Our Faith’s Future Depends on Discipleship

The Lausanne Movement’s State of the Great Commission report details where and how Christianity is growing.

Is Christianity becoming irrelevant? Or is it flourishing?

Your answer probably depends on where you live.

In advance of its fourth conference, The Lausanne Movement published the State of the Great Commission report, drawing on research from international nonprofits, Christian organizations, and professional polling and presenting insights from 150 global missions experts.

You can learn more about the report’s findings here—including its emphasis on discipleship in the global church.

And check out the rest of CT’s writing on Lausanne over the decades.

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News

Trump’s Promised Mass Deportations Put Immigrant Churches on Edge

Emily Belz

Some of the president-elect’s proposals seem unlikely, but he has threatened to remove millions of both undocumented and legal immigrants.

A man furls a flag after a US naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles earlier this year for immigrants becoming citizens.

Mario Tama / Getty Images

Jackson Voltaire, a pastor who leads a fellowship of 255 Haitian Baptist churches in Florida, prayed a personal blessing for Donald Trump the day after the election.

But Voltaire also met to pray with leaders of his churches who were worried about what might happen to Haitians’ legal status in the country.

“We may tell people not to worry, but for most of them, there is cause to worry,” Voltaire said. “But when we fix our eyes on Jesus, the worry starts to dissipate. The strength and comfort we find in God’s promises are stronger than the fear.”

President-elect Trump made mass deportation a central part of his campaign, promising to remove millions of immigrants from the United States, including Haitians. The official Republican Party platform vows to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”

In campaign speeches, Trump talked about undocumented immigrants committing violent crimes, but he also indicated he would end certain legal immigration programs like one for Haitians.

These proposals could affect more than 10 million people in the US and result in family separation for millions since most undocumented immigrants live in households with legal immigrants.

Haitians are largely in the country legally, under a program for those fleeing war or severe hardship called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which covers Haiti and other nations like Venezuela and Nicaragua. Trump unsuccessfully tried to shut down the program in his first term and wants to end it again.

Haiti currently does not have a functioning government, which makes any deportation difficult, and locals live under warring gangs.

Voltaire said he prayed not just for Trump to bless the United States but for God to find people to change the course of the nation of Haiti so people would not have to flee the country for safety in America. Voltaire prays that Haiti can go “back to the glorious season when that nation was considered the Caribbean pearl.”

Trump made promises to deport millions in his 2016 campaign, but the deportation numbers over his first term look about the same as the Biden administration’s. The Obama administration still has the record for largest number of deportations in one year.

This time, Trump has proposed a more drastic means of deportation: deploying the National Guard to arrest undocumented immigrants. He has often cited the Eisenhower administration’s “Operation Wetback,” where federal and local law enforcement did sweeping raids to deport perhaps a million people, some of whom turned out to be US citizens.

Immigration experts doubt that Congress will provide the funding for mass deportations, and that infrastructure is not easy to scale up. One immigration group estimated the cost of deportation of every undocumented person in the US at $315 billion.

Even if there isn’t the money for mass deportations, “I don’t want to tell people it’s all going to be fine. I think we are going to see an uptick in deportations of very sympathetic people,” said Matthew Soerens, the head of advocacy at World Relief, an evangelical refugee resettlement organization. “Everyone agrees with deporting violent criminals.”

While evangelicals supported Trump in the election, they also historically have more compassionate views on immigration. They support legal status for “Dreamers” (undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children), oppose family separation, and feel the US has a moral obligation to accept refugees. One view that has shifted recently, though, is that they see immigrants as an economic drain.

Faith-based groups are hoping to make the case to Trump that immigrants have value.

“We are going to be pleading with him, appealing to his commitment to stand with the persecuted church, to his statements that he believes in legal immigration,” said Soerens.

“We … believe in the possibility of progress and urge the incoming administration to consider the immense value that immigrants and refugees bring to our nation,” stated Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Global Refuge, a faith-based refugee resettlement agency.

Family separation is the most unpopular immigration policy among white evangelical Christians.“It’s unclear what President-elect Trump will do,” Soerens said.

Deportations would hit the Latino community disproportionately. Latino evangelicals support extending legal status to Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US a long time. But most of those evangelicals (60%) voted for Trump in the last election largely based on social issues like abortion and the origins they may have in countries with Communist or leftist regimes.

“While Latino evangelicals are neither a monolith nor one-issue voters, when it comes to immigration many Latino congregations have expressed deep concerns around the language of mass deportation and its impact on the ministry of and with the Latino church,” said Gabriel Salguero, the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, in a statement to CT.

“We ask ourselves how churches can collect the tithes and offerings of immigrant members while being silent on policies advocating their mass deportation,” he said. “Our sincere prayer is that there finally would be a bipartisan immigration solution that respects the rule of law and honors the dignity of all people.”

Political pressure has long kept Congress from enacting immigration reform; a bipartisan border bill proposed in February to restrict migrants at the border and address the asylum process failed when Trump objected to it.

Other legal immigration programs are in question. Humanitarian parole has allowed Afghans, Ukrainians, Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to find legal shelter in the US, but Trump pledged to deport people in that program.

“Get ready to leave,” Trump said.

Many Ukrainians fleeing the war in their country have come to the US under humanitarian parole. Paul Oliferchik is the son of refugees from the Soviet Union and was until recently a pastor of a Ukrainian Assemblies of God church in New York, the city that is home to the largest Ukrainian population in the US. He now serves at a Chinese church in the city.

His wife is the daughter of Ukrainian refugees, who received help from a Lutheran organization to resettle in the US, he recalled. “We moved as refugees and were tremendously blessed,” he said.

But many of the Ukrainian evangelical immigrants he knows are Trump supporters—they don’t make political decisions based on immigration but on socially conservative issues.

He thinks they likely do not know about the potential ending of the humanitarian parole program. Either way, he hopes they will stand with other refugees.

“God helped to bring many of us here to the States to live,” he said. “God was telling Israel when he was bringing them out of Egypt to remember. If we don’t remember that God himself brought us out and redeemed us, it might reflect on how we treat others who are also just trying to make it out and to live.”

In Trump’s first term, he tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for those known as Dreamers but ran into legal hurdles. Immigration experts have said that his legal advisors have learned from their first attempts at undoing some of these programs and might be more successful this time.

Led by longtime immigration advisor Stephen Miller, the Trump team is looking for other ways to narrow legal immigration, The Wall Street Journal reported, like a policy that would block immigrants who have disabilities or low income.

One program fully under the president’s purview is the refugee program, and in his last term Trump temporarily suspended the entire program then dramatically reduced the numbers of refugee admissions to a record low.

In 2020 when he completed his term, refugee admissions were down to 12,000 from the historic average of 81,000 a year. Trump in his 2024 campaign criticized Biden’s refugee admissions and said he would bring “brand new crackdowns.”

The previous Trump administration’s crackdowns in some cases arrested immigrants without criminal records who had been in the country for decades.

In 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested hundreds of Iraqi Christians in Detroit, some on their way to church. These Christians would have faced persecution and “even death” if they had been deported, evangelical leaders wrote to the Trump administration at the time.

During legal fights about the deportation, many Iraqi Christians were held in US detention for more than a year before their release, and some were deported. (Some of the individuals did have criminal cases that led to deportation; others had no criminal record.) Many of the Chaldean Christians did not believe they would be deported because they had supported Trump and believed his statements about protecting persecuted Christians.

Whatever the scale of deportation in the next administration, Trump’s promises have already led to anxiety in immigrant communities.

“The sense I get from most of my Haitian friends is that their concern is not so much about deportation, because they have a protected (albeit temporary) status that shields them from deportation,” said Jeremy Hudson, pastor of Fellowship Church, one of the largest churches in Springfield, Ohio, which has a large Haitian population.

“The concern I have heard them talk about more is how they will be treated and viewed by the local citizens.”

Trump has talked about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and promised to rescue “every town that has been invaded and conquered.” He and his vice president, JD Vance, went after Haitians repeatedly, spreading the false story that they were eating people’s pets in Springfield.

Voltaire, the pastor in Florida, said his Haitian churches are still dealing with the fallout of those remarks.

“The impact of the Springfield thing is … here to stay,” he said. “But Haitians are a resilient people. They have been through a lot.”

In the meantime, Haitian pastors must continue to serve the immigrants who are in their churches.

“It is our prayer that people will find strength and comfort in the love we show them,” he said. “Ultimately, we pray that God’s name will be glorified in the lives of all immigrants, Haitians or wherever they are from.”

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

God Is Faithful in Triumph and Despair

Nicole Massie Martin

I voted for Kamala Harris and mourn her loss. But I want to keep politics in its proper place, subordinate to Jesus.

Saul Loeb / Getty

I’ll never forget the beautiful Sunday afternoon when we waited in line at our local library for early voting. It was the first year we took our kids into the voting booth. They weren’t initially thrilled to be there, but as we got closer to the front, we could feel it all building: anticipation, excitement, hope.

At ages 9 and 11, my girls watched my husband and me vote for the one we believed would be the best-qualified president of the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris. And now they witness the grief that comes from knowing that the candidate we championed has lost the race. They watched as our faces fell when we heard the results. They experienced our sorrow, not only for this loss but also for the fear of what might happen in the coming days and years.

With former president Donald Trump as our next president, I am acutely aware of the darkness that lingers in the shadows of his victory. Our country is still deeply politically divided, and while many of his supporters celebrate his reelection, I fear the deepening of this divide, one that has potential to cause a great chasm between me and those who voted for him—many of them brothers and sisters in Christ.

But as troubled as I am over this outcome, I am also aware that more than the presidency is at stake. Our country has proven its allegiances, and though I am upset and worried because Trump was reelected, I’m also aware of the relief and excitement that many Trump supporters are experiencing.

These different reactions are unavoidable, but despising our political rivals is not. Even my younger daughter has noticed our fractured public life. She has classmates echoing their parents’ declarations that people who vote for Trump are “stupid”—or that those who vote for Harris are “not Christian.”

As a parent, I always expect to have conversations with my children about how to live in love. But this election season, we’ve had to expand those talks into lessons about how our children can reject this kind of demonization and protect themselves from those who may demonize them or my husband and me as their parents.

It should not be this way. I’m not fazed by political celebration over a win or disappointment during loss, which is a normal part of any election. But I am concerned that there are too few spaces for those who weep to be in durable community with those who rejoice. The act of celebrating alongside those who grieve—and vice versa—is a source of necessary balance, a needed check on our impulses to be thoughtless in our happiness or bitter in our grief. For believers, that balance helps keep politics in perspective, subordinate to Jesus.

This need to be together in our rejoicing and weeping is not just a political challenge. It also follows a biblical pattern that we see in the story of the Israelites building the foundation for the second temple in Ezra 3. Those who wept at the loss of what had been were there together with those who rejoiced at the possibility of what could be. It became impossible to “distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping,” Ezra records, “because the people made so much noise. And the sound was heard far away” (v. 13).

This brief note about the mixture of triumph and despair is important because it reminds us that regardless of how they felt, the people remained together. Their covenant with God required that they learn to work together amid their differences, not simply for the sake of unity among themselves but for unity against outside adversaries. This passage should remind us that we too have a need for national unity amid our differences, that unity is necessary to preserve our freedom and democracy.

And while they differed in weeping and rejoicing, the crowd in Ezra 3 was united in praise and trust of God. “He is good; his love toward Israel endures forever,” they sang together (v. 11). American Christians of all political affiliations must keep this higher truth in mind in the weeks ahead.

For those of us who are unhappy with this result, let me encourage you not to despair. I am praying for you, and I hope you will pray for me—and for our next president “and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (1 Tim. 2:2). Regardless of who leads our nation, we can seek God’s wisdom for how we can continue to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city” even when we feel we are in exile (Jer. 29:7).

For those who are happy with the outcome, let Ezra’s story remind you to be firm in your demands of accountability and justice from the administration you elected. Remember that your earthly allegiances must never supersede your faithfulness to God. And remember to pray for our next president, his cabinet, our nation, ourselves, and your fellow Christians who are worried about what comes next.

This week, I will take time to mourn with my daughters in what feels to me like a true loss. But I will do so alongside my neighbors and many Christian brothers and sisters who are reassured or outright joyful that President-elect Trump won. And I will praise God alongside them, too, for he is still good, and his love still endures forever.

Nicole Massie Martin is the chief impact officer at Christianity Today.

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Ideas

Vance’s Chance

W. James Antle III

How VP-elect JD Vance could build a bridge between populism and Christian conservatism.

Jeff Swensen / Stringer / Edits by CT

Vice President–elect JD Vance has an opportunity to play an important role in the incoming administration and the Republican Party’s realignment following Tuesday’s election results: No one is better situated than Vance to serve as a bridge between the ascendant populist wing of the GOP and the Christian social conservatives who remain an important part of the party’s electoral coalition.

Vance is an evangelical convert to Catholicism, and it is social conservatism more than the economic variety that defines his politics. He is a family man, genteel where President-elect Donald Trump is brusque. His faith journey was an important part of his initial appeal as an author and commentator, even before he ran for the Senate and joined the 2024 Republican ticket.

In fact, it is Vance’s style of traditionalist Catholicism that differentiates him from free-market conservatives in a party that is increasingly pitching itself to workers, not management. For better and worse—like the now-infamous “childless cat ladies” remark—he has focused his attention on strengthening the family, sounding the alarm over falling fertility rates and the practical struggles of working parents.

“At a fundamental level, if we’re worried about moms and dads not being as involved at home, if we’re worried about rising rates of childhood trauma, if we’re worried about the fact that in this country today, for maybe the first extended period in our country’s history, we’re not even having enough children in this country to replace ourselves—if we’re worried about those problems,” he said at a gala in Washington, DC, in 2019, “then we have to be willing to pursue a politics that actually wants to accomplish something besides just making government smaller.”

Sometimes small government is a priority, Vance added, but it’s not the highest priority in his pro-family “vision of conservative politics.”

That theme has been consistent for Vance since well before this campaign cycle, and he routinely ties his ideas about family back to his faith. “How do you be a better husband, a better man, a better father?” Vance asked in a podcast the year before he became a Republican senatorial nominee.

“How do you build a sense of masculinity that is protective and defensive and aggressive but isn’t just showy?” he continued. “Elites don’t care at all about the difference between men and women and how we need to inculcate masculine virtues and feminine virtues. But Christianity really does.”

Trump doesn’t talk like this. But many conservative Christians who have voted for him do. The president–elect, a thrice-married, twice-divorced, one-time playboy and sexual libertine, has developed quite a following among people who care deeply about family cohesion and declining birth rates.

Trump’s selection of his first running mate, Mike Pence, was intended to address that dissonance. He needed to establish ties to evangelicals and other social conservatives, not least because he’d briefly run for the presidential nomination of Ross Perot’s Reform Party as a “very pro-choice,” socially liberal candidate in 1999. Even in 2016, the organized Christian Right largely preferred rival Republican candidates like Ted Cruz. That cycle, journalist Tim Carney found Trump had a strong appeal for Christians who professed certain evangelical beliefs but no longer attended church regularly.

But Pence was always an uneasy fit with Trump’s bid to remake the GOP in his populist image. Pence’s conservatism was that of the Ronald Reagan era. He served as Trump’s ambassador to the old-guard Republican leadership, lawmakers like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, never effectively bridging the gap between conservative Christians and Trump’s crude populism. It’s no accident that Pence ultimately broke with Trump’s wider political project after their falling out over January 6, 2021, and began inveighing againstthe “siren song of populism.”

Vance has taken a different route, not hearkening back to the small-government approach of the Reagan years but pushing the GOP toward a new kind of Christian conservatism. “Look, my basic view is that if the Republican Party, if the conservative movement stands for anything—and I’m running as a politician trying to advocate for what we should stand for—the number one thing that we should be is pro-babies and pro-families,” The New York Times quoted him as saying at a conservative Catholic event. “That’s what this whole thing is all about.”

Whether that will remain “what this whole thing is all about” for Vance—and Christians who want a pro-faith, pro-life, pro-family conservatism from the new Trump administration—remains to be seen.

Trump has borrowed some of Vance’s family rhetoric himself. But he has also compromised on abortion—despite facilitating the reversal of Roe v. Wade through his judicial appointments—and endorsed in vitro fertilization practices that entail a high amount of embryo destruction. Unlike Pence, Vance has gone along with this. And where Pence did the right thing in certifying the 2020 election results, Vance has raised questions about what he would have done in a similar set of circumstances.

Thus there’s no guarantee Vance will steer Trump’s party more successfully than Pence did, whatever we conservative Christians may hope. But there is an opening here to create a brand of faith- and family-friendly politics that moves beyond the limitations of the old Moral Majority. Vance, as understudy to a term-limited Trump, could be the right person to take that chance.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

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Church Life

How to Pray for Persecuted Christians

Compiled by Peirong Lin

Leaders from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa offer guidance on interceding for believers suffering for their faith.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Each November, the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) calls for an International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church and encourages churches around the world to participate. We think the global church should invest more prayer and resources in supporting brothers and sisters in challenging countries. But beyond that, hearing their stories and priorities helps us remember what should be important in our own lives.

Below, six Christian leaders dealing with threatening situations around the world discuss what they have faced or are currently experiencing and suggest how to pray for those under persecution.

David Sangbok Kim

Senior pastor, South Korea

Why I pray: In 1950, I fled North Korea for South Korea at age 11 with three of my older siblings. We were separated from our family for decades. After studying theology in the US, I eventually returned to Seoul as a pastor.

In 1984, I finally went back to North Korea. When I met my mother, then 80 years old, she surprised me by singing “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” and other hymns that she used to sing with me as a child!

My mother had brought me to faith in Christ before I left home, but my younger siblings, who had stayed in North Korea, were surprised to discover her faith in Christ, which she had sustained secretly for over 30 years.

My mother told me that she prayed alone, in tears, in the corner of her room when no one was around. She had to bury her Bible and hymnbook in the yard. If these items were ever found in the house, the whole family could be sent to a labor camp until they died. My younger siblings, had they known that their mother was doing such things, would have been required to report her to their teachers, who in turn would have had to tell the police.

How I pray: Pray for the secret Christians in North Korea. To survive, they have to hide their faith. Pray that they may continue to remember the gospel story in their hearts. Pray also for opportunities to share the gospel safely. Pray that the North Korean government may be changed to one that permits freedom. And pray for the Chinese government to send North Korean defectors to South Korea, not back to North Korea.

Jack Sara

President, Bethlehem Bible College, Palestine

Why I pray: For centuries, the church in the Middle East has lived in survival mode.

Conversion to Christianity is illegal in most countries. Even in nations with less extreme regimes, conversion can provoke public outrage. Family members often consider conversion a source of dishonor, leading to significant internal strife.

Anti-Christian sentiment has been growing in the Holy Land, particularly among Jewish groups in Jerusalem. The recent rise of radical Islamic movements has also intensified hardships for Christians in the region. ISIS has specifically targeted Christians for extermination or expulsion, leading to a mass exodus from areas like the Nineveh Plains, a historically Christian region in Iraq.

How I pray: Pray that God will raise up resilient leaders who will set an example of courage and faithfulness, guiding the church through ongoing pressures. Pray that Christians in other parts of the world will not only provide practical help, support, and encouragement to these communities but also learn from their endurance, recognizing the deep spiritual insights that emerge from their struggles.

Ed Retta

Latin America director, WEA Global Institute of Leadership

Why I pray: Three Latin American countries currently stand out as places where Christians are threatened. In Venezuela, there are two groups of Protestants: one that operates with government consent and one (affiliated with the WEA) that does not. Thousands of Christians have left the country, mainly due to its severe economic hardship.

In Cuba, the church has been under persecution ever since Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959. Churches are not allowed to construct buildings. All institutions are controlled by the government. Government informants are in every church. The government tends to favor religions such as Santería and witchcraft while opposing the church. Many pastors and Christian leaders have left Cuba due to dire economic need.

Nearly half of Christians in Nicaragua are evangelical, but its government is openly hostile to Christians. Officials have shut down Baptist, Adventist, and Catholic universities and have forced churches to close while denying them legal standing. Some Christian leaders have suffered beatings in front of their homes.

How I pray: Pray for the church in these countries to persevere boldly as an effective public witness, to be protected from government abuse and bullying, and to embrace and leverage the positive results of persecution—namely, enhanced devotion, endurance, and purity. And pray that the global church will become informed and care.

Mike Gabriel

Head of religious liberty, National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka

Why I pray: In many parts of Asia, persecution is a daily reality for many Christians. It often comes in the form of social exclusion, discrimination, and violence. Today, we are witnessing an evolving landscape of violations. On one hand, we are seeing increased state restrictions and involvement in matters of religious expression. One example is state regulation of places of worship. On the other hand, we are seeing rising religious intolerance, targeted online hate, harmful content against religious minorities, and an intensification of disputes concerning sacred sites. On top of this, we cannot overlook the gendered dimensions of religious freedom violations, particularly affecting minority women of faith.

How I pray: Pray for the work God is doing in us—building patience, strengthening witness, deepening love, and shaping us so that we can transform others. Ask God to use these hardships to strengthen his people and grow his kingdom. Pray also for forgiveness, that the hearts of our persecutors may be softened and that we can continue to shine brightly for Christ in our communities.

James Akinyele

Executive secretary and CEO, Nigeria Evangelical Fellowship

Why I pray: Nigeria currently leads the world in the number of deaths related to religious violence. More than 50,000 Christians have been killed in the last 15 years. Others have been wounded, sexually abused, forcibly displaced from their homes, and utterly traumatized. Christians have been left destitute by the destruction of their farmlands and villages, and some have been unable to return because the attackers have taken over their properties.

We are not seeing an end to these atrocities. The government is aware of these incidents, but action is limited.

How I pray: Pray for our government to have the political will to act against Islamic militias; for the international community not to turn a blind eye but to engage with Christian organizations and to support victims through seeking justice and redress; and for the Christian community to persevere and receive justice.

Helene Fisher

Chief advocacy officer, Gender and Religious Freedom, UK

Why I pray: Persecutors use every means at their disposal to diminish the strength of the Christian community. They favor persecution that brings shame and provokes rejection of believers. Therefore, what happens after an incident can leave as significant an impact as the event itself.

Community rejection of victims is integral to the experience of persecution, and persecutors rely on it for success. When an incident of persecution results in the body of Christ acting unlike Jesus, then the Adversary has won.

At the Fourth Lausanne Congress in September, I heard from a woman who escaped from the Boko Haram terrorist group. She said the biggest shock she received was that she wasn’t welcomed as a survivor when she reached home. Instead, she was treated as a tainted, shameful outcast.

How I pray: Pray for God’s persecuted children to have the courage to live in the fullness and power of his blood shed for us. Ask that the church may resist cultural pressures to reject or belittle those who have suffered sexual assault, lost their jobs, or been in prison. Pray that the church can become a community of trust, freedom, empowerment, and acceptance (John 13:34–35) and that it may glorify God even when words are forbidden.

Peirong Lin is the deputy secretary general of the World Evangelical Alliance.

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Culture

‘The Best Christmas Pageant Ever’ Could Be A Classic

Joseph Holmes

The new movie from Dallas Jenkins is at times too on the nose—but also funny, heartfelt, and focused on Jesus.

Beatrice Schneider as Imogene Herdman and Judy Greer as Grace Bradley in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

Allen Fraser for Lionsgate

Last year, a New York Times article argued that Elf and Love Actually, released two decades ago,were the last classic Christmas movies to play in theaters. “On the one hand, thanks to the churn at places like Hallmark and Lifetime, which will collectively release upward of 50 new holiday movies [in 2023], it feels as if the genre is more robust than ever,” wrote the reviewer. “On the other, the idea of getting a new film that’s as revered and rewatched 20 years on [as these two] feels far-fetched.”

Could The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, out this week, beat the odds?

Based on the beloved 1972 book by Barbara Robinson, the film follows Grace Bradley (Judy Greer), who’s running her local church’s Christmas pageant for the first time. Unexpectedly, the Herdmans—known around town as “the worst kids in the world”—show up in the pews and attempt to steal the show. Grace and her family must decide whether they’ll reject the troublesome children and “save” the pageant or welcome them, allowing everyone to discover the true meaning of Christmas.

Spoiler alert: They choose the latter. Daughter Beth Bradley reflects, “Because of my mom and her understanding of the Christmas story, the Herdmans finally got what they needed most all along: a community.”

Pageant is directed by The Chosen showrunner Dallas Jenkins, who calls it “the movie that I was born to make.” He wrote, “For almost 20 years, [my wife] Amanda and I have hoped for, prayed for, and cried for the opportunity” to adapt the book that made them weep when they read it aloud to their children.

Congratulations to Jenkins: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is pretty much everything you’d want in a faith-based family Christmas movie. It’s heartfelt, self-aware, and genuinely funny, as when the Herdmans interrupt the nativity story with questions. Here’s one exchange:

“What’s frankincense and myrrh?”

“Oils and perfume.”

“What kind of cheap king hands out oil? You get better presents at the firemen’s shelter!”

It also offers an explicitly Christian message about welcoming sinners and outsiders. As one punchy line puts it, “Jesus was born for the Herdmans as much as he was for us.”

The Bradleys are also as good a movie depiction of a Christian family as I’ve seen. Grace and her husband, Bob (Pete Holmes), are loving but not sugary, affectionately ribbing each other for their foibles. When their daughter, Beth (Molly Belle Wright), expresses her frustrations with the Herdmans, her parents neither overindulge nor condemn her. The family supports each other while also pointing out opportunities for growth—such as when Bob takes the kids on an empathy-inducing trip to see the Herdmans’ rundown shack.

It’s hard to remember a movie that so effectively “puts Christ back in Christmas.” Whereas other Christmas classics sidestep the Nativity altogether, opting instead for vague appeals to joy and hope, Pageant normalizes the centrality of Jesus. The Herdmans’ story of transformation requires them to learn the story of how much God loves them.

That’s not to say the movie is perfect. It’s relentlessly plot-heavy and at times too on the nose, a problem exacerbated by an ever-present voiceover from grown-up Beth Bradley. Oftentimes, the voiceover is used to humorous effect. But it also overstays its welcome. There’s barely a scene that goes by where Beth isn’t telling us what to think or feel, ultimately creating too much distance between the audience and the story. Toward the film’s end, her narration slips into moralizing about the message, diluting the magic of those final scenes.

What is that message? Because Jesus came to redeem the sinner and the outcast, our job is to do so as well rather than exclude them. Pageant rightly wants us to understand that believers should welcome marginalized, sinful people rather than excluding them. It’s a powerful, heartwarming Christmas—and Christian—message. (One clunky line has the church’s mean girl scoff that the Herdman’s version of Mary and Joseph “look like refugees.” Point taken.)

But this message is complicated by the fact that the Herdmans are legitimately bullies. And they don’t stop bullying when they join the church. In fact, they get their parts in the pageant by threatening physical harm to other kids! In this case, Christian hospitality occasionally comes at the expense of vulnerable community members.

Today, the church is locked in heated debates about how to balance Christlike inclusion with protecting the flock and how to extend forgiveness in the aftermath of wrongdoing. Sometimes, the people who need welcoming do try to harm those who welcome them. Can boundaries coexist with mercy? The only people in Pageant who work hard to uphold community norms are a few uptight, pharisaic church women.

Ultimately, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a beautiful picture of redemption. The Herdmans lie, steal, and bully. And yet, by means of the Bradleys welcoming them into their church, they are given the chance to be different. This is what Christ did for us: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Christmas marks the moment when Jesus came into the world to give us that opportunity, which is why we—the Herdmans of the world—celebrate it so joyously.

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

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News

Trump’s Path to Victory Still Runs Through the Church

Harvest Prude

The former president held on to the white evangelical vote while making gains among Catholics and Hispanic Christians.

Donald Trump 2024 campaign sign in front of a church

Samuel Corum / Getty Images

The 2024 presidential election may have been Donald Trump’s best yet.

While white evangelicals’ strong support for the former president didn’t budge, he made sizable gains among Catholic and Hispanic voters that helped him sweep battleground states.

Projections show Trump may be the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote, beating out Democrat Kamala Harris.

Vice President Harris improved upon President Joe Biden’s numbers with white Americans, though a 55-percent majority continued to back Trump. The Republican candidate also improved among non-white voters; in 2016, Trump got 21 percent of the non-white vote, compared to Biden’s 74 percent. This year, the gap narrowed: 32 percent to Harris’s 65 percent, political scientist Daniel Bennett noted.

Trump’s win comes in part thanks to improved performance among Catholic voters, who make up about a quarter of the electorate and went for Trump by a 15-point margin. A Catholic himself, Biden won his fellow faithfuls in the 2020 contest, but 58 percent of Catholics voted for Trump over Harris this time, according to The Washington Post’s exit polls.

“Exit polls aren’t perfect, but they show that large majorities of the country are deeply concerned about the economy and inflation, and those voters went heavily for Trump,” said Caleb Verbois, political science professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, a key swing state with a sizable Catholic population that went for Trump this year.

The Trump campaign chose Ohio senator and Catholic convert JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. Vance will be the second Catholic VP behind Biden. In an op-ed last month, Vance suggested that a Harris administration would be biased against Catholics after Harris said she would not support faith-based exemptions for health providers on abortion legislation.

While Verbois said much of the evangelical landscape appeared unchanged, one of his takeaways is that abortion may be less motivating than in previous years.

“For pro-life Christian voters, abortion is just not as salient of an issue as it used to be,” Verbois said. “Trump has made it very clear that he does not really care about abortion and has moderated on it, and that didn’t keep pro-life voters away.

“There has never been a time in the last 50 years when there were fewer legal barriers to pro-life legislation, and yet politically the pro-life movement is on life support. Seven states just voted to enshrine abortion rights into their laws, and Florida only failed to do so because the measure needed a super-majority to pass.”

A survey from Lifeway Research found in September that voters with evangelical beliefs ranked abortion as their fifth issue, behind the economy, immigration, national security, and personal character.

Exit polls from The Washington Post found that even voters who believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases voted for Trump by nearly 30 percent.

Meanwhile, Democrats bet that their voters would turn out due to concerns over abortion access.

“Harris’s team seemed to assume that abortion and democracy concerns were all that mattered. But groceries cost 25 percent more now than they did in the fall of 2020. That mattered to voters,” Verbois said.

A survey by the Associated Press found that the economy and jobs were the top issues for voters at 39 percent, followed by immigration. Abortion came in next at only 11 percent.

“The fundamentals matter a whole lot,” Ryan Burge, a religion researcher and political science professor, told Christianity Today, referencing James Carville’s campaign line: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Voters motivated by the economy led to a strong showing for Republicans in rural areas and generally among men, voters without college degrees, and young voters, as well as in some minority demographics. Harris was unable to make up that support in urban areas, despite having more support from Black voters and women.

Trump captured the majority of men under 30, a group Biden won last time. The campaign expended substantial energy seeking to appeal to younger male voters and earned endorsements from podcasting giant Joe Rogan and tech billionaire Elon Musk, both of whom got shoutouts during Trump’s election night celebration.

With Trump on the ticket, Republicans have seen major improvement among Hispanic voters, the majority of whom are Catholic or evangelical.

In 2016, Trump won 17 percent of Hispanics. By 2020, 32 percent. With Hispanic voters this year, he narrowed the gap. Trump won 45 percent while Harris won 53 percent. Trump was also able to win among Hispanic men for the first time.

“These numbers show a growing trend—the Latino vote is conservative in essence and vote for what is best for the country they live in and love,” said Javier Chavez, pastor of Amistad Cristiana Church in Gainesville, Georgia.

“And just like that, Latino voters become the belles of the ball, becoming an electoral asset for the GOP, and a liability for Democrats in many states across the country,” said Daniel Garza, president of the Libre Initiative. Activists at Libre have worked for months to encourage more Hispanic voters to get engaged politically and vote Republican.

White evangelicals remained the strongest religious group for Republicans, voting for Trump by almost two to one.

White evangelicals’ margin of support for Trump stayed at 81 percent, exit polls found. That percentage hasn’t budged the last two cycles, and they have been stalwarts of the Republican base for years. “That’s the norm at this point, going all the way back to 2004,” Burge said. “This is exactly what you would expect. Nothing’s changed.”

Still, there have been shifts in who chooses to identify as evangelical. After 2020, more Trump supporters began calling themselves evangelicals, even if they hadn’t previously used the label and weren’t going to church.

White evangelicals supported George W. Bush in 2004 by 79 percent, John McCain in 2008 by 73 percent, and Mitt Romney in 2012 by 79 percent.

They voted for Trump by 81 percent in 2016 and 76 percent in 2020 (other 2020 estimates placed the number closer to 81 percent).

In a concession speech Wednesday, Harris said her team would work with Trump’s to peacefully transition to the next administration.

“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she said. “At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God.”

Harris encouraged Americans disappointed by the outcome to continue to engage politically.

“Here’s the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win,” she said. “The important thing is don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place.”

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Ideas

What to Do After the Election

Bonnie Kristian

CT Staff; Columnist

Prudence from Ecclesiastes and exhortation from Hebrews for the jubilant and disappointed alike.

Bloomberg / Getty / Edits by CT

Neither outcome of this presidential race would’ve surprised me. I don’t like to make predictions, but in my capacity as my former roommate’s mom’s personal, text-on-demand pundit, I did venture back in August my instinct that Donald Trump would take my state of Pennsylvania and, with it, the victory. And so he has.

Neither outcome would’ve pleased me, either. I know that’s the kind of thing for which partisans have no patience, especially while the win or loss is so fresh. But the truth is, I don’t want Trump or his rival, Kamala Harris, to be president of these United States. I believe he will do (and she would have done) a bad job. In some matters, it would’ve been the same kind of bad job in either administration; elsewhere, I think one or the other is worse.

I don’t want to parse all that here. The decision is made, and there will be plenty of time for policy and poll analyses later. Here, I want to speak to fellow Christians from my spot outside each camp but friendly with people in both. I keep returning to two passages from Scripture as I mull this result and consider what has not changed in and for ourselves and our neighbors.

“There is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes 3:1 says, and this week is a time for Ecclesiastes, especially its eighth chapter, which is brimming with prudence and equanimity in the face of political and social turbulence.

“Obey the king’s command,” advises 8:2—but not, apparently, because he is a good king. Act instead out of duty to God (v. 2), refusing to “stand up for a bad cause” while recognizing that, realistically, the king “will do whatever he pleases” (v. 3).

Don’t spend too much time on worries and anticipations, whether your concern is the Trump administration or backlash against it: “Since no one knows the future, who can tell someone else what is to come?” (v. 7)

For all we may hope or fear now, we do not know what will happen next. Sometimes, “a wicked person who commits a hundred crimes may live a long time” (v. 12). Sometimes, it is “the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve” (v. 14).

But sometimes, “a man lords it over others to his own hurt” (v. 9). And sometimes, “because the wicked do not fear God, it will not go well with them, and their days will not lengthen like a shadow” (v. 13). Sometimes, even, “it will go better with those who fear God, who are reverent before him” (v. 12).

In any case, our business must be the state of our hearts before God, for “wickedness will not release those who practice it” (v. 8). We cannot always keep its claws off others, but with God’s help we can tear them off of ourselves.

Yet rejection of wickedness and a bad cause is not enough. We don’t want to be houses merely swept clean (Luke 11:25) but filled with the likeness of Christ, rebuilt as little outposts of his kingdom, recognizable as his claims.

Add, then, to the prudence of Ecclesiastes 8 the exhortations of Hebrews 13. This is the chapter that declares, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (v. 8), and that is a timely word right now. But so too are the chapter’s many instructions for the Christian life under duress.

First and foremost, “Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters” (v. 1). Show “hospitality to strangers” (v. 2), and “remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (v. 3). Never is that advice more needed than if we find ourselves in power. The first readers of Hebrews were a poor and powerless minority in their society, yet they had a duty to the stranger, the prisoner, and the suffering. How much more, then, do we?

Beyond that, heed church authorities (v. 17) and avoid “all kinds of strange teachings” (v. 9). Honor marriage and reject sexual immorality and love of money, two of our culture’s greatest idols (vv. 4–5). Be content, “because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’” (v. 5).

It is in this context that we can “say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?’” (v. 6). It is in this context that we recall that “here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (v. 14).

And yet, the present city is unmistakably, unignorably before us. Maybe you are happy with its new direction, or maybe you are mourning. In either case, all the above remains the same—and so do we.

Contrary to some sensational election responses, America is not different than it was on Monday, and neither are our duties as Christians. The family members, friends, and fellow congregants who voted differently from us all thought differently from us a few days ago, too. What we love about them is the same. The kindnesses they have done us still happened. And what we find misguided or incoherent or annoying about them is the same, too. They were sinners then and are sinners now. We all are.

“Pray for us,” as the author of Hebrews pleads in 13:18. “We are sure that we have a clear conscience and desire to live honorably in every way,” but so often we are weak. We err. We sin. We strain harder to see tomorrow than to see Christ. There is a time for everything, and this is a time for humility, grace, and prayer.

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

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Culture

Spain’s Oldest Protestant Publishing House Began Underground 100 Years Ago

Hernán Restrepo

Now Clie celebrates a century of equipping the church through dictatorship and secularization.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Courtesy of Editorial Clie

It was another dark day during the Spanish Civil War. Two nuns were fleeing a group of Communist guerrillas who had threatened to rape them. Running through the streets of Tarrasa, a small town in Catalonia, they took shelter in the small house of Protestant pastor and publisher Samuel Vila.

One of these two nuns turned out to be a relative of the Spanish general, whose forces won the war. Francisco Franco subsequently ruled Spain with an iron fist as the head of a military and ultra-Catholic dictatorship that lasted 36 years.

But Franco made one small concession. As an act of gratitude for protecting his family member, he issued Vila a safe conduct permit that allowed him to travel freely inside and outside the country. A permission that few were granted in those nearly four decades, it allowed for a small evangelical publishing house to build the partnerships it would need to survive a religiously hostile Spain—and to celebrate its centennial this year.

Today, Editorial Clie is Spain’s largest Protestant publisher and has distributed or published nearly 3,000 titles since its founding in 1924. But during the dictatorship (1936–1975) and the years leading up to it, its work existed primarily underground.

Except for a brief respite in the 1930s, for decades Spain was ruled by a monarchy that did not separate church and state. In this environment, the Catholic church controlled schools, hospitals, and social services, and its leaders were vehemently opposed to any movement that might challenge its authority, be it secularism or Protestantism.

“We [evangelicals] were considered heretics,” said Antonio Cruz, a biologist who has published numerous books with Clie. “Children were taught at school that Luther was a rebellious monk who abandoned Catholicism because he wanted to marry a nun.”

Born in 1902, Vila grew up in this environment as the son of a prosperous family of Catalan merchants who converted to Protestantism due to the ministry of English missionaries. Despite the centuries of repression that Protestants had experienced during the Inquisition (which began in 1478 and lasted for centuries), there was slightly more tolerance at the start of the 20th century for expressions of faith other than Catholicism, at least in Catalonia.

As a child, Vila received a toy printing press with movable rubber type from the Methodist church the family attended. He began to print Bible verses on pieces of paper that he threw out of the train window on his regular trips to Barcelona, in the hope that someone would read them and find Jesus.

As Vila continued with his studies, his love of printing was soon rivaled by his passion for writing essays, in which he defended his Christian faith from Catholics who called it a heresy. These essays became his first book, A las Fuentes del Cristianismo (To the Sources of Christianity), in which he sought to give pastors tools to defend their beliefs.

In 1924, Vila opened Clie, or Comité de Literatura para las Iglesias Evangélicas (Literature Committee for the Evangelical Churches), a publishing house that would print books helping Protestants to defend their faith under the premise that “a reasoned faith is a solid faith.”

Courtesy of Editorial Clie

Samuel Vila and his wife, Lidia Vila Campderrós, in front of Clie in the early 1960s.

After an ugly civil war devastated the country, Franco established his nationalist regime, a 40-year rule characterized by human rights violations and oppressive censorship. During the harsh years of persecution under the dictatorship, Clie had to operate primarily in secret since publishing any book by a Protestant author was prohibited by the state. The number of people who could gather for a Protestant service was limited by the police.

For decades, Clie printed its books at the workshops of two friends of the Vila family, who had become Protestants. It was not until 1965 that Vila was able to import an industrial printing press from the United States that had been discarded as scrap metal and install it in his home to create the printing workshop for his publishing house.

“Samuel Vila was a courageous man. He never hesitated to write letters to regional governors to complain about the many forms of discrimination against evangelicals at the time. He was also clever,” said Cruz, noting that Vila evaded state censorship of Protestant books by registering them as if they had been printed in the United States.

After Franco’s death in 1975, the 1978 Constitution officially recognized freedoms of religion, conscience, assembly, and expression, which had historically been denied to Protestants.

“We were hoping for a great revival after Franco’s death,” said Cruz. “But this just did not happen.”

On the contrary, the secularization of Spain accelerated after the dictator’s death. Today, only 19 percent of the population consider themselves practicing Catholics.

New millennium, new editorial approach

When the philosopher Alfonso Ropero became an evangelical Christian, he faced the challenge of explaining his new faith to his family. Originally from La Mancha, the region that inspired Miguel de Cervantes to write Don Quixote, Ropero was surrounded by uncles and cousins who were dedicated to the occult arts of spiritualism and divination, popular among the gypsies in central and southern Spain. In the midst of this dilemma, he came across El Espiritismo y los Fenómenos Metapsíquicos (Spiritism and Metaphysical Phenomena), which Vila had published in 1978.

“After reading it, I was able to use theological tools to debate with my relatives who were mediums and believed they had the power to communicate with the dead,” Ropero told CT. “That was my first contact with Clie.”

After publishing several of his own works on theology and philosophy, Ropero became Clie’s editorial director in 2001, only retiring earlier this year. In his two decades leading the publishing house, he initiated the creation of multiple biblical encyclopedias, including the Gran Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Biblia, Historia de la Filosofía y su Relación con la Teología, Biblia de Estudio del Mensaje Profético Escatológico, and the Diccionario Enciclopédico Bíblico Ilustrado.

During this time, Clie also began to publish more female Spanish speaking theologians, including Mexico’s Elsa Támez and Costa Rica’s Irene Foulkes, who grew up in America. They were included in the publishing house’s catalog, and the number of Latin American authors also increased, such as the Colombian Arturo Rojas, the Paraguayan Marcelo Wall, the American Juan Valdés, and the Guatemalan Rigoberto Gálvez.

Another of Clie’s great contributions to the theology of the Hispanic world has been the translation into Spanish of great academic works that at that time were only available in English or German. Of the 413 active books in their catalog, 35 percent are translations and include titles such as The Matthew Henry Study Bible, Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, Keil and Delitzsch’s Commentary on the Old Testament, or Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics.

The next 100 years

Even though the number of evangelicals in the country has been slowly increasing due to immigration from Latin America, protestants make up just under two percent of Spain’s 47 million people. Clie is interested in reaching them all—as well as the country’s Catholics.

“My father’s idea was that we had to serve everyone,” said Eliseo Vila, who took over the publishing house after his father died. “That is why Clie never discriminated denominationally or theologically in terms of what it published.”

Alfonso Triviño, who has been Clie’s CEO since 2006, has further broadened the publishing house’s portfolio, publishing titles that feature potentially controversial takes on social justice or feminism.

Clie published a Spanish translation of American historian Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood, which challenged the idea that gender hierarchy is biblically mandated. It also published Exclusion and Embrace by Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, a deep dive into reconciliation and forgiveness.

“We have always sought to be a bridge between academia, the pastoral world, and society based on the values of our faith,” Triviño told CT. “Many call us conservative. But the truth is that we have always pursued balance by bringing to market books that only a progressive publisher would dare to publish.”

Paradoxically, piracy has been one of the biggest problems that this Christian publisher has had to deal with today. Triviño has been surprised to frequently find PDF versions of Clie’s (and other competitor Christian publishing houses like Editorial Vida or Verbo Divino) books circulating openly in WhatsApp and Telegram Bible study groups or uploaded on the Bible seminar portals of some churches.

“Piracy has slowed us down slightly in our goal of making our entire catalog available in digital format,” he said. “It’s a shame that this happens in the Christian world.”

Reaching new audiences, especially younger ones, is another of the publisher’s challenges in this new century. Besides expanding to audiobooks and e-books (when possible), Clie has also sought out younger writers, including Argentine singer-songwriter and YouTuber Lucas Magnin, who has authored 95 Tesis para la nueva generación (95 Theses for the New Generation) or Teología Pop (Pop Theology).

“To get through over a century, an institution needs the capacity to adapt to all circumstances. Hence, we have been, for example, the first Spanish Christian publisher to have a website, and later, the first on social media,” said Eliseo Vila. “The Lord has brought us this far. If it had not been for the will of God and his hand constantly urging us, we would not exist today.”

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

- More from Hernán Restrepo

Theology

Paul’s Prescription for a Polarized Church

Julien C. H. Smith

The apostle’s ethic of welcome challenges our personal, social, and political instincts.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

If you have recently witnessed an instance of intolerant contempt, the telltale symptom of our increasingly polarized society, you may find yourself wondering, “Why can’t we all just get along? If only we could learn to at least tolerate one another.” Toleration is an important civic virtue, but it may not be enough.

We have probably all prayed for toleration on our way to one of those awkward Thanksgiving family reunions where the political divides are so sharp all we can talk about is football (and even here we must be careful). But even if we escape the day without argument, we may be left with a hollow sense of sadness on our way home. Yes, we may have succeeded in tolerating our “enemies,” but our hearts yearn for something more: love.

When our enemies are distant, the question of loving them can be conveniently ignored. But when the enemy is across the table, in the same committee meeting, or in a group project, the countercultural wisdom and necessity of Jesus’ commands—love your enemy, who is your neighbor (Matt. 5:43–44)—becomes apparent.

For help in parsing out practical instruction of neighborly love, I turn to the apostle Paul in the closing chapters of his letter to the church in Rome. We often think of Romans as a densely argued theological treatise, but it is also—perhaps even primarily—a pastoral letter seeking to reconcile Jewish and Gentile Christians.

In Galatians, Paul insisted, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile … for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (3:28). Roughly a decade later, this claim was still being put to the test in the Roman church. It wasn’t so much that the essential truth was being challenged (Paul no longer had to argue against circumcision as a requirement) but that the truth of the gospel was being challenged by a myriad of small grievances that threatened to turn neighbors into enemies.

One such grievance arose from cultural differences over food shared at communal meals (Rom. 14:1–3). At stake seems to have been whether Jewish dietary laws should be observed at communal meals within the church. In the early years, before Claudius’ expulsion of Jews from Rome in AD 41, the largely Jewish Christian church would have seen these regulations as normative and even essential, but they grew irrelevant as the church became more Gentile.

Far more than preference or habit, food practices—like circumcision, Sabbath, festivals, and so on—marked the Jews as God’s covenantal people. Such practices outlined identity and boundaries, marking who was part of the community and who was not. In such a polarized situation, where lines between groups are drawn too sharply, Paul’s rhetorical strategy is to blur them by substituting the labels weak and strong for the words Jew and Gentile.

Initially, this decision seems liable to further antagonize the parties by giving one a pejorative label with respect to the other. Yet the genius of Paul’s strategy lies in its intentional ambiguity: It is rather difficult to ascertain who in the community is “weak” and who is “strong.” Even today, there is no scholarly consensus on the matter. In either case, Paul leaves room for individuals in both groups whose beliefs and practices don’t align with their larger group’s identity.

His essential strategy is to define an ethic of welcome: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (15:7 NRSV). Broadly applied to the church as a whole, the “strong” have a duty to welcome the “weak” (14:1)—to “bear with [bastazein] the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves” (15:1).

Paul is not merely calling for toleration, for enduring undesirable behavior for as long as one is able. Toleration can only ever be an interim strategy to keep peace until genuine reconciliation is achieved. Paul’s radical exhortation is to “bear with,” or support, the weak.

As Paul indicated earlier in the argument, this support entails significant behavioral change for the strong: “Therefore let us stop passing judgment (krinōmen) on one another. Instead, make up your mind (krinatē) not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister” (14:13, emphasis added. See also vv. 14–15).

This sentence makes a subtle pun on two different forms of the verb “to judge” (krinō), so as to say essentially, “Don’t judge one another, but judge how you can avoid tripping up another.” In other words, instead of judging others, we’re supposed to judge ourselves.

Although both sides in the conflict are urged to welcome one another, Paul goes on to exhort the strong to support the weak by accommodating their food preferences—he asks them to change their behavior even though it is warranted and correct, as he admits.

Paul’s larger goal is to inculcate a new kind of moral reasoning modeled after the self-giving love of Christ. Just as Christ gave up his life, the strong are to give up their food preferences for the sake of the weak. This is what it means, in this particular context, to “walk in love.”(2 John 1:6)

Behind this respect for conscience lies a further recognition that “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17). Ultimate significance belongs to the kingdom of God manifested in his church. Preserving this greater good requires relinquishing penultimate goods—in this case, eating what one wishes to eat.

This argument challenges us to carefully reconsider several cherished values and entrenched habits in our society: first, our concept of freedom; second, our habit of painting our enemies with a broad brush; and third, our tendency to sacralize politics.

According to the seminal political philosopher John Stuart Mill, freedom in democratic society is conceived as personal autonomy. Unless I am causing physical harm to my neighbor or to her property, I ought to be free to pursue my own tastes and interests as I see fit.

Mill’s so-called harm principle informs our foundational notion of freedom and its limits in democratic society. It hardly needs to be added that freedom thus defined is widely perceived to be the highest good in our culture. To curtail one’s freedom in deference to the religious scruples of a neighbor would constitute for Mill—and I suspect many Americans today—an affront to the very notion of civic liberty.

Paul’s definition of freedom is radically different—we are to be free from the enslaving power of sin, and its end result is not personal autonomy but righteousness. The choice, as Paul sees it, is not between slavery and freedom but between two different kinds of slavery: “You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (6:18).

When Paul later contrasts “eating and drinking” with “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (14:17), he is making the point that freedom is not simply about getting our way but about living a new kind of life in which the Spirit frees us to love our neighbor.

By contrast, personal autonomy—limitless desire restricted only by harm against others—leads to polarization. When autonomy is seen as the highest good, conflicting desires create division. People form tribes to protect their interests, seeking power through majority rule. And in a system where (ideally at least) the majority wins, it is an obvious advantage to be on the “strong” side, not the “weak” one.

But Paul’s idea of freedom-as-righteousness through neighborly love challenges this logic. Freedom from sin’s control, entering God’s kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy, promotes unity over division. Paul’s vision is a communal one—Jew and Gentile worshiping God together (15:7–13)—which polarizing autonomy cannot sustain.

Second, we often mischaracterize our enemies, creating monolithic and inaccurate stereotypes: “If you believe X, then you must also believe Y.” Alan Jacobs characterizes such unfair oversimplification as “in-other-wordsing.” Rather than working to understand the nuance of our opponents’ views, we reduce our opponents’ views to unflattering sound bites like “In other words, my opponent thinks we should harm the vulnerable.”

By contrast, Paul’s vision of freedom calls us to view our enemies as ourselves. His strategy in Romans 14–15 blurs the lines between conflicting groups, countering our tendency to misrepresent our opponents and their motives. He exhorts both sides to act out of embodied devotion to Christ, whether they observe certain days or not, choose to eat or abstain (14:5–6).

This approach is not rhetorical but rooted in a fundamental value: We belong to the Lord in life and death (14:7–8). Paul likens believers to household servants, who should not judge each other since we all serve the same master (14:4). This shift in perspective encourages seeing enemies as fellow servants, which is a crucial step toward loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

Third, Paul’s ethic chastens our habit of sacralizing politics—of our prideful assumption that God thinks and judges as we do and that his will is aligned with our own agendas. When we sacralize our political agendas, we effectively domesticate God and invoke his authority in judging our neighbors.

Writer Anne Lamott warns against assuming God hates the same people we do, a mindset that fuels violence like the First Crusade’s slogan, Deus vult (“God wills it!”). This is the danger of identifying our penultimate goods with God’s ultimate good—and yet we so often defend them as such.

Paul emphasizes that God is above our divisions and that we all face God’s judgment equally: “Each of us will give an account of ourselves to God” (14:12). Our ultimate answerability before God cannot but chasten our impulse to weaponize him and to hold our enemies accountable to our own (imperfect) standards of judgment.

Julien C. H. Smith is professor of humanities and theology at Christ College, the honors college of Valparaiso University. His most recent book is Paul and the Good Life: Transformation and Citizenship in the Commonwealth of God.

- More from Julien C. H. Smith

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