Thread by @PMatzko

I'd love for a religion beat reporter to take a crack at the story of the failed, possibly US-sponsored coup in Venezuela. Why?

B/c I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the person who named it "Operation Gideon" was an evangelical of some variety.

rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…

How do I know that?

If you were raised in an evangelical church, odds are you experienced this common preaching practice: every sermon had an easily digestible takeaway (or "application" in evangelicalese), an admonition for listeners to work on in their own lives that week.

Thus a sermon on, say, Moses and the Brazen Serpent would end with an admonition to trust in the ultimate God rather than looking to the lesser gods offered by modern society.

And that's all well and good, but...

...this practice was often paired with a habit of placing the listener in the position of the hero mentioned in the text. So the moral of, say, the story of Daniel and the lion's den ended with a call to "dare to be a Daniel," to stand up for what you believe in.

I won't get down in the theological weeds here, but suffice it to say that this isn't a habit limited to evangelicals nor is it inherent to evangelicalism. There are long traditions, for example, of Christological typology in all Christian denominations.

Nevertheless, a typical evangelical layperson will hear this kind of admonition over and over, potentially 100s or 1000s of times in their life. Dare to be a Daniel. Stand in the gap like Nehemiah. Be a man after God's own heart like David.

And fight like Gideon.

Now we arrive back where we started. Why call an attempted coup in Venezuela "Operation Gideon"?

First you need to know the story of the biblical Gideon.

Gideon was an ancient, Israelite military leader. He was also an ethno-nationalist, starting an insurgency against other nations whose religious practices had spread among the Jewish tribes.

More importantly for our purposes, Gideon believed that a small, committed cadre of soldiers was better than a large, reluctant army. He put his recruits through tests to winnow the field down from 32,000 to just 300.

Those 300 men, despite being hugely outnumbered, launched a surprise nighttime attack that spooked the Midianite host which fled and allowed Gideon to capture their kinds.

Now put yourself in the shoes of our modern day coup planner. If you've been conditioned by a childhood sitting in evangelical pews to think of *yourself* as Gideon, then his story is practically a template for what you're trying to do in Venezuela.

Our wannabe hero is Jordan "Gideon" Goudreau. He erects military camps in neighboring Columbia to train his insurgents, which, funnily enough, number just 300 men.

They don't appear quite as...committed as their millennia ago counterparts, however.

This small cadre would sneak into Venezuela by sea with the goal of surprising the much larger regime military forces, who would then, ostensibly, either flee or even join in as Goudreau's men seized the capital; if they got lucky, they'd bag Maduro himself!

None of that happened. The insertion wasn't a surprise, the military promptly rounded them all up, & Goudreau was left twiddling his thumbs. There would be no happy ending in Venezuela, unlike for Gideon's Israel, which had 40 yrs of peace afterwards.

This thread illustrates, I think, the importance of having reporters who understand religion well enough to realize that there is an entire world of meaning behind otherwise innocuous sounding words and ideas.

It doesn't mean that any reporters have to be evangelical or religious to do good work--though those with that background like the incomparable @spulliam are valuable assets to any outlet--but it's important to have people with religious literacy on staff who can spot the signs.