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    Syria’s Easter Celebrations Pass Peacefully, in Early Test of New Government

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    At one of the most famous Christian churches in Damascus, the Melkite Greek Catholic cathedral known as Al Zeitoun, the bishop spent part of Sunday’s Easter sermon comparing Jesus’s Resurrection to that of Syria.The metaphor was an obvious one. Less than five months have passed since Syrian rebels overthrew President Bashar al-Assad, putting a sudden end to the Assad family’s brutal half-century reign. The new Syria, liberated Syria, is still rising to its feet.But what that new nation will come to look like is an open question. While many Sunni Muslim Syrians have embraced the country’s new leaders, who espouse a conservative version of Islam, religious minorities who felt protected or empowered during Mr. al-Assad’s rule greeted the takeover with anxiety.Worshipers at the Orthodox Armenian Church in Damascus.Young people who attend Al Zeitoun church in the city streets on Saturday night.Easter, for Syria’s historically persecuted Christians, was therefore something of a test. How would the new government led by President Ahmed al-Shara, a former Al Qaeda member who says he has moderated and who has promised inclusivity and tolerance, handle one of Christianity’s most important holidays? Would it pass as peacefully as it had under Mr. al-Assad, who courted minority support with his secular outlook?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      America Wants a God

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      Today, we’re introducing “Believing,” a yearlong exploration from The Times on how we experience religion and spirituality now.Americans believe.Most people are wary of the government, the future and even each other, but they still believe in astonishing possibilities. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they have a spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world,” as we reported earlier this year.The country seems to be acknowledging this widespread spiritual hunger. America’s secularization is on pause, people have stopped leaving churches, and religion is taking a more prominent role in public life — in the White House, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and even at Harvard. It’s a major, generational shift. But what does this actually look like in people’s lives?I have spent the past year reporting “Believing,” a new project for The Times. This project is personal to me. I was raised a devout Mormon in Arkansas. I’ve left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I understand how wrestling with belief can define a life. I hoped to capture what that journey looked like for others, too — both inside and outside of religion. I interviewed hundreds of people, visited dozens of houses of worship and asked Times readers for their stories. More than 4,000 responded.In my reporting, I found that there are many reasons for this shift in American life. Researchers say the pandemic and the country’s limited social safety nets have inclined people to stick with (or even turn to) religion for support. But there is another reason, too: Many Americans are dissatisfied with the alternatives to religion. They feel an existential malaise, and they’re looking for help. People want stronger communities, more meaningful rituals and spaces to express their spirituality. They’re also longing to have richer, more nuanced conversations about belief.Unsatisfying alternativesIris LegendreOver the past few decades, around 40 million Americans left churches, and the number of people who say they have no religion grew to about 30 percent of the country.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Resurrection Faith Needs a Resurrection Church

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      Have you ever seen a person come back to life?I don’t mean literally. The Easter miracle of nearly 2,000 years ago is not so easily replicated. We don’t have the power to physically raise the dead. Instead, we Christians have faith that death is nothing more than a temporary separation from the people we love. The pain we feel at a funeral is a pain of absence, not the pain of permanent loss.No, I’m talking about something else — the resurrection and redemption when we see a person who is lost to darkness return to the light. It’s the dazzling smile when a young woman gets her one-year coin at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or it’s in the tears of joy when an estranged husband and wife finally embrace again after repentance and forgiveness.Or it’s in a moment like I experienced in a small church in Kentucky. One Sunday evening, our pastor was preaching about the prodigal son, Jesus’ parable about a young, ungrateful man who left his home, squandered his fortune and returned home completely broken, expecting to face anger and retribution — only to be greeted by a father who ran to him, embraced him and declared, “My son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”The pastor concluded his sermon with an altar call. “Some of you here are dead — you’re lost in a life you don’t want — but you can live again.”It was a simple call, one that pastors have made countless times in countless churches. Often they’re ignored. The congregation sings its final song and files out. But this time someone answered.From the back of the church, a young man choked out a single word: “Pastor?”It sounded like a question, as if he was asking for permission to come forward. When we looked back to see who’d spoken, I heard a gasp. The young man was a deacon’s son who had abandoned his faith long ago. He’d become angry and violent. He bullied kids in the church’s youth group. It was shocking that he’d even shown up at church.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      One Nation, Under God

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      Americans have stopped leaving Christianity. And the country is overwhelmingly spiritual, a new report found.As religion in America declined, experts administered last rites.Churches were approaching “their twilight hour” as attendance fell, The Brookings Institution wrote in 2011. In his 2023 book, “Losing Our Religion,” the evangelical preacher Russell Moore asked: “Can American Christianity survive?”The answer appears to be yes. People have stopped leaving churches en masse, according to a new study released this morning by Pew Research. America’s secularization is on pause for now, likely because of the pandemic and the country’s sustained spirituality. Most Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they hold one or more spiritual beliefs that Pew asked about:Share of U.S. adults who believe … More

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      America Loses Its Soul When It Rejects People Fleeing Danger

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      I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be “civilized.” It’s not caring for one’s own; animals do that. It’s not making music and art; cave men drew and sang. It is, I believe, to live with a moral standard that takes into account our fellow man, and to ask: What do we owe one another, and what do we owe strangers?For me, to be civilized boils down to being willing to work against our own lesser interests in order to alleviate greater suffering, no matter the sufferer’s identity or relationship to us. It is a high standard, but it is not heroism, which is putting one’s own life in real danger for another.After World War II, a large group of lawmakers decided to codify this principle of humanitarian duty into international law. Nonrefoulement (from the French “fouler,” meaning “to trample”) is the idea that vulnerable people, once arrived on safe shores, should never be sent back into danger. Put simply, it is the premise that the least we can do is not knowingly send someone out to die. It is this idea that was challenged by the first Trump administration, with its “Remain in Mexico” policy, which denied responsibility for asylum seekers. Now, in his second term, President Trump has not only reinstated that harmful policy but also suspended thousands of existing asylum cases, and canceled appointments and even flights for refugees already cleared to enter the United States. All of this goes against a contract this country signed 58 years ago.One hundred and forty-five countries signed the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention (the United States signed on to the bulk of the convention’s requirements in 1967, including those on refoulement), which states: “No contracting state shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”The language in the treaty was designed to be all-encompassing, and to acknowledge that there will always be refugees fleeing persecution. The vaguest protected category, “particular social group,” was added by a Swedish delegate who worried that some people who deserve shelter would not fit into the existing categories. How could anyone when this language was drafted, just six years after the horrors of the Holocaust, foretell whom the next atrocity would target? “Particular social group,” then, was written as a catchall, to make sure everyone who needed refuge would be covered by the legal language.In 1988, my family fled Iran and landed in the United Arab Emirates. After nearly a year, we were recognized as refugees by the U.N.’s High Commissioner on Refugees and sent to a camp in Italy. There we sat for another six months or so, waiting and submitting to “credible fear” interviews, wherein asylum seekers must prove to an immigration office that the danger back home is real, not imagined. My mother explained to the officers that her Christian conversion was apostasy according to Islamic law, and that before we escaped, she had been imprisoned, interrogated and told she’d be executed. As we told our story, I sensed that our interlocutors’ aim was to save us, not to send us away. Later, too, I saw American neighbors and friends embracing this moral duty, a responsibility and an instinct to protect lives more vulnerable than their own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Pauses Online Tirade to Preach Unity

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      Of all the many forms Donald J. Trump can take, maybe the most perplexing one is Pious Trump.It is a shape he shifted into shortly after 8 o’clock on Thursday morning to deliver a sermon of sorts on Capitol Hill for the annual National Prayer Breakfast. In the grand amphitheater of National Statuary Hall, members of Congress sat before him. There were leaders of the Republican Party, never so in thrall to him as they are now. There were Democrats, never so lost and powerless in their struggle against him as they are now.“Look at each other,” he urged. He said they were a “great group of people” and beseeched them to come together. “We have to make life better for everyone,” he said.President Trump, appealing to the better angels?Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle filled Statuary Hall on Thursday morning.Eric Lee/The New York TimesThis was somewhat amazing, since the various other forms of Mr. Trump happened to be running around with flamethrowers earlier that morning, torching the federal bureaucracy, the global order, the media, the opposition party in the room and even the messaging coming out of his own White House.Just before his arrival at the Capitol to preach unity, he had gone on a fiery posting spree. He demanded that CBS lose its broadcasting license. He trumpeted a baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats had “STOLLEN” billions of dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development to pay off media outlets for slanted coverage. “DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE,” he wrote. “TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!” In another post a few minutes before that one, he elaborated upon his desire to grab the Gaza Strip, an idea that drew bipartisan condemnation and shocked even his own staff, who tried to clean it up yesterday, evidently to no avail. He described Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, pejoratively as a Palestinian.This was all difficult to square with the version of Mr. Trump who arrived at the Capitol a little over an hour later and had only warm words to say about Mr. Schumer. “Chuck, thank you very much,” Mr. Trump said as he read out a list of names of lawmakers he believed were present, “thank you.” (In fact, Mr. Schumer had skipped the ceremony to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Excruciating Wait for Abundant Life Christian School Families After Shooting

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      Inside Abundant Life Christian School, a chilling message came over the intercom late Monday morning: “Lockdown. This is not a drill.”Teachers herded students out of view, a sixth-grader recalled. Then there was banging, and screaming. “Everybody started freaking out,” said the student, Breken Ives.The sirens came minutes later.“Police car after police car,” said John Diaz de Leon, a retiree in his 60s who lives near the school in Madison, Wis., and who soon headed outside to see what was bringing so many squad cars to usually quiet Buckeye Road.It would be hours before anyone knew any of the details that the police disclosed in a series of news conferences — including that the shooter was a student at the small private school, and that a teacher and a fellow student had been killed and six others injured.Mr. Diaz de Leon had tuned into a police scanner and heard the words “triage” and “D.O.A.” — dead on arrival. Outside the school, he watched as two police officers with long guns drawn approached the school building, leading a police dog. Soon, groups of students began running out, some coatless and holding hands.All around Madison, parents began to rush toward the school. One father, Mike Brube, was blocks away at work, he said, when he saw the police cruisers screaming by, sirens blaring.He drove straight to the school where his seventh-grader, Angel, had been enrolled throughout childhood. “The school is Christian, and it’s like a family place,” Mr. Brube said.Viktoriya Gonzales was among the parents who waited anxiously near the school for hours to be reunited with their children. Some of the students were held back to talk with police officers as the authorities began to investigate.Ms. Gonzales had heard from other students that her son, 12, was safe but “severely traumatized, because he was right by the shooter.”“That’s all I know,” she said. More

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      The Trouble Began Where #MeToo Became #ChurchToo

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      When did we know that the #MeToo moment was truly over?At its most compelling, #MeToo tried to change a culture that both concealed and enabled the illegal abuse of women and imposed hypocritical double standards, holding women to one standard of behavior while celebrating and elevating unscrupulous men.But events in 2024 have told us loudly and clearly that the moment has passed.Perhaps it was when reports emerged that Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice to be the next secretary of defense, had paid an accuser to settle a sexual assault claim. He denies wrongdoing, but his defense — that he had consensual sex with a married woman — was still dreadful. His philandering and mistreatment of women have been so egregious that his mother called him an “abuser of women,” in an email to him (she has since disavowed her statement) — and yet somehow his chances of being confirmed by the Senate appear to be increasing.Perhaps it was when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who is married to the actress Cheryl Hines, allegedly had an improper “personal relationship” via smartphone with Olivia Nuzzi, a political reporter who is much younger, and she lost her job while he was picked to run the Department of Health and Human Services.But I think it happened earlier, when a jury found Donald Trump responsible for sexual abuse, and he was ultimately re-elected to the presidency. After years of rightfully arguing that combating sexual assault and sexual abuse can’t override due process, many conservatives not only disregarded the jury verdict, they actually reveled in how little his voters cared about the scandal, or just dismissed it as another instance of “lawfare” against Trump.I distinctly remember the mood on the right when the #MeToo movement got going. There was a sense of schadenfreude. The morally bankrupt, sexualized culture of Hollywood and the liberal media had finally been exposed. For all their talk about feminism and respecting women, many famous liberals proved to be dangerous hypocrites — or much, much worse.Yes, there was leakage into right-wing media. Roger Ailes was pushed out at Fox News in 2016, and Bill O’Reilly suffered the same fate after my Times colleagues Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt reported that O’Reilly or Fox had paid $13 million to settle claims of sexual misconduct made by five different women against him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hal Lindsey, Author of ‘The Late, Great Planet Earth,’ Dies at 95

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      In that 1970 book and others he wrote of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.Hal Lindsey, a onetime Mississippi Delta tugboat captain who became a campus preacher and improbably vaulted to fame and riches by writing that the world would soon end with natural catastrophes and ruinous wars, followed by the return of Jesus Christ, died on Monday at his home. He was 95.His death was announced on his website. The announcement did not specify where he lived.Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.An editor at Bantam Books thought the book, Mr. Lindsey’s first, had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold around 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages.If you are reading this, Mr. Lindsey’s doomsday predictions have not come true, and his prophesies of imminent end-of-the-world events seem less credible with each passing day. Yet Mr. Lindsey was indeed a harbinger — of a movement he helped create.“Hal Lindsey is one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of contemporary prophecy belief,” Paul S. Boyer, a historian who specialized in the role of religion in American life, wrote several years before his own death in 2012. While Mr. Boyer saw the book as neither profound nor truly avant-garde, he wrote that its author “represents another one of those moments of breakthrough, when interest in Bible prophecy spills out beyond just the ranks of the true believers and becomes a broader cultural phenomenon.”The Middle East, and Israel in particular, were central to Mr. Lindsey’s predictions. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” was published just three years after Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Mr. Lindsey was on safe ground in predicting that Israel’s victory would not bring peace, but he envisioned events far worse than the violence and tensions that plague the region.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More