Evangelical institutions knew their anti-Muslim celebrity was a fraud yet stayed silent

Evidence

It was after Saleem came to his Christian college campus that Doug Howard, an expert on the Ottoman empire, began to look more closely at Saleem’s backstory. Saleem had claimed to be a descendent of “the Grand Wazir of Islam,” but Howard knew there was no such thing as a “Grand Wazir.” He discovered that Saleem’s real name was Khodor Shami, that he had worked for Pat Robertson’s CBN for sixteen years and in 2003 had joined the staff at Focus on the Family. In 2006 he’d founded his own nonprofit, Koome Ministries, from which he drew a salary and a generous expense account. Determined to get to the bottom of Saleem’s nonsensical claims, Howard contacted Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, in the fall of 2007. Focus on the Family had been actively promoting an anti-Islamic agenda as part of its ministry, so Howard was surprised to learn that they, too, had become skeptical of Saleem’s claims—not only his tales of a violent terrorist past, but even his claim to have kicked a game-winning field goal for the Oklahoma Sooners. (Saleem/Shami never played for the Sooners.) They had not, however, gone public with their doubts. Nor were they eager to do so. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 503

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the institutional silence around sexual abuse and other inconvenient truths this book documents within evangelicalism.
• DEEPTHINKING: Focus on the Family knowing the fraud yet refusing to go public captures how institutional self-interest disables the verification machinery that consumer-culture success depends on.