The Rev. William Barber addresses a crowd at a demonstration organized by the Poor People’s Campaign outside the U.S. Capitol on June 29, 2024. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)
June 29, 2024
By Jack Jenkins

WASHINGTON (RNS) — Thousands of clergy, union members and activists rallied on behalf of the poor near the U.S. Capitol on Saturday (June 29), with faith leaders calling for lawmakers to embrace a slate of policies and for low-wealth Americans to make their voices heard in November as the nation’s “largest potential swing vote.”

The Rev. William Barber, co-chair of the organizing group the Poor People’s Campaign, declared to the sprawling crowd Saturday morning that poor people — who, he stressed, represent members of both major parties — are one of the largest untapped voting blocs in the country. Citing studies compiled by the Poor People’s Campaign, Barber argued poor and low-wealth people do not vote to their full potential, despite making up around 30% of the national electorate and close to 40% of voters in battleground states.

Were the poor to vote with full strength, Barber said, they could potentially elect lawmakers who support policies focused on the wide range of topics that impact the poor, such as voting rights, raising the federal minimum wage, housing issues, LGBTQ+ rights and climate change.

“Like the Prophet Moses, honored by Jews, Muslims and Christians, led the people out of bondage of Egypt, it’s time to rise,” he said. “Like the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel’s vision, we’ve got to rise. Like the ancient vision of the prophet, when the stones that the builders rejected became the chief cornerstone of a new reality, we have got to rise.”

A crowd gathers at a Poor People’s Campaign event outside the U.S. Capitol on June 29, 2024. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Speakers at the demonstration, which has been planned for months and recently promoted by Barber on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” grappled with two major political happenings that took place this week: a Supreme Court decision upholding bans barring homeless people from sleeping outside in certain cities, and the presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Barber, who personally endorsed Biden ahead of the 2020 election and preached at the president’s inaugural prayer service, seemed dubious of calls for the president to halt his re-election bid in the wake of his widely panned debate performance, which included moments when Biden paused for long periods of time or lost his train of thought. Noting that an array of issues that impact the poor are at stake in the 2024 election, Barber — who walks with a cane and has been public about his own health struggles — suggested Biden’s poor performance shouldn’t be seen as disqualifying.

“In my tradition, Moses stuttered, but he brought down Pharaoh,” Barber said, to cheers. “Jeremiah: depression, but he stood up for justice. Jesus was acquainted with sorrow. Harriet Tubman had epilepsy. People getting caught up on how a candidate walks — well, let me tell you, I have trouble walking, but I know how to walk toward justice.”

Even so, Barber and other speakers lamented the lack of conversation about poverty this campaign season. Barber voiced similar frustrations during the 2020 election, when Biden and several other Democratic nominees participated in a Poor People’s Campaign candidates forum. On Saturday, Barber announced his group would send statements to major networks imploring them to bring up the poverty issues at any future televised debates.

“In politics, there is a dirty, ugly, open secret that the word ‘poverty’ — the topic of poverty — is a taboo subject,” said the Rev. Adam Taylor, president of Sojourners. “We saw that displayed in the first presidential debate on Thursday night where the candidates spent more time debating their golf game than they did debating what would help all of us.”

Other religious speakers included Wendsler Nosie Sr., founder and leader of the Apache Stronghold; the Rev. Terri Hord Owens, general minister and president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); the Rev. Leslie Copeland Tune, senior associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches; the Rev. Theresa Lewallen of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia; Sheila Katz, head of the National Council of Jewish Women; the Rev. Jimmie Hawkins, advocacy director for the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Office of Public Witness; and the Rev. Abhi Janamanchi, a Unitarian Universalist minister who also represented Hindus for Human Rights.

The Supreme Court’s decision was also a subject of scrutiny, with Poor People’s Campaign co-chair the Rev. Liz Theoharis blasting the justices’ ruling on Grants Pass v. Johnson from Friday, which ruled that cities may ban homeless residents from sleeping outside.

“It is wrong for the highest court in the land to criminalize homelessness, to rule that you cannot breathe in public — on a bench, in your car or in a park — if you do not have a home,” Theoharis said.

The Rev. Mira Sawlani-Joyner, the Minister for Justice, Advocacy and Change at New York’s historic Riverside Church, attends a Poor People’s Campaign event outside the U.S. Capitol on June 29, 2024. (RNS photo by Jack Jenkins)

The SCOTUS ruling was also on the mind of participants in the crowd, such as the Rev. Mira Sawlani-Joyner, the minister for justice, advocacy and change at New York’s historic Riverside Church.

“We can see that our country is moving in the direction where we are no longer caring for the people who are most impacted in our nation by poverty,” she said, adding: “Shelter and housing is a right for everybody.”

Sawlani-Joyner also rejected what she described as efforts to divide Americans against each other, pointing to heated debates over immigration.

“We say things like, ‘We have an immigration problem in this nation, look at these immigrants coming in and taking all our resources,’” she said. “The thing is, those resources weren’t there to begin with: They’re all being hoarded by the people at the top, and we need to have equitable distribution of our resources.”

Sawlani-Joyner was echoed by the Rev. Brett Wilson, pastor of Georgetown Lutheran Church in Washington, who stood nearby. She often sees people at her church’s drop-in center for the unhoused, she said — sometimes more frequently than rank-and-file parishioners.

“That’s my congregation and community, and I see their struggle — I know that homelessness is not a crime,” she said. “We’ve got to stand up and speak out.”

She added: “I think it’s not time to go to church. It’s time to be the church.”

Mary Pendergast, from left, Terri Bednarz and Lamar Bailey, advocates with the Sisters of Mercy, attend a Poor People’s Campaign event outside the U.S. Capitol on June 29, 2024. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Several Catholic groups, such as the Sisters of Mercy, had representatives at the event. Among them was Mary Pendergast, a nun from Rhode Island who said she attended the gathering to offer a “moral witness,” and was among those who addressed the crowd.

“We have about 1,600 homeless people (in Rhode Island), and there are some shelters, but they’re not safe,” Pendergast said in an interview, referring to dynamics that advocates argue prevent unhoused people from using shelters. “There are about 600 people a night in encampments and on the street. And they’re there because of policies.”

The event also included speeches from labor leaders as well as a number of people impacted by poverty. But in some cases, speakers identified with several of the categories at once: Gabriela Martinez, an associate of campaigns for Franciscan Action Network, first noted that “we are all children of God, no matter your color or where you live or how much money you make.” She then recounted her experience as a child growing up near pollution, which researchers have long argued disproportionately impacts the poor and leads to higher rates of various diseases.

Martinez recalled smelling rancid odors while playing in playgrounds near industrial centers outside Philadelphia as a child and was later diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. When her family moved to Ohio, she drove by foul-smelling petrochemical plants that blackened the sky on the way to school and was later diagnosed with a thyroid disorder. She now lives across the street from a Superfund site.

“My whole life I’ve been running, only to find that there is nowhere to run in this country that is not contaminated by the disease of injustice,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion. “Meanwhile, a three month supply of my insulin, that is medically necessary, retails at $1,600. At the federal minimum wage, someone with diabetes has to work 28 full days full time (to afford that). The child in me screams: Why?”

She then looked up at the crowd, closing with a call to action.

“I look at all of us and I know that we’re the solution to our problem,” she said. “Forward together!”

The crowd shouted back: “Not one step back!”

Gabriela Martinez, associate of campaigns for Franciscan Action Network, addresses a crowd at a demonstration organized by the Poor People’s Campaign outside the U.S. Capitol on June 29, 2024. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

This is religious favoritism, and it is not only dangerous, but runs counter to my religion and faith,’ said the Rev. Jeff Sims, a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister and a plaintiff in the case.

by Jack Jenkins, (Religious News Service)

WASHINGTON (RNS) — A group of public school parents, including some clergy, have filed a lawsuit against Louisiana’s new law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, arguing the statute unfairly privileges a specific version of Christian scripture in addition to impinging on the rights of the nonreligious and those of other faiths.

The complaint — which was filed Monday (June 24) by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and offices of the ACLU — singles out a bill signed into law last week that requires public schools to post copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, paid for by donations. Plaintiffs argue the law violates their First Amendment right to religious freedom as well as the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against establishing a state religion.

“This simply cannot be reconciled with the fundamental religious-freedom principles that animated the founding of our nation,” reads the complaint, which notes no federal court has upheld the display of the Ten Commandments in a public school setting.

The Rev. Jeff Sims, a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister and a plaintiff in the case, blasted the law during a press conference on Monday, saying it “sends a message to my children and other students that people of some religious denominations are superior to others.”

“This is religious favoritism, and it is not only dangerous, but runs counter to my religion and faith,” said Sims, who is one of at least three Christian clergy who have signed on to the case.

Also among the plaintiffs — which include religious and non-religious parents — is the Rev. Darcy Roake, a Unitarian Universalist minister who told reporters that among her faith tradition’s seven principles is a call for “the right to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

“By subjecting my children to permanent displays of scripture in every classroom, the Ten Commandments conflicts with this principle,” she said.

Roake added that her husband, who is also a plaintiff in the case, is Jewish and that they have raised their children in a multi-faith household.

“My husband believes this state-mandated version of the Ten Commandments does not conform with his Jewish faith either, because the displays misappropriate and alter the text of the Ten Commandments as they are set out in the Torah,” she said.

The complaint argues that by mandating the display of the Ten Commandments, Louisiana effectively “requires a specific, state-approved version of that scripture to be posted, taking sides on theological questions regarding the correct content and meaning of the Decalogue.” It notes the diversity of opinion regarding the scripture in question, including a wide array of religious traditions that do ascribe to the Ten Commandments, but their translation, numbering and wording of the passage varies widely.

The arguments outlined in the complaint echo those voiced last year when state lawmakers in Texas launched an unsuccessful attempt to pass similar legislation. At the time, Jewish leaders noted that the bill required the Ten Commandments to be listed in English (both the Louisiana law and the Texas bill use the same translation, which is based on the King James translation of the Bible popular with some Protestants) and not the original Hebrew.

During Monday’s press conference, Rachel Laser, head of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, pointed out that several other states — Oklahoma, Mississippi and South Carolina — have introduced similar bills, calling such efforts examples of the “Christian nationalism that is on the march across this country.” She noted Texas has also already passed a law allowing public schools to enlist chaplains and that other states are primed to do the same.

“These Christian nationalist laws violate the religious freedom principles that are core to this country’s founding, that everyone should be free to live as themselves and believe as they choose, so long as they don’t harm others,” she said.

The legal team behind the effort expressed confidence they would prevail should the case rise to the U.S. Supreme Court. Patrick Elliott, legal director for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, told reporters he believes the issues in the case are “already covered by clear Supreme Court precedent” and that justices may not even take up the case.

Supporters of the law have argued otherwise, with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry reportedly telling attendees at a GOP fundraiser, “I can’t wait to be sued.” And at least two conservative justices have signaled a fundamentally different understanding of the separation of church and state than their colleagues on the bench: In 2020, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch signed on to a concurring opinion that suggested the establishment clause only applies to the federal government and not the states.

But even if justices decide to rule on the case, Elliott said he was confident his team would win.

“I think looking at many, many years of Supreme Court precedent, there’s extreme concern about coercive religious practices on children,” he said. “So I don’t really think even for the current makeup of the court (that they) would rule against our plaintiffs in this case.”

Religion New Service-By

The Rev. James Lawson Jr., an apostle of nonviolent protest who schooled activists to withstand brutal reactions from white authorities as the Civil Rights Movement gained traction, has died, his family said Monday. He was 95.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Rev. James Lawson Jr., an apostle of nonviolent protest who schooled activists to withstand brutal reactions from white authorities as the Civil Rights Movement gained traction, has died, his family said Monday. He was 95.

His family said Lawson died on Sunday after a short illness in Los Angeles, where he spent decades working as a pastor, labor movement organizer and university professor.

Lawson was a close adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”

Lawson met King in 1957, after spending three years in India soaking up knowledge about Mohandas K. Gandhi’s independence movement. King would travel to India himself two years later, but at the time, he had only read about Gandhi in books.

The two Black pastors — both 28 years old — quickly bonded over their enthusiasm for the Indian leader’s ideas, and King urged Lawson to put them into action in the American South.

Lawson soon led workshops in church basements in Nashville, Tennessee, that prepared John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, the Freedom Riders and many others to peacefully withstand vicious responses to their challenges of racist laws and policies.

Lawson’s lessons led Nashville to become the first major city in the South to desegregate its downtown, on May 10, 1960, after hundreds of well-organized students staged lunch-counter sit-ins and boycotts of discriminatory businesses.

Lawson’s particular contribution was to introduce Gandhian principles to people more familiar with biblical teachings, showing how direct action could expose the immorality and fragility of racist white power structures.

Gandhi said “that we persons have the power to resist the racism in our own lives and souls,” Lawson told the AP. “We have the power to make choices and to say no to that wrong. That’s also Jesus.”

Years later, in 1968, it was Lawson who organized the sanitation workers strike that fatefully drew King to Memphis. Lawson said he was at first paralyzed and forever saddened by King’s assassination.

“I thought I would not live beyond 40, myself,” Lawson said. “The imminence of death was a part of the discipline we lived with, but no one as much as King.”

Still, Lawson made it his life’s mission to preach the power of nonviolent direct action.

“I’m still anxious and frustrated,” Lawson said as he marked the 50th anniversary of King’s death with a march in Memphis. “The task is unfinished.”

Civil rights activist Diane Nash was a 21-year-old college student when she began attending Lawson’s Nashville workshops, which she called life-changing.

“His passing constitutes a very great loss,” Nash said. “He bears, I think, more responsibility than any other single person for the civil rights movement of Blacks being nonviolent in this country.”

James Morris Lawson Jr., was born on Sept. 22, 1928, the son and grandson of ministers, and grew up in Massillon, Ohio, where he became ordained himself as a high school senior.

He told The Tennessean that his commitment to nonviolence began in elementary school, when he told his mother that he had slapped a boy who had used a racial slur against him.

“What good did that do, Jimmy?” his mother asked.

That simple question forever changed his life, Lawson said. He became a pacifist, refusing to serve when drafted for the Korean War, and spent a year in prison as a conscientious objector. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group, sponsored his trip to India after he finished a sociology degree.

Gandhi had been assassinated by then, but Lawson met people who had worked with him and explained Gandhi’s concept of “satyagraha,” a relentless pursuit of Truth, which encouraged Indians to peacefully reject British rule. Lawson then saw how the Christian concept of turning the other cheek could be applied in collective actions to challenge morally indefensible laws.

Lawson was a divinity student at Oberlin College in Ohio when King spoke on campus about the Montgomery bus boycott. King told him, “You can’t wait, you need to come on South now,‘” Lawson recalled in an Associated Press interview.

Lawson soon enrolled in theology classes at Vanderbilt University, while leading younger activists through mock protests in which they practiced taking insults without reacting.

The technique swiftly proved its power at lunch counters and movie theaters in Nashville, where on May 10, 1960, businesses agreed to take down the “No Colored” signs that enforced white supremacy.

“It was the first major successful campaign to pull the signs down,” and it created a template for the sit-ins that began spreading across the South, Lawson said.

Lawson was called on to organize what became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sought to organize the spontaneous efforts of tens of thousands of students who began challenging Jim Crow laws across the South.

Angry segregationists got Lawson expelled from Vanderbilt, but he said he never harbored hard feelings about the university, where he returned as a distinguished visiting professor in 2006, and eventually donated a significant portion of his papers.

Lawson earned that theology degree at Boston University and became a Methodist pastor in Memphis, where his wife Dorothy Wood Lawson worked as an NAACP organizer. They moved several years later to Los Angeles, where Lawson led the Holman United Methodist Church and taught at California State University, Northridge and the University of California, Los Angeles. They raised three sons, John, Morris and Seth.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Lawson taught Southern California activists and organizers “and helped shape the civil rights and labor movement locally just as he did nationally.”

“Today Los Angeles joins the state, country and world in mourning the loss of a civil rights leader whose critical leadership, teachings, and mentorship confronted and crippled centuries of systemic oppression, racism and injustice,” Bass said in a statement.

Lawson remained active into his 90s, urging younger generations to leverage their power.

Civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton, founder and president of the National Action Network, called Lawson “the ultimate preacher, prophet, and activist.”

“In his senior years, I was privileged to spend time with him at his church in Los Angeles,” Sharpton said. “He would sit in his office and tell me inside stories of the battles of the 1950’s and 1960’s that he Dr. King and others engaged in. Lawson helped to change this nation — thank God the nation never changed him.”

Eulogizing the late Rep. John Lewis last year, he recalled how the young man he trained in Nashville grew lonely marches into multitudes, paving the way for major civil rights legislation.

“If we would honor and celebrate John Lewis’ life, let us then re-commit our souls, our hearts, our minds, our bodies and our strength to the continuing journey to dismantle the wrong in our midst,” Lawson said.

___

Today, the ‘nones’ kind of look like everybody else,’ said sociologist Ryan Cragun. ‘At some level, we’re saying, hey, actually, this is just your neighbor.’

by Kathryn Post

America’s religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” are largely defined by what they are not, rather than what they are. So as they’ve multiplied, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they’ve also been shrouded in myths and misconceptions.

They’ve sometimes been pegged as a group that’s wholly secular and hostile to religion, or conversely as a cohort that has uniformly adopted spirituality rather than religion. They’ve also been characterized as morally directionless or civically disengaged.

A new Pew Research Center report on America’s nones shows the truth is more complicated.

“Just like there’s many differences among religious people, turns out there are many differences among non-religious people, too,” said John Green, professor emeritus of political science at The University of Akron and an adviser on this study. “And I think this report adds some real substance to that.”

In fact, sociologist Ryan Cragun suggests that the report shows America’s nones aren’t much different from the rest of the American public — at least not anymore.

“In the 1980s, the nones actually looked pretty different. They were small, they were 5 to 7% of the U.S. population, disproportionately male, disproportionately white, very young. Not likely to be married. Highly educated, pretty high incomes,” said Cragun, a professor at the University of Tampa who is also an adviser on this study. “Today, the nones kind of look like everybody else.”

“At some level, we’re saying, hey, actually, this is just your neighbor,” he added.

Pew’s findings, which come from a survey of 11,201 respondents conducted in the summer of 2023, show that, at 28%, a 12 percentage point increase since 2007, the religiously unaffiliated cohort now makes up a sizable portion of the U.S. population. They’re also still leaning young and democratic, with 69% under the age of 50 and 62% of nones identifying as Democrats or leaning toward the Democratic Party. But in contrast to where they were 40 years ago, today’s religiously unaffiliated are roughly split between men and women, and their racial makeup broadly mirrors that of the general population.

Pew’s study shows many nones do believe in something, even if it doesn’t fall into traditional religious categories. While 20% say they are agnostic and 17% identify as atheist, the majority of nones (63%) fall into the more ambiguous “nothing in particular” category. And though only 13% say they believe in the God of the Bible, more than half (56%) say they believe in some other higher power.

“There can be a temptation to assume that all religious nones are non believers … that they must all have secular worldviews,” said Greg Smith, associate director of religion research at Pew and the primary researcher for this study. “And this report shows that’s not really true.”

About half of nones say they are spiritual, or that spirituality is very important to them. And, Green pointed out, not all of them are hostile to religion. Though 43% of nones say religion does more harm than good in society, 41% say religion does equal amounts of harm and good.

Though these findings reveal more about the beliefs and spiritual inclinations of the nones, Cragun cautioned that further research is necessary, especially because the current study doesn’t pinpoint exactly what respondents mean when they say they are spiritual or believe in a higher power. While some might see spirituality or a higher power as connected to the supernatural, others could see spirituality as grounded in something more tangible, like nature.

The study also shows that while about half of the nones are spiritual, the other half say they are not, and by many measures the group still remains distinctly non-religious. A full 90% seldom or never go to religious services, 71% say they seldom or never pray and 81% say religion is not too important or not at all important in their lives.

“The religious nones certainly are not all non-believers, but they are way less religious on average than people who identify with a religion,” said Smith. “Religious nones, by and large, are really disconnected from religious organizations of any kind.”

Despite their disengagement from institutional religion, the report debunks the myth that religious nones lack a moral framework. More than 8 in 10 (83%) say the desire to avoid hurting people is key to helping them decide between right and wrong, and about the same number, 82%, say they also rely on logic and reason. “Almost all of those people have very clear moral understandings of the world,” said Cragun.

Civil rights icon Jesse Jackson and his longtime friend and collaborator James Zogby helped convene the gathering of nearly 2,000 faith leaders over MLK weekend.

by Ben Norquist

CHICAGO (RNS) — On Friday and Saturday (Jan. 12 and 13), nearly 2,000 faith leaders, politicians, activists and operatives — heirs of the Civil Rights Movement — convened for an Emergency Summit for Gaza hosted at the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition in partnership with the Arab American Institute.

Jackson and his longtime friend and collaborator James Zogby, AAI founder, were both present in the role of senior leaders. The Rev. Frederick D. Haynes III, the current president of Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Maya Berry, executive director at AAI, spoke and helped preside.

Leaders were joined by numerous dignitaries, including U.S. and state representatives and Chicago aldermen — U.S. Reps. Jonathan Jackson, Jesús “Chuy” Garcia and Cori Bush, and state Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid, among others. The countless kaffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves, being worn throughout the room highlighted the Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian rights.

The coalition that organized the summit, including Churches for Middle East Peace, where I am a fellow, is calling on the White House and Congress to advocate for a permanent cease-fire, the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners being held without due process, comprehensive access for humanitarian aid to Gaza and the enforcement of conditions on U.S. funding to Israel that are already in U.S. law and applied to every other nation that receives U.S. military aid.

The summit highlighted the historic connections between the American Civil Rights Movement and the fight for Palestinian rights.

Participants gathered in person and virtually to reaffirm the civil rights tenet that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” a refrain reiterated by several speakers. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used the phrase to insist that injustice in Birmingham, Alabama, was a threat to justice throughout the country. By the same token, the event website states that it is “our moral obligation” to stand against injustice in Gaza and called on Americans to advocate for an end to the violence and for root causes to be addressed.

A winter storm blasted Chicago on Friday, but organizers forged ahead. Hundreds of participants arrived through blizzard conditions, braving dangerous roads to be present as snow piled up and temperatures plunged.

Multiple organizations co-sponsored the summit, including Christian, Jewish, Muslim and secular groups. Haynes celebrated this diverse participation as an expression, in King’s words, of the “beloved community,” working across racial, religious and geographic lines for a shared vision of justice.

In the room were leaders of efforts to pass local resolutions across the country calling for cease-fire in Gaza; members of international human rights organizations documenting the violence and its effects in Gaza; and activists mobilizing constituencies to speak to their representatives.

The full program also included Cornel West, who holds the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary and is a presidential candidate; Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator and now a senior fellow at the New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy; Eva Borgwardt, national spokesperson for IfNotNow, a movement of American Jews seeking justice for Palestinians; John Dabeet, president of the U.S. Palestinian Council; and the Rev. Jamal Bryant, pastor at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church near Atlanta. Some of the speakers had a busy weekend, splitting their time between the summit, the March for Gaza in Washington, D.C., on Saturday and MLK Day observances.

This connection between the American Civil Rights Movement and Palestinian liberation can be seen at least as far back as the responses of some Black American groups to the 1967 war, when Israel first occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came to view the Palestinians as part of an international struggle against colonialism and racism.

This solidarity is embodied today in the relationship between Jesse Jackson and Zogby, a relationship that goes back to the mid-1970s when Jackson was among the first civil rights leaders to support Zogby’s new Palestine Human Rights Campaign. Other civil rights leaders also went on to offer their support, including many of those who had been close to King.

Zogby recalls that when Jackson asked him to serve in Jackson’s 1984 campaign for U.S. president, Zogby told him: “You’ll accomplish more in the next four months than you have in the last four years.”

“And it was true. I can’t tell you how energizing it was for Arab Americans to have someone running for president want to listen to them,” Zogby said.

These connections between the American Civil Rights Movement and the movement for Palestinian rights were celebrated throughout the summit, as references were made to proponents of racial justice in the United States — King, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer and James Baldwin — alongside Palestinian American writers such as Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi.

Senior leaders at the event, some of whom were part of the Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s and ’70s, appealed to the youth in the room. At one point, the “young people” were asked to stand up and be recognized. Dozens rose throughout the sanctuary. “The younger generation coming up in the movement are rediscovering their connections to Palestinian liberation,” said Zogby. “It’s been lost on some, but the roots were always there.”

Indeed, Jesse Jackson has been advocating for peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians for decades over numerous trips to the Middle East, meetings with Middle East leaders and public statements. This event, featuring senior, present and future leadership, suggests that legacy is continuing.

The event took place surrounded by Jewish images adorning the stained glass panels and the plaster relief throughout the historic synagogue that serves as the headquarters for Rainbow PUSH Coalition. The building is in Kenwood, in a geography saturated with Black history and the fight for racial justice. Emmett Till’s house is minutes away, starkly resonating with the unfolding fate of children in Gaza.

The Civil Rights Movement’s lexicon was in ready use throughout the event. Jesse Jackson led the room in a call-and-response prayer from earlier days in the movement.

“I am somebody!”

“I am somebody,” came the response.

“I am a child of God!”

“I am a child of God,” the audience called back. They did not need prompting — they knew the words already. It was like that throughout the event.

This was a group that shared a common language developed over decades of working for civil rights in the United States and liberation for oppressed people around the world, behind the language a set of commitments now leading them to speak up and speak out for a cease-fire and justice for the Palestinians.

(Ben Norquist serves as the Ambassador Warren Clark Fellow at Churches for Middle East Peace, where he studies the shrinking space for civil and human rights activities in Israel. He is also working on a book about how American Christians engage with land and place, due in 2025. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

There’s already plenty of need present in this community,’ said one faith leader. The challenge is to make the situation work for both longtime residents and migrants arriving from the border.

By RNS Rebekah Barber

Chicago was already facing a homelessness crisis before Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, began directing thousands of migrants entering his state to Democratic bastions that had declared themselves migrant-friendly sanctuary cities.

Since the transfers began in April 2022, more than 20,000 migrants, many of them destitute Venezuelans, have arrived, and many Chicagoans have expressed concerns that the city’s resources are being drained and have accused government officials of failing to communicate about the migrants’ cost and their fates.

At the same time, advocates for the migrants, especially community organizers in more vulnerable neighborhoods, have pushed back against attempts to pit two marginalized groups against each other. These groups have stepped up to support the new arrivals and in many cases have found allies in local faith leaders.

When the Rev. David Black, pastor of the historic First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, in the city’s South Side, learned that migrants would be housed at a shelter just two blocks from his church, he knew his congregation would need to help the neighborhood respond.

“There’s already plenty of need present in this community,” Black told Religion News Service. The challenge, he said, was “to support those who are coming into the community and also find ways that the situation can be a support to people who are historically living in the community.”

As Black considered what this support should look like, he was having conversations with local leaders such as Paula Gean, founder of Chicago4All, which works to connect long-term residents with new arrivals like the recent migrants.

Gean, who immigrated to the United States from Colombia when she was three, said she owes her family’s success as immigrants to the support of neighbors in their new home. In her work today, she often looks to churches to play that role and frequently collaborates with faith leaders like Black.

“It’s been really a joy to be able to follow her leadership and vision, and she’s been very, very engaged,” Black said. “She rightly recognizes that in the South Side of Chicago, churches are a really important center of community and civic life.”

Through the partnership with Gean, Black mobilized First Presbyterian to host banquets and community conversations at the church so migrants and neighborhood residents could come together to build fellowship.

A banquet on Nov. 30, attended by more than 150 people, included translators to facilitate communication, and the Rev. Stephany Rose Spaulding, a diversity and inclusion consultant, led conversations on neighborliness.

The Rev. Edward Morris Sr. is pastor of Parkway Gardens Christian Church in the predominantly Black Woodlawn neighborhood nearby. He saw the arrival of the migrants as a natural challenge for his church, which was planted in the 1950s to serve residents of a nearby apartment complex. The congregation decided then to join the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) because the denomination has a history of mission.

“It’s always been a community-driven church,” Morris said. “On the very front of the church building, it says, ‘For all people.’”

Morris became involved in the issue of migrants in the city about a year ago, after a fellow community leader invited him to speak to local residents worried about migrants moving into a makeshift shelter in a former school. Morris talked about the importance of Woodlawn being a welcoming community.

Soon after, he met Gean and began organizing efforts at the Parkway Gardens church to provide hygiene packets and deliver food and clothes to the shelter where migrants were staying.

Morris understands the concerns of his congregants and their neighbors and supports their desire for more communication. He wants to see city officials hold community forums where they could listen to residents and explain what the government is doing about the influx of outsiders. He also believes the government should work more closely with both the migrants and the neighborhood to find solutions that work for everyone.

“I think there still needs to be more open lines of communication, and that would deter a lot of the negative pushback that they’re getting,” he said. “It may not deter it completely, but at least people would feel they’re not being put upon.”

At the same time, Morris would like to see more understanding from community members. “I would like to see communities, especially African American communities, understand the situation of the migrants is not that far from our own situation,” he said. “Years ago, when folks were coming up out of the South and then moving into Chicago, they were rejected by the white community.”

He cites the Bible’s Book of Deuteronomy, saying, “Remember the stranger when he is in your midst. Treat them with love and treat them with kindness, remembering that you, yourself, were a stranger in the land at one time.”

When he spoke with RNS, Morris had just finished preparing for the church’s Friday food and clothing drive, which has been open for more than a decade and serves 60 to 75 people weekly — with an increasing number of migrants. As a result, the church has been training its volunteers to use a translation app on their cellphones to understand the newcomers.

Black said the majority of community residents want to find a way to both support the migrants and build support for a part of Chicago that has been historically underserved and underresourced. At the banquet at First Presbyterian, a speaker from Southside Together Organizing for Power, a community organizing group, talked about what it means to have Black and brown unity.

“It’s basically founded on this idea that there’s no scarcity,” Black said. “Not only is there enough for everybody — for the asylum-seekers, and the historically disenfranchised populations of South Side Chicago.”

He added, “We have so much more to gain from our unity than from the division which is being manufactured and orchestrated by interests that don’t want these communities to get the resources they need.”

An irreverent biblical comedy counters decades of whitewashed and stiff-necked biblical narratives.

by (RNS) Andre Henry, Written in Protest

The film director and music producer Jeymes Samuel, best known for his work as a music consultant on Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby,” reminisced to an illustrious gathering of Black Hollywood luminaries about watching “Jesus Christ Superstar” as a boy.

“And I was like, this is cool but where are the Black people? Like the only Black person in the whole thing was Judas!” This got a laugh from the crowd at the David Geffen Theater at the Academy of Motion Pictures, which included Angela Bassett, soul music icon Seal and comedian Dave Chappelle, but Samuel pushed on. “It’s fair for us to at least have one of these films that we can see ourselves in,” he said.

Samuel was there to introduce just such a film: “The Book of Clarence,” an irreverent biblical comedy, produced by the rap star Jay-Z, that counters decades of whitewashed and stiff-necked biblical narratives. The movie, written and directed by Samuel, hints at how much more compellingly Jesus’ story could be told if it were told like Clarence’s.

Clarence, played by LaKeith Stanfield, is a first-century hustler out to prove that he’s “not a nobody.” He’s most interested in proving this to two people in his life — the woman he loves and his twin brother, Thomas, also played by Stanfield, who happens to be one of Jesus’ 12 apostles.

In a bid for the attention of Viridia, his lady love, Clarence enters a chariot drag race against Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor), borrowing his horse and vehicle from a local mob boss. When Clarence loses the race and the horse and chariot as well, he has to lay his hands on a lot of money, miraculously fast, to pay his debt and preserve his life.

Clarence, an atheist, reckons he can save his hide, if not his soul, by joining his brother’s gang. But getting anyone to believe in his newfound belief is a rough go. John the Baptist (David Oyelowo) slaps the devil out of him but doesn’t buy Clarence’s interest in converting to the Jesus movement. When he applies to become the 13th apostle, the disciples laugh him out of the room. Barred from following the most popular messiah in town, he resolves to become one.

Clarence’s career as a false messiah presents some of the film’s most compelling material, about the reality of Roman occupation in first-century Palestine and to the earthly conceptions of salvation that their presence inspires in the occupied.

In this telling of the Jesus story, the Jews are a Black population living under white rule enforced by armed centurions patrolling the streets. At any moment, a soldier might stop a passing Judean and demand to see identification or search the Judean for contraband. When Clarence is detained in a roundup of local messiahs, the encounter echoes confrontations that provoked the uprisings of the Black Lives Matter era: The centurions mistake everyday objects for weapons while claiming to fear for their lives even as suspects are running away from them.

After Clarence’s trial, his mother, weeping on the side of the road, cries out, “They always take our babies!”

Samuel isn’t the first to draw parallels between Black life in America and the lives of colonized Jews in the first century. These scenes echo a central claim of Black liberation theology: God is Black.

When James Cone, Black liberation theology’s most famous proponent, dared to publish those words in 1969, he was pointing out that in Jesus of Nazareth God chose to be incarnated as a victim of imperial power rather than someone who wielded imperial power. While “The Book of Clarence” is a comedy, Samuels threads into his movie this essential insight, introducing Black liberation theology to audiences that may never have heard of Cone’s work.

The idea that Jesus was one of a small crowd of self-proclaimed messiahs at the time has shown up in biblical spoofs before, most memorably perhaps in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.” The fact that the salvation they promised was political liberation from Roman rule is lost on many Americans. The ancient world assumed divinity was behind political reality.

The modern church’s refusal to make this connection between the spiritual and political has driven many Christians away (including me). But more importantly, it ignores what the ancient Jews meant when they spoke of salvation: salvation from slavery in Egypt, exile in Babylon or the so-called peace of Rome.

To be sure, “The Book of Clarence” is no theological treatise, and even well-read Christians may be flummoxed by Samuel’s incorporating unfamiliar stories from the Gnostic Gospels and elements of magical realism. However, it would be wrong to interpret Samuel’s creativity as blasphemy. Samuel is as creative with his source material as the New Testament writers were with the Hebrew Bible.

But in its way of getting to the core of what the messiah means, the movie deserves to stand next to “The Passion of the Christ,” and Samuel has made himself someone believers and nonbelievers will want to watch.

Author and researcher Seth Kaplan has some advice for Americans on how to address the country’s most vexing problems.

(RNS) by Bob Smietana

Get to know your neighbors. Then get to work making the community you live in better for everyone.

“Stop thinking that the best use of your time is to advocate for something in politics, or advocate for something far away,” said Kaplan, author of a new book, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One ZIP Code at a Time, in a recent interview. “Look for something close to home that you can do. You have to think of real people and real places and how you contribute to them.”

Kaplan, a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins University who studies so-called fragile states around the world, believes that politics and advocacy matter. But he thinks too many Americans neglect the community right outside their door — to their detriment and the detriment of their neighbors.

Humans are innately social creatures and have long maintained close ties to the people and institutions in their immediate communities. Today, Americans have largely abandoned that approach, instead choosing to form community through more distant networks of friends and colleagues with similar interests, often online, with less involvement in the place they live.

That’s one reason, Kaplan argues in his book, that American society has become fragile.

“Beyond the home, we don’t belong to place-based mutual aid societies, ethnic clubs, civic organizations, or religious congregations the way our grandparents did,” he writes. “We don’t have the kind of close-knit relationships with our extended family and friends that we used to have, or interact much with our neighbors, leaving many without a support system to call upon in a crisis.”

Far-flung networks have helped many people get ahead, Kaplan said, but it’s rendered them materially rich and relationship-poor. People in crisis are more likely to turn to a smartphone app than to a neighbor.

“That may help you for one problem or two problems,” Kaplan told Religion News Service. “That doesn’t make you feel secure as a person. It makes you feel anxious. It makes you feel vulnerable. You’re afraid to show people that you have a problem, and that’s not a healthy way to live.”

Many religious groups in the United States have tried to adapt to a network-based social structure by abandoning a parish model of congregational life, replacing their houses of worship, with close ties to community, with a consumerist faith that focuses on providing spiritual content but not building a “thick” community — one where people bond deeply and share tasks and rituals.

Worshippers instead get a sermon and programs they like but aren’t tied into a community where they belong outside of weekend services. Kaplan believes American faith communities have thinned out.

“For the most part, religion is very thin,” he said. “It doesn’t think of itself as having a large community-building role. I think this is a mistake. It weakens belief. It weakens the sustainability of religion.”

Kaplan has both professional and personal interests in promoting place-based community. He has spent much of his professional life in the broken places of the world, from Somalia to Bolivia to Sri Lanka, where governments are falling apart and humanitarian crises, conflicts or catastrophes are commonplace.

Ironically, he said, while those states are failing, their local communities are not. People often have deep social connections despite the chaos around them.

Things are different in the U.S., he said. When people learn he studies fragile states, they often ask him about America’s own fragility, given the country’s polarization and disunity. Kaplan tells them that, yes, the United States is fragile, but not in the way they think. America has free elections, thriving businesses, ever-advancing technologies and a higher living standard than almost anywhere else in the world.

America as a state is doing fine, Kaplan contends. America’s communities are not.

“It’s American society that is in trouble — from gun violence in Baltimore to teens committing suicide in Palo Alto to the opioid crisis in Appalachia,” Kaplan writes. “Our families and communities suffer from social problems that shock the rest of the world, and ought to shock us: family disintegration, homelessness, school shootings, racial animosity, skyrocketing rates of loneliness and depression, and deaths of despair — alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.”

Addressing the country’s social woes, Kaplan argues, must involve rebuilding the country’s neighborhoods and social capital.

Religious leaders and institutions have a role to play in that work, but they need to build trust before they can build community. In the book, he profiles several religious innovators, such as Life Remodeled, a community organization in Detroit that grew out of a church founded by a pastor named Chris Lambert in 2007. Life Remodeled began refurbishing houses, assisting local schools and generally bettering the church’s neighborhood. By 2016, the nonprofit, whose staff was mostly white, took over a closed-down community school in an area with many Black families and converted it to a community opportunity hub

When the deal was announced, neighbors reacted with anger, as Kaplan recounts, concerned that a group led by a white pastor and other outsiders had taken over a community asset, with little local involvement. That led Lambert and other leaders to meet with local groups and begin a slow but steady process of earning their trust.

That kind of trust-building takes time, said Kaplan. “It would not be successful if no one trusted him,” he said. “It would not be successful if the people in the community did not have some stake and feeling of ownership in what he was doing.”

Kaplan has also experienced the power of place-based community in his own life. He recounted growing up uneasy in a middle-class New Jersey suburb. His parents, who were Jewish but not practicing, were divorced and he struggled socially at school.

“I had relationships that were characterized by mistrust, stress, and frustration, leaving me with an overriding sense of insecurity,” he writes. “And while my material needs were always met, I frequently felt socially uncomfortable, even vulnerable.”

As an adult, he found what he’d been missing by becoming part of an Orthodox synagogue and living in a closely-knit community. It’s a neighborhood filled with joy, he said, filled with friends and neighbors whose names he knows and where people look out for each other in ways large and small. When a friend’s daughter was diagnosed with cancer, he said, the neighbors rallied around her. When one of his kids fell and cut their chin, his wife took the child first to a nurse who lives nearby before heading to an urgent care center.

That kind of support can’t be bought, but only comes through human relationships. That’s a lesson he hopes religious groups will remember — urging them to become countercultural by returning to their community-building practices.

“You cannot be like everybody else,” he said. “People of faith can offer not just a vision of a sermon once a week and a few services, but an alternative vision of flourishing that involves strong community.”

This story was supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.

#wellnesswednesday

by Kathryn Post

(RNS) — Raised in an evangelical church she now describes as a “dumpster fire” of fundamentalist beliefs, Laura Anderson’s terror of hell kept her up at night as a 4-year-old. Her insomnia was less about hell itself and more about the fear of being separated from her family if Jesus came back. So she’d lie awake, picturing an image of Jesus dying on the cross, hoping it would guarantee salvation.

Decades later, long after her sleeping patterns had regulated, she suddenly suffered from severe insomnia again — this time after she’d come to reject the idea of hell.

“Because of the way I had embodied those messages about the consequences of going to hell, my body started to panic again, because I didn’t have this assurance of salvation,” Anderson explained to Religion News Service. Her fears were still ingrained in her body.

At the time, Anderson thought she was alone in experiencing a trauma response to her religious upbringing. But now, as a psychotherapist who specializes in religious trauma, she knows that’s not the case. In her new book When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion, Anderson gives language for and insights about this under-researched form of trauma and invites readers to take part in the ongoing process of healing.

RNS spoke to Anderson about purity culture, why atheism isn’t a remedy for religious trauma and how to identify high-control religions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you mean when you say religious trauma is trauma?

Prior to the last five, maybe 10 years, most dialogue around religious trauma in professional spaces suggested that to heal from it, you just needed to become an atheist. And for a myriad of reasons, I disagree with that. It can turn into fundamentalism very quickly, just on the other side of the spectrum. Also, that cognitive shift to atheism doesn’t address how trauma is embodied, how those messages, practices and lifestyles live inside of us even after we believe new things.

Research and clinical interventions show us trauma is a physiological state that is happening in our bodies. It is the result of anything that’s too much, too fast, too soon, that overwhelms our ability to cope. So when we understand religious trauma as trauma, it gives us a wealth of resources and interventions. It also helps to validate the actual lived experience. Many of my clients have experienced shame and confusion over having psychological responses even after they don’t believe the same things anymore.

Understanding religious trauma helps us wrap our minds around what’s happening in our bodies and then opens the door for compassion toward yourself and healing in a deeper, more embodied way.

Why might it be important for therapists working with religious trauma not to be anti-religion?

Anti-religious messages can quickly become prescriptive and fundamentalist. To say all religion is terrible and you just have to get rid of it, or the idea that God is dumb and only for mentally weak people, is incredibly shaming and discouraging. It’s also not necessarily helpful for the healing process. My job as a therapist is not to get you to a belief that I might hold. It is to help you heal and to lean in more to who you are authentically. I think that includes religion or spiritual practices. Now I always say I’m not anti-religion, but I am anti-harm and power and control, and anti-abuse. So if you can find a religion or faith or spiritual practice that isn’t including those things, I think that’s wonderful.

What’s the difference between religious abuse and religious trauma?

Trauma is not the thing that happens to you, it’s the result of how your nervous system responds to the thing that happens to you. Trauma is very subjective. And that means no event or single doctrine is inherently traumatic. Think of a car accident. Some people might walk away from it being deeply traumatized, and other people don’t.

Abuse is the thing that happens to you. It doesn’t necessarily mean that if you’re abused, you will absolutely have trauma, though there’s a higher likelihood of it, especially if it’s repeated or inescapable, as we often see in the context of high-control religions.

It’s also important to note that even if the abuse you experienced inside religion did not result in trauma or a diagnosis such as PTSD or CPTSD, that doesn’t mean you didn’t suffer severe consequences from it. It just means that your body did not store it as trauma.

How can we identify when a religion is a high-control religion?

In the back of the book, I talk about what I call the religious power and control wheel. There’s a diagram, and you’ll see categories like isolation; minimizing, denying and blaming; spiritual abuse; economic control; defining gender and sexuality rigidly. What’s important to recognize about high-control religion is that it’s never just one thing. It’s these seemingly benign or small things that are compounded, that are consistent and persistent, and oftentimes have severe consequences attached. And then with religious trauma, if you defy the rules they set, then you are defying God.

You can also ask: What happens when somebody leaves? What happens when somebody expresses disagreement? What happens when somebody shows up as themselves in a way that might be different than how the group defines what is OK or normal? How are they treated?

What do you mean when you talk about healing as something that’s ongoing?

There is a lot of research that talks about healing as symptom reduction or alleviation. As I was doing my own research for my doctoral dissertation, I had this idea that healing from all these things that happened to me would look a particular way. And it didn’t. In fact, in many cases, it felt like I was getting further and further away, which meant my shame was increasing exponentially. So my dissertation chair told me, I just think you might have a really limited definition of healing. Through research, what I discovered is that when we allow ourselves to consider that healing doesn’t have a finish line, it allows us to be present in our day-to-day life. It let me have more compassion for myself, tune into my body and figure out what I needed.

Why do you call purity culture a form of sexual abuse?

One of the definitions of abuse is the improper use of something for its intended purpose. Purity culture targets our gender, our sexuality, our relationships and our bodies, in terms of what is allowable. It sends us messages about being disgusting, that inherent urges or desires or sensations within us are evil. It takes our sexuality and it twists it and puts rules around it for control. I’m very careful to say that I don’t consider it sexual assault because that is a physical act committed on another person. That said, the long-term impact of purity culture oftentimes shows up very similarly to how a victim of sexualized violence and assault experiences symptoms.

Why is there so little research on religious trauma?

Most research that has been done is around extreme versions of religious trauma involving cults, clergy sexual abuse, things like that. Also, a lot of research suggests religion provides a sense of identity, purpose, belonging and worth, and certainly it can. But on top of that, we have a country that believes it was founded as a Christian nation. So research on religious abuse is not necessarily easy to fund or wildly promoted.

Now, in the last decade or so, there are people starting to research it anyway. But up until 2015, 2016, there just wasn’t a lot of public discourse about it. People were experiencing things in isolation. With social media, that’s changed. And there is research currently being done. The Religious Trauma Institute, which I co-founded, has a collaborative research group. There are many people tackling religious trauma from a variety of angles. It’s just a matter of jumping through all the hoops and getting them into journals.

The 1,900-year-old swords are in perfect condition, thanks to the arid climate of the Judean Desert.

by Michele Chabin, RNN

Fifty years ago, Israeli archaeologists discovered an ancient Hebrew inscription on a stalactite in a remote cave in the desert east of Jerusalem, where the land begins to slope down toward the Dead Sea. In June, hoping to find additional inscriptions not visible to the naked eye, three researchers — an archaeologist, a geologist and a photographer trained in multi-spectral photography — returned to the cave.

While exploring a new level of the cave, one of the researchers discovered the iron head of a Roman javelin, known as a “pilum,” in a hidden narrow crevice.

The trio immediately contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority, which has been conducting a systematic search of Judean desert caves for the past six years with the goal of keeping any remnants of Dead Sea scrolls or other ancient artifacts in the archaeology-rich region out of the hands of looters and off the black market.

Soon after discovering the javelin, the archaeologists discovered a cache of four 1,900-year-old swords, all of them remarkably well-preserved. Even more remarkable were the swords’ wood and leather accessories, which the desert’s arid climate had prevented from decaying. Three of the swords were identified as Roman spatha swords, with 2-foot-long blades, and a shorter weapon, a ring-pommel sword, with an 18-inch-long blade.

The weapons were most likely left in the cave by Jewish rebels involved in the 132 to 136 C.E. Bar Kokhba revolt, the Jews’ final attempt to force the Romans out of the ancient land of Israel after nearly two centuries of occupation. During the revolt, bands of Jewish fighters and refugees lived in the caves that dot the forbidding Judean landscape.

The uprising failed, and the Romans expelled most of the surviving Jews and changed the territory’s name from “Judaea” to “Syria Palaestina.”

The swords may represent a small victory amid this defeat. “It appears that the weapons were hidden by the Judean rebels, after they were seized from the Roman army as booty,“ the IAA said in a statement.

For the archaeologists, the discovery is a major triumph. “Finding a single sword is rare — so four? It’s a dream! We rubbed our eyes in disbelief,” the researchers wrote.

The swords were discovered in what is today the En Gedi Nature Reserve, about 100 miles from Jerusalem, according to Eitan Klein, who co-directed the IAA’s sweeping excavation of the cave after the first weapon was discovered.

Klein said the swords “are maybe the best preserved” Roman swords ever discovered anywhere in the world. “Usually, you find only the blade without the handle. Here you have the entire sword, with equipment.”

Klein said the Judean Desert has yielded thousands of ancient artifacts thanks to its extremely hot and dry climate, which enables organic materials to be preserved for thousands of years. Some 90% of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the Judean Desert after the Second World War were written on vellum, made from processed animal hides.

“We can assume there were many more such scrolls in Jerusalem,” Klein told Religion News Service, but the city’s much higher humidity would have destroyed them.

When the researchers examined the swords, they knew from their design that they had been manufactured by Roman armorers during the second century C.E.

“We believe that the people who hid the swords in the cave were not Roman soldiers,” Klein said. “It is very difficult to access the cave, so the strong probability is that they were hidden by the Jewish rebels who fought against the Romans. We already knew that caves in very close proximity to this cave were used during the Bar Kokhba revolt.”

A Bar Kokhba-era coin found in the cave added further evidence.

Three of the swords were discovered inside their wooden scabbards. The site also contained leather strips and wooden and metal bits belonging to the weapons.

Now relocated to the IAA’s climate-controlled facility, researchers are carrying out Carbon-14 testing on the weapons’ organic materials to better determine their age, as well as investigating the exact type and source of the metal, wood and leather. They are hoping, too, that DNA testing will reveal something about the ancient people who handled — or were impaled by — the weapons.

“We should know more, perhaps in the coming days and weeks,” Klein said.