World Religions News

SÃO PAULO (RNS) — Once hailed by evangelical Christian leaders of different stripes for his support of their churches, Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro, currently awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail along with his wife, Cilia Flores, has apparently lost most of his Christian backers in his native country.

While evangelical groups have come out for pro-Maduro demonstrations since Jan. 3, when U.S. troops bombed Caracas and other locations and abducted Maduro and Flores, most churches have remained silent, and most Christian leaders have not issued public statements. At least one evangelical movement has opted to leave the movement known as Chavismo, whose name is a nod to its founder and Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez.

Since Chávez took office in 1999, the Venezuelan government and the Catholic Church, whose followers make up least 63% of the population, have famously warred over autonomy and alleged political interference, beginning with the constitution approved shortly after Chávez assumed power. It removed privileges historically enjoyed by the church and established freedom of worship and religion, and was received by many Catholics as a direct blow to its hegemony.

“This way, we finally could have access to schools and universities. He expanded our social space,” said Bishop Gamaliel Lugo, of the Venezuelan Evangelical Pentecostal Union, known by the Spanish acronym UEPV. The union has been close to Chavismo from the beginning.

But if Chávez managed to win over some evangelical backers with policies that were designed more to reduce the power of the Catholic Church than for their benefit, Maduro, who became president when Chavéz died in March 2013, directly appealed to evangelicals, hoping to secure their loyalty. One of the landmarks in that process occurred in March of 2024, when Maduro held a massive meeting with Christian leaders from across the country in the city of Puerto Cabello.

An estimated 17,000 delegates took part in the event, including ministers from international megachurches such as the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, whose acronym in Portuguese is IURD. In Brazil’s 2022 elections, IURD, like many evangelical denominations, opposed leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party but failed to secure victory for far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. In Venezuela, however, the church has openly voiced support for Maduro, who on paper is a socialist, though his programs of anti-imperialism and wealth distribution have dissolved into a general authoritarianism.

IURD Bishop Ronaldo Santos, the leader of the church in Venezuela, not only fervently prayed for Maduro in Puerto Cabello, but also asked God to lift all U.S. economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela.

After the Puerto Cabello gathering, Maduro established a program called Bono El Buen Pastor (Good Shepherd Bonus), which provides a monthly payment to Christian ministers funded by the regime. His government also launched Mi Iglesia Bien Equipada (My Well-Equipped Church), a program that provides audio equipment and other goods for churches in need. In some cases, the government paid for the church renovations. “I receive a monthly payment today, as do numerous ministers. Such a thing had never been possible, not even under Chávez,” Lugo said.

The Rev. Elida Quevedo, a minister at the Evangelical Pentecostal Church Genesis in Caracas and a UEPV member, recalled that Maduro also created Pastors’ Day, to be celebrated every Jan. 15. “Even so, anti-Chavista propaganda never stopped claiming that Chavismo is against Christianity. The idea is to silence people like us,” Quevedo said.

When Maduro was arrested and spirited out of the country in January, UEPV issued a letter repudiating the “imperial U.S. aggression” and the “kidnappings” of Maduro and Flores. But the numerous statements from other evangelical leaders that they expected never appeared.

In a January interview, Moisés García, leader of another once strongly pro-Maduro association, Christian Evangelical Movement for Venezuela, or MOCEV, said he had spoken with the new president, Delcy Rodríguez, although MOCEV and other associations were not certain at that point about their role in the future government.

Now García, who served in Venezuela’s legislature but left office in January after losing his reelection bid, said: “We spoke with Delcy two days after the incident and told her that we were at her disposal. But we haven’t received any response,” García said, adding, “She is not fond of Christianity and hasn’t said anything about the churches since she took office.”

But MOCEV’s cooling relationship with Chavismo, García said, stems from the 2024 meeting with Maduro in Puerto Cabello, which likely caused many smaller evangelical churches to change their views of the regime. “Only the megachurches were invited and the popular evangelical groups were left out,” said García. “That led to the 2024 electoral results.”

While Maduro was declared the winner that year, with 51% of the votes, an opposition coalition claimed that its candidate, Edmundo González, had received 67%. The government has never presented the complete voting records, prompting Maduro’s adversaries, notably Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and her allies, to insist the elections were fraudulent.

While no ally of Machado or González, García said: “We think a political reset is necessary. New elections must be held this year or next, and economic change needs to be felt by the people.” 

While the UEPV and a few other Christian organizations still advocate for “an ideological Chavista stance” and others remain silent, MOCEV “supports a third way, without Delcy Rodríguez and without María Corina Machado,” said García. “Those are extremists rejected by the people,” he said.

According to political analyst Johel Orta Moros, Maduro astutely realized that evangelicals were growing among popular sectors of Venezuelan society and managed to attract them to Chavismo. “The current silence of that segment in the face of the changes imposed by the United States in Venezuela may seem awkward, but the reality is that everybody is planning their next steps,” he told RNS.

Lugo and Quevedo support a religion and worship bill introduced by the Chavismo party that, in their view, will expand evangelicals’ rights. They hope it will be approved and that UEPV will return to its role as an evangelical power broker in the coming years. “We think Maduro’s kidnapping ended up uniting Venezuelans,” Lugo said.

But Orta Moros believes the current uncertainty will continue for a long time, arguing that Venezuela is at the center of a major geopolitical transformation. “We have a new kind of polarization centered on Russia, China and the United States. Energy resources are the target.” As the dust settles, he said, along with García, that new elections are the country’s “only hope.”

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Italian Olympic speedskating champion Francesca Lollobrigida faced backlash for bringing her energetic 2-year-old son to interviews after her gold medal wins last month. But at the Vatican on Tuesday (March 17), officials held her up as a model of motherhood and elite sport.

“Francesca’s choice is not an obvious one,” said Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, who heads the Vatican department for culture and education, during a press conference at the Vatican. “In her victory, we celebrate the victory of all men and women who say it is possible.”

Lollobrigida learned she was pregnant with her son, Tommaso, soon after winning silver and bronze medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. While many said she would not be able to return to the ice, she continued training after her pregnancy and while breastfeeding as she prepared to compete in the 2026 Olympic Games in Milano Cortina.

“I did not give up when they told me I would not win again — and instead, I won even more,” Lollobrigida said at the Vatican press conference.

On Feb. 7, her 35th birthday, Lollobrigida won gold in the 3,000-meter speedskating competition, setting a new Olympic record in the process. On Feb. 12, she won a second gold medal in the 5,000-meter race. The New York Times referred to her as “Super Mom.”

“I wasn’t afraid. I surprised myself because I won against myself,” Lollobrigida said, pointing to the challenges she faced as an athlete and as a mother to achieve her results, including sleepless nights and getting sick from the illnesses her son would bring home from daycare. “I made a decision not to give up either a family or an Olympic dream.”

But Lollobrigida received backlash online after doing interviews while holding her spirited son. At the Vatican, she said she has accepted the criticism but is determined to spread her message of being a mother-athlete — in that order. She said many mothers wrote to her to show support and share their struggles with managing motherhood and other responsibilities.

Tommaso was present at the press conference and rushed to sit on his mother’s lap, to the applause of curial officials and the cardinal. The Vatican sports team, Athletica Vaticana, gifted Lollobrigida with a shirt with the papal colors of yellow and white.

“I was smiling during the race because I was enjoying it — I was doing what I love and did not give up,” Lollobrigida said.

She said her achievements would not have been possible without the support of her team and family, which supported her through the years. “With the right support, and by being mentally strong, a woman can be a mother, a worker and an athlete,” she said.

Pope Leo XIV wrote a letter addressed to Olympic athletes ahead of the start of the Winter Olympic Games, stressing that the human element of sport and competition must remain at the center of the Olympics. He will meet with Italian Olympic athletes on April 9 at the Vatican, in an event meant to address athletes worldwide and highlight the unifying and peace-building dimension of athletics.

“Sport is truly at the service of the happiness of the human person in all his or her dimensions,” Tolentino de Mendonça said, adding, “The greatest medal is joy and hope, and feeling within oneself that one’s life has succeeded.”

(RNS) — In late February, Vincent Lloyd, director of Africana studies at Villanova University, interviewed Dwight N. Hopkins, an influential scholar of Black liberation theology who teaches at the University of Chicago. When the interview was published on the Political Theology Network website, as “From James Cone to Donald Trump,” many in the world of Black church theology were taken aback, as Lloyd questioned whether Hopkins had become a supporter of President Trump and the MAGA movement. This would be a sharp departure from Hopkins’ mentor, James H. Cone, the father of Black liberation theology, who died in 2018.

But Lloyd didn’t stop there. He speculated whether Hopkins had followed the supposed trajectory of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “a strand of conservative Black nationalism that responds to the existential insecurity of Black men thrust into elite white spaces.”

Within minutes of its publication, Lloyd’s interview circulated via social media around the world, sending shock waves through the academy. Scholars of religion, theology, biblical studies and related fields registered their confusion, frustration and, in many cases, outright dismay. That a second-generation Black liberation theologian might abandon his commitment to liberation theology, only to find a home in a right-wing political movement that many interpret as hostile to the aims of liberationist thought, was difficult to reconcile.

If true, the claims presented in the interview felt less like a provocative intellectual shift and more like a profound betrayal.

None of it matched what we know about Hopkins. It left many important questions unanswered, primarily: What happened? How are we to account for such a shift? On social media, this became the central refrain: What happened? How could someone who had devoted his scholarly vocation to advocating for the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed embrace a far-right theo-political movement at this stage of his career?

To answer these questions for myself, I reached out to Hopkins about the Political Theology column. In my own interview, which is excerpted below, I explored Hopkins’ inquiry into the Black MAGA movement. We talked about his methodology of going deep into the world of groups he studies, including those with whom he disagrees.

What I came away with is that Hopkins’ turn to research on Black MAGA does not reflect his support of the movement, but rather his curiosity about what attracts other Black people to a political sphere increasingly entangled with white Christian nationalism, colonial attitudes and racial domination.

What he claims to have uncovered is a segment of Black people, particularly in underserved communities, who have leaned into a conservative politic out of discontent with decades of liberal allegiance. His findings provide Hopkins with a theoretical frame for writing about Black Trump supporters but also inform his effort to teach his students how to think and not what to think.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Are you a Black MAGA supporter or leader of the black MAGA movement?

No, I’m not Black MAGA and I’m not a leader in the Black MAGA movement. I am a Black liberation theologian. 

What is Black liberation theology?

Black liberation theology is about poor and working-class families who follow the Jesus stories so that they can have spiritual and material resources to build a life that is freedom. The key term is liberation. It signifies Jesus’ stories about why he came. His incarnation and self-revelation have one primary purpose – to help poor and working people have an abundant life and resources for their families and all communities by liberating them from anything that will block this purpose so that they can practice freedom.

The theology shows how, after his death, his liberation-freedom obligation was passed down through generations. And “Black” answers this question: How has the liberation and theology manifest in Black American culture? There are different institutions that practice BLT, but the Black church plays a huge role in this process.

BLT is a constructive project, not a deconstructive one. One form of BLT starts with what has white supremacy done to Black people, but a second way starts with affirmation and joy for what Jesus has done for poor and working-class Black people. This latter approach gets families up every morning and gets children or the family ready for a new day — a day that was not promised to us. But in the process of joy and building a new day, evil happens. And then one has to deal with evil.

What can you tell us about the theological themes?

The very first article I ever published was “Poor Brother, Rich Brother: Faith, Family, and Education,” in 1991, three years after my first Ph.D. The purpose of the article is to speak about Black American men in the Black church and the larger society, and points to one set of themes underlying my entire near 40 years of teaching. I’m concerned with faith in the Jesus stories in the Bible, the thriving of the family, and education of young generations. What holds these themes together in the article was my describing the economic and material differences within the Black community, especially between poor Black American men and rich ones. “Ultimately,” it concluded, “the plight of the poor brother depends partly on the democratization of the major economic resources in North America.”

That included opening up venture capital so more poor and working people can own wealth for their families. I’ve been on the path of these themes for some time for nearly four decades.

What can you say about your research methods?

I’ve always linked some form of field work and primary sources in my publications. In the case of that first article, I had been working with Black men while doing pulpit duties in a Black church in New York while I was completing my M.Div., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees. That article includes secondary literature and social science data, but it is also based on my work out in the field among rich and poor Black Christian men.

Throughout my academic career, I’ve pursued the archival work and field investigation like a theological anthropologist. I get involved in the subject matter as an academic researcher. In the field, I do interviews, go to different meetings and purchase pamphlets, flyers, paraphernalia, unpublished manuscripts, photographs, minutes from meetings, notes taken, newspapers, journals, transcripts and so on. 

Sometimes it leads to some strange places. For my dissertation, which became my first book, “Black Theology USA and South Africa: Politics, Culture, and Liberation,” I visited the homes of 15 of the founders of USA Black liberation theology and flew to South Africa, which was under a state of emergency, to interview 15 of the founders of South African Black theology.

I also talked to an Afrikaaner theologian, one of the architects of apartheid. My purpose was not to argue with him or try to convince him about the evils of apartheid. My academic purpose was to get as much information to inform my writing project.

Even when I am only editing a book, I follow the same method. I spend time with each of the contributors to learn about his or her theology, method and who they were as people. In 2009, as lead editor of “Another World Is Possible: Spiritualities and Religions of Global Darker Peoples,” I initiated a 14-country network to think about the practices of building healthy communities and healthy individuals in communities. I traveled around the world, gathering archival, primary and secondary literature from each country. I also got to know each person one-to-one.

How did the Lloyd interview come about, and what was the process?

I was told that the purpose of the interview would be to understand my academic work, its scholarly development over the years and how my academic projects relate to politics. The request appeared to come out of interest in my academic research, and that is why I agreed to the interview. I was quite surprised with the final product, especially the preface, before my actual interview.

The author never mentioned to me any of the claims he makes in the preface, nor had I seen the title of the column. If he had told me what the interview was really about and what he actually thought about my work, I could have easily explained each point, by unpacking my work and my academic method. The preface to the interview engages neither.

Also, the published interview looks rather disjointed and raw, as if disparate points were thrown against the wall, so to speak, to see what might stick, and it ends in a flat way, about a bassoon. It appeared just over 24 hours after the interview was conducted. It seemed like its conclusions were ready beforehand and disjointedly placed in front of a rapid and raw printout of the interview.

(Leonard C. McKinnis II is an associate professor of African American studies and religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

(RNS) — A Muslim woman who was the last pro-Palestinian protester still in immigration custody after the Trump administration’s 2025 campus crackdown walked free from a Texas detention center Monday (March 16). 

Leqaa Kordia, a 33-year-old Palestinian woman who has lived in New Jersey for 10 years and had been in custody for a year, was detained last March after protesting near Columbia University against Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, which killed nearly 200 of her family members. 

“Alhamdullah (thank God) I am free, after a long hard year,” she told worshippers at the Valley Ranch Islamic Center in Irving, Texas, hours after her release. “It wasn’t easy in ICE’s dungeons.” 

Kordia was freed Monday on a $100,000 bond after an immigration judge ordered her release on Friday, her lawyers said. It’s the third time a judge has ordered her release. The Department of Homeland Security challenged the first two rulings and kept her in detention.

In February, Kordia was hospitalized for a seizure and unreachable by her lawyers and family for three days, renewing nationwide calls for her release.

“We are overwhelmed with relief and gratitude at the release of our beloved Leqaa Kordia,” said Hamzah Abushaban, Kordia’s cousin, in a statement. “This past year has taken an unimaginable toll on Leqaa and our entire family.”

Kordia — who was not a student at Columbia and was not involved in political student organizing — was first arrested by New York City police during a protest outside the gates of the school in 2024, but the charges against her were dropped. The New York City Police Department later shared information about her arrest with the Trump administration. 

Kordia was then arrested during a voluntary check-in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New Jersey on March 13, 2025.  Her lawyer said she was in the process of securing legal residence. The federal government has said she was detained for overstaying her student visa.

In a statement to Religion News Service in February, a DHS spokesperson referred to her involvement in Palestine solidarity protests. DHS had previously also scrutinized Kordia’s payments to her family in Gaza, telling The Associated Press that Kordia was “providing financial support to individuals living in nations hostile to the U.S.”

Over the past year, other people who have protested in support of Palestinian rights have been placed in immigration detention and have faced legal proceedings, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Yaakub Ira Vijandre and Badar Khan Suri.

A kaffiyeh draped on her shoulders, Kordia told reporters outside of Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas on Monday that she would continue fighting for the people she met in detention.

In recent months, some Texas lawmakers raised alarms about Kordia’s detention, according to reports from The Dallas Morning News. Over 30 Texas state officials sent a letter in January to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem demanding Kordia’s release, saying her confinement is part of the Trump administration’s “broader crackdown on freedom of expression and its criminalization of peaceful protest.” 

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani also called for Kordia’s release in a recent meeting to President Donald Trump, he wrote on X.

(RNS) — The U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran is now in its third week, and the consequences of the war for Americans are beginning to hit home. Not only have we lost servicemen and women, we have expended billions of dollars on weapons and logistical costs. And the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas travels, has reduced exports, raising gas prices and, indirectly, almost all prices.

President Donald Trump’s energy policy has left the country unprepared for his war. At a time when the country desperately needs alternatives to oil and gas, his policies have left us naked to the storms of war.

Pope Francis was a prophetic voice on behalf of peace and the environment, and Pope Leo XIV has taken up this mission. Diplomacy should always be preferred to war. And if Francis’ warnings about climate change had been heeded by Trump, our country would be better prepared for the current energy crisis. Even if you do not accept the popes’ moral arguments, green energy is not only good for the planet, it is good for national security.

The closing of the Strait of Hormuz has caused the price of crude oil to go over $100 a barrel. This means higher prices for gasoline, diesel and everything in the economy that runs on oil or is made from oil. Not only will it cost more to drive your car, it will cost more to deliver goods by rail and truck to consumers.

Natural gas prices have also gone through the roof. This will lead to higher prices for electricity, fertilizers and other products.

This is good news for Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which can now sell its oil and gas at higher prices to finance its war on Ukraine. It is also good news for oil and gas producers in the United States; they will make billions of dollars since their prices are set by global markets. But it is bad news for Americans who already think prices are too high.

It is also bad news for Detroit’s auto industry, which has continued to focus on trucks and big cars as they currently are more profitable than the sale of smaller, fuel-efficient cars. Many companies are not ready to put electric vehicles on the market, especially since Trump told Detroit to forget about electric cars last year. 

Higher gasoline prices, however, always make consumers question their love affair with trucks and big cars. Don’t be surprised when sales of trucks and big cars fall, followed by a fall in automotive stocks and jobs. Meanwhile, China is dominating the world market in electric cars. Soon, Detroit could have no future.

The president’s energy policies have been bad for the Earth and bad for our national security. But it is not entirely his fault. Even before he entered politics, the Republican Party pampered the fossil fuel industries by protecting their tax loopholes and giving them cheap access to government lands. Meanwhile, they have opposed energy efficiency standards, wind turbines, solar energy or any form of green energy.

These national security hawks talked a good game but failed to protect the nest.

Yet without the energy standards that Trump and the Republicans attack, we would be much less prepared for today’s energy crisis.

Government fuel economy standards have saved over 2 trillion gallons of gasoline in the U.S. since 1975. Without these standards, the demand and therefore the price of gasoline would be even higher.

LED lighting also uses roughly 75%-90% less energy than incandescent bulbs. Other government standards have made refrigerators and other electrical appliances more efficient. Imagine what our electricity needs would be if these standards had not been put in place.

Republicans have traditionally opposed government subsidies to alternative energy projects, and now that solar and wind energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, they are still using the government to stop green energy.

Trump has stopped the expansion of land-based and offshore wind farms, including five offshore wind projects on the East Coast. The president has also made things difficult for solar energy. Without Trump’s tariffs, solar panels would be much cheaper.

China, on the other hand, which is highly dependent on oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, has expanded green energy to the point that it has more wind and solar capacity on its grid than it does fossil fuel capacity. Other countries, like Pakistan, took advantage of cheap solar panels from China to reduce their imports of oil and natural gas.

Many farmers and ranchers are ahead of their Republican representatives because they see solar and wind energy providing a revenue stream that can help them keep their land.

And now, Trump’s energy policies and his war of choice oppose each other. We are now reaping the results of his insane policies.

Trump believes he can stop the war whenever he wants, but that does not mean that Iran will immediately open the Strait of Hormuz. It could be months before the oil and liquid natural gas flow again. Keeping the strait open without Iran’s cooperation will require more fighting and probably American boots on the ground in Iran.

Trump has made a terrible mistake by ignoring our need for alternative energy and going to war with Iran. For this, the country will suffer. He should have listened to Popes Francis and Leo.