Ephesians 4:22 That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts
1John 1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
‘A longtime faculty member at Taylor University no longer has a job at the Christian school, reportedly after posting a video of a song he’d written titled “Little Hitler” on YouTube.
An email sent last week to the “Taylor University Family” from the school’s president, provost, dean, and board chair confirmed James Spiegel, a professor of philosophy and religion, no longer is employed by the university in Upland, Indiana.
Spiegel, who had been employed by the university since 1993, according to his curriculum vitae, is a controversial figure on campus.
He spearheaded a petition objecting to plans to bring Starbucks to campus because of its support for Planned Parenthood and for its endorsement of LGBTQ causes. He also signed onto another supporting Vice President Mike Pence’s invitation to speak last year at graduation. Taylor’s president resigned a month after Pence’s visit, which sparked sharp disagreement on campus.
He also was one of the authors of an anonymous conservative newsletter that popped up on campus challenging the school’s changing views on sex, immigration, and creation science, which the newsletter claimed was growing more liberal.
“We published it in order to express a conservative perspective that we sensed could use more representation on campus and to create substantive conversation in our community about a variety of issues,” he told Religion News Service in an email last year.
Spiegel told Taylor’s student newspaper, The Echo, that he was fired after he posted and declined to remove a YouTube video two weeks ago in which he performed an original song titled “Little Hitler.” The professor claimed the school had received a harassment complaint about the video. He also said he previously had performed the song at chapel and at a faculty retreat, according to The Echo.
The song includes the lyrics: “We’re appalled at injustice and oppression and every atrocity that makes the nightly news, but just give it a thought: If you knew you’d never get caught, you’d be thieving and raping and murdering, too.”
Spiegel had posted the video on a YouTube channel called “Picking Your Brain.” Other songs on the site, including “Mr. Government Man” and “Let’s Start Our Own Country,” feature the professor singing songs under the stage name “Philonous” that appear to be political commentary.
“COVID-19 is everywhere, so wear your masks and maintain proper social distancing,” he sings in another song. “Crowds can gather to riot in the street, but people can’t meet in a church to sing.”
Spiegel did not immediately return requests for comment by RNS.
Taylor does not comment on “personnel matters,” according to the email from school leadership. It did not specifically say Spiegel was fired.
But the email to the campus community addressed the “process by which this separation occurred,” saying the school followed the procedure to restore damaged relationships in its “Life Together Covenant.” That included engaging faculty leadership, the academic department and the administration.
“In this case restoration was not possible,” it read.
University leaders did not name what relationships were damaged that led to Spiegel’s departure.
But they said in the email that his departure had nothing to do with politics or restricting academic freedom.
Proverbs 6:16 These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: 17 A proud look…
There are a ton of churches that I have never heard of and may never hear of! However, in time one of the unheard of churches is made known for various reasons. One of those is Watermark Community Church in Texas. Watermark is what is called a mega-church with multiple campuses and founded by Todd Wagner. ‘Todd Wagner, senior pastor of Watermark Community Church—a multi-site megachurch in the Dallas area with an average attendance of 11,000—announced yesterday that he is taking a break from ministry to address the sin of pride. This comes about a year after a blog called No Eden Elsewhere published several posts alleging spiritual abuse at the church.
Wagner told his congregation that he is not guilty of “disqualifying sin” like sexual immorality, financial misconduct, or “foul language.”
Yet, Wagner admitted that friends had confronted him about behaviors stemming from pride, which initially was hard for him to see because “I know who’s built Watermark. It’s not me. I know who gives gifts. It’s not me.”
But Wagner added, “Pride is not simply being overly impressed with who you think you are in terms of accomplishment looks or position. It has most often to do with the position of your heart. It’s got to do with not listening, not being as hard on yourself as times you’re with others. It’s not humbling yourself to listen to others. It’s not thinking of God first and others first.”
In 2019, No Eden Elsewhere published several articles by anonymous sources alleging that Watermark exercised excessive control and spiritual abuse of its members.
One post relayed the story of “Susan” who alleged that Watermark encouraged her to disclose personal sins and family secrets that were then used by the church to control her. She also alleged that the church pressured her to disclose personal financial information like how much she earned, spent, and saved.
Similarly, a second post reported the story of “Michael” who said that after leaving the church, he feared that he would be surveilled and his reputation or employment harmed.
Yesterday, @noedenelsewhere tweeted the news about Wagner’s announcement. And in the comment thread, Wagner apparently posted and then deleted the comment: “Mission accomplished.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1302773737742368769&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fjulieroys.com%2Fwatermark-abuse-break%2F%3Fmc_cid%3Dfbacccd3fe%26mc_eid%3Db13d34ad49&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px
Wagner founded Watermark in 1999 with the expressed purpose of ministering to “the unchurched, dechurched, dead-churched and unmoved.” The church grew rapidly and now has campuses in Dallas, Frisco, and Plano.
The church also produces a popular marriage curriculum called re|engage that is used in more than 370 churches nationwide. Watermark also has developed a popular 12-step recovery program called re:generation, which is used at many other churches, as well.
Proverbs 8:13 The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate. Proverbs 11:2 When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom. Proverbs 13:10 Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom. Proverbs 14:3 In the mouth of the foolish is a rod of pride: but the lips of the wise shall preserve them. Proverbs 16:18 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 21:24 Proud and haughty scorner is his name, who dealeth in proud wrath. Proverbs 29:23 A man’s pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit.
According to the article below a former children’s minister at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas had a charge for ‘sexual’ assault dropped. However, according to pastor Matt Chandler, Tonne was fired in 2019 for being ‘repeatedly drunk in violation of church rules.’ What in the world is going on in evangelicalism?! It’s about time for professing Christians to STOP and ‘Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates? 2Corithians 13:5.
‘Criminal charges have been dropped against a former associate children’s minister at The Village Church, a Dallas-area evangelical megachurch.
Matt Tonne was indicted for indecency with a child involving sexual contact in January 2019 and has denied the charges against him.
The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office moved to dismiss the charges against Tonne last week, according to court documents. The motion — signed by Sherre Thomas, an assistant district attorney of Dallas County — states that, despite an investigation, “the complainant cannot and has not positively identified defendant as the person who committed this offense.”’
A young woman who attended The Village Church while growing up has accused Tonne of sexually assaulting her at a 2012 church camp she attended when she was 11. Now an adult, she sued the Village Church for gross negligence and emotional distress last year, seeking $1 million in damages.
J. Mitchell Stone of Scheef & Stone, who is one of the woman’s lawyers, said that the district attorney did not speak to his client before dismissing the charges.
Stone said that his client “stands ready” to identify Tonne.
“Our client and her family are shocked and disgusted at the Dallas County District Attorney’s sudden decision to dismiss this case without so much as consulting her or even picking up the telephone to talk with her before they decided to dismiss it,” he said.
Stone said the lawsuit against The Village Church is moving forward. He told Religion News Service that he expects a jury trial in 2021.
Tonne’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
In an email Monday (Aug. 31) to its members, The Village Church shared the news that the charges had been dismissed. The church also shared resources like crisis lines, contact information for its care department and local counseling referrals for those who might need them.
“We continue to pray for all involved,” the email said.
The Village Church has been posting updates about the case to its website since news of an alleged incident at the church camp broke in 2018.
In January 2019, The Village Church said it had removed Tonne from church staff the year before but did not reveal the reasons for his dismissal.
Matt Chandler, pastor of The Village Church, later said that Tonne, who was a family friend, was fired from the church because he had been repeatedly drunk in violation of church rules.
Do men like Jerry Falwell Jr. and others who have built large ‘Christian’ organizations and churches have too much pride, time and money? Now, ‘Megachurch pastor John Gray announced that he has “submitted to a process of restoration” that will sometimes take him away from his church in the wake of new allegations of infidelity, some of which he admits are true.
“I’m sorry for the areas of my life that I left unattended, that I was apathetic about, the areas where I have treated the calling of God, the grace of God and the hand of God casually in my life. For every area of behavior that has dishonored the holiness of God, I want to tell you that I’m sorry. There have been a number of things, blogs, some of them accurate, some of it not. But all of it, my responsibility,” the embattled leader of Relentless Church in Greenville, South Carolina, said in an address to his church and family Sunday.
“I apologize for putting the name of God in harm’s way and I and I alone take the responsibility for the actions that harmed and injured God’s sheep. No matter how many pseudo-excuses one can hurl in a moment like this, for the purposes of self-preservation, all of them ring hollow when all that is truly needed is the truth,” he said.
Gray’s address comes after his lawyers said a week ago that he was being blackmailed and extorted after he was accused of engaging in another inappropriate relationship.
The latest allegation against Gray came from a 48-year-old Houston woman who identified herself as “Mary” during an interview with online personality Tasha K, which was broadcast on YouTube. The Houston woman said during her interactions with Gray, she sent him partially nude photos at his request and he video-chatted with her while revealing his underwear. She claimed that he also met with her in Houston and invited her to visit his home and she declined because she felt he may have wanted to sleep with her.
Gray did not specifically address any of the allegations against him but explained that he had been in therapy for himself as well as in marriage therapy with his wife for a while but those efforts were insufficient in helping him to become the pastor, father and husband he aspires to be.
He said after being confronted by godly friends and leaders, he will now submit to a process that he has never endured before for an indefinite period.
“[I] submitted to a process of restoration that will require me to continue to do the deep work, not only of therapy but of emotional health professionals; physical restoration because my body and my soul have been deeply wounded and impacted by a life that was rooted in shame,” he said. “I don’t know how long that process is going to be.”
He said he has the help of pastors who will help him get “whole” and urged members of his church to continue giving to his ministry as he seeks the help he “deserves” in the broken areas of his life.
He argued that one of the reasons he didn’t seek radical help before now was because he incorrectly assumed that his church could not survive financially without him always at the helm.
“I never submitted to anybody in those other areas, whether through shame fear or an inflated sense of worth. Well, the church needs me to keep preaching so that everybody can be able to take care of their families,” he reasoned before noting, “If God needed someone who was stuck in sin to help Him then I ain’t read the Bible.
“God’s Church is His business and it is my prayer that a mature Relentless Church will continue to sow into this great work while I continue to seek the help, the health, the healing and wholeness that I deserve. My kids deserve a whole father, not a fragmented puzzle piece of a man,” he said. “Some weeks you’ll see me. Others you won’t.”
In the latest allegations against Gray, online personality Tasha K also recently shared a video on Instagram highlighting the Greenville preacher complaining to Mary that his wife, Aventer Gray, did not cook for his family and offered to fly her to Cabo, Mexico, for a rendezvous during the pandemic.
In early 2019, Gray publicly revealed he had wanted to end his life and received prayer from Bishop T.D. Jakes as allegations of infidelity clouded his marriage. Weeks before that, Gray had drawn flak for gifting his wife a more than $200,000 Lamborghini Urus to celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary.
The South Carolina pastor had previously told his congregation that his wife, Aventer, discovered that he had started “listening to the wrong voices and let some people get too close … she set it off just like a good wife should.”
Aventer Gray then revealed to their congregation that one of those wrong voices belonged to a “strange woman,” whom she fought off with prayer and Scripture. During that revelation, Gray’s wife stood stoically by his side.
On Sunday, Gray faced his church alone and publicly apologized to his wife and his church, declaring that this time, his repentance would be true.
“As I’ve said to my wife, I say to her now in this moment, Aventer, I am sorry for the pain that I have caused you and my prayer is that the life I live from this moment is one worthy of the love that you have extended and that our family receives from,” he said.
“I am grateful for you [and] our children and I pray that God would restore the joy that we had in the days when we would drive around the city dreaming. You know more than everyone else, the areas of pain that I have carried for years.
“I believe that this moment had to come so God can make me the man I need to be. I’m sorry for the pain that I’ve caused. You don’t deserve it. You are an amazing woman of God and I love you and I will face me so that the man that comes out of this moment will be able to honor you in a way that I never have before.”
He explained to his church that God still required holiness of pastors and the standard had not changed.
“To my church, I am sorry. You have gone through enough. From cars to meetings with leaders that have caused great pain and deep division amongst political ideologies to one thing after another. I want to tell you I’m sorry. The standard has not changed. Holiness is still right. And I want you to know that it is my prayer from this moment of true repentance that you will see emerge from this moment a pastor that you can be proud of,” he said.
He also had words for the bloggers who helped to expose his sin and argued that he is “God’s man” and they would not have the last word.
“People have better things to do than to stay on blogs rejoicing in the demise of who they have incorrectly ascribed a charlatan. No, I didn’t make me. God made me. And He’s going to get the glory out of my life,” Gray said.
Isn’t it sad when a professing Christian’s life arrives to the place where rumor and fact become indistinguishable. So it is with Jerry Falwell Jr. Here are THREE ARTICLES from secular sources on Falwell Jr. The first article is from a little over two years ago, the second from almost three years ago and the third is a very recent article. Falwell Jr. and Liberty University have a lot to answer for. This is the Good Ole Boys Club at work and Me thinks, most of it is fact.
From Rolling Stone we read ‘Falwell, 57, is the president of Lynchburg, Virginia’s Liberty University, one of the nation’s most prominent Christian colleges. More importantly, he’s President Trump’s principal liaison to evangelicals, the political involvement of which was fashioned largely by Falwell’s televangelist father, Reverend Jerry Falwell, Sr., who co-founded the Moral Majority movement in the ’80s. Falwell is not a pastor himself, but he’s taken on an overlarge role in the evangelical community after building Liberty University into a national powerhouse of Christian education.
Falwell’s profile has grown since he cozied up to Trump, who, according to Falwell, offered to install Falwell in his Cabinet as secretary of education, an offer he says he turned down. He has defended Trump unconditionally since publicly registering his support in the form an endorsement in January 2016, just before the Iowa caucuses. The endorsement was surprising not only because Trump embodied everything evangelicals detest, but because Falwell allegedly had already agreed to endorse Ted Cruz, to the point that Cruz’s campaign had written up a press release to announce the news, according to the Times. When Cruz’s campaign asked Falwell to make his support official, Falwell said he was not permitted to endorse primary candidates. Shortly thereafter, he endorsed Trump. “Clearly, something changed that led him to endorse Trump, and I would like to know what that was,’’ then-Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler told the Herald.
So what’s this about a “pool boy”?
In 2012, Falwell and his wife Becki visited the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. While there, they befriended a 21-year-old pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda. Granda soon began traveling with the Falwells, both to their home of Virginia to hike and water ski, according to the Times, and to the Cheeca Lodge in the Florida Keys, according to the Herald. The latter paper published photos of the trip to the Keys, with Granda smiling next to Falwell, the two looking like father and son. Just months after the friendship commenced, the Falwells offered to help Granda, who had practically no business experience, set up a venture in Miami. After consulting with his friend Jesus Fernandez Jr. and Fernandez’s father, they agreed to open a hostel. Falwell ponied up $1.8 million.
Why did Falwell (who was nearly 50 at the time) and his wife invite a 21-year-old hotel pool boy to travel with them on multiple occasions, and then put up seven figures for him to open up a hostel in Miami Beach that Politico described as a “cesspool of vice”?
Uhhhhh…
What about the salacious photos?
The relationship between the Fernandez family and the Falwells and Granda eventually went sour, and the Fernandezes sued, claiming they were being muscled out of a deal in which they were promised a controlling stake. The lawsuit, and many of the details of the Falwells’ relationship with Granda, were not know until Buzzfeed News reported on it in May 2018. Though it was not included in the lawsuit or Buzzfeed’s report, multiple compromising photos of the Falwells became a central element of the legal battle, according to the Times, which spoke to several people involved in the case.
Falwell has denied the existence of the photos — or at least that they’re of him — but the Herald reviewed three of them, which show Falwell’s “wife in various stages of undress.” When they were taken or by whom is not known, but, according to the Herald, two of them appear to have been taken at the Falwells’ farm in Virginia, and one at the Cheeca Lodge.
THEN THERE IS THIS ARTICLE by a graduate of Liberty who is also a homosexual. ‘”It’s actually that one,” our Uber driver said, pointing with one hand and shifting into reverse with the other. “Right here?” I asked, thinking he must have gotten the address wrong. All I saw was a liquor store.
“That’s it,” he said, crawling to a stop. Miami Hostel, 810 Alton Road, a dilapidated boarding house quietly hidden behind non-descript storefronts.
The trunk opened, and as my partner, Andy, pulled out our luggage, I took a deep breath and surveyed my temporary home away from home. This building in front of me, nestled quietly in a relatively rundownstretch of South Beach, contained three different businesses: an Italianrestaurant, a liquor store and a hostel.
As the Uber pulled away, Andy stood, slowly shaking his head. What had I gotten him into? “It’s probably not as terrible as it looks,” I told him. “Let’s go.”
The first thing I noticed was the almost eye-level gray gate with an odd, oval sign declaring that the hostel was—for lack of a better term—a safe space.
NO
SOLICITING
FUNDRAISING
POLITICS
SALESMEN
RELIGION
The “no religion” sign on the hostel’s front gate. | Brandon Ambrosino
“That’s weird, right?” Andy chuckled and opened the door. By then, he and I already knew, thanks to a tipster that the owner of the Miami Hostel was none other than Jerry Falwell III, better known as Trey, who purchased the property with financial help from his father, Jerry Falwell Jr., a man who pretty much embodies everything on that sign: the fusion of religion with politics, aggressive fundraising and a slick, salesman-like approach to public faith. It was Falwell Jr. whose early endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries—he hailed him for living “a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the great commandment”—was seen as pivotal in helping Trump secure the evangelical vote.
At Liberty University, the Christian private school at which Falwell Jr. is the president and Trey is the vice president for university operations—and from which I graduated in 2011—all manner of vice is prohibited. Students, whether on campus or off, and whether school is in session or not—cannot consume alcohol or tobacco. Co-ed sleeping arrangements are verboten. And, in the words of “The Liberty Way,” the school’s student handbook, “homosexual conduct or the encouragement or advocacy of any form of sexual behavior that would undermine the Christian identity or faith mission of the University” are strictly prohibited. Any one of these transgressions could get you saddled with reprimands, financial repercussions, and even expulsion. And yet, here we were, in perhaps the gayest 6 square miles in the United States—South Beach, Miami—staying in Falwell’s gay-friendly flophouse with an on-site liquor store.
At least that’s the story I thought I was there to report. The more I dug into it, the larger and more byzantine the story became—and the more questions it raised. Though Liberty University officials declined to comment on the record for this story, senior-level sources at the university agreed to answer many of my questions. But rather than settling the matter, the answers they provided begat new and more serious inquiries that go beyond mere charges of hypocrisy over owning a hostel, and point to dubious behavior by Liberty University—actions which, according to several tax-law experts I consulted, could violate IRS rules.’https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/25/jerry-falwell-miami-hostel-liberty-university-trey-falwell-215528
THIS THIRD ARTICLE centers in on Falwell Jr’s wife. ‘A former Liberty University student says Becki Falwell, the wife of the university’s then-President Jerry Falwell Jr., jumped into bed with him and performed oral sex on him while he stayed over at the Falwell home after a band practice with her eldest son in 2008.
The student was 22 at the time of the encounter, near the start of Liberty’s fall semester. He said she initiated the act, and he went along with it.But despite his rejection of further advances, he said, Falwell continued pursuing him, offering him gifts and engaging in banter through Facebook messages.
How did all this continue for so long? I have spoken of the Good Ole Boys Club in several articles and this is exactly how it works. Whether it is Falwell Jr. and Liberty University or the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE) and missionary Dr. Donn Ketcham https://sadsaga.wordpress.com/ it is all a part of the way the Good Ole Boys Club works.
In my own opinion (which doesn’t carry much weight with some) Liberty University has never been what you might call a Biblically separated Baptist school of higher education. However, as far as I know Jerry Falwell Sr. never had a stain on his public reputation BUT that cannot be said for his son Jerry Falwell Jr. The following is from https://save71.org/ which is comprised of Liberty alumni which have been for some time advocating for reform at Liberty. They say ‘In the wake of Falwell’s resignation, the focus of Save71 is not on the salacious details of the most recent reporting on the Falwell family. Our focus is on improving our university, and for improvement to be possible, we must look beyond Falwell’s personal behavior and confront the failure of the university’s derelict Board of Trustees. Dramatic changes are necessary.
For years, Liberty’s Board of Trustees allowed Falwell to frequently, publicly harm Liberty’s reputation. The Board permitted Falwell and his family to run the school like a personal business at the expense of its faculty and students. Board members sat by while Falwell’s words and deeds disgraced the name of the Lord again and again.
The Board of Trustees is not a legitimate governing body. For years, Board meetings have been infrequent, brief, and filled with propaganda from Falwell and his staff. While some of its members, like Acting Chair Allen McFarland, take an active role at the university, many others do not. The Board is not qualified to determine who is best fit to lead Liberty, and its members should humbly recognize that.
After accepting Falwell’s permanent resignation, four things need to happen for Liberty to move in a positive direction. First, the Board of Trustees must permanently remove all the beneficiaries of Falwell’s inappropriate nepotism. Second, the Board should hire independent legal counsel to investigate the claims of financial corruption documented in previous reporting. Third, SACS, Liberty’s accreditor, should open an investigation into Liberty to determine whether its Board and executive leadership meet SACS’s principles of accreditation.’https://save71.org/
Numbers 32:23 …ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out.
Some ‘professing’ Christians make out pretty good for the present when playing around in the pig pen of sin. In Lynchburg, VA ‘Liberty University is giving its former president, Jerry Falwell Jr., a $10.5 million severance package, despite numerous allegations of immorality and wrongdoing.
Falwell told The Washington Post that his contract entitled him to $2.5 million over 24 months—the equivalent of two years’ salary. During that time, Falwell reportedly has agreed not to work for a competing university. After two years, Falwell will receive around $8 million in retirement.
Falwell reportedly said the board gave him the severance because he is leaving Liberty without formally being accused of, or admitting, wrongdoing.
“The board was gracious not to challenge that,” Falwell told The Washington Post.
In Liberty’s statement yesterday, the university said that Falwell’s “severance compensation was dictated by the terms of his pre-existing employment agreement without any adjustment by the University or its Board.”
Falwell, however, has been accused not just of prurient behavior that violates the university’s own code of employee conduct, but of preying on Liberty University students.
Last night, Giancarlo Granda, the pool attendant who alleges he had sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell watched, tweeted a statement, saying: “The reality is Jerry Falwell is a predator. I know this because he sent me an image of a female Liberty University student exposing herself at their farm.”https://julieroys.com/liberty-falwell-10-5-million/?mc_cid=452087fbe0&mc_eid=b13d34ad49
The following is not a surprise to anyone who is even a little discerning of Hollywood, communism and totalitarian governments.
‘This report examines the ways in which Beijing’s censors have affected and influenced Hollywood and the global filmmaking industry. Stories shape the way people think, and the stories told by Hollywood reach billions. As an anti-censorship organization dedicated to the celebration of open cultural and artistic expression, PEN America has sought to understand how one of the world’s most censorious regimes is extending its influence over the global locus for filmmaking here in the United States, shaping what is perhaps the world’s most influential artistic and cultural medium.
PEN America defends and celebrates freedom of expression in the United States and globally. Our work has included a decades-long advocacy engagement on China, where dozens of members of our sister PEN organization—the Independent Chinese PEN Center—have been imprisoned or persecuted by Beijing. The most influential of those colleagues was Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence for his writings when he died of liver cancer.2 Our work has involved advocacy campaigns, detailed research reports, literary exchanges, and other efforts aimed at pushing back against Beijing’s censorship policies and its criminalization of dissent.
Over the last decade or more, as Beijing has expanded its global role as a world power, leading trade partner, sovereign investor, and cultural influence, these domestic patterns of censorship and control have extended beyond China’s borders. Beijing’s rising global influence has meant that the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) approach to censorship is making itself felt by publishers, authors, scholars, writers, journalists, and others who address topics of interest to China, regardless of their citizenship or where they are based. In 2015, PEN America documented Chinese publishers’ censorship of Chinese-language translations of foreign authors in our report Censorship and Conscience: Foreign Authors and the Challenge of Chinese Censorship. In 2016, we analyzed the CCP’s efforts to affect foreign media’s coverage of the country in Darkened Screen: Constraints on Foreign Journalists in China, and its enforced disappearance of five publishers (including two with foreign citizenship) connected to a Hong Kong bookstore in Writing on the Wall: Disappeared Booksellers and Free Expression in Hong Kong. In 2018, our research on social media censorship in China for Forbidden Feeds: Government Controls on Social Media in China included an analysis of how Beijing’s digital censorship affected users of Chinese digital platforms even when they were outside the country.
We have seen this exportation of censorious pressure elsewhere, so much so that there is a long—and growing longer—list of examples from the last few years alone: the major academic publisher Cambridge University Press attempting to pull titles from access by Chinese audience due to fear of CCP retaliation; the consistent degradation of press freedoms and civil liberties in Hong Kong; New Zealand publishers finding their books censored by Chinese printers; academics and students across the globe facing intimidation when they speak out on issues the CCP considers sensitive; and global brands forced to apologize simply for printing the words “Taiwan” or “the Dalai Lama.”
Increasingly, Beijing’s economic clout has allowed it to insist that others comply with its censorship strictures—or has led others to voluntarily internalize these strictures, even without being asked—as a prerequisite to doing business with or in the country. While individual compromises may seem minor or worthwhile in exchange for the opportunity to engage with China’s population, the collective global implications of playing by Beijing’s rules need to be recognized and understood before acquiescence to Chinese censorship becomes a new normal in countries that have prided themselves for their staunch free speech protections.
Hollywood is an important bellwether. The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”8 Within the pages of this report, we detail how Hollywood decision-makers and other filmmaking professionals are increasingly making decisions about their films—the content, casting, plot, dialogue, and settings—based on an effort to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials who control whether their films gain access to the booming Chinese market.
As U.S. film studios compete for the opportunity to access Chinese audiences, many are making difficult and troubling compromises on free expression: changing the content of films intended for international—including American—audiences; engaging in self-censorship; agreeing to provide a censored version of a movie for screening in China; and in some instances directly inviting Chinese government censors onto their film sets to advise them on how to avoid tripping the censors’ wires. These concessions to the power of the Chinese market have happened mostly quietly, with little attention and, often, little debate. Steadily, a new set of mores has taken hold in Hollywood, one in which appeasing Chinese government investors and gatekeepers has simply become a way of doing business.’ For the full report go to https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing/
whatyareckon 