In The Land Of ‘The Savior,’ Bibles Are Always Welcomed
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — In between class periods, children gathered to chat and play in a school’s open-air hallway.
Nearby, older students worked on state-issued laptops. A girl studied geology slides. One boy reviewed his most recent assignment. Another played Minecraft online.
Bars — on the windows, gates and walls — separated these children from the outside world.
Philip Holsinger, a journalist and 2010 graduate of the master of ministry program at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, stood inside photographing the peaceful schoolyard.
The scene lacked the anger and vengeance he expected to find when he arrived 18 months earlier.
“My friend was calling me from El Salvador, saying, ‘You’ve got to come and see this. It’s working. The country is transforming,’” Holsinger recalled. “And I said, ‘No way. I know it’s not transforming. If it is, it’s going to be smoke and mirrors, and it’s just not real.’”
But now Holsinger isn’t so sure.
“I wondered in my spirit, is this a godly thing that’s happening here?” Holsinger said. “Is God behind this? And then it looks like there might be evidence that that’s true.”
This regular school day at the Professor Humberto González School Center would have been impossible four years ago.
The neighborhood surrounding the campus used to be the grounds of a turf war between the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. The student body, which once numbered 1,200, dropped to about 50.
Attending school meant risking becoming a casualty — or being forced to join a side.
Students watch a boy outside of the Professor Humberto González School Center gate in San Salvador, El Salvador. (Photo by Audrey Jackson)
‘Wet with blood’
Once dubbed the “murder capital of the world” by the media for its homicide rate — 6,656 deaths among the population of about 6 million in 2015 — this Central American country reported only 114 homicides in 2024.
But the memories of a bloodier time still linger.
Caesar Martínez, an El Salvadoran police sergeant with the intelligence division, graphically described the gangs’ brutal violence against school-aged children.
One such case was a 16-year-old girl. She left for school one morning “in her uniform with a backpack full of books,” Martínez recalled.
She never returned home.
A witness and an investigation later revealed that her boyfriend, a member of MS-13, persuaded her to skip school. Then he took her to a house where eight other MS-13 members forced her to drink liquor and took turns raping her.
“She says that she wants to go home. Crying. Bruised,” Martínez said. “And the boyfriend starts to stab her.”
The other gang members joined in, making everyone equally culpable — and less likely to testify in court later.
“They had a special term for it,” Martínez said. “It was called ‘getting your machete wet.’ It was wet with blood.”
To dispose of the girl’s body, the gang members stuffed it into a bread oven and then collected the remaining evidence that didn’t burn — bones and teeth — and placed it in black plastic bags.
They then gave the bags to a bread vendor with instructions: Hide the evidence under the bread during his usual deliveries, and then dispose of it later in a nearby creek.
In other cases, Martínez investigated MS-13 killings that involved the dismemberment of victims while they were still alive.
“Dismemberment was meant to cause pain,” Martínez said, “and most of the time dismemberments were an offering for the Holy Death.”
Philip Holsinger shows his pictures to children at the Professor Humberto González School Center. (Photo by Audrey Jackson)
The land of The Savior
Holsinger had heard of the Holy Death before.
Considered a saint in folk Catholicism and the occult, the Holy Death — depicted as a skeletal female figure shrouded in a robe — is often worshiped by convicts, drug addicts and criminals in Latin America, according to FBI reports.
“I can be very skeptical when I hear people talking about spiritual things like powers and principalities,” said Holsinger, whom then-minister Bruce McLarty baptized at the College Church of Christ in Searcy in the early 2000s.
But for more than a year, Holsinger has interviewed families of incarcerated people, documented families torn apart by gang violence and photographed prisoners in CECOT, El Salvador’s terrorist confinement center.
He now believes the change to the San Salvador neighborhoods isn’t just political — it’s also spiritual.
“It’s the only country in the world that’s named after Jesus,” Holsinger said. “It’s not generic — ‘The Savior.’ It’s named after Jesus, a country. That’s got to matter in heaven.”
So Holsinger made a call to an old friend, Benny Baker, executive director of Misión Para Cristo in Nicaragua. The ministry — “Mission for Christ” in English — is associated with Churches of Christ.
“It was in my time visiting the prisons, and especially the non-terrorism prisons where they can have Bibles, that I thought, ‘Man, this would be a great way to put that to work,’” Holsinger said. “So I reached out to (Benny) and said, ‘How many Bibles do you have? I think I can get these in the prison here.’”
President Nayib Bukele’s anti-gang emergency measures in 2022 had led to the arrest of more than 53,000 people suspected of gang activity — nearly two out of every 100 Salvadorans, the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, according to the United States Institute of Peace.
Then deportation planes began arriving from the U.S. International scrutiny of the mass incarcerations and the arrival of international deportations caused security protocols to change in the prison system, limiting Holsinger’s access.
Working with the Office of the First Lady, Holsinger and Baker shifted their focus from the prison systems to juvenile detention centers.
“There’s one thing about our church fellowship: When it comes to raising funds for different things … you can go into a congregation, anywhere in our fellowship, and if you ask for Bibles, you’re going to walk away with money,” Baker said.
Marianna Montes Moreno, chief of international affairs and cooperation in the Office of the First Lady, suggested Baker send 10,000 copies — close to the number of detainees in the juvenile detention centers.
“Adolescents that are in the centers do need a lot of hope, and bringing Bibles to them would be a part of that,” Moreno said. “We try to restore them with dignity and also create second chances.
“We want them to integrate, if they can, in the future society,” she added.
Sentences and severity of criminal charges vary in the detention centers. Some juveniles are there for shoplifting. Others have committed murder.
The severity doesn’t dissuade Baker — all deserve to be blessed.
“A lot of the children that are in there, their parents are in the prison,” Baker said, “and so we may not be getting Bibles into the big prison right now, but they would be blessed to get them into their hands.”
An additional 2,000 Bibles will be sent to local Churches of Christ, he added.
It’s a welcome gift. The El Salvadoran government has partnered with multiple faith-based institutions and organizations to provide material on morality to at-risk youth and their families, Moreno said.
“El Salvador is a very religious country, very based in faith,” said Moreno, who is Catholic. “And I feel like that also has kind of helped us in trying to rebuild the country … because it has helped us bond with communities, bond with families and bond with different values. Salvadorians are believers.”
On one of Baker’s recent visits to El Salvador, Moreno arranged for the two Christian men to visit a girls juvenile detention center to see where the Bibles might be disseminated.
There, Holsinger met the Holy Death again.
But this time she was on the back of a 17-year-old girl awaiting sentencing.
A detainee in a San Salvador juvenile detention center shows her tattoo of the Holy Death. (Photo by Audrey Jackson)
Holy Death and the living God
Dressed in a white shirt and gray sweatpants, hair up in a messy bun, she looked like any normal teenager when Holsinger and Baker met her at a juvenile detention center.
The skin around her eyes crinkled when she smiled and shook their hands.
She was 9 when a member of MS-13 tattooed the robed, skeletal figure on her back — a mark she’d asked for, she said.
By 11, she was leading worship shirtless, people kneeling to offer blood sacrifices to the figure inlaid in her skin.
“I grew up with psychological trauma, and I felt like God didn’t answer me by finding a solution, so I started praying to the Holy Death for a response,” the girl explained via a translator during a private interview at the detention center.
Her name is being withheld from this article since she is a minor and still awaiting sentencing.
Even after being detained, she led girls routinely in rituals to the figure. Then another detainee approached her to share about God.
“She would say that God would say, ‘One day it’s going to be the day that you’re going to love me, and you’re going to bend your knees, and you’re going to be here with me,’” the girl recalled.
The words made her cry at the time, and prayers for forgiveness soon followed. Since that encounter, she hasn’t worshiped the skeletal saint.
But her fear of the Holy Death still lingers.
“My real parents are active gang members,” she said. “So I’ve seen what justice can be done, and I’ve seen evil. … My biggest fear right now, since I’m not praying to her (the Holy Death), is that she will take away my brothers and sisters.”
Sitting on the floor beside her, Holsinger shared the New Testament story of the demon-possessed man chronicled in Matthew 8, Mark 5 and Luke 8.
“Jesus goes to him and tells all the bad spirits to leave him,” Holsinger shared with the girl. “The man was totally changed.”
This piece is republished with permission from The Christian Chronicle.
Audrey Jackson, a 2021 journalism graduate of Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, is The Christian Chronicle’s managing editor.