What Wrestling Taught an Olympic Gold Medalist About God

Emily Belz

As he prepares for the Paris Olympics, wrestler Kyle Snyder talks about how faith helped him loosen up and love his teammates.

Kyle Snyder, left, wrestles at the US Olympic Wrestling Trials in April.

Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images

Kyle Snyder, the youngest US wrestler to ever win Olympic gold in 2016, is competing in the Olympics again this year with Team USA, now as a more veteran member of the team.

He has many other accolades, including three NCAA championships, two world championships, and a silver medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The top wrestling competitors are the US, Russia, and Iran, which adds geopolitical zest to the bouts, Snyder noted.

Snyder and I met in Philadelphia—he lives and trains in State College, Pennsylvania—before he headed out to France. Olympic wrestling events begin August 5.

Your faith came about through wrestling, right?

I’ve always been addicted to sports. I wanted to be in the NFL. And then I stopped growing. So I thought, I guess I’ll try to be the best wrestler. I had a lot of success and I won, but I wasn’t wrestling to my potential because I was afraid of losing. I felt like if I lost, then I wouldn’t be as valuable a person, and I’d be embarrassed. I would get tight and not be able to compete even near to the way I could practice.

I moved to the Olympic training center my senior year of high school, and the coaches asked me to start coming to a Bible study with them. I said, “Yeah, I’ll go.” I would jump off a bridge if they told me to. I just wanted to win world and Olympic titles, and if they thought studying the Bible would help, then I’d do it. So I went to the Bible studies. Never read a Bible before. I used to think, How can anyone read it? It’s so big, and the words are so small. But I started enjoying the stories from the Bible. And then I moved to Ohio State and started going to Bible studies there.

But I wasn’t fully committed. I was still doing a lot of my own will, living how I wanted to. My goal was to be a four-time NCAA champion—that’s a big goal in wrestling. I made it to the finals my freshman year and I ended up getting pinned. That was heartbreaking for me. It was the first time I had ever been depressed. I’m a happy guy, but I was just broken and didn’t talk to anybody for a week, didn’t eat.

My strength coach called me and he was like, “All right, you know what you got to do now? You got to give your whole life to Jesus. You’ve got to be more committed to him than you are to wrestling.” I said , “I don’t even know how to do that, or what that even means .” I just prayed that night that God would help me be more committed to him than anything else in my life. And I started being more disciplined with studying the Word myself.

Then, seven months later, I became the youngest world champion in the history of USA Wrestling. I went from being the second best in college wrestling to the best in the world. I didn’t get any better at technique, and my shape didn’t get any better. But God, he freed me from my identity of being a wrestler and from my value coming from winning wrestling matches, to my identity being his child. And my purpose is to know him and trust in him and, Lord willing, to bring other people into faith. I was able to compete a lot harder.

Is that something you’ve seen happen with other wrestlers you know?

In 2016, there were seven guys at the Olympics—five of them were Christians who were really passionately following the Lord. You go to any wrestling camp, there’s Bible study almost every night with 40, 50 guys there.

The guy who was leading the study at the Olympic training center, his name is Gene Davis. And he’s worked for Athletes in Action for 65 years, and he’s still teaching. There’s so many people who have poured so much work into the sport, in regard to faith. You start to learn about God, and you’re like, Wow, I want to just follow him because I love him, and he loves me.

I saw there was a worship service at the Olympic trials.

The Olympic trials were on Saturday. And then on Sunday, we just had a Bible study, we were singing, and a couple people taught. About 230 people came.

It was a great way to end the weekend, because some people’s dreams got crushed. Only six people accomplished what they set out to do. It was a good way to get refocused on what’s most important.

What do you think is special about wrestling as a sport?

Wrestling forces you to look within so, so deeply. You’re going out there to fight somebody else. In the moments beforehand, you have a lot of questions that come into your head that you have to deal with. So that’s something people don’t see.

My friend who is a wrestling fan said one thing he likes about wrestling is that you have to get beat up a lot to be good—you have to lose a lot and learn from it.

Yeah, every wrestler experiences it. I’ve always been bigger for my age too. So I was wrestling kids a lot older than me. I was beat up a lot as a kid. I’ve also had this weird belief in my ability to win ever since I was a kid. I would get beat real bad by somebody. And I’d be like, Yeah, the next time, I’m going to beat them. And then they beat me again. … But that belief never wavered for some reason. I think God gave that mindset to me.

We talk about losing well as Christians, but what do you, as a Christian, see that’s good about being competitive and about winning?

In my career, I’ve traveled to places like Russia, Dagestan, Iran, Georgia, and Ukraine. A lot of the places I go, the majority of people are Muslim. But they’ll listen to what I have to say because I’ve won a lot. That gives me an opportunity to be able to tell them, “Well, this is what I believe, and this is what’s helped me in my career.” It’s just being genuine about the way God’s worked in my life. And they listen.

Did your faith change your mental approach to the sport in other ways?

One major change that took place early on in my faith was—it used to be, if I didn’t win, but my teammates won, that was a problem for me. I was jealous. I wasn’t happy for them.

I might externally say good job, but, internally, that was something I really struggled with. God helped me with that. I wanted to be happy for my friends and genuinely wanted them to do well. But I couldn’t do that before. God taught me how, and helped my heart, to just love other people more.

What do you think about the culture of kids sports now, where you have to start young, be committed 24/7, travel, and all that?

It’s definitely not what you have to do. I know stories of many different people that have made Olympic teams and started wrestling in high school. Kids should do things they enjoy, start slow, work on technique, and have fun. When they start to understand competition more, they can get into that.

The issue is, parents all believe their kids are going to go to the NFL or NBA. But it’s just not the truth. Only a couple of people get to do it. Kids can get better in a less intense, more fun environment. Parents need to chill out.

I do clinics; we have our own camp that we run each summer. I’ve been around a lot of kids and their parents. Some of the kids are crying out on the mat. They’re too young to even understand what’s going on. They’d be better just learning a couple moves, a technique, and then playing a game.

Twenty years ago, no Olympians had to deal with social media. You have more than 300,000 followers on Instagram. How do you balance promoting your personal brand and focusing on your sport?

Social media is pretty draining. I’m seeing pictures of my competition and seeing what people are saying. I don’t want to see comments about me and think about that. I don’t really get too involved with it.

Is there anything you’re looking forward to about this Olympics?

Doing the opening ceremonies and all that at the 2016 Olympics was really cool. But when I look back, my favorite part was the wrestling. I’m just looking forward to wrestling.

The last Olympics was during COVID-19. Everybody had to wear a mask, you had to get COVID tested every day, no family could come. I’m looking forward to it just being back to normal.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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News

New Alliance Aims to Unite Chinese Churches Divided by Geopolitics

interview by Angela Lu Fulton

Leader explains why members of the World Evangelical Alliance visited leaders of China’s government-sanctioned Three-Self churches.

Christians attending church in China.

Ng Han Guan / AP Images

Anyone wanting to bring together the more than 100 million Chinese-speaking Christians around the world must deal with the thorny issue of the church in China. There, Christians are split between unregistered house churches and the government-sanctioned Three-Self church. Additionally, heated differences in political views make it difficult for the global Chinese-speaking church to unify.

Nevertheless, global evangelical leaders want to bring this community together. Last week, a delegation from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) traveled to China to meet with the leaders of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and the China Christian Council (CCC)—which are both overseen by the Chinese Communist Party—and offered them an invitation to collaborate.

The WEA launched the World Chinese Christianity Alliance (WCA) a year ago to serve the Chinese-speaking church with a think tank, publishing house, and media center, along with academic exchanges, resource sharing, and trainings.

Ezekiel Tan, general secretary of both the WCA and the Evangelical Alliance of Singapore, spoke with CT about the WCA’s aims, its current progress, and the unique challenges it faces as it brings together ethnic Chinese from around the world. (In the article, the term Chinese refers to all ethnic Han people regardless of where they reside.)

The WCA is the WEA’s first language-based network, instead of its typical location-based network. Why was Mandarin Chinese chosen to pioneer this?

Mandarin Chinese is our first endeavor because Chinese speakers are unique: They are overwhelmingly ethnically Han Chinese and share the same ancestry from China. Other international language groups, such as Arabic and Spanish, include people from different ethnicities.

Because Chinese people are so spread out, by reaching the Chinese, you reach all corners of the world. The only difference is that some read simplified Chinese while others read traditional Chinese. When you produce something in Chinese, there are economies of scale. The elephant in the room is the geopolitical tensions around China. Oftentimes, there are mutual suspicions between China and its trade partners. We don’t want other groups to misrepresent the Christian community and how we perceive our relationship with China.

Chinese people also have a lot of financial resources. In many Asian countries, they are the minority, but they manage a disproportionate percentage of the wealth and resources. Reaching out to them helps us not only improve resource sharing among the community but also promotes greater philanthropy and charitable giving within the global movement.

What are the WCA’s aims?

We want to create a global platform that is not plucked from thin air but built on existing global networks, like Haggai International, which trains Christian leaders in 189 nations, or national Bible societies.

The WCA is a global platform for Chinese ministries and outreach. It will bring all Chinese Christians together to share Chinese-language resources—such as Sunday school materials, Chinese worship songs, and academic papers on subjects relevant to the global Chinese church—and improve efficacy in their respective work. At the end of the day, it will help us fulfill the Great Commission.

What is it not aiming to do?

Following the key ethos of the WEA, the WCA is not political, and we will not be taking sides. We want to be a neutral platform that provides a safe space for people to come together. We will abstain from anything political.

Also, we do not aim to be a global governing body of all Chinese ministries. It is a platform for existing groups and organizations to interact with one another. We are not here to compete with any existing network. Instead, we hope to play a complementary role.

Therefore, we invite any group that is already doing some aspect of Chinese ministry to get involved. The WCA is not geographically centric. While we are reaching out to ethnic Chinese, it doesn’t mean that Asia is the key base. We seek to be global-centric rather than regional-centric.

The WCA officially launched last July. What stage is it at right now?

Currently, we are focused on building infrastructure for the WCA, which we expect will take another year. The media center is still getting started and we have been communicating about it with various parties. Some work has been done with resource sharing and we have published a few books.

Right now, the training center is the most developed. We started holding trainings before the program was launched, and we have had 20,000–30,000 people from 20 countries joining our training annually. We go to different countries and locate a well-known Chinese speaker on a topic that we think is helpful, like parenting, communication, or Bible exposition. We publicize the training through our networks and invite people to join.

The second aspect is reaching out to the global Chinese Christians, including church leaders in Africa, Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific. There have been many discussions and visits, although our budget constrains us.

The third aspect is the question of how we engage China. It’s too obvious to say that the majority of Chinese people are in China. Before this recent trip, we had taken several visits to different stakeholders, including the authorities. However, in China, we need to do things formally, so last week, an official delegation of representatives of the WEA’s international council and its regional leadership visited China to reestablish a relationship with the leaders of the Three-Self church.

The last visit that the WEA made to China was many years ago. After that visit, there hadn’t been any follow-up to engage in a more intentional working relationship. This time was groundbreaking because it marked the beginning of a long-term relationship.

We hope to contribute to building up goodwill among all groups. Christianity is a movement of peace, so we hope the meeting provides greater understanding between the registered church and the larger global church.

What are some of the sensitivities that the WCA has to take into consideration when working in a place like China?

Many people in China have misconceptions and misunderstandings about the external world, especially the West, and the rest of the world has a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings about what is happening in China.

Many Chinese think that all Christians are like American evangelicals—who are seen as very anti-China—or believe that we might have subversive intentions to destabilize China. But I tell them, The great majority of the people just want to love you, as we do.

If you approach China’s registered church with misconceptions, you will go in there too guarded and can make a sensitive situation even worse. Also, China has its own rules and regulations, so we seek to approach the government-run church within a legal framework. When we visited China this time, we went to learn more about them, about what can be done and what can’t be done. We learned to navigate the relationship with humility like some of the earliest missionaries to China, Hudson Taylor and Robert Morrison. They went to China, appreciated the culture, and worked with the Chinese people.

What did you learn during this recent fact-finding trip to China?

The WEA’s International Council received a very warm welcome in China. We met with the top leadership in China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs, the national TSPM and CCC, Nanjing Union Seminary, the Amity Foundation (a Christian charity in China), and Amity Printing, one of the world’s largest Bible producers. It was a chance for the international council to see China’s Three-Self church for themselves and ask questions.

Besides building friendships, we were also able to have authentic and robust conversations, raise issues, and invite partnership. For instance, two of the concerns we discussed were about the Sinicization of Christianity as well as China’s attempt to create a new version of the Bible. We were able to ask the different leaders we met about this and hear their perspectives.

In the first instance, they clarified that they were exploring what it means for someone in China, in a socialist country, to practice their faith. They are not addressing the core doctrines like the Incarnation or the deity of Jesus, but other aspects like how they worship or relate to Chinese society. We invited them to do this together with the rest of the global evangelical family.

In the second instance, they noted that they were not coming out with a new translation of the Bible but revising the popular Chinese Union Version, which was first translated in 1919. They said they wanted to make as few changes as possible, with the goal of helping young people and non-Christians better understand the Bible. Again, we told them that we were interested in engaging with them in the revision in order to help defuse tensions and clarify miscommunications. Then they could produce a translation that those outside of China could use as well.

At the end of the day, the international council members were very grateful to hear from the TSPM and CCC leaders and encouraged by this positive beginning of this new relationship.

You mentioned earlier some misconceptions that the West has of China and vice versa, but what about the misconceptions within the Chinese-speaking community, such as between house churches and Three-Self churches? How do you plan to bring them together?

When people ask me this, I always point to the United Nations as an example. The world’s enemies gather there because they trust in the UN’s neutrality. Even today, some groups are trying to kill each other, but they go to the UN for dialogue. They work on joint projects like the World Health Organization or UNICEF.

The WEA is not about individual preferences or inclinations but the global evangelical family. Our track record speaks for itself—we work with the whole spectrum of evangelicalism. We want to include everyone and provide resources for everyone.

How have diaspora Chinese groups responded to the idea of the WCA?

There are some concerns, but I was pleasantly surprised to receive overwhelmingly positive responses. They said they had been looking for something like this for a long time.

We were not prepared to see such an overwhelming response, which means we now have to work very hard with limited resources to get started. Many groups have asked, “What can you give me now? What can you help me with?” We are thankful but playing a bit of catch-up.

Of course, there have been some collaborations between Chinese Christian groups in the past, but they have never been so global. This is especially true as many overseas ministries are keen to visit or do ministry in China but do not have the avenue to do so. Also, ethnic Chinese Christians want to do missions, but because they only speak Chinese, they are limited in where they can go. With the WCA, they can partner with churches in Africa and use Mandarin to relate to their fellow Chinese who live there. They are looking forward to greater opportunities and possibilities.

Also, some pastors have good materials, but they don’t know how to reach the world, they only use it in their congregation or their church. With this platform, their material can now go global.

How would this alliance differ from the existing network of the Chinese Coordination Center of World Evangelization (CCCOWE)?

The difference is that CCCOWE was built from the ground up, while the WCA is part of a global family. Diaspora Chinese Christian leaders inspired by the first Lausanne Congress started CCCOWE to connect the global Chinese church. The WCA, on the other hand, is an offshoot of the WEA, which represents 600 million Christians and represents all denominations and groups.

At the same time, we want to reach the tens of millions of Christians in China who attend registered churches. As noted by our recent trip, the WEA is willing to go to the Chinese government and work with all parties, including the registered churches. This is what distinguishes us and demonstrates that we are complementing what CCCOWE is doing by reaching places that it can’t. Currently, we are already collaborating with CCCOWE on several projects.

What are your hopes for the future of WEA’s partnership with China?

We want to continue dialoguing with the TSPM and CCC and explore ways these groups can partner with the WEA and regional evangelical alliances, as well as working together on the WCA.

If the WEA could be at the forefront of building goodwill and collaboration with the registered church, I think this would be really beautiful. I pray that there will be more ground-up collaborations with the registered church and with other groups that may be concerned, suspicious, or fearful of establishing relationships with them. We hope to be a bridge anchored by our faith in the region and beyond.

- More from interview by Angela Lu Fulton

‘The Most Important Election of Our Lifetime’

Kaitlyn Schiess

Extreme political rhetoric stokes fear and encourages apathy. Christians can offer a productive counterpart.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

This is the most important election of our lifetime.” I’ve heard this said every presidential election in my lifetime, but, this time, the stakes are being raised even higher. The 2024 election is not just the most important—the consequences of it are existential.

At a fundraiser in February, President Joe Biden called Donald Trump the “one existential threat,” and he has also written on X to constituents: “In this election, your freedom, your democracy, and America itself is at stake.” Vice President Harris said at an event this month, “This is the one. The most existential, consequential, and important election of our lifetime.”

Former president Trump has used this line of argument as well: At the Faith and Freedom Coalition last month, he said that “this will be the most important election in the history of our country” and “our one chance to save America.” Back in March, he responded to the claim that he was a “threat to democracy” with, “I’m not a threat. I’m the one that’s ending the threat to democracy.”

These talking points might be effective campaigning, but they make for a toxic political culture.

In college, I competed in policy debate tournaments—a form of debate that focuses more on detailed (and fast-paced) presentation of evidence than rhetoric or performance. We created elaborate argumentative chains, showing how one policy change (subsidies for offshore wind turbines or the legalization of online gambling) could cause a cascading chain of events that nearly always ended in global nuclear war. It was a way of beating the other team: Sure, your proposal might lower inflation or decrease violent crime, but that’s nothing compared to global nuclear war.

Often, we spent more time debating which global extinction scenario was immediately catastrophic than we did debating the merits of the various policies that were supposed to be the topic of the debates. It sounds silly, but, this year, the same thing seems to be happening in our national politics.

We raised the stakes so high that we often sidestep substantive conversations about policy in favor of weighing apocalyptic scenarios. These existential narratives are often more about scaring people into turning out to the polls than they are about fostering dialogue about important issues.

This is where Christian theology offers a gift to our politics: an end to existential threats.

For Christians, nothing is truly a threat to our survival or existence. We are a people who believe Jesus Christ when he promised to return to his fallen creation, to wipe every tear from every eye and to make all things new. We believe that this story we are living does not end in violence, chaos, and strife—it ends with perfect righteousness, justice, and peace.

The promise of Christ’s return does not demand quietism or political escapism; rather, it should prompt faithful political work that can resist the impulse toward violence and injustice. If Christ is returning to make everything new, prejudiced or brutal political options become less rational, less necessary. If this election poses an existential threat, then we can more easily justify doing anything—including harming our neighbors, lying, stealing, or cheating—to avoid it. But if ultimate justice is promised by God, we have the freedom to seek provisional justice here on earth as faithfully as we can, without fearing that if we fail all is lost.

This is the theology that motivated some of the greatest movements for justice in our country’s history. The abolitionist Maria W. Stewart was able to hold together a fierce condemnation of slavery with a deep commitment to nonviolence because the end of the story was assured: “Stand still, and know that the Lord he is God. Vengeance is his, and he will repay.”

Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps this country’s most famous advocate of nonviolent resistance, was clear that this approach was not merely pragmatic but theological: “The movement [of nonviolence] was based on hope … even though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.”

There has been a lot of talk lately about lowering the heat of our political rhetoric, a recognition that when the issues seem so paramount, we risk reacting with violence. But this wise counsel needs a stronger theological backing.

The threats, after all, are not imagined or entirely exaggerated. The consequences of this election will be serious, and likely in ways we do not yet know. Lowering the stakes in the face of these threats might diminish the real significance of elections: They shape people’s lives, especially the most vulnerable. It risks communicating to people that politics doesn’t really matter that much, that the human lives that will be affected by the outcome are not worthy of our attention.

But lowering the stakes because we believe that the end of the Christian story is true is another thing altogether. Lowering the stakes because ultimate justice is not at risk in this election opens up greater opportunities for meaningful change here and now.

To many in our nation, it feels like the options are between living in a constant state of existential threat and checking out of politics entirely. I’ve heard many bemoan on social media, “Can’t we just live in precedented times?” or “How many historical events do I have to live through?” We constantly hear that the fate of our country is at stake in this election, but raising the stakes hasn’t seemed to inspire more political involvement.

The comment I hear most frequently from people in churches and schools across the country is that the fear and anger have exhausted them, tempting them toward total political apathy. We are bombarded with information about the great injustices and evils in the world, alarmed by the conditions of our own political culture, and we feel helpless to do anything about it.

Either we constantly scroll social media for updates on the latest sign of impending political doom, sign up for every political group in town, and take every opportunity to convince our friends and family members about these existential threats—or we throw up our hands, declare the whole political system unfixable, and live in blissful ignorance of the folks who will be more directly affected by the policies we can’t be bothered to research. However, there is an alternative to these options.

All of these claims—of existential threat, of “living in historic times,” of democracy teetering on the edge of disaster—are claims about where we sit in history, and what agency that position allows us. If this is the defining moment of history, we should act differently than we would under normal conditions. If democracy is on the ballot, nothing else really matters. If this candidate or party will end our very existence, political options to persuade or negotiate are off the table. All that’s left is to destroy or be destroyed.

But the Christian story says that we are not awaiting the impending turning point of history from goodness to chaos. The Christian story says that the defining point of history has already happened: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In light of that victory over the powers and principalities, and in hopeful anticipation of his return to bring that victory to consummation, we have opportunities to effect change in our fallen world. The resurrection of Christ is the horizon of our agency, the event that defines the possibilities for creative and faithful work.

One of the most frequent biblical themes is that it is not the powerful and important whose actions most matter but the lowly, forgotten, and small. In a political culture that feels hopeless, in a system we feel powerless to change, Scripture offers us stories of surprising agency: of three men who survive a fire when they stand down an idolatrous king, of midwives who save the lives of infants, of a man on a cross who dies a gruesome death but then rises from the grave.

In the face of an onslaught of existential threats, Christians can proclaim to the world that our options are not between apathy or political violence (Rom. 12:18–20).

Freed from the constraints of existential politics and motivated for change, new possibilities appear. We can fight for justice, advocate for the oppressed, and seek flourishing in our own neighborhoods without worrying that if our candidate loses or our advocacy fails it means that our very existence is threatened. And we might just discover that politics has all kinds of places for fruitful work that we previously ignored in our rush to stave off the biggest existential threat.

Christian political action can be bringing a casserole to a neighbor, showing up to a city council meeting, setting up an apartment for a refugee family, writing a letter to an elected official. Within the frame of God’s redemptive story, these small acts of justice and peace take on greater significance than the desperate attempts to bring peace to earth at any cost.

Kaitlyn Schiess is the author of The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here.

- More from Kaitlyn Schiess

Ideas

Kamala Harris Against History

Bonnie Kristian

The candidate’s “unburdened by what has been” and “coconut tree” lines push her party toward a troubling partisan divide over the past itself.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris

Chris duMond / Stringer / Getty

President Joe Biden is out of the 2024 race, and Vice President Kamala Harris is angling to lead her party’s ticket. In the surge of interest in her revised candidacy this past week, online attention has focused on two of her turns of phrase. One is a line Harris has apparently been repeating for many years, returning to it so often that a four-minute clip of her saying it dozens of times is trending on social media.

That line—a call to envision and work toward “what can be, unburdened by what has been”—has been widely placed in tension with the other phrase in which Harris, quoting her mother, scoffs at those who “think [they] just fell out of a coconut tree.” No, she says, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Such a tension would be interesting—if it existed. It’d suggest a thoughtful balancing of progressive and conservative impulses, of aspiration for benevolent advancement and respect for wise tradition, of acknowledgment of the real ills of history alongside a quest for the careful preservation of its goods.

Unfortunately, this supposed tension is not evidenced. The contradiction is not within the vice president’s thinking but across the partisan divide, as Harris looks likely to lead Democrats toward a simplistic condemnation of bygone times while the GOP just as simplistically embraces a nostalgia so rosy it is sometimes false.

Listen to the coconut comment in context, as the line itself suggests we should, and you’ll find Harris isn’t speaking about respect for prior generations or retrieval of the virtues of the past. She’s accounting for the evils and woes of history so as to better progress toward equity in the future. Some young people are disadvantaged by lingering effects of the bad old days, Harris explains, which means that to help them, state programs may also have to help their families and communities overcome their pasts.

That’s probably correct at the level of practical guidance for members of the federal working group to whom Harris was speaking. But at a deeper level, it evinces the same negative attitude toward history and tradition that the “unburdened” quote so efficiently communicates. There is no thoughtful tension. There’s only a revolt against the trappings of the past.

That posture would mark a significant difference between Harris and her predecessor—for Biden’s age, long tenure in Washington, and predilection for reminiscing about his late father and son all incline him to a mixed view of history. Many of Biden’s policies are progressive, but his attitude toward the past is neither uniformly critical nor nostalgic.

(At the height of 2020’s iconoclastic fervor, for example, he distinguished “between monuments to Confederate leaders and statues of slave-owning former presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, saying the former belong in museums while the latter should be protected.”)

More important than her difference from a retiring Biden, though, is the contrast between Harris as a probable new leader of the Democratic Party and her rivals across the aisle.

Always in recent decades the party more inclined to look longingly at the past, the Republican Party of our moment is all-in on nostalgia: for the first Trump administration, for the Reagan years, for official prayer in public schools, for one-income households and company pensions, for traditional gender roles and a robust drug war and a time when “woke” was not in our lexicon. For the 1950s or the 1890s or the 1770s or whenever it was, exactly, that America was pure, powerful, and great. Make America Great Again is the slogan, after all.

As constitutional scholar Yuval Levin observed in National Review earlier this year, nostalgia politics used to be bipartisan. Go back 10 or 15 years and you can find baby boomer Democrats reminiscing about middle-class mid-century Middle America just as fluently as their Republican counterparts.

“I grew up in an America that invested in its kids and built a strong middle class; that allowed millions of children to rise from poverty and establish secure lives,” Levin quotes Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren telling her party’s convention as recently as 2012.

That kind of rhetoric has been in decline for three presidential election cycles—on the left, that is. And if Harris clinches the Democratic nomination, we may expect her to move her party further on to “what can be,” “unburdened” by the regressive “context of all in which you live” and the oppression of “what came before you.”

Nostalgia politics have not comparably declined on the right, nor does that seem likely so long as the GOP is helmed by former president Donald Trump and his literal or political heirs. And this strikes me as a serious problem.

The problem is not that some of us would be generally pro-history and others pro-future. It's not that some of us would tend toward tradition and others toward progress. It's that some of us would have such revulsion for the present and others such revulsion for the past, and that polarization would push us to see this split as a matter of partisan loyalty and animosity—that history would be reduced to burden or meme.

The tension (wrongly) perceived in those two lines from Harris is good. It is a tension that should make sense to Christians, we who affirm the goodness of creation and new creation, who understand humanity is both fallen and retentive of God’s image, who pass on the faith of our forebears while living with the consequences of their sins (Deut. 6:5–9; 5:9–10).

We worship a God who does not erase history nor spare us its pains, some of them self-inflicted (Ps. 7:14–16)—but who does promise to redeem that suffering (Rom. 8:18–21), to bring justice and forgiveness (Ezek. 18), and to rescue us from sin, evil, and death itself (Heb. 2:14–15).

For us, to fall entirely on one side of a simplistic pro-history or anti-history split is not just divisive politicking. It’s bad anthropology and soteriology, evincing a naive and shallow understanding of how God made humans, how we spurned him, and how he is working in history to save us. It leaves us unburdened, yes: unburdened by reality.

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

- More from Bonnie Kristian

News

Wire Story

Americans Are Still Inviting People to Church

Aaron Earls - Lifeway Research

Young, evangelical, and African American churchgoers ask the most.

Erika Giraud / Unsplash

When churchgoers show up to their church’s worship service, they’re often hoping to have a guest with them.

A Lifeway Research study of US Protestant churchgoers finds 3 in 5 (60%) say they have extended at least one invitation in the past six months for someone to attend their church, including 19 percent who have made one invitation, 21 percent with two invitations and 20 percent with three or more invitations.

A third of churchgoers say they haven’t invited anyone to a worship service at their church in the past six months, while 7 percent say they aren’t sure how many invitations they’ve made.

“Churchgoers were not asked the typical net promoter score question of whether they recommend their church. They were asked if they’ve actually invited someone in the last six months,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “For most churchgoers, invitations are not just an aspiration but a current practice.”

Extending invites

Compared to a similar Lifeway Research study six years ago, a similar percentage of churchgoers say they haven’t invited anyone recently—33 percent now versus 29 percent in 2017. Fewer churchgoers, however, are making three or more invitations. In 2017, 1 in 4 said they’d extended at least three invitations for someone to visit their church in the previous six months. Currently, 20 percent say the same.

“It’s not surprising the proportion of churchgoers extending invites is not growing, since the proactive nature of inviting people to church is counter-cultural,” said McConnell. “People in America are not being more relational, but an invitation to church is an invitation to join you in activities you enjoy, a message that brings you hope, and relationships with you and others.”

Some churchgoers are more likely to invite guests than others. Unsurprisingly, those who attend more often are more likely to extend invitations. Churchgoers who attend four times a month or more (27%) are more likely than those who attend less often (11%) to say they’ve made three or more invitations in the past six months.

Those under 50 are more likely to extend invitations than older congregants. Almost a third of those 50 to 64 years old (32%) and nearly half of churchgoers 65 and older (46%) say they have not invited anyone in the past six months. Those 35 to 49 (29%) are most likely to have offered at least three invitations recently.

African American churchgoers are among the most likely to say they’ve extended either two church invitations (28%) or three or more (25%). White churchgoers (36%) are more likely than African Americans (26%) and Hispanics (18%) to say they did not invite anyone in the past six months.

Baptists (27%) and those attending Restorationist Movement churches (21%) are more likely than those at Presbyterian/Reformed congregations (9%) to say they’ve invited at least three individuals or families. Lutherans (52%) are among the most likely to say they haven’t invited anyone.

Churchgoers with evangelical beliefs, which include believing it is very important to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior, are more likely than non-evangelicals to invite others to church. Almost a quarter of evangelicals by belief (24%) say they’ve extended three or more invitations, compared to 15 percent of those without such beliefs.

Invitation limitations

When asked why they don’t bring guests more often, churchgoers point to several reasons. Around a quarter say they don’t know anyone to invite (27%) or those they invite refuse their invitations (26%).

Another 13 percent say they’re just not comfortable asking people to church, while 7 percent say they don’t think it’s up to them to bring people to church. Few (4%) say they’re too busy serving on Sunday morning.

Additionally, 19 percent say they don’t know why they don’t bring guests to church more often, and 5 percent say it’s another unspecified reason.

“It can be easy for churchgoers to have their own relationship needs met at church and not know anyone else to invite,” said McConnell. “It takes intentionality to be meeting new people in your community to have opportunities to invite them.”

Compared to 2017, churchgoers today are more likely to say they don’t know anyone to invite (27 percent v. 17%) and those they invited said no (26 percent v. 20%). Current churchgoers are less likely than those in 2017 to say they aren’t sure of the reason they don’t bring guests more often (19% v. 31%) or to point to another unnamed reason (5% v. 15%).

Those who attend most often say the reason they don’t have guests with them more frequently is because their invitations are refused. Those who attend a worship service four times a month or more (31%) are more likely than those who attend one to three times (19%) to say a rejected invitation is the primary reason.

Baptists (33%), as well as those at non-denominational (27%) and Restorationist Movement (24%) churches are more likely than Lutherans (12%) and Presbyterian/Reformed (11%) to say the primary reason they don’t bring guests with them to worship services more often is because the potential guests refuse their invitations.

Methodists (28%), Lutherans (24%) and those at Restorationist Movement churches (19%) are more likely than Baptists (9%) to say they aren’t bringing guests with them because they aren’t comfortable asking people to church. Additionally, Methodists (23%) are among the most likely to say they don’t think it’s up to them to bring people to church.

- More from Aaron Earls - Lifeway Research

Culture

Penalty or No, Athletes Talk Faith

Brad East

Contributor

The public square is increasingly hostile to religion. But don’t be surprised when Olympic athletes overflow with thanks to God.

Bongarts / Staff / Getty / Edits by CT

The opening ceremonies of the Olympics are extravagant celebrations of national glories and global unity. But if you watch past this week’s opener to the Games themselves, you’ll notice an unusual pattern: Athletes are always talking about God.

If you caught last month’s Olympic trials, you’ll have noticed the same thing. Athletes of every kind continuously gave God the credit, often in explicitly Christian terms. It was almost like a competition within the competition to see who could outdo the others in redirecting praise heavenward.

For my money, US track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone won. After breaking the world record (again) for women’s 400-meter hurdles, she answered a reporter’s question this way: “Honestly—praise God. I was not expecting that, but he can do anything. Anything is possible in Christ. I’m just amazed, baffled, and in shock.” The reporter laughed nervously and moved on to the next qualifier.

It’s not news that athletes thank the Lord for their success. But watching these public displays of piety made me wonder: Why is this still normal? The Oscars couldn’t be mistaken for church. Neither could large gatherings of writers, journalists, musicians, venture capitalists, or politicians. Sporting events appear to be the last refuge of “acceptable” public faith in our secular culture.

After all, almost no one slams McLaughlin-Levrone and other publicly Christian athletes for their praise. It’s allowed. Reporters may find it quirky or even bizarre, but athletes generally aren’t punished for religiosity. And even if they were, it’s clear they wouldn’t care. In a time when belief is belittled, ignored, or relegated to one’s private life, athletes are unapologetically faithful in public. But why?

The place to start, I think, is the nature of sports itself. Athletic discipline is rigorously controlled because, when the whistle blows, nothing is under control. It’s chaos, contingency, and chance all the way down. The skies fill with rain clouds; the court is slick with sweat; the track is spongy; your opponents are strategically unpredictable.

The most important variable is the body. Top athletes treat their bodies almost like a separate entity—caring for it, treating it, feeding it, resting it, trusting it, blaming it. An athlete who trips and stumbles or suffers an injury says, My body failed me. We know what that means. Who can predict, with absolute certainty, when a ligament will snap or a muscle cramp?

In Game 1 of the 2014 NBA Finals, LeBron James—at the time the best basketball player on the planet—had to leave prematurely due to cramps. Why? The stadium was slightly warmer than usual. He’d been known to request ice-cold air conditioning wherever he played, so much so that fans speculated that the opposing team, my beloved San Antonio Spurs, kept things warm for a competitive advantage. True or not, the Spurs won the game and the series both, all because the league’s MVP couldn’t keep his muscles from spasming.

With good reason, therefore, do athletes turn to God. None but God is sovereign. I can’t control the weather, but he can. I can’t stop my body from failing, but he can. Even the wind and the waves obey him (Matt. 8:27). Shouldn’t footballs and softballs obey him too?

This is why athletes, as much as fans, can be so superstitious. They may or may not believe in God, but they wear the same socks for every game, rub the same statue for good luck, eat the same meal at the same time of day: It’s sports magic. The “sports gods” are quite particular, and they can be propitiated through complex rituals or angered by the slightest transgression. “Karma” gets called in for apostates, traitors, and cheats. Even a skeptic like Michael Jordan, peeking at teammates, will bow for Zen meditation so long as coach Phil Jackson promises it’ll help them win.

For athletes, God isn’t just in charge of the moment. He’s the governor of history. This is true for all of us, at all times, but elite athletes are viscerally reminded of it with a frequency few of us experience.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a victorious athlete will speak of more than God answering a prayer. He’ll tell the world a story—a saga divinely directed by the heavenly Playwright. He’ll say: I was born for this; I was meant to do it; this outcome was ordained from the start. Sure, he may be caught up in the moment. Deep down, though, he’s expressing faith in divine providence. It’s one more way to be clear about control. None of us has it, because only God does, and the sooner one recognizes that, the sooner peace is possible when losing and real joy available when winning.

Finally, athletic contests are about nothing less than glory. Homer said as much almost 3,000 years ago: “What greater glory attends a man, while he’s alive, / than what he wins with his racing feet and striving hands?” Glory shines on the last man standing, the first woman to cross the finish line, the team with the winning score when time runs out. The victors are showered with status, fame, money, and applause. Yet what do the victors themselves seem to feel? A few of them strut and jaw, but many will drop to their knees and weep like children. Ask them their emotion and they’ll tell you: gratitude.

From a secular perspective, it makes no sense: Are you grateful to yourself? You’re the one who just did this!

But what athletes intuit is that, somehow, this accomplishment is well and truly theirs and a gift. So they thank their teammates, families, and parents—especially mom—but more than any worldly giver, they thank “the Father of lights,” since they know that “every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17, RSV). Athletes push themselves beyond the limits of their capability, and in the ecstasy of triumph, they cannot help but declare the truth: I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Creator, the sovereign Lord.

Sports, like other art forms, are potential channels of transcendence. It’s why we watch and admire athletes. It’s why athletes sometimes can’t tell you why they made some choice on the field or what they were thinking in the moment. They were so in the flow, so self-forgetful, so present to teammate and circumstance that they lost themselves. The beauty that results, for them and for us, is marvelous. Our breath catches in our throat. David Foster Wallace called watching Roger Federer “a religious experience.” In a sense, he wasn’t wrong.

This should help to explain the sometime acquiescence of otherwise secular fans and journalists to athletes’ relentless religious enthusiasm. For many, following sports is as close as they get to liturgy. Observance—already a religious word—is a kind of bearing witness, and the experience is far from passive: Fans participate vicariously through their cheers, boos, clapping, stomping, and chanting. Athletes in turn draw energy, strength, and encouragement from this unique relationship.

Having said that, there are other, less savory reasons athletes’ faith is tolerated among the press and irreligious public. A more cynical take is that many journalists see it as the price they pay to cover sports. They must feign listening to the devout drone on about Jesus before asking, for the umpteenth time, “So, what was going through your head when you hit that shot?”

That’s not the most damning interpretation, however.

At times, if you look closely, you’ll see what looks like an ugly dynamic at work. In many popular American sports, an increasingly privileged, irreligious, and still mostly white media writes about a mostly religious, mostly non-white league in which relatively few come from privilege. The upshot is a chasm between journalists and athletes—whether marked by class, education, race, or all of the above. In this respect, liberals are right and conservatives are wrong: You can’t take politics out of sports. Ironically, this is never more evident than when God enters the conversation.

To take a memorable example, a few years back, sportswriter Dave Zirin dinged quarterback Russell Wilson for attributing a win to God, charging that “football players speak about God as if He … is the Big Coach in the Sky, scripting outcomes like Vince McMahon with a baggy sweatshirt and a headset.” If there even is a God, Zirin added, “this all-powerful force doesn’t care a great deal about football.” One wonders how he knows.

Coverage was similarly dismissive when Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis was inducted to the Hall of Fame. Deadspin was baffled by his conviction that God spoke to and cared for him amid tragedy, and SB Nation headlined a section about his paraphrase of Isaiah 54:17 (“No weapon formed against me shall prosper”) with “Weapons, God, you know, that kind of stuff.”

Criticism is fair game, and journalists shouldn’t withhold substantive disagreement just to be polite. The optics of these encounters aren’t great, though, and responding to athletes’ piety with derision or mock forbearance is neither respect nor tolerance. It’s barely masked contempt—and a revelation of the yawning gap between how our secularized culture thinks about religion and how faithful athletes see themselves in a God-enchanted world.

The lovely fact is that the athletes in question seem to care not one whit, which is quite freeing for those of us who both cheer them on and share their faith. They’re a model for all believers of what it looks like to be cheerfully, unabashedly Christian in public.

Like many in sports media, I used to be guilty of rolling my eyes at such displays of piety. It seemed gauche, unnecessary, maybe even a grift. And perhaps sometimes it is. But I had to admit that I’d be inclined to keep my mouth shut on the victors’ podium—I’d be too embarrassed to be so bold about my faith. Yet these sisters and brothers are downright unafraid. I, for one, have something to learn from their example.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.

- More from Brad East

28 Christian Athletes to Cheer On at the Paris 2024 Olympics

CT Editors

Meet Olympians who love God from around the world.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty / WikiMedia Commons

Many Olympics lovers learn that their favorite athletes love Jesus through social media posts or postgame interviews following their success on the field, court, or track or in the pool. But the overwhelming majority of Christians competing in the Games won’t end up on the podium.

For many, simply arriving at the Games will be a testament to overcoming injuries, mental health challenges, or grief due to the loss of loved ones. Below are the stories of Christian athletes from 13 sports and 20 nations, all eager to make their countries—and their Lord—proud.

With reporting by Annie Meldrum, Isabel Ong, Angela Lu Fulton, Franco Iacomini, Mariana Albuquerque, and Morgan Lee.

Badminton

Anthony Sinisuka Ginting (Indonesia)

https://www.instagram.com/p/C4rJa9fhqyX/

Known as badminton’s “Giant Killer” for defeating the sport’s greatest stars, Anthony Sinisuka Ginting took home the bronze medal for men’s badminton singles in Tokyo. This year, he’s headed back to the Olympics with fellow Indonesian and Christian badminton player Jonathan Christie.

Ginting was born in Cimahi in West Java and is of Karo ethnicity, a people group from North Sumatra where Christians make up 70 percent of the population. His father introduced him to badminton when he was five, and he started competing at age nine. Since then, he has medaled or won in numerous competitions.

On his Instagram account, Ginting isn’t shy about his faith. In a post from March, he noted finishing second to Christie at the All England Open, writing, “Thank you Jesus for your goodness. It was all beyond my expectation.” In response, Christie commented, “We made history together that we never imagined, God is good all the time.”

Basketball

Kayla Alexander, Canada

https://www.instagram.com/p/C3OQj6gNnBk/

Team Canada basketball player Kayla Alexander, 33, frequently writes on Instagram and her blog about how God has directed her career. “Every dream I had as a child, God has surpassed in ways I never thought possible,” she wrote in 2018.

The star center has played in the WNBA and is currently with Spanish pro team Valencia Basket—a place she never thought she would be as a 12-year-old who was “terrible” at her first basketball tryout. In 2020, she suffered knee injuries that put her out of commission and left her “heartbroken.” But her faith in God kept her motivated: “Unfortunately, things happen that don’t make sense, we don’t understand the reasoning or why behind it, but I believe that [God] works it all out for his good and his glory.”

When Japan beat Canada in the Olympic qualifying tournament, Alexander thought their Olympic hopes were dashed. But the team recovered to finish third and secure a qualifying spot. “God said we’re not done yet! When they say He works in mysterious ways, let this be the example!” she declared.

Carlik Jones, South Sudan

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cq3dTxLu5E5/

Since becoming an independent nation 12 years ago, South Sudan has struggled with conflict and humanitarian disasters. Yet this summer, the country is sending its first-ever basketball team to the Olympics, led by Carlik Jones, 26, whose South Sudanese heritage is from his mother's side.

Jones, who has played for the Chicago Bulls and is currently with the Zhejiang Golden Bulls, was born with a brain condition that took him out of competitive sports for several years, as getting a concussion could have seriously injured him. Eventually, the doctors cleared him in second grade and his basketball career began from there.

Jones frequently shouts out God on his social media. “I’m putting my trust and faith in GOD, and letting him lead the way,” he tweeted in October 2022. The next month, he wrote, “I AM EXTREMELY BLESSED, THANK GOD,” and the following month, “GOD YOU ARE AMAZING.”

Despite his team’s lack of international experience, Jones believes in them. “South Sudan is slept on, its people are slept on, and we as a unit are slept on,” he said last year. “We just trying to put South Sudan on the map.”

Boxing

Saidel Horta, Cuba

https://www.instagram.com/p/CjB-vp1LfE9/

Saidel Horta secured a silver medal at the 2023 World Boxing Championships and earned his Olympic qualification in the featherweight division the same year during the Pan American Games. But back in 2021, Horta had contemplated retirement. After missing out on a podium finish in the youth category, he wondered if he was good enough to compete at the elite level. Ultimately, his love for boxing motivated him to keep training, resulting in a 2023 strong performance that culminated in an Olympic spot.

At just 21 years old, Horta is now recognized as one of the proponents of Cuba’s esteemed boxing tradition. In one photo on social media, the athlete stands inside the ring with his hand raised toward the sky. His caption paraphrases Psalm 121: “My help comes from above.” In another post, he wrote, “God, all honor and glory to you.”

Gymnastics

Aleah Finnegan, Philippines

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cx8fAQKqjGg/

Aleah Finnegan, 21, is the Philippines’s first female gymnast to qualify for the Olympics since 1964. (Several months later, Emma Malabuyo, another Filipino-American gymnast, also qualified.)

“Thank you for the opportunity to represent this beautiful country. … God be Glorified!” she wrote in an Instagram caption below a photo of herself holding the Philippine flag.

Finnegan is Filipino through her mother and represented the US from 2019 to 2021. In 2021, she retired from elite gymnastics to compete at the college level at Louisiana State University. A year later, she switched nationalities to the Philippines.

In the 2024 NCAA National Championship, Finnegan’s high scores helped LSU’s gymnastics team win the championship title for the first time in program history.

“GOD DID!! WE ARE NATIONAL CHAMPIONS!!” she wrote, celebrating their win. “Thank you, Jesus, for allowing us to compete for something far greater than ourselves.”

Brody Malone, USA

https://www.instagram.com/p/C7slo9vukDD/

After Brody Malone underwent a third surgery on his right leg only a year ago, his odds for the 2024 Olympics did not look good. He dislocated his knee after landing poorly, leaving him with a fractured tibia and multiple torn ligaments.

Now, just over a year later, he has won the US gymnastics all-around competition and is bound for his second Olympics. After finishing fourth in the high bar competition in Tokyo, he has his sights set on medaling in Paris.

Malone had a brutal recovery process—he essentially had to “relearn how to walk.” His personal life has not been without trial either. His mother passed away from cancer in 2012, and in 2019, his stepmother died from a brain aneurysm.

Yet he still praises God.

“I just have to give all the glory to God,” he said earlier this year. “It’s all him. … So I just want to thank him for this.”

Judo

Geronay Whitebooi, South Africa

https://www.instagram.com/p/CwkdFnFI_ih/

Judoka Geronay Whitebooi has seen too much of life to mince words. When she recently finished second at the Marrakech Africa Open 2024, she posted a picture of herself post-tournament with a serious expression on her face. “My heart desired the gold medal, but it was not the plan God had for me today. GOD is my strength and power,” she wrote in a lengthy Instagram post. “GOD is with me and within me.”

Whitebooi, who also qualified for the Olympics in 2021, has won multiple titles at both African and European tournaments. Yet to get to this point in her judo career, she said she had to give up her social life and spend time away from her family, especially as she faced the tragic losses of two family members: her dad when she was 13, and her sister two years ago.

“The medal proudly represents another barrier-breaking effort I have made, but it is a medal I look at with sadness because I made [my sister] proud, but I wasn’t there enough for my family and myself during that time,” she said about her win at the 2022 Senior European Cup.

“Our pain has a purpose,” she recently wrote. “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance.”

Rugby

Jerry Tuwai, Fiji

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cui_ISVJ7Cs/

Fijian rugby player Jerry Tuwai, 35, led his teams to clinch the gold at Rio 2016—the first Olympic win for the country—and at Tokyo. Both times, Tuwai and his teammates hugged each other in a circle and sang the traditional hymn “We Shall Overcome,” or, as it’s known in Fiji, “E Da Sa Qaqa.” Its English lyrics read: “We have overcome / By the blood of the Lamb / And the word of the Lord.”

“We always start … and we always end with our prayers and songs. That song says that our God is a loving God,” said Tuwai.

Tuwai grew up in one of the poorest districts outside the Fijian capital, Suva, and lived in a one-room house made of corrugated iron walls. He used plastic bottles or bundles of clothes as a rugby ball. When asked what made him successful in the sport, Tuwai credited discipline and dependence on God.

In January, Tuwai was axed from the Fiji Sevens squad for not being fit enough. Six months later, he was announced as captain of the Paris lineup—just when Tuwai had thought that his rugby career was over. “You have different plans, but God has another plan for us … maybe this one and maybe the next big thing,” he said. “I don’t know. Only God knows.”

Skateboarding

Rayssa Leal, Brazil

https://www.instagram.com/p/C0ZVXWTOcra/

At age 7, Rayssa Leal had her first moment of fame when a video showing the elementary-age student dressed as a fairy executing a perfect heelflip was shared by Tony Hawk, one of the biggest names in skateboarding.

By age 11, Leal had begun competing internationally, and at 13, she became Brazil’s youngest Olympic medalist, winning silver in the street skateboarding category in Japan in 2021. “Thank you, God, for providing me the opportunity to do what I love!” she wrote the night before the competition.

Last December, Rayssa achieved the highest score of her career in the final of the SLS Super Crown in São Paulo. “All honor and glory to God,” she wrote. Now, at 16, the girl who attends a Baptist church in Imperatriz, a city in the northeastern state of Maranhão, is aiming for gold.

Soccer

Rasheedat Ajibade, Nigeria

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf2X3I4MCMO/

In the final match of the Olympic qualifying tournament, Rasheedat Ajibade scored the winning—and only—goal that sent the Nigeria women’s soccer team to Paris, its first Games since 2008.

Ajibade celebrated her victory in a shirt that read, “Jesus Revealed, Jesus Glorified, Haleluyah,” and in a caption of a postgame photo, she wrote, “TO YOU ALONE LORD BE ALL THE GLORY. THE MANDATE REMAINS CRYSTAL CLEAR.”

Despite these bold professions, Ajibade says she sees herself as a reserved person and that she has often relied on dying her hair blue to express her personality. For Ajibade, her hair is a nod to her struggles with depression as a teenager and a symbol of her encouragement that everyone can survive their mental health struggles.

Ajibade began her professional soccer career at the young age of 13. In 2022, she finished as the top scorer at the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations. She also plays for Atletico Madrid, which won the Women’s Cup in 2023.

Despite her success, Ajibade remains attuned to the less fortunate in her country. Last year, she visited a Lagos slum, later writing, “Our mission was twofold: to extend acts of kindness and to share the gospel’s light (Mark 16:15).”

Taishi Brandon Nozawa, Japan

https://www.instagram.com/p/C0nshzfPP-r/

In a country where only one percent of the population is Christian, Japan’s 21-year-old goalkeeper, Taishi Brandon Nozawa, is committed to using his platform to share his faith. His Instagram account includes images of him on the soccer field interspersed with Bible verses, thoughts about his devotions, and a worship song.

Under an image of the Charles Spurgeon quote “Be walking Bibles,” Nozawa wrote, “For Christians, the Bible is a lamp and light that illuminates the path we walk. However, for those who do not read the Bible, it is not light. So what do we do? We must become a Bible that is read by our neighbors and become a light for them!”

Nozawa, originally from Okinawa Province, has played for Japan’s national team since he was 14. In 2023, he played for FC Tokyo.

“I would like to express my sincere gratitude for each and every blessing that the Lord has prepared and guided for us this season,” he wrote in an Instagram post at the end of last year. “Even when times are tough, when things don’t go well, and we do things that displease the Lord, his unchanging love is truly wonderful. That is why I return and worship the Lord.”

Swimming

Adam Peaty, Great Britain

https://www.instagram.com/p/CRx9zWmruum/

Adam Peaty won the men’s 100-meter breaststroke at both the Rio and Tokyo Olympics and has also earned eight world championship golds. And yet the British swimmer has dealt with significant personal struggles, including depression and alcoholism.

He became a Christian in 2022 after a foot injury forced him out of the pool. He began attending church regularly after meeting with chaplain Ashley Null, and this new routine “felt like the missing part of the puzzle,” he said. He now sports a large cross tattoo across his abdomen, accompanied by the words Into the Light.

Caeleb Dressel, USA

https://www.instagram.com/p/C9U5N3pIyC4/

Caeleb Dressel says the eagle tattoo on his shoulder nods to Isaiah 40: “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (vv. 30-31).

Hailed as a successor to Michael Phelps, Dressel is well on his way to living up to the name. At Tokyo, he took home five gold medals.

However, his journey has not always been smooth. Leading up to the last Olympics, Dressel found himself struggling with depression and panic attacks. The pressure to live up to one of the most well-known names in sports weighed heavily on him.

But his faith helped him to rise out of that place. “I really learned to see the light at the end of the tunnel and trust what God is doing, whether it be a rough point in your life or a top pinnacle in your life,” he said.

Georgia-Leigh Vele, Papua New Guinea

https://www.instagram.com/p/C0FP6_VBUv8/

When she received the bronze medal in the women’s 50-meter breaststroke at the 2023 Pacific Games, Georgia-Leigh Vele, 25, said, “I was hoping for this. You never know what could happen, but I tried my best and God did the rest.”

For Vele, being an athlete has led her to feel grateful and content. “Completely surrendering myself to the Lord with thanks and praise,” she wrote last year. “It’s an amazing thing when you find that place, where you know you can and you will because of Him.”

- More from CT Editors

Theology

Praising God Is an Act of Political Defiance

Carmen Joy Imes

The Book of Psalms reminds us that worship demands our unequivocal devotion and allegiance.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Unsplash

The Psalms capture the full range of human experience. Personal and collective, sorrowful and rejoicing, remembering God’s faithfulness and wondering what has become of it—the biblical book, prayed by generations of believers, invites us to enter God’s presence with piercing honesty.

For those of us weaned on the positivity of American evangelicalism, the psalms of lament can take us aback. The authenticity of their angst pushes the boundaries of what we have witnessed in corporate prayer. It calls us to reject toxic positivity and embrace godly grief. And while this wake-up call to embrace the psalms of lament is still badly needed, I suspect we need a similar reckoning when it comes to the psalms of praise.

The claim of the praise psalms is startlingly unique in its context and powerfully relevant in ours, especially in an election year that is charged with political energy. As candidates vie for our votes, Christians hotly debate which contender best reflects our values and which issues most deserve our attention. On top of this, as Jared Stacy noted in a recent article for CT, we are experiencing a rise in politically motivated violence.

While lament is surely appropriate in times like these, maybe the best thing we can do is engage in audacious praise!

I’ve often felt about the praise psalms the way a mom feels about getting a store-bought Mother’s Day card proclaiming in all caps that she is the “BEST MOM EVER.” We know the company has printed thousands of these cards—and I’m the only mom my children have ever had, so how would they know any better?

But when Israel exclaimed, “Praise the LORD!” they were making far more audacious claims than that of a generic greeting card. As Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann points out in his excellent book, From Whom No Secrets Are Hid, “an act of praise is not an innocuous ‘spiritual’ act. It is rather a taking of sides for this God against all other gods.” He explains that “hymns of praise are acts of devotion with political and polemical overtones … [and] acts of defiance of the world that is in front of us.”

One reason we often fail to appreciate the power of praise presented in the Psalms is that most English translations render the unique divine name, Yahweh, as LORD (in all caps). Lowercase “Lord” is not a name, but a title indicating a person of status. Most Bible readers miss the distinction. And so, in our attempt to honor God’s name by calling him Lord, we inadvertently erased his divine name, Yahweh. So, the phrase “Praise the Lord” ends up sounding like a Hallmark card—or a Christian version of the “live, laugh, love” creed.

A second reason the impact of the Psalms’ invitation to “Praise Yahweh” is often watered down is that in monotheistic contexts, where many of us grow up being (rightfully) instructed that there is only one God, praising the Lord can seem like stating the obvious. Of course he’s the only one worthy to be praised—because what other creature could compete?

But Israel’s psalms were far grittier than we realize. Every time they sang a psalm, they were making a bold claim that was simultaneously for Yahweh and against other gods.

This is significant, because the Israelites lived in a world crowded with other possible deities to worship. Several thick books on my office shelves catalog these gods alphabetically, explaining what each one was known for. In Egypt, there was Re, the sun god; Isis, the goddess of protection and healing; Hathor, goddess of fertility; Osiris, whose bloodstream was thought to be the Nile; and many dozens more. In Canaan, Baal and Asherah, the god and goddess of fertility, were worshiped, along with El, the supreme God, and a whole pantheon of other options. The gods of Mesopotamia included Marduk, Isis, Ashur, Enlil, Ea, Tiamat, and Adad, to name a few.

More than that, ancient cultures did not worship these deities to express affection but as a matter of necessity. They believed the gods were responsible for the success of their crops and the survival of their children. They believed kings ruled under divine patronage, and that the rulers’ task was to do the bidding of the gods and to maintain order in their realm. Most ancient Near Eastern gods were not absolute but had a particular specialty or a specific jurisdiction.

When we read the praise psalms against that backdrop, a whole new world opens up to us—a world with the potential of reshaping our own. Let’s consider Psalm 96 as an example. I’ve quoted from the NIV here, but replaced “LORD” with the divine name Yahweh to help us experience the power of the original Hebrew in its context:

Sing to Yahweh a new song;
sing to Yahweh, all the earth.
Sing to Yahweh, praise his name;
proclaim his salvation day after day.
Declare his glory among the nations,
his marvelous deeds among all peoples. (vv. 1–3)

Psalm 96 is not generic. It cannot be used in just any worship context, but only to worship Yahweh, the God of Israel. But that’s what makes this psalm so radical: It calls “all the earth” to praise Yahweh, not just the Israelites! All the nations must hear the story of “his salvation.”

Yahweh’s salvation is not something that Israel looked forward to in the future but something they had already experienced when Yahweh defeated Pharaoh at the sea and brought them to safety. The salvation of Yahweh does not offer merely an individual sense of reassurance but the decisive defeat of Egypt and its gods on the world stage (Ex. 12:12; 15:2). Psalm 96 continues:

For great is Yahweh and most worthy of praise;
he is to be feared above all gods.
For all the gods of the nations are idols,
but Yahweh made the heavens.
Splendor and majesty are before him;
strength and glory are in his sanctuary. (vv. 4–6)

The smackdown of this psalm is deliberate and obvious, once you know to look for it. To exalt Yahweh is to demote any other claimants to divine prerogative. Yahweh has all the splendor, while the gods of the nations are nothing more than mute objects. To sing this is to deny the validity of the foundation myths of all of Israel’s neighbors.

Ascribe to Yahweh, all you families of nations,
ascribe to Yahweh glory and strength.
Ascribe to Yahweh the glory due his name;
bring an offering and come into his courts.
Worship Yahweh in the splendor of his holiness;
tremble before him, all the earth.
Say among the nations, “Yahweh reigns.”
The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved;
he will judge the peoples with equity. (vv. 7–10)

What’s remarkable about these verses in Psalm 96 is that they call for the nations to worship at the temple in Jerusalem. It’s not enough for them to admit Yahweh’s power from afar. Their acknowledgment ought to translate into action of the most humbling variety—to make a pilgrimage to a foreign land overseen by another ruler and occupied by another people.

To say that Yahweh reigns not only undermines the authority of every other god in the ancient pantheons of Israel’s neighbors but also calls into question the legitimacy of every human monarch other than the one Yahweh anointed. Since no king ruled except by divine appointment, one of any king’s first priorities was to establish the legitimacy of his rule by showing how the gods had selected him. If those gods were unseated from their heavenly thrones, then the kings who identified with them were also illegitimate. Psalm 96 concludes with these words:

Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;
let the sea resound, and all that is in it.
Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;
let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.
Let all creation rejoice before Yahweh, for he comes,
he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
and the peoples in his faithfulness. (v. 11–13)

Israel’s neighbors depicted their gods using the symbols of animals and saw divine representation in trees and oceans—whereas Psalm 96 portrays every created thing as celebrating Yahweh’s rule and standing before him as the ultimate judge. In the end, all will answer to Yahweh. These are fighting words!

Perhaps an illustration will help us appreciate the audacity of praise psalms. The 1965 classic film The Sound of Music offers an analogy. Captain von Trapp is a retired naval officer in Austria raising his seven children with the help of one governess after another. The children are hard on these substitute mothers, so the captain turns to a nearby abbey for help—maybe a nun can keep his children in line! The abbey sends him a novitiate, Fräulein Maria, who wins over the hearts of the children as well as that of their father.

Captain von Trapp and Maria’s romance is set against the backdrop of a growing threat of occupation by Nazi Germany in 1938. They return home from their honeymoon to see a Nazi flag flying over their front door, along with a summons to serve in Hitler’s navy and an (unrelated) invitation for the musical family to perform in the Salzburg Festival. Attempting to escape to neutral Switzerland that very night under the cover of darkness, the family is caught in the act. But thinking quickly, they pretend they are heading to perform in the music festival instead.

That joyous evening of music is strained by the presence of Nazi soldiers guarding the exits. In the front row sits the officer who was sent to escort Captain von Trapp to his new post in Hitler’s navy. While the judges evaluate the results of the competition, Captain von Trapp sings alone in the spotlight, regaling the waiting crowd with a simple song about a white alpine flower native to Austria.

The lyrics are not in themselves seditious, but sung in this context, his audacity is plain. The lilting melody of “Edelweiss” evokes for the crowd a longing for Austrian independence from Nazi Germany. The captain is overcome with emotion and finds himself unable to finish the song. Maria, the children, and the entire audience join him for the final few stanzas, which end with a hopeful prayer: “Bless my homeland forever!”

The Psalms are much like the captain’s song. On their own, they don’t sound rebellious, but set against the backdrop of Assyrian or Persian rule, they represent a form of spiritual insurrection—a kind of active protest to the powers that be. Psalms of praise exalt Yahweh above all human rulers and rival gods, diminishing their right to sovereignty. As we read them today, they call us to reimagine our ultimate citizenship—reminding us that even our elected government officials must one day bow the knee to Yahweh and that all our allegiance belongs only to him.

During this election year in the United States, or wherever we find ourselves, let us re-engage the Bible’s psalms of praise with eyes wide open—recognizing their unyielding summons to bow to our sovereign king.

Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and author of Bearing God’s Name and Being God’s Image. She’s currently writing her next book, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters.

- More from Carmen Joy Imes

Theology

Can Christian Publishing Survive in a Country Where Few Still Read?

Hendro Suwito

As smartphones steal potential readers in Indonesia, booksellers are looking to new ideas.

People use smartphones at a cafe in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Yasuyoshi Chiba / Getty

Only 1 out of every 1,000 Indonesians is an avid reader, according to UNESCO’s 2012 reading interest index. The country also ranks second to last in a list of the world’s most literate countries, which examined tests as well as “literate behaviors” such as the number of libraries and newspapers and the availability of computers and years of schooling in a nation.

In such a challenging climate, can local Christian publishing survive?

Indonesian pastors and publishers say yes, although it might look different from the golden years of the early 2000s. It may include collecting donations to give away books to the impoverished, drumming up excitement over book releases with Zoom talks, or polling local seminaries and churches to determine which books they should translate into Bahasa Indonesia.

Indonesians can also learn from one of Indonesia’s most prolific Christian writers, Andar Ismail, whose 33-book Selamat series sold tens of thousands of copies in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Even as reading falls out of the zeitgeist, Christians believe it has an important role in spiritual maturity.

“Congregations should not rely only on weekly sermons to strengthen their faith,” said Susanto (who goes by one name), a pastor and current chairman of Gloria Foundation, which oversees two Christian publishing companies. “They need to develop their spiritual journeys themselves, such as through quality books.”

An industry in crisis

The low interest in reading points to Indonesia’s strong oral culture, where stories and knowledge were traditionally passed through spoken rather than written word. Researchers also point to underfunded libraries, expensive book costs, and an education system that doesn’t encourage reading books outside of the classroom. Casthelia Kartika, president of Amanat Agung Theological Seminary in Jakarta, noted that in the past, education was not a top priority in the country as families struggled to make ends meet. As the economy improved, especially in the cities, parents started focusing more on their children’s education, which led to an improvement in literacy. However, the recent rise of smartphone usage is pulling Indonesians toward watching videos or playing games instead of reading.

“Although the awareness of the importance of reading has started flourishing, teachers still need to further develop the passion to read books among their students,” Kartika noted.

This is apparent at Indonesian seminaries—including her own—where some professors struggle to teach classes where few students complete the required readings. At the same time, some of the lecturers themselves aren’t readers either, which keeps them from writing books and sharing Indonesian theology with the rest of the world. “There are actually a lot of smart theologians in Indonesia, but it is so hard to encourage them to write books,” she said.

In addition, the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of brick-and-mortar bookstores and a plunge in book sales. In 2010, Indonesia had about 600 bookstores across the country. Now the number has dwindled to 100, according to Susanto.

Odessa Diaz Krisdiyanto, coordinator of Literatur Perkantas Jatim (East Java InterVarsity Literature) said that before the pandemic, the publishing house printed about 15 titles a year, all of which were translated from English, and it took about six months to sell out the print runs of roughly 2,000 copies. Last year, they only printed 8 titles, and selling the copies took a year.

During COVID-19, sales slowed as “customers shifted their reading habits to online media and their spending priority to the health of their families,” Krisdiyanto said.

Still, Literatur Perkantas has a leg up on other Christian book publishers, as they have been selling books online since 2017. This year, Perkantas may be able to publish as many titles as they did pre-pandemic, although with a smaller number of copies in print.

Other Christian publishers are not as lucky. Susanto said both publishing houses under Gloria, Katalis and Graffa, suffered substantially from the recent downturn. Katalis publishes discipleship books, while Graffa publishes popular Christian titles.

Started in the 1980s, Gloria initially only printed Our Daily Bread in the Indonesian language, presented in a simple format and distributed free of charge. Several years later, the booklets were printed more professionally and sold for a slight profit. Not long afterward, Gloria also started printing foreign and local Christian books.

“During the rosy years of the early 2000s, we could print and sell up to 150,000 copies of Our Daily Bread each month and about 100 book titles,” Susanto recalled. “Today, we can only print around 24,000 copies of the monthly edition and 10,500 of the quarterly editions.” In total, Katalis and Graffa only managed to publish 8 book titles in 2023.

The slump in sales has led Gloria to rent out some of their office space to other firms in their Yogyakarta building.

Kartika, meanwhile, is mildly optimistic that Christian publishers will be able to survive in the years to come. “They might not perish, but they might not flourish either,” she said. “The demand and need for books will continue to exist, but it will not be as massive as in the past.”

The rise of the Selamat series

One Christian book series that has seemingly defied the dominance of Indonesia’s oral culture is Ismail’s Selamat, published over the past four decades. A former pastor of the Samanhudi Indonesian Christian Church in Jakarta and a professor of theology and pedagogy at Jakarta Theological Seminary, Ismail is unique in that he can present difficult doctrinal topics in a down-to-earth way. This set his books apart from other Christian books at the time, which were mainly targeted to intellectuals.

In the Indonesian language, the word selamat is used for greetings or congratulations, and it can also mean “safe from harm” and “salvation.” Each of the approximately 130-page books includes 33 short stories covering a wide range of topics like the biographies of well-known Christian figures, morals gleaned from traditional Javanese wayang puppet shows, profiles of faithful “no-name” pastors, and vignettes from Ismail’s own spiritual journey. Some stories are funny, while others are thought-provoking, inspirational, or even tear-jerking. Their common denominator is Ismail’s portrayal of the matchless love of Christ.

Ismail published the first two books in the series, Selamat Natal (Merry Christmas) and Selamat Paskah (Happy Easter), in 1981 and 1982. After a decade-long break where he focused on studying overseas, he published his third book, Selamat Pagi Tuhan (Good Morning, Lord). From then until 2022, he published a new book every year.

For two decades, Selamat books were bestsellers for the Christian publishing house BPK Gunung Mulia, according to former CEO Stephen Z. Satyahadi. Selling more than 10,000 copies of a Christian book is considered a rare achievement in Indonesia, and scores of Ismail’s books have sold up to 70,000–80,000 copies over the years, with earlier editions reprinted more than 30 times.

“Through the easy-to-understand yet deeply meaningful stories, Ismail could help nurture the spiritual understanding of readers from all levels of educational backgrounds,” said Ismail’s close friend Sunoko Nugroho Samiadji. He noted that Ismail wrote many of the books by hand before Samiadji helped type them up on a computer.

One of Samiadji’s favorite short stories in the series is Ismail’s analysis of Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son. The pastor also wrote about Muslim figures who painted or wrote about Jesus, including journalist Goenawan Mohamad and poet Chairil Anwar, and how their unique viewpoints draw out different aspects of the Savior.

To acknowledge Ismail’s significant contribution to the Christian community, Indonesia’s Christian Art and Literature Festival awarded him the Tokoh Inspiratif (Inspirational Figure) award in August 2018.

After completing the series, Ismail went on to publish Tukang Antar Selamat (Courier of Salvation) in 2023, another collection of 33 stories. Now 84, Ismail plans to publish yet another book this year.

Finding new ways to attract readers

Yet even the sale of Ismail’s books have been affected by the recent downturn in reading. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Gunung Mulia has halved the number of first printing copies of Ismail’s new books to 5,000. (Ismail, so far, has refrained from selling his series as e-books, as few Indonesians read electronic books.)

As a result of the bearish climate, publishers are looking for ways to increase interest and to tailor what they publish to local demands.

Graffa has started to hold online book discussions and reviews. For instance, following the release earlier this year of an Indonesian translation of the book When Children Come Out: A Guide for Christian Parents by Mark Yarhouse and Olya Zaporozhets, they invited Dwidjo Saputro, a local pastor and expert on child psychology, to give several talks about the book over Zoom. Hundreds of people joined in.

Literatur Perkantas, meanwhile, has been communicating with seminaries and other Christian institutions to figure out which foreign books they want translated for their students and members. In the past, Perkantas mainly based translation decisions on a book’s popularity overseas. Since 2021, Perkantas has also started publishing books by local authors, such as Leadership Reformed and Menghidupi Injil & Menginjili Hidup (Living the Gospel & Evangelizing Life) by Sen Sendjaya, a professor of management and leadership at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.

Kartika believes that churches can help spur book sales by encouraging small-group book studies. She cowrote a series of Bible study books called Life Expedition , which sold more than 10,000 copies after small groups at several churches and high schools started using them.

Yoel M. Indrasmoro, pastor of Javanese Christian Church in Jakarta and former director of Literatur Perkantas Nasional, has a different approach to increasing reading among Christians.

During the pandemic, he started sharing a daily reflection and reading materials with more than 1,600 people through WhatsApp. As he developed closer personal ties with his readers, he asked them for financial support to send books to those in need, including pastors in impoverished areas and prison inmates. This developed into Tangan Terbuka Media (Open Arms Media), which publishes books by foreign and local authors.

In the past two years, Indrasmoro and Open Arms Media have sent 800 packages of books to pastors, priests, and nuns in Papua; more than 1,000 packages for pastors in East Nusa Tenggara; 650 packages for prison inmates in and around Jakarta; and almost 900 packages for teachers in Halmahera Island in North Maluku.

To distribute books to teachers, he worked with a council for Christian education in the province. Each package costs donors 164,000 rupiah ($10 USD) and consists of the books Sekolah Kristen dan Jalan Turun Yesus (Christian Schools and the Way of Jesus’ Descent) by Tyas Budi Legowo and Jujur Melangkah: 307 Renungan Kitab Amsal (Honest Steps: 307 Reflections from Proverbs) by Indrasmoro.

Indrasmoro urged other Christian publishers to build closer relations with their communities so that they could also raise support to distribute free books to those in need.

“So many church leaders and teachers in remote areas, and also prisoners, badly need books to enrich their lives,” he said. “But they don’t have the resources or access to get inspirational reading materials.”

- More from Hendro Suwito

News

ERLC Retracts Announcement Firing President Brent Leatherwood

Kate Shellnutt

UPDATE: The chair of the board of trustees, Kevin Smith, has resigned.

Brent Leatherwood

Josselyn Guillen / Baptist Press

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) announced Monday evening that its president Brent Leatherwood suddenly lost his job—only to retract the statement the next morning.

The board of trustees stated on Tuesday that the decision had been made without an authorized meeting or vote and that Leatherwood “remains the President of the ERLC and has our support moving forward.”

The chair of the ERLC board of trustees, Kevin Smith, took responsibility for the unilateral move and has resigned.

In remarks to Baptist Press on Tuesday, Smith said he believed there was consensus to remove Leatherwood, and “in an effort to deal with it expeditiously, I acted in good faith but without a formal vote of the Executive Committee.”

“This was an error on my part, and I accept full responsibility,” he said.

The initial statement from the ERLC had given no reasoning for Leatherwood’s termination but came a day after he issued remarks applauding President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 race.

“I deeply appreciate everyone who has reached out, especially our trustees who were absolutely bewildered at what took place yesterday and jumped in to set the record straight,” Leatherwood wrote on X on Tuesday. “More to come.”

Leatherwood has been on staff with the ERLC—the public policy and advocacy arm for Southern Baptists—for the past seven years and has been president of the entity since 2021. Just a few hours before his termination was announced Monday evening, Leatherwood was still working and sharing ERLC resources on social media.

I am a trustee at @ERLC. Our president @LeatherwoodERLC was NOT fired yesterday. See this press release. Brent deserves countless apologies for this error and all the assumptions that came with it. He has proven to be a faithful leader and man of integrity time and again. pic.twitter.com/bUd0w3SbER
— Eric Costanzo (@eric_costanzo) July 23, 2024

In a press release sent out around 8 p.m. Monday, the ERLC announced the executive committee of the board of trustees had removed Leatherwood “in accordance with our bylaws.”

The bylaws allow the executive committee to remove officers without a full trustee vote, so ERLC staff members went ahead and issued the press release when directed to, assuming “they were acting under the appropriate authority of the board,” they later said.

Once the news was out, it was clear people within the ERLC were learning about Leatherwood’s removal for the first time, and Smith had acted on his own.

On Tuesday morning, Smith apologized in a since-deleted post on X:

The trustees of the @erlc steward the entity on behalf of Southern Baptists. In leading them, I made a consequential procedural mistake. The exec cmte and other trustees are Christ-honoring volunteers, who give much.

The mistake was mine; I apologize.

Smith, a pastor in Florida and former executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware, had served on the ERLC board since 2018. He told Baptist Press, “I love the SBC. I love the ERLC. And I trust the Executive Committee to take the best course of action moving forward.”

After the retraction, the executive commitee of trustees clarified the reasoning for the “destabilizing” “flurry of activities” this week:

To be clear, this retraction was about following the procedures laid out in the bylaws of the ERLC, not about responding to pressure from outside organizations. As people who must give an account to God and Southern Baptists for how we have stewarded this commission, we have worked to ensure that every action taken follows the appropriate procedures affirmed by Southern Baptists.

An increasingly vocal minority of Southern Baptists have called for the defunding of the ERLC year after year. Some of their ire has been directed at Leatherwood for his unwillingness to endorse an abolitionist pro-life stance that would criminalize mothers who abort and for his calls for gun reform after his children survived the 2023 shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville.

Yet Leatherwood also has a reputation as an effective and respected leader for Southern Baptists in Washington, DC. At an ERLC luncheon last month, former vice president Mike Pence recognized Leatherwood in particular, saying it was only with his advocacy and partnership that the previous Trump administration was able to advance certain pro-life and religious liberty measures.

The announcement regarding Leatherwood’s removal had pleased some critics but mostly confused Southern Baptists since it came suddenly, outside of a scheduled meeting, and without explanation.

The last time—and only time in recent memory—that an SBC entity president was fired by trustees was in 2018, when Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s board ousted Paige Patterson after a 13-hour-long meeting.

Several Southern Baptist pastors had called for prayer and clarity, affirming the work of ERLC, while others saw the removal as a justified response. The Center for Baptist Leadership—an ultra-conservative group calling for “institutional revitalization within the SBC”—accused Leatherwood of failing to represent their interests and called out his recent comments on Biden.

Over the weekend, Leatherwood had been quoted in Baptist Press as saying, “Despite what some partisans will say, to walk away from power is a selfless act—the kind that has become all too rare in our culture.” He also wrote an article for the publication calling it “an astonishing moment for American history.”

This day should come as no surprise. Still, it is a historic moment. And this decision by President Biden is the right decision for our nation. https://t.co/rJDcI23kQ1
— Brent Leatherwood (@LeatherwoodERLC) July 21, 2024

At the SBC annual meeting in June, Founders Ministry president and Florida pastor Tom Ascol made a motion to abolish the ERLC for becoming “increasingly distant from the values and concerns of the churches that finance it.” The motion—like previous proposals to abolish or defund the entity—failed to receive a majority vote on the floor, though a significant minority raised their ballots.

The ERLC received over $3 million from the SBC’s Cooperative Program last fiscal year, about 1.6 percent of the $191.8 million in Southern Baptist giving that was distributed to denominational entities and activities.

In Leatherwood’s address to the annual meeting, he said, “The work of this Commission is not just rooted in this Convention, it is responsive to this Convention,” bringing up ERLC resources addressing gender confusion and political engagement as well as its advocacy around pro-life policies, international aid, and conscience rights.

“While the executive committee recognizes a wide range of opinions on the work of the ERLC, most visible in a recent attempt to abolish the organization at the 2024 SBC annual meeting, the executive committee does not believe that this discontent rises to the level of a dismissable offense,” the executive commitee said in a clarification on Tuesday.

“Further, any insinuations that the events of the previous days are the result of a moral failing on Brent’s part are wholly false. We find Brent Leatherwood to be a man of utmost moral and ethical integrity.”

Leatherwood succeeded Russell Moore, who led the ERLC until his resignation in 2021.

Moore also faced backlash for his advocacy and messaging, particularly around Donald Trump. He now serves as editor in chief of Christianity Today.

This is a breaking news story and has been updated.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

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Extending invites

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Anthony Sinisuka Ginting (Indonesia)

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Kayla Alexander, Canada

Carlik Jones, South Sudan

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Saidel Horta, Cuba

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Aleah Finnegan, Philippines

Brody Malone, USA

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Geronay Whitebooi, South Africa

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Jerry Tuwai, Fiji

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Rayssa Leal, Brazil

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Adam Peaty, Great Britain

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An industry in crisis

The rise of the Selamat series

Finding new ways to attract readers

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