Explainer

Creed

Freedom of Belief

8 May 2024

7 min read

Nicaragua in peril

Daniel Ortega's power grab fuels persecution.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

An balding man with a moustache turns to look at a camera.

President Daniel Ortega.

Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America with a varied and beautiful landscape; towering volcanoes, unique freshwater habitats - Lake Nicaragua is the region’s largest lake - and spectacular marine environments. It has huge potential for development according to the World Bank. But despite this, not only does Nicaragua remain one of the poorest countries in the region but it is caught in the grip of an increasingly totalitarian regime that, according to a recent all-party “Nicaragua Inquiry Report” by UK Parliamentarians, is taking consistent steps to silence democracy and close civic space. This includes human rights violations against religious leaders, particularly within the Catholic Church, as well attacks against political opposition, journalists, scholars and human rights defenders.

The Ortega dynasty

President Daniel Ortego returned to power after a break of seventeen years in 2006. Historically a Marxist revolutionary, on his return as President, Ortega threw out his left-wing ideals for more achievable policies. However, in 2012, his politics took a disconcertingly authoritarian turn when he pressured the Nicaraguan Supreme Court to authorise his bid for a second presidential term. And more recently, the Nicaraguan Government, which includes Ortego’s wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, and several of their nine children in prominent positions, has escalated its campaign of persecution against Christians and the Catholic Church.

The harassment started in 2018 with a wave of protests across Nicaragua. University students and others took to the streets to demonstrate against the Government’s proposed social security reforms set to increase pressure on workers whilst providing fewer benefits. Ortega, seeing these protests as a threat, responded with violence using pro-government militia and security forces. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), 355 people were killed and approximately 2,000 injured making it the deadliest and most violent protest since the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979. Following these protests, the Ortega regime then escalated its human rights violations raising concerns internationally. According to the UNHCR, since 2018, neighbouring Costa Rica has hosted over 300,000 Nicaraguans seeking asylum.

The intimidation and incarceration of clergymen under the Ortega regime in Nicaragua is particularly chilling. It sends a clear message of contempt for God’s priests.

Persecution of Christians in a Christian-majority country

The World Watch list is an annual report published by Open Doors, an NGO which supports Christians worldwide, and lists the fifty countries in which Christians face the ‘most extreme persecution’. The latest report shows Nicaragua has risen up the list, from number 50 last year to number 30 in 2024 rankings. Over 95% of the Nicaraguan population profess to be Christian, so this is perhaps a surprising development.

In 2022, according to the Nicaragua Inquiry, President Ortega was reported to have:

“ordered the arrest of, forced into exile, and verbally attacked priests and bishops, labelling them ‘criminals’ and ‘coup-plotters,’ and accusing them of inciting violence.”

Most publicly known about is the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, who was sentenced to 26 years in prison and later exiled to the Vatican and stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship. At the end of 2023, the Government arrested and detained seventeen clergymen including Father Silvio Fonseca, an open critic of the Nicaraguan government’s intense persecution of the Catholic Church, and two Bishops who publicly offered prayers for Álvarez before they were arrested.

In Latin America, culturally there is a reverence for clergymen that differs to what we see in the West. I lived in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil for a number of years and worked with my husband (who is an ordained Anglican priest) in a favela (shantytown) routinely patrolled by armed gangs. When we first enquired about the safety of walking into the community on our own, a local resident assured us that we would be fine, saying “They will never shoot a pastor”. Perhaps that is why the intimidation and incarceration of clergymen under the Ortega regime in Nicaragua is particularly chilling. It sends a clear message of contempt for God’s priests that will strike to the very core of people of faith across the country.

Over the past year, according to the Inquiry, the Nicaraguan government has also systematically targeted and closed religious organisations that it views as opponents and banned Catholic traditions such as street processions during Holy Week. A journalist was recently sentenced to eight years in prison for reporting on an Easter procession. And perhaps most insidiously, the government has begun to routinely intimidate worshippers, with uniformed and plain clothes government agents visibly monitoring religious services to intimidate clergy and churchgoers.

Three centuries of religious persecution across the world

Religious persecution is etched firmly into the history of humanity through to the modern day. From Emperor Nero’s outlawing of Christians across the Roman Empire to the persecution of Muslims and Jews in the Crusades, to the Armenian genocide in Turkey following the First World War to attacks on the Rohingya in modern-day Myanmar.

Today religious freedom is a hallmark of a developed society, widely considered to be a basic human right. And indeed, the right to freedom of religion or belief is relevant to an array of SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) aiming to reduce inequality and improve health, education, gender equality, access to justice and climate action. Religious inequalities and discrimination are key obstacles for progress in many of these areas.

According to UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion… either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

But in spite of this global commitment, and although 123 of the 193 Member States of the United Nations have served as Council members on the UN Human Rights Council (of which Nicaragua is currently a member state), religious freedom is under threat in many parts of the world today. And it takes many different forms. Some countries in the Middle East expressly forbid all religions except Islam whilst others, such as North Korea, do not permit any religion at all. The most recent annual report of the USCIRF lists 28 countries—home to well over 50 per cent of the world’s population—with Governments actively persecuting their citizens for their religious views.

But is it about religion or is it all about power?

In Nicaragua, the Catholic Church has power in numbers and therefore an influential voice. When Christians such as Bishop Álvarez, a vocal defender of civic freedoms, began to join other civil society actors in speaking out more critically against the Government, the persecution began. Catholic clergymen have long been targeted for speaking out against authoritarian regimes in other Latin American countries. For example, Archbishop Romero y Galdamez was assassinated in 1980 in San Salvador when he appealed to the military dictatorship to stop the brutal repression of the people.

But arguably, the Ortega regime’s crackdown on Christians isn’t only because of its fears of the Catholic Church’s power and influence in Nicaragua.

Having the capacity and choice to believe in God - to have faith - is a profound and powerful characteristic of being human. For Christians, faith in God and Jesus Christ comes first, before any political, social, or economic order. Humans who have a real and living faith in a higher power are defined by it, both individually in how they live out their lives and collectively in how they come alongside others who share the same faith. Perhaps that is why totalitarian regimes that lay claims on the whole person and want ultimate power and control over the collective, are so intent on destroying or co-opting religion.

Thankfully the international community is on alert. Ortega is being called out for his regime’s spiralling human rights record and persecution of Christians. But there is no room for apathy. In the book of Proverbs in the Bible, it says “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves… Defend the rights of the poor and those in need.”

As the words of the poem, First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller presented at the start of the Nicaragua Inquiry Report movingly remind us,

First, they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Creed

Wisdom

7 November 2025

6 min read

Forget AI: I want a computer that says ‘no’

Chatbots only tell us what we want to hear. If we genuinely want to grow, we need to be OK with offence

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A person hold their phone on their desk, a think bubble from it says 'no'.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

It is three years since the public release of Open AI’s ChatGPT. In those early months, this new technology felt apocalyptic. There was excitement, yes – but also genuine concern that ChatGPT, and other AI bots like it, had been released on an unsuspecting public with little assessment or reflection on the unintended consequences they might have the potential to make. In March 2023, 1,300 experts signed an open letter calling for a six month pause in AI labs training of the most advanced systems arguing that they represent an ‘existential risk’ to humanity. In the same month Time magazine published an article by a leading AI researcher which went further, saying that the risks presented by AI had been underplayed. The article visualised a civilisation in which AI had liberated itself from computers to dominate ‘a world of creatures, that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow.’

But then we all started running our essays through it, creating emails, and generating the kind of boring documentation demanded by the modern world. AI is now part of life. We can no more avoid it than we can avoid the internet. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

I will confess at this point to having distinctly Luddite tendencies when it comes to technology. I read Wendell Berry’s famous essay ‘Why I will not buy a computer’ and hungered after the agrarian, writerly world he appeared to inhabit; all kitchen tables, musty bookshelves, sharpened pencils and blank pieces of paper. Certainly, Berry is on to something. Technology promises much, delivers some, but leaves a large bill on the doormat. Something is lost, which for Berry included the kind of attention that writing by hand provides for deep, reflective work.

This is the paradox of technology – it gives and takes away. What is required of us as a society is to take the time to discern the balance of this equation. On the other side of the equation from those heralding the analytical speed and power of AI are those deeply concerned for ways in which our humanity is threatened by its ubiquity.

In Thailand, where clairvoyancy is big business, fortune tellers are reportedly seeing their market disrupted by AI as a growing number of people turn to chat bots to give them insights into their future instead.

A friend of mine uses an AI chatbot to discuss his feelings and dilemmas. The way he described his relationship with AI was not unlike that of a spiritual director or mentor.

There are also examples of deeply concerning incidents where chat bots have reportedly encouraged and affirmed a person’s decision to take their own life. Adam took his own life in April this year. His parents have since filed a lawsuit against OpenAI after discovering that ChatGPT had discouraged Adam from seeking help from them and had even offered to help him write a suicide note. Such stories raise the critical question of whether it is life-giving and humane for people to develop relationships of dependence and significance with a machine. AI chat bots are highly powerful tools masquerading behind the visage of human personality. They are, one could argue, sophisticated clairvoyants mining the vast landscape of the internet, data laid down in the past, and presenting what they extract as information and advice. Such an intelligence is undoubtedly game changing for diagnosing diseases, when the pace of medical research advances faster than any GP can cope with. But is it the kind of intelligence we need for the deeper work of our intimate selves, the soul-work of life?

Of course, AI assistants are more than just a highly advanced search engines. They get better at predicting what we want to know. Chatbots essentially learn to please their users. They become our sycophantic friends, giving us insights from their vast store of available knowledge, but only ever along the grain of our desires and needs. Is it any wonder people form such positive relationships with them? They are forever telling us what we want to hear.

Or at least what we think we want to hear. Because any truly loving relationship should have the capacity and freedom to include saying things which the other does not want to hear. Relationships of true worth are ones which take the risk of surprising the other with offence in order to move toward deeper life. This is where user’s experience suggests AI is not proficient. Indeed, it is an area I suggest chatbots are not capable of being proficient in. To appreciate this, we need to explore a little of the philosophy of knowledge generation.

Most of us probably recognise the concepts of deduction and induction as modes of thought. Deduction is the application of a predetermined rule (‘A always means B…’) to a given experience which then confidently predicts an outcome (‘therefore C’). Induction is the inference of a rule from series of varying (but similar) experiences (‘look at all these slightly different C’s – it must mean that A always means B’). However, the nineteenth century philosopher CS Pierce described a third mode of thought that he called abduction.

Abduction works by offering a provisional explanatory context to a surprising experience or piece of information. It postulates, often very creatively and imaginatively, a hypothesis, or way of seeing things, that offers to make sense of new experience. The distinctives of abduction include intuition, imagination, even spiritual insight in the working towards a deeper understanding of things. Abductive reasoning for example includes the kind of ‘eureka!’ moment of explanation which points to a deeper intelligence, a deeper connectivity in all things that feels out of reach to the human mind but which we grasp at with imaginative and often metaphorical leaps.

The distinctive thing about abductive reasoning, as far as AI chatbots are concerned, lies in the fact that it works by introducing an idea that isn’t contained within the existing data and which offers an explanation that the data would not otherwise have. The ‘wisdom’ of chatbots on the other hand is really only a very sophisticated synthesis of existing data, shaped by a desire to offer knowledge that pleases its end user. It lacks the imaginative insight, the intuitive perspective that might confront, challenge, but ultimately be for our benefit.

If we want to grow in the understanding of ourselves, if we genuinely want to do soul-work, we need to be open to the surprise of offence; the disruption of challenge; the insight from elsewhere; the pain of having to reimagine our perspective. The Christian tradition sometimes calls this wisdom prophecy. It might also be a way of understanding what St Paul meant by the ‘sword of the Spirit’. It is that voice, that insight of deep wisdom, which doesn’t sooth but often smarts, but which we come to appreciate in time as a word of life. Such wisdom may be conveyed by a human person, a prophet. And the Old Testament’s stories suggests that its delivery is not without costs to the prophet, and never without relationship. A prophet speaks as one alongside in community, sharing something of the same pain, the same confusion. Ultimately such wisdom is understood to be drawn from divine wisdom, God speaking in the midst of humanity

You don’t get that from a chatbot, you get that from person-to-person relationships. I do have the computer (sorry Wendell!), but I will do my soul-work with fellow humans. And I will not be using an AI assistant.

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