referred to the city as Bombingham for all the Black homes and businesses that were dynamited. And there was never any prosecution for these crimes. It was a place whose goal was to strike fear in every Black person. CBS’s Edward R. Murrow, when he

visited the city a few years prior to King’s own trip, said he had not seen anything like Birmingham since Nazi Germany.

For King, the city’s terror was the point. King’s goal there was to anger every terrible white person in Birmingham. If he did that, if he and his volunteers marched and remained peaceful even as the blows fell, he would turn his body into a vessel of suffering, into a metaphor of the Black experience. King wanted violence to be visited upon him and other volunteers

BY 1963 OTHER CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS SNEERED AT KING AND CALLED HIM A “PHONY” FOR HOW HE DID ALL THE TALKING AND THEY DID ALL THE WALKING.

in Birmingham. Because if that violence persisted, especially as, say, a New York Times reporter took notes or a CBS camera crew filmed the grotesquery, well then, these metaphors of racism and hatred on the part of white America, relayed through the means of mass communication, might find the audience King most wanted to influence. The audience of two brothers, the Kennedy brothers who governed America and would watch these metaphors, this domestic terror, from the White House. As

they watched, perhaps they would at last be persuaded to side with King on the one thing he had wanted for years, and the one thing that Jack and Bobby Kennedy had consistently denied him: Real and lasting civil rights legislation, the right for Black people to be treated as fully human, which no one, not even Lincoln, had put into law.

But once in Birmingham a problem surfaced. The white brutes who ran the city were wilier than King thought. When King’s nonviolent protests attracted the national media and then the Birmingham police department’s K-9 corps — with German Shepherds attacking and almost feasting on unarmed Black volunteers and bystanders on Palm Sunday, April 7 — Birmingham public officials and judges saw they were falling into King’s trap. So they set their own. They issued a court-approved injunction. This was a ban on all future protests, starting with the one King plan to lead on April 12. This injunction did more than just forbid marches. It also set exorbitant terms for anyone who violated it: six months in jail.

And this brings us back to Room 30 in the Gaston Motel on Good Friday morning, and the greatest dilemma King ever faced. Because if he marched that afternoon and violated the injunction, the six months he spent behind bars would be more than enough time to snuff out the Birmingham campaign. To finish King and the SCLC, too. King doubted whether his organization and the civil rights movement as a whole could

survive if they lost in Birmingham.

The solution was no better, though, if he fought the Birmingham injunction in court. King’s own lawyers that morning in Room 30 told him that it would take months, if not a year, to appeal the injunction to a federal court outside Alabama, where the SCLC might at last get a fair hearing.

Some aides thought he should leave Birmingham and stage emergency fundraisers in New York. But the bail for violating the injunction had doubled in the last few days from $50 per protester to $100. There were perhaps hundreds of people ready to march that afternoon, but the SCLC was effectively broke, and no emergency fundraiser could raise enough cash to cover the march’s bail fines.

Worse, if King left town, or even just refused to march, he would be pilloried in the press as he had been for years. He was seen in 1963 as a pompous pastor who could give a good speech but never lead a movement. The SCLC had not had any victories in over seven years. By 1963, other civil rights groups sneered at King and called him a “phony” for how he did all the talking and they did all the walking. It was true enough. King had not yet led a march in Birmingham. Part of the reason he promised to lead the march on Good Friday was to respond to press allegations that he always remained behind the scenes. So

to refuse to march now, in Room 30, would disavow the trust of not just the newsmen but all Americans, Black and white. Who would follow the leader who could not even follow his own words?

King was left with no good choice. All options seemed like the end of the Birmingham campaign, and very likely the death of the SCLC. The mood that sunny morning turned dark. Ralph Abernathy, King’s best friend, later remembered those trials in the Easter season and in Room 30 in particular as “the work of the devil.”

King agreed. That morning, feeling hopeless, King later wrote, “I was alone in that crowded room.”

Isolated from the two dozen and, in that moment without end, from God, too.

I BECAME FASCINATED with that campaign in Birmingham not just because of the courage it took King and the SCLC to go down there — King thought he and others might be killed — but because of how severely the campaign tested King’s faith. I wanted to write a book about it. King’s crisis reflected one in our own age, and in my own household.

I am a white man married to a Black woman and together we are raising our three children to understand that they embody King’s famous dream. True integration, the literal result of a couple who

looked past their skin-deep differences. But the problem of America in the 21st century mirrors the problem of America in the 20th. Whatever progress we’ve made, we remain fixated on those differences. My kids first noticed this in 2020. It wasn’t just the hate that burbled in the fetid pools of alt-right social feeds or the identity obsessions that spread across the green expanse of progressive colleges, where, say, Black students were encouraged by school administrators to segregate themselves from white students in the cafeteria and white students were encouraged to not question the policy. No, my kids saw America’s real fixation with race play out in a story that reflected their family history.

Though we live in Connecticut now, my wife, Sonya, grew up in Houston’s Fifth Ward. George Floyd grew up in Houston’s adjacent and equally hard up Third Ward. In 2020, George and Sonya were the same age, 46. George had gone to Yates High. Sonya’s cousins had gone to Yates. Her cousin Derrick knew George back then. Derrick called him Perry, which was George’s middle name, and watched him as a tight end on the Yates football team that made the state championship game in 1992.

George’s murder, then, felt almost personal to Sonya, and to me, and to my mother-in-law Connie, who lives with us and who, until she retired, had spent her life in Houston. We mourned George Floyd. And because we mourned, we didn’t shield our kids from the coverage like we had the others, the innocent Black men who’d also been killed by police officers and whose deaths had also been recorded by cellphones. No, we watched George die on CNN and our kids did too, as if to tell them that this was the Black experience as well. As our daughter Harper, then 11, and our twin boys, Marshall and Walker, then nine, watched, they became upset. Over the coming months they ran from any footage of Black people suffering, ran in tears, because they understood that nothing they did — and nothing we could do as parents — could keep them truly safe. Danger would always walk a little closer behind them than

AFTER REV. RALPH ABERNATHY, LEFT, AND REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. WERE ARRESTED FOR LEADING A PEACEFUL PROTEST, KING WROTE HIS FAMOUS “LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL.”

it did white children. The fear our kids felt hardened eventually into a cynicism, which wizened and calloused them to a certain extent, even protected them, but also enclosed them in a prison of their own rage. We saw it. We heard it. How everything about their country was awful and bloody and how they would move away from here just as soon as they could.

The America they were coming to understand was not a dream of any famed orator from 1963, or the multicolored reality that was their home 60 years later, but instead a bleak landscape where almost nothing changed.

And that was why I wanted to write a book about the Birmingham campaign. Not just to highlight for my children that societies do bend toward justice, if given enough time. And not just to show that the despair they felt — what my boys called a “darkness” — was what King felt, too, in Birmingham. But the real reason to write the book was to show the truth of any darkness. Eventually, it is followed by light.

WITH ALL HIS dark thoughts on that Good Friday morning, King rose in the suite of Room 30 and excused himself. He walked around the two dozen awaiting his decision about whether to march and opened the door to the suite’s adjoining, and empty, bedroom.

He closed the bedroom door behind him. He was truly alone now and perhaps never more distant from God. He had turned to prayer in the past when he felt unsure, unmoored, without hope. He had even written about one such incident, which had become famous in Christian circles when it appeared in his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” in 1958. In that episode, during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, a late-night phone call — “Listen, (slur), we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery” — had unnerved King. Maybe it was the anger in the man’s voice; maybe the forewarned date: before next week. But that night in 1956 King couldn’t sleep and it was worse than insomnia. “It seemed

that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point.”

He went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. When it had brewed and he’d poured his cup he’d reached a conclusion. “I was ready to give up. … I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.” He couldn’t figure out how so he took his problem of saving face to God. With his head in his hands and his cup of coffee untouched before him, King prayed aloud:

“I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

THE PROBLEM OF AMERICA IN THE 21ST CENTURY MIRRORS THE PROBLEM OF AMERICA IN THE 20TH. WHATEVER PROGRESS WE’VE MADE, WE REMAIN FIXATED ON THOSE DIFFERENCES.

He’d come to the point where he couldn’t face it at all.

At that moment he experienced the rush of God’s presence “as I had never experienced Him before.” A voice called to him or, rather, issued from within him. “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth,” it said with quiet assurance. “God will be at your side forever.”

The fears dissipated. His self-confidence returned. He could endure this night. He could lead this movement.

“I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same but God had given me the inner calm to face it.”

The racist man’s warning turned out to be anything but idle — King’s home was bombed three nights later — but how King continued to lead in Montgomery despite his fear was why he was still leading in 1963, and often against his inclination.

What he sought now in Room 30 in Birmingham was that same inner calm. That assured voice that would tell him what to do in a situation even more threatening than the late-night phone call in Montgomery. The noise of his inner monologue that Good Friday morning — if I proceed the campaign will die; if I delay, the campaign will, too — quieted as he at last relayed his struggle to God in prayer. Soon he found himself “in the midst of the deepest quiet I have ever felt,” King later wrote. A moment more and he was somehow standing in the center of the room, eyes open. “I think I was standing also at the center of all that my life had brought me to be.” He thought of the two dozen next door, the hundreds more ready to go to jail today if the thousands of Blacks lining the streets were any indication. All of them waiting to see what Martin Luther King Jr. would decide. His mind then leaped beyond Birmingham, and Alabama, to the 20 million Black people in America who yearned for the freedom King promised — If only he would lead them. Suddenly, “There was no more room for doubt.”

He took off his suit jacket and dress shirt. From Montgomery until today he realized he had prayed to God for wisdom about how to lead but often faltered in his own execution. During the Freedom Rides in 1961, King had remained a bystander, unwilling to board the buses alongside other civil rights leaders who attempted to integrate the bus lines that crossed Southern states; King watched as those same buses were firebombed for their attempts. King realized now in Room 30 how his reluctance during the Freedom Rides had led younger civil rights groups, like a member of John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to call King a “phony” and “De Lawd,” the latter a sneering bit of irony that caricatured how highly King thought of himself.

And yet was it a caricature? After all, King’s own deputy whose job was to oversee the daily protests in Birmingham, James Bevel, had reportedly become so disgusted by King’s passivity that Bevel had already

left the campaign, quit it a few days ago and returned to his native Mississippi.

Now, in that empty bedroom of Room 30, King took off his dress slacks.

He realized that Bevel had left and SNCC had sneered at him and the Freedom Riders had dismissed his speeches because King’s actions as a leader had never, not really, risen to the level of his rhetoric.

He had been a phony. He had lacked the courage to truly partake in the work God had set out for him. He vowed he would no longer lack that courage.

King put on a pair of blue jeans and a denim shirt.

He stared in the mirror in the empty bedroom, in these “work clothes,” as he called them, which were suddenly as rich in symbolism as Good Friday itself. He opened the door to the other room where the two dozen waited for him.

He walked in.

KING LOOKED AT the deputies of the SCLC.

“I have decided to go to jail.”

The room gasped. So Martin would march today? He would go to jail? But that meant he would stay in jail for six months! Some deputies began to raise their concerns again about the Birmingham campaign being snuffed out by King’s jail term — and perhaps the SCLC’s death, too —

King stopped their protests.

The firmness of King’s voice, what he wore even: Many of the 24 had never seen King in anything but a suit and tie. To dress like the working-class Blacks who would inevitably want to march behind him this afternoon — it showed the conviction King held.

“I don’t know what will happen,” he said. “... But I have to make a faith act.”

King’s own father, Martin Luther King Sr., stepped forward and told him he did not think marching was a wise move. Perhaps if the SCLC fought the injunction in court —

“I have to go,” Martin said. “I’m going to march if I have to march by myself.”

It didn’t come to that. The people in Room 30 were so stirred by King that not only did Ralph Abernathy and the Birmingham pastor who co-led the campaign here, Fred

Shuttlesworth, ultimately agree to march alongside Martin, but soon the whole of Room 30 joined hands, King’s father, too, and together they sang the anthem that now defined the civil rights movement.

“We Shall Overcome.”

Some sang with tears in their eyes. Perhaps because the Holy Spirit moved through the room. Perhaps because so much remained uncertain. Would King be arrested? And if so, what would happen to him? Would the campaign here in Birmingham, and the SCLC, languish without its leader, languish unto death?

There were no answers when they finished singing their song.

WE WATCHED GEORGE FLOYD DIE ON CNN AND OUR KIDS DID TOO, AS IF TO TELL THEM THAT THIS WAS THE BLACK EXPERIENCE AS WELL.

There was only the echo of the faith they shared, the fragile faith they’d put in God.

I LOVED THE fragility of that moment as I researched my book. For so many of us, faith is never steadfast and calm. It contains currents of doubt, forever pulling us under water. What surprised me as I researched was how I myself was soon gasping for breath.

My book on the Birmingham campaign — this open letter to my kids to remain courageous and faithful in life — officially began its reporting in the summer of 2020. But by November of that year I was laid off by ESPN, where I had worked for 17 years as a features writer and editor. For how long would I be able to feed my family of six?

I had no answers. I only had a faith that things would work out because I was doing work which felt like God had set out for me, a faith that, admittedly, grew more fragile with each passing day and each glance at our checking account.

As I weighed my future I returned to that morning in Room 30, searching for how

exactly King persisted. How exactly did he hold on to his fragile faith as he walked out the door and into the glare of the afternoon?

He didn’t. Or rather, his faith — in himself, in God — oscillated as wildly as my own. “I was besieged with worry,” he later wrote of what was going through his head that Easter weekend. “Those were the longest, most frustrating and bewildering hours I have lived.”

So how did he persevere?

FOR THREE HOURS that Good Friday afternoon the press and thousands in Birmingham waited for King to march outside Zion Hill Baptist Church, the protest’s starting point. The onlookers waited so long that sweat began to drip off their foreheads and some questioned whether King would step out of the church at all.

Then, suddenly, there he was, in his work clothes, with Abernathy and Shuttlesworth behind him, bounding down Zion Hill’s front steps and hitting the street out front.

“There he goes!” a man in the crowd yelled. “Just like Jesus!”

And like Jesus marching his cross toward his demise, King looked anguished. In an iconic photo from that march King strode beside Abernathy and Shuttlesworth, all three dressed down in denim shirts and jeans, but only two of the pastors smiling for the courage they embodied. King frowned. His eyes darted to the left, toward the camera’s lens, as if not wanting to see what faced him straight ahead.

Trouble.

Because here came a cop on a motorcycle, cutting hard in front of King on the street, forcing him to stop.

King dropped to his knees and began to pray. This is what the SCLC had taught all its protesters to do: If white authority is going to arrest you, let it do so while you remain on your knees, in prayer. I often wonder in that moment if King were offering more than a public display of nonviolence. I wonder if King were truly asking God for strength.

I tend to think he was. Because in the filmed footage of this encounter there is a moment that I always freeze, whenever I

watch it online. The white cop has hoisted King off the ground and frog-marched him, roughly, to the waiting paddy wagon, when King briefly turns his eyes toward a television camera.

The eyes show everything.

They show fear. Nothing about this march has confirmed that God will reward King’s faith. King may be beaten in jail. The campaign here may die with him behind bars. The SCLC may no longer exist when he’s eventually released.

And yet in King’s turn toward the television camera his eyes also show hope. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase,” King later wrote. “You just have to take the first step.” His eyes showed how he believed that taking the first step, and then another, and marching would not lead to death but, somehow, a new life for the civil rights movement. King’s eyes showed the faith that, in some way, by some means he couldn’t imagine, God would see him through this.

And then he was beyond the camera’s frame and onto the Birmingham jail.

FROM HERE, THE story becomes a bit supernatural. The solitary confinement of King’s imprisonment in Birmingham allowed for introspection, and in that “dungeon” of a cell, in King’s words, he used stubby pencils and scraps of newsprint to write a searing, soaring piece of rhetoric, a document that when it was finished not only compared to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation but carried the simplest of titles, as if only a simple heading could relay the letter’s transcendence.

“Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

“God’s companionship does not stop at the door of a jail cell,” King later said of how he wrote it.

God’s companionship does not stop anywhere, it seems. King was sprung from jail after eight days thanks to his friend and fellow activist Harry Belafonte, the Hollywood actor who used his own fortune to release King and Abernathy and Shuttlesworth from jail on bond.

King’s freedom inspired a few, and then dozens, and then hundreds, and then

thousands in Birmingham that spring to protest and march as King had. The jails filled with activists, and still more took their place on the streets, and white authority in Birmingham felt it had no choice but to release the K-9 corps again, to raise billy clubs high in the air and slam them on the heads of kneeling and defenseless Black protesters, to unfurl, even, fire hoses from the engines of Birmingham fire trucks and train the nozzles at Black children and then, with a water pressure whose power could knock bricks loose from their mortar or strip the bark from trees at a distance of 100 feet, to unload the water’s fury on the children, at 50 feet or less, and watch as it back-flipped the kids in the air and disintegrated the clothes from their bodies and pulled their hair from its roots.

And it was that pain, that filmed terror, the children’s suffering turned into a metaphor of the Black experience, which galvanized the Kennedy brothers. They saw the images of Birmingham from the White House and the president, and his brother as attorney general, ultimately saw what King did, too: The need for civil rights legislation.

This was that Easter season’s greatest miracle. President Kennedy’s sponsorship of civil rights legislation in June of 1963, just as King broke segregation in Birmingham, became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That miracle for King was followed

by another: the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which further enshrined equality and led, I believe, not only to King’s martyrdom in 1968 but a new life for his country. Shirley Chisholm’s presidential bid in 1972, the rise of the Black middle- and then upper class across the closing decades of the 20th century, Barack Obama’s presidency at the outset of the 21st, even me marrying a Black woman in Texas, a former Jim Crow state, and now raising our kids on a shaded street where we are not harassed for who we are: None of this happens without the Birmingham campaign of 1963. And none of that happens without King returning to the two dozen in Room 30 on the morning of Good Friday, and saying to them that he had to “make a faith act.”

He had to march.

This moment marked the beginning of King’s “true leadership,” one of those present in Room 30 later said.

And this moment is the one I want my kids to remember well into adulthood, and what I want to return to myself when I’m uncertain, and you as well.

Just keep walking. Take the first step, as King said, and then another. Because when you are uncertain, God himself walks alongside you.

POLICE TURN THE FIREHOSES ON YOUNG PROTESTORS IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA, 1963.

THE BRIDGE BUILDER

HOW

RELIGIOUS ENGAGEMENT INCREASES FREEDOMS AROUND THE WORLD

BY BRIAN GRIM

Over four decades working abroad and at home, I’ve seen the benefits when both societies and businesses allow people within them to live out their faith and the consequences when they impose restrictions on religion or belief.

As a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center and former chair of the World Economic Forum’s global council on the role of faith, I’ve documented the opportunity and growth that takes place in countries that embrace religious freedom and the stagnation that results when social groups and governments, like in China or Syria, severely restrict religious practice. More recent research has shown those same principles apply in the corporate world when companies create a culture that accommodates a religiously diverse labor force.

Even without today’s empirical data to back it up, countries around the world recognized the benefits of religious freedom since the United Nations adopted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights nearly 75 years ago. Those who’ve been devoted to advancing conscience rights have the declaration’s Article 18 seared into their own conscience: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to

manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

The fight for that right has developed two philosophies, according to foreign policy and religion expert Chris Seiple, who has drawn attention to the pros and cons of the two camps he calls “advocates” and “builders.”

Advocates often focus on the moral and legal responsibility to protect the human right of freedom of religion or belief. They aggressively monitor religious freedom violations and push governments to address them.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS HIGHLY CORRELATED WITH SOCIOECONOMIC WELL-BEING, ONE OF THREE FACTORS THAT PREDICT FUTURE ECONOMIC GROWTH.

They’ll use the courts and call to account governments and groups that restrict the ability of anyone to live out their deeply held beliefs.

Builders also seek to advance the human right of freedom of religion or belief, but they avoid legal and political arenas to instead engage with local communities, seeking to foster what is referred to as covenantal pluralism — what Seiple describes as the “the social harmony that

is possible when citizens of multifaith and multiethnic countries are equipped to mutually engage and even respect one another across deep difference.”

Having experienced both camps, I’ve found advocates and builders to be more interconnected than conflicting in their methods to champion freedom of belief at home and abroad. But a few anchor points in my career have steered my approach toward builders, finding their organic, bottom-up approach more inclusive in bringing about long-lasting change.

THE FIRST ANCHOR was dropped in summer 1991 in the Soviet Union, where as co-chair of an organizing committee of the ruling Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic’s Supreme Soviet, I coordinated the first large-scale, people-to-people festival organized in a republic without Moscow’s oversight. Three hundred American Christians — ranging from astronauts and surgeons to business leaders and musicians — spent two weeks with tens of thousands of people across Kazakhstan.

At the time, I was a Southern Baptist aid and development worker (I’ve since become Catholic) and also served as vice president of the faith-based Central Asian Foundation. Being the only American co-chair of an organizing committee gave me access to travel to former nuclear testing zones and the dying

Aral Sea — both regions of this Central Asian Soviet republic facing urgent medical needs.

The Kazakh-American festival’s name, Senim, meant “trust.” The event not only fostered trust in a communist land where religion was largely taboo and nearly persecuted out of existence, but it also built religious freedom, through a series of collaborative endeavors between U.S. believers from various professions and their Kazakh counterparts.

The good works of these two groups ranged from rebuilding an earthquake damaged school to performing lifesaving surgeries as American and Soviet doctors worked side-by-side. Thousands attended joint concerts by Sound Theology and A Studio (a popular Soviet rock band at the time.) Hundreds of Kazakh elite participated in a business conference on opening the economy to market forces, with faith perspectives shared. This led to an invitation to help establish a western-style business school, which continues to operate today.

All of these people-to-people activities built religious freedom by expanding the space where faith was welcome. Indeed, having faith-motivated collaboration and assistance be on display in the workplaces, schools and marketplaces of this officially communist land was a first, opening the door for religious organizations into the country, not just individual believers.

As part of the Senim festival, the Muslim mufti of Kazakhstan, the archbishop of Alma-Ata’s Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the heads of the Seventh-day Adventist and Russian Baptist churches signed the country’s first-ever multifaith declaration on religious freedom, stating that “the government should not interfere in any religious confession — either by restriction or favoritism.” After the religious leaders shook hands and posed for pictures, a Russian Baptist pastor called this show of openness “a real miracle.” Previously, Protestant leaders feared imprisonment for practicing their faith in Kazakhstan. Now their pictures appeared on front pages of newspapers as they shared their newfound interfaith camaraderie openly with

television, radio and newspaper reporters.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker visited Alma-Ata to recognize Kazakhstan as an independent country. At a press conference with Baker, the new Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev committed to each of the religious leaders in the room, some of whom had signed the religious freedom declaration, that they would have religious freedom. He pointed last to me, saying “and for you and your group, too.”

One way to look at the impact of the 1991 sea change in Kazakhstan away from totalitarian control of religion is through reli-

RELIGIOUS EMPLOYEES LACKED NOT ONLY A VOICE, BUT A SENSE OF BELONGING, WHICH LED SOME TO TAKE THEIR TALENTS ELSEWHERE.

gious demographics. Religious populations have grown from being less than half the population in 1970 to now accounting for approximately 95 percent of the country’s population. As a participant-observer of those days, I can attest to the great movement towards religion set free by the openness to religious freedom in 1991.

Unfortunately, religious freedom is facing new challenges today in Kazakhstan. It may be that another initiative to build freedom of religion and belief for all could be effective again.

THE SECOND ANCHOR point is 2006 when I began the global tracking and reporting of restrictions on religious freedom at the Pew Research Center.

The journey to get to 2006 includes living and working in other religiously restrictive countries. From 1982 to 2002, in addition to working in the Soviet Union, my wife and I were educators in the western Xinjiang region of the People’s Republic of China, where our four children took on Uyghur names, as well as in the Persian Gulf region.

Our final posting was in the United

Arab Emirates, where I coordinated academic studies at Zayed Military College, their “West Point.” We were there when the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred. There were 20,000 Afghani workers in the city near the college, and two of the 9/11 hijackers were from the UAE. One response was to have all the cadets come to class with their bayonets and man guard posts with loaded weapons, which didn’t make me feel any safer.

The attacks of 9/11 made clear to me that religious freedom was not only restricted by governments, but also the actions of groups such as al-Qaida. As the world experienced, such social forces can cross borders and change the temperament, security and freedoms of the entire planet.

Coming back to live in the United States in 2002 as a 43-year-old doctoral student had its challenges, but I needed to upgrade my skills and knowledge to test theories about the world and events I had been part of. I felt that a deeper ability and understanding were critical if I was to be of service going forward.

The 9/11 understanding of the power of social forces to restrict religious freedom informed my doctoral dissertation at Penn State University that measured and analyzed the detrimental impact of restrictions on religious freedom in countries around the world. That led to Roger Finke and I publishing further research (Religious Persecution in Cross-National Context: Clashing Civilizations or Regulated Religious Economies?) in 2007 and a book (“The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the 21st Century”) in 2010.

Our research was the first time that restrictions on religious freedom had been rigorously measured and scientifically analyzed. It also moved discussion of religious freedom out of the realm of conjecture to the domain of facts. And perhaps most importantly, it showed that societal restrictions on religion can trigger government restrictions on religion and vice versa: Government actions can also trigger or reinforce societal prejudices. We showed that the two forces,

when acting in tandem, can create a cycle of violent persecution and conflict.

The direct implication of the research is that if we hope to successfully address violations of religious freedom we must not only work with governments, where “advocates” focus much of their attention, but we must also work with influential sectors in society such as business, the arts and education. The civil society and private sectors are where “builders” make a particularly important contribution to religious freedom because they place a priority on engaging with society, communities and people.

At the Pew Research Center, I was director of cross-national data and directed the first annual reports on global restrictions on religion that began monitoring trends in 2006 and continue to this day.

The data were so eye-opening that major national and international bodies invited briefings, including the State Department, Pentagon, Congress, United Nations, British Parliament, the European Parliament and the U.N. Human Rights Council. The basic statistic that nearly 75 percent of the world’s population live in countries with high or very high government or social restrictions on religion soon became the beginning point for many advocacy arguments to take violations of religious freedom seriously.

THE PEW TREND data, however, made it clear that advocacy efforts alone were not reversing a rising global tide of restrictions on religious freedom.

As we continued to collect, analyze and mine the data, a third anchor point emerged: Religious freedom was highly correlated with socioeconomic well-being, one of many factors that statistically predict future economic growth. The publication of these findings with Greg Clark and Robert Snyder in “Is Religious Freedom Good for Business?: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis,” and my further analysis in a piece for the World Economic Forum, “The link between economic and religious freedoms,” resulted in my founding of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, where our mission is to make the case to

the business world that religious freedom is good for not just the economy, but also for business.

While the foundation has been active since 2014, a watershed moment came in 2020 when we released the first-ever index measuring the degree to which Fortune 100 workplaces are faith-friendly, aka religiously inclusive.

The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation’s Corporate Religious Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (REDI) Index found that a trend of global corporations accommodating religion in the workplace is propelled by company-sponsored, faith-ori-

PEW RESEARCH DATA MAKE IT CLEAR THAT ADVOCACY EFFORTS ALONE ARE NOT ENOUGH TO ADVANCE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

ented employee resource groups and other programs. Google, Intel, American Express and others score highly on the index for supporting such initiatives. American Airlines’ chief flight dispatcher is a priest and company chaplain. Tyson Foods has chaplains on staff across America serving the needs of all employees regardless of faith or belief.

Why do these companies do it? It’s good for employees. It gives them a competitive advantage. And that’s good for society.

This 2020 finding came thanks to Kent Johnson, who had just retired from Texas Instruments after a career as senior counsel. While at Texas Instruments, he founded the first faith-based employee resource group more than 20 years ago. When he retired, he joined our foundation as a senior corporate adviser to keep this faith-friendly movement going.

What Johnson helped me see was that religion can be a welcome part of corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, given that religion is also protected by Title VII like other protected characteristics.

To give one example, Google’s Inter

Belief Network employee resource group gives employees of faith an official channel to have their voice be heard within the company. Prior to the network, religious employees lacked not only a voice, but a sense of belonging, which led some to take their talents elsewhere. In addition, the group educates the broader Google workforce on religious freedom issues, such as the rapidly rising level of antisemitism and other forms of religious hatred at home and abroad.

AS I REFLECT ON a lifetime of building freedom of religion and belief through innovative programs, tools and approaches, I can identify four key elements of a “builder’s approach” to religious freedom.

First, its motivation is love. Because love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things, a builder’s approach is positive, lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness. It affirms goodness and highlights what works. It is optimistic, not adversarial. It celebrates and finds God in all things and all people.

Second, it evaluates. A builder’s approach learns from data-driven evaluation and anticipates that change is constant and acts on information, intuitively connecting dots. It moves on from things that don’t work. It learns from failures. It is humble.

Third, it creates. It builds creatively. It invents. It is expansive. It creates something out of nothing. It sees a need and fills it. It’s entrepreneurial. It requires risks. It doesn’t always work as expected, but often exceeds what could be asked or imagined.

Fourth, it procreates. It builds collaboratively. It builds on itself. It emancipates and draws in others. It doesn’t try to own its efforts but pushes them from the nest. It’s catalytic. It’s not controlling. It is self-interested but selfless. It’s a calling, not a career.

All it takes to build religious freedom in your community and workplace is to put into practice love of neighbor and the Golden Rule: In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. It’s that simple and profound.

BRIAN GRIM IS FOUNDING PRESIDENT OF THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & BUSINESS FOUNDATION.

STILL I RISE

HOW

A TARGET OF RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY FOUND A HIGHER WAY

BY SIMRAN JEET SINGH

Ifirst joined Twitter in 2010. Being the nerd that I am, I saw it as a great platform for education and activism. I loved sharing views on justice and introducing people to fresh perspectives. I didn’t mind differing viewpoints, though I would get fired up when people sent me bigoted tweets. I would want to answer with something equally angry or hurtful. I knew it wouldn’t be constructive, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. On the one hand, I felt like it would be best to turn the other cheek and not give racists a platform. On the other hand, I felt a duty to respond, inform and educate.

This dilemma has stalked me since I was 11 years old — the first time someone called me a terrorist. I was in middle school, and our club soccer team had a game near Dallas, Texas. During our pregame equipment checks, the referee came straight to me and demanded that I let him pat down my turban, the traditional headwear of my Sikh faith.

“Hey, little terrorist! You’re not hiding bombs or knives in there, are you?” he said. “I know how you people like to blow (expletive) up.” My fists clenched tightly and my body tensed. I wanted to punch him. But in that moment, I decided to lean my head forward instead. I hadn’t ever let someone

touch my turban before. But I wanted to play. And I was a kid.

You might praise me for not reacting with violence, but my response came from pragmatism, not principle. As an 11-year-old boy, I wasn’t about to fight a grown man. I hated being put in that position, and I hated even more how I responded. For the rest of that game, the six-hour car ride home and in the days and nights that followed, I

MY FISTS CLENCHED TIGHTLY AND MY BODY TENSED. I WANTED TO PUNCH HIM. BUT IN THAT MOMENT, I DECIDED TO LEAN MY HEAD FORWARD INSTEAD.

seethed with anger. I resented the referee for how he treated me — like a criminal — and I resented myself for not having the courage to take a stand.

After a few weeks of reflection and talking through it with my family, I became less angry with myself for giving in to an ignorant man’s racism. I started to see this interaction as a learning moment.

I couldn’t change what had happened, but I could promise to do better in the future.

Decades later, I found myself mulling over those same choices of how to react in the realm of social media. Sometimes I would respond positively with the hope that I might create a moment of humanizing connection. Sometimes I would respond angrily, hoping to put racists in their place. Sometimes I would use humor, trying to show them the absurdity of their thinking and trying to win over people who might see me as unrelatable. The results varied, but one outcome remained the same for those first several months. Each interaction would set off a long internal dialogue, mixing anger, outrage, hope and confusion. I felt exhausted from putting all this energy into dealing with strangers online and frustrated that my effort seemed to be making little difference.

In the midst of this emotional confusion, I received my first credible death threat since those first few weeks after 9/11, when people the world over associated my appearance with fear, terror and intolerance. It came via mail, an envelope addressed to me at home with no return address. I opened it up and saw something I thought only happened in movies: To prevent their

handwriting from being traced, the sender had cut letters out of a magazine and glued them to the paper.

It was frightening enough to know someone would take the effort to create that letter. It was even more frightening to realize that whoever had sent this knew where we lived. I went to bed that evening feeling even more angry, frustrated and powerless than I usually did in situations like these. I remembered what my friend Carina once told me: “If you think American hate is ugly, imagine what activists go through.”

I was too bothered to sleep that night, so to distract myself I flipped through photos on my phone. I scrolled right past our family values document, and something told me to go back and read through it for the millionth time. Reading it, I could start feeling my power return.

I may not have been able to change how this person viewed me, but I could control how I chose to deal with the situation. Instead of being trapped in fear and rage, I made the conscious decision to respond based on the five values we had articulated all those years before.

To live with faith meant that I would not compromise those aspects of my religious appearance that bothered racists.

To live with integrity meant that I would continue to do what I thought was right in terms of racial justice and social justice activism.

To live with love meant that I would continue on the path that a James Baldwin quote had put me on: that loving people means showing them what they cannot see on their own.

To live with service meant that I would continue engaging and educating, not for my own benefit but for the enrichment of those around me.

To live with excellence would mean to continue doing all of the above to the best of my abilities, fearlessly and unapologetically, and without compromising our family’s physical security.

Articulating each of these points helped me then and in the years since as threats

of violence have increased. I share this approach with you because knowing my values turned out to be my saving grace at a time of confusion. Getting this clarity didn’t happen immediately and it didn’t happen on its own. It took intention and sustained effort — and that worked.

I no longer find myself infuriated and outraged by attacks online, despite how toxic they might be. My entire online persona is now oriented around those five personal values: faith, integrity, love, service and excellence. Maintaining authenticity between the virtual world and real world has made it much easier to navigate the two.

This is not just because adopting a values-based approach has made me feel more at ease with my responses or even that engaging authentically comes more intuitively — it’s also that I now spend far less

I BECAME LESS ANGRY WITH MYSELF FOR GIVING IN TO AN IGNORANT MAN’S RACISM. I STARTED TO SEE THIS INTERACTION AS A LEARNING MOMENT.

time and emotional energy on things that upset me. I am still cautious about risking our family’s safety and still mindful when I receive credible death threats; this comes with the territory of being visibly different in today’s America. The difference now, though, is that I no longer carry the psychological weight of these toxic and life-sucking emotions.

Values-based living is life-giving because it releases us from the bondage of other people’s hate. Where my focus was once on responding to what happened to me, this document has given me a way to act with clarity and purpose. The circumstances may be the same, but how we experience them can be radically different.

I was fortunate that my parents had the wisdom and wherewithal to instill these concepts in us from a young age and to build them into our family structure. When we first articulated these values together, we believed they would serve as guideposts for better decision-making. I didn’t realize then that this values-based approach could help protect the things we held most dear.

Another example that comes to mind most immediately has to do with the time I almost lost my dream job within a month of getting it.

Since Day 1 of my 10-year journey in graduate school, I set a goal of returning to teach at my alma mater, Trinity University. Just before completing my doctorate degree, I was hired to teach there. Although I would have preferred to teach Sikh studies, there were only a handful of jobs in North America in that field — and all of them were filled. I knew this going into my training, and my advisers had insightfully suggested that I become proficient in teaching multiple traditions — including Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism — in order to be more flexible in my teaching abilities. This advice proved to be wise. I couldn’t have been more thrilled to receive an offer from my alma mater to return home and teach in their religion department about the Islamic tradition, including its history, the Qur’an and global Muslim communities.

Before joining Trinity’s faculty, my new department colleagues and I agreed that I would not slow down my social justice activism. I would continue working on civil rights with the Sikh Coalition, participating in racial justice campaigns at the national level and speaking against hate openly and unapologetically.

Here I was, a turbaned Sikh guy teaching about Islam and talking openly about racism in the middle of Texas. I knew my activism would rub some people the wrong way, but I didn’t realize how many within the local community would be upset and how quickly they would organize against me. Within a month of my arrival (and before I even made it onto the Professor Watchlist),

there was a campaign to have me fired. I know this because I received a call from our university president’s office one morning informing me that their phones had been ringing off the hook with people demanding that I be removed from the job. The day before, school authorities and police officers in Irving, Texas, had detained and arrested a young Muslim boy, Ahmed Mohamed, because they wrongly presumed the clock he had brought to school was a homemade bomb. I had a sense of how humiliated the boy must have been and I felt moved to post a note of solidarity. I tweeted a photo of myself holding a clock with the caption: “Brought my clock to work today in solidarity.” Unbeknownst to me, that tweet went viral, making it on national morning and evening news shows. Because of this tweet, people were calling on the university to fire me.

When asked why they were upset, the complainants claimed that I had a track record of making hateful statements online — a charge I knew was untrue. I hid the concern in my voice and asked what I could do to address the accusation. The representative with whom I was speaking, an assistant vice president at Trinity, told me to hang tight and that she would reach out again after their team reviewed the facts.

The next two hours felt like two weeks. I sat in my office staring at my phone, willing it to ring. When it finally did, I was relieved to learn that the university would be putting out a statement on my behalf. I breathed a second sigh of relief when the vice president assured me that my job was safe. When I thanked her and asked why, she explained that university administrators had gone through all my social media history and couldn’t find a single post or comment to suggest the kind of hate or anger people were accusing me of. Scrolling through my posts had shown her that, if anything, I was consistently posting about two topics: love and justice.

I had never planned to create an online persona that would help protect me. The idea had never crossed my mind. Yet one

month into my professional career, the reward couldn’t have been more evident. Having a clear sense of my values had rescued me from emotional tumult years earlier. Now it had just saved my dream job.

A values-based approach to life is like a compass, both clarifying and instructive. It’s so easy for us to get caught up in the ups and downs of our busy lives, losing sight of what we’re doing and why. This is normal. It’s part of being human.

We fall into problems when we’re not purposeful about our decisions. So where do we turn in times when we realize that we have lost our way? How do we deal with these moments of crisis so that we come out stronger and not weaker? And what are we actually doing proactively to save ourselves from the pain and difficulty of personal crisis?

If you feel like you could be doing more to find coherence and direction within yourself, try this simple exercise. Create a list of 20 or so qualities you wish to embody. From that list, identify five that feel central to who you are and who you aspire to be. For instance, your list might include honesty, generosity, courage, service and humility. Once you have identified your top five values, try to come up with one action you will take each day to practice each of them. For example, if you chose generosity, you might commit to giving three compliments a day to people in your life. Now ask yourself: What will you do to hold yourself accountable to each commitment? Will you record it in a daily journal? Will you have an accountability buddy you check in with at the end of each week?

This exercise may feel anodyne, but it has real import. It can help you develop more clarity around what values matter most to you; more intention and power behind your actions; and more self-love and self-confidence as you begin taking steps toward becoming who you truly aspire to be.

TO LIVE WITH INTEGRITY MEANT THAT I WOULD CONTINUE TO DO WHAT I THOUGHT WAS RIGHT IN TERMS OF RACIAL JUSTICE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIVISM.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

WHAT COMPELS US TO DOCUMENT OURSELVES AND THE LIVES WE LIVE?

BY ALEXANDRA RAIN

Acrowded tram climbs into the hills above Los Angeles on a bright blue day in early spring. The views are grand — the city sprawling below us on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other — but I find myself watching an elderly couple near the window. The woman, her white hair cut along her jawline like my grandma’s, admires a panorama of midcentury mansions, green treetops and golden canyons. Beside her, a man holds up a phone with his wrinkled hands, the camera recording this moment in time. It’s striking to see them adopting a habit endemic among members of my own younger generation.

The tram doors open, spilling visitors onto the broad, idyllic campus that is home to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Equipped with phone cameras, digital point-and-shoots, and even professional gear, we scatter across a flagstone courtyard, up stairways and along passages from one pavilion to another. Fountains and sculptures dot an outdoor garden — itself a piece of art — around several modern buildings of concrete, stone and glass. And in every corner, somebody is photographing a painting or posing with their companions. A camcorder is strapped to my own hand.

The urge to document our lives on camera is often characterized as specific to young people in the age of social media, but we all do it. Phone cameras have made it easier and cheaper for the masses

to capture images, but the same obsession fueled earlier phenomena, from disposable cameras, Polaroids and photobooths to scrapbooking and portrait studios. From a broader perspective, museums like this one act as repositories of our collective memory in visual form. This drive is uniquely human. What makes us want to keep images of ourselves and our kind?

WE TRY TO CREATE A PERSONAL HISTORY, USING PHOTOGRAPHY TO NOTATE OUR LIVES AND ESTABLISH A CONNECTION WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD.

HUMANS HAVE BEEN documenting ourselves for as long as we’ve had the ability to do so. The earliest stone figures we’ve found are around 300,000 years ago, but the first known “selfie” dates to about 40,000 years ago, when a person on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia pressed her hand to a cave wall and sloshed it in red paint, creating a hand stencil like we all made in kindergarten. Across the millennia, we painted human figures performing ceremonies in Australia and alongside the animals we hunted in France; we carved them from wood in Siberia; and, much later, we sculpted them with terracotta in Romania.

With the rise of civilization, art began to represent specific individuals — even the artist. The earliest known example comes from Egypt in the 14th century B.C., a carved stone slab depicting Bek, the pharaoh’s chief artist, and his wife. Phidias, the ancient Greek sculptor in charge of the relief panels that line the Parthenon, seems to have added his own image to a frieze depicting the “Battle of the Amazons.” And in the Roman Empire, powerful officials with less artistic talent commissioned realistic busts of themselves, with cosmetic flaws and even signs of medical conditions, as in “Head of a Roman Patrician.”

Portraiture evolved along with society. The Moche people of pre-Columbian Peru crafted portraits on vases; their successors, the Chimú, did so in metals, notably silver. Traditional Chinese painting focuses on narrative, with portrait subjects blending in, often subtly. In Renaissance Europe, a wealthy merchant class could afford to hire painters to immortalize their image, as in the “Arnolfini Portrait” by Jan van Eyck of 1434. The rise of the modern state gave certain court painters the resources and standing to sneak themselves into official portraits – as Diego Velasquez did in “Las Meninas” in 1656 — or paint less prominent subjects — as in “Portrait of Juan de Pareja,” which depicts an enslaved man of North African descent, who Velasquez owned and eventually freed.

It’s easy to forget how expensive it was to create art, how precious the ingredients. Perhaps that is why the closest example to a modern selfie is probably “Portrait of a Man in Red Chalk,” drawn on paper by Leonardo da Vinci in 1510, when he was about 60 years old. In it, a balding man with a long, flowing beard looks stern and, frankly, exhausted. It doesn’t seem meant for public display. But as modern economies made materials more accessible, artists like Rembrandt, Frida and Basquiat made painting selfies a significant part of their work.

In 1839, a Parisian named Louis Daguerre invented a technique that would hand self-portraits over to the masses. Even da Vinci had dreamed of a “camera obscura,” essentially a pinhole camera the size of a room. But the daguerreotype was a process anybody could learn, captured with a device that could be carried anywhere, from a studio to the dusty streets of the Old West. This new medium was uniquely capable of holding up a mirror to our society’s successes and failures. While photographers like Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz recorded the celebrities we came to admire, Dorothea Lange and Robert Capa documented the poor we tried to ignore and the wars we’d rather forget. Diane Arbus presaged the modern selfie in high art form.

But America’s economic boom after World War II made 35mm cameras accessible to ordinary families. Dads became the obnoxious art directors we know today, and by the 1970s, a typical mom could drop off a roll of film at a drive-thru and pick up the prints after a few days. A decade later, she could buy her daughter a disposable point-and-shoot to document a school field trip. They might sit together later to lay them out in an album with stickers and other supplies from the scrapbooking sector, launched in 1981 when Marielen Wadley Christensen opened a store called Keeping Memories Alive in Spanish Fork, Utah. The scrapbooking industry peaked at $2.5 billion in 2005; camera sales grew until 2010, when more than 120 million were sold globally. But camera phones and social

media changed the game. There are now an estimated 1.5 billion iPhone owners worldwide — just one example — and we use that camera. Beyond graduations and first days of school, we photograph our meals, what we wear (“fits,” to people my age), and our moods. It is reported that 61 percent of people use their phone camera every day. We often upload the images to social media, where we expect they’ll remain for the rest of history.

If the internet has become the ultimate repository of our self-documentation as a species, art museums are an archive we can visit, each one a curated visual representation of some aspect of the human family. That makes the Getty a good place to interrogate what’s behind this impulse. Why do we all want to record our own image?

THE ITEMS WE PASS DOWN OVER GENERATIONS BECOME A FORM OF KNOWLEDGE FOR FAMILIES, EITHER THROUGH THE OBJECTS, OUR EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS TO THEM, OR THE STORIES WE INHERIT ALONGSIDE THEM.

AS I WANDER the pavillions, time feels jumbled, between the people beside me and those from the past whose portraits remain. I pause at “Portrait of a Bearded Man,” painted by the Venetian Jacopo Bassano in about 1550. Alone in the frame, cloaked in black, the subject turns his head to the side. Bags hang under his tearful green eyes. His hair looks buzzed, with a slight widow’s peak. For the first time, it hits me that this was a real person with a beating heart, who posed for a painter nearly 500 years ago. He had a name. Now, his image rests in a golden frame.

There is nothing remarkable about that

fact. Our lives are finite. But maybe that’s the key. Later, when I call Joe Marotta, a photographer and emeritus art professor at the University of Utah, he tells me a story about Daguerre. The father of photography once captured his own image and said, “Now my immortality is guaranteed.” Not in any spiritual or metaphysical sense, but rather, he meant that he would be remembered — and relevant — beyond the limited scope of his time on earth. “The photograph, in a sense, extends our mortality,” Marotta says. He has spent a lifetime not just shooting images, but teaching and thinking about how we do it and why it matters. “We try to create a personal history,” he says. “I think everyone uses photography in that way, to notate their own lives and to somehow establish that connection with the rest of the world.” We want to remember our experiences, but these images also offer evidence that we were here.

Long before he became a professor, Marotta was on a road construction crew in upstate New York when it rained for 28 days straight, spawning epic floods. He recounts a tide of water over 30 feet high that destroyed houses and the lives within them. “I remember walking down the street and everything was covered in mud,” he says. “And there was a photo album.” He picked it up and thumbed through images of an unknown family. “Some of these photographs went back to maybe 1860. And I said, ‘no one’s ever going to see this again.’ This history is gone now.”

A THREE-RINGED SCRAPBOOK lies open on my grandmother’s living room floor. Candids of children are glued in an array of colored papers, with captions she wrote. Flipping through the pages, I see my mom as a teenager, along with the aunts and uncles I’ve only known as adults, safe behind protective film. In another — she has more than a dozen — I see old homes, pets and birthdays I was too young to remember. I start to feel small and existential. “I don’t want you to ever die, Grandma,” I say. “I’m not dead yet,” she says, shaking her head.

My grandparents’ house in Utah is, much like a museum, the repository of our own family history. My grandpa, a dedicated “indexer,” has our genealogy records upstairs, in his office. My grandma’s work is down here, in the form of photo albums on the living room bookshelf. Her memory is stored here, not just frozen in each photograph, but in the collection itself that is the work of her hands.

They’re certainly not alone. “Family history has arisen as a popular hobby across the globe,” write historians Katie Barclay and Nina Javetta Koefoed, in their 2020 article “Family, Memory, and Identity: An Introduction.” “Yet, as historians have been quick to point out, genealogy is not new to the present generation, and families have deployed a wide range of other mechanisms for recording family lineages and stories to ensure the survival of the family over time.” Examples of such mechanisms could be quilts or recipe collections, memorabilia and other heirlooms, as well as paintings, photographs or home movies. “The items that we pass down over generations become a key form of knowledge for families, either through the objects themselves, our emotional attachments to them, or the stories that we inherit alongside them,” the authors continue.

When I was about seven years old, my father turned around from the driver’s seat and asked why I always wanted to spend time with my grandparents. “They’re going to die sooner than us,” I said. The logic felt impeccable at the time. But later, as a teenager, I would roll my eyes when grown-ups talked about family history. When my grandpa raved about some obscure but important name he found up high in the branches of our family tree, I struggled to connect that to my modern self. That feels normal for the age, but at the Getty, I realize there may be a deeper reason.

A FACE SCULPTED in black stone jars me out of a museum daze and into the moment. The delicate curls, wide nose and strong lips remind me of my father and brothers. Clearly, the subject is a Black man. But his

bare chest and shoulders appear powerful and athletic, like those of a boxer — or perhaps a slave. Created by Francis Harwood in 1758, “Bust of a Man” may be one of the first sculptures of a Black person by a European artist. It’s the first piece at the Getty that looks much like me.

My father — Papi — grew up without a camera phone or art museums. Photos were expensive in the Dominican Republic, so his family shared their history around a table, telling stories loudly and with laughter. He came to the U.S. because he ran fast enough, even with cardboard taped to the soles of his shoes, to earn a track scholarship. He married my mother, but we were never very close, even before they separated when I was a child. I’ve only met his mother

THE DELICATE CURLS, WIDE NOSE AND STRONG LIPS REMIND ME OF MY FATHER AND BROTHERS. CLEARLY, THE SUBJECT IS A BLACK MAN. IT’S THE FIRST PIECE AT THE GETTY THAT LOOKS THIS MUCH LIKE ME.

— my abuela — and never even dreamed of traveling to his hometown.

There are reasons for this, and they’re logical enough. I grew up in Utah, primarily raised by my mother’s parents, among that side of the family. The people around me looked roughly like the faces in the Getty: overwhelmingly white and European, most living in some degree of comfort. That was my world, whether or not I felt truly at home there. Still, above all else: I haven’t cared enough to be curious, to listen, or to learn about my other half. Maybe I’m not that different from the country I live in. Now, I stare at “Bust of a Man,” waiting for an answer I know he cannot give. I stand still, like I’m facing a mirror. The bust is just over two feet tall, a head and

chest resting on a small pedestal of wood and marble. “Although the identity of the sitter is unknown,” the plaque reads, “the scar on his face suggests this is a portrait of a specific individual.”

Identity unknown, I repeat to myself.

IT FEELS FUNNY to point a camcorder at your own face, but it’s part of the experience. Maybe I’ll post a clip. Maybe I won’t. But the video will exist, and I’ll be able to remember this day as long as I have the technology to view it. It’s part of my identity that no longer depends on my ability — or desire — to remember it. Generation Z isn’t that different. We just use the tools available to us to accomplish something we’ve all longed for: to be present, and to be remembered.

This memorial rests on a certain condition: the care of those who follow us. Some families, and the individuals that compose them, are doomed to be forgotten, at least in the temporal sense. Their memories are washed away, their images lost, their names erased, because they didn’t have the tools to change that. My father’s family doesn’t have to end up that way. I am ashamed now that I have valued only one side of my history. It seems so obvious: including the whole family makes for a broader and richer world. I have some work ahead of me.

But today, camera phones and internet access are becoming nearly universal, bringing social media and selfies to even poverty-stricken areas of rural Asia or Africa, where clean water can still be difficult to keep around. Considering the role that our images play in our narrative as a human family, and the power that comes with joining the global conversation, this feels like a democratic process. Forget the cake, let them shoot photos!

I’m still self-conscious about my need to document everything, but I also think it’s important. And when I remember my grandma’s work, I realize something else. She didn’t build those scrapbooks for herself or even for the dead. She made them for my cousins, for me. So we can remember.

INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM SUMMIT

THE THREE-DAY EVENT FOCUSED ON RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION AROUND THE WORLD.

Deseret Magazine executive editor Hal Boyd was in Washington, D.C., for the third annual IRF Summit, a three-day event focused on religious freedom around the world. The summit was co-chaired by Sam Brownback, former senator from Kansas and the ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom from 2018 to 2021, and speakers included Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Samantha Power, the administrator of USAID and former ambassador to the U.N.

ABOVE:

KATRINA LANTOS SWETT, IRF SUMMIT 2023 CO-CHAIR, REFERENCED

MARTIN LUTHER

KING JR’S LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM IN HER OPENING REMARKS, POINTING OUT KING CHALLENGED HIS ALLIES TO JOIN HIM IN HIS FIGHT FOR EQUAL RIGHTS.

RIGHT: AARON SHERINIAN, CEO OF RADIANT FOUNDATION AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL REACH FOR DESERET MANAGEMENT CORPORATION, SAID BELIEVERS SHOULD NOT BE SHY WHEN THEY CALL FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM OR FOR MORE REPORTING ON THE ISSUE.

SAM BROWNBACK, FORMER SENATOR FROM KANSAS, SAID RELIGIOUS FREEDOM HAS BECOME A BIPARTISAN ISSUE.

LEFT: SAMANTHA POWER, ADMINISTRATOR OF THE U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (USAID) AND FORMER AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS, SAID REPRESSIVE REGIMES ACROSS THE WORLD ARE COLLABORATING TO TAKE AWAY FREEDOMS. “THEY’RE LEARNING FROM ONE ANOTHER. THEY’RE COPYING RESTRICTIONS FROM ONE COUNTRY, CUTTING-ANDPASTING THEM AND PUTTING THEM IN ANOTHER COUNTRY. “WE NEED TO BE AS SOPHISTICATED AS WE CAN BE IN... CONTESTING THESE ABUSES.”

DESERET MAGAZINE EXECUTIVE EDITOR HAL BOYD CONFERRED WITH RELIGIOUS LEADERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD DURING THE EVENT.

BIRD DANCE

BY TACEY M. ATSITTY

The nice thing about tree rings is tomorrow they’ll curve out of themselves, stay beneath blossom or shoot off into each other; they’ll grow then gray into each other—

to delineate one from another is like pulling at centipede grass:

you’ll pull up the entire lawn or forest, leaving only skinfolds of earthen mounds, carved-out wrist story of Monster Slayer: in a virgin creek, leg & thigh of his mother soak up the Sun. Immaculate pulse of radiance & ripple

in her soon rounded middle, jut out for (f)all— longer than any concentric season, dark and dry circles reveal a tree split open, what is found between arm bones—a kind of sheet music with all whole notes; this is how rings sing in the early morn, a choral of cicadas sound come, come as though they had wrists to shake gourds at His coming.

W. MILLER

THE ETHICIST

DAVID W. MILLER WEIGHS RIGHT AND WRONG, CREATIVITY AND COURAGE

BY LOIS M. COLLINS

In a time when what’s right and wrong seem to depend on who’s asking, ethics is still a field where people look for timeless answers to what matters over time.

David W. Miller, director of Princeton University’s Faith & Work Initiative and an ordained Presbyterian minister, argues that personal faith — in any form — can help us to figure that out. That’s why he takes his own spirituality to work, where he conducts research, lectures on business ethics and social responsibility, and consults with corporate clients.

An atypical academic, Miller spent 16 years in the business world, usually as an executive. He jokes that this makes him “bilingual,” since he loves both worlds. “I have a heart for the real world of business and the wider marketplace, as well as the theoretical world that comes with academia,” he says. He’s also literally bilingual, having spent his senior high school year in West Germany. He still keeps in touch with his German host family. He also spent eight years in London with his wife, who’s an attorney and law professor,

before they came home so he could study theology, earning a master of divinity degree and a doctorate in ethics.

Now he teaches college students considering careers to ponder their own ethics and values. He asks them to imagine what

I’M OF THE BELIEF THAT OVER TIME, DOING THE RIGHT THING PAYS IN MOST CONTEXTS — BUT THERE ARE PARTS OF THE WORLD WHERE THE SYSTEM IS SO BROKEN, SO CORRUPT, THAT WON’T HAPPEN.

they’ll do if their values don’t line up with those of future bosses, or if they face a choice about whether to stand up or stay silent in a scenario where speaking out could put jobs at risk. Students find such questions intriguing and unsettling, but

it probably helps that he laughs easily and often during conversations.

He spoke to Deseret about the state of ethics in 2023.

ARE “ETHICAL” AND “MORAL” THE SAME?

If you ask others in this space, you might get different answers. The school of thought I adhere to describes ethics as a branch of philosophy that attempts to be objective, impartial — a systematic way of thinking about concepts of right and wrong behavior. It’s an intellectual exercise and something you must act on. Morality is related, of course, but tends to be more a set of principles and standards derived from a particular context, whether religious or cultural. The morals of a community in Bahrain might be different from the morals of a community in Boston. With different standards, some would view certain behaviors as problematic and immoral, while others could view them as completely moral, amoral or somewhat neutral. My personal definition of ethics

DAVID

is the “art and discipline of discerning the right, the good and the fitting action to take and having the creativity and courage to do it.”

CREATIVITY AND COURAGE?

It can take courage to stand up or to be the outlier when everyone in the department or the company says, “This is great.” Well, no, I’m a little concerned; I don’t think it’s so great. And how do you have the creativity to say that without sounding know-it-all or preachy?

ARE WE MORE CAREFUL OR CARELESS ABOUT ETHICS THAN IN THE PAST?

It depends on who “we” are. Empirical data suggests high school students now express more openness to and evidence of cheating. That’s concerning to me. I asked my niece about that when she was that age. She paused and said, “Maybe we are, but maybe we’re just more honest in filling out surveys than you all were.” Baby boomers like me tend to think we were more ethical than we really were, but there’s also more ethical relativity now. I teach an elective course called Succeeding Without Selling Your Soul. We look at professional conduct, responsibility. The students are fine young men and women, but there’s reluctance to have boundaries, to say, “No, that’s just always wrong. You just don’t do that.” Cheating is so easy today with digital technologies. No longer are we writing answers on the palm of our hand or sneaking a piece of paper into a pocket. The sophistication of cheating today is just mind-boggling. Someone who might normally not be inclined to cheat could very easily be thrown into it.

WE KNOW KIDS ARE ANXIOUS. DOES THAT MAKE THEM MORE LIKELY TO TAKE SHORTCUTS?

I think it’s more so now, that capacity to rationalize behavior that at some level

you know is wrong, but you choose to do it on a utilitarian basis where the ends justify the means: I’m not hurting anybody and it’s important to me. There was a cheating scandal in an elite boarding school a few years ago. One of the top students was very STEM-oriented and as part of getting a well-rounded education, all were required to take a foreign language. She knowingly, willingly and with zero remorse, cheated to get an A. She said, “Look, I want to go to med school, and I don’t need to know French or Spanish or German for that.” That sort of thinking has always been present, but I think students are bolder to act on that utilitarian logic, rationalizing something you know is wrong.

WHAT ARE TODAY’S STUDENTS LIKE?

I see a yearning to have robust, honest conversations about the very things we’re talking about. They don’t want to be lectured or preached at; they’re interested in ethical ideas and concepts and how they apply to them. In the world of work there’s this sense, “Oh, that ethical problem was a bad apple or a few bad apples. I’ve made a shift. I don’t care about bad apples. They’re always going to be there and hopefully you screen out ethical psychopaths.

But why do good people sometimes do dumb things, unethical things? To the point that, in the cold light of day, they themselves will say, “What was I thinking? It wasn’t worth it.” I look at impediments to ethical decision-making and put a lot more accent on that. Some of those are within our control. And some are largely out of our control; they’re contextual — the culture of the organization that employs you. How do you navigate those? My students are intrigued. What might cause them — or me — to have a lapse? They find that sobering, a little bit scary, but very helpful.

DO ETHICS GET PUNISHED?

Doing the ethical thing can be a career-ending move, particularly if you’re in whistleblowing mode where you’ve tried all the right things and finally go to the press or something if your company has not supported you. I’m of the belief that over time, doing the right thing pays in most contexts — but there are parts of the world where the system is so broken, so corrupt, that won’t happen.

HOW’S CORPORATE CULTURE?

Companies are alert to the importance of professional conduct and ethics. Many have a chief ethics officer. Some differentiate between compliance and ethics, which are not the same. Ethics is character and culture, compliance is checking: Did you break any rules yesterday? I do a lot of advisory work with executives. Some had things go catastrophically wrong, or made embarrassing public mistakes resulting in fines. They say, “Can you help me rethink how we approach ethics and what sort of training we ought to do and how we embody it in our values?” Some have been caught by some regulatory body, so there’s a carrot or stick. But I think most really care about this.

WHAT’S YOUR LAST WORD?

Two things: Ethics is character and culture, not law and compliance. Laws are necessary, but not sufficient. Second, in the Western world we’ve committed intellectual malpractice by essentially deleting the wisdom found in great religious traditions, particularly in university systems. I’m not idealizing the past, but the questions and ideas and thoughts of people from a thousand or three thousand years ago are still relevant to modern-day ethics. There’s great wisdom to be found in these traditions that we ought to be looking at from a practical point of view. I’m fascinated to see what we can reclaim and how it might apply to current dilemmas.

intrigued by the themes of memory, connections and nostalgia, artist Twiggy Boyer carefully curates found photographs to explore her own recollections and experiences with others. Born and raised in Paris, France, Boyer is the co-founder of Photo Trouvée magazine.

COLLAGE BY TWIGGY BOYER

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