Sometimes reading the religion news is like reading the police blotter.
• “New York Shuts Down Embattled Olivet University Campus,” Christianity Today reports.
This is the kind of story you need a bulletin board, thumb tacks, and lots of red string to follow. It involves allegations of money laundering — a crime that involves difficult-to-follow labyrinthine layers deliberately designed to confuse anyone outside of the scheme. And it involves a convoluted institution — a one-time Bible college now expanded into a multi-campus “university” that also includes a real-estate development company and a handful of other businesses.
Then there’s the name: “Olivet.” That’s also the name of two wholly unrelated schools, neither of which has recently paid a $125 million fine after pleading guilty to fraud charges. Olivet is also the name of a church — a wholly related and entangled entity led by a man named David Jang who has, among other things, proclaimed himself to be the messiah. (Again, to be clear, neither Olivet College in Michigan nor Olivet Nazarene in Illinois has, in any way, ever suggested that David Jang is the messiah. And, unlike Grove City College, neither of those schools has ever suggested that Tucker Carlson is the messiah either.)
Both Olivet the idiosyncratic church and Olivet the Bible-college-turned-“university” are also tangled up with several people now or recently involved with Zombie Newsweek, the platform desecrating the corpse of the now defunct and once-respectable newsweekly. Zombie Newsweek occasionally still does actual journalism, but it’s presented along with a hodge-podge of something very much Not That, including lots of outrageous click-bait nonsense, propaganda, and stuff that’s probably Olivet-influenced in a way that doesn’t easily map onto a left-right political spectrum. It has spastic flashes of credibility, but now generally sits closer to the Epoch Times end than to the Christian Science Monitor end of the credibility-spectrum of publications produced by minority religious groups.
So I’m not sure what to make of this report from ZN’s Naveed Jamali, “New York Shuts Down Olivet University Amid Federal Money-Laundering Probe.” Jamali’s reporting seems mostly to parallel the facts laid out in that CT article, and he works hard to be candid and clear about the links between Olivet church/university and his bosses at ZN. I’m not sure he succeeds in clarifying that because, again, this seems to be a story that defies clarification. But Belz and Jamali and federal prosecutors all seem to agree on one thing: It looks shady as all get out.
• I wrote the bit above before reading this RNS report: “Newsweek sues former owners, controversial pastor David Jang, seeking millions.” Now I’m gonna need a bigger bulletin board and even more thumb tacks and thread:
IBT bought Newsweek in 2013, after a failed reboot led the company to end print publication. The sale was controversial at the time due to IBT’s ties to Jang, who founded Olivet University, a small Christian school in San Francisco, during the early 2000s. A native of Korea, Jang once worked for a seminary run by the Unification Church, according to Christianity Today. He and his followers also founded the Christian Post, among other media properties.
The complaint that alleges IBT, owned by Etienne Uzac and Johnathan Davis, is part of a network of organizations and businesses associated with a religious group, known as “the Community,” that is overseen by Jang.
These various businesses all have close relationships. Tracy Davis, a dean and former president of Olivet University, is married to Johnathan Davis, CEO of IBT Media, and a co-owner of Newsweek. William Anderson, the former publisher of The Christian Post, served on the board of Olivet.
Then the radical priest come to get us released
And we’re all out here covering Newsweek …
(As far as I know, none of those entities is linked to whoever it is who now owns Patheos.)
• Here’s another piece from Christianity Today: “Lawsuit Alleges Billionaire’s Christian Foundation Engaged in Self-Dealing.” And now I’m thinking Tim Dalrymple might want to hire a full-time white-collar crime reporter just to let poor Emily Belz get back to the kind of religion reporting that doesn’t require a spreadsheet and a team of forensic accountants.
Joe Shazar at Dealbreaker is more accustomed to working the financial shenanigans beat, and here’s his piece on the (alleged) crimes of this gazillionaire speculator: “At Least Bill Hwang Saved Some Souls.” Subhed: “Because that’s about all his former employees have left in absence of their deferred comp.”
The new suit against Hwang includes accusations of self-dealing through his supposedly separate charitable foundation “Grace and Mercy,” which the billionaire allegedly used as a rainy day fund to protect personal assets he was otherwise at risk of losing through high-stakes speculation and/or lawsuits and criminal prosecution. That foundation gave away about 5% of its assets as actual charity — mostly to white evangelical ministries. That, and Hwang’s personal evangelical faith, are the reason this story is newsworthy for CT.
It’s also why this story points to other stories, or even to One Really Big Story, that Christianity Today needs to cover somewhere down the line. “Grace and Mercy” was a Big Donor for the Christian ministries on the receiving end of its trickle-down charity, but that seems to have been a figleaf for what it was (allegedly) doing with most of its money and power, which was used (allegedly) in service of some rather anti-charitable purposes. Might the same thing be true of other Big Donors on whom the institutions of white evangelicalism have come to rely? (Fake sneeze: DeVos.) Might it be true of most of them? Or maybe even of all of them?
• Corey McNellis is also headed to court, but he is not accused of any financial crime. No, this white evangelical former assistant principal is going to court because he’s a clueless asshole: “Fired after opposing ‘Laramie Project,’ school staffer sues.”
A former assistant principal at a Colorado high school has sued the district, claiming he was fired because he voiced his “Christian belief” in opposing the staging of “The Laramie Project.”
Corey McNellis lost his job at Ponderosa High School in Parker after he sent emails in October 2020 about the planned production of the play, which deals with the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was beaten and tortured in Laramie, Wyo.
In a federal lawsuit filed Friday, McNellis, who was also athletic director at the school, claims Douglas County School District fired him because of his “Christian belief and because he expressed his views, which are protected by the First Amendment.”
McNellis spoke against the production because he was worried about “how the Christian religion comes across in the play,” said his attorney Spencer Kontnik.
“The Laramie Project” was created by a team of writers and actors who traveled to Wyoming to interview local residents about the murder. The play is an “examination of the immediate reactions of Matt Shepard’s community to the murder and to the underlying bigotry and hatred that enabled it,” according to the Tectonic Theater Project.
The most defensible explanation here would be that McNellis has never seen or read the play. That would explain his otherwise-absurd contention that it could possibly be viewed as presenting a single, uniform portrayal of “the Christian religion.”
Consider, for example, the scene in which the despicable Christian minister Fred Phelps and the handful of his relatives who make up his “Westboro Baptist Church” show up to heckle outside of Matthew Shepard’s funeral. That funeral was held in a Christian church and was presided over by a Christian minister. It was attended by hundreds of people, most of whom were also Christians. So what then, does that scene show us about “the Christian religion”?
McNellis’ sputtered objections might mean that he’s upset that Phelps and his crew were included at all — even though this is verbatim theater, and the hatemongering Christians have to be in that scene because they were really there. But if we follow his logic — this play makes “the Christian religion” look bad because it makes Fred Phelps look bad — then we realize that Phelps is the one McNellis most closely identifies with here. And that would mean that his protestations about the play supposedly impugning “the Christian religion” are based on his objection to the myriad Christians the play presents who are not hatemongering, litigious assholes.
McNellis is suing the school district, claiming he was fired due to the religious persecution of white Christians. (Perhaps he was, in fact, the only white Christian working for that school district and that no other white Christians can be found employed there. But I rather doubt that’s the case.) This seems dubious because, as Robyn Pennacchia writes at Wonkette: “It seems highly unlikely that he was fired simply for expressing his Christian beliefs, given that as far as anyone knows, it is not actually against the Christian religion for Christians to be directly quoted in a play, or anywhere else.”
But given that we have an Anything Goes Supreme Court majority who now claim that the Establishment Clause violates the Free Exercise Clause for white Christians, McNellis’ dubious argument might win the day. The school district might not just be forced to rehire him but to put him in charge of future theater productions so that, next year, Ponderosa High’s fall production will be a Halloween Hell House.
You can watch HBO’s star-studded film version of The Laramie Project for free on YouTube.
This play always makes me cry, not just because of the horrible sadness of the tragedy at its center, but because of the beautiful words and beautiful thoughts it contains, and the realization that these aren’t the carefully scripted work of artists and playwrights, but simply the unrehearsed, off-the-cuff expressions of everyday people caught on tape.”There are more things to admire in us than to despise.”
• The title for this post comes from Rhymin’ Simon:
This video has some weird moments (John Madden?), and I can’t figure out why the switch-hitting Mickey Mantle opts to go lefty-on-lefty against Simon, but the stuff here with the kids on the playground is just terrific.
Paul Simon has always been stubbornly obtuse about what “the Mama saw” that was “against the law.” But it was against the law when he wrote that song back in 1971. And the unelected, unaccountable judicial coup of the Robber’s Court is determined to make it against the law again.
Oh, and also too, since we mentioned him above, please take a moment to remember that Fred Phelps is now totally and completely dead. Like, really really dead. As dead as Haman. We have a duty to celebrate that.
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