Sunday Silence: Gateway Church Doesn’t Tell Congregation About Historic Abuse Allegations

Kate Shellnutt

According to the Texas megachurch, founder Robert Morris properly disclosed his misconduct and has had “no other moral failures” since he touched a child in the 1980s.

Robert Morris last preached at Gateway Church on June 3.

YouTube screengrab / Gateway Church

Update: Robert Morris has resigned from Gateway, according to a statement released Tuesday, June 18, from its elder board.

Gateway Church did not address allegations of past abuse—or “moral failure”—by its senior pastor, Robert Morris, when it gathered to worship this weekend, just a couple days after a woman who said he molested her starting at age 12 in the 1980s shared her account online.

The Southlake, Texas–based megachurch made a last-minute change so that its executive pastor, Kemtal Glasgow, could take the stage instead of the guest speaker, Albert Tate, who was scheduled as a part of Gateway’s summer series and who was himself placed on leave last year by his church in California over inappropriate text messaging.

Glasgow, who said he was on his way to church when he got the call that he would be filling in that day, preached about patience, listening, and waiting on the Lord. His message was broadcast across Gateway’s 10 campuses, which draw around 25,000 people in-person each week. He did not mention Morris or any abuse allegations.

Morris, 62, founded Gateway in 2000, and it has grown to become one of the biggest megachurches in the US. He also has a global following, thanks to his programs broadcast on Christian TV and radio. Morris formerly served as a faith advisor to President Trump and had been an advisor for Mark Driscoll’s new church.

Nondenominational and charismatic, Gateway is one of the top producers of evangelical worship music. Singer Kari Jobe served as its previous worship leader, and Gateway Worship music was streamed over 300 million times last year alone. On Sunday, the congregation opened with one of its own hits, singing “Praise the Lord.”

Southlake’s campus pastor, Lorena Valle, also did not bring up the scandal when she spoke to the congregation. A recording of Sunday’s service was posted on the church’s YouTube channel. Comments were disabled.

Gateway did acknowledge the accusations in a statement to media including The Christian Post, saying the church had known of the allegations. Elders wrote that Morris had “been open and forthright about a moral failure he had over 35 years ago when he was in his twenties and prior to him starting Gateway Church.”

The statement came after an Oklahoma woman, Cindy Clemishire, shared her story on The Wartburg Watch on Friday. She told the blog that Morris stayed with her family in Tulsa while working as a youth evangelist and preacher in his early 20s and that he invited her into his room and touched her under her clothing and underwear when she was 12.

Clemishire said that the behavior continued over a four-year span and escalated to an attempt to have intercourse in his car when she was 16. Morris was married at the time and had a child.

In a statement to The Christian Post, Morris said, “When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying. It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years.”

According to Morris, he confessed and repented in 1987, when he was on staff at Shady Grove Church, which later became part of Gateway. Gateway stated that Morris had been subject to a two-year restoration process, including “professional counseling and freedom ministry counseling,” and that since implementing accountability measures, there have been “no other moral failures” in his life.

Clemishire said her father was angry at Morris when she told him about the situation and that he demanded the young pastor get out of ministry. According to her story in The Wartburg Watch, she said she later sought a settlement in 2005 to help cover counseling costs but refused the offer from Morris’s attorney since it included an NDA.

A former pastor at Gateway spoke out on X to urge the church to look beyond Morris’s alleged behavior to the bigger pattern of abuse by Christian leaders.

“The cycle is one that is a much bigger picture than just ‘moral failures’ and the debate about ‘restoration.’ It is a cycle of out of control power dynamics, and manipulation,” wrote Bob Hamp, a licensed therapist who served as the executive pastor of pastoral care at Gateway over a decade ago. “It is a cycle about belief systems in the church and the culture which set us up to support abusive people.”

Morris hasn’t shared a response with his congregation or on social media; he hasn’t posted since Clemishire’s story was published. CT has reached out to both Gateway and Morris for further comment.

The Fort Worth-area megachurch has not indicated that Morris will be subject to additional review or discipline as a result of Clemishire’s disclosure. Elders believed “the matter has been properly disclosed to church leadership” and referred to it as resolved.

The allegations are similar to recent accusations against Mike Bickle, founder of International House of Prayer Kansas City. Earlier this year, a woman came forward with allegations that Bickle began to abuse her in the 1980s when she was 14. The ministry cut ties with Bickle in late 2023 and has since closed.

In many places, the statute of limitations prevents criminal cases from going forward when victims disclose decades-old abuse, but more states—like Louisiana and Washington—are amending laws to allow civil suits from victims of child abuse.

Experts say victims of sexual abuse often take the guilt upon themselves and cannot see themselves as victims until years later. Young women and girls have historically risked being blamed for tempting ministers; Clemishire says she was “forgiven” by Morris’s wife after the story came to light.

Children cannot consent to sexual activity, however. And there’s a further power dynamic when clergy are involved. More experts view the relationships that were once deemed “affairs” as nonconsensual and abusive.

The way we talk about abuse by pastors is significant, according to Hamp, the former Gateway pastor.

“Take these three dynamics: the special leader, the mishandling of sin, and the minimizing labels laden with inaccurate implication, and the entire culture will fight about who was wrong and who should be forgiven and in doing will leave the dangerous dynamics in place. And it will happen again. And it will happen again. And it will happen again,” he said.

“Paul makes it clear that predators should be put out of the church. He does not distinguish which ones should and should not be based on position or popularity.”

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Theology

Bavinck Warned that Without Christianity, Racism and Nationalism Thrive

N. Gray Sutanto

The Dutch theologian argued the biblical worldview is fundamentally incompatible with ethnocentrism.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye

It’s no secret that Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck has enjoyed a renaissance in the past few years, as James Eglinton also pointed out in a previous piece for CT.

Ever since the English translation of Bavinck’s landmark work, Reformed Dogmatics, was released in 2008, there’s been a constant stream of fresh readings of his life and thought. More recently, new translations of lesser known but no less important texts include his Christian Worldview, Christianity and Science, and Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion; and new editions have been published of Philosophy of Revelation, based on his 1908 Stone Lectures, and The Wonderful Works of God.

Theologians like me are also rediscovering the neo-Calvinist tradition shaped by Bavinck and his fellow Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, and examining how these thinkers might engage with cultural issues today, including our nation’s reckoning with racism. And while many have recently (and rightly) criticized Kuyper’s checkered legacy on this issue, they have often neglected Bavinck’s contributions on the subject, which many scholars see as an improvement on Kuyper.

Bavinck’s assessment has enduring lessons for American Christians living in a polarized political climate. Similar to Bavinck’s own context of 19th-century Europe, those in the US today are confronted by the challenges of living in an increasingly post-Christian culture. This has led to heated debates on the identity of America, Christian nationalism, and how we can all find common ground amid our substantial differences.

Bavinck and Kuyper’s neo-Calvinist Christian worldview, for instance, affirmed the diversity of reality but saw that this diversity reflects a greater unity. Since the Creator is Triune, they observed, the world often conforms to patterns of unities-in-diversities. Yet Bavinck believed this motif held further implications for humanity itself.

As I’ve shown elsewhere, Bavinck argued that the image of God (imago Dei) refers not only to us as individuals but to humanity as a whole. As theologian Richard Mouw writes, Bavinck articulates how the image of God unfolds itself “in the rich diversity of humankind spread over many places and times,” as the human race disperses across the globe and develops organically differentiated cultures, languages, and contexts. These differences are not ossified or static but coalesce in beautiful and surprising ways through the Spirit-wrought union of God’s kingdom.

In short, Bavinck believed the glory of God is revealed more clearly through humanity’s diversity, and this diversity is held together by a common confession of Jesus as Lord. The global church is a corporate people from every tribe and tongue—a renewed humanity fulfilling its telos under Christ’s Lordship.

But Bavinck coupled this positive vision with harsh warnings against racism and nationalism. In two texts, Christian Worldview and Philosophy of Revelation, Bavinck anticipated the rise of Eurocentric nationalism. In a forthcoming book, I explore how Bavinck detected these developments in German philosophy at the turn of the 20th century—which eventually set the stage for Hitler’s regime, World War II, and the Holocaust.

Bavinck attributed these ideological changes to the decline of Christian faith in Europe. When humans cease to worship God, they will substitute divine with creaturely realities (Rom. 1:25). Thus, he said, any society that departs from the Christian faith will naturally nurture racism and nationalism.

If God is not the source of defining what is true, good, and beautiful, then morality must be grounded in humanity. And if humanity is not “generic” or “universal” but diverse and ever evolving, then one must decide which humanity at which point in history becomes the standard for moral evaluation. In Bavinck’s context, that benchmark was Aryan nationalism (which he referred to as “pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, and so on”), which saw the Aryan race as the apex of universal humanity and therefore the embodiment of normativity.

Bavinck cites some of the “eloquent” early thought leaders whose emerging racist ideology influenced Bavinck’s contemporaries—and whose ideas eventually led to reconfiguring Jesus himself as the ultimate symbol of the Aryan race.

Since every religion looks to a historical figure as the source for their revelation, the new German nationalism needed to refashion Jesus into “the purest type of the Aryan or Germanic race” in order to “retain” his authority. “Jesus did not come from Israel but from the Aryans,” they determined, because all other and past cultures are primitive, including the Jews. “How foolish is the one who believes Jesus was not a Jew, that he was an Aryan” writes Bavinck, “and that the Bible, in which every heretic finds his proof text, gives the evidence for the matter.”

This “revival of the race consciousness” was further reinforced, according to Bavinck, by the historical view many philosophers held in his time: that each successive stage of human history ascended to their present age, which (conveniently) was depicted as the most evolved and cultured. Thus, the Aryan stock is seen as the dominant and superior race to which all the greatest achievements of Europe (and hence the world) could be credited.

The result, Bavinck observed, was that the “so-called pure historical view turns into the most biased construction of history.” By locating ethics within their own history and projecting their culture as if it were the absolute norm, the Germans posited themselves as the arbitrator and pinnacle of history and eclipsed all other nations and people groups. They untethered their “master race” from accountability to a transcendent revelation of God, which allowed them to inflict oppressive coercion on all “inferior” races and reject any other culture from being a source of correction.

These ideas were coupled with the emerging practice of eugenics—where evolutionary theory and natural science were applied to the notion of creating a superhuman race (Übermensch). What if, for example, the process of natural selection by “survival of the fittest” could be accelerated by winnowing out genetic weaknesses to “purify and perfect” the human race? Thus, philosophers, scientists, and psychologists joined together in the goal to deliver humanity from its miseries—or, as Bavinck put it, “to improve the racial qualities of humankind in an artificial way.”

Bavinck connects these trending theories to the aspirations of German philosophers to present themselves as the bearers of some form of eschatological salvation to the world. He observes that these thinkers do not merely reject Christianity because they perceive it to be false, but because it is seen as bad for the future’s development: “If modern culture is to advance, it must wholly reject the influence of Christianity and break completely with the old worldview.”

Why? As Bavinck explains, whereas modern human hope was believed to be wholly “this-worldly,” Christianity was seen by his European contemporaries as “indifferent to this life,” since its hope ultimately lies in an otherworldly kingdom, eternity, heaven, and God. In other words, hope in tangible human achievements is surer than hope in intangible divine realities.

Seeing a particular human society or nation as the primary bearer of ethical civilization, Bavinck reasoned, fills the eschatological void left by removing Christian hope from modern society. If moral law is not found in the transcendent but in the immanent, then so is heaven. In this case, a utopian society is modeled by whichever nationality represents the “height” of humanity.

These ideological developments, which were all in vogue at the time, paint a bleak picture indeed. What was Bavinck’s response—and what alternative did he propose?

In his Philosophy of Revelation, Bavinck points out the insurmountable problems with transposing the scientific principles of naturalistic evolution onto the social history of humanity. This instinct reflects a form of monism, he argued, which reduces the rich diversity of created life into singular uniformity—as if an explanation that works well in one sphere can be used for all areas of life.

Attempts to craft a grand historical narrative often privileges one nation or people group over others, he further argued, and ignores the unity of the human race across time and space. More than that, claiming that each century is intrinsically and holistically better than the previous one fails to acknowledge that “high civilization” existed in antiquity, even more advanced than us in some ways, and that the same vices of ancient times still plague our contemporary cultures.

Instead of a linear story of progressive development culminating in one nation or master philosophy, Bavinck believed that history is pluriform, a rich and multifaceted maze, and that it recounts a united humanity—across all of its particularities, locations, and time periods.

And to avoid the supremacist instinct to elevate one nation or phase of history, Bavinck argued, the historical sciences must be rooted in Christian theism. That’s because historians require a unique, divine “revelation” to assert that “all creatures … are embraced, and are held together by one leading thought, by one counsel of God.” To believe in the unity of humanity, which is the “presupposition of all of history,” is a claim “made known to us only by Christianity.”

Rather than seeing one culture or ethnicity as the universal expression of true humanity, Christianity for Bavinck teaches that “the unity of humanity does not exclude but rather includes the differentiation of humanity in race, in character, in attainment, in calling, and in many other things.”

Bavinck writes that this “variety has been destroyed by sin and changed into all kinds of opposition” ever since “the unity of humanity was dissolved into a multiplicity of peoples and nations.” But instead of seeking the “false unity” of a worldly monism, preserving humanity’s rich differentiation requires that the “unity of all creation is not sought in the things themselves but transcendently … in a divine being, in his wisdom and power, in his will and counsel.”

In other words, affirming Christianity means rejecting humanly fabricated uniformity and embracing divinely ordained diversity. Only salvation in Christ and fellowship in his Spirit, divine revelation and redemption, can restore and achieve the ideal of humanity’s true, organic unity in diversity.

As human beings, our unity and differentiation, identity and dignity, are all ultimately secured in Christ—who Bavinck calls the “kernel” that revealed the “plan, progress and aim” of history, and who evacuated our sinful tendency to exalt ourselves as the historical ideal. In other words, history’s center, aim, progress, and ultimate end is not found in humanity but in Christ.

The only worldview that “answers the diversity and richness of the world,” writes Bavinck, is one that insists history is governed by divine will. Not only that, but we must believe God willingly entered into the world “historically,” in the person of Jesus Christ, to lift it “up to the heights” of “the kingdom of heaven.”

The heavenly utopia we seek, then, is not a result of human historical progress but a divine work of God: “If there is ever to be a humanity one in heart and one in soul, then it must be born out of return to the one living and true God.”

In today’s increasingly polarized age, Bavinck’s message of humanity’s unified diversity is more needed than ever. Instead of assuming our worldview is ultimate or superior to those in other contexts, Bavinck reminds us of the prophetic witness of God’s universal message of reconciliation embodied in Jesus Christ.

Bavinck’s anthropological reflections are certainly not perfect. He remains a man of the 19th century and, at times, reflects analyses or language that 21st-century readers would reject (for instance, his language of “high” and “low” cultures). But it’s remarkable that, at the turn of the 20th century, Bavinck foresaw the dangers of the emerging eugenics, racism, and nationalism in German philosophy—which were in vogue at the time, even among Christians.

In the centuries leading up to the horrors of WWII, when it was believed that the “German spirit shall heal the world,” Bavinck presented a transcendent eschatological vision—one advanced not by human hands but initiated by God’s divine will. And in a post-Christian era, then and now, Bavinck reminds us that the nefarious roots of racism and nationalism trace back to a rejection of Christian claims—which ground our dignity, our morality, and our ultimate hope in God.

N. Gray Sutanto is associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. He is author, editor, and translator of several books, including God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology and the T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism.

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Theology

Faithful Fathers

Brad East

Reports of the death of fatherhood have been greatly exaggerated. There are many good dads, like mine, quietly blessing their children.

Cohen / Ostrow / Getty / Edits by CT

Problems with fathers are nothing new. They go back to the beginning. Genesis alone is a vast catalog of fathers’ sins, whether those of Adam, Noah, and Lot, or the patriarchs themselves.

What about good fathers, though? Here is C. S. Lewis, writing in the 1940s:

We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man’s early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central.

I first read these words in my teens, when a youth minister—a spiritual father in his own way—began putting Lewis and G. K. Chesterton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in my hands. This excerpt comes from the opening page of a MacDonald anthology Lewis edited. The Scottish pastor, preacher, and novelist’s writings were crucial to Lewis’s conversion, so much so that Lewis called him “my master.”

Lewis writes that MacDonald had “an almost perfect relationship with his father.” This is remarkable on its face. But is it unique?

I don’t think so. Fatherlessness is a real problem, but reports of the death of fatherhood have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the reason Lewis’s comment resonated when I was in high school was that it named my own experience. True, few of us would reach for the phrase almost perfect to talk about our dads. But good, loving, and faithful all fit the bill. Some of us actually want to be like our dads when we grow up—even once we have, technically speaking, already grown up and become husbands and fathers ourselves.

You might not know this from how we tend to mark Father’s Day. Sometimes it takes the form of shaming fathers for their failures, real and imagined. In May, no one can say enough about the glories of motherhood. But once June rolls around, we overflow about the shortcomings of the modern father. Other times, in our (understandable) eagerness to praise God as the perfect father, our talk of fatherhood drifts into abstraction and out-of-reach ideals. Flesh-and-blood dads in the pews never quite measure up; who could?

For this Father’s Day, then, here’s my proposal: Rather than focusing on fatherhood in general, let’s talk about particular fathers. None of us has an abstract dad. The only dads around are three-dimensional. Some of them, true, are guilty of the many paternal crimes with which we are so familiar. But far from all. So what are the particular virtues of particular fathers, yours or mine?

When I think of my own father, three virtues come immediately to mind.

The first has to do with blessing. Fathers are agents of blessing. Children wither away without it; with it, they venture into the world as if cloaked by an impenetrable shield. Think of the tragedy of the Von Erich family, as portrayed in the film The Iron Claw: a father with six sons, five of whom preceded him in death, three by suicide.

My colleague Randy Harris (incidentally, another spiritual father of mine) recently spoke about the so-called Von Erich “curse”:

The movie would have us think that that’s not quite right. It’s not quite a curse. What it is, is what happens when sons chase an elusive blessing from their father that never really comes. And maybe I’m taken a bit with that reading because I’ve worked with students and ministers long enough to see what happens when a son or daughter doesn’t have the blessing of their father. … If you’re a father and you haven’t given your child that blessing recently, you might think about doing that. It’s one of the most important things.

We know from Scripture that a father’s blessing bears enormous significance. But what is it, exactly? It’s not approval or affirmation. Nor is it friendship or commonality. No, a father’s blessing is his favor—his unconditional, unapologetic, unquenchable yes to one’s whole being. It’s his love in the form of a lifelong gift, impervious to threat of loss. It’s the public declaration: “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

The biblical patriarchs’ blessings are one-time affairs, and are all the more vulnerable for that. In our lives, paternal blessing is less a single moment than a posture stretched out across childhood and beyond. A father’s blessing says, I am for you, come what may—even if what comes, as in the parable of the prodigal, is a son who spurns him.

I have never known a day in my life without my father’s blessing. It’s a security without measure, a gift without earthly rival. Besides faith in Christ, it’s the thing I most hope I am imparting to my own young children—more than happiness, more than health, more than a successful future. Thomas à Kempis calls life without Christ “a relentless hell.” I won’t say the same for a life without a father’s blessing, but our culture is awash in stories that don’t share my reticence.

This brings to mind my father’s second virtue: the will to break destructive cycles and the resolve to protect life-giving ones.

My father didn’t grow up wanting to be like his father, who was mean and distant and drank too much. By God’s grace, my dad entered college an atheist and left a married Christian. Meeting Christ meant a revolution for his trajectory as a man, above all as a husband and father. With the Spirit’s help, he would be faithful: to Christ, to his wife, and eventually to his three sons.

“Success” for him wasn’t measured by the standards of the world—pleasure, money, image, or other external marks. It was measured by fidelity. Not perfection, not sinlessness, but faithfulness. A faithfulness that included repentance, which is the only kind on offer for Christians.

There is a famous quote attributed to Frank Clark: “A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be.” A pessimistic interpretation would see this line as an elegy for all the ways fathers fail to be all they ought (or sought) to be. A more hopeful reading would see it as a vision of fatherhood that is both realistic—I will fail—and self-giving—I will succeed if my son surpasses me. If, in other words, my son becomes a better father than I was, and his son a better father than he was, and so on, forever. That is what my own father wanted.

Fatherhood as an aspirational, incremental, generational improvement—ensuring steps backward never surpass steps forward—requires a powerful resolve in two directions. On one hand, it means fiercely repudiating all the history, circumstances, and temptations that would make fidelity less likely. On the other, it means protecting, renewing, and handing on all the good we have received from others or built ourselves. This kind of fatherhood requires an indomitable will: the will to love, the will to sacrifice, the will to be faithful no matter the cost.

Third and finally, a dad is a teacher. Mine certainly was. Like it or not, all fathers instruct, and not only through example.

My catechesis came in the car. Little did I know that our minivan was not a means of transporting me to basketball tournaments around Texas. It was a devious device, somehow legal, designed to trap me for hours of undesired conversation: about God, about girls, about work ethic. About anything and everything I didn’t want to talk about. But what could I do? Even if I didn’t speak, I was forced to listen.

These conversations were seeds that, in some cases, took a long time to sprout, much less to blossom. And no doubt they sometimes were as painful for my dad as they were for me. But they were far more important than the usual lessons, some of which took (how to ride a bike or shoot a free throw) and some of which did not (how to fix a car or work a spreadsheet).

“You will know them by their fruit,” Jesus said of his disciples (Matt. 7:16, NASB). The same goes for fathers.

Last December, my brothers and our wives gathered in the back room of an Austin restaurant with a few dozen of my parents’ friends (and by “friends” I mean sisters and brothers in Christ with whom they have lived, led, rejoiced, wept, worshiped, and served since I was in diapers). We were there to celebrate my father’s retirement from the company where he had worked for more than 40 years.

My brothers and I each spoke, trying to explain what made our dad so good—as a mentor, as a teacher, as a faithful follower of Christ. For us, the question answered itself: This man lived a good life because he lived the good life. He knew what mattered and committed himself entirely to it.

Fathers live well not when their lives go well, but when they live as God wills regardless how life goes. Their children see it. I saw it. Such a life is itself all the blessing a child needs; it opens every right door and closes all the wrong ones.

My kids call him Pop-E. The eldest son, I raised my glass and told the room, I want to be like Pop-E when I grow up.

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.

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Theology

Paternity Leave Made Me a Better Christian Dad

Andrew Egger

Time off at the very beginning helps fathers prepare to bring up their children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

Redd / Unsplash

When our first daughter was born, in the fall of 2021, she couldn’t nurse properly. For my wife, feeding her was an every-few-hours exercise in pure pain. Lactation consultants were consulted, to little avail; a minor tongue-tie operation, newly trendy in such cases, didn’t help either. We thought about switching to formula, but my wife was dead set on seeing nursing through.

So we triple-fed: She would nurse the baby through gritted teeth for as long as she could stand it, while I tried my best to distract her—singing songs, reading, putting something on the TV. Then I’d take the kid and finish the feeding by bottle while my wife pumped. As it turned out, the baby just needed to get a little bigger. By eight weeks, my wife’s pain was gone.

When our second daughter was born last year, the process seemed to restart—then unexpectedly cleared up in week two. The bigger challenge, it turned out, was managing the emotions of the now-toddler, who found herself, unexpectedly, no longer the center of the known universe.

After a period of protest, she settled into a new equilibrium. Yes, mom had a new baby, but she still had dad. For those first few weeks, the toddler and I were inseparable. (I made time for mom and baby too!) Soon, she had grown to like her little sister enough for us all to reintegrate as one happy family.

Both these stories have a key subtext: I was on paternity leave. Under my then-employer’s heroically generous, deliberately pro-family policy, I was free to take up to 12 weeks off per child to help my wife recover from childbirth and to bond with our new arrival.

I was lucky; that arrangement is rare. Most American fathers take only a short stint of paternity leave when their children are born, if any. Despite a growing number of companies and states offering some form of time off for dads—Washington implemented a 12-week standard for all federal employees back in 2022—and surveys finding that a majority of Americans support the practice, the median US father still takes just a single week of leave. Seven in ten take two weeks or less.

Some of this is simple corporate policy; many fathers would take more leave if their place of work accommodated it. But there’s also a reason so many companies get away without offering much: There’s still a good deal of complicated cultural resistance to new dads taking time off too, with masculine anxieties about being seen as insufficiently driven at work coming into play. Even in countries with generous government-funded paternity leave—South Korea and Japan, for instance—many fathers don’t take time off.

For conservative US Christians in particular, the concept of paternity leave can seem to cut against a number of our own political and cultural instincts. Some might roll their eyes at employers—to say nothing of taxpayers—being asked to foot the bill for a dad’s stay at home with a newborn. He’s not the one recovering from childbirth, after all, an important and essential biological distinction.

Others might see in a society that prioritizes maternity leave in particular a healthy assertion of traditional gender roles. That holds true whether a child is biological or adopted. Moms stay home with their kids—playing and nurturing, washing and feeding. Dads get back out there and work.

But the biggest driver of many Christians’ skepticism of paternity leave is the same as in the culture at large: simple inertia. People didn’t use to have the luxury of paid paternity leave, they reason, and they managed to make do. Having dad at home is an extravagance the baby won’t even remember.

Dads who do take leave often encounter this inclination even from well-meaning friends and acquaintances: How’s your time off treating you? Managing to fill up the hours? Bet you’re itching to get back to it, huh?

It’s past time for Christians to revisit this attitude. We know that fatherhood is no low calling, no secondary role. Fathers are primarily tasked not with paying for groceries and college educations—though that’s good too—but bringing up their children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4, ESV throughout). The Book of Proverbs is one long fatherly instruction in righteousness: “Hear, O sons, a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you may gain insight, for I give you good precepts; do not forsake my teaching” (4:1–2).

Scripture shows us good fathers who are immediate and intimate, wise and compassionate—welcoming home a prodigal son with a feast (Luke 15:20–24), prepared to die in peace after seeing a beloved child’s face one last time (Gen. 46:29). Ultimately, of course, fatherhood is a duty modeled for us by God our father—no absent provider, but a father who warmly invites us to approach him in love.

Do fathers need paternity leave to fulfill this calling? Of course not. But obliging a father to rush back to work just a week or two after birth stacks the deck against that vocation in all sorts of ways, even if, to start, there’s more diaper changing than “discipline and instruction.” All at once, a joint effort becomes a solo project on mom’s part to discover, navigate, and surmount the various challenges of early parenthood—the challenges through which one learns what it is to be a parent.

Almost by default, dad becomes a bystander to this process. Far from providing spiritual leadership to his family, he can find himself retreating into the role of secondary parent, somebody who’s happy to leave all the hard parts of the job to mom, the battle-tested expert who knows where the diaper rash ointment is and how to pick up a slippery infant from a bath.

I’m sure we ultimately would’ve muddled through the small challenges I mentioned above without the blessing of paternity leave. Triple-feeding our first daughter wouldn’t have been an option, so we would’ve just switched to formula. Nothing wrong with formula!

Still, after giving up on breastfeeding the first time, odds are we would have done the same the second time around too—and after two such failures to launch, why even bother to try again in the future, should we be blessed with more children?

Our toddler would have found other ways to cope with early sisterhood, as my wife with the thousand little struggles of early motherhood.

But I’m grateful both to God and to my former employer that, in those formative first few months, my family wasn’t obliged to figure out the contours of a new life in which I was only an occasional presence from the jump. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to pause my life as I knew it then for a few short weeks to accommodate our brand-new one—that instead of learning how to cram fatherhood into whatever gaps in my work, I was able to take my crash course in rudimentary fatherhood, then go figure out how my job was going to fit in with that.

So, companies: Offer it! Christians: Embrace it! Dads: Take it—and then spread the word!

Andrew Egger is the White House correspondent at The Bulwark.

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Theology

You Abused and Oppressed Me, Dad. I Forgive You.

Carrie Sheffield

How a community’s example of radical forgiveness helped me relinquish my own rage.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Father’s Day is a multibillion-dollar affair. In the weeks leading up to it, men’s ties, BBQ aprons, and golf-themed gifts fly off the shelves.

My own view on Father’s Day has a complicated history. After an abusive, impoverished childhood (detailed in my recent memoir, Motorhome Prophecies), I sometimes felt an anger toward my dad as intense as what Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist painter, felt toward his own father.

I first fell in love with this brilliant artist while visiting a museum dedicated to his work in sunny St. Petersburg, Florida. It’s a futuristic, fantastical building filled with spacious, airy light flowing through a glass atrium entryway attached to 18-inch thick concrete. It’s a captivating and fitting home for this revolutionary man who pushed the boundaries intersecting art, science, and metaphysics.

Dalí clashed for decades with his father, a mid-level civil servant who didn’t appreciate his son’s creative, rebellious nature or his association with the surrealist movement. Adding insult to injury, he disapproved of his son’s muse and future wife, Gala. Dalí said he considered his true father to be psychologist Sigmund Freud, and later, quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. Legend has it that Dalí gave his biological father a condom containing the artist’s own sperm, exclaiming, “Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!”

Obviously, that’s disgusting. But I confess there was a time in my life when I might have considered buying a sperm sample from a donor bank and sending it to my dad. I thought he’d die before I’d ever speak to him again.

God’s healing balm

As I shared earlier this year for CT, I grew up within an offshoot Mormon cult led by my father, who claimed to be a prophet. I lived with seven biological siblings in various motor homes, tents, houses, and sheds.

Besides time spent in homeschooling, I attended 17 different public schools. When I took my ACT exam, we lived in a shed with no furnace or running water in the Ozarks, where winter temperatures can hover around the freezing mark. Sometimes, we didn’t have food. I have two siblings with schizophrenia, including one brother who tried to rape me and one who accused me of trying to seduce him. I’ve suffered nine hospital visits for complications around depression, fibromyalgia, suicidal ideation, and PTSD.

My dad told my brothers they deserved their schizophrenia. And he warned me against leaving home for college, prophesying “in the name of Jesus” that I’d be raped and murdered. Despite all this, I landed a full journalism scholarship to Harvard, where I earned a master’s degree. Since then, I’ve largely enjoyed a productive career and a life filled with travel, adventure, and caring friends, though it’s been scarred with periodic episodes of severe depression.

Eventually, though I never thought it possible, I forgave my father for what he did to me, my mother, and my siblings. Only through an unlikely series of events did I reach the point of visiting this man’s birthday celebration, grateful for the gifts he did impart and able to forgive the mental agony that made me want to kill myself. (Sadly, three of my siblings have attempted suicide.)

The journey started with my Christian conversion, a decision that began the process of opening my heart to God’s healing balm of forgiveness. Shortly after my baptism, Anthony B. Thompson became a spiritual mentor to me. Anthony is pastor of Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and author of Called to Forgive: The Charleston Church Shooting, a Victim’s Husband, and the Path to Healing and Peace.

We met through a Bronx pastor friend named Dimas Salaberrios, who invited me to a Manhattan screening of his documentary, Emanuel. Coproduced with Viola Davis and Stephen Curry, it tells the story of the 2015 shooting of nine parishioners at Charleston’s predominantly Black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Anthony and I immediately connected over our shared passion for discerning God’s call on our lives.

Anthony’s wife, Myra, was among those murdered by the white supremacist killer, 21-year-old Dylann Roof. Mother Emanuel Church, as parishioners know it, is a historic church with a venerable history in the struggle for civil rights. Anthony and other family members of “the Charleston Nine” shocked the world with their incredible act of forgiveness in the face of such a heinous act.

Roof, a scrawny neo-Nazi with an allegedly violent father, had driven more than 100 miles across the state in hopes of sparking a race war. Instead, Charleston experienced the transformative power of forgiveness. Love and unity reigned, sparing the city the violence and destruction often seen after episodes of racial injustice. The words of the victims’ families carried enormous weight, and even though there was deep anguish in their voices, their message was loud and clear: Hate and vengeance had no place in their hearts.

As a pastor, Anthony followed up with the murderer and visited him in prison to reiterate his message of forgiveness, urging this intransigent monster to pray for God’s mercy and submit his life to Jesus.

For me, Anthony’s book on forgiveness proved invaluable. It knocks down all the major myths that keep us from practicing it. All too easily, we imagine forgiving others means downplaying or excusing the sin and harm involved. Or that forgiving makes you weak and passive. Or that forgiving means you must let an abuser hurt you again.

None of these statements are true. First and foremost, forgiveness is an act of obedience to God. And even if you don’t believe in God, science proves that forgiveness is a powerful, healing antibiotic for victims around the world. For example, scholars with the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health recently produced a randomized trial showing forgiveness improved depression and anxiety and promoted flourishing in five relatively high-conflict countries: Colombia, South Africa, Ukraine, Indonesia, and Hong Kong.

Forgiveness helps release us from the emotional and mental cancers of vengeance, insecurity, rage, and fear. It obliterates the power that abusers maintain over us by releasing their control over our minds and hearts. Though we still might suffer bodily, financially, or in other ways, we have begun to steel ourselves against the dangers of self-sabotage.

Anthony built an exemplary life as a pastor and is now a symbol of God’s redemptive power for millions of people. I knew that if he could forgive, then I could also.

With Anthony’s mentoring, along with numerous prayer circles with other Christian friends, I learned to release my visceral hatred of the man who’d brought me endless shame and regret. The man who spoke curses over me, abandoned me, and likely drove my two sweet brothers to insanity, stealing any possibility of a normal life.

The deep healing prayer ministries that helped me, including Sozo and deliverance prayer, involved a prayer minister or two talking and praying with me through specific events and traumas. We talked through how God was present in each of those moments and their aftermath, even if he seemed silent and distant. We reclaimed each moment and released the residual pain and sorrow in my heart and mind. Though pain returned, it gradually dissipated and is significantly reduced today.

In my late 30s, after years of not speaking to him, I visited Dad at home with Mom and my two schizophrenic brothers for a simple meal. It was surprisingly peaceful. Battling dementia, Dad was still coherent and able to hold a conversation, though there were moments when he seemed to drift off and his sky-blue eyes glazed over. There were no recriminations, no fire and brimstone accusations, no hateful sermons.

Honoring the dishonorable

We often get our view of God from our earthly fathers. That’s one reason our crisis of fatherlessness hits society so hard. Numerous studies show fatherlessness and paternal child abuse are crucial factors in whether a child drops out of high school, falls into drugs and gangs, commits crimes, or becomes a single teenage mother. Whether we suffer the trauma of abuse or abandonment, this often leads us to forget who our real father is—God, our infinite source of love, joy, and purpose.

Billy Graham said, “A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.” He’s right. My rage against my father manifested itself in how I disrespected myself, my romantic partners, and others in my life. I needed to forgive everyone in my life (including toxic coworkers, various church leaders, cheating exes, and others) and ask God to forgive me. There were LDS church leaders who hurt me, but many others who cared for and helped me. I needed to forgive all the hurt and release my anger.

Graham also wrote:

The Bible clearly says, “Honor thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12, KJV). This passage sets no age limit on such honor. It does not say they must be honorable to be honored. This does not necessarily mean that we must “obey” parents who may be dishonorable. We must honor them. Honor has many shapes and affections.

In many ways, my father lived a dishonorable life, but that doesn’t mean I should retaliate and dishonor him by sending him a package of sperm or yelling at him on my grandparents’ grave. It means I must live in a way that brings him honor, both to him as a person and to my family name. The more I study the effects of childhood sexual and emotional abuse, the more my heart grieves for the pain my father suffered.

For me, Father’s Day now means reflecting on the good my father gave me while forgiving the rest. Though I thought my father was the villain, I now see how he had suffered himself. He had been crushed by severe religious zealotry born of mental illness, the result of enduring sexual assault as a toddler followed by isolation as well as the death of his best childhood friend. He’s no more or less deserving of God’s mercy and compassion than I am.

I pray for his life, especially during his struggles at age 86 with Alzheimer’s. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Carrie Sheffield is the author of Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness. This essay is adapted from the book.

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Theology

Church ‘Homelessness’ Must Not Be Grieved Too Quickly

Russell Moore

It’s okay to mourn what’s lost without losing hope for what’s to come.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

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

In his New York Times column this week, my friend David French wrote about what it was like to be “canceled” by his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. He later told me how stunned he was by how many people responded immediately—grieving their own “cancellations” from churches or ministries they’d loved and served.

I was not surprised at all.

Most people, of course, aren’t canceled in the way we typically use that word, but in a way more like the situation described by the late Will Campbell. He wasn’t “fired” by the National Council of Churches, he would joke. They just unleashed a swarm of bees in his office every day until he voluntarily left.

Similarly, many people who feel “homeless” these days aren’t told by their home churches or traditions, “Get out!” Instead, they face a quieter form of exile.

They face those they love, who expect them to conform to new rules of belonging. Sometimes, that’s to some totalizing political loyalty. Sometimes, it’s to a willingness to “get over” their opposition to whatever their church or ministry leaders now deem to be acceptable sins. Sometimes, this doesn’t even happen to these people in their own churches but in their larger theological or denominational homes, or vice versa. It’s confusing. It’s disorienting. It’s sometimes angering.

What it really is, though, is grief.

People who’ve faced this in their own contexts often ask me, “How long does it take to get over this?” I usually quote the landslide-losing presidential candidate George McGovern when he was asked a similar question by later landslide-losing candidate Walter Mondale: “I’ll let you know when I get there.” But an earlier version of myself would have had a completely different view.

When I was a young doctoral student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I hosted a panel discussion on the topic of war and peace on our campus during the weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. I wanted a genuine debate—not just a caricature of one—so I sought to include a pacifist in the group, ending up with the pastor of a very progressive Baptist congregation in our community, one that had long parted ways with our denomination after years of controversy.

Afterward, the pastor said that he didn’t think those of us on the conservative side of the split really understood what it was like to lose a sense of belonging, a sense of home. “It’s like going through a divorce,” he said.

In all of my punkish arrogance, I responded, “Actually, it’s more like after the divorce when the ex keeps showing up on the lawn with a bullhorn, despite the restraining order.” My implicit message was, The controversy is over. We won. You lost. Move on.

All the ways I was wrong would require an entire book, but here’s one of them: I had no idea that trauma here was not a metaphor. What this pastor described was not about Robert’s Rules of Order or even about which systematic theology textbooks would be taught at the alma mater. He was expressing grief, and I did not know what that was like until decades later.

We would not tell someone who’s experienced the loss of a parent, sibling, spouse, or lifelong friend to “get over it” or “move on.” Most of us would do what Jesus did with Mary and Martha, grieving the death of Lazarus: weep right alongside those who experienced the loss (John 11:35). Many of us, though, are less sure what to do when we ourselves experience this kind of grief, this kind of loss. In fact, many people want to hear, in a moment of unexpected church homelessness, a word of hope.

I say: Not so fast.

The hope is real, of course—and that’s not just in the Book of Revelation kind of long-term view, but right now. God is doing something new. Old alliances are shaken, but new ones are being formed.

In the civic political space, many of us are finding that the fundamental division isn’t where we’re used to it being, between the left and the right, but straight through them. People with fundamental differences on important issues are finding that what unites or divides them is whether democratic principles and constitutional norms are needed to have those critically important debates.

The same is happening in the religious space. We are accustomed to the dividing lines we knew whenever we came of age: Calvinist versus Arminian, cessationist versus charismatic, complementarian versus egalitarian. The dividing lines are in different places now, and unusual alliances are forming. From the very beginning of the church, God has worked with what one scholar describes as “patient ferment.” Change is always disorienting, and often painful.

And much of what God has to do can only come out of this kind of shaking. “I think that to overcome regionalism, you must have a great deal of self-knowledge,” Flannery O’Connor once said. “I think that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the world, and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world. So that you have a great deal of detachment.”

O’Connor needed a rootedness—a sense of being a Southerner and of knowing other Southerners, specifically Bible Belt Protestants. She also needed, though, a kind of exile—the experience of being a Roman Catholic minority in Milledgeville, Georgia. Whatever is next—perhaps the conforming of the American church more closely to the global body of Christ—requires the kind of change that can feel scary. And many of us will grieve what is lost.

For some of us, we need to give heed to what Jesus said to his followers: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32, ESV throughout). Grief shouldn’t cause us to look perpetually backward. But many also need to remember too that Jesus, even as he said for us to expect it, recognized that losing one’s home base would be painful (Matt. 10:17–21).

The apostle Paul told us that we were to “rejoice” in our sufferings, but he did not tell us to see them as anything less than suffering. Instead, we are to see that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame” (Rom. 5:3–5). To short-circuit endurance and character to get straight to hope is to do something different than what the Holy Spirit does.

People who do not allow themselves the time to grieve what is lost, in my experience, often end up in bad places. Some of them wind up with a cynicism that sees all connection as suspect—and we know what happens to human beings when we give ourselves to isolation. Some of them, in the fullness of time, end up pursuing the mirror image of what they once had, as though the antidote to every problem were the opposite of it. Fundamentalisms of those on the right become fundamentalisms of those on the left, or vice versa. The end of that path is disillusionment and exhaustion.

That’s why T. S. Eliot, in my favorite poem, “East Coker,” writes:

I said to my soul, be still, and without hope
For hope would hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

For those who feel homeless, grieve with hope—but remember, there actually is a place called Home. And don’t forget that even in hope, it’s okay to grieve.

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

News

PCA Will Investigate ‘Jesus Calling’ Book

Emily Belz

The author of the bestseller died last year. The investigation will determine if the book is appropriate for Christians.

Sarah Young was the bestselling author of "Jesus Calling."

Courtesy of Jesus Calling / Edits by Rick Szeucs

The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) at its annual meeting on Thursday voted to investigate the Christian appropriateness of the best-selling book Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, who was part of the PCA and died in August last year at age 77. Young was one of the most-read evangelicals of the last 20 years.

Pastors in the denomination are concerned that Young’s use of the voice of Jesus in the book undermines the concept of sola Scriptura and might amount to heresy. The book was published in 2004, and criticisms of its theology from leaders in the denomination have already been widely circulated.

In addition to having a degree from the denomination’s Covenant Theological Seminary, Young was the wife of a PCA elder and missionary to Japan, Steve Young.

At the debate on the measure, the recent widower rose and spoke to the room of several thousand church leaders, asking the assembly to vote against the investigation.

“Her writings did not add to Scripture but explain it,” Steve Young said. “She would stand with Martin Luther and declare that her conscience was captive to the Word of God.”

He went on: “Sarah is a sister in Christ and wife who delighted in the law of the Lord, and on his law she meditated day and night. She was led to share her meditations with the world.”

Young herself said her devotions were meant to be read “with your Bible open.”

The measure passed by a relatively close vote, 947–834, with 20 abstentions. It directs two denominational committees to answer a set of questions on the book and to each issue a report.

The committees must look at the denominational agencies’ history with the book and must “assess the book’s appropriateness for Christians in general and PCA members and congregations in particular with special regard for its doctrine and method.”

One of the committee reports will come from Mission to the World (MTW), the denominational mission agency through which Sarah Young and her husband were missionaries. MTW’s report must “examine MTW’s relationship with the book, knowledge of its content, and any counsel given to the author” and “consider actions that MTW and the General Assembly should take in light of this study of the book and of the agency’s relationship to it.”

Those supporting the measure said the reports would be useful.

“This book in question is perhaps the best-selling book by any member of the PCA,” said pastor Zachary Groff, speaking in favor of the investigation.

Chuck Williams, another church leader, said he was concerned about anyone “claiming an immediate revelation from God.” (Young’s editors at Thomas Nelson said she was clear that she did not have “new revelations.”)

Those opposed to the measure thought it was an unusual undertaking for the denomination to investigate a book and thought it was inappropriate given the timing after her death.

A pastor from Tennessee, Daniel Wells, said he knew Young’s extended family.

“They are still grieving,” he said, urging a vote against the measure. “Romans 12:15 tells us to weep with those who weep. This overture would instead ask us to investigate this woman who has passed on.”

Church leader Jerid Krulish, speaking against the measure, noted that he was from Alaska, where people often consume a lot of fish.

“I know a fishing expedition when I see it,” he said to laughter in the room. “I find this to be disparaging and a waste of these committees’ time.”

Hymn writer Kevin Twit also rose to oppose the measure, saying that he hadn’t read the book but that John Newton’s hymn “Pensive, Doubting, Fearful Heart” also speaks using God’s voice, and he considers that not new revelation but a summary of ideas.

The original legislation (called an overture in the PCA) came from an individual, pastor Benjamin Inman. Most pieces of legislation come from a presbytery. The lack of support for the measure from a presbytery didn’t bode well for its chances at a denominational level.

But, this week, the denomination’s overture committee amended Inman’s legislation to be milder and more palatable to the assembly—removing his language condemning Young for publishing a book guilty of idolatry, for example—and recommended the gathered assembly vote yes on the amended version.

Inman’s original legislation called for the PCA to consider repenting for not disciplining Young for idolatry, though he acknowledged that “the author’s passing in August 2023 has carried her above the jurisdiction of the PCA.”

Steve Tipton, the chair of the committee that produced the amended legislation, said that the goal of the denominational report was not to condemn Young, although he said “we can all guess” what the denominational committees would say about the book’s appropriateness for Christians.

The PCA is a small denomination—with about 1,800 congregations to the Southern Baptist Convention’s 47,000—but it has broad intellectual influence, with authors like Young, Tim Keller, O. Alan Noble, Kevin DeYoung, and Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt. Jesus Calling sold more than 45 million copies.

Evangelical leaders have already criticized the book. Author Kathy Keller, wife of Tim Keller, said Jesus Calling undermined the sufficiency of Scripture. Blogger Tim Challies said the book was “unworthy of our attention.”

The PCA disagreed.

- More from Emily Belz

News

Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Abortion Pill Challenge

Harvest Prude

Pro-life doctors had argued the drug isn’t safe. Now Christians are looking for other ways to engage on the issue.

The US Supreme Court

Jemal Countess / Getty Images for Court Accountability

The Supreme Court rejected a bid for more restrictions on the drugs for medication abortions, ruling against a group that included pro-life Christian doctors.

The doctors had argued that one drug, mifepristone, was unsafe, and that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) failed to uphold proper procedure when it relaxed regulations to obtain the drug by mail and at later stages in pregnancy. Assisting patients suffering complications from the medication would be against pro-life doctors’ consciences.

Drug abortions constitute more than 60 percent of abortions in the US and have grown in popularity since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The court ruling was unanimous but on narrow grounds, holding that the doctors lacked standing, or the legal right to sue, because they were not the ones harmed by the drugs.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority. He acknowledged that the doctors are “pro-life, oppose elective abortion, and have sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to mifepristone” but said that they had not proved they would be harmed by the current regulations around the abortion drug.

“Under Article III of the Constitution, a plaintiff’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue,” he said. “The plaintiff doctors and medical associations do not prescribe or use mifepristone. And the FDA has not required the plaintiffs to do anything or to refrain from doing anything.”

Kavanaugh noted that existing federal laws would “protect doctors from being required to perform abortions” or act in other ways that would run afoul of their consciences.

One of the doctors who was party to the case, Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), told CT in a March interview that the pro-life movement has work to do in countering the argument that “abortion is good for [women].”

There are “a myriad of immediate complications that [abortion] can cause,” she said. “The abortion pill, which is now being pushed on women in really unsafe ways, causes a host of complications.”

Francis, a Christian, told CT Thursday in an email statement, “As an organization dedicated to serving both our maternal and pre-born patients, we are deeply alarmed that the FDA’s recklessness is permitted to continue unchecked, risking the lives and health of women across this country.”

AAPLOG represents over 7,000 physicians. Other groups party to the case included several individual doctors, who object to abortion for religious or moral reasons, and several pro-life medical groups, including Christian and Catholic organizations.

In the case, the doctors argued they may have to treat a woman who had taken mifepristone and suffered complications that would require an emergency room visit. That may require a physician with a conscience objection on religious or moral grounds to assist with an abortion.

During oral arguments, the Biden administration countered that the argument “rest[s] on a long chain of remote contingencies … and even if that happened, federal conscience protections would guard against the injury the doctors face.” Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, who brought the case, noted that, according to the FDA, between 2.9 and 4.6 percent of women taking the drug end up in the emergency room.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys also argued the case that overturned the right to an abortion nationwide established by Roe v. Wade.

Mifepristone, also known by its brand name Mifeprex, was approved in 2000 by the FDA as a way to administer chemical abortions during early stages of pregnancy. In 2016, the FDA held that Mifeprex could be used for abortions at 10 weeks gestation and allowed health care providers to prescribe it. The FDA also required, at that time, one in-person visit to receive the medication. In 2021, the FDA announced it would no longer require the in-person visit.

Pro-life organizations have long (unsuccessfully) petitioned the FDA to reconsider its approval of abortion drugs. The doctors asked a district court judge to pull back the expanded access to the drug and to rescind the FDA’s approval of the drug entirely.

The district court sided with the doctors and suspended the drug’s approval and its expanded availability in 2016 and 2021. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit partially reversed the lower court ruling, but it upheld the part that clamped down on expanded access to the drug.

The Supreme Court put the ruling on hold, allowing women to continue obtaining abortion drugs. Thursday’s decision, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, sent the case back to the lower courts.

The ruling left pro-life advocates “disappointed,” but advocates said they would continue to challenge the availability of abortion drugs in the country.

Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, said in an email statement that the organization will “continue to educate and advocate on the need for commonsense protections when it comes to women’s health and well-being and defending the most vulnerable.”

“New legal challenges may emerge, and the ERLC will look for opportunities to engage,” Brent Leatherwood, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, stated. “We all should be resolute in our efforts to elect leaders and support legislative solutions that protect innocent lives and defend mothers against the predatory abortion industry.” Students for Life of America president Kristan Hawkins, whose organization filed an amicus brief in the case, said in a statement that the ruling “is not the end of this case.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Books

A Writer’s Creative Calling Isn’t Found in the Middle of a Crowd

Interview by Karen Swallow Prior

Award-winning author E. Lily Yu speaks about her faith, her deep love of language, and the perils of “moving with the majority.”

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

E. Lily Yu is that rare creature: a writer of exceptional skill who is grounded in faith, literary history, and a lifetime of reading. Her short story collection Jewel Box was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, her novel On Fragile Waves won the Washington State Book Award for fiction, and Yu herself has received the LaSalle Storyteller Award and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.

Break, Blow, Burn, and Make: A Writer's Thoughts on Creation

E. Lily Yu (Author)

Worthy Books

240 pages

$22.22

In her new book, Break, Blow, Burn, and Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation, Yu meditates on reading, writing, and creativity while both celebrating and lamenting the current condition of these holy pursuits. Writer and English professor Karen Swallow Prior spoke with Yu about the relationship between Christian faith, the craft of writing, and the fearless pursuit of truth.

(Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

A recurring theme throughout your book is that good writing, like all good art, emerges from love rather than anger, anxiety, or contempt. You point out that “God created out of love and delighted in life, and when he looked upon his work, he pronounced it good.” As creators, we create best when we imitate the Creator. What are some cultural conditions that present obstacles to creating from love rather than from aggression or fear?

Setting aside for the moment the fact that love can be angry—that there can be loving anger—I think there’s a great deal of vagueness and confusion around the definition of love, which leads to people pursuing 50 different things, only one of which I recognize as deserving of the word.

In the book, I use Erich Fromm’s definition of love: giving out of one’s aliveness, out of what is most vital in the self. That is, in some ways, a very old-fashioned, forgotten, almost obsolete understanding of the word. We have to know what we are talking about before we can even describe what we are seeking or what is missing. And it takes a great deal of time to reach that point; as Fromm says, it is the love of a mature person. It is not a child’s love or a dog’s love. It is not the love of ice cream; it is not the love of money.

Throughout the book, you draw parallels between robust faith and robust art. Can you talk a little more about that correspondence?

I think the work of an artist can only be as deep as the artist herself, whether or not that depth is a permanent condition—whether or not it is achieved by the grace of God. Faith is one avenue that has been known for thousands of years to deepen the self past where we might expect it to go.

Drawing on observations from the essayist Sven Birkerts, you point out that as our world has grown more connected laterally, it has grown shallower and flatter as well. How do the shallowness and the flattening that you see in our creative life correspond to the shallowness and flattening that you see in our faith life?

Decades ago, Guy Debord and Neil Postman wrote about the transition of human society away from print, toward images. That was likely the first step into shallowness: the reduction of attention, of internal subjective engagement with words, to that which could be grasped visually within seconds.

That process has accelerated. It resembles a reversal of the spread of literacy. Prior to widespread literacy, images were all that we had. But those were meant to be pointers to a deeper truth. Giotto’s gold paintings were not supposed to represent the self or self-expression but a deeper relationship to God. So even those images were not functioning in the way that images are today: as marketing tools, as entertainment, as objects of consumption.

Can there be deep images? Certainly. Are we primarily creating and interacting with deep images? I do not think so. There’s a hypothesis that poor teaching of reading in younger generations has led to a greater embrace of the video format. That may be the case. It may also be that video and visual formats are easier to interact with, demand less from us, require less skill to grasp. But whatever the source, we are disinclined to grapple with difficult, thoughtful, deep texts and very much inclined to spend our time on screens. This has produced much shallower writing as well.

You have an entire chapter on vocation in the context of art and writing. Here, you use the powerful example of an orchestra inside a rehearsal room full of toppled chairs and music stands, with only a few instruments being played. But outside in the hallway are a hundred violinists brawling.

The point of the illustration is that all the violinists think everyone else should be a violinist and have persuaded everyone to play the violin. The orchestra, of course, is the less for it.

I’ve noticed in human beings, regardless of affiliation, a tendency to move with the majority, to agree with the majority, which makes living easier, which makes thinking easier. But it doesn’t make living deeper or better, and it doesn’t make thinking deeper or better.

There is also a deep insecurity in people who have not yet grappled with their own smallness, with the inconsequentiality of being a handful of stardust in a vast void, such that they require other people to reinforce their own sense of self. One way of doing this is pressuring others to conform to the exact same decisions that one has made personally, because to see other people making the same decisions is comforting and reassuring, whether or not those decisions are correct. You can see this in the church and in society, in every country, in every time, in every place.

It is both true that people whose lives appear similar to the lives of those around them can have deep faith, incredible character, and integrity, and also that those qualities can belong to people whose lives do not conform at all. The point is not nonconformity, which is very often as shallow and meaningless as conformity, but something else entirely. It’s not the image or the performance that matters here but obedience to the call.

The orchestra, in other words, needs all the players.

The orchestra represents a very specific instance of this. I think the body of Christ is called to work toward a single higher purpose, for which we are all in harmony but not in unison.

You mention in passing that many adults prefer the genre of young adult literature. Why do you think that is? And why is that a concern?

I think the vast majority of human beings have lost a great deal of the ability to concentrate for extended periods of time on complicated and ambiguous texts and on complicated and ambiguous art.

I’m not fond of genre distinctions in general—these are a recent marketing tool introduced in publishing to help categorize and organize the explosion of books coming to market. But if you look at the books that were written specifically for the YA market as opposed to books that were slotted into YA, which I think are two different phenomena, you see a tendency toward simplistic, Manichean situations of good and evil, simple ideologies, shallow characterizations, and thrills and exciting scenarios that don’t require a great deal of understanding to enjoy.

I don’t think this movement toward more digestible reading is limited to YA. You can see it everywhere, including in literary fiction and other genres, and I think it’s indicative of how we’re changing as a whole.

Related to this concern, you spend some time arguing against the idea that literature can or even should increase empathy. You question, as well, the idea that literature needs to be justified by its moral goodness. Following H. L. Mencken, you attribute this impulse to our history of Puritanical thinking. What do you think we lose in literary appreciation when we depend on these rationales?

I’ve never been particularly concerned with classifying human beings as good or evil, because we have the potential for both good and evil within us at all times. I am not a good person; I am not a bad person; I am a human being, with all that that entails.

What I think reading can do is remind us of the values that outlast millennia, that outlast empires, and remind us to search for what is greater than ourselves. The 21st-century focus on empathy as a means of developing morality has taken us to some very dark places, where feelings substitute for justice, for fact, or for truth.

You talk about how essential it is for writers to have a deep love of language. How is this inextricable from a love of truth?

Writing is a means of thinking. It is a way by which we come to understand what we ourselves think, and then revise what we think when we see how badly we have written it. Searching for precisely the right words, the right vessels, into which we can place our meaning in such a way that it can be received as completely as possible by our recipient has a great deal in common with searching for the truth. Writing is a means of finding the form in which to place the truth that—if we are lucky, if we have searched for long enough, if we have endured long enough—we have found.

Even a hundred years ago, this would have been a very rare way of looking at language. For most people, language is a means of getting what they want from the world and from other people. It does not involve an allegiance to the truth. Orwell, W. H. Auden, and Victor Klemperer wrote about this.

We see the sequel of the degradation of language they observed in the rush toward AI-generated text: the devaluation of the slow seeking out of truth, the slow seeking out of the right form with which to express that truth, in favor of what is fast, often incorrect, cheap, and easy. It is essentially an assault upon the reader’s time and attention. And it is done, as it was in Orwell’s day, in the search of profit, personal advancement, and convenience.

You write about the importance of solitude and courage in creating good art. Why are these so important to one’s craft?

Ultimately, the decisions by which we live our lives must be made individually, each of us for ourselves. Other people can advise us, but there has to be a moment of retirement, a moment of singleness, when you say, This is how I choose to live, this is what I choose to stand for. And to make that decision without solitude, to make that decision in the middle of a crowd, often a shouting crowd, means the risk of taking on the crowd’s values, as opposed to living by your own values, which are almost never found in the middle of the crowd.

I think courage has always been a standing apart. Kierkegaard talks about this in one of his posthumously published writings, “On the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual.’” He writes of the need to become an individual apart from the crowd, apart from the judgments of those upon whose approval your livelihood, your social standing, or your well-being depend. Courage is the ability to say, It will cost me a great deal, but I have examined the matter to the best of my ability, and I cannot do otherwise. It is very lonely. You have to say yes to that loneliness.

- More from Interview by Karen Swallow Prior

Theology

3 Ways I’ve Learned to Support China’s Christians Better as an American Pastor

Corey Jackson

Don’t let political rivalry define our perspectives of each other.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

I serve as senior pastor of a medium-sized church in Cary, North Carolina. Besides being multicultural and multiethnic, we are also politically diverse: There are Democrats, Republicans, and many politically “homeless” people who have a difficult time identifying with either party.

This year, like many pastors and church leaders in the United States, I find myself yet again leading my congregation through a season of deep division over the political future of our country.

But I have received valuable lessons in navigating these troubled waters from what might appear to be an unlikely source: Christians in China.

In the US, we often think about China in economic or political terms: trade deficits, global manufacturing, or the rise of Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism.

Narratives often pit the two countries as strategic rivals, breeding a sense of fear and competition. More than 4 in 5 American adults (83%) have an unfavorable view of China and its geopolitical role, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year. Survey respondents felt that China interferes in other countries’ affairs and that its actions do not contribute to global peace and stability.

As American Christians, however, we need to think carefully about our relationship with China. Instead of allowing cultural rivalry to become our driving perspective about China and its people, we are called to be Jesus-first, not economy-first or America-first.

The gospel has taken root in China, despite the indoctrination of materialistic atheism at every level of society and severe persecution under President Xi. Conservative estimates put the number of Christians in China at 40 million, while others say it is closer to 116 million.

How can the church in America support our brothers and sisters in China as they undergo these trials? We can refrain from escalating anti-Chinese rhetoric, embrace political advocacy, and learn from their example.

Sowing goodwill

Ongoing competition between the US and Chinese economies will likely fuel anti-Chinese rhetoric, aimed at swaying the American middle class in the voting booth in the upcoming November 5 election.

The vitriol often directed at mainland China inevitably impacts Chinese people living in the United States. Many of my East Asian congregants worry that there may be more incidents of anti-Asian violence if presidential candidates turn to anti-Chinese speech to motivate their support bases.

Their fears aren’t unfounded. Xenophobia against people of Asian descent has surged worldwide since the pandemic. Nearly 3 out of 4 Chinese Americans reported experiencing racial discrimination last year. And a growing number of Asian Americans are considering buying guns for self-protection, according to a CNN report.

As followers of Jesus, we can choose not to fuel conversations that bear anti-Chinese rhetoric online and in real life. Ephesians 4:29 charges us not to engage in unwholesome talk but to use our words to encourage others. James 1:26 says that if a person does not keep a tight rein on their tongue, their religion is worthless.

In learning to think Jesus-first, we can muster up the courage to verbally correct misconceptions and reject stereotypes about China and its people during election season. We can grow in loving our Chinese neighbors in America. Rather than engaging in speech that escalates anxiety about China and its people, we can sow goodwill in times of animosity by helping others discover how God is at work through the Chinese diaspora to expand the gospel within China and around the world.

The power of advocacy

Refraining from anti-Chinese rhetoric is one way we can use our words wisely. Another way is to speak up on behalf of brothers and sisters in Christ who face persecution or repression of their freedoms.

Within the Chinese house church network, pastors are routinely called in by police for “tea time” and are warned against preaching the gospel. Many consider it the norm to undergo home surveillance, face unannounced evictions, or lose access to basic utilities without notice.

Chinese Christians like Yang Xiaohui and Chen Shang (who use pseudonyms for security reasons) were thrown into prison in 2022 for participating in an alleged illegal religious gathering. While there, they ministered to their fellow inmates and jailors through sharing stories about Jesus and singing hymns.

They are not the only bold ones in a country that has banned evangelism: Chinese churches continue to send mission teams to share Christ on many Chinese university campuses, even though access to college campuses is more restricted than ever.

Our Chinese brothers and sisters are willing to face these trials because of their love for Jesus Christ. They continue to plant churches, raise up young pastors, and serve their local communities.

When we hear about these injustices facing Christians under China’s repressive government policies, we have an opportunity not just to experience or express anger but also to increase our love and compassion for the people of China. As we Americans know, living in a country doesn’t automatically mean we are endorsing its leaders.

Moreover, as people who do not live in a nation-state where Christians are being persecuted, we are called to advocate for those who suffer for their faith in Jesus.

We can become a voice for the voiceless, encouraging our leaders to urge the Chinese government to act as God’s servants for the good of the nation (Rom. 13:4). We can share about the plight of Chinese house churches in our small groups or sermons to help other American believers realize how costly it is to follow Jesus in China.

The way of the cross

Discouraging anti-Chinese rhetoric and advocating for our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ are important ways to support the Chinese house church. But we can also do so in learning from their example.

In America, identifying ourselves as either blue or red is becoming central to our Christian identity. I face pressure from the right and left to align myself, and my church, with various political causes or candidates.

In China, tensions exist within house churches concerning how to faithfully respond to the repressive regulations that Xi’s government is placing on religious groups. Some pastors feel that a more careful approach is needed, which means limiting in-person church gatherings or meeting online only. Other church leaders believe that greater boldness is warranted and that increased evangelism and church planting should be pursued.

Both American and Chinese Christians can find common ground here: We should prioritize the kingdom of God over the pursuit of our political privileges.

The Chinese house church, through the life of prominent pastor Wang Yi, can teach us about what this looks like. Wang was arrested on December 9, 2018, for preaching the gospel. He is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence on the trumped-up charges of “subverting state power and illegal business operations.”

Before Wang was arrested, he was warned many times to stop preaching. Instead, he intentionally gained 30 pounds to prepare himself for prison. He also readied his soul to suffer for Christ.

“The Church must be willing to fight to the death, not for the civil rights and legal statures that we can see, but for the keys to the kingdom of heaven and the power of the Gospel that we cannot see,” Wang and other pastors and elders from the Early Rain Reformed Church wrote in “95 Theses,” a document that outlines the church’s theology amid suffering.

“The Church should never give up her most important asset … the Holy Word.”

Wang Yi’s approach to living under political duress is an example of what it looks like to live fully surrendered to Jesus. While America and China may be experiencing geopolitical conflict, Wang exhorts us to remember that our highest allegiance is to Christ. Believers in both countries share and hold on to hope in Jesus, who has torn down the dividing wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14).

A surrendered life

Becoming Christians who are Jesus-first, rather than economy-first or America-first, is a process that requires humility, self-reflection, and conviction.

As American believers, we can consider how the choices we make, whether in public rhetoric or private voting, impact not only our economy and our security but also the growth of gospel witness in the United States and around the world.

And as we follow our Lord Jesus, who endured the cross so that a global people could be reconciled to God and to each other, we can resist perpetuating discriminatory speech and actions against people of Chinese descent. We can advocate for our brothers and sisters in Christ in China and pray for God to protect, encourage, and embolden them as they suffer for his name. And we can be renewed in our desire to preach the gospel and to live a life that is given over completely to building the kingdom of God.

Corey Jackson is senior pastor of Trinity Park Church in Cary, North Carolina, and founder and president of The Luke Alliance.

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