Keri Ladouceur no longer calls herself an Evangelical Christian.

Like many younger members of this sprawling American religious tradition, she’s left what she says has become a movement mostly defined by aggressive white conservatism and Christian nationalism, the prerogatives of male privilege, and a near obsession with regulating human sexuality.

For a woman who devoted her life to evangelical ministry, it was particularly personal. Again and again, she experienced moments in churches she served that nearly shattered her faith altogether.

But Ms. Ladouceur says her relationship with Jesus carried her through. Though she has disassociated herself from a movement now intimately enmeshed with Republican politics, she and others have embraced an enigmatic new label. She formally identifies herself today as “post-Evangelical.”

There’s an ambivalence embedded in this identity, even if she and others are just beginning to figure out what it means beyond deconstructing white evangelicalism’s fusion of faith and right-wing politics.

There are, of course, plenty of choices in America’s robust array of Christian traditions, including those that have long traveled more progressive theological paths. There is also the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, “the nones,” who may have spiritual beliefs but no longer identify themselves as adherents of an organized religion.

Ms. Ladouceur and her fellow post-Evangelicals say they want to hold on to the faith they’ve lived, even though they reject – or have been rejected by – their former churches.

There are reasons to keep the term they use to describe themselves, even if they are decisively putting traditional evangelicalism in their pasts.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Keri Ladouceur goes for a family walk with her children, Liam and Olivia, Nov. 5, 2023, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“I just find the person of Jesus and story after story of liberation and healing and redemption just a really compelling depiction of who God is,” says Ms. Ladouceur, now the co-founder and executive director of the Post-Evangelical Collective, a small but growing consortium of congregations of former Evangelicals. “It’s just something that I still want to try to align my life with.”

She still testifies, too, to the dramatic personal encounter with Jesus that compelled her to change her life almost 20 years ago. Though she no longer uses the expression, her spiritual experience of being “born again” still defines who she is.

As political power grew, pews shrank

Two decades ago, white Evangelicals comprised over a quarter of the U.S. population. This number has since dropped to about 15%, according to a 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

There’s a certain irony in this decline. For decades, the religiously conservative movement flourished in the U.S. as more liberal Protestant traditions lost members. Raw, real, and literal, evangelical Christianity engaged the human heart in ways a more intellectual Christianity never could, many believers explained.

These religious characteristics describe a significant section of Black and Latino Protestantism, too. Since the 1970s, however, the term has mostly applied to white conservatives who coalesced around the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, becoming the most reliable and politically potent force in American politics, and the core of the Republican Party.

A wide majority of white Evangelicals continue to proclaim a zealous enthusiasm for former President Donald Trump – and they feel their support has been vindicated. Last year, in a resounding victory after a half-century of effort, a Supreme Court with three members appointed by President Trump overturned Roe v. Wade.

The nation’s high court, with a supermajority of justices who have conservative religious commitments, also opened the doors for taxpayer support for religious education, another top-line goal for Evangelicals. Similarly, the justices have made protecting religious liberty a paramount concern in cases brought by religious conservatives.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Congregants pray together during a Sunday morning service at Church on Morgan Nov. 5, 2023, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As white evangelicalism now stands at the peak of its political power, however, many are beginning to confront the movement’s own internal decline.

“More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined,” write Evangelical pastors Jim Davis and Michael Graham in their book, “The Great Dechurching.”

While they suggest a nuanced picture of the decline of Evangelicals, it’s clear that politics is driving a significant part of younger generations away, surveys show. 

“The No. 1 question that younger Evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible,” writes Russell Moore, former head of the ethics committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. He felt forced to leave the denomination because of his outspoken opposition to Mr. Trump. “Almost none of them even call themselves ‘evangelical’ anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories.”

The nation’s bitter political divisions have played a significant role in the fledgling movement of post-Evangelicals, who also emphasize their more progressive concerns as they try to reforge their understanding of Christian faith.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Justin Morgan, lead pastor at Church on Morgan, delivers a sermon Nov. 5, 2023, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“What they’re leaving behind is anti-intellectualism; they’re leaving behind anti-LGBT commitments; they’re trying to leave behind patriarchy,” says David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta. “They’re trying to leave behind nationalism and militarism, because they believe that doesn’t really fit with following Jesus – in any country. And they’re definitely trying to leave behind the identification of conservative whiteness as synonymous with following Jesus.”

Once considered a preeminent Evangelical ethicist, Mr. Gushee wrote “Changing Our Mind” in 2014. His book appealed to biblical authority and traditional Christian theology to argue for the full inclusion of same-sex couples and transgender people. In many ways, his book remained conservative, in that it invited LGBTQ+ people into the tradition of Christian marriage, reserving sexual expression within monogamous lifelong commitments.

Mr. Gushee was used to being outside his culture’s conservative views, and he had always been comfortable calling himself a “progressive Evangelical.” But in this era of amplified polarization, former friends, colleagues, and students thought he had moved into a place that was both dangerous and wicked.

“More and more Evangelicals have the idea that the people who disagree with us – the people who gave us Roe v. Wade, the people who gave us the gay rights movement, or that progressives and Democrats in general – they’re not just wrong, they’re not just our respective opponents; they are demonic enemies of all that is good,” he says.

After 40 years as a committed Evangelical scholar, Mr. Gushee says that journey has ended. The time has now come to forge ahead and build something new with those that he says are “following Jesus out of American evangelicalism.”

Nicole Buchanan/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

David Gushee stands at his home church, Towne View Baptist Church, in Kennesaw, Georgia, Oct. 8, 2023. The author says he believes the Post-Evangelical Collective will become a significant part of American Christianity.

A moment that changed a life

Ms. Ladouceur still vividly remembers the moment Jesus came into her life on Easter Sunday in 2005.

She was driving home late, as usual, from one of the restaurants where she worked in Tampa, Florida. She was 20 and still thrilled with her cute new car with leather seats and a sunroof.

She had gotten her GED diploma a few years earlier and had become a regional manager for a restaurant group, in charge of employee training at an age when most people are still in college. She was working long hours and making bank, spending weekends on boats with friends, attending parties, and dating a lot.

“I tried everything the world had to offer me that I thought was going to make me feel whole or fulfilled,” Ms. Ladouceur says. “But it all kind of came up empty.”

That night, she took notice of the sign in front of the sprawling evangelical church next to her restaurant, announcing its Easter service. She’d passed the campus probably hundreds of times, says Ms. Ladouceur. “I just felt a sort of a whispered invitation,” she says.

The next morning it was a bit strange, she says, being a single 20-year-old walking into a large church with lots of families. Four years earlier, she had legally emancipated herself from her own religious family. She describes leaving behind a household of addiction, abuse, and adultery, vowing she wanted nothing to do with religion as she set out to live alone at 16.

But she was drawn to the church’s high-tech worship, fun lobby photo booths, and focus on family services. “I suddenly felt this connection to a spirit of, ‘Yes, I do think this is part of what has been lacking in my life,’” she says.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Keri Ladouceur (left) laughs with her kids, Liam, 9, and Olivia, 14, at the end of a Sunday morning service at Church on Morgan, Nov. 5, 2023, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

She was gripped by the 30-minute sermon of a pastor she found “earnest and real and compassionate” as he talked about the struggles of living a Christian life. When she went home, she wrote a verse from the sermon on a sticky note and posted it on her mirror, where she could see these words of Jesus every day:

“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”

She felt reborn. It was a moment that changed her life. She began to see her work as a chance to build teams rooted in respect and kindness. Within weeks, she instituted a Building Better People policy for her restaurants’ training program.

“Every day, it was like, what do I have to do to lose my life but find my life in Christ before showing up to work to a managers meeting? How am I going to lead these managers? How am I going to talk about our cultural issues within our organization? What should I do with my money?” Ms. Ladouceur. “Yeah, it was just, what do I need to do to lose my life and what do I need to do to find my way to Jesus?”

She began to volunteer with the youth ministries. Within a year, the senior pastor asked the enthusiastic young member: You’ve been building restaurants and scaling a franchise. I wonder if you’ve ever considered building ministries?

It would mean taking a 70% pay cut. It would mean changing her lifestyle. That week she sat down and wrote pages and pages of ideas for leading a ministry for middle schoolers. It was, as she would later say, “a clear calling.”

She accepted the job, and the church gave her a modest salary and a new title: pastor of youth ministries. 

Riley Robinson/Staff

Keri Ladouceur attends a Sunday service at Church on Morgan with her kids, Olivia (left) and Liam, in Raleigh, North Carolina. After a series of painful experiences, she no longer describes herself as Evangelical. Today, she is the executive director of the Post-Evangelical Collective.

But there were warning signs, even back then. The first came relatively soon, when her congregation called a new pastor of discipleship. He wouldn’t take the job they offered him if women were able to hold the title of pastor. Her gender should use their gifts to complement the proper spiritual headship of men, he believed.

So church leaders changed their young minister’s title from pastor to coordinator of youth ministries.

American evangelicalism in the 20th century

American evangelical Protestantism has long been forged in cultural conflict.

In many ways, it emerged from what were called the “modernist” controversies of the early 20th century. Historical and critical studies of the Bible and the theory of evolution challenged literalist interpretations. Many Protestant denominations adjusted their understanding of faith and miracles within a very different understanding of the cosmos and the physical world. 

In response, conservatives issued a statement that became known as “the five fundamentals,” which insisted on nonnegotiable beliefs such as the virgin birth, the literal resurrection of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible. The Scopes Trial in 1925 brought these controversies to a crescendo in a well-publicized clash over the teaching of evolution in public schools.

For decades after that cultural defeat, fundamentalist Christianity mostly retreated from public life, quietly building new institutions and denominational infrastructures. The term “fundamentalist” became a mostly pejorative label.

By the 1950s, many conservative Christians started to distance themselves from fundamentalism, at least in a cultural sense. The Evangelist Billy Graham brought a more middle-class and business-friendly sensibility, wearing a suit and tie during his revivals. He used radio and television to share a less reactionary religious message, even if he still decried the country’s liberal direction and called for a return to its perceived authentic past.

“The modern American evangelical movement born in those years always had a kind of a ‘Take America back for God,’ and ‘Take the world back for Christ’ kind of vision,” says Mr. Gushee. “I mean, that’s just in the marrow of evangelicalism.

“The strategy was, you tell all your neighbors about Jesus and then you bring them to church,” he says. “And then you send missionaries all over, all around the world. It was, ‘win the world for Christ.’”

Nicole Buchanan/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Author and scholar David Gushee preaches a sermon at his home church, Towne View Baptist Church, in Kennesaw, Georgia, Oct. 8, 2023.

By the end of the 1970s, this cultural reemergence included political organizing, especially in support of Ronald Reagan. “But I now think that that strategy partly reflected a loss of confidence in the strategy of evangelism and missions,” Mr. Gushee says.

Abortion and sexuality played little role in the political organizing of white Evangelicals in the 1970s, historians such as Randall Balmer at Dartmouth College point out. The galvanizing political issue, he argues, was the desegregation of public schools and the needs of the private, mostly white Christian academies that sprang up in response.

Mr. Gushee’s book “Defending Democracy From Its Christian Enemies” traces how evangelical politics has evolved. Today, its targets include critical race theory and books about race and LGBTQ+ people, drag shows, and abortion and transgender health care.

“Christian nationalism is not my preferred term to describe the politics that has emerged,” Mr. Gushee says. “I call it authoritarian, reactionary Christian politics that increasingly doesn’t trust the democratic process.”

A rebel pastor

In truth, Zach Lambert has always been something of a rebel.

He grew up in Austin, Texas, as part of a family long steeped in evangelicalism. His grandparents were charter members of Great Hills Baptist Church, which flourished over the decades to become Austin’s first megachurch. His father, Reagan Lambert, was hired by legendary Dallas Cowboys Coach Tom Landry to open a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which he ran for 30 years.

Despite such a pedigree, Mr. Lambert bristled at some of the ideas about God he was learning at his family church. Confident and aggressive, he sometimes liked to challenge the youth minister on matters of theology during youth group discussions. 

Sergio Flores/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Pastor Zach Lambert sings during a service at Restore Church Oct. 22, 2023, in Austin, Texas.

One Easter week, the youth minister was explaining the theology of atonement, Mr. Lambert recalls. When Jesus was on the cross, God turned his back on him, the minister said, because Jesus had all of our sins on him. God in his perfect holiness can’t abide sin in his presence, so that’s why Jesus said, “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?”

“So, I raised my hand and said something to the effect of, ‘You tell us that this God is a good father and he is trustworthy and he loves us,’” he says. “And yet, it sounds like at the greatest time of need, he turns his back and is nowhere to be found. How does it work, anyway, that God can’t be around sin, which means, what? That he can’t be around the world or any of us at any time?”

The youth minister had enough. Rather than try to explain one of theology’s harder problems, he kicked the smart aleck out of the group. Far from chastened, Mr. Lambert was happy to go.

Like many teenagers in Texas, he was obsessed with video games and football, giving little thought to religion. He became a member of his high school’s varsity football team, which had the Rebels as a mascot. Like many teammates, he hung a Confederate battle flag above his bed.

But then a moment changed him. He reconnected with a friend he’d known from kindergarten through middle school. They had lost contact after each went to high schools on different sides of Austin. Excited to see him, Mr. Lambert invited him to hang out and play video games.

At the door of his bedroom, however, his friend froze, suddenly saying he had to leave. Confused, he asked why. His friend explained that his parents had told him that if he ever found himself with white people displaying that flag, he should leave as quickly as possible. Mr. Lambert was stunned; he had no idea his flag could cause such a reaction. He took the flag down and never put it back up.

When Mr. Lambert was 17, he was still something of a rebel, smoking weed and drinking. One summer evening when he was out late with friends, he overdosed on a combination of cough medicine and alcohol, needing medical attention. Not long after that, an acquaintance also overdosed, then died.

The experiences were devastating. “I started to ask those existential questions, like, why am I here? And is God real, and have I misunderstood Christianity? Do I need to reengage with it to find meaning in my life?” he says. He started reading the Bible again. Then, at a youth camp, he had a powerful conversion experience.

He’d always planned to attend a Christian college in Texas and play football. His plan was to study sports management and start a career as a football coach. But during his first year at college, he found a small evangelical congregation and became an active member.

A devastating injury meant he could no longer play football. But his church asked him to be their part-time youth pastor. Soon there was no doubt in his mind: His true calling was to be a full-time Christian pastor. 

After graduating, he went to Dallas Theological Seminary. He also landed a pastoral internship at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, one of the largest megachurches in the U.S. During the Obama years, he worked closely with Jack Graham, who would later become a member of the evangelical advisory committee to President Trump.

“Politics, it was all very integral to what the church did,” says Mr. Lambert. “A church that was supposed to be doing God’s work was so enmeshed with right-wing politicians and political figures. ... So, yeah, I just got really disillusioned really quickly.”

And then there were the scandals. According to the 2022 Guidepost report on sexual abuse within Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Graham, a former president of the convention, “allegedly allowed an accused abuser of young boys to be dismissed quietly in 1989 without reporting the abuse to police.” The former music minister moved on to a congregation in Mississippi, where he was charged with abusing young boys, the report says.

Sergio Flores/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Pastor Zach Lambert leads a chant at Restore Church, Oct. 22, 2023, in Austin, Texas. After performing ceremonies for LGBTQ+ congregants, he says his church was disenfranchised from every evangelical group, “including our denomination.”

In May 2008, another pastor at Prestonwood was arrested for soliciting sex from a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl online. A few years later, Mr. Lambert says a pastor on staff became addicted to painkillers and, during pastoral calls to older adults, stole their medications. Church leaders accused the pastor’s wife of neglecting her appearance, gaining weight, and contributing to her husband’s addiction.

“I kind of thought, yeah, I’m probably going to be done with ministry,” he says.

“It was a wild time”

Looking back, Ms. Ladouceur always felt a bit uneasy with the “purity culture” that seemed to fall mostly on women. She had lost the title of pastor, but she was still dedicated to her ministry, working with middle school children.

Another youth pastor started to pursue her romantically. “I actually said to him, ‘You’ll probably get fired for hanging out with me. Like, this is never going to be a thing,’” she recalls joking. But they started dating, and church leaders made it clear: They should marry as soon as possible, especially since he was planning to go to seminary. So they did.

Part of her new husband’s training included a position near Chicago at a renowned megachurch, Willow Creek Community Church. Its founder and senior pastor, Bill Hybels, was recognized as one of the most important Evangelical ministers in the country. Politically moderate and focused on evangelism and ministry, he worked with President Barack Obama on immigration issues. Unlike other conservative ministers, he supported women having the role of pastor.

Leaders at Willow Creek, impressed with her experience, also offered Ms. Ladouceur a full time job as a youth minister. 

For over a decade, it was a good life. The young, energetic ministers started a family, having a daughter and son. “While I worked in student ministry, I ran a winter camp for 2,000 high school students while I was nine months pregnant” with her daughter, Olivia, she says. “It was a wild time.”

She moved on to other ministerial roles, including a peacemaking ministry, which sought to address the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians. Then, six months pregnant with her son, Liam, she interviewed for an adult education ministry. She got the position, and she began to work closely with Mr. Hybels.

In 2018 in an international scandal, Mr. Hybels resigned after at least five women told their stories of being groomed and sexually harassed while working closely with him. Ms. Ladouceur was one of those women. Mr. Hybels continues to deny the accusations, including those of Ms. Ladouceur.

“The way Willow Creek and its leaders responded to me, it was gutting to me,” Ms. Ladouceur says. “I just really had to wrestle with, wouldn’t Jesus be moving toward the ones who were hurt in this situation, not protecting the organization?”

Riley Robinson/Staff

Congregants pray together during a Sunday morning service at Church on Morgan Nov. 5, 2023, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Church on Morgan describes itself as “shaped by the Methodist tradition” and supports LGBTQ+ identities, women in leadership positions, and anti-racism work.

Her marriage didn’t survive the public ordeal. For a time, she returned to working with racial justice and peacemaking nonprofits, as she struggled to rebuild her life, and her faith.

“My faith paradigm had been decimated,” she says. “But Jesus was still the compelling force behind not wanting to give up my faith in Jesus.” Deep in therapy, she decided to go to seminary to work through her shattered call to ministry.

A single mother, she became a pastor again in a congregation in Kentucky. But she felt called to do more after her experiences in prominent evangelical churches. She wanted to try to change the paradigms of Christian ministry.

Her faith in Jesus was still calling her to build the kingdom of God, she says. And soon she was finding hundreds of people who felt called to do the same.

A church in exile

After leaving Prestonwood, Mr. Lambert decided to remain committed to ministry. In fact, he says he “really kind of caught the church-planting bug,” so he moved his family back to Austin and started a church from scratch.

He and others began to raise funds, and they formed a denominational partnership with the Evangelical Free Church of America.

At first he felt that his ministry should shun politics. But his church, Restore Austin, was becoming diverse, and it included same-sex couples and others who didn’t fit the evangelical profile.

“Everything started happening in our first year of being a church in 2016, and it wasn’t even because of the presidential election,” Mr. Lambert says. “At our first baptism service, we baptized a number of LGBTQ+ folks, including a lesbian couple. We gave a kids’ dedication service for another lesbian couple who became a part of the church,” he says. The congregation also started to have discussions about racial justice and Black Lives Matter.

Sergio Flores/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Zach Lambert greets members as they arrive at Restore Church Oct. 22, 2023 in Austin, Texas. Mr. Lambert, a former Evangelical, started the church after feeling disenfranchised with his former faith due to its politics.

These actions placed them under investigation by the Evangelical Free denomination and other financial sponsors. His congregation’s actions were considered unbiblical and sinful, and his ministry license was revoked.

“We were kicked out of absolutely every evangelical organization that we were a part of, including our denomination,” Mr. Lambert says. “We felt really alone.”

During the pandemic, he says, a miracle happened. As his ministry moved online, he started to connect with other ministers and congregations who had experiences like his.

“We realized, we needed to figure out how to build some systems and structures into an actual kind of network organization so that we can better support pastors, a lot who have been kicked out of denominations or stripped of ordinations. We all had the same stories,” he says.

By 2021, roundtables and meet-ups included hundreds of ministers and others who were starting to call themselves “post-Evangelicals,” and who were not ready to abandon their faith or call to ministry.

Ms. Ladouceur was among them. Together, they helped forge the Post-Evangelical Collective to support those who were either forced out or decided to walk away. So far, the collective has established “hubs” in at least 14 major cities, with about 50 congregations. 

“Evangelicals are driving out their exiles. They are losing their young disproportionately,” says Mr. Gushee. “So God-oriented, Christ-following folks are heading into post-evangelical spaces, but it needs to exist institutionally for people to have a place to land,” he adds. “That is what is being built right before our eyes. I believe that evangelicalism is definitely shrinking, post-evangelicalism is definitely coalescing – and I believe it will become a significant part of U.S. religion.”

Mr. Lambert no longer thinks his ministry should be apolitical. “I’ve just become really convinced that the call to Christ’s followers is to leverage whatever power or privilege we have in the service of people who have less,” Mr. Lambert says, adding he feels a responsibility to use whatever privilege he has “in a way that helps people rather than harms people.”

Ms. Ladouceur feels much the same: “I feel way less pressure these days to have all of the right intellectual thoughts about Jesus, and more about just how upside down and subversive his way of being in the world was – a way of being that did not lead to destruction, but led to redemption.”

The story of the Syrophoenician woman in the Gospel of Mark has been in her heart, she says. Jesus is trying to get away from the clamoring crowds, and this Gentile woman falls at his feet and begs him to heal her daughter. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs,” Jesus retorts. “Lord,” the woman replies, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Impressed, Jesus tells her that her daughter has been healed.

“The idea that a Black woman would have changed the mind of the divine in such a tense interaction – I think it’s a really subversive text,” she says. “But I think the biggest thing is, time and time again Jesus made space for outcasts. And who Jesus came to welcome, every time it flipped religious ideals on their heads – even his own. He made a lot of religious people angry by continuing to build a longer table and invite more and more people.”

In some ways, the words of Jesus at her conversion were prophetic. “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”

Sandra Cuffe

Cristina Valenzuela raises a hand-crafted protest sign during a march for democracy in Guatemala City Dec. 7.

Cristina Valenzuela raises her hand-crafted protest sign on a downtown street corner earlier this month, while hundreds of people file past. The poster shows alarmed passengers holding up the Guatemalan flag aboard a boat labeled “democracia,” as the vessel tilts into blue tissue-paper water.

“We are just one step away from losing that democracy we have struggled so much to maintain,” says Ms. Valenzuela, a retired teacher shouting over the din of the crowd of pro-democracy protesters on Dec. 7.

More than 3 1/2 months since anti-corruption candidate and underdog Bernardo Arévalo won the presidential runoff election in Guatemala, top prosecutors are ramping up efforts to subvert his victory. They claim the results of the first-round, general elections back in June should be annulled.

Mr. Arévalo is set to take office on Jan. 14, but he and other leaders of his political party are facing attempts by prosecutors to strip them of their immunity from prosecution. If stripped, they could face charges including sedition and money laundering. But they aren’t the only ones under threat: Those in charge of certifying the election results, officially making Mr. Arévalo the president-elect, fled Guatemala earlier this month after their immunity from prosecution was taken away by Congress.

Attempts to undermine democracy across Latin America have put the region under an international microscope in recent years, and individual sanctions by foreign governments are on the rise. Lawfare – defined as misusing the law or judicial system as a weapon against opponents – is now thriving in parts of the region, including Guatemala, where observers say it is being used to subvert electoral democracy.

On Dec. 14, Guatemala’s top court stepped in, ordering Congress to ensure all officials elected in 2023 take office in January. The ruling, however, does not put the brakes on prosecutors’ investigations into Mr. Arévalo. As the crisis breeds uncertainty, civil society and Indigenous-led protests are leading the call for Attorney General Consuelo Porras and other key players to resign.

Moises Castillo/AP

Guatemalan President-elect Bernardo Arévalo (center) should take office on Jan. 14, 2024, but prosecutors and members of Congress are trying to invalidate the election and strip him of immunity.

“The justice system has been used as a political tool,” says Edgar Ortiz, a constitutional lawyer and one of the plaintiffs in the case that led to the Dec. 14 ruling. Lawfare has reached new heights in Guatemala, he says. Still, Mr. Ortiz sees some progress.

“The beautiful thing about this moment in Guatemala is that it has been like a concert, an orchestra. Everyone has played an instrument” in defending democracy, he says, from public protests to international pressure to legal action.

Suspensions and suspicions

Efforts to undermine the election process began after Mr. Arévalo, a sociologist and sitting congressman from the anti-corruption Movimiento Semilla party, qualified for the August runoff.

A judge suspended Semilla’s party status, and prosecutors carried out a series of raids on election tribunal facilities. Public prosecutors filed a motion in November to strip Mr. Arévalo, his vice president-elect, and other lawmakers of their immunity from prosecution, citing social media posts supporting a student movement as evidence of their involvement in a criminal conspiracy.

Congress voted at the end of November in the final ordinary session of the year to strip four election tribunal magistrates of their immunity, paving the way for charges against them. The two-thirds majority vote was made possible by an informal alliance across many of the 19 parties in Congress whose representatives feel threatened by Mr. Arévalo’s promises to crack down on corruption. The four magistrates left the country, following in the footsteps of dozens of prosecutors and judges who have fled into exile in recent years due to threats for their roles in tackling high-level corruption cases.

“The judicialization of politics in the country has been reaching more and more worrying levels,” says Gabriela Carrera, a political science professor at Rafael Landivar University. “This is not happening overnight. ... It’s a strategy that’s being adapted to election results.”

On Dec. 8, prosecutors asserted the results of the general elections should be nullified, citing alleged irregularities, including the format of voting records. They also filed an additional request to strip Mr. Arévalo of his immunity. He can’t officially face any charges until his immunity is lifted.

“Today we are seeing the consequences of the subjugation, subordination, and control of the judicial system,” says Renzo Rosal, a Guatemalan political analyst who believes the aim of prosecutors’ latest moves is to extend the crisis.

Sandra Cuffe

Miguel Angel Alvarado, the Indigenous Maya Achi mayor of Rabinal, and other Indigenous authorities take part in a march for democracy in support of Guatemala's elected, anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo.

A 180 on corruption?

Not long ago, Guatemala was seen as a shining light in the region in terms of judicial independence, sending former heads of state to trial for genocide and systemic corruption. It garnered international praise, but not all Guatemalans were pleased with the country’s path.

An informal multipartisan alliance of state and private-sector actors, whose interests were threatened by anti-corruption work, set out to dismantle that judicial independence. The alliance, known in Guatemala as the “pact of the corrupt,” co-opted institutions and consolidated power across branches of government.

The Organization of American States called the Dec. 8 move “an attempted coup d’état by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.” The European Union announced it was preparing “targeted restrictive measures against those responsible” for continued attempts to undermine election results. The United States is ramping up its sanctions against officials across branches of government, announcing new visa restrictions last week on nearly 300 Guatemalans, including more than 100 of the country’s 160 members of Congress.

“We are facing a ridiculous, absurd, and perverse coup d’état,” Mr. Arévalo said at a press conference in the wake of the prosecutors’ latest attempts to keep him out of office. Election tribunal officials have since repeatedly affirmed election results are certified and cannot be altered.

The Dec. 14 Constitutional Court ruling, if respected, ensures the presidential transfer of power takes place in the new year. But even if Mr. Arévalo is able to take office, prosecutors could pursue the same legal paths to try and oust him regardless.

The “use of justice for political cases weakens the political and democratic institutionality of Guatemala,” says Dr. Carrera. “We are confronted with a more complicated situation: how to recuperate and strengthen political institutionality in the service of the citizenry and common good.”

Indigenous leaders from around the country don’t trust that the Constitutional Court ruling will halt coup attempts. They say they will maintain their protest encampment, set up on Oct. 2 outside the public prosecutors’ office in Guatemala City, until inauguration day.

“Democracy belongs to the people, not to the state,” says protester Ana Lucrecia Char, a Maya Kaqchikel leader from Chuarrancho, 20 miles north of the capital.

She thinks Mr. Arévalo managing to take office on Jan. 14 will in itself be cause for celebration, after months of struggle in the streets and courts.

“We are sick of all the corruption,” she says.

A new era dawned in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains on Monday with the release of five gray wolves. 

The reintroduction of the wild canines to Colorado fulfills a voter-passed plan to begin restoring the endangered species here by the end of 2023. The first batch of furry predators, flown in from Oregon, bounded out of crates in Grand County, Colorado, across an undisclosed meadow. 

Wolves are contentious in the western United States, with disagreement about the threats they may pose versus their ecological benefit. A judge last week denied a last-minute lawsuit from the Colorado cattle industry seeking to block the release.  

Despite the culture-war status of wolves, their release has also spurred cooperation. Many ranchers, wolf advocates, scientists, and wildlife officials have engaged in knowledge-sharing and strategizing around conflict reduction. 

“Much of the conflict around wolves isn’t necessarily direct conflict between people and wolves,” says Kevin Crooks, director of the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence at Colorado State University. “Rather, it’s conflict among people, different stakeholders with really different opinions.”

Still, much remains to be seen about how the Canis lupus will affect Colorado. 

Why is Colorado reintroducing gray wolves?

In 2020, Colorado voters approved this through a ballot initiative. It won by a whisker: 50.91% to 49.09%.

Gray wolves, wildlife experts say, are native to the Centennial State. Killed off in Colorado by the 1940s, some have since migrated here across state lines. Colorado biologists recorded the birth of wild wolf pups in the state’s north in 2021. 

The animal is subject to a patchwork of protections. Listed as endangered in Colorado, for instance, the gray wolf loses that status once it crosses the northern border into Wyoming. Gray wolves are protected nationally under the federal Endangered Species Act, with exceptions in the northern Rocky Mountains. 

After the 2020 vote, Colorado got special permission from the U.S. government for its state restoration plan. This generally allows management flexibility in Colorado, such as killing wolves that attack livestock.

The Colorado cattle industry sued state and federal wildlife agencies last week seeking to block the rollout of the plan. The Gunnison County Stockgrowers’ and Colorado Cattlemen’s associations argued that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service failed to produce a certain environmental study on wolf impacts that federal law required.

On Friday, a U.S. district judge denied the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order. Their arguments, the court found, didn’t merit halting Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s wolf plan, which “would be contrary to the public interest.” 

Thirty to 50 wolves could be reintroduced on Colorado’s Western Slope over the next three to five years, according to the state’s wolf management plan. 

Don Gittleson/AP

Wolf tracks are shown in the snow in this undated photo from the Sherman Creek Ranch near Walden, Colorado. The state released five wolves on Dec. 18, 2023, after voters approved a ballot measure to return the endangered species.

The Western Slope, a largely rural area, sits west of Denver and several other population centers, which carried the pro-wolf vote. The outcome underscored an urban-rural divide in a Democratic-led state that used to trend more purple.

Why is the plan controversial?

Supporters, including environmentalists, argue for restoring a natural balance. 

“Wolves, for millennia, have been one of the primary engines of evolution and the drivers of ecological health throughout the Northern Hemisphere,” says Rob Edward, strategic adviser at the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project. 

He cites an example in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. An abundance of elk there has depleted vegetation “in the absence of their primary predator, gray wolves,” says Mr. Edward, who’s advocated for the return of wolves to the state since the 1990s. 

Critics, including agricultural producers, raise concerns about predation of wild and cultivated animals. 

“There’s obviously the concern with the impacts to our own livestock, both financial and emotional,” says rancher Greg Peterson, a member of the Gunnison County Stockgrowers’ Association. “It’s traumatizing when that animal suffers.”

Though wolves are well studied, the behavior of new packs in Colorado depends on a variety of factors, says Dr. Crooks at the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence.

Wolves may help reduce elk overbrowsing and bolster habitat diversity, he says, based on research in national parks like Yellowstone, which reintroduced gray wolves in 1995. But the science also suggests that “wolves were likely not solely responsible” for ecosystem changes there.

And while wolves could harm individual livestock, he says, in terms of ranching concerns, research shows that a rebound of wolves is unlikely to have a major economic impact on the cattle industry. Yet that’s cold comfort to one Colorado ranching family that’s already seen several livestock deaths and injuries from wolves since 2021, reports The Washington Post.

In an effort to bridge trust gaps, Dr. Crooks’ center has compiled peer-reviewed research and crowdsourced funds for nonlethal wolf mitigation, like fencing or guard dogs. The university has also engaged Western Slope stakeholders like Jo Stanko, who runs a ranch with her husband near Steamboat Sp​​rings in northwestern Colorado.

As a voter, Ms. Stanko says she cast her ballot in 2020 against wolf releases. Though she still has concerns, three years later she holds an attitude of acceptance – and hope for solutions around wolves and ranchers sharing land. Her family continues to train livestock dogs and install new fencing, and Ms. Stanko hosted a dialogue with wolf advocates and other ranchers last year. 

“We’ve got to learn to have – and relearn how to have – civil conversations with each other,” she says.

How will the state manage the new wolf packs? 

Under its wolf plan, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is charged with managing the carnivores – and monitoring them through GPS collars. The agency doesn’t envision wolves as threats to humans. Studies find that’s rare. 

“They’re very fearful of people, and so we don’t expect them to come into populated areas,” says Eric Odell, species conservation program manager at Colorado Parks and Wildlife. The state is sharing tips for recreation in “wolf country.” As “habitat generalists,” wolves are known to roam across various landscapes.

Humans aside, however, Mr. Odell does expect some conflict between wolves and livestock. There’s a state compensation program for livestock producers who’ve suffered confirmed wolf attacks, though Mr. Peterson, the Gunnison County rancher, says that’s an insufficient remedy.

Courtesy of Texas Country Reporter

Mike Snyder, producer (left), and Dan Stricklin, photographer, shoot an episode of “Texas Country Reporter” in 2018. The iconic show’s host is stepping away after five decades.

Every Sunday for the past 50 years, Texans have settled in front of the television to hear the same warm, six-word invitation: “Hop in and travel with us.”

So begins each episode of “Texas Country Reporter.” Since 1973, Bob Phillips has transported Texans around the state. For most of the past decade, his wife, Kelli, has been his co-host. Each week, viewers meet a trio of characters and learn something new about the culture, history, wildlife, and communities of a state larger in size than Spain and France.

The program is the longest-running independently produced television show in American history, according to its website. Starting as a small local travel program, it evolved into a cultural icon. A generation grew up humming the theme song, dreaming of being featured as one of the “ordinary” Texans doing “extraordinary things,” as Mr. Phillips has described the program. Since 1996, Waxahachie, a city south of Dallas, has hosted the annual Texas Country Reporter Festival. 

“It grew and it grew and it grew,” says Joe Nick Patoski, a writer who has chronicled Texas culture for decades. By the turn of the century, the program “had grown into a real juggernaut,” he adds. “It wasn’t just a television show.”

“Texas Country Reporter” will soon be entering a new era. After five decades, and countless miles in the show’s iconic van (today, a Texas flag-adorned Ford Expedition), Mr. and Mrs. Phillips are unbuckling their seat belts and stepping away from the show. The new host is J.B. Sauceda, a journalist and lifelong fan of the show.

The beloved institution is at a crossroads in more ways than one. Mr. Sauceda – and Texas Monthly, which acquired the program in 2021 – are taking over in a state, and a media landscape, much changed from the early 1970s.

Texas is increasingly young, urban, and digital. While the population is growing, more than half of the state’s counties are in “rural decline,” meaning their deaths outnumber their births, according to the Texas Demographic Center. The romantic vision of Texas as a rural state of ranches and small towns doesn’t fit the lived experience of most Texans. Meanwhile, programs of all stripes now compete for clicks and eyeballs in a seemingly endless flow of content on a growing list of streaming platforms. 

Courtesy of Texas Country Reporter

A Texas sunset is seen through the rearview window of the popular program’s vehicle. The show has traveled to every county in Texas.

“We recognize there are lots of things demanding of people’s attention these days,” says Mr. Sauceda. But he thinks this formula that “Texas Country Reporter” has built up over the decades – short, warm glimpses into everyday life – will not only survive in the current moment, but also grow.

“It’s not about famous people. It’s not about making a point and a statement. It’s about giving a platform to exceptional things ordinary people do,” he adds. “I think people want that right now.“

“They say you are what you eat. I believe you are who you meet,” says Mr. Sauceda. “That’s what I hope comes through the show.”

Building a brand

“Texas Country Reporter” (or “TCR” to fans) debuted as “4 Country Reporter” at the CBS affiliate in Dallas in 1972. Mr. Phillips took over as host a year later, but after 14 years, the show was canceled. It turned out to be the making of the program, as he started producing it himself and selling it to television stations around the state. Over the decades, as his hair turned gray and the “TCR” van gave way to an SUV, Mr. Phillips – aided by his baritone Texan drawl – built a brand.

Working as a TV producer in Amarillo, Larry Lemmons admired the unique personal stories that the program broadcast each week. “That’s what influenced me so much, the idea that anyone could have a story,” says Professor Lemmons, who now teaches media and communications at Texas A&M University in College Station. He says there weren’t many shows at the time “that featured the local blacksmith,” for example. 

Courtesy of Texas Country Reporter

Longtime host Bob Phillips (top photo) stands near the van used for “4 Country Reporter,” which would become “Texas Country Reporter,” in the 1970s. New host J.B. Sauceda (bottom photo) stands with his truck in October.

As much as the show explores the back roads of Texas, it’s an exploration of Texans themselves, from a mule whisperer in Medina, to a blind painter in Denton, to homemade Indian food at a gas station near Paint Rock. “Texans like to believe it’s still a rural state. Bob tapped into that a while ago, that zeitgeist,” says Mr. Patoski.

The program “is always friendly,” he adds, “and it’s getting storytellers to tell their story.” 

Appearing on the program earlier this year fulfilled a lifelong dream for historian Gary Pinkerton. He was featured in an episode with a nature documentarian from Lubbock and a grocery store owner in Maud. The episode dove not just into their work but also into their lives. 

“Big moments in history, the big splashes we think about or remember, are sometimes begun by very common people,” he told the hosts.

Mr. Pinkerton’s eight-minute segment, exploring a road used by 19th-century settlers, “got to the emotions of the story, and that’s what counted to me,” he says.

The show “takes its time to cover details ... but [also] gives you the big picture,” he adds. “It just draws you into the story.”

Telling small-town stories

“Texas Country Reporter” has long had a folksy, nostalgic feel. The program never touches the many political or social issues in the Lone Star State. It focuses on rural lives to an extent that doesn’t reflect contemporary Texas. (Four out of 5 Texans live in urban areas, according to Census Bureau data, though the state does also have one of the country’s largest rural populations.)

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

J.B. Sauceda, a multimedia journalist, will become the new host of “Texas Country Reporter” in 2024.

All the above is what has made the program so enduringly popular, says Mr. Patoski. “There’s always been this niche. Texans love hearing our small-town stories,” he adds. “It speaks to our better angels. I think that’s why it resonates.”

The change in host also reflects “the change in Texas,” he continues. “It’s a very diverse state, it’s a very young state, and to me the new [host] represents that.”

Mr. Sauceda’s background does tick many boxes for “modern Texan.” His parents were raised by migrant workers, but he grew up middle class near Houston. The household soundtrack featured George Strait, Selena, and Willie Nelson. They ate brisket and brisket tacos.

He says when the next season begins airing in September 2024, there will be a few changes. He wants to get new equipment and to get the show more widely available on streaming platforms (some episodes and segments are already on YouTube). But the warm, personal stories of ordinary Texans are going to continue to be its heart and soul.

“The show is meant to be a coffee break that reminds us about why we like living here and why our neighbors are such great people,” he adds. “That’s something that resonates with every Texan of every age.” 

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Bob and Kelli Phillips are leaving the show, but are not retiring.

In the sticky evening, two boys in torn clothes dart between shop verandas and wrestle in the dust, trading jokes that quickly turn to insults. Onlookers grunt disapprovingly, angry at the noise. More groups of rowdy children will soon stream into the back alleyways of this small city in northern Uganda, eking out a life in its underbelly.

By day, the children pick through discarded plastic bottles trying to gather enough of them to sell. At night, they hang out in the shadows of dance clubs or sleep under pieces of cardboard between shop shelves that normally hold fruit.

Steven Onek strolls over to the squabbling boys. Speaking in a calm and quiet voice, he breaks up their argument. A few minutes later, around another street corner, he comforts a teenager sporting a deep cut on his head, providing the boy with some money to see a doctor. 

Such situations are commonplace for Mr. Onek, who is a program officer at Hashtag Gulu, a small organization supporting the city’s homeless children. For him, it is not so much a job as a calling. “Helping a child, one child out of the street, I feel like I have helped the whole nation,” he says, smiling.

The name Hashtag Gulu points to its history. Friends sharing on social media the problems they saw in their city decided to do more than that. At first, their efforts were all volunteer-based. The friends bought food for homeless children and comforted them when they could.

“If you were in our network, you were free to do anything, for any young person or child. You didn’t have to report to anyone,” co-founder and director Michael Ojok said of Hashtag Gulu’s early days.

Fleeing family abuse

Eventually the group grew into a fully registered community organization, as activists attempted to address the added problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Now, Hashtag Gulu reunites homeless children with their family members and provides them with vocational skills. It is also a rare safe haven, running a free clinic as well as counseling and arts programs.

Sophie Neiman

Michael Ojok, the director of Hashtag Gulu, turned a volunteer effort among friends into a community organization helping homeless children.

Some of the children Hashtag Gulu works with are as young as seven, but its beneficiaries can be as old as 25. Most have nowhere else to go. Others have dropped out of school to make a living on the street, returning to their homes and families only rarely. 

Gulu is a place accustomed to hardship. For some three decades, between the late 1980s and early 2000s, the city was the epicenter of an uprising against the government mounted by the Lord’s Resistance Army, notorious for forcibly recruiting some 20,000 child soldiers. A grim parade of boys and girls would flood into the city each night and sleep under its market stalls and in church yards, hoping to avoid capture by the rebels, before returning to their villages at dawn.

Today, the children are often escaping family abuse or neglect, hoping to make it on their own. Mr. Dong, who asked to use a pseudonym, fled to the streets when he was six years old. His mother had died giving birth to him, and the women his father brought home with him were physically and emotionally abusive.

Without parents to look out for him, he fell in with other children for safety. “I got a family outside of my family,” he says. They helped each other find food; they also offered some protection in a community that viewed them as troublemakers, and from police officers quick to make arrests.

“There’s this general feeling among people that those who live on the streets are bad people and everything that is wrong that is happening in our society is done by some of them,” explains Mr. Ojok, the Hashtag Gulu director, of the stigma surrounding homeless children.

Sophie Neiman

Mr. Dong received piglets and other help from Hashtag Gulu. Having once lived on the street, he hopes to one day be a rich man.

While collecting scrap metal a few years ago, a blade fell and cut Mr. Dong’s foot. He came to Hashtag Gulu for free medical treatment. After healing his injuries, workers provided him with piglets and agricultural training. Mr. Dong, now 16, lives with an aunt and continues to care for his pigs.

“I dream of being a very rich man,” he says. “I don’t know how to get rich, but I am glad that [Hashtag Gulu] has opened doors.”

Hashtag Gulu also works with other local organizations to provide employment. At Taka Taka Plastics, which transforms waste into home goods, some 20 children who once lived on Gulu’s streets have been given jobs.

Their Taka Taka earnings have enabled those young people to rent their own rooms, buy and cook their own food, and even start side businesses, says co-founder Paige Balcom, an American living in Gulu. 

A municipal survey conducted two years ago estimated that there are some 2,000 children living rough in Gulu. So far, Hashtag Gulu has managed to reach about half of them with its programs.

Moments of merriment  

As the holidays approach, the organization is in the process of preparing for a Christmas party. Mr. Onek, the program officer, says he’ll skip celebrating with his family in order to spend time with the children. 

“They always come here,” he says. “To them, [Hashtag Gulu] is home.”

There will be beef to eat at the party, served with rice and beans, along with soda to drink and a cake for dessert. The children will also put on a short play, showcasing the hardships they have gone through.

Sophie Neiman

Stephen Onek, who works at Hashtag Gulu, plans to skip Christmas with his family and celebrate with the children his organization supports instead.

“The script is going to come from them,” says Emmanuel Odoch. He works at Watero Dance Initiative, a local organization helping Hashtag Gulu with arts programs. In the coming days, his team will draft a script based on interviews with homeless children.

“It is something that is going to keep inspiring them, keep healing them,” Mr. Odoch says.

Looking forward to the holiday is Ms. Acogo, also a pseudonym. Like Mr. Dong, she fled abuse at home, arriving on the streets in her early teens.

“We would go to night clubs, and there were men who would always support us. That is how we survived,” she recalls quietly.

Ms. Acogo became pregnant by one of those men. Hashtag Gulu helped her train as a tailor, and reconnected her with her grandmother.  “I didn’t know where to start from, how to raise this child,” she recalls, holding her one-month-old baby. “Other women at home are now supporting me and guiding me into motherhood.”

By engaging with and supporting homeless children, Hashtag Gulu workers hope the organization will one day be able to stop them from turning to the streets in the first place, allowing them to live and play as all young people should.

The workers also remind them that a brighter future is possible. “I always tell them the street is not part of you. You’re not born to be on the street,” says Mr. Onek “You have something better that is awaiting you.”

Reuters/Amir Cohen

Benny Gantz, a member of Israel's war cabinet, touches the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site, during a protest in Jerusalem against proposed judicial reforms, on July 23, 2023.

Prior to the war in Gaza, Israel and Saudi Arabia were on their way to normalizing ties. Although now on hold, that warming positions Riyadh to play a vital role in restoring peace. All the more curious then – as Saudi expert Aziz Alghashian wrote Monday in Foreign Policy – that as the conflict has deepened, the Saudis are “using an overlooked diplomatic tool: silence.”

What they may be listening for is evidence of shifting attitudes among Israelis and Palestinians about their shared future. Hints are coming from both sides. In a meeting with families of Israeli hostages last weekend, Benny Gantz, a minister in Israel’s war Cabinet, said that eliminating individual leaders of Hamas, the Islamist group whose militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, “is not the point at all. ... We will not erase the idea [of Hamas] except through a different, better idea.”

That tone found an echo. “Isn’t it worth discussing how to manage this conflict with the Israeli occupation?” asked Hussein al-Sheikh, general secretary of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in a weekend interview with Reuters.

The two men may be future partners in peace. Their views underscore how the war in Gaza is moving their societies toward coexistence set on renewed democratic values. Polls show that Israelis and Palestinians hold similar frustrations over corruption, insecurity, economic disruption, and threats to judicial independence.

“To weaken Hamas, I don’t think you’re going to do it by bombs,” Amaney Jamal, an investigator at Arab Barometer who surveys Palestinian views on government and democracy, told Stanford Report earlier this month. “It’s really bolstering and empowering all the other groups, civil society, all the other efforts, and monopolizing on the support for a peaceful resolution to this conflict.”

The war has sharpened demands for new leadership on both sides. When the militants struck in October, Israelis were already roiling over proposals by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to weaken the authority of the Supreme Court. The Hamas attack increased their unease.

“After a dangerous brush with illiberal, authoritarian rule,” wrote Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israeli Democracy Institute, “Israelis ... will demand firm guarantees that a temporary majority cannot overturn democracy and constitutional safeguards that will enshrine its citizens’ individual rights.” A poll taken last month showed that Mr. Gantz, a retired army general and former minister of defense, would trounce Mr. Netanyahu in snap elections.

Mr. Sheikh also represents a potential shift in leadership. Palestinians have lived under divided rule between the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 2006, their last election. That stagnation, wrote Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, in a companion piece in Foreign Affairs, has “become a perpetual source of violence and instability.”

Diplomats are increasingly focused on “the day after” – how postwar Gaza will be governed and rebuilt. “It would compound this tragedy if all that was waiting for the Israeli people and your Palestinian neighbors at the end of this awful war was more insecurity, fury and despair,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a visit to Israel Monday. As Saudis and others watch for an opening, many Israelis and Palestinians see better democracies and better ideas about each other as better protection than fences and guns.