Evangelicals did not ‘abandon’ PEPFAR

Plus: courtyards, a tiny step away from security theater, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

But first, a housekeeping note: I will be on vacation for much of the next two weeks, so there will be no new post until Wednesday, July 30. Consider this all the more reason, if you’re not a paid subscriber, to upgrade your subscription to read this whole piece, get access to my full archive to read while I’m away, and encourage me to go ahead and get that second amaro spritz on an Italy trip five years in the making:

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Evangelicals did not ‘abandon’ PEPFAR

(via the Lagos Food Bank Initiative)

President Donald Trump came into office with a flurry of executive orders, many of them concerned with pausing or cutting U.S. foreign aid. One of the programs affected was the Bush-era President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has distributed lifesaving medical care to millions in Ethiopia, Uganda, Botswana, and other parts of Africa.

As Christianity Today’s Emily Belz has extensively reported, PEPFAR was granted a waiver to continue at least some operations. But in practice, the administration’s orders massively disrupted its work, causing widespread chaos and leading to preventable deaths. “More than 75,000 adults and children are now estimated to have died because of the effective shutdown of PEPFAR that began less than six months ago,” explains Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner in his latest article, and that running total is forecast to reach the millions if PEPFAR is shuttered entirely.

These numbers are horrifying. But Wehner’s interest is not only in the indisputably tragic cost of this policy shift. His primary contention, his headline claim, is that evangelicals “turned their back on PEPFAR” and thus are guilty of “the sheer cruelty of abandoning” the program—in some sense complicit in these deaths.¹

“As this human catastrophe unfolds, few American evangelical pastors, churches, denominations, or para-church organizations have spoken out against the destruction of PEPFAR,” Wehner charges. “Nor, from what I can tell, do they seem inclined to do so.”

What I wish more people understood about American evangelicals

This is a serious allegation, and Wehner’s recounting of his initial theories of the case is revealing. “Why have so many evangelicals remained silent?” he wonders, then suggests some answers, most of them unsympathetic:

Is it mostly explained by ignorance or indifference? Compassion fatigue? Or perhaps fealty to Trump? Is the silence among ministers explained by fear of upsetting congregants? A desire to keep their ministry separate from politics? Other ministry commitments?

However, when Wehner reports what he heard in conversations with “more than two dozen individuals, mostly pastors, past and present,” the picture changes dramatically. The answers he received overwhelmingly do not evoke evangelical cruelty or partisanship or cowardice. They are generally good and defensible reasons, more exculpatory than not.

Here’s the first and apparently most common explanation: People don’t know what PEPFAR is.

“Several [interviewees] said that most Christians, and most pastors, simply aren’t aware of PEPFAR,” Wehner notes. Well, of course they aren’t. This is the explanation I expected even before I’d read that far.

Polling from past debates over PEPFAR reauthorization shows most Americans across party lines support this kind of program, which is unsurprising: Saving children from being infected with HIV or orphaned by AIDS is not a hard sell. But that survey data does not mean most Americans have a clue as to who or what a “PEPFAR” might be. (Pollsters often describe the program rather than naming it so that respondents understand their questions.)

Our government is a sprawling entity and possessed of many acronyms.² I’d hazard a guess that fewer than 10 percent of Americans know PEPFAR by name and that evangelicals are probably slightly more knowledgeable on this than average, though not by much.