The following articles have been selected because they are informative, instructive, entertaining, or simply interesting. Articles appearing in Your Friday Five do not represent an endorsement.
Gospel witness is suppressed in Russia.
Russian Evangelicals Fined for ‘Missionary Activity’ During Pandemic, Daniel Silliman
In the first six months of 2020, more than 40 people have been punished for violating a Russian anti-missionary law, according to a new report from Forum 18, a religious liberty news service based in Norway. Government lockdowns and pandemic stay-at-home orders did not substantially slow the multiyear crackdown on unauthorized religious activity.
The battle for church members minds includes Qanon.
Evangelical leaders denounce QAnon as “political cult,” Christian Post
“And the QAnon movement has a tendency to call evil that which is good, and good that which is evil, and to put darkness for light, and light for darkness (Isa. 5:20). As movement of Satan, QAnon is incompatible with Christianity.”
Carter called on Christians to “work to guard those who would fall for such deceptions” and to “plead” with QAnon supporters within the church “to return to the faith.”
Severe human rights abuses continue in China.
The “most horrific” human rights abuse of the century, Mindy Belz
Authorities have continued to increase the Chinese government’s internment camp system in Xinjiang province, where officials already have detained more than 1 million Uighurs. Using satellite imagery, BuzzFeed News identified 260 new structures built since 2017—at least one in every county of Xinjiang. It’s the latest evidence of mass detention aimed at controlling and eliminating the mostly Muslim Uighur population in the province. At a Faith Angle Forum discussion this week, China Aid founder Bob Fu told journalists the persecution of Uighurs is “the single most horrific, systematic human rights abuse of the 21st century.”
This is a serious issue with enormous gospel implications.
Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion, Foreign Affairs
From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.
Growing numbers of people no longer find religion a necessary source of support and meaning in their lives. Even the United States—long cited as proof that an economically advanced society can be strongly religious—has now joined other wealthy countries in moving away from religion. Several forces are driving this trend, but the most powerful one is the waning hold of a set of beliefs closely linked to the imperative of maintaining high birthrates. Modern societies have become less religious in part because they no longer need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major world religions have instilled for centuries.