A Subtler Political Idolatry

We don’t always like our presidents. But we’re apt to exalt the presidency.

As a college student, I never missed a State of the Union address. Feeling a sense of patriotic duty, I sat through the whole bloated spectacle: the obsequious handshakes, interminable applause, and extravagant promises to vanquish foes, blot out injustice, and kickstart a golden age of prosperity.

But over time, I came to see all that for what it was. Then came a series of epiphanies about other allegedly sacred observances. Presidential debates? A wasteland of sound bites. The nominating conventions? Pointless pep rallies. Election night coverage? Instead of wasting hours, I can access the results online in seconds.

Why do so many people feel they owe reverence to the Oval Office? Perhaps it’s one sign we’ve succumbed to what political analyst Gene Healy, in his 2008 book of the same name, calls “the cult of the presidency.”

Five election cycles after publication, Healy’s book is worth revisiting for its still-fresh perspective and unfortunately forgotten wisdom. (The purpose of this column, for those just discovering it, is revisiting books that are neither brand new nor really old).

Healy’s work, subtitled America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, can usefully reframe well-worn evangelical conversations about political idolatry, though it wasn’t written with Christians in mind.

We often bemoan flagrant departures from Christ-centered faith, like Christian nationalism or blind loyalty to Team Red or Team Blue. But the presidential “cult” operates on a lower wavelength, Healy argues. Even if you keep a healthy distance from partisan spectacle, you might have fallen under its sway.

This tendency can be easier to see if we distinguish individual leaders from the office itself. Americans are fond of dismissing particular presidents as fools, knaves, and charlatans. Yet we still expect the White House to work wonders, Healy observes, pining for the president to heal society’s every ill.

That’s not how our government is constitutionally designed. Over 250 years, however, an office envisioned as humble and unglamorous gradually acquired grandiose trappings. The State of the Union, for instance, was originally a practical, written update for lawmakers, and the notion of one man waxing eloquent from Olympian heights would’ve sent shivers down Madisonian spines.

How quaint that seems today! So does the bygone norm against presidents venturing opinions on legislative matters, lest they be seen as stepping on Congress’s toes. From our vantage point, it’s shocking to learn of the informal codes Healy details that once discouraged presidential candidates from appealing directly to the public on behalf of their own ambitions.

In Healy’s telling, the presidency changed irreparably with “transformational” figures, like Woodrow Wilson and both Roosevelts, who saw constitutional limits as anachronistic and ill-suited to modern life. They and most of their successors crafted the office we know today, with staggering power over policy and public opinion.

A Cato Institute researcher, Healy writes as a libertarian who decries elements of crusading moralism in both parties. As such, he appreciates how immodest conceptions of presidential duty precipitate abuses of power, from domestic espionage and suppression of dissent to bloody misadventures overseas. George W. Bush, in office when Healy was writing, earns especially low marks for ignoring constitutional strictures in the name of fighting terror.

Stranger, though no less unsettling, is the spiritual component of this “cult.” Why do we imagine that one person can fulfill our highest hopes? Why, after every natural disaster, does the president don the mantle of national chaplain? Why do we anoint mere mortals as moral tone-setters and purpose-givers for the defiantly pluralistic masses? The error here should be especially obvious to Christians, yet we often fall into these habits as easily as other Americans.

I was surprised to see Healy close on a guardedly optimistic note. Yes, he concedes, presidents of both parties will always be tempted to misuse the power of the office. Yes, our grueling campaign gauntlets favor egotists and demagogues over decent, self-effacing public servants. And yes, even the children of democracy have an incurable craving for kings.

But more than ever, Healy argues, our political culture fosters a healthy distrust of authority and an awareness of corruption in high places. And it permits a style of withering mockery that echoes an earlier, more raucous era of political discourse.

That’s all true, yet I left The Cult of the Presidency wondering whether its critique goes far enough. Healy focuses on what presidents do in office, largely overlooking another important factor: how we memorialize our presidents, inflating their legacies to mythic dimensions. Consider the Capitol rotunda painting Apotheosis of Washington or narratives casting Abraham Lincoln as a Christ figure.

It’s possible too that Healy underrates the media’s role in entrenching presidential monomania. He lands some satisfying blows against prominent pundits who daydream about heroic leaders and causes. But rank-and-file journalists form their own consuming attachments. Why do they crowd into White House press conferences when so many local city councils, regulatory commissions, school boards, and police departments could stand some extra scrutiny? Why do they grumble indignantly when presidents decline to dominate the public conversation with constant speeches and interviews?

Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump took office after Healy was writing, but, with hindsight, they seem like tokens of his prescience. In both, we witness a creeping triumph of symbolism over statesmanlike substance, each politician becoming a totemic embodiment of a warring subculture. In Obama, progressives see the urbane intellectualism they cherish in themselves. In Trump, populist conservatives see their own dukes raised against elite condescension.

Ultimately, Healy argues, the heroic president ideal persists because the people desire heroic presidents. But this durability also hints at a vulnerability: At the level of law and practice, it would take years to newly restrain our chief executives. But citizens enjoy an enviable freedom—and Christians a blessed imperative—to fix our affections elsewhere.

After all, the White House isn’t a literal temple, and the president can’t make you literally bend the knee or burn a pinch of incense. Whatever it costs to break away from the cult of the presidency, it won’t land you in the lion’s den.

Matt Reynolds is senior books editor for Christianity Today.

The Beckoning Nightstand

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Books

Review

New & Noteworthy

Matt Reynolds

Chosen by Matt Reynolds, CT senior books editor.

Illustration by Tara Anand

Great to Good

Jae Hoon Lee (IVP)

Highly driven performers and organizational leaders often speak of making the leap from good to great. As his book title suggests, Korean pastor Jae Hoon Lee believes the church (and individual Christians) should invert that mindset, pursuing Christlike character rather than earthly power and glory. “Jesus referred to himself as a good shepherd, not a great one,” writes Lee, whose reflections draw upon his Korean church context. “He attributed his accomplishments to God, not to himself. After all, God was the One who raised him up. So, the church should follow his example of humility, service, and meekness instead of trying to elevate itself unnecessarily.”

Nearing a Far God

Leslie Leyland Fields (NavPress)

The Psalms, as believers have long affirmed, furnish language for pouring out our whole hearts in prayer. Writer Leslie Leyland Fields builds on this foundation in Nearing a Far God, showing how these sacred poems help us compose our own cries of sorrow and joy, praise and lament. “We’re not rewriting Scripture,” Fields cautions about her book, which includes a series of writing and prayer exercises. “The Psalms cannot rewrite us if we are rewriting the Psalms. Instead, we are allowing the Psalms to teach us to pray, to guide our own words and emotions as we seek God’s face, and to lead us to listen more closely to the response of his Word.”

A New and Ancient Evangelism

Judith Paulsen (Baker Academic)

One can understand why nonbelievers might be queasy about the idea of evangelism. But similar attitudes run surprisingly deep in Christian circles, as evangelism professor Judith Paulsen reports in this book. Paulsen, who teaches at Wycliffe College in Toronto, looks to New Testament conversion stories for guidance on repairing the reputation and reviving the practice of sharing the gospel. By “delving deeply” into these stories, she hopes “the church in the West can again learn ancient wisdom about how God draws people to himself and how, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we as the people of God can be his instruments in that great venture.”

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Ideas

Against the Culture of Demonization

Timothy Dalrymple

President & CEO

The problem is not when the Christian is in the conflict—it’s when the conflict is in the Christian.

MidJourney / Christianity Today

I grew up in a small evangelical church in California’s Central Valley where there were more blue collars than white. About 25 families filed into the pews each Sunday; they were loving, generous, and thoughtful. We camped the Sierra Nevadas, backpacked Yosemite, and set crab traps in Half Moon Bay. We studied the Word, shared meals when misfortune struck, and made more after-church trips to Taco Bell than any human being should be able to withstand. It was evangelicalism of the sunny California variety that wore its conservatism with T-shirts and surfer shorts and a breezy, convivial disposition.

When I think about that church, imperfect though it was, I am immensely grateful. It inoculated me against the poisonous caricature I would hear so often in the years following—especially in secular universities—that evangelical churches were fortresses of ignorance and prejudice.

When I left academia in 2009, it was partly out of disillusionment. The humanities departments seemed less interested in intellectual inquiry than ideological conformity. I distinctly remember a doctoral seminar where one of my colleagues dismissed the entire history of Christian missions as nothing but rapacious colonialism. There’s much to lament in that history, I agreed, but surely there were some missionaries, some of the time, who had some good intentions?

As a matter of intellectual honesty, it seemed the least my interlocutor should accept. Instead, she had me hauled in front of the professor for the thought crime of “defending an evil institution.”

This was only one in a long series of such experiences. Too many lectures felt like recruitment for political programs, too many seminars like competitions for who could be the first to take offense. Advance a thesis that defied the trends sweeping through the humanities departments, and no amount of evidence and argumentation were sufficient; advance a thesis that served a favored cause, and very little evidence and argumentation were necessary. After all, once you have abandoned the concept of a unitary truth, why not choose a story that serves your tribe? Who cares about accuracy when you can deliver “justice”?

So I left academia to help launch a new media enterprise. It’s ironic now to remember the idealism that accompanied the emergence of the blogosphere and social media in those years. The digital landscape was a wide-open expanse where we could reimagine a public conversation that was charitable, informed, and willing to challenge partisan conventions. Perhaps Christians could shape a form of public engagement that simultaneously defended Christian values and exhibited Christlike virtues. Perhaps social media could be what the university should be: an open marketplace of ideas where the best arguments win on the merits.

Over the years that followed, however, new media businesses established financial models that incentivized the worst in human behavior. The road to wealth and influence led through virality, and the surest path to virality was to stir up tribal animosities. Technology ethicist Tristan Harris calls it a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” Affirm your audience’s prejudices and presuppositions, stoke their fears, heap scorn on the other tribe, and you collect a passionate and growing following, which you can monetize through speaking and writing engagements.

Put differently, the quickest way to build a readership was not to establish expertise and credibility over a long career of faithful work, but to achieve viral fame by playing into the tribal antipathies of one group or another. What started as attention harvesting became rage farming.

In the early years of virality culture, the dividing lines cut between large groups of people, such as conservative evangelicals and progressive mainliners. Eventually, it became clear that social media platforms could increase engagement further and deliver more finely targeted advertising (which is to say, make more money), by funneling readers into ever-narrower subcategories. Larger communities of common conviction became divided and subdivided into warring camps; each camp was served by its own information sources and united in shared hostility to those around them. The anger we feel for so-called betrayers of our tribe is far greater than the anger we feel for those who never belonged to our tribe in the first place.

So we arrive where we are today, where evangelicals are bought and sold in the scorn markets and pitted against one another for profit. Where writers and readers alike are addicted to the dopamine of division. It is like the humanities departments where I once lived and worked.

Everything is reduced to the political. Facts don’t matter if the story serves your tribe. Careers are made not by loving and understanding others but by mocking and mischaracterizing them.

To be clear, Christianity Today has never argued that Christians should withdraw from political life. Although the dead are not raised by politics, the living are served by it.

The problem is not when the Christian is in the conflict. The problem is when the conflict is in the Christian. Our engagement with one another and with society should follow the pattern of Christ and not the culture.

Christianity Today has never fit neatly into anyone’s political agenda because we are more committed to the kingdom of God than to the interests of any party or country. This frustrates those who would patrol the boundaries of political conformity, but we view it as essential to our calling. And we decline to participate in the outrage cycle.

Our calling is to advance the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God. We tell those stories when they are encouraging and when they are hard. We invite orthodox Christian voices to make their arguments for contrary points of view. We seek to understand and exemplify what it means to follow Jesus in our time. CT is comprised of directors, executives, staff, writers, and readers who hold different political stances. We view this as a strength and not a weakness.

One of the songs we sang in that church in California’s Central Valley was “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love.” Experiencing the love of the body of Christ left its mark on my soul. As Jesus said in John 13, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (v. 35). And as he prayed to the Father in John 17, it is because of the unity of the church that “the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (v. 23).

This is a weighty thing. The love we show one another, the unity we show to the world, bears testimony to the divinity of Christ and the reality of the love of God. The Church bears the image of Christ to the world, yet today that image is contentious and fragmented.

The kingdom of God is always confounding the expectations of the world. It takes what the world has turned upside down and inverts them back to their right order. It lifts the humble over the proud, the meek over the mighty, the powerless over the powerful. It is profoundly countercultural.

Perhaps the most countercultural thing Christians can do in this present moment is to refuse to demonize one another. Christians with sound hearts and minds will reach different conclusions on what love requires of them in the upcoming election. Support whom your conscience bids you support. But let your first love be your first love, and let our love for one another be our witness to the world that Christ is alive and at work among us.

Timothy Dalrymple is president and CEO of Christianity Today.

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News

Died: Daniel Bourdanné, Millipede Scientist Turned IFES Leader Who Loved Christian Books

Maude Burkhalter

The Chadian student ministry leader spent his final years promoting publishing in Africa.

International Fellowship of Evangelical Students / Edits by Rick Szuecs

Daniel Bourdanné, a scientist from the central African nation of Chad who inspired young evangelicals around the world as the general secretary of IFES and a longtime champion of Christian book publishing in Africa, died on September 6 at age 64 as a result of cancer.

After years of ministry to students, Bourdanné became general secretary of IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) in 2007, serving in this role until 2019. An avid reader (and sometimes writer), from 2018 until his death, Bourdanné worked with Africa Speaks to promote Christian book publishing across the continent.

Bourdanné spent much of his life in Francophone nations including Togo, Cameroon, and Côte d’Ivoire before moving to Oxford, England, when he became IFES general secretary. At the time of his death, he was living in Swindon, England.

“God sent me into the world from this continent, and he brings me back with the world to this same continent, so that I may complete my role as a missionary of the African church,” Bourdanné said in his farewell speech in South Africa in 2019 at the IFES World Assembly.

“Daniel was proud to be African,” said Tiémoko Coulibaly, general secretary of the IFES national affiliate in Mali. “Though he lived in the West, his heart remained in Africa, the continent of his birth that he never gave up on.”

The son of a pastor, Bourdanné was born on October 18, 1959, in Pala, Mayo-Kebbi Ouest, Chad. At age 10, he lost his father, whose death forced Bourdanné to begin working in the fields, chopping wood, and raising vegetables for his mother to sell. These responsibilities were compounded by a civil war that lasted from 1965 to 1979 and took the lives of thousands.

A few months before the war ended, Bourdanné won a scholarship to pursue studies in animal ecology at the Université du Tchad. He then earned a bachelor’s degree in natural science at the Université of Lomé, Togo (formerly Université du Bénin).

In 1983, Bourdanné moved to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire to pursue a doctorate in animal ecology. In 1990, he defended his dissertation on millipedes, subsequently becoming a member of the International Society of Myriapodologists.

As he pursued his education, Bourdanné began working as a high school biology teacher. However, his passion to share the gospel with students had been sparked much earlier. “At the age of 14 in a Bible study on Revelation 1, I first grasped the vision and passion to see students saved for the Lord,” he once said.

“Directly or indirectly, universities profoundly influence and guide the future of human societies,” he wrote in an article on student evangelism published in the Dictionnaire de théologie pratique in 2011. “Students are often at the forefront of social change around the world. Indeed, when they move together, fueled by their energy, vitality, determination, passion, imagination, and creativity, they have the power to move society.”

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In 1990, Bourdanné began working with IFES as a traveling secretary; he was named regional secretary for IFES Francophone Africa (GBUAF) in 1996.

When he became general secretary in 2007, succeeding Lindsay Brown who had held the position since 1991, the IFES movement was 60 years old and established in over 150 countries. Still, during his 12-year tenure, the movement grew significantly, especially in the diversity of its leadership.

Under Bourdanné, IFES gave more space to theologians from the Global South. In 2007, he appointed Christy Jutare of the Philippines as the first female regional secretary of IFES to lead the Eurasia region. In ⁠2011, he appointed the first two student representatives to the IFES board of trustees. In 2016, he revived a global theological and missiological reflection journal (Word and World).

When asked about the highlights of his tenure, Bourdanné stated that they included witnessing God “take the unusual path” when inviting unexpected people to join the walk with him, along with the joy of seeing God opening doors in difficult contexts.

He also noted a key challenge. “We celebrate our unity,” he wrote in his farewell email to the fellowship, “but we are human, so it is not surprising that sometimes someone may try to promote their agenda or preferences. … Having grown up myself in a context of war and tribal conflict, I was perhaps more sensitive to how this could become a threat to IFES unity.”

One of Bourdanné’s greatest passions was to enable the global church to hear from more African Christians. He did so by encouraging them not to follow a unique school of thought but to become prominent voices in the theological field.

“Some of us may side with Billy Graham,” he stated at the same 2019 speech. “Others [align] with John Stott, or with John Piper, and these differences enrich us more than they divide us.” But he added, “Among these three names, there is no African. Nor is there anyone from Latin America or Asia.”

Bourdanné’s love for students was only rivaled by his love of books. The scientist owned hundreds if not thousands of them, carefully housed in three different libraries—one in his home in England, one in his Oxford office, and one at a residence in Côte d’Ivoire.

At one point, Bourdanné’s passion for the written word led him to start a magazine. He and four friends pooled their resources to fund the first issue and invest in the publication. The magazine ran debt-free until the group disbanded, and aside from a one-time $80 donation from missionaries, they never relied on external help.

In 1995, Bourdanné became the director of the Presses bibliques africaines (African Biblical Press). In 2018, he joined the board of Africa Speaks, where he continued to serve until his passing, promoting the growth of the Christian publishing industry in Africa by encouraging African Christian writers to write and publish and by promoting their books.

Bourdanné believed that for African Christians, books could be catalysts for transformation. “Africa will not experience its publishing revolution until we win the battle for the love of books,” he wrote. In turn, this passion would “contaminate” Africa positively from the inside, he asserted, his metaphor inspired by Jesus’ words in Mark 7 that what contaminates (or defiles) a person comes from the inside out.

Bourdanné firmly believed that Africa needed to equip itself for its own progress, which required, in his view, a shift in mentality accompanied by fruitful collaborations with the West.

“What is the use of Africa’s Sunday fervor if the demons of corruption, conflict, and genocide resurface on Monday?” Bourdanné preached in Geneva in 2006 to an audience of primarily European evangelical leaders. “What is the point of our worship and prayers in Europe if our lives are still driven by the pursuit of maximum profit and if our churches remain divided?”

He called on European Christians to fight for change: “Our actions speak louder than our words. Victims of injustice must see the commitment of Western Christians in this area.”

Though he was more involved in promoting Christian literature in Africa than in writing it himself, he authored Ces évangéliques d’Afrique, qui sont-ils? (Who Are African Evangelicals? 1998), and L’Évangile de la prospérité, une menace pour l’Église en Afrique (The Prosperity Gospel, a Menace to the African Church, 1999), among others.

In 2018, Calvin University awarded him the Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life, noting his work in Francophone Christian publishing and his ministry with IFES.

“A quarter-century ago, Daniel saw a need for Christian students to have guidance, from a Christian worldview, on a variety of topics that were of great concern to them, and so he took action,” said Jul Medenblik, president of Calvin Theological Seminary.

Timothée Joset, a missiology professor at the Faculté libre de théologie évangélique (FLTE) in France and member of IFES Global Resource Ministries, said his friend Bourdanné introduced him to the complex issues facing Francophone Africa and global North-South relations.

“What also impressed me was his resilience. He was never resentful, even though he experienced a great deal of racism,” Joset said, noting an example so egregious that theologian N.T. Wright even mentioned it in an Easter sermon.

After IFES hired him as general secretary, “the British High Commission in Accra dragged its feet over Daniel’s application to come here, and then turned it down with minimal explanation,” said Wright. “Daniel then asked for permission to travel to the UK on his current visitor’s visa, and was told he could. But when he arrived he was detained for 22 hours, his mobile phones were seized, and he was flown back to Africa.”

Despite these incidents, Bourdanné inspired his peers through his consideration and humility. One of his students remembered fondly how Bourdanné personally sent him books, after the English postal system kept confusing his address with one in another country. Another international colleague recalled how he preferred sitting on the floor during conferences, to allow others to have a chair.

This modesty never kept Bourdanné from challenging his fellow Christians on issues he cared deeply about, such as evangelism. He served the Lausanne Movement as International Deputy Director for French-speaking Africa (21 countries), leading up to Lausanne’s 2010 conference in Cape Town, South Africa. When he left that position, he was appointed to the Lausanne Movement’s board.

“Can we be credible while proclaiming a gospel that ignores the exploitation of the weak by the strong? Can we continue to care only for the salvation of African souls while turning a blind eye to their social situation?” he asked in 2016. “In what way is the gospel good news for communities struggling to meet their basic needs? How can we remain silent in the face of rising social inequalities in Africa, or environmental issues? Proclamation and action must go hand in hand.”

Daniel Bourdanné leaves behind his wife Halymah, originally from Niger, and their four children.

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Culture

The Squandering of ‘God’s Not Dead’

Joseph Holmes

The 10-year-old franchise is right that Christians face challenges. But its latest installment, ‘In God We Trust,’ is another disappointment.

David A. R. White as Reverend David Hill in God's Not Dead: In God We Trust

A decade ago, Barack Obama was president. Louis C. K. was hosting Saturday Night Live. And the first film in the God’s Not Dead franchise was in theaters.

You may know the concept: A college student stands up to an atheist philosophy professor who’s trying to bully his class into denying God. The two engage in several debates; the student successfully defends God’s existence. The professor ends up turning his life over to Jesus before he’s hit by a car and killed.

The movie was a massive box office hit, earning over $60 million on a budget of just $2 million. It’s not hard to understand why. Though much has changed in ten years, evangelicals then as well as now were reckoning with the prospect of an increasingly post-Christian United States. The rise of the religious “nones” had begun. Conservative Christians who felt that pop culture portrayed their views as stupid or evil—see The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show—finally got to see one of their own play the hero, trouncing a Richard Dawkins–like adversary. (And saving his soul too.)

But God’s Not Dead also met with criticism from Christians and non-Christians alike; it became the poster child for what’s wrong with faith-based films. Viewers mocked the movie for its bad acting and poor writing, and they condemned it for its dumbed-down arguments about God’s existence and its caricatures of atheist villains.

Alissa Wilkinson, film critic for The New York Times (also a former critic at Christianity Today and my professor at the late King’s College) has commented extensively on the failures of God’s Not Dead. “It’s always been easy to poke holes in the movie’s fast-and-loose relationship with reality and its essential fantasy of persecution,” she wrote for Vox in 2019.

“The film heralded a future,” she continued, “one that has since arrived, where culture is fully bifurcated—where the streaming services you subscribe to can double as markers of identity, and where selecting the inspirational Christian option means making a proclamation about your politics.”

That future has indeed arrived—and so have more God’s Not Dead movies. In God’s Not Dead 2 (2016), a teacher fights for her right to talk about Jesus in the classroom; a law is passed requiring pastors to submit their sermons for government review. In God’s Not Dead: We the People (2021), government atheists attempt to ban homeschooling.

And now, one more: God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust premieres in theaters on September 12. In this iteration, the government will no longer fund a women’s shelter because a Bible study is held on its premises. Reverend Dave, whose church supports the shelter, is persuaded to run for office so he can allocate money appropriately. At the movie’s end, onscreen text tells audiences to “vote.” God’s Not Dead has come full circle—from the relatively small stakes of a classroom and a passing grade to a call for Christians to grasp political power.

If it’s not already obvious, I’m no fan of the God’s Not Dead movies. But that’s not because I dismiss the concerns that motivate them.

There’s some potential in the In God We Trust story. Reverend Dave’s dynamic with his reluctant political strategist, Lottie Jay, is a classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington setup. One scene, in which Lottie advises her candidate before a talk show appearance and he interrupts her to pray, got a genuine laugh out of me.

Imagine a well-made, Aaron Sorkin–esque, legal-political drama from the perspective of the Religious Right. Such a film might pose questions like: What does it look like to have Christian convictions in a pluralistic, secularizing nation? How do Christians in positions of authority bravely speak scriptural truth while also loving their neighbors well? These questions are far from irrelevant for evangelicals like me.

But God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust squanders any opportunity it might have to weigh in on them. Characters don’t dialogue with each other so much as trade ham-fisted buzzwords. The acting ranges from wooden to wildly over the top. The religious and political arguments are lazy and surface level.

And crucially, reality is distorted. The bad guys are motivated by a shallow hatred of religion as something that stands in the way of personal power. The media and government are so universally anti-Christian that even in a state like Arkansas, cynical Lottie tells Reverend Dave to stop discussing his faith.

These distortions matter. Embracing a caricature of your opponents’ views makes you ineffectual at both loving them and addressing their real concerns. On the flip side, thinking that any politician who speaks about God publicly must be honest makes you vulnerable to charlatans. Insisting that Christians on “our side” won’t be seduced by political power makes us less watchful.

It’s not that Christian claims of marginalization are wholly wrong. It’s that marginalization hasn’t happened in the way that God’s Not Dead warned it would. The original film implied that sending kids to college would endanger their faith—though actually, the college educated are among the most likely to attend church. The US government has not stripped Christians of their rights; in fact, in recent years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled in favor of religious liberty. (Though what constitutes free exercise is far from settled; see Bethany Christian Services’s recent suit against Michigan.)

Instead of facing outright persecution for being Christians, Christian marginalization is happening around particular social issues as our culture increasingly demands conformity on gender, sexuality, and abortion. Most US evangelicals aren’t suing the government or giving apologetics-laden speeches to defend the Incarnation; we aren’t being imprisoned for being caught with Bibles.

But many US evangelicals are facing pressure—in workplaces, schools, and other organizations—to either quietly go along with norms that are now increasingly taken for granted or else face accusations of bigotry. And as this cultural pressure increases, so too is legal or policy pressure for pro-life activists or parents who hold traditional views on gender.

It’s far simpler to wail about “Christian persecution” than to deal thoughtfully and faithfully with this reality. The problem with “simpler” is it doesn’t actually help Christians navigate their world. Perhaps that’s why God’s Not Dead has largely dropped out of mainstream relevance. Its last two movies were both distributed as Fathom Events (an alternative to a traditional release), and hardly any reviewers covered them.

There’s one exception to the rule of this franchise: God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (2018). Reverend Dave works with his atheist brother to fight his church’s removal from school property but eventually realizes that his efforts are only contributing to hate and division on campus. He gives up the cause, even though he’s winning, and apologizes to everyone.

The movie is well written. It’s well acted. It portrays atheists sympathetically and gives them a chance to verbalize their legitimate grievances against Christians. In fact, you could argue that it went too far in the other direction, acting like any criticism believers faced was always their own fault.

What happened to the movie? Nobody liked it; it made only $7 million at the box office. And critics, both Christians and non-Christians, panned it. As Wilkinson put it, “In the end, this God’s Not Dead installment is just like the others: putting on a pious face but failing to imagine what real sacrifice might look like.”

I found most criticisms of the film to be “straining at gnats.” Giving up power is heroic, even if you wish someone gave up more. A Light in Darkness showed a willingness for Christians to start a dialogue, to apologize, to put down their defenses and listen. It began to make a case for the Christian way of doing things, with peacefulness and humility.

Ten years after its inception, it’s hard not to see the God’s Not Dead franchise as a wasted opportunity. The movies emerged at a time when Christians needed a way to wrestle with our decline in numbers and cultural influence. We needed stories about how to stand up for ourselves in the world as it really is without becoming what we’re fighting against. We still need those stories. Here’s to praying that in the next ten years, other storytellers come along who can do better.

Joseph Holmes is a Christian culture critic and host of the podcast The Overthinkers.

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News

Kenya Greets Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music with Excitement—and Skepticism

Moses Wasamu

Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music are popular with Kenyan Christians, but some are increasingly wary of their influence.

Chandler Moore of Maverick City Music and Kirk Franklin perform during the Kingdom Tour.

mpi04 / AP Images

In June, Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music’s Chandler Moore performed with actor and rapper Will Smith at the BET Awards. Smith premiered his single “You Can Make it” on a dark, smoke-filled stage, standing in a circle of fire with a small choir of vocalists in a raised semicircle behind him. The performance incorporated the sound of a gospel choir and solos by Franklin and Moore, but those nods to Christian music seemed to be in service of a message that was only vaguely spiritual, referring to heaven and hell but focused on personal struggle and triumph.

Though the performance boosted the single to No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot Gospel Songs chart, the performance sparked controversy in Africa, where Franklin and Maverick City Music would soon embark on their Kingdom World Tour (KWT). Some Christians there called the performance “satanic.” News outlets in Zimbabwe reported that some of the opening acts— including Annatoria, winner of The Voice UK and a recent Maverick City Music collaborator—had pulled out of the Harare concert. Others called for a boycott, telling fellow Christians to stay away from the tour, which also made stops in Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, and Kenya.

Few listened.

Before it finished in August, the KWT drew enthusiastic crowds across Africa, filling arenas and selling out its concert at Kenya’s Uhuru Gardens (a 60,000-person venue).

“It will be a moment in my life that I will never forget,” Franklin said in an interview. “To travel to many countries at one time and to feel the Black experience on this continent and on this planet, and to be reminded how unified we are as Black people—we are just separated by water. We are never separated by spirit.”

Though its overall commercial effect seemed minimal, Franklin and Moore’s BET performance prompted some soul-searching among African Christians about their relationship with American artists, even among those who attended the concert.

Daniel Shirima, a Kenyan emcee and event organizer, said that even as part of the crowd, he was preoccupied with the backlash.

“Many Kenyan Christians, including myself, feel blessed by their songs … but compared to the warm reception of past artists, this felt different,” Shirima told CT. “Some are questioning Kirk Franklin’s walk with God, influencing others not to attend or to feel skeptical.”

The KWT was Maverick City Music’s first performance in Kenya. The group had risen in popularity in the country during the 2020 pandemic, and songs like “Jireh” and “Bless Me” have become some congregations’ favorite worship songs.

Franklin has been popular with Kenyan Christians for over two decades and has performed in the country twice—in 2007 and 2011. Franklin’s 1998 album The Nu Nation Project achieved international success, going double platinum and selling over 3 million copies worldwide. For many Kenyan fans, that album was their introduction to Franklin’s music, and he has remained popular in the country, building a multigenerational audience with his eclectic blend of gospel, R & B, and rap.

The veteran Christian artist has faced increased scrutiny from American and African audiences in recent years in response to videos of suggestive dancing and rap lyrics that some perceive as irreverent or blasphemous. Kenyan gospel artist Jefro Katai said that a 2022 performance in which Franklin rapped the line “the Lion and the Lamb will bow down to the GOAT” (referring to the acronym for “greatest of all time”) gave listeners pause; some heard it as a sacrilegious suggestion that Jesus would pay homage to an artist.

“We are familiar with the teachings of Christ as the Lamb, and we are also called to be sheep,” said Katai. “I think many Christians heard that rap on a surface level and frowned on Kirk.”

The global reach of the American Christian music industry has meant that the public personas of its artists are up for global discussion. Katai said that African Christians have always had to evaluate the influence of American artists and negotiate which differences to accept as cultural rather than moral.

“American artists can have some tattoos and piercings, for example,” he said. “And some of them are liberal in their politics,” pointing out that some conservative Kenyans objected to Franklin’s willingness to appear publicly with liberal American politicians like Vice President Kamala Harris.

However, Katai said, most Kenyan Christians historically have been willing to overlook those differences when an artist’s music seems to be serving the global church. In Shirima’s view, music from the US has served and will continue to serve the African church.

“Africans are generally very supportive of artists whose songs minister to them,” Shirima said. “We’ve seen this with artists like Don Moen and CeCe Winans, whose songs are sung in our churches. We truly appreciate their talents and giftings.”

Kenyan Christians generally listen to an array of music from Nigeria, South Africa, and the US, in large part because of the production quality and because their local industry isn’t big enough to support full-time recording artists.

“That one can be a gospel artist as a profession [in the US] is quite encouraging. But the reality in Africa is that one also needs a second job to make it in gospel. I sense things are changing, but most Christians are still dealing with bread-and-butter issues,” said Kiarie Mwenda, a management consultant and a longtime fan of Kirk Franklin.

For some, the gap between the lived realities of African Christians and American Christian performing artists is a cause for concern. Some suspect that in addition to an imbalance in economic power between African audiences and American artists, there are competing worldviews.

Olivia Kibui, a recent graduate from Daystar University, is convinced that the interests of American Christian artists can’t be neatly separated from the global political and economic landscape.

“Any media from the US always has an agenda. Always. It is never just what you see. And all their machinery is usually involved,” said Kibui. She also insists that American Christian media is partly to blame for the surging interest in New Age and alternative spirituality.

“These tours have more to do with the ideals and ideas of men than God,” she said. “Kenyans since the ’90s have been followers of US evangelical ideas. Generally, American Christianity is very shallow.”

Not all Kenyan Christians are as pessimistic about the influence of American Christian media. Eva Ishengoma, a Tanzanian businesswoman now living in Nairobi, says that Kenyans value the music of Don Moen, Kirk Franklin, and Maverick City Music because it’s good music.

“Kenyans warmly welcome Christian musicians that come from the US. When secular musicians come, they are received well, so long as Kenyans love their music,” she says. “Africans are receptive to artists from the US as long as their songs are hits.”

In recent years, Christian artists like Travis Greene, Todd Dulaney, William McDowell, Lecrae, Andy Mineo, KB, and Trip Lee have performed in Kenya for enthusiastic crowds. The only recent example of strong opposition or backlash to a Christian figure from the US was to charismatic evangelist Benny Hinn when he visited earlier this year.

Although some opening acts dropped out of the Harare concert, the performance in Nairobi went as planned, with Zambian artist Pompi opening the show and performances by Malawian musician Jeremiah Chikhwaza and Bethuel Lasoi, a songwriter and worship leader at Nairobi’s International Christian Centre. The tour wrapped up in the UK at the end of August with a performance at London’s Wembley Arena.

The mixed response of African audiences to Maverick City Music and Kirk Franklin may be a harbinger of intensifying scrutiny American Christian musicians who seek to cultivate a global audience. As American artists leverage social media and translation to reach Christians around the world, their personas, affiliations, and politics are increasingly visible, and perhaps increasingly alienating.

And yet, the music of Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music has played a significant role in the faith journeys of many Africans, who have forged strong personal connections with the songs themselves and the musicians who wrote or performed them. For some, it seems unfair to brush aside the artists and music that have ministered to them so powerfully.

“On a personal level, the life and music of Kirk has kept me sober,” said Mwenda, reflecting on his decades spent listening to Franklin’s music. “And Maverick City got me through the COVID season.”

- More from Moses Wasamu

Books

Review

Meet the ‘Precocious Atheist’ Still Pining for a Misplaced Faith

Justin Brierley

Donna Freitas hasn’t found Jesus on the other side of depression and trauma. But her search persists.

Christopher Lane / Getty

Donna Freitas’s spiritual autobiography, Wishful Thinking: How I Lost My Faith and Why I Want to Find It, stands in the tradition of the “dark-night-of-the-soul” memoir. But unlike mystics such as St. John of the Cross, who found their way through dark times into the light of faith, Freitas is unsure whether she ever believed in God to begin with.

A successful scholar and author of teen and adult fiction, Freitas was raised in a devout Catholic home in Rhode Island. She writes nostalgically about a childhood surrounded by spiritual memorabilia, such as angel figurines and Virgin Mary statuettes, beloved by her grandmother. Attending mass every Sunday was central to family life, especially for her Italian American mother, whose faith was simple, constant, and enduring.

However, belief didn’t come so easily for Freitas, who began to struggle with doubt from an early age. When an acquaintance described her as a “precocious atheist,” the label stuck. And despite going through the motions of confirmation in the Catholic church, she failed to inherit the devout faith of her mother. She writes with toe-curling embarrassment about her “angry atheist” phase as a young adult, including phone calls from college in which she told her mother that “your God is nothing but another Santa Claus.”

Philosophy to the rescue

As you may already suspect, this is as much a story about Freitas’s relationship with her mother as it is about her search for a relationship with God.

Despite a wealth of academic credentials—her research on the lives of young people has yielded notable books like Sex and the Soul and The Happiness Effect—the story Freitas tells is not primarily an intellectual quest. You won’t find any examination of core apologetics arguments, like attempts to reconcile science and faith or address the problem of evil. Belief in God is simply presented as something you either have or you don’t. And Freitas says she doesn’t have it. But she wishes she did, writing,

I may have lost my faith as a child, misplaced it very young. But I have never stopped searching to find it again because if my mother taught me anything, she instilled the notion that our belief in God is precious.

Freitas movingly describes how any hope of holding on to God seemed to disappear when she entered a period of deep depression in her early 20s. Although the darkness lifted eventually, it would return many times throughout her life. She knows that for many people, faith in God is the only thing that makes sense in the midst of such suffering. But the fact that she felt so alone in her “bottomless abyss” was the final confirmation that there was no divine hand waiting to pull her out.

Instead, something else came to the rescue: philosophy.

Freitas’s joyful discovery of the work of existential philosophers is an enchanting part of the book. She describes the emotional thrill of finding intellectual soulmates in Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. Their works not only spoke to her frequent encounters with the existential void within but also gave voice to her experience (or lack thereof) of faith.

The book describes Freitas’s attempts to find peace and wholeness through academia and philosophy, which are both touching and agonizing to read. Time and again, she reminds us how much she longs for the simple faith of her mother, and why it seems to remain tantalizingly out of reach.

The memoir is also instructive in framing how Freitas’s journey has been shaped by the Catholicism she inherited. Aware that her readership will likely contain more evangelicals than Catholics—her publisher, Worthy Books, caters largely to this audience—Freitas devotes a chapter to the wildly different assumptions about Scripture and practice embodied by the two groups.

She contends that evangelicals read their Bibles and examine issues like sex and relationships in ways that are rarely encouraged among lay Catholics. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but her analysis probably reflects the type of cultural Catholicism that dominates a university like Georgetown, where she studied as an undergraduate.

Ironically, despite her own unfamiliarity with Scripture, Freitas’s love of philosophy led her to pursue a PhD in theology. The avowed atheist found herself studying alongside Catholic ordinands and theologians. This turned out to be both a blessing and a curse in her ongoing search for God.

Tragically, Freitas became the target of an obsessive sexual pursuit by an abusive academic priest. When she reported him to the authorities, she says, the church was only interested in protecting the professor and its institutional reputation. It left her devastated.

Yet much good came out of her theological studies. She discovered the lives and writings of female mystics, such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. They struck Freitas as proto-feminists of the medieval age—as torchbearers who dared to approach God in ways that transcended the norms of their era.

Unexpectedly, the nearest thing to evidence for God came as Freitas’s mother was dying from cancer. As she considered the countless acts of kindness shown during and after her mother’s illness, she found herself compelled to revise her opinion of the Catholic church: Institutionally, its record might be deeply flawed, but its local members could still minister great healing and love.

“During those months,” she writes,

When my mother was first receiving treatment, God took the form of sausage and meatballs and big pots of tomato sauce and God was in those sick days offered by my mother’s colleagues. God was in the prayers answered that we didn’t need to utter because the parish community got there first and made it so we didn’t have to pray for those things at all.

Faith in others’ faith

Wishful Thinking is a beautifully written memoir in which the journey is more emotional than theological. This will doubtless result in frustration for some readers, as it leaves the author’s search for God frustratingly unresolved.

Ultimately, however, those female voices from centuries past and the continuing influence of her own mother (and grandmother) helped Freitas to retain some form of Catholic identity, despite having every reason to reject it. As she reflects: “Maybe it seems a little weird to call myself Catholic given how the jury is still out—kind of way, way out—on the belief front for me.”

The closest we get to a final resolution is a moving description of how, despite struggling to find God in church, Freitas now finds that the familiar words, actions, and rituals of the Catholic Mass allow her to connect emotionally with the memory of her mother and grandmother. If she has any belief at all, it is faith in their faith.

This is a personal journey, honestly told. But, as a Christian myself, I wanted to reach through the pages of the book and encourage Freitas to give up searching for the same experience of God that her mother found comfort in. Far better to go to the source, seeking the image of God found in the Jesus of the Gospels.

Perhaps Freitas would tell me that’s the evangelical in me speaking—always fixated on Scripture. But I was struck by how rarely the figure of Christ featured in a book about someone trying to make sense of Christianity. If you want to find God, surely that’s the place to start?

A notable exception comes when Freitas describes a sudden moment of clarity while reading Sartre during her philosophical awakening. The philosopher’s concept of “bad faith” refers to the danger of investing our self-worth in temporal things—careers, relationships, love—that will inevitably let us down.

Freitas acknowledges that, for Christians, Jesus must be the answer to Sartre’s “bad faith” dilemma. But, when plunged into the abyss of depression by relationship breakdowns and traumatic life events, she says she has simply never found Jesus waiting for her:

This is where the difference between a believing Christian and a faith-challenged person like me reveals itself. I plunge into that darkness and wish for someone to carry me to the other side of this hell. But the only way I ever get there is if I somehow find the way out again alone.

For a season, Freitas tried to implement Sartre’s solution—surrendering to the meaninglessness of life and perhaps finding a way to live above the maelstrom of the storm. But she struggled to make it work in practice.

However, I believe Jesus has a better response to nihilism than Sartre. In his famous story about the wise and foolish builders (Matt. 7:24–27), he pointed out how easily life lets us down when we construct it on the shifting sands offered by this world. Instead, he advised his hearers to weatherproof their souls against the storms of life by building on the rock of his own life and teachings.

That may sound like wishful thinking to some people, but it has proven a solid foundation for countless lives and even whole civilizations. I hope that Wishful Thinking (beautifully written as it is) won’t be Freitas’s last word on her search. In my experience, Jesus often surprises those who keep seeking.

Justin Brierley is a writer, broadcaster, and speaker in the UK. He is the author of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again.

- More from Justin Brierley

Theology

Will Your Presidential Vote Send You to Hell?

Russell Moore

Decisions made on Election Day have implications for Judgment Day. But let’s not confuse one day for the other.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

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

Since by nature of my work I’ve had to weigh in on a lot of controversial issues over the years, I’ve been cussed out a time or two. Sometimes, I’ve been yelled at with, “God damn you!” When an unbeliever says that, it’s one thing. Christians, though, mean it literally.

A family I know and love was rattled recently to get a note from someone they considered a longtime friend suggesting that the family was going to hell. The cause for the impending brimstone was not that the family denied the faith, embraced some heresy, or adopted some unrepentant life of immorality. At issue was that the family did not support a presidential candidate.

The note-sender put in all the provisions of “I’m only saying this because I love you,” which works for cruelty the same way “This doesn’t actually count as sex” works for people who want to sleep with each other without giving up their purity rings. Adding a “bless your heart” to the “God damn you” doesn’t really change it that much.

This sort of situation comes to me at least once a week these days and, in some ways, it’s jarringly new in our history. I can’t think of churches splitting over whether Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson should sit in the Oval Office, for example. I can’t imagine family members refusing to speak to one another over who voted for Jimmy Carter and who for Gerald Ford. That has changed over the past decade or so, and some of us aren’t used to it yet. I pray we never will be.

Much of this has to do with larger divisions in American life—the polarization of the populace, the tribalization of the parties, the trivialization of politics itself. And some of it has to do with changes in the American church.

A market-driven religion seeks to appeal to “felt needs” and especially to what drives the passions of the people to whom it wants to appeal. When the concern is what happens after death or how to be forgiven of guilt, a market-driven religion emphasizes those things.

And when the market secularizes to caring more about how to thrive in the workforce or how to spice up a marriage, a market-driven religion will reflect that. When the market further secularizes to the point that what people want is “red meat” about why their political or ethnic or racial “enemies” are bad, a market-driven religion can do that too. And it has.

That’s why we end up with an American religion in which people can gladly partner with prosperity gospel teachers who would be thrown out of a Billy Sunday crusade, not to mention the Council of Nicaea. These same people simultaneously denounce as maybe-not-even-regenerate those who are orthodox on every article of the faith but who won’t violate their consciences on supporting political causes or candidates they believe to be wrong.

In a politicized, secularized American Christianity, some seem to think that the apostle’s admonition to make your calling and election sure (2 Pet. 1:10) has to do with posting the right pop-political opinions on social media.

We live in a time when religious experience has grown cold and dead, and political affiliation feels alive and invigorating. Plus, it’s easy. Trolling your neighbors on social media for their politics may cost you some self-respect, but you can budget for that.

On the other hand, bearing witness to Christ and persuading your neighbors to give their lives to him requires something of you. Modeling Christ in word and life for your Haitian immigrant neighbors fleeing violence and poverty will require you to interrupt your life and comfort. Reposting memes falsely accusing them of eating household pets—because somebody’s cousin’s friend from high school said they did—takes only a few seconds.

While this might feel new to many of us, we should recognize that it’s rooted in something very old: an Americanized version of one of the earliest heresies in the church.

Much of the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters to the churches in Rome and Galatia, addresses a dispute about what it means to follow Christ and to be united to him in faith. Those the apostles pronounced to be false teachers suggested that the Gentiles seeking to follow Christ must first become Jews, with the marks of circumcision and the observance of diets and days. Concerning the teachers who insisted on circumcision for these Gentiles, Paul wrote to the Galatians, “To them we did not yield in submission even for a moment so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you” (2:5, ESV throughout).

For the apostle, those who added to the gospel were not thereby practicing addition but subtraction. A gospel of “Christ and” is another gospel altogether (1:6). Paul speaks of those who wish to add additional entrance requirements to the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected as “anathema,” as those who should be cursed (vv. 8–9). If one is united to Christ, the old categories are broken down, and people who ordinarily wouldn’t be united together—Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, zealot and tax collector—find themselves in this mystery where the only defining category is Christ and Christ alone (Col. 3:11).

The gospel, of course, works itself out in life—both in terms of how we live our lives personally and how we live our lives together, socially, culturally, and politically.

People can be committed, though, to the same goals of justice but differ as to how to get to them. The Bible mandates care for the poor. On some matters, the application is explicit and clear-cut: One should not exploit the pay of one’s laborers, for instance (James 5:1–6). On other matters, believers may disagree on exactly which public policies benefit the poor and what unintended consequences might actually hurt them. Somebody on that will likely be wrong. That’s why we have debate and moral persuasion.

Some Christians believe the pro-life vision of care for the unborn always requires voting for the Republican ticket, no matter what. Others believe the pro-life vision is harmed long-term by tying it to sexual anarchy, misogyny, contempt for the vulnerable, and mob violence. Some believe their consciences require them to vote for a candidate with whom they disagree, even on major issues, but who will respect the rule of law and the constitutional order. Others don’t believe they can vote for either candidate in good conscience.

As you know, I have very strong views on the presidential election. I have and will continue to make those views known. To do otherwise would be to violate my own conscience, and my own sense of what it means to love my country. Some people disagree with me—even up to half the country. I do not believe those viewpoints are morally or rationally equal, of course, or I wouldn’t hold the views I do.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I think that those who disagree with me are, by definition, not Christians. To do so would be to add to the requirement of faith in Christ a commitment to see the political and cultural stakes of the moment the way I do. That would be veering close to the Galatian heresy. And that, the Bible says, really does endanger our souls.

We have the obligation to speak out when support for any partisan movement or personality is conflated with Christianity itself. It’s especially odd when those who defend slaveholding or white supremacist Christians of the past as “men of their time” or as good Christians with “blind spots” are nonetheless willing to say that only those who vote the way they do can be genuine Christians.

More serious than all of the issues combined—more serious even than the future of the American Republic itself—is the conflation of the gospel with a human personality or power. When the church yawns at Trinitarian heresy or scoffs at what Jesus defines as the fruit of the Spirit but unites around a partisan identity, we are heading toward something closer to the imperial cult against which the risen Christ warned the first-century churches—congregations persecuted by that cult for refusing to say, “Caesar is Lord.” Decisions one makes on Election Day have implications for Judgment Day. But if we confuse one day for the other, we’ve lost more than an election. It’s bad enough when we say to our political opponents, metaphorically, “Go to hell.” It’s even worse when we think that’s the gospel.

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

News

Pro-Life Voters Find Trump Disappointing—but Harris Even Worse

Harvest Prude

At the debate, Donald Trump didn’t take a strong stand and continued to defer to the states, while Kamala Harris championed expansive abortion rights.

The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris took place Tuesday night.

Allison Bailey / AFP via Getty Images

During the first presidential debate between former president Donald Trump and vice president Kamala Harris, both candidates spent a few minutes discussing abortion policy, yet pro-life Christians didn’t get the conviction or clarity they were hoping to hear.

Trump twice declined to give a clear answer on whether he would veto a federal abortion ban should Congress pass one and reiterated that he believes abortion restrictions are best left to the states. Meanwhile, Harris said she would recodify Roe v. Wade if it came to her desk and didn’t say whether she supported any restrictions on abortion at all.

Trump appointed three of the US Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in 2022. During the debate, he referred to the justices’ “genius and heart and strength” and “courage” in the Dobbs decision.

He defended the move as something the majority of Americans wanted—to be able to vote on the issue themselves state by state.

“It’s a horrible place to plant your flag:, ‘Life is a state’s rights issue.’ No, it isn’t,” said Ryan Bomberger, founder of the conservative pro-life organization The Radiance Foundation. “Should civil rights have been a state’s rights issue? Because when that happened, it didn’t go well.”

Bomberger plans on voting for Trump but also said that seeing Republicans retreat on life has been “devastating.”

The discussion during this week’s debate reflected how pro-lifers have found their convictions on the sanctity of life sidelined by both major parties, with Republicans under Trump backing away from what has been a core voting issue for religious conservatives and Democrats doubling down on the right to abortion.

Trump didn’t voice any specific pro-life positions other than opposing abortion in the third trimester. He also sought to highlight Democrats’ extremism on abortion, accusing them of supporting “execution after birth” of babies.

Trump’s answer on a national abortion ban led to a back-and-forth with the moderator.

“If I could just get a yes or no, because your running mate, J. D. Vance, has said that you would veto if it did come to your desk,” ABC News moderator Linsey Davis asked, referencing a hypothetical national abortion ban. Getting such a bill over the finish line would require Republicans to control both chambers of Congress.

“I didn’t discuss it with J. D., in all fairness,” Trump said, then said that Vance might have a different view of the issue. Trump had previously also implied he wouldn’t sign a bill banning abortion nationwide.

“We’re headed back to this space where social conservatives aren’t sure what deal they’re getting with Donald Trump,” John Shelton, policy director for former vice president Mike Pence’s foundation, Advancing American Freedom, told CT.

Trump’s move toward the political center on abortion—or failure to speak with clarity about his position—means there is less of a contrast between the two parties when it comes to life.

“A lot of people are dispirited, demotivated,” Shelton said. Yet, “ultimately, you don’t necessarily have to trust that Trump is going to be great on this. You can just trust that Harris will be worse.”

On the debate stage, Trump said that bringing up whether Harris would sign a bill to codify abortion rights was a waste of time, since such a bill would require Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. “We don’t have to discuss it, because she’d never be able to get it,” he added.

Harris clarified that, should Congress pass a bill codifying a constitutional right to an abortion similar to Roe v. Wade while she was in office, she would sign it. She also came out swinging against states that have restricted or banned abortion.

VP Harris refuses to answer where she will draw the line on abortion.
— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) September 11, 2024

Some Christian pro-life leaders pushed back on how Harris brought faith into her responses, referencing couples who “pray and dream” of building a family with reproductive assistance and suggesting that religious beliefs can align with abortion protections.

She emphasized the difficult position women are put in when they seek abortions and claimed, “One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government, and Donald Trump, certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”

Harris declined to give any specific limitations she would support on abortion and expressed incredulity that abortions at nine months occur. “Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion,” she said. “That isn’t happening; it’s insulting to the women of America.”

Trump referenced controversial comments by a former Virginia governor on third-trimester abortions. The majority of abortions take place in the first trimester (93%) with 6 percent occurring between 14 and 20 weeks and 1 percent performed at or after 21 weeks, according to Pew Research Center. The United States is one of a handful of countries that allows elective abortion past 20 weeks.

Since the Dobbs decision, a number of states have loosened restrictions or voted against placing more restrictions on abortion, including in Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas, leading some politicians and strategists to blame these electoral losses on a backlash to Dobbs and the GOP’s overall position on abortion. Since then, national Republicans have sought to back away from the issue.

Currently, 63 percent of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center. In contrast to other religious groups, a majority of white evangelicals oppose abortion, with 73 percent holding it should be illegal in all or most cases.

In July, the Republican Party watered down its previous position on abortion. It scrapped language that called for a national abortion ban, instead punting the issue to the states.

“I have to admit I have serious scruples following the number of shifts in the GOP platform and the general messaging that has pretty overtly abandoned pro-lifers and social conservatives,” said Marlo Slayback, director of programs for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. She said some are optimistic that Trump might reverse course once elected, but others aren’t convinced.

“They fear this will mark the inflection point of the GOP that historically stood by the pro-life cause, that the pro-life issue and even other issues important to social conservatives, like traditional marriage, will be abandoned in a misguided effort to win elections as Americans adopt more liberal views on these issues,” Slayback, a young Catholic mom who describes herself as a single-issue voter on abortion and life issues, told CT.

Overall, committed pro-life voters are unsatisfied with the lack of urgency around abortion. Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Andrew Walker told Politico that he knows “not a small number” of conservative evangelicals who are not going to vote for Trump over the issue.

“Former President Donald Trump no longer has a convincing case for why pro-lifers should vote for him,” bioethics professor Charles Camosy, who is Catholic, wrote for The Atlantic.

Abortion will be on the ballot in ten states this November: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota.

In most cases, the ballot initiatives would amend the constitution in these states to remove or ease restrictions on abortion. Nebraska is an exception: Voters will consider dueling ballot initiatives, one that allows abortion up until fetal viability and another that would leave the state’s 12-week ban in place and continue to ban abortion in the second or third trimesters, with some exceptions. The amendment that gets the most votes will be implemented.

One of those states is Trump’s current state of residence. He had previously criticized Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis for the state’s current abortion policy, which limits abortion after six weeks, as “too short” and a “terrible mistake.” When asked about how Trump would vote on a state referendum that would codify access to abortion, the former president said he would “be voting that we need more than six weeks.” Later, he clarified that would not vote for Florida’s initiative.

After criticizing Trump’s shifting stances on abortion, Live Action founder Lila Rose, an evangelical-turned-Catholic activist, said she hoped Trump would change his mind and earn back pro-lifers’ votes. During the debate, she wrote on X that she was glad Trump didn’t confirm Vance’s remark that he’d veto a national ban.

Other evangelical leaders predicted that despite their concerns on the issue, religious conservatives would come home to the former president when it comes time to vote.

Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, told Religion News Service that Trump’s track record on abortion outweighs his rhetoric this election cycle: “While his position on abortion may not be as absolute as some would hope, it doesn’t change the fact that he has been the most pro-life president in my lifetime and is the only pro-life presidential candidate on the ballot this election.”

Faith & Freedom Coalition head Ralph Reed said that evangelical support for Trump won’t waver because of Harris’s “extreme” positions on abortion.

Isaac Willour, a conservative commentator, analyst for Bowyer Research, and Pennsylvania voter, told CT he only expects defections if a second Trump administration actually expands “reproductive rights” and abortion access.

“I think a large swath of the pro-life movement doesn’t follow the ins and outs of everything that Trump’s been saying the past four weeks,” he said. “If he wins and then governs in the way that Trump who showed up to the March for Life would … I think the pro-life movement will welcome him back with open arms.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Ideas

Worship Together or Bowl Alone

Brad East

Contributor

There’s already a local institution that meets our moment’s many social needs. It’s called church.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

From wherever you’re sitting, this likely feels like a low point for the church in America. (Elsewhere it’s a different matter.)

Some of our neighbors see the church as an agent of reaction, pressing the brakes on every major movement for progress since the country’s founding. Others believe the church is a wolf in the process of losing its sheep’s clothing, finally being revealed as toxic, abusive, and self-protective. For still others, the church is a nonstarter, even invisible. Perhaps older generations attended services at Christmas and Easter and more recent generations claimed they did. No need to pretend anymore.

For those of us who remain committed to church—even pastors, apologists, and Christian writers—it may feel tempting to meet this moment by downplaying the church as much as we can. You don’t have to go to church to be Christian, we might say. Christianity is about a personal, individual relationship with Jesus. What matters is whether you know him, follow him, love him, in your daily life. Organized religion may help some folks, but it’s okay if that’s not you. Try a sermon podcast instead.

I’d like to offer a different perspective. It isn’t exactly a theological case, though not because there isn’t one. As I’ve written elsewhere, theologically speaking, there is one reason and one reason only to go to church: God.

If the God of the gospel is the one true and living God, then every one of us should be at church every Sunday morning (and more). If not—if Jesus did not rise from the dead—then the church is built on a lie, our faith is futile, and “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:16–19). If the gospel were false, church would be a waste of time, even if it added decades to our lives and absolutely ensured our total personal flourishing. If the God of Abraham is fictional, if he is not the maker of heaven and earth, it would be better to live in the truth and be miserable than to playact the liturgy and be happy.

But by definition, Christians believe the gospel is true. And if it is true, then church—“the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15, NET) and Christ’s “body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23, ESV)—is a vital element of human life lived to the utmost.

That’s why the instinct to meet our culture’s critique or ignorance of the church by downplaying its import is so misguided. Church is not an optional add-on to Christian faith. It is how we learn to be human as God intended. Indeed, it makes possible truly human life before God.

Church has what we need, the purpose and community and cultivation of virtue for which the rest of our culture is grasping in the dark. It’s right here. It’s nothing to be coy or embarrassed about. It’s nothing to apologize for. Church is what people are hungering for, even if they don’t realize it. Sometimes we ourselves don’t realize it.

Consider some popular recent diagnoses of what ails our society, especially our families and young people. Jonathan Haidt’s An Anxious Generation indicts the “screen-based” childhood of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy decries the colonization of education and parenting by a faux-scientific, quasi-religious therapeutic worldview. James Davison Hunter, Yuval Levin, and Rob Henderson detail the economic precarity haunting the public square, and a growing list of writers including Richard Reeves and Louise Perry have analyzed our confusion about gender, embodiment, work, marriage, and raising children.

We’re even seeing secular thinkers exploring anew the practical and cultural benefits of Christianity—so much so that Justin Brierley has written a book titled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Besides recounting actual conversions, he engages intellectuals who want to be Christian but can’t (yet) bring themselves to convert, a notable development in a supposedly secular age.

Now step back and consider what these authors prescribe.

They tell us that people generally and children particularly flourish when parents are married, when families are intact, when households and neighborhoods are bustling with brothers, sisters, and cousins.

Kids need to be outdoors playing with friends, not indoors on screens. They need to be literate—readers of books that not only provide wisdom but also take them on imaginative adventures.

They need to be charged with good work, with helping their neighbors and serving the least of these. They need to be embedded in a variety of intergenerational social settings that teach them how to navigate uncertain and sometimes risky relationships with peers as well as adults.

And speaking of adults, children need mentors on whom they can rely. They need rituals that mark transitions, whether from childhood to adolescence or adolescence to adulthood. They need spaces in which to feel free to discuss and debate aloud, with friends and trusted adults alike, what it means to be male or female.

They need tech-free spaces in which to inhabit their bodies and be present to others: old and young, black and white, married and single, disabled and able-bodied. They need to suffer boredom—during a sermon, say, or a long budget meeting—and lack an obvious way to stanch it. They need to see adult friendships at both their best and their most challenging.

Now, if you were to design from scratch a local institution to fill to these needs for any child, individual, or family of any income bracket, you’d end up with something very like the church. Even those outside the church are beginning to realize this. See The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson lamenting “the churchgoing bust” (although he’s an agnostic) or Haidt speaking of “a God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart” (although he’s an atheist).

In saying all this, I’m not suggesting the church is reducible to its role in solving social problems. It is more than this, but it is not less. Besides, our social problems are spiritual problems too—and the church is also where we learn to pray, to worship with others, to see what should be obvious but all too often eludes our grasp: that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. The church offers us the solemnity of rites and practices that train our eyes and hearts to stay focused on Jesus in a culture of perpetual irony, cheap snark, and easy entertainment.

None of this should be a shock from a theological perspective. God founded the church. It is no merely human institution. We should expect it to be finely tuned to the complex needs of the human experience—to help us with everything from early socialization to midlife crisis to dying well.

It’s true, to spin off a phrase from Jesus, that the church was made for man (Mark 2:27). In a deeper sense, though, man was made for the church. Humankind is meant for fellowship with God, and we have a foretaste of that feast in the church, the body of Christ. It’s where we were made to flourish. For what makes us flourish most supremely is found most powerfully there, where we worship together, hearkening to the Word and receiving the sacraments.

You’d think that Christians would see the opportunity here—the chance to tell our society that we have what it’s seeking, that a local institution responsive to these social ills already exists. But for the most part we’re failing to seize the moment, and I think the reason is twofold.

At the cultural level, American Christians tend to treat the church as an embarrassing encumbrance or a bait and switch, something to be endured if you want to follow Jesus.

On the contrary: The church is the selling point. I don’t mean that we want people joining churches for the social perks. I mean that Christ himself has made the offer of the gospel one and the same as the offer of joining a people. Just as we cannot have the Father without the Son (1 John 2:23) or adoption by God without adoption by Abraham (Gal. 3:6–4:7), so we cannot have Christ without his body and bride (Eph. 2:1–22). It’s a package deal. The Lord and his family come together; either we have both or we have neither.

In a different context, the Protestant theologian Philip Melanchthon once remarked that to know Christ is to know his benefits. Something like that is true here as well: The church is a haven for humanness. It’s a school for learning to be human like Jesus, the one true fully human being. Accordingly, given the challenges of our day, the church is a training ground for antifragility.

Whatever you call it, the church is there for a reason. It is not an encumbrance. It is not organized religion you can take or leave. Minus the church, the gospel is bodiless, incorporeal, ghostly. According to Scripture, the community to which Christ has forever bound himself is none other than the church (Eph. 5:25–33; 1 Cor. 12:4–27; Rev. 21:1–14). The living God dwells there. In this world, therefore, the church is where fullness of life is found. Let’s act like it.

At the congregational level—and admittedly this is anecdotal—what I see is churches anxious about their falling status, nervous about losing Gen Z, and eager to give the people what (church leaders think) they want. The religious landscape has become a marketplace, and churches compete with one another by offering an ever-flashier product. More technology, louder worship, fewer rituals, catchier slogans, and a whole lot of therapeutic jargon. Something to be entertained by. Something to keep the boredom at bay. Perhaps even something to go viral on socials.

The lesson we should have learned long ago is that the more the church is indistinguishable from the world, the less the world has any reason to take an interest in it. The church cannot do better therapy than counselors, better concerts than rock bands, or better TED talks than best-selling authors. In a competition to entertain, the church will always lose to brunch and the NFL.

The more we try to play catch-up to Hollywood, Nashville, and Silicon Valley, the less distinct the church will be—and the less suited to its purpose of worshiping God and forming humans. The practical benefits of the church’s common life are not its proper center. They are byproducts of the Spirit gathering a human community around the incarnate Son of God, and they will deteriorate or vanish altogether if we are no longer centered on Christ.

Every generation of the church has some urgent question to answer. Ours is not about Christology or iconography or even soteriology. It’s about theological anthropology, the doctrine of the human being.

We Christians know something about what it means to be human—and the many ways being human can go wrong—and our society is desperate for answers to this question. Thankfully, our neighbors don’t have to read Augustine or Calvin or even Paul to figure it out. Being human isn’t something you learn by reading. You learn to be human with other humans, in company with the people of God. In other words, at church.

God has shown us how to be human in Christ, and we learn the lesson in his school, alongside fellow lifelong learners (that’s what “disciple” means, after all). Let’s have the confidence to show others. Let’s say with the psalmist, “Come and see what God has done, his awesome deeds for mankind,” and “let me tell you what he has done for me” (Ps. 66:5, 16). The world is knocking on the door. Let’s invite them to come inside.

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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