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

?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>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.”

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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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Theology

10 Prayers for a Volatile Election Season

Kimberly Deckel

From apathy to anger, how we pray for our country and its citizens matters.

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

I have often heard from others that written prayer seems less inspired than other types of prayer. While I understand this sentiment, I have found that in my own life and in the lives of those around me, there are times when we long to pray but just don’t have the words. In these moments and moments of communal prayer and lament, I find written prayers to be especially welcomed.

We’re in the last couple months leading up to an election some say is the “most important” of our time. As political presidential candidates vie for our votes, divisiveness and vitriol are at an all-time high in our country—not just in the public square but in the church as well.

For many of us, this moment in history may be one where we don’t have the words, but it is more important than ever for God’s people to lay aside the wrathful ways of the world and take up the ministry of reconciliation and intercession on behalf of our nation. We must lay our crowns down at the feet of our Savior, along with any judgment or offense causing us to withhold love from our neighbors.

We must turn our eyes upon Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith and the king of another kingdom altogether.

A prayer against apathy

God of empathy and compassion, we are grateful you do not sit idly by without concern for your people. In your deep love for us, you sent your only Son to walk among us, to know what it is to be human, and to suffer on our behalf. O Lord, as your humble servants, give us the ability to look upon others with the same empathy and compassion. Protect us from being so consumed with our own lives that we fail to notice what is happening in the lives of others and the world around us. Move in our hearts, O Lord, giving us eyes to see, ears to hear, and courage to act. We pray in your Son’s name.

A prayer for a Christlike spirit

Holy Spirit, you are the Comforter and Advocate, who was present with disciples even after Jesus ascended to heaven. We pray for an openness to your work in and through us. May we resist the temptation to get caught up in fruitless arguments and defensiveness. Strengthen us to serve and uphold one another and to put the needs and suffering of others ahead of our own. Especially during this divisive election season, we pray for a gentle, loving, and kind spirit—like that of Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit as one God eternally.

A prayer for nonviolence in our country

O Good Shepherd, you who gather us as lambs in your arms, carrying us close to your heart, we long for peace on earth as it is in heaven. In this election season, we ask that you carry our nation close to your heart. Protect us and guide us into the ways of peace. We pray specifically against violence at political rallies, polling places, debates, and other spaces where many are gathered. May we become a nation that turns our weapons into plowshares, taking on your posture of nonviolence. By the power of your Spirit, we ask for safety to prevail and that you would lead us into the ways of your peaceful kingdom. We submit ourselves and this prayer to you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

A prayer for the opposing candidates

King of the universe, you who reign over all things, we submit to you our thoughts, feelings, and frustrations about the candidate we disagree with. May we not look at them with contempt, and may we be reminded that they, too, are created in your image. We pray for protection over all political candidates and their families. We humbly ask, O Lord, that you act in mighty ways in our own hearts. Give us the humility that is needed to pray for all people, not just those who think or look like us. Direct, we pray, the next president of the United States with a heart for justice and truth. Deliver us from poverty, prejudice, and oppression. Regardless of who is elected, may your will prevail by the power of your Spirit,. We ask all these things in your holy name.

A prayer for a posture of humility and against defensiveness

God of humility, you humbled yourself to the point of death on the cross. You show us the way of the servant. Rather than being motivated by pride and self-righteousness, may we, as your people, clothe ourselves with kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Manifest in us the ability to hold in tension the disagreement of others and our own convictions with grace. Enlighten us, guide us, and strengthen us so that we may submit to your will through Jesus Christ, our High Priest.

A prayer for the ability to see things from others’ perspectives

Gracious and merciful Jesus, you spent time with those you knew would betray you, along with prostitutes, tax collectors, and others who were outcasts. We come before you, asking for the ability to hear and consider the perspectives of those with whom we disagree. Root us in your Word and cultivate in us the ability to compassionately and clearly articulate our convictions. Remove from us the need to prove our points and defend ourselves, and instead fill us with your overflowing grace. Enable us to look with tenderness upon the entire human family through your eyes, O Jesus.

A prayer for those who are marginalized around us

Christ Incarnate, we uplift those who are marginalized in our nation: the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the unhoused, racial and ethnic minorities, and those who do not find protection in the laws of this land. You came to proclaim good news to the poor, to restore the sight of the blind, and to set the oppressed free. May those on the margins of our society have a deep and true sense of your love for them. Protect the least, the lost, and the lonely, we pray, as a mother hen protects her chicks. Grant us the ability to love our neighbor and to exercise our right to vote with the interests of the least of these in mind—for we know that what we do for the least among us, we do also for you. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

A prayer for when we feel anxious about the future

God of Shalom, you say, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Today we bring to you our burdens, our uncertainties, and our anxieties. When we cannot sleep, when our minds won’t slow down, on the days when our palms are sweaty and our hearts race—when our imaginations get the best of us and we are full of despondency and anxiety about the future—calm our hearts, O Lord. In you alone, our souls find rest. In this chaotic world, we lay all our burdens at your feet, and we find safety and protection in your kingdom. In Jesus’ name.

A prayer for unity with our neighbors who vote differently than us

O Father, you who hear all our prayers, sanctify us for your good purposes, we pray. Show us how to love our neighbor as ourselves, even those who disagree with us, as you have commanded us. May we be leery of any unity that is used to manipulate and silence others, especially the least of these. When we find ourselves tempted to dismiss others’ thoughts and experiences, create in us the ability to seek understanding rather than to pronounce judgement, as well as the ability to see the humanity in others. Manifest in us the ability to think beyond our own political interests and to consider the interests of those who are different from us. We ask all these things in the powerful name of Jesus.

A prayer for the act of voting and the election outcome

Almighty God, prepare our hearts and minds as we head toward voting. We express gratitude for the right to vote, and we lament the brokenness of our democracy and voting system—a system that continues to suffer from inequity. Empower us, O Lord, to make decisions rooted in the ways of Jesus rather than the ways of the world. Give us wisdom and discernment as we cast our votes with a humble spirit, and let our voting be an act of prayer. May we be reminded that the candidates we vote for are not our savior, but you are the bringer of the heavenly kingdom, and our ultimate hope rests in you. We commend this nation to your care, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Kimberly Deckel is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She serves as as executive pastor at Church of the Cross in Austin, Texas.

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Culture

How Colombia’s Most Popular Christian Artist Landed in Houston

Hernán Restrepo

Alex Campos has a new home in Texas and a new musical focus—Latin worship.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

Colombian cyclists often refer to themselves as escarabajos or “beetles,” drawing a comparison between the journeys of the small bugs across their varied terrain with those of bicyclists pedaling up and down their country’s mountainsides. For one of Latin America’s most popular Christian artists—a self-proclaimed escarabajo—a grueling ride can help generate a new song.

“There is no recipe. I don’t have anything special. While I’m riding my bike, there’s a melody, a theme going around in my head,” said Alex Campos, who hails from Bogotá, a city that sits at more than a mile and a half high. “It’s about being connected, meditating not only on the Word but on the things that God does in your life—the good and bad.”

It may be true that Campos has no secret recipe for a hit song, but he has won five Latin Grammys over the course of his career and is one of the most influential Latin American Christian artists in the industry. His most popular songs, like Al taller del Maestro (“To the Master’s Workshop”), have crossed from Christian to secular radio stations throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He averages 1.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify and has 2.55 million channel subscribers on YouTube.

According to Colombian Billboard journalist Luisa Calle, who highlighted Campos’s “Pan Duro” as one of the best Latin American Christian songs of 2023, persistence and musical versatility have sustained his long career.

“Campos does not think that he has already achieved everything. He continues to evolve; he continues to innovate; he continues pursuing new goals,” Calle told CT.

Campos’s ability to work in various Latin American folk and dance genres has allowed him to collaborate widely and produce music that draws on a different combination of styles and regional musical traditions, said Calle. Campos has worked with not only an array of Christian popular musicians but also mainstream vallenato (a Colombian folk genre) and ranchera (a traditional genre rooted in rural Mexico) artists, including Fonseca, Silvestre Dangond, Jorge Celedón, and Yeison Jiménez. “Pan Duro” is a bachata (a dance genre originating in the Dominican Republic) song that also draws on bolero (a Cuban poetic song style) and ballad sensibilities.

“Colombian artists are very versatile because there is great musical diversity in our country,” said Calle. “Alex has been able to make the most of that.”

These days, Campos has given up the mountains of Colombia for Houston, Texas, a city whose downtown is nearly at sea level. The Christian pop star is now releasing music as an independent artist and attends the Spanish-speaking congregation of Lakewood Church, a move that reflects some of the broader trends in global contemporary worship music and transnational evangelicalism in the Americas. His latest album, Esencia, released on August 23, has a new sound, combining conventions of contemporary worship music from the US and Australia with style elements of Latin pop and other regional Latin American genres.

With Esencia, Campos continues to lean into his versatility as he starts a new chapter of his career, turning his attention to music that serves church congregations and contributes to a growing body of contemporary worship music written in Spanish, for Spanish-speaking communities (rather than translated). Campos has served as a worship leader and preacher throughout his career (he was featured in Hillsong’s 2012 Global Project), but the album marks his entry into worship music as a songwriter.

“I have wanted to make a congregational album for a long time,” Campos told CT. “Esencia is an album of music that can be sung in churches. I’m very excited about that.”

In the Latin American Christian music industry, as in the US, worship music has become the dominant genre within the niche, and artists who have written radio hits are increasingly seeing worship music production as both a spiritually fulfilling endeavor and a strategic career move. This trend has made waves in Brazil, as popular secular artists are crossing over into the Christian sphere to release worship tracks.

Christian music is one of the fastest-growing musical genres in the US—growth that is fueled by the popularity of worship music. Artists like Brandon Lake are finding success straddling the boundary between Christian pop or rock and contemporary worship. And as that boundary has become fainter, Christian artists are increasingly creating music for congregations and Christian radio.

Campos has been navigating the changing Christian music industry for years, but now he’s doing so from a home in a new country.

“It is difficult to let go of your culture, food, and family. We did not come because we wanted to, but out of obedience to God. It took me a year to understand his purpose for us here,” said Campos. “I feel like I’m starting my career all over again.”

Although he isn’t typically outspoken about his politics, Campos said that political changes in Colombia contributed to his decision to leave the country.

In 2022, former guerrilla leader Gustavo Petro, a leftist leader with an unfriendly relationship with the country’s evangelical churches, was elected president of Colombia. When he was mayor of Bogotá, Petro’s office refused to allow Góspel al Parque, the largest free Christian music festival in Latin America, to take place as planned in 2013. Some have perceived Petro’s election to the presidency as a sign that the country is becoming more and more politically fraught for Colombian evangelicals.

During a 2019 television interview, Campos was asked what he thought of then presidential candidate Petro. “If that man is elected president, I will leave the country,” he said.

Reflecting on the interview, Campos said, “I think I was expressing what many Colombians were feeling—that if a leftist government came to power, it was necessary to go out and look for other horizons.”

Campos moved to the Houston suburbs with his family in April 2022. He has found new career opportunities in Texas, but the transition has come with personal challenges. The musician struggled with depression during his first months in the US, a painful experience he says helped him empathize with other immigrants. It also spurred him to double down on his faith.

“Many of the Latinos who come here end up getting absorbed in work, and they move away from the church,” he said. “But we know that if God brought us here, it is because this country needs to be passionate about the Lord again, and Latino Christians are part of his plan to rekindle that flame.”

Campos speaks openly about his belief in God’s ability to heal and work miracles. In 2002, he was diagnosed with a tumor in his throat and lost his voice just days after beginning the tour to launch his first album. Doctors warned that his singing ability would be affected by the surgery to remove it, cutting his vocal capacity in half. According to Campos, when he went in for a consultation before his surgery, the tumor was gone.

“When I understood that God didn’t want my voice but my heart, I was healed.”

After that health scare, Campos embarked on a decades-long career that has made him arguably the most recognized Colombian Christian artist in Latin America.

Now he is expanding his reach in the US market, writing and recording songs in English and in Spanish. Campos’s 2023 album, Vida, included a song with English and Spanish lyrics. “Libre,” the single from his new album, also has lyrics in both languages and features popular American Christian artist Tauren Wells. The song, released on June 21 of this year, has over 1 million views on YouTube.

After a decade of being signed to major record labels such as CanZion or Essential Records (Sony Music), Campos is pursuing his career as an independent artist, an increasingly popular path for artists who can leverage social media to promote their music without the oversight (or overreach) of a major label. Last year, Campos managed and produced his own 13-concert tour around the US.

Lakewood Church in Houston, Campos’s new home church, is led by Joel Osteen and is one of the largest in the US. Costa Rican musician and preacher Danilo Montero is the pastor of Lakewood’s large Spanish-speaking congregation. Before Montero, the congregation was pastored by influential worship artist Marcos Witt.

The stability and support of Lakewood have allowed Campos to pursue his career as an independent artist and participate in worship music production and leadership in both English and Spanish. Although Campos is not on staff at Lakewood, he is an occasional collaborator with Lakewood Music. Campos said that Houston has been a good place to build relationships with other Christian artists and worship leaders.

“Recently the guys from Miel San Marcos [a Dove Award–winning Guatemalan Christian band] were at my house,” Campos said. “Bani Muñoz, Harold and Elena, Ingrid Rosario, or Thalles Roberto … There are a lot of people here to share coffee, lunch, a good chat. We are edified by living near so many fellow Christian musicians who have blessed us.”

As Campos has turned toward worship music as a songwriter, he has had to adapt his poetic lyricism and gift for imagery.

“His lyrics are quite complex; they are not the simple or conventional lyrics we generally see within Christian music,” Billboard’s Calle told CT. “I think the personal stories he describes in his songs—stories of struggle and faith—and his vulnerability help him to connect with people.”

Although Escencia is clearly a foray into contemporary worship music, Campos has not abandoned his interest in blending Latin American genres. As the album’s subtitle, “Latin Worship,” suggests, Campos is bringing those genres into conversation with the style and aesthetic characteristics of popular worship. Songs like “Libre,” “Gracias Cristo,” or “Te Amo” fit the canons of modern worship. But others like “Rumbo Pa la Iglesia” boldly mix musical styles as different as regional Mexican and joropo (a genre originating in the eastern Colombian plains). “Veo Tu Gloria” oscillates between Argentine tango and Puerto Rican salsa.

These days, Campos writes for the church as he navigates life in a new country and in the context of a new faith community, away from familiar landscapes. Last month, Hurricane Beryl brought huge pine trees down onto their house and car.

“Just as nature recovers over time, we too can find within ourselves the strength to overcome challenges,” Campos wrote on Instagram. “This incident is not the end, but a new beginning. It teaches us to value what we have, to be resilient and to trust that we can always rebuild and flourish again.”

Campos isn’t building a career from scratch, but he sees this season of his life and career as distinct, marked by writing music for the global church and helping define the evolving genre of Latin worship. He is still an escarabajo at heart, steadily and persistently moving along, traversing difficult terrain and finding ways to keep momentum.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m building a new career,” said Campos. “He has taken me out of my comfort zone, which just makes me more dependent on faith in Jesus.”

Hernán Restrepo is a Colombian journalist living in Bogotá. Since 2021, he has been managing Christianity Today’s social media accounts in Spanish.

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News

Bethany Sues Michigan for Denying State Contracts Due to Faith-Based Hiring

Kate Shellnutt

The Christian ministry says it is being blocked from helping hundreds of refugee children and families, despite its decades-long history of service.

Mike Kline (notkalvin) / Getty Images

After decades of resettling refugee families and placing unaccompanied refugee children in foster homes, Bethany Christian Services announced Tuesday that it is suing the state of Michigan for denying its contracts due to long-standing faith-based hiring practices.

Bethany—the country’s largest Christian adoption and foster agency and one of ten refugee resettlement agencies in the US—says Michigan’s requirement that partners must hire from across faith traditions is discriminatory and violates the free exercise clause as well as exemptions for religious nonprofits in the Civil Rights Act.

Plus, leaders say that restricting Bethany’s involvement hinders urgent efforts to care for vulnerable children and families.

This case represents the latest First Amendment legal tussle around Christian social service agencies, as more ministries eager to offer services find their basic statements of faith clashing with nondiscrimination provisions in grant programs and other government partnerships. Courts are left to weigh Christian organizations’ religious freedom protections against state regulations.

“We’re committed to serving everybody, but this is about who we hire,” said Keith Cureton, Bethany’s president and CEO since last summer. “Hiring rights is an important religious liberty that not only impacts Bethany but affects thousands of faith-based nonprofits and ministries.”

Bethany has been contracted by the state of Michigan since 1981. Last year, the organization helped over 600 refugees and immigrants and placed around 300 unaccompanied minor refugees in foster families in the state, according to its own tallies.

But in 2024, the Office of Global Michigan (OGM), the government agency that enlists local partners for immigrant outreach and services, began denying contracts to Bethany. According to Nhung Hurst, Bethany’s general counsel, the state indicated it had a new requirement that contracted organizations hire individuals of all religions.

“None of our contracts stretching back multiple decades with the state government have included such a requirement,” Hurst said. And no other organizations were affected by the new provision.

Bethany’s leaders said that before moving forward with the lawsuit they reached out to OGM 19 times and prayed fervently for resolution. Bethany is headquartered in Grand Rapids and serves more refugees in its home state than any of the other 27 states where it operates.

Christian organizations like Bethany play a huge role in refugee resettlement and foster care services, both areas that rely on contracts with the government. Even after a 2021 Supreme Court ruling sided with a Catholic foster agency that was denied a government contract in Philadelphia, the justices didn’t override a precedent involving the general applicability of state laws (Employment Division v. Smith), so cases continue to emerge around faith-based providers seeking government funding.

Bethany has been in a deadlock with the state before. When Michigan declared in 2019 that foster agencies couldn’t turn away LGBTQ families, the organization opted to change its policies in the state and then across the country. Leaders at the time argued that it was the only way for Christians to continue to care for kids in the system.

As the state of Michigan began challenging Bethany’s faith statement requirement, there were reported rumblings over the policy internally. In January 2024, a local TV news station in Grand Rapids reported on a “culture clash” at Bethany, with unnamed staff describing a stricter enforcement of the Christian hiring policy under Cureton and tensions as the refugee branch moved into the organization’s main headquarters.

When asked about the claims, Hurst said, “Like any organization, sometimes you have differences in implementation, but we are unwavering in our mission and our values and our statement of faith.”

Bethany asks its new hires to affirm the Apostles’ Creed. (Back in 2019, Bethany’s statement of faith was based on the evangelical Lausanne Covenant.) Cureton did not directly respond to questions from CT about whether it has additional faith directives for employees, such as around sexuality, but did say that no employees have been fired over the past year due to such requirements.

Among Christian nonprofits, Bethany’s requirements aren’t unusual. (World Relief, another refugee resettlement agency, asks that employees align with an evangelical faith statement. A note on its hiring page also references the “protections afforded World Relief as a faith-based employer.”)

Bethany’s lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity and the OGM has been filed in the federal district court in Grand Rapids. Hurst said she is unaware of any instances where Bethany has lost contracts in other states due to its hiring practices.

The exemption for faith-based hiring has faced challenges over the years, lately over whether Christian nonprofits can require employees to live according to conduct standards and “whether the state can discriminatorily disqualify from government benefits those religious agencies that stay religious by exercising their Title VII and First Amendment rights to hire those who share their faith,” according to Steven McFarland.

McFarland is director of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom at the Christian Legal Society, co-counsel of record for Bethany’s case. Over his career specializing in religious freedom cases, he defended Seattle Pacific University in a lawsuit over its evangelical faith statement back in 1984, only to see similar legal challenges continue to arise.

Currently, the Alliance Defending Freedom is suing Oregon for rescinding a state grant from a youth ministry over its Christian hiring practices. Last month, a circuit court decided that the ministry could receive the state funding as the appeal continues.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act has protected faith-based organizations from the government interfering with their hiring practices for six decades now, McFarland said. “For Congress in 1964, the First Amendment was clear enough, not to mention common sense, that what makes religious organizations religious is what they believe, communicate, and exercise through their staff.”

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Ideas

China’s New Adoption Policy Leaves Children in the Balance

Chelsea Sobolik

Suspending international adoptions hurts children who already have waiting families.

Blackstation / Getty

On September 4, the US state department informed adoption service providers and waiting families that the People’s Republic of China (PRC), would “no longer carry out foreign adoption work,” except in a few narrow cases.

Several hundred American families have been matched with children in China. Many families were scheduled to bring their children home in January 2020, the same month that China closed down due to its zero-COVID policy and have been waiting for over four and a half years to bring their children home.

Aimee Welch was about to travel to China in March 2020 to finalize the adoption of a 6-year-old girl. After an agonizing past few years, Welch reflected on China’s announcement, saying, “It’s a closed door with no closure. And to think about this little girl, we promised to come for her. As a 6-year-old, how could she process the reason why we weren’t coming when we said we could?”

For years, China was “a leading country of origin” for adoptions and had one of the smoothest and most efficient programs. According to state department data between 1999 and 2023, more than 80,000 children from China were adopted into the US.

The landscape of intercountry adoption has changed over the past twenty years, and there’s been a steep decline in the number of such adoptions. In 2004, adoption across foreign borders peaked at 22,988. In 2023, only 1,275 children were welcomed into families through intercountry adoption.

The reasons for the global decline range from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, sending countries halting their programs, and countries and cultures becoming more open to domestic foster care and adoption.

Another shift is that many of the children available for international adoption are older children and children with moderate to severe medical special needs. The waiting children are some of the most vulnerable, and for many, their only chance to grow up in a safe, loving, permanent home is having the option of intercountry adoption.

China’s announcement is devastating because it means that thousands of children will likely grow up in institutions and won’t have access to families around the world who would be willing to give them loving homes. It remains unclear and unlikely that China will allow the waiting families to finalize their adoptions.

The waiting Chinese children range in age from 5 to 16, and all have moderate medical needs. In addition to being separated from the families pursuing them, most of these children have gone without medical care and educational opportunities.

Christians should care about this announcement because God designed children to flourish in the safety and love of families. Each of these children is made in God’s image, and our hearts should be attuned to the suffering of the vulnerable.

Adoption is complex because it involves loss and sacrifice for all parties involved—birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. Even though adoption is intricate, it must remain viable for children around the world who long to be raised in families where they are known and loved, not in impersonal institutions.

Although many orphanages in China seek to care well for children, institutions aren’t able to offer a child the same benefits, love, and safety as a permanent family. Children flourish to their greatest potential when their physical and emotional needs are being met in individualized ways.

Research has shown that the longer children remain in institutions, the more developmentally behind they can fall in comparison to their peers who are not in institutionalized settings. While we have great respect for professionals caring for children, there is no substitute for permanent families. One of the positive shifts over the past few years has been from Christians who understand and support local family-based care and deinstitutionalization.

Beijing’s termination of intercountry adoptions officially began on August 28, one day before US national security advisor Jake Sullivan met with Chinese president Xi Jinping. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and top US government officials should swiftly urge China to allow the waiting families who’ve been matched to complete their adoptions.

It is crucial that our government use all mechanisms available to seek a resolution that allows these families to complete their long-pending adoptions and ensure that the rights and well-being of children remain at the forefront of any diplomatic efforts.

My own life was forever transformed because of international adoption. I’m an adoptee from Romania. My five siblings and a cousin were all adopted internationally from Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. I remember helplessly watching President Vladimir Putin sign a law that prohibited the adoption of Russian children by US citizens beginning in 2013. It struck me that had the timing of my own family’s adoption story been different, my very own Russian siblings might never have joined our family.

My husband and I welcomed our son home through international adoption from India last year. I have the unique vantage point of being both an adoptee and an adoptive mother. My son and I, though our stories are distinct, both know what it’s like to join a family through international adoption.

When we said yes to our son’s file, we gleefully texted friends and family, joyfully showed his picture to anyone who’d pay attention, decorated his room, prayed fervently for him, and achingly counted down the days until we could be with our son.

The same was true for many of the waiting families who’ve held space in their hearts, homes, and lives for the children in China they were pursuing. Their grief and uncertainty of waiting an additional four and a half years only to hear this announcement is truly heartbreaking.

Scripture reminds us that “the king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord” (Prov. 21:1, ESV). May we boldly ask the Lord to soften the heart of President Xi so that he might allow the waiting children to join their families. May we remember the adoptees from China, families who’ve adopted children from China, the waiting families, and the waiting children.

Christians must be at the forefront of fighting for what is right and just. We should use our voices to advocate for these children to be brought home into the permanency of loving families. Jesus loves the little children of the world, and so should we.

Chelsea Sobolik serves as director of government relations for World Relief and is the former director of public policy for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). She is the author of Called to Cultivate: A Gospel Vision for Women and Work and Longing for Motherhood: Holding on to Hope in the Midst of Childlessness.

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Theology

Joseph and the Unintended Authoritarian Politics

Carmen Joy Imes

Contributor

His economic policies were later used by Pharoah to oppress the Hebrews in Exodus. What can this teach us about politics today?

Joseph Explains Pharaoh's Dream by Adrien Guignet

WikiMedia Commons

As an Old Testament scholar, I’ve been spending much of my time writing a commentary on Exodus. And as I worked through the first chapter, considering the predicament of the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, it hit me: The exploitation of the Israelites was made possible by the drastic administrative policies Joseph implemented during the years of famine. The descendants of Jacob had arrived in Egypt under the (somewhat) mutually beneficial arrangements Joseph had made with the support of the previous Pharaoh.

The curtain of Exodus opens on this scene: A new Pharaoh who despised the Hebrews arose and exploited their labor for his own ends, using Joseph’s own crisis-era economic policies. To me, this story offers a cautionary tale about why the personal integrity and character of our political leaders may matter just as much as their platforms or policies—a principle we should keep in mind as we cast our ballots this November.

Joseph is often cast by interpreters as one of the few Old Testament leaders characterized by integrity, along with Daniel, Deborah, Joshua, and Josiah. Arguably, Joseph lacked emotional intelligence in his younger years—reporting to his brothers the dreams he had of his future glory and their obeisance. As the eldest son of his father’s favorite wife, Joseph was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a colorful cloak to prove it.

Jealous of Joseph, his brothers attacked and sold him into slavery in Egypt. Yet Joseph’s abilities in household management resulted in him running his master’s entire household. You know the story: After his master’s wife tried to seduce Joseph, she falsely accused him of assault, and he landed in prison. Again, he won the trust of the prison warden, who offered him more responsibilities.

Joseph’s spiritual discernment aided his fellow prisoners, and eventually he found himself standing before a troubled Pharaoh to interpret his dream. He offered shrewd advice on how to navigate an impending food crisis, so Pharaoh put him in charge.

In the first year of the famine, people spent all their money buying grain from the Egyptian government (Gen. 47:14–15). Joseph had stockpiled it through a mandatory 20 percent tax during the years of plenty (41:34–36). During the next year of famine, people traded their livestock for grain (47:16–17).

And by the final year of famine, people began offering themselves and their land in exchange for food (vv. 18–19). Pharaoh provided seed for planting that year and laid claim to 20 percent of the harvest going forward (vv. 23–26).

Through these emergency measures, Pharaoh ended up owning almost all the land, and heavy taxation became a regular feature of Egyptian life. Although the Egyptians were grateful to Joseph for saving their lives (v. 25), according to Genesis, he “reduced the people to servitude, from one end of Egypt to the other” (v. 21).

Joseph became a powerful man. His brothers were terrified of the authority he wielded (50:15–18). Yet Joseph’s forgiveness allowed them all to live at peace (vv. 19–21). In other words, his integrity made the difference between benevolence or exploitation at the hands of the government.

That is, until the new Pharaoh arose, one who had no connection to Joseph and felt the Hebrew population was a threat to Egypt’s national security (Ex. 1:6–10). Building on the foundation Joseph had unwittingly laid, this new Pharaoh exploited the Israelites’ labor and “made their lives bitter” (v. 14).

The narrator’s signals encourage us to see the connections. Exodus begins with a list, borrowed from Genesis, of Jacob’s sons, who had moved to Egypt with their 70 descendants (Gen. 46:8–27; Ex. 1:1–5). The new Pharaoh’s attempt to “deal wisely” with the Hebrew people (Ex. 1:10, KJV) is a verbal echo of the wisdom Joseph had demonstrated (Gen. 41:39). And finally, his concern that the Hebrews would be “added to” (yasaf) their enemies (Ex. 1:10) echoes Joseph’s own name (Yosef), which means “added to” (Gen. 30:24).

Read in the most charitable way possible, Joseph’s policies were neutral—a shrewd path to survival for a country facing a large-scale humanitarian crisis. Yet those same policies wielded by another leader—one marred by prejudice and lacking a commitment to human flourishing—spelled disaster.

In this light, we might ask ourselves: Does it matter how our political leaders conduct themselves in private? Should we be concerned about issues of character? Or should we prioritize platform and policy over personal integrity?

Growing up, the answers to these questions were obvious. I came of age during Clinton’s presidency, when the adults in my Christian community insisted that spurious sexual behavior was a political deal-breaker. (To be clear, they already opposed him, citing, among other things, that he was a “ladies’ man” with a history of dubious business deals.) Yet today, many of these same people are planning to vote for former president Donald Trump for the third time—a man whose sexual and financial history makes former president Clinton’s indiscretions sound amateurish.

I’m not the only one wondering, What changed? When did we decide that character no longer matters in our nation’s leaders? What justifies our acceptance of public officials whose personal lives lack ethical standards? Why is criminal behavior no longer a disqualification for public office?

CT’s editor in chief Russell Moore notes that Gen Xers and millennials are leaving the church at an alarming rate. However, he explains, “We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.” Many young people are losing faith in the evangelical legacy.

Until recently, many conservative Christians said that a pro-life party platform justified their vote for a man whose personal life was deeply problematic. But things have changed even on this front, as the Republican Party appears to distance itself from its former approach to pro-life issues. As their presidential nominee and former president Trump recently stated, “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

Since former president Trump’s Supreme Court appointments secured the end of Roe v. Wade, this announcement feels like a bait and switch. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, since Trump supported abortion before his presidential bid. This is the kind of betrayal that can happen time and again whenever we vote for candidates who have a checkered history with integrity—and it happens on both sides of the political aisle.

For instance, evangelicals like myself have also expressed disappointment with President Biden’s broken promises on refugee resettlement and immigration. As I saw for myself on a trip to the Mexican border with World Relief, his administration tolerated detention of asylum seekers in unsanitary conditions for days awaiting processing. Instead of receiving a more humane and efficient approach to border security, asylum seekers released into the US often face a wait of more than five years for a court date.

As a registered independent, I’m looking to support leaders who model a consistent character and make decisions that lead to the long-term flourishing of our nation. And as a Bible scholar, I find passages throughout the Bible that support both personal piety and social responsibility—in ways that do not fit neatly into either major political party.

It may be too soon to tell whether the American Solidarity Party offers a path forward for voters like me, but I’m encouraged by how their platform seeks to honor the values I hold dear. No doubt many believe a third-party vote is wasted at best and dangerous at worst. Such pragmatism is understandable, and I respect those who have carefully weighed their options and decided to vote for what they believe to be the lesser of two evils.

But my point is that we must not turn a blind eye to the character flaws in any political candidate—or worse, feel the need to defend them simply to justify our vote. The Joseph story reminds us that integrity matters universally, especially in politics. A platform is only as good as the person it elevates. Likewise, voting for policies alone is not enough if the next person in office can simply reverse their precepts or apply benefits unevenly.

It matters how our public officials conduct themselves in private, because eventually their true colors will show in public whenever it is no longer politically expedient for them to stay hidden. No governmental system or political party is perfect—which is precisely why the person we vote into the Oval Office can make all the difference.

Joseph’s story is also one example among many in history where a government’s response to crisis paved the way for later abuses of power. Joseph worked within the political system to save his family and an entire nation, unaware of how his policies would eventually be abused. This is why we must place guardrails on government authority—as well as business and labor practices—to protect future generations from unscrupulous leaders tempted to use the system to their advantage.

At the end of the day, as N. T. Wright said in a recent interview with CT, faithful Christian engagement with politics doesn’t mean “that the church should be running the world, but that the church has a vital role to play in speaking truth to power—in holding up a mirror to power and in modeling what God’s new creation should look like.”

Let’s not forget that people take their whole selves into political office. Character matters, for our candidates and for ourselves.

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

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Culture

I Had a Horrific Childhood. I’m Glad I Exist.

Randi Bianchi

The prospect of a rough upbringing, even one as traumatic as mine, should never be “remedied” by abortion.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

It is midnight, and my phone is ringing. Blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I roll over to see my older sister’s name flashing across the screen.

“Hello?”

My sister says nothing at first. She is crying. The sound jolts me awake.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Finally, she speaks: “I killed my baby.”

Shock lodges itself in my throat. My sister’s pain is suddenly in my chest, crushing my heart against my rib cage. I scramble down the bunk bed ladder, my feet slipping on the rungs, and tiptoe past my sleeping roommate. “Just a second,” I whisper, holding my hand over the phone’s speaker until I’ve left the dorm.

“He made me do it,” she says, sobbing. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal.” The pavement grits against my bare feet. “I killed my daughter. I’m going to hell.”

Eventually, I discerned what had happened. My sister had been pregnant. And then, at 12 weeks, she’d had an abortion. She was pressured by her boyfriend, who said that he couldn’t afford to take care of the children he’d already had with other women, let alone another one.

I am not equipped. I have no words to offer.

I clutch the phone to my ear and I stand in the wind and I listen.

When we were young, my sister and I had many late-night talks about our determination to be better parents than our own. The abuse we braved as children in the years before we were adopted is almost too heavy to express, too horrible to justify with language. Our parents were addicted to drugs. They bloodied and bruised us; they admired the whip marks their belts left on our skin, and put their cigarettes out on our elbows and knees. Until the age of eight, I ate only baby food.

My sister and I survived together. And yet as we grew, my sister began to shut me out. She left home suddenly, with no way to contact her; she entered a relationship with an abusive man. After a while, I stopped fighting to keep a connection. The door between us stayed closed, and I stopped knocking—until it cracked open that chilly spring night.

That desperate call was more than five years ago, but my sister’s words still ring in my ears. She thought she was doing the right thing. The father was abusive and money was tight. But her grief was a confirmation: Every human life has intrinsic value, no matter the poverty or cruelty or chaos that life is born into. My sister had discovered this the hard way, the same way she had learned most of her lessons.

“Every child, a wanted child.” The 1923 Planned Parenthood slogan has a horrific subtext; if a woman believes that she’s ill-equipped to be a mother, or that her partner is ill-equipped to be a father, or that her home will be an unhappy one, then abortion is encouraged. It’s not just an option; it’s a solution. It’s responsible. It’s the right thing to do.

Pro-abortion advocates have long suggested that abortion access improves future outcomes for women and children. In June of 1978, the National Abortion Rights Action League published Legal Abortion: A Speaker’s and Debater’s Notebook. Among other talking points, it asserted that “a policy that makes contraception and abortion freely available will greatly reduce the number of unwanted children, and thereby curb the tragic rise of child abuse in our great country.”

These arguments have persisted into the 21st century. In 2002, an article in the American Economic Reviewclaimed that “unwanted children may be more subject to child abuse and neglect by their parents or care-takers than are desired children. … Abortion availability may reduce the number of unwanted children … leading to lower rates of child abuse and neglect.”

“There’s a lot to be said for preventing babies from being born who are going to be unwelcome and therefore have a rotten childhood,” argued a Guardian columnist in 2016. “A few years ago the crime figures of New York were suddenly much lower than they had been, and researchers linked the fact to high numbers of abortions in the year when the potential criminals would otherwise have been born.”

“Unwanted” children are less likely to succeed in school and make money, wrote a trio of psychology professors around the time of the Dobbs leak: “We are focused on preventing the transmission of risk factors for poor economic, social, physical and mental well-being for parents and children.”

“Every child, a wanted child.” By this formulation, a child’s dignity is determined not by the fact of their existence but by the extent of their parents’ desire and their likelihood of future “success.” A child’s personhood is contingent. It would be better for suffering children, children like me and my sister, to have never been born at all than to experience those cigarette burns and baby-food lunches.

But the prospect of a rough upbringing, even one as traumatic as mine, should never be remedied by removing a child’s opportunity to live at all. Abortion discounts the redemptive power of God—and the “wantedness” inherent in our creation.

Genesis tells us that we are sanctified, set apart, created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27). Psalm 139 elucidates the intrinsic value that God places on every person, value that comes only from the Father, not from any earthly parents. We are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” knit together, our days ordained.

Mark 8:36 shows that one human soul alone has more worth than the entire world of material possessions: “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Even in the direst circumstances—even if a child is born with a deformity, even if a child will go hungry, even if a child will be hurt—God imparts boundless value on their life. My sister should have kept her daughter, even given her boyfriend, her instability, her past. In spite of the pain, I’m glad that my parents kept us.

God’s hand is evident in my life, especially after my adoption by two wonderful people. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and with highest honors. God gave me gifts in writing and music. Now, I lead worship for youth and young adult programs at my church. My participation in youth ministry is an outlet for me to ensure all children are shown love.

“Every child, a wanted child” implies that the goodness of my life today isn’t worth my bad beginning. But I know that’s not true.

My sister April is a mother now. She has two beautiful sons, Edward and Justin. April learned she was pregnant with Edward only a month after she lost her daughter. “When I got pregnant again a month later,” she reflects, “it was almost like God was saying, ‘Did you think I didn’t know what I was doing?’”

Randi Bianchi is a church administrator and writer.

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Ideas

The Acceptance Stage of Lost Evangelical Influence

Matthew Kaemingk

Five pathways toward breaking the cycle of political outrage, depression, and lament without settling for passivity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

American Christianity is in cultural and political decline. In 1937, 70 percent of Americans reported that they belonged to a church. These numbers held relatively steady through much of the 20th century. But in the past 25 years, an estimated 40 million Americans have stopped attending church. As Ernest Hemingway said, bankruptcy comes gradually and then suddenly.

The American public square, previously white and Protestant, is quickly becoming a pluralistic bazaar of diverse cultures, religions, ideologies, and lifestyles. Once dominant and uncontested, Christianity is increasingly one moral vision among many.

How are evangelicals responding to the decline of Christianity’s cultural and political power?

Contrary to media caricatures, evangelicals are not a monolith. We’re responding to this decline in a wide variety of ways. The classical stages of grief can offer an insightful tool for understanding the ways evangelicals are processing their cultural and political decline (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance).

It is quite possible to meet an evangelical at any stage in this grieving process. But of course, this scheme does not fit everyone. Some evangelicals are not grieving at all. They actually celebrate Christianity’s loss of power. This group believes it would be fundamentally good and healthy for Christians to take a moratorium on political engagement, seeing it as beneficial for both America and the church.

While I sympathize with their sentiments, I must object. I believe that Christians are called by God to engage in political life. We must actively seek public justice and mercy. We must vigorously work for the flourishing for our neighbors. This requires us to be involved in politics and exert some level of political power and influence toward these ends. Privileged Christians who wish to politically disengage are abandoning the very neighbors they’re commanded to protect, serve, and love.

No, I believe it is entirely appropriate for evangelicals to grieve their loss of cultural and political power. That said, as any counselor will tell you, there are productive and unproductive forms of grief. The bereft are not permitted to remain in denial, anger, depression, or bargaining forever. Nor are they allowed to hurt others as they wail.

Here’s how we might interact with these stages. The first stage of grief is denial. While some evangelicals are still in denial over the decline of Christianity, their numbers are dwindling by the day. It is becoming harder and harder to ignore Christianity’s marginalization in the media, the academy, the marketplace, arts, and politics. For those still in denial, there is not much to say.

The second stage is anger. Evangelical rage makes for great TV; infantile evangelical leaders coming unhinged attract a lot of clicks. It is thus no surprise that the bulk of media attention has been trained on evangelical fits of outrage, victimhood, and lament over the emergence of a post-Christian America.

The third stage is bargaining. Quite a few articles and books have explored the disastrous ways in which evangelical leaders are increasingly willing to make a devil’s bargain for a few scraps of political power and access.

While much ink has been spilled on these forms of evangelical denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, the final stage has received precious little attention. What might look like for American evangelicals to step into a state of acceptance?

I’m not a neutral observer on this issue. I’m an evangelical who believes that American Christianity should adopt a form of non-passive acceptance. To be clear, acceptance is not acquiescence. By non-passive, I hope to indicate my fervent support for ardent Christian engagement in public life. Accepting America’s ideological diversity is not a sign of my resignation from American public life. As an evangelical, I still intend to advocate for a biblical approach to justice, peace, and flourishing in our nation.

With this clear, let’s return to the question before us: How might evangelicals progress through their grieving process and emerge from various states of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression? As far as I can tell, at least five things are needed.

The first is a change in theology. All political philosophy begins with a rather simple question: “Who’s in charge?” Academics call this the question of sovereignty. For Christian political philosophers, the answer, of course, is Jesus. Christ alone is ultimately the one in charge, not kings, politicians, or ideologies. There is one throne, and it belongs to Christ.

Unfortunately, many American evangelicals suffer from a weak Christology when it comes to politics. They seem to imagine that Jesus is either absent or weak in American public life, that he is not strong enough—not tough enough—to take America “back.” Given this apparent weakness, evangelicals cast about looking for a strong politician who can do Christ’s job for him. After all, if Jesus is not up to the task, we need someone who can do it for him.

Carrie Underwood’s music is good for everyone, but evangelicals in particular should work “Jesus Take the Wheel” back into their playlists. Too many American evangelicals are trying to white-knuckle a political wheel that does not belong to them, that they do not, cannot, and should not control. If Christ is in the driver’s seat, that means Christians are not. We must learn to place our trust in the political sovereignty of Jesus.

The second change is tactical. As evangelicals accept their status as a political minority, they will need to learn how to play with others. They will need to build tactical partnerships with other “moral sub-cultures.” Rather than demonizing Catholics, Mormons, and Muslims, evangelicals will need to learn to collaborate on mutually agreed upon political goals. Tactically speaking, evangelical leaders are too weak to go it alone. To succeed, we need to make friends.

Evangelicals in the Netherlands offer an interesting path forward in this regard. They’ve been a minority political voice for decades. In a recent effort to curtail the practice of prostitution in the Netherlands, local evangelicals formed a common political effort with left-wing feminist groups. Despite their deep ideological differences, they agreed on three things: Women have profound value, their bodies should not be commodified, and they are worthy of protection from the moral privations of the sexual marketplace.

Dutch evangelical leaders did not bargain away their Christian principles to make this political deal. And, importantly, evangelicals did not attack their leaders for collaborating with left-wing feminists. These Christian brothers and sisters have accepted that if they wish to seek public justice in the Netherlands, they need to partner with diverse groups.

The third change is one of posture. Some evangelicals are acting like martyrs hunched over in a state of depression about their loss of power. Others are desperately grasping about for what little power they can grab before it slips through their fingers. If we’re in anger, we may have a fighting posture—head down, fists up. If we’re bargaining, we prostrate ourselves before politicians who promise political scraps in return. None of these postures serves us well.

Like a basketball player who can only dribble to the right, evangelical voters have become predictable. Politically speaking, this makes them easy to manipulate, pigeonhole, use, and ignore—a politician’s dream. Whether crouching, bowing, or fighting, evangelicals lack the posture necessary to adapt and respond to a dynamic and pluralistic political landscape.

One of the first lessons a basketball player learns is the power of the three-point stance. With one foot forward and the ball in front of his chest, the player becomes a “triple threat” and can in an instant pass, shoot, or dribble. The defender doesn’t know where he’s going next, so he has options. The three-point stance enables the player to use creativity, imagination, and skill to improvise, adapt, and overcome.

Evangelicals need a new posture that will enable them to collaborate and contest, fight and forgive, persuade and listen. Our game is in desperate need of some new moves.

This need leads us to the fourth change. The future of evangelical political engagement is going to require a profound renewal of the evangelical imagination. Any artist will tell you that things like creativity and inspiration are tricky to come by. They can be fickle friends, here one day and gone the next. There is no three-step process to “becoming politically imaginative.” But there are a few practices that could certainly help.

Evangelicals will need to shift from a life of political consumption to one of cultural creativity. Rather than consuming endless hours of political vitriol via cable news, talk radio, and social media, we need to focus on—to put it frankly—becoming more interesting human beings. It may seem an odd political prescription, but evangelicals need to throw more dinner parties, attend more poetry classes, take up woodworking, and start book clubs or bowling leagues. We should serve refugee families or learn a new language, learn to cook or throw a neighborhood picnic.

The mindless consumption of political rage will never produce an evangelical political witness marked by creativity, imagination, or wisdom. A life filled with play, beauty, learning, and love offers fertile soil for a much healthier political culture.

Extracting oneself from the clatter of the 24/7 news cycle and investing one’s hands and heart in life-giving practices can do a great deal for one’s political posture and practices. The iron grip of political outrage, depression, and bitterness must be broken. Embodied activities can liberate evangelicals to navigate a polarized world of deep differences with a renewed and open-hearted imagination.

The final change for American evangelicalism brings us back to the heart of the gospel. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). The center of evangelical politics must be the Good News.

If this is true, ours should be a politics of gratitude, not grief. The global evangelical movement, regardless of culture or context, has always agreed that the gospel is central. The evangelical life begins with an experience of grace and gratitude—not fear, anger, or resentment. This personal experience of grace in Christ has public consequences for evangelicals who claim to follow him. The hospitality we’ve experienced in Christ is a hospitality that must be demonstrated before a watching world.

America is an increasingly pluralistic marketplace of diverse religions, ideologies, and lifestyles. How should evangelicals politically respond to this diversity? When should we listen and learn? When should we stand and fight? When do we collaborate? When do we contest?

Dynamic political environments call for dynamic political postures and practices. On this side of eternity, the boundary lines are not always clear. This should not concern us as long as we remain clear on our center.

Matthew Kaemingk is the Richard John Mouw Associate Professor of Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary. His podcast on faith and politics is called Zealots at the Gate. His recent books include Reformed Public Theology and Work and Worship.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

- More from Matthew Kaemingk

Ideas

How to Talk About God and Politics in Polarized Times

Seth Freeman

My work in conflict management helped me develop an effective way to navigate sensitive topics. Here’s what I found.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

How do we talk about Big Things when it seems so risky? It feels hard these days to even mention Jesus in conversation when we are faced with hostility toward Christianity. As faith is declining in the West, how will people find Christ if we can’t talk about him with nonbelieving friends and family? Our churches, families, and communities often feel so polarized we can’t talk about politics or values either.

So we’re understandably wary of talking about God or Christ or politics with anyone outside our close circles, and sometimes even within them. We fear it will just lead to arguments or damage our relationships. We don’t have the answers to tough questions. We can’t even agree on the facts. Loved ones seem uninterested or resentful about views different from their own. Small wonder we avoid evangelism and political conversation with friends and family, never mind strangers.

But I am confident there’s an effective, enjoyable, and winsome way to talk with people about Christ that also works well in discussions about any sensitive issue, even in heated times.

For years now, my students have used a simple method to have excellent “hot topic” conversations with friends they strongly disagree with—conversations about every conceivable political issue around the world. “It went so well,” they often report, “my friend and I feel closer now, and we want to have more conversations like that.”

I’ve seen the power of this method firsthand. For example, when I used this method a few months ago in a conversation with a secular friend, he said as we parted, “That was the best conversation I’ve ever had.” We’d been talking about God for two hours. This method has also equipped me to talk with people I disagree with about highly charged political issues in lengthy conversations that leave us feeling energized and warm toward each other.

Knowing how to discuss important and sensitive topics can make you a better friend, family member, and follower of Jesus. It’s not about winning an argument; it’s about being more loving and connecting more deeply and joyfully with someone you care about. It may also be the best way to help gradually change someone’s heart. The Barna Group found that an approach like this is the most effective way to reach nonbelievers. Best of all, it’s a method that’s surprisingly learnable.

The key is three words: paraphrase, praise, and probe. The method: Privately, over coffee or a meal, nudge the conversation into a Big Topic and ask your friend what they think about it. Then:

Paraphrase: Repeat the gist of your friend’s thoughts so well they say, “Exactly!”
Praise: Highlight anything they said that you can sincerely honor.
Probe: Ask about your concerns, curiosities, and confusions as a co-seeker of truth.

Do this two or three times. Then, share your own perspective and let the conversation unfold from there, returning to paraphrase, praise, probe whenever there’s tension. When you want to exit the conversation, simply express gratitude and change the subject: “Thank you. I’ve enjoyed this. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Let’s talk more about it another time. How’s your weekend looking?”

Here’s an example of how it works. You mention to your friend, “I see X died the other day. What do you think happens when we die?” She replies, and you paraphrase back to her, “So you’re saying death really is the end, and the afterlife is just wishful thinking. And believing a fantasy like that is a distraction from the important work of caring for people here and now. Am I getting that right?”

“Exactly!”

Then you add, “I appreciate your concern about this life and your worry that someone might focus on the afterlife too much and stop caring about this one. I so appreciate your commitment to taking care of people here and now. I share it.” She breathes a sigh of relief.

Then you probe: “So let me hear more. How do we get to that conclusion that this is all there is?” Whatever she replies is useful. You paraphrase, praise, and probe again, delving more deeply into her thoughts, feelings and, perhaps, her story (which may be particularly illuminating).

Eventually, the conversation generally becomes safe and rich enough that your friend is open to and interested in hearing your own perspective: “I do find a faith in an afterlife makes me more focused on this one. For example …” And you’ve begun a rich and often eye-opening conversation.

Though they usually do quite well with it, students sometimes struggle with this method when they use it spontaneously. Some casually turn to it in the middle of an argument, after things have gotten testy. Not good. Others try to use it in a group setting where others can chime in, interrupt, and argue. One tried it at a bar. Ugh.

I’ve seen most of my students do better when they plan ahead for a private conversation and choose a quiet, comfortable setting. They might invite a friend to talk about a topic or simply watch for an occasion to use this method during a conversation. For a conversation about Christ, it may be better to take an indirect approach, looking for a topic that touches on spiritual matters, like an event that raises the problem of evil or a movie that raises a philosophical question.

Why is Paraphrase, Praise, Probe so effective? First, because it’s grounded in humility, a quality that’s so winsome that the most admired people are renowned for it—Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, and far more importantly, Christ himself.

This approach also adds safety and lowers defensiveness because it validates and respects the other person without requiring you to agree with their conclusions. People feel safe and relax when they sense you deeply respect them, and they trust you more. The approach also slows the conversation down, making you both less reactive.

Also, it gives you a chance to learn and frees you from having to rebut points you don’t have answers for. (“That’s an intriguing point. I have more to learn about that.”) Barna found that Christians who listen generously like this are markedly more winsome; nonbelievers say they’re much more open to further conversation and learning about Christ from someone who listens to them than from someone who tries a hard-sell approach.

Paraphrase, Praise, Probe also lets us emulate the apostle Paul’s approach to evangelism. In Acts 17, we see Paul at the Areopagus reasoning with the Athenians, demonstrating he deeply understands their beliefs then praising them for their religiosity before speaking about Christ.

As Tim Keller observed, if Christians just monologue and argue, we’ll get nowhere with unbelievers. Paul, he notes, is not preaching in that passage of Acts. Rather, Paul is “entering into dialogue … a Socratic method.” That means, Keller explains, that you should come inside the other person’s perspective and listen sympathetically. Then and only then do you challenge their view from its own standards. In other words, you probe.

In fact, knowing how to talk about Big Things with our perceived opponents or true enemies can transform us and them. Daryl Davis, an African American R & B musician, dialogued with KKK leaders and, in the process, led dozens of them out of the Klan, moving them to repent of their racism. Yet he never asked them to do so—he just had generous and inquisitive conversations with them. The ability to talk across chasms of thought can make us peacemakers and agents for change.

Here, then, are two safe, easy ways to practice using Paraphrase, Praise, Probe:

Watch a YouTube interview of someone you strongly disagree with. Stop the video, practice Paraphrase, Praise, Probe, resume the video, and then repeat. Perhaps get feedback from a friend who’s watching you.

Or, try it with a friend this week. Choose someone you usually agree with and pick a nonreligious topic you each care about somewhat but not passionately (Minimum wage? Greatest basketball player?). Invite your friend to talk about this topic with you for 15 minutes. Intentionally use Paraphrase, Praise, Probe. See what effect it has, get some feedback afterwards, and then try it again the following week with someone else, perhaps nudging a conversation toward God, salvation, or another Big Thing.

We change the world by the way we listen and talk. Paraphrase, Praise, Probe can help us be that change, living out more fully on Monday what we pray to become on Sunday, helping us act more like the God we want others to know. It can help us gently, safely start conversations that could one day lead a person to Christ. Additionally, it can help us build bridges across political and ideological divides. What could be better?

Seth Freeman is a professor of conflict management and negotiation at the NYU Stern School of Business and Columbia University and the author of 15 Tools to Turn the Tide: A Step-By-Step Playbook for Empowered Negotiating. He has given talks to The Veritas Forum, InterVarsity Fellowship, and Christian college groups.

- More from Seth Freeman

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A prayer against apathy

A prayer for a Christlike spirit

A prayer for nonviolence in our country

A prayer for the opposing candidates

A prayer for a posture of humility and against defensiveness

A prayer for the ability to see things from others’ perspectives

A prayer for those who are marginalized around us

A prayer for when we feel anxious about the future

A prayer for unity with our neighbors who vote differently than us

A prayer for the act of voting and the election outcome

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In this series

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