In Appalachia, Helene’s Water Crisis Taps a Global Christian Response

Emily Belz

North Carolina churches are seeing people suffering dehydration. Disaster groups that work overseas are showing up to help.

People collect water to distribute in hard-hit Swannanoa, North Carolina, after Helene knocked out running water.

Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images

International Christian engineering nonprofit Water Mission usually responds to clean water crises overseas, like flooding in East Africa this year or the earthquake in Turkey last year.

But when the South Carolina–based organization saw the extensive damage to Western North Carolina’s water infrastructure after the historic storm Helene, it decided to activate a rare disaster response in the US.

“We’re able to take our systems and plug them in here,” said Brock Kreitzburg, the director of disaster response at Water Mission, speaking from Boone, North Carolina. “North Carolina is in our backyard, so let’s use our expertise in providing safe water.”

With permission from the state government, the organization drove up to Western North Carolina and put into operation four of its proprietary mobile water treatment systems that can produce 15,000 liters of clean water a day, or enough for several thousand people. Water Mission has also now distributed and gassed up 400 generators for people who need power to pump their wells, assembling a team of electricians to install the generators as needed.

Swaths of Western North Carolina are without running water for an indeterminant amount of time. Helene’s historic floodwaters took out the pipelines to the main water treatment plant serving the city of Asheville, as well as hit hard Swannanoa and Black Mountain, two smaller communities near Asheville. City officials do not have a timeline for when water will be restored but expect it to take weeks more.

Areas in rural Appalachia are struggling with water supply, too, because they are dependent on wells, which need power to pump. Electricity remains out in many parts of the region nearly two weeks after the storm.

First Baptist Swannanoa, a church that has been a key relief resource and distribution point in the hard-hit community of Swannanoa, set up a health clinic on its property early last week. There were no preexisting clinics in the area. Pastor Jeff Dowdy said the volunteer doctors and nurses have been seeing people with health issues related to lack of clean water. Dehydration has hit people of all ages, he said.

“Once you don’t have access to clean water, all sorts of things can happen healthwise,” Dowdy said. The timeframes he has heard for water to come back are four to eight weeks. “This is a long-term crisis that we’re in.”

Spotty cell service, power outages, and destroyed roads and bridges have compounded the difficulty of restoring infrastructure. One of Water Mission’s trucks got stuck on a mudslide.

“The amount of destruction here in this region—you don’t see this [in the US],” said Water Mission’s Kreitzburg. The death toll from Helene stands at 227, with most of those killed in North Carolina, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the US since Katrina in 2005.

Without running water, residents must gather water to drink, cook, flush toilets, bathe, and wash clothes. Donations of bottled water are abundant, but locals said they are beginning to see more large water tanks positioned around town. Tankers with potable water where community members can fill large containers for their homes are the ideal in-between measure, international clean water engineers told CT.

The residents of Appalachia might not have known, but Taiwanese Christians were watching their plight. After the storm, World Vision US heard from the leaders of World Vision Taiwan. The Taiwanese leaders had seen the water crisis in Appalachia and said they already had a solar-powered water filtration system in transit to the United States, a system they had used in Taiwan after a recent typhoon.

The Taiwanese leaders wondered if North Carolina could use the water system.

Reed Slattery, World Vision’s national director of US programs, had an idea for where it could go. He had been in Swannanoa and the Asheville area and met with the head of Western Carolina Rescue Ministries, a Christian organization which is providing emergency housing to about 120 people, including 6 pregnant women and some babies. The shelter needed water. Slattery thought the mobile filtration system would produce the right amount of water for the shelter—providing 1,900 gallons of water a day.

The system from Taiwan was scheduled to be delivered to the shelter this week, and the Taiwanese staff planned to remotely train the shelter staff on using the system.

The uncertain length of the water outage requires more than bottled water, these relief nonprofit leaders say. World Vision’s “chief water officer” is working with local North Carolina officials on those longer-term solutions, Slattery said.

Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization whose headquarters are in Boone, also typically responds to disasters overseas. But the organization has set up three water filtration systems in the Asheville area.

Each of its systems can produce 50,000 liters a day, or enough for 10,000 people. The organization has also been airlifting water to difficult-to-reach areas. Dowdy, the pastor in Swannanoa, said his community has benefited from large tankers of water from Samaritan’s Purse.

Other international nonprofits like chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen have tankers of water on the ground in the area. WaterStep, which responds to water crises overseas, has established clean-water operations in Augusta, Georgia, one of the places Helene hit hard.

The responding Christian organizations’ leaders told CT their operations are coordinated with emergency management officials, but they are also proactively reaching out to heavily damaged areas and talking to local fire departments or other local officials to learn the needs of the communities. Water Mission is targeting more rural areas where it will take longer to get power and water back.

Local governments have been responding well, said Water Mission’s Kreitzburg, but “it’s just such a wide area of damage. They have to prioritize. So we’re trying to be the supplement between the disaster happening and the restoring of services.”

He added, “It’s a privilege to serve them and serve the Lord.”

The head of the North Carolina Baptist Convention, Todd Unzicker, said the Baptists have semitrucks with water arriving to more than a dozen sites in Western North Carolina every day. Most of that is bottled water, but more tankers of water have been going out. He said the state Baptists are serving 140,000 hot meals a day in the area, and he didn’t know numbers on water distribution but said they were distributing more water than food.

The lack of cell service has made that distribution and communication difficult. Unzicker traveled to the storm-hit area with his daughter recently, and they had to use a map book to navigate.

The presence of so many churches and nonprofits in the region, on top of the government response, meant that the “immediate need is being met,” World Vision’s Slattery said. But residents he talked to were worried about what would happen when bottled water donations dried up or when attention shifted to other crises like Hurricane Milton.

While staffers of these relief organizations are focused on the basics of restoring infrastructure, they are also seeing the hurt and trauma of residents in the aftermath of the storm. People coming into the churches that Water Mission is partnering with have often lost everything, sometimes including family members.

“Wherever we’re responding around the world, we want to partner alongside the church,” said Kreitzburg, adding that his organization would stay as long as it was needed. “The church is going to be in that community a lot longer than we are.”

Dowdy, in speaking to CT from Swannanoa, had to move several times to chase a fleeting cell signal. The area around him is a landscape of cars flipped upside down in trees, destroyed homes, and washed-out roads. But morale is good at his church.

“Everything we’ve gotten in here has been from churches and individuals who have brought it to us,” he said. Outside groups coming in more recently have allowed his church members to rest and attend to their own disaster recovery. “It’s encouraging to see the church in a time of great need.”

Before the storm, his church had been wrestling with the question of whether anyone would miss the church if it ceased to exist. The congregation had begun looking to be more involved in the surrounding community.

“Wow, has God provided that!” he said.

- More from Emily Belz

Theology

The Bible Doesn’t Fit an Information Age

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

Algorithms strip us of mystery. The Gospels restore our ability to be astonished by the truth.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

I recommended the Gospel of Mark to an unbeliever. He read it and found it “creepy.” That’s exactly the response I wanted.

This young man is probably an atheist or an agnostic but has lived in such a secular environment that he doesn’t seem to think of himself in such terms, any more than you would introduce yourself as “non-cannibalistic” or “anti-horse-theft.” He wanted, though, to try to understand—just as an intellectual exercise—why someone would hold to religious views or practices he finds alien.

He asked what he should read in order to do that. There are, of course, many places I would send such a person, but to him I said, “Why don’t you read the Gospel of Mark? Don’t worry about whether you understand it all; just read through it.”

I later ran into the secularist again, and he reported that he had taken my advice. “So, what did you think?” I asked.

He said he was conflicted. Reading the Gospel was, on the one hand, narratively gripping in a way that he hadn’t expected, supposing an ancient religious text would be preachy and propagandistic. On the other hand, he said, “It was kind of creepy.” And that’s when he brought up Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem.

This man knew that I had read the science fiction novel last year—and that I had done so reluctantly. A trusted friend had recommended the book to me with a warning: “Don’t give up. You will feel like you don’t know what’s going on and you’ll want to put it down. Keep reading and, you’ll see, it will all pay off in the end.” My unbelieving conversation partner had not read the book but he had watched some of the Netflix adaptation of it, 3 Body Problem.

Mild spoilers here: in both the book and the series, an alien civilization communicates with human scientists through a virtual reality gaming headset. The scientists are put in scenarios where they must solve the gravity fluctuations that are plunging the distant world into unpredictable periods of chaos and calm.

“At times, it was kind of like playing those games,” the young man said about reading Mark. “It was almost as though someone was on the other side, watching me.”

By that, he meant particularly that the “character” (his word) of Jesus in the text sometimes seemed to be written in a way that felt unexpectedly immediate. “Sometimes I had to remind myself that I wasn’t right there in the middle of everything. That kind of freaked me out a little bit.”

Although virtual reality aliens were not on my mind, this reaction was exactly what I had been hoping for when I’d recommended that he read Mark.

Usually if I’m helping someone “get” what Christianity is, I ask them to read the Gospel of John. With someone like this, though—who I don’t know if I’ll ever get to follow up with—I’ll suggest Mark, partly because it’s concise and relatively easy to read.

I also do this because of a story I heard years ago. If I remember right, a man who had been some sort of New Age Eastern religionist, the kind found often in the hippie countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, became a Christian because a professor in his comparative religion class assigned the Gospel of Mark. Like the young man, he was drawn to the figure of Jesus and started to feel as though he was not only reading the text but that he was being beckoned from the other side of it.

Leon Wieseltier argues that we have too much emphasis on “storytelling” right now—that this leads to a loss of arguments, of persuasion. “Storytelling is designed to inculcate certain responses, certain mental stances, in the listener. They are passivity, credulity, wonder,” Wieseltier writes. “All of them are stances of surrender.”

This, of course, denies that there are important truths one can only see from stances of passivity, credulity, wonder, and even surrender.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han agrees that we should be worried about how much we hear about storytelling, but that’s because—however much we talk about it—we’ve lost the ability to tell and to hear an actual story.

“We tell fewer and fewer stories in our everyday lives,” Han argues in his new book The Crisis of Narration, because “communication takes the form of the exchange of information.” In an information age, Han writes, an actual story is a disruption. Information, after all, is direct, controllable, and consumable. A story works a different way. A story requires that, in order to be experienced, some information must be withheld as well as revealed.

“Withheld information—that is, a lack of explanation—heightens narrative tension,” Han writes. “Information pushes to the margins those events that cannot be explained but only narrated. A narrative often has something wondrous and mysterious around its edges.” That kind of mystery is startlingly rare in an era of algorithms.

Part of our problem is that we find a plot unsettling in an information age, especially if we start to see our lives as part of that plot. That’s what Han finds diminishing about algorithms. We consume bits of disconnected data—curated by our curiosities and our appetites—to the point that we no longer feel surprise. Reality itself starts to feel dead, like so much abstract data. The deadness brings forth more deadness.

“Bits of information are like specks of dust, not seeds of grain,” he writes. “They lack germinal force. Once they are registered, they immediately sink into oblivion.” The metaphor immediately brought to mind Jesus’ own words: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24, ESV throughout).

Journalist David Samuels laments that we now live in the flatness of a time when story and song are hollowed out by Big Data, replaced by “consuming pornography and propaganda.”

“The goal of their governing algorithms isn’t to create beauty, or anything human; it’s to suck out your brains and then to slice and dice them into bits that can be analyzed and sold off to corporations and governments, which are fast becoming the same thing; it’s a mass mutilation of the human,” Samuels writes. “What that sounds like in practice is like a car alarm that keeps going off, at a higher and higher pitch—a sound that has no meaning in itself, except as a warning that something has been shattered.”

Maybe the three-body problemof it all is not the Bible but the rest of life. On the other side of our digital lives are intelligences seeking to question us—nameless, faceless algorithms designed to test us with just one question, “What do you want?” What if, though, our boredom and malaise are themselves signs that we weren’t meant to live like this?

Jesus said that this is a key reason he taught in parables, “because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” (Matt. 13:13). A story requires a certain kind of participation, a certain lack of control. One must be prepared for, and often through, the story to hear what it is saying. One must be baffled enough to suspend control, to feel the tension, in order to not just share information but to experience something true. Without that sense of bafflement and mystery, a story lacks the ability to astonish and to linger.

Think, for instance, of the Gospel of John’s very familiar account of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes—a miraculous sign so important that all the Gospels reference it. We tend to remember that there was a crowd of thousands, that there was not enough to eat, and that Jesus provided a feast from almost nothing. What most people don’t think about when recalling that story, however, is just how Jesus sets up the occurrence.

“Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?’” John records. “He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do” (6:5–6).

He himself knew what he would do. The question itself—the kind of momentary perplexity it would create in Philip—was Jesus’ intention. It’s the same pattern God followed with the tribes of Israel in the wilderness after the Exodus. Moses said to them: “And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3).

Jesus does not just intend to feed; he intends that we would first “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt. 5:6). He did not simply intend to rescue Peter from drowning, but also that Peter would experience what it was like to go under water, to cry out and to feel a hand pulling him up (Matt. 14:30–31).

Jesus’ encounter with us in Scripture is meant to work the same way. We too are meant to find ourselves exclaiming with the Capernaum synagogue, “What is this? A new teaching with authority!” (Mark 1:27). We are meant to start asking the question, “Why does this man speak like that?” (Mark 2:7). We are meant to hear, as though addressed directly to us, “But who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29).

When one finds authority amid the algorithms, revelation among the consumption, that can feel creepy—just as after a time of starvation, the smell of baking bread can seem nauseating. It’s not those who find all this strange who are not “getting it” but rather those who find it all familiar and boring. That’s what a plot does, but it’s especially what a plot breathed out by the Spirit of Christ does, a plot in which we are meant to hear the voice of a Shepherd (John 10:4).

What if someone on the other side of those ancient words knows that you’re there? What if, in those words, you can almost hear the Galilean-accented voice that once disrupted the plotlines of some fishermen by saying, “Follow me”? What if it’s speaking to you? If so, finding that disturbingly strange isn’t the end of the story, but it’s a good place to start.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

News

Wire Story

Evangelicals for Harris Asked to ‘Cease and Desist’ Billy Graham Ad

Kathryn Post – Religion News Service

Franklin Graham says the campaign is “trying to mislead people” by positioning his father’s preaching in contrast to Donald Trump.

The ad uses clips from a Billy Graham sermon.

YouTube screengrab

The ad begins with a clip of Billy Graham, wearing glasses, a gray suit and tie, leaning in toward a pulpit.

“But you must realize that in the last days, the times will be full of danger,” Graham declares. “Men will become utterly self-centered and greedy for money.”

Suddenly, a clip of former president Donald Trump is spliced in. Standing before a row of American flags at a campaign rally in Des Moines, Trump says: “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.”

For the next few seconds, the ad, which has racked up over 30 million views, flips between Graham’s 1988 sermon, contrasting his points with shots of Trump using violent language, claiming to be “the chosen one” and talking about kissing women without their consent.

That ad, the result of a $1 million ad campaign by Evangelicals for Harris, is now the subject of a potential lawsuit from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based nonprofit that supports the ministries of Billy Graham’s son and grandson.

In late September and early October, Evangelicals for Harris, a grassroots campaign of the political action committee Evangelicals for America, said it received multiple letters from lawyers representing the association, including a “cease and desist” letter. An October 2 letter, sent from outside counsel and obtained by Religion News Service, threatened to sue Evangelicals for Harris on the basis of copyright infringement.

In a statement to RNS, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association said it does not generally comment on potential disputes, but it acknowledged having communicated with Evangelicals for Harris regarding its concerns about the “unauthorized, political use of BGEA’s copyrighted video,” and said it would continue to address the matter.

“It may be worth noting that, in all of his years of ministry and across relationships with 11 US presidents, Billy Graham sought only to encourage them and to offer them the counsel of Christ, as revealed through God’s Word. He never criticized presidents publicly and would undoubtedly refuse to let his sermons be used to do so, regardless of who is involved,” said the statement.

In August, the association’s president and CEO, Franklin Graham, turned to the social platform X to voice his displeasure at Evangelicals for Harris’s use of his father’s sermons.

“The liberals are using anything and everything they can to promote candidate Harris. They even developed a political ad trying to use my father @BillyGraham’s image. They are trying to mislead people,” he wrote. “Maybe they don’t know that my father appreciated the conservative values and policies of President @realDonaldTrump in 2016, and if he were alive today, my father’s views and opinions would not have changed.”

In response to the threatened lawsuit, Evangelicals for Harris released a statement saying Franklin Graham is taking a page from Trump’s playbook by trying to silence the group through legal action.

“Franklin is scared of our ads because we do not tell people what to do or think. We merely hold Trump’s own words up to the light of Scripture, the necessity of repentance, and Biblical warnings against leaders exactly like Trump,” it wrote in a post on X.

The lawyers representing Evangelicals for Harris also released their formal legal response to the threatened lawsuit. Originally sent on September 28, the letter asserts that the ad does not constitute copyright infringement or violate the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s right.

They write that the public discussion of Trump’s moral failings is “essential First Amendment expression” and that the use of Billy Graham’s sermon is protected under the Copyright Act.

“EFH will not be removing the ‘Keep Clear’ advertisement in response to your demand. The advertisement is a transformative, noncommercial use of less than two percent of a widely disseminated video, aimed at a market that BGEA (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) was prohibited from targeting,” the letter says.

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Evangelicals for Harris was founded by Jim Ball, an evangelical minister and former head of both the Evangelical Environmental Network and Evangelicals for Biden. Since its launch in August, the group has had over 300,000 people sign up for information about the campaign, according to Ball. Jerushah Duford, Billy Graham’s granddaughter; Bishop Claude Alexander of The Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina; and Baptist pastor Dwight McKissic are among the group’s ranks. (Alexander is also a CT board member.)

Ball said the “Keep Clear” ad, named after Graham’s admonishment to “keep clear of people like that,” was inspired by a desire to rely on the biblical wisdom of Billy Graham, whom Ball considers a personal hero, and to reintroduce young people to the evangelist.

“We’ve never had a situation where a single individual has threatened democracy and the rule of law like Mr. Trump has,” said Ball. “We’re also hoping to provide a witness to others that love should be at the heart of how we look at politics. … How are we called to love our neighbors in the public square? We think hands down that Kamala Harris is the candidate that everyone should be voting for on that regard.”

- More from Billy Graham

Ideas

Facing My Limits in a Flood Zone

Hannah King

As a minister, I’m used to helping people during crisis. But trapped at home during Hurricane Helene, I could only care for who was in front of me.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / Getty

When we moved to the small town of Canton, North Carolina, last fall, we heard stories about flooding. Living in the mountains spells unpredictability. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred flooded the river that runs through our city, destroying significant portions of the downtown area. Some homes and businesses were lost.

So when we heard that Hurricane Helene had headed our way, people took it seriously. It seemed our little city was on guard and prepared for the storm. But on Friday morning, we still watched with collective shock and dismay when floodwaters were approaching rooflines and still rising.

One mantra I’ve been hearing in the aftermath is “Mountain people are resilient.” And they are. The spirit and the strength of our new community in this crisis is honestly staggering. But any level of preparedness or resilience doesn’t nullify trauma. Or homelessness. Or watching your business literally disappear before your eyes in a mudslide.

As community members and church leaders in the area, my husband and I have been eager to support our neighbors who were impacted by the flood. But widespread cellular and internet outages have made even the most basic communication and collaboration difficult. The first few days after the storm, our lives became hyperlocal: We walked through town, talking and praying with people and pooling resources with friends on our street.

Then, my husband started making his way around the county to coordinate broader efforts. I was at home with three small children and no way to hear or share news or participate in citywide projects. My inability to contribute was maddening. I was wracked with a strange combination of frantically wanting to help and being extremely limited in what I could do.

The truth, I soon remembered, is that limitation is a basic human condition. In our digitized, high-speed age, we believe the lie that we are limitless, omnipresent and omniconnected—but in reality, we are so very finite. Sometimes it takes a crisis to force us to realize this. Even then, we tend to rage against our limits, punishing ourselves for not being able to do more or becoming so disillusioned that we retreat into apathy.

But on the other side of the frustration is a freeing realization: All that any of us can do is the one or two things in front of us. We feed our kids; we pray for our neighbors; we donate or fundraise or hand out bottled water. These things might feel laughably small or even irrelevant in the face of national or global crises, but they are the very things God entrusts to us. In return, we must trust that God conscripts us, limits and all, to manifest his limitless love and presence in the world.

I see this promise on display in the composite stories around me. One of my neighbors, a pharmacist, is working part-time shifts at the hospital while also caring for her six school-age kids at home. Another, a pastor’s wife and small business owner, helps empty someone’s flooded house during the day and shares her family’s Wi-Fi signal with needy neighbors (like me) at night. This week, a newly ordained Lutheran minister whom we’ve never met drove a truck full of supplies across the state to our Anglican church—supplies she bought with the money she was gifted for her ordination. In their unique ways, each of them is part of the tapestry God is weaving to showcase his beauty in this tragedy.

Each of them also wishes they could do more. Many out-of-state friends and colleagues wish they could do more than donate, send supplies, or pray. But to those of us on the ground, each small offering we receive multiplies—it becomes not only blankets or bottled water or money but also a tangible reminder that we have not been forgotten. Today I unloaded dozens of relief boxes packed by complete strangers, people I will likely never meet or get to thank directly. Their gifts brought tears to my eyes.

Sometimes, of course, even small acts of obedience like packing a relief box or helping to unload it can feel overwhelming. In a crisis, our brains often lock down and we lose the ability to function normally. We feel overwhelmed by all the needs or frozen with confusion and fear. In these moments, the act of obedience entrusted to us might be as simple as getting out of bed or even offering up a prayer for help.

When I lost my brother suddenly six years ago, my first steps forward included choosing to eat breakfast and then going for a walk outside one day at a time. In the disorientation of that grief, I worked on my own small obedience.

But I did not walk alone. People supported me in myriad ways. They sent flowers, brought meals, played with my kids. Then, as now, it wasn’t a singular hero who swept in and fixed everything but an army of people doing the little things they could do to help. Because of them, my memories of a dark season are littered with gratitude and even joy. I believe the same will be true of this season in my town’s life.

I return to this belief as I grow in my understanding of Helene’s impact in my community. When I walked through town today, I began to realize how long this season will be. We will be recovering from this flood for years. The thought overwhelms me. My limited ability to help others over the long haul—or even to help myself when despair wells up in my throat—tempts me to burn out or to give up.

But in view of God’s expansive resources, our personal limitations are a gift to be received. In our collective weakness, we experience his strength. And in our small acts of obedience, we participate in a much larger economy of grace.

In this economy, the line between “helpers” and “receivers” blurs as we all practice saying “please” and “thank you.” And our confidence grows—not in our ability to accomplish our desired ends, but in the Father’s ability to fulfill his purposes through us.

This frees us to offer up what we have every day, even though we know it’s not enough. We trust that he will take and distribute our offering as he sees fit. We can’t control or understand how our offering might multiply. Sometimes we can’t even see it. But in the end, we will all be fed by his mercy—with baskets left over.

Hannah Miller King is a priest and writer serving at The Vine Anglican Church in Waynesville, North Carolina, and the author of a forthcoming book about living with hope in the presence of pain.

- More from Hannah King

Theology

5 Lessons Christians Can Learn from the Barmen Declaration

Kimlyn Bender

How a wartime confession resisted Hitler’s Nazification of the German church, and why its principles are still relevant today.

The Protestant Bishop Ludwig Muller does the Nazi salute outside the Town hall of Wittenberg in 1933.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

In recent weeks, a group of evangelicals crafted a Confession of Evangelical Conviction in response to the “social conflict and political division” plaguing the American church, especially amid another contentious presidential election season.

Few know, however, that this confession was conspicuously modeled on another: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, a framed copy of which hangs in my office. It was penned during Nazi-era Germany by Christians who opposed indirect state interference in the work and life of the church.

The Barmen Declaration has since become a model for resistance against other forms of ideologies and political systems that domesticate the gospel and compromise the church’s witness. It inspired both the Belhar Confession, penned in opposition to South Africa’s apartheid, and the international Orthodox opposition to the Russian Orthodox Church’s nationalist views after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Making public statements in response to cultural shifts has become a modern evangelical instinct, due in part to the legacy of Barmen. What can we learn from this document, and what critical reminders does it offer the Christian church today? There are many things we might consider, but here are five enduring lessons.

1. Our theology always has real-world implications.

In the 1930s in Germany, a group called the “German Christians” was already sympathetic to the political goals of National Socialism long before the rise of Hitler since they shared its convictions of racial and ethnic nationalism and antisemitism. They hoped to unite various German confessions under a single bishop and establish a single Volkskirche, or “people’s church”—one sympathetic to the Nazi government and supportive of the Germanic ideology of Adolf Hitler’s Reich.

These German Christians believed the divine will was revealed in Jesus Christ and in Scripture, but they also insisted that it could be discerned through natural theology—in nature and historic events. They concluded that the existence of different races and people was God’s design and that each group was to be kept distinct (the intermarriage of Aryans and non-Aryans, specifically Jews, was officially forbidden by the government in 1935). Natural theology for the German Christians was thus one of Volk (“peoplehood”), a mystical fusion of culture, blood (racial supremacy), and soil (land/nation).

In addition, German Christians believed the divine was expressed, and could be discerned, in singular historical turning points. Foremost among these events was the rise of National Socialism and Hitler, which they understood in spiritual terms and took to be the direct work of God’s providence in history for the salvation of the German nation.

In contrast, a group of Christians who called themselves the “Confessing Church” sought to oppose the German Christian teachings and governance. In May 1934 in the city of Barmen, 139 concerned delegates gathered for what would become the Confessing Church’s most famous synod, not least because of the Barmen Declaration that it produced.

Lutherans Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit and the Reformed theologian Karl Barth were commissioned to write the confession, with Barth as its principal author. The confession has six articles—the most well-known article of which is the first, which states,

Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

“We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.

From its first article, the Barmen Declaration explicitly rejects the premises of natural theology, and this rejection is a key to its legacy. In a time when distorted theology led to devastating consequences, the declaration sought a return to “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture.”

2. The church’s confession must be centered on Jesus Christ alone.

Many National Socialists spoke freely about God, but in terms of an absolute being. Most often, they referred to God with reference to his omnipotence as “the Almighty” (this was Hitler’s preferred way to speak of God). Others, like Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s propaganda minister, spoke passionately of “the Divine” or of “Providence.”

But these were vague utterances. As one pastor during the war observed, the word God in Germany is “an empty word into which any concept can be poured.”

In contrast, every resistance to National Socialism by Confessing Church members—such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Barth—was sustained by an appeal to the singular and supreme revelation of God in Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture.

These Christians perceived that, no matter how much traditional Christian language its leaders used, National Socialism was a rival religion that appealed to a different god—whether a god of a mystic ideal of racial superiority, or of the state itself, or of a generic, divine “Almighty.”

Moreover, the theologians in Germany who were most open to a natural theology of nature and history—and in turn downplayed God’s particular revelation in Christ and, at times, denied Jesus’ relation to Israel and Judaism—were those who were the most implicated in compromises with National Socialism.

Only a particular theology of the God of the gospel, a theology of the cross, could ever resist such idolatry in its full force.

3. An exclusive confession of Christ protects against ideological and political capture.

We as Christians can never place our ultimate hope in earthly political leaders or movements, no matter how promising or powerful they seem or however threatened we may believe ourselves to be. (Many Germans overlooked problems with National Socialism and fascism because they were terrified of communism and the Russian revolution of 1917.)

When rightly understood, Barmen offers a basis for both theological and political resistance against any claims to absolute allegiance made by a state or government. It also serves as an inoculation that fights against any ideology, whether of the left or the right, that might invade the church body.

For Christians, there can only be one Lord, one subject of our ultimate hope and allegiance. As the second article of Barmen declares, Jesus Christ has a claim “upon our whole life,” and Christians should reject “the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords.”

It was thus inevitable that the church would come into irreconcilable conflict with the National Socialist regime. As Judge Karl Roland Freisler of the Nazi People’s Court in Berlin noted at the death trial of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke: “There is one thing, Herr Graf, which we National Socialists and the Christians have in common, and only one: we both demand the whole man.”

4. Theological declarations, apart from confessional community, are not enough.

Those who assented to the Barmen Declaration not only viewed it as a binding confession but also lived a confessional life together in community. These committed Christians strove to remain faithful to the one Word of God and to be in service to the church and the vulnerable. Though few, they lived a life of intentional witness and corresponding suffering.

Most Protestant churches in Germany had no tradition of political resistance, and most Christians in Germany found such a thing inconceivable. Yet the Confessing Christians learned that, at times, discipleship entailed dissent. Bonhoeffer is perhaps the most famous of such dissenters, but there were many others like him.

Despite its shortcomings, the Confessing Church was the only German entity to resist the Nazi regime. Every other part of the nation—industry, the financial sector, the arts, the universities—was subjugated to state control. And the leaders of the Confessing Church paid a steep price for their convictions. Some were sent to concentration camps. Others were imprisoned or executed.

The Barmen Declaration was poignant because it was not only a statement of words but also a call for a holistic commitment to a costly way of life.

5. We should not romanticize Barmen but seek to live out its spirit in our present age.

It is tempting for us to romanticize Barmen, but there are a couple reasons why we should not do so.

Even for those who strongly disliked the government’s interference in their self-governance, most pastors in Germany—including many who were part of the Confessing Church—were not necessarily opposed to the National Socialist movement itself. Most remained loyal to their nation’s government, not wanting to appear unpatriotic or sectarian in any way.

In fact, the majority welcomed the chance to demonstrate their loyalty by signing up to serve in the German army when the war came. And despite several contrary examples, most said nothing when persecution of Jews and others intensified and was evident to all.

Moreover, we should remember that any superficial comparison between modern Western democracies in the early 21st century to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is unhelpful and often distortive. While some Christians in America see themselves as being in a state of persecution, such does not begin to compare to the systematic oppression of the churches that intensified in Germany from 1935 onward and throughout the war.

What can be directly applied from Barmen, though, is that the ultimate task of the church is not to align itself with the levers of political power for its own self-preservation. Rather, the church should trust its safeguarding to the Lord, in whom we find our true and proper power.

Faithfulness to the gospel, not political effectiveness, is the church’s divine commission. And there are real dangers when these are reversed or when the first is replaced by the second.

Two decades after World War II, in his treatise “The Christian Community and the Civil Community,” Barth remarked prophetically, “The secret contempt [that] a church fighting for its own interests with political weapons usually incurs even when it achieves a certain amount of success, is well deserved.”

In the end, the Christians in Germany who were the most committed to resisting the evils of the state were, ironically, those who were the least invested in preserving the church for its own sake. Instead, they were interested only in remaining faithful to the gospel—and this translated into acts of political resistance, often by Christians who were little known and frequently forgotten.

Friedrich Justus Perels was a Christian lawyer in Germany who was deeply involved in the Confessing Church. With remarkable clarity of conviction, he worked to free political prisoners, help relatives of those in concentration camps, and assist Jews in Germany. For these actions, he was arrested in October 1944.

On February 2, 1945, he was condemned to death. During the trial in Berlin, Freisler, the judge who presided over the trial, screamed at Perels: “After the war the Church will be wiped out.”

But Perels calmly replied, “The Church will endure.”

This is the confession of one whose hope was not in the church itself but in God, who through his Son promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

Kimlyn J. Bender is the Foy Valentine Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University. His books include Reading Karl Barth for the Church and 1 Corinthians in the Brazos Theological Commentary series.

- More from Kimlyn Bender

News

Back at Shooting Site, Trump Supporters Pray for His Protection

Harvest Prude and Megan Fowler in Butler, Pennsylvania

Still shaken by the tragic attack, Butler, Pennsylvania, welcomed the former president back with cheers of triumph and a memorial for the previous rally’s victim.

Donald Trump returned on Saturday to the scene of his attempted assassination in July.

Justin Merriman / Bloomberg via Getty Images

When Kori Koss heard that Donald Trump was coming back to Butler, she felt her stomach sink.

It’s been less than three months since a would-be assassin’s gunshots narrowly missed the former president. The shooter killed one man, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, and gravely injured two others.

Koss lives down the road from the Butler Farm Show grounds, close enough that she and her kids had set out chairs and set up a livestream of the July 13 rally. Close enough that at 6:11 p.m., they heard what they thought were fireworks.

Her husband, who had walked to the rally, called and told her someone was shooting. She told him in a panic to “get out of there.”

So when she found out Trump was returning in less than a week, she prayed every day leading up to the rally. When Saturday dawned, she took a chair, a cup of coffee, and her Bible out to her backyard that faces the rally site and opened up to Psalm 27.

Out of the first five verses, one line especially struck her: “My heart will not fear.” Meditating on that psalm, with its themes of God’s protection, brought the 46-year-old mother comfort and a sense of peace.

Koss, who attends a Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Butler, prayed Psalm 27 “over Trump and America” and prayed that “others would come to know God through this event.”

When the day of the rally came, it felt like déjà vu. Once again, her family opened up their yard for parking for rally-goers and exchanged small talk with attendees who tramped through her backyard. Once again, her father-in-law and husband attended. She and her kids watched from their backyard. But this time, there were no gunshots.

This time, the stream of people that filed in did not file out until much later. The rally wrapped up without any tragic incidents.

“Butler is a pretty tough, patriotic, resilient community,” Koss said. “I think people obviously showed up to support each other, like the churches did.”

Koss wasn’t the only person praying over her town.

The day before the rally, a group of Trump supporters gathered to “pray for the protection and safety” of Trump and the event, Deseret News reported.

The prayer gathering opened with the Lord’s Prayer, and the group also prayed a prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, which Trump had recently shared on social media. Eventually, the gathering shifted into a testimony night, where people shared where they had been when the original shooting happened, Deseret wrote.

Back at the rally grounds, the former president’s event was part somber memorial service, part “Trump farm show,” as Koss put it.

During his remarks, Trump fired up his supporters, saying that when the July shooting took place, “we all took a bullet for America.”

“Exactly 12 weeks ago this evening on this very ground, a cold-blooded assassin aimed to silence me and to silence the greatest movement, MAGA, in the history of our country,” Trump said.

“But by the hand of providence and the grace of God, that villain did not succeed in his goal, did not come close. He did not stop our movement; he did not break out our spirit. He did not shake our unyielding resolve to save America from evils of poverty, hatred, and destruction.”

In the bleachers behind the stage, Comperatore’s firefighter coat and helmet were placed where he had been sitting at the July rally. Introductory remarks paid tribute to Comperatore and honored his family members, who attended the event.

In the hours of speeches leading up to Trump’s appearance, nearly every speaker hailed the courage of the first responders on July 13, remembered David Dutch and James Copenhaven, the two men injured in the shooting, and honored Comperatore’s memory.

Many also attributed Trump’s survival to God, with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump saying that God had spared Trump’s life: “Donald Trump was made for a time such as this.”

“If you have any questions whether God exists and whether he performs miracles, we got our answer right here July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania,” said Lara Trump, who serves as the cochair of the Republican National Committee.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, told the crowd, “I truly believe God saved President Trump’s life that day.” The Ohio senator also joined the crowd in chants of “Corey, Corey, Corey.”

He told attendees that it was a “testament to your courage and patriotism that you’re here again today.”

James Sweetland, the doctor who had come to Comperatore’s aid at the July rally, shared his story from the stage. Sweetland said after the shots rang out, he heard someone shouting that a bystander was down, but he hesitated to assist. Then he heard a “clear, rich, and reassuring” voice telling him to go help. “I’m telling you right now, that was the voice of God,” he said.

At 6:11 p.m., Trump led the crowd in a moment of silence while bells tolled four times for each victim. Tenor Christopher Macchio then sang “Ave Maria.”

“Corey’s not with us tonight, and he should be,” he said, mentioning the volunteer firefighter’s widow and two daughters by name. “I can only imagine the depths of your grief.”

Some speakers urged rally-goers to help turn down the heated political rhetoric. A local sheriff asked them to disagree respectfully and passionately but “without violence.” Sweetland challenged attendees to reach out to at least two people they know with different political views and ask to meet with them to discuss their differences “in a civil and respectful manner.”

After that, Trump’s remarks quickly shifted to standard rally fare, and he touched on everything from immigration to fracking with bombast, at times doubling down on debunked claims that he won the 2020 election and directing insults toward Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

At one point, Trump invited tech billionaire Elon Musk on stage. Musk, who endorsed Trump July 13, encouraged everyone in the crowd to pester their friends and family until they registered to vote.

A massive crowd filling the grounds listened to the former president with reverence, occasionally punctuating the air with chants or a stray “We love you, Trump!”

Some dedicated supporters had even camped out the night before to get a good spot in line, and traffic in the surrounding area had slowed to a crawl by that morning. The grounds bristled with a large security contingent, with local police presence and Secret Service agents dotting the crowd and snipers watching on nearby rooftops.

Rally-goers sported typical campaign merch, but many also wore T-shirts or held signs referencing the Butler event.

Many waved signs that read “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” a reference to Trump’s words after the bullet grazed his ear and he got back on his feet to let the crowd know he was all right. Others wore shirts with an image of Trump with his fist in the air and the caption, “I Survived Butler.”

Jacob King, a student at nearby Grove City College, will cast his first vote for Trump come November. The 18-year-old, who sported a “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president” T-shirt, told Christianity Today he likes how Trump “stands for more freedom in our country.”

Karen Toff, a 63-year-old with short hair dyed pink, had a “Women for Trump” button pinned to a shirt that read “Pray, Vote, Pray.” She said that Trump is the “most pro-life president we’ve ever had.”

Toff, who belongs to a Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod congregation, said she appreciates Trump’s stance on shifting abortion policy to the states. She’s found herself disagreeing with other pro-life Christians who have voiced support for a national abortion ban: “I don’t think that’s reasonable.”

Toff said she also supports Trump’s foreign policy. “We need to help our people first,” she said.

Several attendees mentioned economic issues, citing high gas and grocery prices, as reasons they thought life had been better when Trump was president.

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Lisa Sicilia, who carried a Bible with her and offered “hallelujah” and “amen” in response to the speakers’ remarks, said she had been praying at the July 13 rally. On Saturday, she made her way through the crowd to the front. Standing by the short metal fence, she bowed her head and clasped her hands until the end of the event.

Around town, the aftereffects of the shooting have lingered. One congregation, the Church of God at Connoquenessing, put up billboards in several spots around town, including near the fairgrounds, that read, “We Thank God For His Mercy. We Comfort Those Who Mourn.”

Another, Gospel Life Church in nearby Evans City, set up a pop-up prayer tent in the days after the shooting with signs that read, “Pray for America.” Kori Koss stopped to join in prayer after seeing the signs on her way home one day.

Karen DeLorenzo, a 43-year-old teacher who attends a Presbyterian church in town, said she thought the rallies had driven more people to put out many Trump-Vance signs, as well as a few Harris-Walz signs.

“People are a little more open with what their feelings are, in either direction,” she said.

Brandon Lenhart, the senior pastor at North Main Street Church of God, said the weeks after the shooting were “surreal.” Helicopters and a security presence remained in town, and major news outlets camped out near the Farm Show grounds and held interviews in local spots like Vintage Coffee House.

“Now we’re on the map, but not in the way I think we would like to be. You don’t want to be known for ‘That’s the place the assassination attempt happened on this former president,’” he said.

Families from North Main Street Church attended both rallies, though one woman, who had been less than ten feet away from Comperatore during the time of the shooting, told Lenhart she couldn’t go back. Another couple, who parked in Koss’s neighborhood for both rallies, left the rally early and came back to their car after only a few hours. They found they just couldn’t stay.

In the aftermath of the July rally, Lenhart found himself preparing remarks on Saturday night to address the tragedy when he took the pulpit. “It is a traumatic experience for many in our community. Many of our churches had people there, so I felt like I should address that,” Lenhart said.

This time around, there thankfully wasn’t any need to scramble the church’s regular programming.

DeLorenzo, who also lives close to the Farm Show, was glad when she heard that Trump was returning.

“I think it was important for Butler to have a second [rally] back here again too,” DeLorenzo said, “to end on a better note. Rather than being remembered by that, let’s be remembered by this huge, peaceful rally.”

News

JD Vance Says Trump White House Will ‘Fight for Israel’

Bonnie Kristian in Washington, DC

The candidate’s message at an October 7 memorial rally was popular among Christian supporters.

JD Vance at Philos Project's "Remembering October 7th" memorial rally.

Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

Several hundred people on the National Mall in Washington cheered Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance as he headlined an October 7th memorial rally, punctuating his remarks on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war with shouts of “yes” and “amen.”

“I know that in this crowd some of us are Christians, some of us are Jews, some of us are people even of no faith,” Vance began. “But we are united in the basic, common-sense principle that we want the good guys to win, and we want the bad guys to lose. And what happened on October the 7th was disgraceful, and we have to fight to make sure it never happens again.”

Monday’s event was assembled by a coalition of 60 organizations led by the Philos Project, a group that “seeks to promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East.”

Over the rest of his 12-minute speech, Vance ranged from campus protests—also a popular theme from fellow speakers on the lineup, including activist Adela Cojab and Daily Wire journalist Kassy Akiva—to antisemitism, American ignorance of Holocaust history, and a throwback invocation of “peace through strength.”

The VP candidate was met with a standing ovation, and the attendees launched into chants of “Bring them home!” when Vance said the “only way this war is going to end is when Hamas gives up its arms and stops the fighting and lets the hostages come home.”

The Catholic convert didn’t make theological arguments, never alluding to Christianity outside of two brief mentions of agreement across faiths and a sign-off of “God bless you.”

Still, Christians in the audience—who have been following the war and praying for peace in Israel—said they continue to see God at work. Attendee Joseph McLean said that Vance’s remarks made him feel as if things were going to change soon.

“I felt like Israel was going to be protected with that man speaking, that man speaking and his soon-to-be boss, Donald Trump,” said McLean, who is from Mobile, Alabama. “I believe both of them will be elected, and this whole nation will change as a result of it, so I’m praying for it.”

Last month, Trump called himself a “big protector” of Israel and claimed without explanation that the Jewish state is at risk of “total annihilation” if the “other side” is elected. Vance made a similar comment Monday, saying if Americans “do this the right way, we’re going to reject [antisemitism] in the ballot box on November 5.”

An elder at a Pentecostal-leaning church, McLean envisioned God directing a Trump-Vance White House on whether to send US troops into combat against Hamas or even Iran.

“I believe as these men get in, they will hear God,” McLean said, “and if he says, ‘I want them over there,’ they’ll be there.”

American defense of Israel is McLean’s top issue for this election, he added, because he believes the US was created by God for this purpose and “without Israel, us protecting them, we don’t have an America.”

In a recent Lifeway Research survey, evangelical Christians and Trump supporters are more likely than others to prioritize a candidate’s position on foreign policy when deciding their vote.

Vance supporter Alexandra Salcedo, a student at Penn State and a California native, cited concerns around anti-Israel protests in America as a major issue for her this election.

“I usually lean more Democrat, but this election I’m going to lean Republican,” said Salcedo, who traveled to Washington specifically for the memorial rally.

As a Christian, Salcedo said she prays for both sides in the Israel-Hamas war, “but I do feel like Israel has been treated and portrayed unfairly.”

She also mentioned protests when weighing whether US troops should fight on Israel’s behalf. “I think at this point it might be necessary,” she said, “because we see groups in college campuses just spreading hate and harassing even Americans.”

During his speech, Vance criticized the chant “from the river to the sea” heard at many pro-Palestinian protests.

“This is not just a dispute about territory or borders. This is a war between a peaceful nation and terrorists who want to exterminate the Jewish people and eradicate the state of Israel forever,” he said. “Americans believe that Israel, we believe that the Jewish state, has a right to exist. And Donald Trump and I will fight for that every single day when we’re in the White House.”

Vance criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate-stage claim that no US troops are “in any war zone around the world.”

“There are American troops in harm’s way,” he said, warning that “America and the world are at risk of being dragged into a massive and bloody regional conflict” in the Middle East. He did not say whether he’d take those troops out of harm’s way, however, simply adding a line of blame for Iran.

Vance also said that Harris and President Joe Biden “haven’t done a thing” to bring hostages home from Gaza.

The Biden administration could “use [its] authority to help bring them home,” and a future Trump administration will “bring home American hostages wherever they’re held and whoever’s holding [them],” Vance said, not specifying how.

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Vance’s speech continued the trajectory of his much-scrutinized comments about Israel and Iran at last week’s vice presidential debate. There, he answered a question about a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran by saying it’s “up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe.”

On the National Mall, Vance again endorsed Israel’s right “to do what it takes to end the war,” pledging to “give Israel” that “ability.” He did not say what kind of US support that could entail or whether it might include US boots on the ground.

The Philos Project characterized the memorial rally as a bipartisan gathering, and Philos senior research fellow Andrew Doran mentioned the difficulty of “trying to thread that needle.”

The programming up through Vance’s speech had a rightward tilt, but speakers varied in their positions and tone.

Comedian Zach Sage Fox and Concerned Women for America chief Penny Nance spoke of praying for innocent Gazan children’s safety. Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies advised that when “a mass murderer tells you they are going to kill you, believe them. Act. Rise up and kill them first.”

Organizers did invite the Harris-Walz campaign to participate as well, Doran noted. Unfortunately, he said, “We didn’t get a response.”

- More from Bonnie Kristian

Ideas

You Are the Light of the Public Square

Justin Giboney

Contributor

American Christians can illuminate our country’s politics—if we engage with moral imagination, neighborliness, boldness, and humility.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

The Christian public witness has raised a voice of emancipation in American history. Our faith has provided the civic muscle to build schools for the poor and hospitals for the sick. Christians have visited the lonely and comforted the dying. The church has confronted sex trade pimps and run off neighborhood dope peddlers. It’s no exaggeration to say that no other institution in America has a comparable record of service. At our best, Christians have illuminated the way toward justice and moral order in US society.

Conversely, at our worst, American Christians have misused the church’s social and political capital. We’ve demeaned the outcast and condoned the worst elements of secular society for the sake of our own power or validation. Too often, our hymns and public action have been in conflict. We’ve lent moral authority to amoral leaders and allowed ourselves to become the prop of devious political interests.

When wielded with selflessness and sobriety, the Christian public witness can be the conscience and Good Samaritan of this nation. When driven by pride, conformity, or domination, it can trample the best American ideals and even tread over the principles of our own divine exemplar, Jesus Christ.

Our public engagement has been a powerful—and regrettably mercurial—force in the American experiment. And in this polarized moment, we must decide which side of this dual legacy we’ll continue. Will we reflect the tenacity and grace of Fannie Lou Hamer and Dorothy Day? Or will we embrace the hubris of the Christian nationalist and the opportunism of the jackleg preacher?

If the issues our nation faces today were small and superficial, believers could just play nice and mind our own business. But it’s far more complicated than that. Americans’ disagreements concern our fundamental values and the well-being of our neighbors. Debates about economics, the scope of parental rights, and life-or-death issues like health care and abortion can’t be shrugged off.

We share this democracy, and many of our positions impact other people and groups—America is truly a union. We should be respectful across political differences, but not every political perspective is as good as the next one. There are ideas and movements that deserve a very public and democratic death, which means political conflict is unavoidable and necessary. We can’t silently watch from the sidelines as Wall Street steals from the widow or social media sexually corrupts the orphan.

The question is not “Should Christians engage in public life?” but “How can Christians imitate Christ as we engage constructively in the conflicts of democracy?”

First, we must engage with moral imagination, which is a product of faith. Moral imagination gives us a redemptive perspective by reminding us that today’s issues are significant but not ultimate. Therefore, our social and political action is significant, but this world’s direction is determined by God—not us, our allies, or our opponents.

Moral imagination gives us the vision to transcend the contempt, skepticism, and desperation that mark the spirit of our day because we know that whatever happens, it’s not the end of the story. Christians must have the capacity to see and pursue what ought to be rather than being arrested by what is or what is most probable. We can acknowledge a bleak reality without becoming its slave.

Christians politicking with moral imagination will see beyond the nasty behavior of our opponents to the brokenness behind those actions. We’ll tenaciously confront the unjust and immoral without denying their human dignity or reciprocating their hatred. We will not be profane to get our points across or pretend the other side is pure evil to articulate why they’re wrong. Even when integrity is not rewarded in culture or politics, moral imagination will remind us that it’s still our duty as followers of Christ.

Moral imagination makes us aspirational and innovative. During the 2024 election cycle, many American Christians’ political commentary has depended on fearmongering. Our public witness is lazy and pedestrian, so everything the left does is called “Marxism,” and the right’s efforts are dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0.”

We settle for those tired allegations because articulating an artful, fair critique of our opposition takes more time and vision. Christians must demand better of our would-be leaders (James 3:1). Anyone who wants to lead us must have a positive vision and a critique that addresses the best arguments on the other side. We cannot be satisfied with caricatures and misrepresentations.

Next, to be a neighbor in public life is to be an advocate: to identify an issue that’s tormenting a community and passionately seek a solution. Sacrificing your time, resources, and social capital to aid others is the 1 John 3:16 definition of love. It’s the imitation of Jesus in the public square.

Loving, neighborly advocacy can’t be mean-spirited. But sadly, some of the most passionate advocates in our democracy seem to be the most bitter. This is an occupational hazard of frontline advocacy: The setbacks, heartbreaks, and dreams deferred can distort a person. Our passion can become poisonous, a toxin that drains the spirit of compassion. Our social actions can become counterproductive, and our ugly posture can end up doing a disservice to both our cause and the people we’ve set out to protect.

For Christians, advocacy must always be an act of love, not a source of contempt and rage. It must be a means of worship, a service to our neighbors done in obedience to God. We should campaign and reform like Thomas A. Dorsey, the godfather of gospel music, composed, with a joyous spiritual in our hearts and a mind resolved to “never turn back.”

A good cause isn’t enough in and of itself; the spirit of our efforts must also be redemptive. We should advocate because it glorifies God, not because we’re assured of personal exaltation or temporal victories. As C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend, “It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that), but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God.”

Lastly, we must lead with boldness and humility. The Christian in conservative circles must speak without equivocation against racism and for civic pluralism. The Christian in progressive spaces—the academy and the Democratic caucus—must stand firm in professing that the value of autonomy ends where sin begins. Those who worship at the altar of scientism or self-perception must lovingly be confronted with moral knowledge and wisdom.

Yet we can’t allow our boldness to become self-righteousness. We must reckon with our tendency to overestimate our own rightness and goodness. If we’re to lead well in a diverse democracy, we must first acknowledge our own failures and humbly accept correction for our errors, including correction from Americans with views very different from our own.

The American abolition and Civil Rights movements are proof that Christian witness can light the public square. Our faithfulness is needed now amid the fog of polarization.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

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Culture

Heaven Is A Homeplace

Amanda Held Opelt

Hurricane Helene devastated the land I love. My pain points me toward what’s to come.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels, Unsplash, Wikimedia Commons

On the morning of Friday, September 27, I sent a frantic text message to my cousin Paul:

“Been thinking of Granny’s house and hoping it survives this storm! Let us know!”

It wasn’t long after I sent the text that the lights went out, along with the internet. And cell signal, already spotty in the mountains, seemed to drop altogether. There we were: me and my husband and our two small children, alone with the wind, the rain, and our worry.

I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina in a little community called Meat Camp just north of Boone. My husband and I are grateful to be raising our girls here, in a region where my roots grow deep. My six-times great-grandfather came to this area around the time of the American Revolution and set up a homestead on the banks of Little Rock Creek in Bakersville, an hour or two south of where I live now.

A farmhouse dating back to the mid-1800s still sits along that creek, inherited and recently renovated by my cousin Paul. “Granny’s House,” as we’ve always called it, is home to so many memories for me: Christmas mornings, summers splashing in the creek, bountiful tables of fried trout, biscuits and gravy, soup beans, and fresh tomatoes. Just across the road is a small graveyard where Granny (my great-grandmother) along with countless other relatives (great-great grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins) are buried.

That house and that land are the center of kinship and ancestry for me, a physical space reminding me of who I am and whom I came from. Appalachians call this a “homeplace.”

Though I spent my growing-up years in Alabama and East Tennessee, I think I was always meant to come back to Western North Carolina. We’ve now lived here for 13 years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life. It was here where I discovered the meaning of the word home, where my husband and I created our own “homeplace” of sorts.

People say that home is where the heart is. But I like to think that home is where the body is. What I mean is that to “be home” is to know a place, a people, and a personal shelter in an embodied way. Home is something you feel in the ground beneath your feet, the roof over your head, and the other human bodies encircling you with unconditional love. It is both concept and substance, an incarnation of belonging.

For Appalachians especially, home is more than a house. Home is the land that sustains you. It is the rich soil of the bottomland where you plant your garden and grow your apple trees. It is the fields and forests where your ancestors grazed cattle, hunted game, and foraged for food.

Home is a terrain veined by countless rivers and creeks, the lifeblood of our population. Our waterways carve out the hollers we call communities, churn the wheels that traditionally grind our grains, give us water to drink and fish to eat, and offer our children endless hours of play along the banks and mossy creek rocks. We navigate our lives by these waterways. They create the undulating grids of our townships, chart the course for our roads and infrastructure. They name our communities: Little Rock Creek, Laurel Fork, the New River, Cane Creek, Pine Run, Boone Fork, the Toe River, Meat Camp Creek.

Home is a culture, the generational practices born of hardscrabble living and ingenuity. It is the art, the music, the foodways, and the storied mythologies that are imparted to you by grandparents and great-grandparents. Home is an economy of creativity and provisions: familiar coffee shops, favorite eateries, concert venues, farmers’ markets, and theaters.

Home is the vast network of kinship that supports you. It is the friends who show up with food when you are sick, the neighbors who mow your grass when you are out of town, the family who comes around you to mourn when you mourn and celebrate when you celebrate. Home is the church that communally practices the habits of a holy life: worshiping, praying, learning from Scripture, and serving those in need.

And yes, home is a house—a literal “homeplace” that holds in its holy walls all those instances of safety and rest. It is the floorboards your children learn to walk on, the walls and roofs that keep the rain and cold out, the tables on which you break bread with family and neighbors, the kitchens and laundry rooms in which you conduct life’s labors in all their mundanity and joy. Ordinary havens, extraordinary vessels of love. Home is a sacred space.

Home is sight, smell, sound, and taste: the vista from a hilltop, the wet earth of a creek bank, the plucked string of a mandolin, the sweetness of fresh-baked apple pie. Home is the topography you are always eager to return to. Home is the place where the road rises up to meet you.

But sometimes the road falls out from under you.

When Hurricane Helene tore through Southern Appalachia, every stream, every tributary, and every underground spring in the mountains became a raging torrent. Our beloved waters that made this place home suddenly took so many homes away.

The waters engulfed roads, pulling pavement into the water and washing out bridges. It poured into our downtown businesses, scattering merchandise and spoiling food. Our hillsides rushed down upon houses in waves of mud. Trees smashed into roofs and cars.

Suddenly, everything that makes a home a home was interrupted. Power was lost, well pumps could no longer draw water into houses, and all communication was down. Restaurants, stores, and schools across the region shut down indefinitely. The winding roads that used to take us to town, to church, and to our friends were suddenly inaccessible, washed away and making many neighborhoods and communities devastated islands, cut off from the rest of the world.

There is a feeling of betrayal when a land you love so much seems to turn on you. I felt this acutely even though my own house remained undamaged by wind or water. We had no power and no water, and we quickly ran through our shelf-stable food. Limited cell coverage meant painfully scarce communication with friends and family. When we saw that the only two bridges leading in and out of our neighborhood were dangerously close to collapsing, we made the hard decision to relocate to my parents’ house.

Our house was standing, but we’d lost our home.

Now we are left wondering: When can we “go home”? What we are really wondering is—when will our friends be safe, when can we hike again, when can we rebuild our gardens, when can we have coffee together, when can we break bread at our table, and when can we worship in our sacred sanctuaries?

When home is disrupted by a broken creation, when we suffer as inhabitants of a world that has been groaning since the Fall, we are wont to think of our heavenly home. Popular belief among many evangelicals is that when we die, we go to heaven and leave this physical earth and these corporeal bodies behind forever. We picture heaven as a disembodied, ethereal place, no longer spoiled by the hardships of materiality.

But Romans 8:21 tells us that God’s plan is for a new heaven and a new earth. Revelation 21 and 22 speak of an embodied experience of God’s perfect presence, where a crystal-clear river flows from the throne of God and there is a tree of life bearing fruit every month (22:1–2). The Holy City where we will reside rests on a mountain, and its walls and gates are beautiful (21:10–19). Isaiah speaks of feasting and drinking an abundance of food and wine in this new heaven and earth (25:6), a place where all people will be safe and secure.

And just as Jesus’s body was resurrected, so too our bodies will be resurrected, free from the pain of hunger, thirst, and loneliness. Our heavenly home is resurrected life with Christ. It will be a physical, material reality, just as our own homes are now. Finally enfolded in the communion of all the saints, we will know no wants and experience the joy of true, deep rest. It will be the ultimate “homeplace.”

This feeling of the absence of home in the wake of a disaster is perhaps a gift, a way of knowing that deep in our hearts we long for sacred belonging, and what we long for will be given to us someday. What’s ours to do now is to endure—to celebrate the comforts of home (when we have them) as a foretaste of what’s to come, to rebuild when homes are broken, and to pray for the eventual restoration of all things.

Late Saturday night, I received a text from my cousin. He’d heard from a neighbor that the storm was indeed bad at Little Rock Creek, that the waters had risen, and that the trees had come down. But Granny’s house was undamaged, standing strong as it had for 150 years: a homeplace just waiting to shelter someone.

A picture of our future home and shelter from all harm.

Amanda Held Opelt is an author, speaker, and songwriter. She has published two books.

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Books

Review

We Have Never Been Deplorable

Carrie McKean

A new book critiques elites’ incurious accounts of the American right and illuminates their complicity in our social breakdown.

Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo / Getty

By the time Hilary Clinton “put half of Trump’s supporters” into “the basket of deplorables” in 2016, I confess I was frustrated enough to largely agree with her—even though she was talking about people I cared about in communities like mine. It seemed simple to me at the time: If you don’t want to be called “deplorable,” maybe don’t behave so deplorably.

Eight years later, I don’t need to rehash all the reasons I’d come to feel that way. The excesses of Trump and his loyalists are widely recognized, even among many Trump voters. My experience through those years is also familiar to many moderate evangelicals, who, like me, grew increasingly baffled as our faith leaders, friends, and family wholeheartedly endorsed a man who reflected none of our shared values, values that for so long we’d loudly insisted were bedrock and nonnegotiable. How could this be happening?

Though I’m ashamed to say it now, my confusion hardened into cynicism as I consumed a steady diet of commentary about the danger posed by MAGA voters. I grew arrogant, sure of my intellectual and moral superiority over people I’d come dangerously close to dismissing as backwater boors, and less and less aware of my own hubris (Prov. 16:18).

Then came the pandemic. By August of 2020, I was astonished at my own quick pivot—taken aback by how quickly I’d grown thankful to live in a deep red town. I wrote dispatches from West Texas for The New York Times and The Atlantic describing how good it was to live in an area that didn’t kill small businesses out of “an abundance of caution” or sacrifice our children’s educations on the altar of safety.

The responses I got from readers of legacy media in more progressive enclaves (some hate-filled death wishes, some longing for the normalcy I enjoyed) were eye-opening. In the more negative exchanges, I was baffled time and again by my correspondents’ inability to see how they’d become the very thing they hate: bigoted, closed-minded, arrogant, and incurious about the lives of people who are different from them. I ate a slice of humble pie and saw how I’d become enamored with the polished speech and polite niceties of the ruling class, so enchanted that I’d missed both the failures of those I’d grown to admire and the complexity of those I was tempted to deplore.

I still live in a politically conservative community, and I haven’t stopped wrestling with the apparent mismatch between values and votes in the years since. But I’m leaving my impatience and cynicism behind. Though I still share many of the core concerns of the anti-MAGA crowd, I’m wary of the broad, flat brush with which sophisticated politicos paint conservative, religious parts of the country like mine. By the time Trump left office, I’d grown to understand that it isn’t fair—let alone permissible for Christians (Matt. 5:44)—to deplore those who voted (or will vote) for him.

But finding critical yet nuanced writing about my neighbors has been a challenge. Much of what comes from the progressive left—usually some version of the claim that all evangelical Republicans are white Christian nationalists who pose a dangerous threat to democracy—is reductive and one-dimensional. It doesn’t match the reality I see in my everyday life, where, for example, a Trump-voting Hispanic pastor provides shelter and resources to countless migrants.

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, a new book from sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, is an illuminating exception to that rule. For anyone genuinely curious about why working-class, culturally conservative Americans, many of them evangelical Christians, remain so loyal to Trump, We Have Never Been Woke is required reading.

In a book that’s both granular in its detail and panoramic in its perspective, al-Gharbi builds a tightly argued case for how the “Great Awokening” is neither particularly novel nor particularly helpful to the marginalized and disenfranchised of American society. Drawing on both his working-class background and the experiences and expertise afforded by his access to some of the most hallowed halls of American academia, al-Gharbi understands that we can’t reduce the current political moment to a battle of blue heroes and red villains.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer a road map out of our political predicament. Yet for Christian readers, Never Been Woke’s conclusions suggest the church is uniquely positioned to help repair our divided society—if we can return to our first love (Rev. 2:4) and the love Jesus commands of us (Matt. 22:34–40).

Core to grasping al-Gharbi’s argument is his concept of “symbolic capitalists.” This is a group he defines as the academics, bureaucrats, consultants, journalists, and other “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis.” That is, they are our culture’s elites, often (but not always) wealthy, well educated, and enormously influential, with insatiable appetites for the one sort of capital that might be more useful than cold, hard cash when it comes to getting ahead these days: social currency.

One way symbolic capitalists amass more social currency is to champion social justice and the oppressed. But the main effect of their activism, al-Gharbi charges, is the advancement of their own agendas and personal success.

That’s not an accusation of deception or even cynicism. These elites sincerely (and loudly) believe in ideals like equality and justice, Never Been Woke contends. Yet there’s a “profound gulf between symbolic capitalists’ rhetoric about various social ills and their lifestyles and behaviors ‘in the world.’” To put it plainly, in the parlance of evangelicals: They don’t practice what they preach.

From this premise, al-Gharbi ranges widely. In some ways, the book reads as a “theory of everything,” arguing that underneath the discord so often pinned on the bad behavior of working-class Republicans—people who don’t use the “right” words or put their pronouns in their bios—is a simmering pot of resentment stoked by cultural elites.

Those most skilled at playing the rhetorical “virtue game” are at the top of the societal heap, and their displays of virtue do far less to help the underclass than to protect their own comfort and power. The “Great Awokening” is all fervor and no self-sacrificing love. It turns even well-meaning adherents into hardened ideologues serving a small and capricious god in their own image. It’s legalism, secular-style.

In practice, this looks like calls to defund the police coming mostly from people who live in low-crime neighborhoods. It looks like spending big money to hire DEI experts instead of materially—maybe even self-sacrificially—improving the lives of the poor. It looks like self-identifying into marginalized groups (Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s history as a “Native American” is a prime example) that just so happen to give you a leg up on elite college and work applications.

It looks like calling for pandemic-era lockdowns while ordering DoorDash; or renaming a school named for a confederate general while doing little to ensure the minority students within are learning to read; or thrilling with enthusiasm at a Black Lives Matter march while being irritated by the homeless Black man on your block.

Or, to borrow the apostle Paul’s words, it looks like speaking in the tongues of men or of angels without having love (1 Cor. 13:1).

So we live in a society ruled by symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi writes, but significantly populated by people they deplore. The result is polarization and mutual disdain, with each side unwilling to give the other a fair hearing or take responsibility for its own sins and errors.

It reminds me of nothing so much as my daughters’ sisterly conflicts. Though I will not name names, one of my children is fiery and hot-tempered, while the other is into covert ops. Though they’re each guilty of instigating arguments, over the years I’ve learned that some of the trickiest situations to navigate start with the quiet provocateur deliberately pushing her less-restrained sister over the edge. When I intervene, she’s all innocence: “What did I do? She should have better self-control.”

It’s easy to exclusively blame the child with the explosive reaction. It’s also, often, a mistake. And the same is true on a much larger scale. Yes, MAGA fanaticism is a problem. Racism and storming the Capitol are wrong. But the “deplorables” have real concerns that deserve to be heard, not manipulated and inflamed by opportunistic politicians. To refuse to listen to the story beneath the noise of outrage—even when the outrage is offensive and crass—only drives us further apart.

As Christians, we should know this. Jesus’ answer to the problem al-Gharbi describes is for us to take seriously his command to love the least of these and to lay down our lives for our friends, including the ones in the red hats. It’s to meet with Nicodemus and to dine with Zacchaeus.

Al-Gharbi is not a Christian. After a crisis of faith resulted in his “abandoning a calling” to become a Catholic priest, he entered a season of atheism before converting to Islam. Some Christians, to their peril, will dismiss We Have Never Been Woke on this ground alone. Others will read with misplaced glee, touting it as a masterful book that “owns the libs.” Either response would miss an opportunity to grow in wisdom and love.

I had a recurring thought as I read this book: I cannot believe he’s writing this. I cannot believe it’s getting published.This book doesn’t reflect well on the gatekeepers of all the institutions al-Gharbi needs on his side to succeed in his field. For that reason alone, many people would not have written this book or at least would have picked a different, softer angle.

After all, al-Gharbi isn’t a right-wing pundit lobbing bombs at the left from a safe perch at Breitbart. As he repeatedly acknowledges, he’s a symbolic capitalist, too. He’s asking his peers to be honest with themselves about their complicity in America’s social breakdown. He doesn’t question their motives or principles, but he does reveal the tension produced when those principles are paired with a very human desire to maintain one’s advantages and to pass them on to one’s children.

That gentle example deserves imitation. What might it look like if more of us—Democrats and Republicans, elite and working class—took the time in the lead-up to the election to admit how our own behavior has failed the test of 1 Corinthians 13? What if we confessed that we also have conflicting desires and betrayed principles? How can we better listen for God calling us to honesty about ourselves, repentance where we have ignored or maligned our neighbors, and real service to others?

Christians are also uniquely positioned to respond to al-Gharbi’s warnings about modern identity politics, in which some groups are encouraged to take great pride in their identities while others are strongly discouraged from doing the same. As al-Gharbi explored in a conversation with political scientist Yascha Mounk, this “asymmetric multiculturalism” is celebrated on the left, but it’s socially unstable. We should lean into what unites us, he advises, instead of emphasizing differences and valuing some while denigrating others.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that actually it’s a lot easier for people to [get along] if you start by foregrounding things that people have in common—like ‘we’re all Americans’ or ‘we’re all Christians,’” al-Gharbi said in his conversation with Mounk. “One important path forward is to find ways of appealing and justifying and affirming superordinate values, superordinate identities, common goals, shared interests,” he continued. “If you can’t build things up—if you’re only focused on criticizing and deconstructing and problematizing and tearing things down—it’s really impossible to meaningfully sustain [shared] identities and shared goals and shared values.”

This is where the church can shine if we turn away from our political idols and self-aggrandizement and turn toward Jesus. We can remind one another that what we have in common in Christ is far more profound and significant than what separates us. We can move from that common ground to be agents of social repair in our communities. With God’s help, we can live and serve and even engage in politics in humble, practical, other-oriented love.

Despite his deconversion, al-Gharbi concludes We Have Never Been Woke by quoting Jesus in Matthew 6 and warning against “performative displays” of righteousness. That’s a problem on the left, the book’s main subject for critique, but it’s also a problem on the right and in every group of fallen, sinful humans. It’s a problem in my own heart. “Ultimately, Jesus argued, people have to choose what’s really important to them,” al-Gharbi writes, “and it’s a choice they make with their actions, not their words. You know the tree by its fruit.”

As I came to better understand in the years between 2016 and 2020, conservatives can rightfully dislike the rotten fruit of our cultural elites. But if we’re to fully benefit from al-Gharbi’s message, we must turn this scrutiny on ourselves as much as our political rivals: What fruit are we bearing? Is it carefully arranged to make us look righteous? Or is it good and abundant and beautiful and life-giving fruit, bringing glory to God and nourishment to all?

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.

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CT's Week of Giving

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1. Our theology always has real-world implications.

2. The church’s confession must be centered on Jesus Christ alone.

3. An exclusive confession of Christ protects against ideological and political capture.

4. Theological declarations, apart from confessional community, are not enough.

5. We should not romanticize Barmen but seek to live out its spirit in our present age.

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In this series

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