Sports Betting Has Become Too Prevalent for Christians to Ignore

Online gambling isn’t necessarily sinful, but it’s certainly not a careful use of the wealth God has given us.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

The odds are good that you know someone who wagered on sports in the past year. With the rise in online sports betting, the industry now makes more than all the US major pro sports leagues combined. Americans are expected to bet $35 billion on NFL games alone this season.

Gambling is not a new temptation, but I believe that the advent of online sports gambling raises the stakes considerably on how seriously Christian leaders should address questions around the moral and theological nature of gambling.

Online sports betting companies sponsor broadcasts and sports media, so the push to play is everywhere, and it’s easy to join in. People can register and pay in just a few taps right on their phones. Plus, tying it to sports makes the gambling seem more innocent than poker and blackjack.

While sports gambling in any form is currently illegal in some very large states—including California, Texas, and Georgia—online sports betting is now legal and available in the majority of the country. For states like Texas, where I live and pastor, it seems probable that gambling will be made legal eventually.

As I speak with Christian leaders and church members about gambling, I often encounter hesitation. There is a reluctance among Christians to condone gambling but not enough opposition to condemn it outright. I think many Christians aren’t quite sure what to make of the morality of gambling.

In fairness, the Scriptures do not speak to gambling with the same degree of clarity and forcefulness with which they address other vices like adultery, drunkenness, and theft. It leaves us with the question, “Is gambling sinful?”

In Proverbs 13:11, we see an admonition against the hasty pursuit of wealth: “Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it” (ESV). We are repeatedly warned about the love of money in the New Testament: “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’” (Heb. 13:5).

We are told in Ecclesiastes 5:10 that money will not satisfy. And 1 Timothy 6:9–10 warns that “those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”

While 1 Timothy seems to come closest, it’s not a direct command to not gamble. Yet there are many things the Bible doesn’t specifically forbid that Christians of common sense and commitment to Scripture acknowledge as morally wrong. God’s Word doesn’t prohibit cocaine usage, but I don’t believe many Christians would treat the consumption of cocaine as morally neutral. Scripture doesn’t explicitly condemn dog fighting, but if a guy in your small group invited you over to watch his dachshunds square off in the backyard, I believe you’d have no problem objecting to that event.

While gambling of all kinds includes risk, wager, and gamesmanship, not all betting games should be measured in the same way. The extreme instances of foolishness in gambling may amount to sin, but is it wicked to wager ice cream with my daughter over a game of Uno? The beauty of the wisdom we find in Scripture, especially in the absence of clear biblical admonitions in favor of or against a specific thing, is that it provides principles for living prudently.

The ethics of gambling may appear to be hazy in Scripture, but the Bible’s regard for exploiting the plight of the poor is not. Beyond the question of individual morality, we must be honest about the predatory nature of gambling.

Israel’s prophets routinely castigate God’s people for their carelessness and exploitation of the poor. Many of Israel’s codes around money lending are given explicitly to prevent those with many resources to unfairly profit from those with less. This is what the gambling industry is built to accomplish: to exploit those who are eager to build wealth hastily, particularly those who feel as if they have no other viable option.

Big gambling companies have systems in place that limit sharps (people who make excellent bets) but intentionally don’t limit people who lose a lot. The expression “The house always wins” is not merely a statistical reality; it is a system of “game” that keeps gambling profitable for its purveyors.

Some modern readers may suggest that the Bible is not just apathetic toward the question of gambling but actually speaks in support of the enterprise. Proverbs 16:33 says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” We read that the priest Zechariah was chosen by lot to burn incense (Luke 1) and that the apostle who replaced Judas was chosen by way of casting lots—after the disciples prayed for the Lord to direct this apostolic selection (Acts 1).

Are these passages giving implicit approval to the betting, risk taking, and game approaches of gambling for money?

The casting of lots in ancient Israel is wrongly assumed to be a kind of random gambling for gain. While some mystery remains around the practice, we know that casting lots involved some way of rolling stones. Some scholars suggest that the Urim and Thummim the high priest carried were used for the casting of lots to determine God’s direction. We see in the Old Testament that priests were selected and some priestly duties were assigned by way of casting lots (1 Chron. 24:5, 31; 25:8; Neh. 10:34).

The casting of lots was never accompanied by a wager or profiteering bet of any kind. It becomes clear, then, that the casting of lots among God’s people was not some game of chance for financial gain but a practical way of putting trust in the Lord.

Lot casting was neither foolhardy in its application nor pursued for fun or wealth; it was a simple and ancient acknowledgment that decisions belong to God. However, these descriptive practices are never prescribed as a normative approach to discerning God’s will, and they shouldn’t be treated as such. Nor should they be treated as passages in support of gambling.

Is gambling sin? I don’t believe that Christians can see every instance of making a wager as sin. Is gambling wise? Rarely. Should Christians gamble? As a norm, I believe they should avoid it. Why? Well, not everything that is lawful is beneficial. There are things that don’t break the dictates of Scripture but are not wise.

Gambling treats what God has entrusted to our care with a spirit of carelessness. Its enterprise is exploitation, and its endgame is the hasty making and taking of wealth. Christians should be reluctant to participate in and support gambling of any kind, and I believe Christian leaders should begin addressing online sports gambling with clarity and precision now.

For fellow ministry leaders, here are five practical ways to address this issue:

1. Talk about money.

It is simply a failure of the church’s discipleship strategy that most Christians have no positive conception of wealth. If we don’t provide a coherent account of what wealth is, how wealth is gained, and how wealth can be stewarded for the good of households, communities, and churches, we should not be surprised if people squander it.

Most Christians in our churches have been presented with what appear to be two messages about money: Wealth corrupts, and you should give generously. Beyond the simple contradiction of these two messages, there is a lack of purpose and vision for the pursuit, stewardship, and maintenance of wealth.

The Christian shouldn’t worship wealth, but they also shouldn’t waste it.

2. Provide opportunities for healthy and fraternal competition.

Many men are drawn to sports gambling because of the competitive and communal nature of sports. In a digital age of exacerbated loneliness, men are flocking to online sports gambling to catch a whiff of something that they miss: fraternal play.

Christian leaders of all kinds can help engage in holistic discipleship by recovering simple invitations into fraternal play that benefit the men in their churches and communities. Host a charity golf tournament, organize a men’s softball team, or set up a pickleball league. As your brackets fill with men engaging in the embodied community of healthy competition, you are providing them a chance to practice a better way than what online sports gambling provides.

3. Speak prophetically to respectable and “fun” vices.

One reason the church is suspiciously silent about gambling is that it is not one of our “vicious vices.” Like gluttony of various kinds or slothfulness or bitterness, we don’t feel the same pressure to address gambling because it is a vice of abdication. When it reaches the point of sin, it is something close to a “sin of omission.” Gluttony is the abdication of self-control, sloth the abdication of work, and bitterness the withholding of forgiveness; and gambling can often become the surrender of stewardship.

We have to consider that sanctification includes not only growing to not do what we shouldn’t but also working to do what we’d rather not.

As the Book of Common Prayer confesses, “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.”

Gambling, in its worst forms, is the undoing of stewardship. It is leaving care for what God has entrusted to us “undone.”

4. Help people see that the system that allows for one person’s “harmless indulgence” is the same one that allows for another’s exploited enslavement.

The calculus of odds makers and gambling enterprises is to offer the illusion of opportunity so they can eventually take it all from participants. For some, losing $1,000 on the Super Bowl may be a negligible loss. But the same system that allows for this harmless play will take the last $100 of grocery money away from a gambling addict.

We exist in the context of communities. The pursuit of wisdom and righteousness will often mean suspending our freedoms to indulge in what is not harmful for us, specifically because it harms and hinders the weaker among us.

5. Tell your local, state, and national leaders that you don’t want to live in places with state-supported vice.

Even if you remain unconvinced as to the immorality and foolishness of gambling, it is a fact that gambling creates centrifugal energy for vice. Prostitution, trafficking, illegal drug sales and abuse, and violence are pulled toward centers of gambling. Wherever gambling is allowed to grow unchecked, the weeds of wickedness will grow abundantly.

If we truly are to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city” (Jer. 29:7), then we must oppose the cultivation of fertile soil for what is obviously wicked, evil, and dehumanizing. Gambling may be ethically gray, but it serves as the breeding ground for vices that are simple in their sinfulness.

To those who might believe that this is nothing but the moralizing of yesteryear, convinced that this same kind of reasoning was invoked to complain about the “young folks dancing” back in the traditional churches of our youth, I say, “You might be right.”

But I for one think we could do with a bit more gospel moralizing in these immoral days. I remain unconvinced that it is good for us to pretend as though the public, economic, and leisurely affairs of our civic life are better off without the principles of Scripture guiding them.

If you are inclined to disagree, then I guess all I have to say is “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

Kyle Worley is a pastor at Mosaic Church in Richardson, Texas, and hosts the Knowing Faith podcast with Jen Wilkin and J. T. English. He is the author of Home with God: Our Union with Christ and Formed For Fellowship.

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News

You Can Turn Off the News and Still Be a Good Citizen

Harvest Prude

Five experts share advice for Christians overwhelmed by the headlines

Forget October surprises; this election season has already had a dizzying number of twists and turns: criminal trials, consequential debates, attempted assassinations, a candidate dropping out and being replaced, and new vice-presidential picks coming on the national scene.

And every major development has been accompanied by plenty of 24–48 hour sideshows—controversies, partisan squabbles, scandals, and conspiracy theories. The crush of news may be catching up to Americans: While nearly half of Americans say they follow political news “extremely” or “very” closely, 6 in 10 also told researchers that they “need to limit” their news consumption due to feeling overwhelmed, according to a survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts.

Christians eager to be informed citizens can feel both obliged to keep up with the news and overwhelmed by the volume of stories and level of outrage cycling around them.

“We were not designed to drink from a fire hose in our lives when it comes to media consumption,” Ryan Burge, an Eastern Illinois University professor and religion and politics analyst, told CT. “Honestly, most days, there’s two or three things you need to pay attention to.”

Burge’s approach to news consumption is more a measured cup of tea than a drink from a fire hose. To catch up on events, he’ll go to Google News, look at the aggregation of headlines, scroll, and choose one to three stories to read.

“I read for five or ten minutes, I close it, I go do something else. I’m caught up,” Burge said. “Think about how much ephemeral stuff happens on a day-to-day basis in America, where you’ll completely forget about it in about 24 to 36 hours.”

CT asked several media-savvy Christians for their advice on engaging with the news during an election year—and all of them recommended reading less and using discernment to determine which stories really matter.

“We don’t need to give oxygen to the outrage du jour, whatever it happens to be at that moment,” said Jeffrey Bilbro, an English professor at Grove City College and editor of online magazine Front Porch Republic. “I don’t think there is anything wrong with checking out of the outrage cycle.”

When it comes to developing a Christian orientation to news consumption, Bilbro has spent enough time on the subject to write books about the topic. He personally takes a minimalist approach to consuming political coverage during election years, admitting freely that he tunes out of events like conventions or debates.

“My goal is to care about the November election to the extent that I have agency and responsibility regarding it,” Bilbro said.

His goal is to be informed enough to be confident about his vote but avoid a “disproportionate emotional investment in the whole spectacle that doesn’t benefit anybody, has no positive effect, and causes me anxiety, and likely distracts me from the issues and the people that I can be responsible for.”

Overly avid consumption, particularly consumption focused on controversies or conspiracies, can lead to a distorted perception where these flash-in-the-pan topics overtake issues closer to home. Bilbro has seen political hobbyists become less involved in their local communities and church life.

For Christians who find themselves getting angry after watching cable news or scrolling through social media, Bilbro said they should explore if their time would be better spent seeking out hands-on community involvement, from volunteering at church or a local organization to joining a book club.

Daniel Bennett, a political science professor at John Brown University and author of Uneasy Citizenship: Embracing the Tension in Faith and Politics, advised Christians to dedicate more time to stories that impact them, or ones they have agency to impact in turn.

“I would pay attention to the stories or issues that are affecting you and your community more personally,” he said. “Rather than latching on to whatever is designed to get clicks by highlighting this one small town in this one state that you’ve never been to and letting that really fire you up, instead focus on, What’s going on in my community? What are the big issues that are influencing my neighbors? How can our church serve in these ways?”

Bilbro also pointed out the necessity to be mindful of which stories and outlets we choose.

“As fallen creatures, we tend to be drawn toward things that titillate us, that are exciting and interesting and shocking and rile us up. When we give into those cravings, we reinforce and support journalistic models that feed them,” he said. “I would hope that we could, as Christians, try to recognize that in ourselves, and then try to patronize different kinds of news, different kinds of journalism.”

Paul Glader, a journalism professor at the recently closed King’s College who has worked for outlets including The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Associated Press, recognizes the importance of media literacy.

In a world where misinformation and disinformation from foreign actors and anonymous pages posing as credible sources are a reality, he says Americans should approach sources and stories “critically but not cynically.”

Good outlets are recognizable because they take steps like clearly differentiating opinion from news, having a track record of reporting truthfully, and issuing corrections if and when errors are published, he noted. For outlets or journalists with a trustworthy record, he advised supporting that work through subscriptions or following them.

“People should shun sites and outlets that blatantly and repeatedly disregard the truth and facts,” he said. “The hallmark of a good news organization is, in my opinion, one that corrects and acknowledges its own mistakes. That is a Christian virtue and a virtue of quality news organizations.”

Glader cautioned against only reading outlets that align with your worldview and challenged Christians to pick one or two from a slightly different worldview or political view “to help you see how other parts of America are taking in information or presenting information.”

Exposure to different views can also help Christians break out of an echo chamber. “Remember, hey, there’s people who may go to my church or may live in my community who think differently.”

Bonnie Kristian, editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today, as well as an author and opinion writer, said much of how Christians should consume the news boils down to capacity and disposition.

“If you like following this stuff, if it’s intriguing for you to track the changes in our culture and governance in real time, then—with all due caveats about rightful priorities for a Christian’s time and attention—I’d say have at it,” she said. “But if politics is nothing but a duty for you, and perhaps a quite unpleasant one, don’t.”

Like others, Kristian said the amount of attention to pay also depends on the particular political race in question. Most voters are extensively familiar with Trump and “unless you’ve been in a coma and made a miraculous recovery, you probably don’t need to spend any time on his latest hijinks to know basically who he is and how he’ll govern.”

A new cast of characters, say, Minnesota governor Tim Walz or Ohio senator JD Vance might be different.

“Learn what you can about the candidate’s character; read insightful commentary about bigger issues in play if you encounter it; but don’t get bogged down in every detail of partisan bickering over competing or even unverifiable accounts,” Kristian said.

“There is plenty of passing garbage you can safely ignore. If you find yourself getting caught up—and worked up—over something your conscience is whispering is inconsequential, consider leaving it alone just for 24 hours, then seeing if you still care tomorrow.”

Burge also encourages readers to skip over the quick hits for bigger themes.

His advice to people who want to be informed is to skim the surface, resist doing a deep dive into clickbait, then sit back and think. “Let’s not say, Don’t be informed. But be macro-level informed.”

Stories that are flash-in-the-pan controversies lead him to ask questions like, “How can this story speak to the larger narratives that are happening in America, in the West? That’s how I consume news, is [asking], how does this little chapter fit into the bigger book?”

He’s found that in his newsletter, Graphs About Religion, topics related to current controversies get less traction and fewer views than stories dealing with more timeless themes. Burge, who also pastored a Baptist church for 20 years, believes this shows people are in search of “eternal, long-ranging trends and truths … compelling, interesting pieces of analysis that will stand the test of time.”

But ultimately, Christians interested in news should proceed with discernment, while others should not feel guilty for taking several steps back.

“If staying up on politics leaves you angry, jittery, fearful, or unpleasant, as it does for many people,” Kristian pointed out, “you can learn all you need to know to make a well-informed vote from a few hours of reading the Saturday before Election Day.”

- More from Bonnie Kristian

Books

Excerpt

God at the Bottom of the Glass

Francis S. Collins

An excerpt from “The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust” on discovering the hand of God in the science of his creation.

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

As a child I had no formal religious training. My parents were not opposed to faith, but they did not find it particularly relevant to daily life.

At age five, I was sent to a local Episcopal church to sing in the boys’ choir so that I could learn music. I learned to love the hymns, but the theology washed over me without leaving any discernible residue. I can still play most of those hymns by heart on the piano—yet for the most part, I have trouble remembering the words because they had little impact on me.

As a child and adolescent, I had occasional moments of a strange longing for something that might be called spiritual, oftentimes inspired by a musical experience. But I couldn’t put it into words. Much later I learned to recognize this as a potential glimpse of the eternal, something described by C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy. But at the time, I had no framework for interpreting such experiences.

Going on to college and graduate school in physical chemistry, I lost any glimmers of spiritual interest and essentially became an atheist. I was unwilling to accept anything as having meaning or consequence if it couldn’t be measured scientifically. That of course denied the very possibility of anything outside of nature.

My adopted worldview thus presupposed that materialism is all there is. That in turn rendered such questions as “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and “Is there a God?” irrelevant. In its exclusionary stance, this philosophical view was actually not science—this was “scientism,” although I did not recognize it at the time.

But then I underwent a transition in my professional plans, moving from a focus on basic questions in chemistry and physics to an interest in life science and enrolling in medical school. I found the study of the human body fascinating on scientific grounds, and it was harder to keep those deeper questions about the meaning of life at bay when I found myself dealing with life and death on a daily basis.

I could see that many of the patients I was assigned to were facing the end of their lives and that our medical interventions were unlikely to save them for long. Some of them were angry, some depressed, but some who had strong faith in God seemed oddly at peace.

One afternoon, an elderly woman with advanced heart disease shared her Christian faith with me, explaining in deeply personal ways how her faith in Jesus provided her with a sense of comfort as she prepared to die. I was silent, awkwardly not knowing what to say.

But then, in a moment when time seemed to stand still, she looked directly at me and asked, “Doctor, what do you believe?” With an intense and unexpected flush of discomfort, I realized I had just been asked the most important question of my whole life.

Struggling to provide an answer, I knew that down deep I had nothing to say. I stammered something like “I really don’t know,” saw her look of surprise, and ran from the room.

This interaction tormented me over the next few days. I still thought atheism was the only rational option for a thinking person, but then why did her question make me so uncomfortable?

I realized that I had arrived at atheism without considering whether there might be evidence for other alternatives—something that a scientist is not supposed to do. I knew a few friends and professors who were Christians. While I assumed they must all have been brainwashed about this as children, I still wondered whether there was some explanation for how such scientifically minded people could hold ideas about God in the same brains that were studying biochemical pathways or cardiac surgery.

So, I began a search of books and people to try to understand this mystery. Through the assistance of a pastor who lived down the road, that search brought me to a little book by C. S. Lewis called Mere Christianity.

As I turned the pages, I realized with considerable alarm that my atheist arguments were laughably superficial. One by one, they were demolished by Lewis, an Oxford don who had also once been an atheist. Lewis anticipated my objections at every turn.

He helped me understand how atheism suffers from the arrogance of asserting a universal negative (again, something that scientists aren’t supposed to do). His logic also helped me see that atheism presents a colder, more sterile, and more impoverished view of humanity. Lewis led me to consider, for the first time, the true significance of good and evil.

He described something I knew from experience but hadn’t really thought much about: the universal human experience of being called to be moral creatures, though we all know that we regularly fail. Purely naturalistic explanations for morality (for example, the argument that it somehow has improved our chances for successful reproduction over many millennia) seem to account for some of this, but they fail to explain examples of sacrificial actions that we humans consider truly noble—the ministry of Mother Teresa, the legions of people volunteering for the Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity, or countless other individual acts of radical altruism. Was this a signpost to God?

Lewis also opened my eyes to considering experiences he called “joy” that I had dismissed—those rare moments, often inspired by the beauty of music or nature, when I had a glimpse of something profound, a sense of longing I could not name, a piercing ache that was somehow more satisfying than any earthly happiness but gone too soon. I recognized those in myself. Was this another signpost?

Additionally, I became aware that science itself provides pointers to a Creator. Examining the data from multiple different perspectives, physicists now tell us unequivocally that there was an initial start to our universe around 13.8 billion years ago, where out of nothingness came this unimaginable explosion of matter and energy. This so-called Big Bang cries out for answers to the questions “How did that happen? What came before that?” But I was stymied.

Nature has not been observed to create itself. If there is to be an answer, therefore, it would seem to require a force outside of nature—a “supernatural” force. However, to resolve the dilemma of the origin of the universe, this Creator would have to be unconstrained by space and time. Otherwise, the next question would be “Who created the Creator?”

The more I looked at how our universe has been put together, the more amazed I became at the evidence for an intelligent Creator. As a scientist, I had studied and admired the elegant physical laws that govern matter and energy. These were simple, even beautiful, mathematical representations of scientific truth. But why should the universe have such properties?

As I further explored these laws, I learned something even more stunning—that the universe is precisely tuned to allow something interesting to happen after the Big Bang. Go with me here for a minute. The mathematical laws that govern matter and energy all include constants whose actual value cannot be derived by theory; you just have to measure them. They are what they are.

Take gravity, for instance. Gravity has a very specific, measurable, universal force. (Don’t worry about the exact number, but here it is, just to show you how specific it is: 6.674 × 10⁻¹¹ N⋅m²/kg².) Gravity made it possible after the Big Bang for matter to coalesce into stars, galaxies, planets, and ultimately us.

But what would happen if the value of that gravitational constant were just a little different? Here’s the stunning answer: If it were just one part in 10¹⁴ (that’s 1 with 14 zeros) stronger or weaker, there would be no stars, galaxies, planets—and hence no possibility of life.

It’s not just gravity that has this knife-edge fine-tuning to allow for an interesting universe. All the other major constants—the speed of light, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the mass of an electron, and several others—that determine the physical properties of matter and energy have precisely the value they need for us (or any other complex life form) to be here.

This can’t just be good luck. Even the atheist Stephen Hawking allowed that “the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Either these parameters were set by a Creator, or we are forced to consider the possible existence of an infinite number of alternative universes with different values of these constants.

Because we are here, we are in the one (or one of the very few?) where it all worked out. Scientists tell us that it is extremely unlikely that we will ever be able to observe the existence of these other hypothetical universes. Furthermore, their postulated but unproven existence does not solve the problem of how these universes all got started and why there is something instead of nothing. Given these options, I had to conclude that the Creator hypothesis was profoundly more compelling than the atheist alternative.

Ultimately, I seem to have lived out the predictions of a quote attributed to the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, the author of the famous uncertainty principle: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” I had reached the bottom of the glass.

Francis Collins is a physician scientist. He founded the BioLogos Foundation, led the Human Genome Project, served as director of the US National Institutes of Health, and leads an initiative to eliminate hepatitis C in the United States. He is the author, most recently, of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust.

Excerpted from the book THE ROAD TO WISDOM by Francis S. Collins. Copyright © 2024. Available from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.

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Ideas

Shielded from Truth at Our Own Expense

Justin Giboney

Contributor

The Bible consistently tells us we must examine ourselves and accept correction, but our culture is forgetting the art of fair critique.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Lightstock

Around my sophomore year of college, I approached my African American History professor, Dennis C. Dickerson, to inquire about my performance. Honestly, I was fishing for a compliment. I spoke frequently in class and expected his praise. And since he was one of a limited number of Black professors on campus, I thought he’d flatter me as a show of solidarity given our shared identity.

He did not. In no uncertain terms, Dickerson told me I was a poor communicator and needed to tighten up my half-cocked and convoluted arguments.

I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I was devastated. I was so shocked that I lost a couple nights of sleep. I’d assumed I was a proficient communicator, but he’d candidly burst my bubble. He exposed that I was more verbose than artful, more opinionated than informed. (I’m sure my detractors will say his assessment is still true.)

That was the most important and formative moment in my academic career and remains one of the most valuable moments of my life. As André 3000 said, his words were hard “to swallow. But so is cod liver oil.”

Once the sting of the truth subsided, I saw his critique was right. His reproach has rung in my ears for years, and I’ve become determined to communicate more concisely and persuasively. I don’t believe I could’ve learned the lesson so well without his frankness. A sugarcoated message wouldn’t have had the same impact.

Dickerson’s straightforward correction was the method of many of my elders. My grandparents’ generation had a way of bluntly letting you know when you were in the wrong. It was more than tough love. It was wise guidance that demanded humility and self-examination in the listener.

Both are necessary for self-awareness and growth. But in too many circles today, candor is frowned upon. And pointed critiques, no matter how truthful, are prohibited. We’ve expanded the definitions of concepts like harm and victim blaming to include anything that causes embarrassment or guilt. The question now is how a comment will make one feel, not whether it is right or wrong.

In some contexts, your social location can protect you from all correction. It has become acceptable to disallow candid critique of entire groups of people.

We identify an enemy—the “woke” for some, “cisgender males” for others—and imagine them as the source of all that is mean and evil. No one from these groups could possibly have anything to contribute to our betterment, we tell each other. We’re good, of course. And even if we’re not completely good, it’s only because they’ve forced us to be bad to survive. We parade around in our façades, shouting this false narrative to exalt ourselves while ignoring or trying to censor those who dissent.

It’s not only the commentary of outsiders that we are quick to malign. Sometimes we also scorn the unflattering appraisals of people inside our own tribes. Any conservative Christian who critiques Christian conservatism will quickly be branded a phony and a sellout—as if there’s no possibility that a culture that got slavery and Jim Crow wrong might also have more recent errors. I’ve seen the same basic pattern play out among Black social media influencers when someone questions whether an aspect of the culture is healthy or seeks in-group accountability.

This pattern is in partisan politics, too, where supporters of candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris reject even friendly scrutiny—which is not just unreasonable but undemocratic. The pushback I’ve received from fellow Christians for scrutinizing political candidates has left me to wonder, like Paul in his letter to the Galatians, “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” (4:16).

Of course, discomfort with criticism isn’t always unfounded. In America, women and racial minorities have too often been the recipients of malicious and unfair judgments. They’ve been measured by discriminatory scales and called unfit based on arbitrary norms. This is what happens when critique is disconnected from relationship and compassion, and it’s wise to be skeptical of critique from those who’ve shown us neither fairness nor love.

Still, that very important reality does not put anyone above or below fair and constructive criticism—especially not those running for office. The Bible consistently tells us we must examine ourselves, both individually and collectively (2 Cor. 13:5; Lam. 3:40). What does good reproof look like in practice?

I’ve found a model worth imitating in Nannie Helen Burroughs, who is the subject of two books from Jasmine L. Holmes and Kelisha B. Graves. Both have given me a greater appreciation for the art of cultural critique as Burroughs practiced it.

An advocate for civil rights and women’s rights, Burroughs was also an educator, orator, and devout Christian. She dedicated her life to bettering her people and America more broadly through social action and forthright commentary. She didn’t pander to white America, nor did she pander to Black America.

Burroughs’s work reflected the love of Jesus, and her words could cut like a two-edged sword. She told the white American church it needed to stop using the Bible to perpetuate lies. She told Black elites to stop separating themselves from and looking down on common people.

Burroughs would never have accepted the dangerous notion that her people—or any group—were without value or without their own cultural pathologies. She had the moral knowledge to understand that a love which only affirmed and coddled was a lesser love. She knew that when coupled with relationship and self-sacrifice, piercing words can liberate us from ignorance of our own faults.

Burroughs earned the credibility to critique through her sacrifices for the people she was critiquing. And if she could constructively scrutinize her own people in a time of great oppression, then Christians of all ideologies and races can do the same. We must have the courage to critique our own cultures and the humility to accept the corrections of others. The people we love cannot grow and thrive without self-examination, and neither can we.

We must “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15, NLT) and reject the pride that lures us into rejecting good and fair critique—whatever its source. We are shielded from truth at our own expense.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

- More from Justin Giboney

Ideas

School Screens Are Worst for the Least of These

Wendy Kiyomi

Contributor

Many children are adversely affected by laptops and tablets in the classroom. Some, like my son, are affected more.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / Getty

Halfway through fifth grade, the school district issued a laptop to our son. Up to then, his “accelerated learning” classroom had been a pretty good fit. He had a great teacher, dynamic peers, and a pace that challenged and stimulated him.

But with the laptop, our son’s learning immediately went off-track. He browsed the internet in class, played online games, fiddled around with display settings, changed his desktop photo, and then changed the photo again. His grades, behavior, and organizational skills suffered. Even after his 504 educational plan for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was adjusted, he had less and less success in school.

Our son is an insightful kid who’s in constant motion, as prone to getting locked into classic literature as arranging his toy cars. He joined our family through foster care and adoption and is, as his fourth-grade teacher informed us, “twice exceptional,” possessing both significant capabilities and significant impairments.

I’ve long observed that children like him, with backgrounds of early adversity, develop deep sensitivities to things that others do not particularly notice. In so many cases, their responses are the canary in the coal mine, alerting us to something important that will soon affect everyone.

Classroom tech is something important—and as another school year begins, parents and pundits, organizations and educators are hearing the canary’s song on school-issued laptops and tablets. Screen-based learning, it turns out, has not proven particularly effective, negatively affecting students by interrupting their focus, decreasing their attention spans, and desensitizing their brains’ reward systems. One study found that about 13 percent of US teens have viewed pornography on a school-owned device during school. Even when conventional social media platforms are blocked by internet filters, laptops open up channels of cyberbullying through Microsoft Teams, YouTube, and Google Docs.

These realities impact all students. But for kids like my son—for the 11 percent of school-aged children with ADHD or for children suffering the lingering impacts of trauma—screens have even more severe effects. Their conditions make them more susceptible to developing the attention fragmentation, sleep deprivation, social deprivation, and addiction that psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies as the major risks of a high-tech childhood.

Thus, screen-based learning creates an educational disparity for children who are especially vulnerable through no fault of their own. My son’s disability meant that he paid a higher price for the district’s laptop decision relative to his peers—and there seemed to be no remedy. His school was unwilling to accommodate off-screen learning for him, telling me, “It’s just not possible.”

Christians should want to address this. We’re called to cherish children, helping them avoid whatever causes them to stumble (Matt. 18:6). We also serve a God who prioritizes the needs of the most vulnerable community members (Ps. 68:5; Matt. 19:14; 25:40). By advocating for school-tech policies that accommodate disability interventions and establish loving guardrails, we take a stand against the “war on the weak.” We flourish as Christ followers, becoming his hands and feet in specific commitments to the least of these.

Our Christian advocacy on this issue also offers an opportunity to understand anew God’s enduring intention for human flourishing. Through the struggles that our son and other vulnerable children have with screens, we reaffirm something marvelous about our created human nature and the Lord’s delight over us (Zeph. 3:17).

In our son’s encounter with classroom tech, it became impossible to ignore how essentially creatural he was—how important it was for him to learn in an embodied, relational environment. Already his childhood trauma—connected to his ADHD—had led him to struggle with attachment, a word that’s always felt too sterile to describe the rich sense of mattering. Babies matter first to their parents, through eye contact and loving touch; children who experience disruption or pain during their formative years develop “disordered attachment.” That intrinsic sense of being unique, cherished, and secure within loving relationships, that inner conviction of worth and innate sense of personal security, is broken.

Screens can exacerbate this brokenness for kids who already experience it. And screens also seem to break something in all of us, exerting a pull out of our God-ordained personhood and into a nonpersoned, disembodied, and nonreal world of missing attachments.

Good learning takes not more solo time in front of a screen but rich relationships that span the spectrum of intimacy. Close family is important, but so are peer, teacher, and public relationships. Good learning means we stop scrolling and involve our full bodies, moving in space and time.

Our family had a very rare opportunity to enroll our son in a school where every tech tool is “ruthlessly evaluated” before being used in the classroom. Students have scheduled sessions in a computer lab for writing, attend classes like website development, and can use a graphing calculator for some math problems but have no access to an “under-regulated digital world.” The school makes participation in class and extracurriculars independent of individualized screens as much as possible. Our son has wrestled with his attention and organizational skills, found decent academic success, and further developed his gifts.

A retreat from high-tech learning might not be a retreat at all. It might be an opportunity to affirm that learning apart from personal interactions is bankrupt for everyone, not just students like my son. It might be a chance for God’s people to shape education that honors children’s need for attachment as they grow and flourish. In that shaping, we refer back to a God who exists in eternal relationship, a God who took on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and who provides for all our embodied needs.

Wendy Kiyomi is an adoptive parent, scientist, and writer in Tacoma, Washington, whose work on faith, adoption, and friendship has also appeared in Plough Quarterly, Image, Mockingbird, and The Englewood Review of Books. She is a 2023 winner of the Zenger Prize.

- More from Wendy Kiyomi

Books

Review

Parents Today Are Kinder and Gentler. They Can Still Take Sin Seriously.

Tabitha McDuffee

A new book aligns modern approaches to raising children with the ancient wisdom of God’s Word.

My husband and I found out we were expecting our first child in the summer of 2020. Ongoing pandemic lockdowns in California gave me ample time to read parenting books and research baby products.

I was raised in the shadow of fundamentalist evangelicalism at the turn of the 21st century, my parents and their peers guided by authoritarian parenting experts like James Dobson and Michael and Debi Pearl. I was eager to lay a different foundation for our own parenting philosophy, and I was also interested in fostering early independence in my child since I was approaching parenthood while facing a medley of chronic illnesses.

These motivations led my husband and me to explore the world of “gentle parenting.” We read several bestselling books on the Montessori approach to early childhood education and got acquainted with an organization known as RIE, or Resources for Infant Educarers. As we read, we came to recognize so many echoes of kingdom values: The authors and experts viewed children as full people in their own right, and they didn’t expect behavior that outpaced a child’s developmental capacities.

I knew, as I read these books, that they wouldn’t supply an exact formula for parenting. But over the last four years, we’ve tried to transfer great quantities of knowledge from our heads to our hearts and from theory to practice. During this time, I have occasionally struggled to harmonize different sources of parenting advice and my understanding of Scripture into a consistent plan for order and peace amid the chaos of raising young children.

So I was thrilled to encounter a new book from fellow Christian parents that makes explicit connections between some of these newer approaches to parenting and the ancient truths of God’s Word. In The Flourishing Family: A Jesus-Centered Guide to Parenting with Peace and Purpose, David and Amanda Erickson present a vision for Christian parenting that is grounded in Scripture and informed by modern understandings of neuroscience and child development.

“Our goal,” the authors write, “is to align our parenting approach with the teaching of Jesus and keep our focus on Him and our identity in Him.” The book serves this goal by challenging parents to address their fears and frustrations, first examining their own hearts and then working to cultivate the inner peace necessary to raise their children with a posture of trust. The Ericksons aim to provide tactical tools and answer practical questions that will enable parents of young children to begin establishing new patterns as they respond to common parenting challenges.

A key cultural moment

David Erickson is currently the president of Jacksonville College, a private Christian junior college in East Texas. Amanda, his wife and coauthor, has a passion for neuroscience sparked by her own struggle with postpartum anxiety and rage after the birth of their two sons.

The Flourishing Family (and the ministry the Ericksons began in 2019, Flourishing Homes and Families) arrives at a key cultural moment in parenting. In society at large and among Christian parents in particular, we see an unmistakable shift from authoritarian approaches to a more relaxed mindset.

Many millennial parents who were raised with the misguided (and sometimes outright abusive) “wisdom” of authors like Dobson and the Pearls are understandably anxious not to repeat those patterns with their own children. Others, who had milder experiences under authoritarian forms of discipline and essentially “turned out fine,” hope to continue that legacy as a hedge against the perceived flaccidity and permissiveness of gentle parenting. Still others have adopted modern parenting’s scripts of acceptance (“it’s okay to be upset”) while clinging to the behavioral expectations they grew up with (“but you need to stop pouting and tuck your lip back in”).

But while The Flourishing Family arrives during a particular cultural moment, the Ericksons have avoided tethering their work to that moment. They use occasional sidebars to briefly respond to common objections—like “What about the fear of the Lord?”—while keeping their distance from larger controversies. And while they devote an entire chapter to the topic of spanking (and properly interpreting verses in Proverbs that refer to “the rod”), they emphasize a holistic vision for Christian parenting that is founded on Scripture and supported by modern neuroscience. The result is a book that, while timely, figures to stand the test of time as a resource for Christian parents.

While the Ericksons set out to present a cohesive view of Christian parenting, I’m glad that the outcome is less a comprehensive manual than a facilitating guide—a starting point for deeper discussions and longer journeys into God’s heart for Christian families. This intention is evident in their use of storytelling to convey their experiences and convictions without being rigid or prescriptive.

And the authors include helpful reflection questions at the end of each chapter. These are not an afterthought, as they are in too many books. Instead, they further invite readers to consider their goals and hopes for their children and to draw nearer to Christ as they seek to disciple them well.

Constraining sin

The Ericksons clearly distinguish their peaceful-parenting approach from gentle parenting’s popular mantras like “There’s no such thing as a bad kid” and “All behavior is communication.” They are forthright in naming the reality of sin in our hearts and the hearts of our children.

They also (I believe rightly) call parents to focus more on building up their own spiritual growth than on rooting out every hint of sin in our young children through overzealous behavior modification. I wish, though, that they had gone a step further, acknowledging that parents might sometimes need to set narrower boundaries as a way to constrain their own sinful tendencies.

While acknowledging the effects of original sin on their children, my husband’s parents raised him with a careful eye toward the effects of original sin on themselves. This has led him to maintain a healthy skepticism of his own capacity to parent with peace and patience, while I tend to overestimate my ability to keep my cool amid toddler conflicts and constant messes. He tries to anticipate the dangers of his own resentments, preemptively saying no to a toddler art project at the end of a frustrating workday even though he would usually say yes. In contrast, my resentments come barreling down so overwhelmingly that we all end up literally crying over spilled milk.

“What would Jesus do?” is the question that, while never explicitly stated, seems to undergird the Ericksons’ parenting philosophy. Yet parents, within whom the flesh and the Spirit still wrestle (Gal. 5:17), probably need to pair that essential question with another: “Where are my limits in acting like Jesus today?”

An uncomfortable question

Early in the book, the Ericksons briefly note that their framework for parenting runs counter to many dominant tendencies within our society.

Fear-based parenting techniques are ubiquitous in modern Western culture. … And it overflows into day cares and classrooms. From our response to the earliest sign of defiance in a tiny toddler to the thick section on discipline included in the student handbook we give to college students, our world is set up to have children controlled, manipulated, and managed primarily through fear.

But even as they present a vision for Christian parenting that is rooted in peace and models grace, rather than punishment and behavior modification, the Ericksons never fully address the tensions that may develop between the environment we would foster inside our homes and the expectations our children may confront outside them. As I read, an uncomfortable question began burrowing into the back of my mind: Would this parenting paradigm work for all Christian families? What considerations, caveats, or tools might be missing for the parents of children who do not look like mine?

An example from the book may help to put some flesh on the bones of my question. In one chapter, the Ericksons address a disciplinary phrase I heard frequently while growing up: “Delayed obedience is disobedience.” They demonstrate that this phrase is not supported by Scripture (see the parable of the two sons in Matthew 21), and they argue for giving young children more expansive opportunities to learn and freely choose obedience, rather than focusing on immediate compliance.

Their discussion called to mind a short-form video I saw years ago. A mother is playing a classic game of Simon Says with her son. He is no older than five or six, and he is Black. His mom’s tone from behind the camera is playful, her instructions frequently punctuated by laughter. But as the game continues, the viewer realizes that the instructions “Simon” gives are eerily similar to the commands a police officer might bark at a Black teenager. The mother is using a preschool game to teach compliance, because while she may not believe that “delayed obedience is disobedience” in her own home, she understands the sober reality that delayed obedience elsewhere could mean death.

Can homes filled only with the expansiveness of grace and choice prepare children of color for the utter lack of grace they may find as adolescents? Can the Ericksons’ vision for peaceful parenting work for Christian families of every background and in any social location? I don’t have an answer to these questions, and I don’t necessarily expect the Ericksons to have one either. I only wish they had done more asking themselves.

Peace and trust

The Flourishing Family repeatedly applies Scripture to parenting in fresh ways, while taking great care to remain biblically faithful. It draws on the advancing field of modern neuroscience, not as an infallible authority but as a source of natural revelation and common grace that Christian parents would do well to consider. And while giving parents practical advice for the everyday exhaustions of raising young children, the Ericksons continually direct attention to the only one who provides true rest and lasting peace.

“Parenting with peace is ultimately about trust,” the Ericksons write toward the end of the book.

It is the embodiment of your knowledge of and hope in the trustworthiness of Christ. It is holding fast to His faithfulness rather than striving to stay faithful to a parenting paradigm. It is resting in the truth that His plans for your child are good, and He will complete the good work He started in them.

Parenting for me, for many of us, was once an idea, gestating (like my first baby) in mystery and anticipation. Today it is one of my identities—not the ultimate reality in my life but an ever-present reality nonetheless. As such, I’m called to live it out day after day, whether I feel ready and rested or not. What freedom to be reminded that I can explore new parenting styles while leaving my children right where they belong, in the faithful arms of Jesus.

Tabitha McDuffee is a writer and editor living in Southern California. She curates faithful Christian writing at BeautifulDiscipleship.com.

- More from Tabitha McDuffee

News

Wire Story

Half of Pastors Plan to Vote for Trump, Nearly a Quarter Wouldn’t Say

Aaron Earls - Lifeway Research

The former president receives the most support from Pentecostal, Baptist, and nondenominational leaders.

Dallas pastor and Trump evangelical adviser Robert Jeffress

Suzanne Cordeiro / Getty Images

Like other Americans, pastors are deciding who they’ll vote for in the November election. Compared to previous elections, however, they’re much more hesitant to share their preference.

Almost all US Protestant pastors (97%) plan to vote in the 2024 presidential election, according to a Lifeway Research study conducted August 8–September 3, 2024. But almost a quarter (23%) refused to answer the question of whom they’ll cast their ballot for. Few felt the same hesitancy in 2020 (4%) or 2016 (3%).

Still, among those who plan to vote and shared their preference, 50 percent say former president Donald Trump is their choice, while a quarter (24%) back Vice President Kamala Harris and 23 percent are undecided. No third-party candidate garnered more than 1 percent support.

“We ask pastors about many things going on in the culture today, and they are willing to provide their opinion. However, the growing number of pastors unwilling to respond with their voting intentions shows how sensitive or divisive politics has become in some churches,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research.

The 2024 voting preferences are similar to those during the leadup to the 2020 election, when 53 percent of US Protestant pastors said they planned to vote for Trump, 21 percent for Joe Biden, and 22 percent were undecided. In 2016, 40 percent of pastors were still undecided in September, while 32 percent supported Trump, and 19 percent planned to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Currently, pastors are less likely to be solidly supportive of either major party candidate than their congregants, according to a Pew Research study. Around 3 in 5 US Protestants (61%) say they would vote for or lean toward voting for Trump if the election were held today, while 37 percent would choose Harris.

Self-identified evangelical pastors are more likely to vote for Trump (61%), while half of mainline Protestant pastors (50%) say they support Harris. African American pastors are among the most likely to say they plan to vote for Harris (71%) and among the least likely to back Trump (5%). Pastors under 45 are among the least likely to support Trump (41%).

Denominationally, Pentecostal (65%), Baptist (64%), non-denominational (64%), Restorationist movement (55%) and Lutheran pastors (48%) are among the most likely to plan to cast their ballot for Trump, while Methodist (52%) and Presbyterian/Reformed pastors (44%) are among the most likely to choose Harris.

Half of US Protestant pastors (50%) say they are either a registered member or consider themselves to be a part of the Republican party. One in 5 (18%) are Democrats, and 25 percent say they’re independent.

Evangelical pastors are more likely than mainline pastors to be Republicans (64 percent v. 30%), while mainline are more likely to be Democrats (35 percent v. 8%). Specifically, Baptist (67%), Pentecostal (67%), nondenominational (67%) and Restorationist movement pastors (57%) are among the most likely to identify as Republican. Methodist (36%), Presbyterian/Reformed (36%) and Lutheran pastors (25%) are among the most likely to say they’re Democrats.

Among Republican pastors, 78 percent support Trump. Among Democratic pastors, 85 percent back Harris.

“Out of all the descriptors of pastors, their own political party preference is the best predictor of how they will vote,” said McConnell. “Denominational groups often lean one way politically, but pastors must minister alongside many clergy who don’t share their political views. The same is true within their own congregations. In a culture that increasingly doesn’t want to tolerate people with different political views, pastors lead churches that strive for unity centered on their faith.”

From a list of 11 characteristics, a majority of pastors say 10 are important in deciding how to cast their vote. Around 4 in 5 say they are looking for a candidate with the ability to maintain national security (85%), the ability to protect religious freedom (84%), the position on foreign policy (83%), the ability to improve the economy (83%), the position on immigration (81%), the position on abortion (80%) and personal character (79%).

Three in 4 (75%) say likely Supreme Court nominees are important. Around 7 in 10 are looking for the ability to address racial injustice (71%) and the position on the size and role of government (70%). Fewer (38%) say the ability to address climate change is an important factor in how they vote.

When forced to choose the most important factor, 24 percent say personal character, 18 percent say the candidate’s position on abortion, 16 percent say the ability to protect religious freedom and 12 percent say the ability to improve the economy. Every other issue is the top priority of 4 percent or fewer pastors.

“Pastors are not single-issue voters. They care deeply about where presidential candidates stand on many issues,” said McConnell. “There are moral dimensions to all of the characteristics that could be selected, and pastors did not all pick the same characteristic as most important.”

Pastors voting for Trump are among the most likely to say an important issue in their voting decision is the ability to protect religious freedom (96%), the ability to maintain national security (95%), the ability to improve the economy (94%), the position on abortion (93%), the position on immigration (92%) and the size and role of government (89%).

Those voting for Harris are among the most likely to say they’re looking for a candidate with personal character (96%), the ability to address racial injustice (92%) and the ability to address climate change (91%).

Evangelical pastors are more likely than their mainline counterparts to say their primary vote-determining issue is the candidate’s position on abortion (22% vs. 12%). Mainline pastors are more likely than evangelical ones to say their top issue is the personal character of the candidate (35% vs. 17%).

Pastors planning on voting for Trump are the most likely to place as their top priority the candidate’s position on abortion (29%) and ability to protect religious freedom (25%). Those supporting Harris say their most important issue is personal character (58%).

- More from Aaron Earls

Ideas

Unclench Your Fist

Kristen Deede Johnson

Instead of white-knuckling our way through life in a pluralistic, rapidly changing society, Christians should learn from Augustine’s openhanded discipleship.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Questions about the place of Christianity and the posture of Christians in a pluralistic society have never been merely theoretical for me. They have always been very personal.

I was first drawn to the Christian faith as a child in London. Both the city and the school I attended there were marked by profound religious, ethnic, and cultural pluralism. A few years later, while a freshman in high school, I began to follow Christ more intentionally after a conversion experience in a church youth group in the Washington, DC, area. I spent the rest of high school and college navigating how to inhabit my faith in settings where few shared my convictions.

When I got to grad school and discovered the life and writings of Augustine of Hippo from the fourth and fifth centuries, I felt like I’d finally found the resources I needed to begin imagining a faithful, generous Christian witness in our own time and place.

We live in a diverse and quickly changing democracy, surrounded by people with many divergent beliefs and ways of life, and this comes with both opportunities and challenges. We’re able to know and love neighbors very different from ourselves as we share and embody the gospel. But navigating deep difference and rapid social shifts can also be difficult and scary, and we may end up hurting our neighbors rather than loving them well.

I remember a friendly but heated conversation with a classmate in our high school senior lounge, on the brink of graduation. I was wrestling with what kind of moral expectations I could have for those who didn’t share my Christian faith. I was still naïve to the moral brokenness found within the church, and I had high expectations for the behavior of believers and low expectations for everyone else.

My friend wasn’t a Christian, and she pushed back on that assumption, arguing that people could have deep moral commitments outside of faith in God. I realized my line of thinking was offensive to her. I’d unintentionally implied that she had no moral grounding and failed to consider the personal ramifications of my theoretical ideas. It was a clarifying moment.

A few years later, my friend and I picked up the conversation again. I’d stayed near Washington for college and, along the way, had sobering experiences at the intersection of faith and politics. I saw fellow Christians responding to the realities of pluralism with fear, anger, and anxiety rather than faith, hope, and love, and these experiences left me asking a lot of questions.

Meanwhile, my friend had gone to an elite college in the Northeast and was on the brink of law school. Her convictions about the role of religion in a pluralistic society had become much stronger. She was convinced religion was harmful and no longer had any positive role to play in our society, politically or otherwise.

I’d read this viewpoint in the writings of people like philosopher Richard Rorty, who argues that religion is inevitably a “conversation-stopper” and causes harm. But to hear a friend speak this way about faith—including my faith—was painful. I could acknowledge that harm had been done in the name of Christ throughout the centuries. Yet this critique of Christianity felt very personal. It felt like my friend was saying that I, as well as my brothers and sisters in Christ, had no place in American public life.

These conversations and similar experiences were what led me to conclude that Christians need to learn how to better embody and articulate our convictions. So when I encountered the witness and writings of Augustine, I was delighted to discover resources for that project within the Christian tradition.

Augustine, too, became a Christian in a deeply pluralistic and tumultuous setting. Throughout his life, including his many years in ministry and as a public figure, he was always aware of the many religions and philosophies around him. Augustine didn’t expect Christianity to dominate society, and he rejected the impulse to respond to rapid political and cultural change with fear or anger.

Instead, Augustine called Christians to remember that we are citizens first and foremost of the City of God. This is our primary identity. He encouraged us to trust that no matter what happens in politics or culture (even the fall of the Roman Empire!), Jesus Christ is King. If we know this biblical truth, we never need to be afraid amid societal turmoil.

That rejection of fear does not mean retreat from society. Augustine taught that this kind of trust in God should inform our engagement in this world, not lead us to withdraw from it. We can seek the welfare of our earthly cities (Jer. 29:7) without losing sight of God’s kingdom. No political society will be or become the city of God in this age, but we can still contribute to public goods, like peace.

I’ve learned from Augustine an approach to Christian engagement amid pluralism that I’ve come to call “openhanded discipleship.” We learn about openhandedness all throughout the biblical story, going back to the very beginning when God gave humans everything: the breath of life, creation in his image, the gift of each other, a calling to be fruitful and multiply, a calling to steward the created world, and the power to fulfill those callings faithfully (Gen. 1:26–2:25). We were to receive all these gifts with gratitude and offer them back to God with open hands of our own.

Instead, humanity fell. Failing to trust God’s counsel, we used our hands to take rather than to receive. Since then, we’ve tended toward a posture of tightfistedness rather than openhandedness, of hoarding rather than sharing. To use a classic Christian term, humans became incurvatus in se (“turned in on ourselves”)—looking out for ourselves and our own instead of offering ourselves in love and service.

But even after the Fall, God didn’t let go of this vision of his people living with open hands. God called his covenant people, Israel, to remember that all they had came from God and was to be freely offered back, every moment of every day. We see this explicitly in Deuteronomy: “If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need” (15:7–8).

That same vision underlies Israel’s calls to tithe and give God the first fruits of the harvest, as well as the command to leave the edges of fields unharvested so those in need could glean enough to survive. The land was a gift from God to be openhandedly received by God’s people, then offered back to God and to others.

This openhandedness was also behind God’s call to love him “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5), a call famously reiterated by Jesus (Matt. 22:37). And not just reiterated but embodied by him, who loved so fully that he offered all of himself for the salvation of the world.

As his disciples, it is our call to “have the same mindset as Christ Jesus,” who emptied himself, opening his hands wide enough to die on the cross for us and our redemption (Phil. 2:5–8). In Christ and by the Spirit, we are to openhandedly offer all of ourselves to God every day, not tightfistedly holding anything back but loving God fully and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

This always lies at the heart of the call to follow Jesus, but it is particularly vital as we seek to live faithfully in pluralistic spaces. Even amid great political and cultural change, openhanded discipleship remains our calling. With Augustine, we can still find our primary identity in the kingdom of God. We can still generously offer ourselves as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1–2). We can still seek the welfare of our cities, countries, and public institutions, whether or not our neighbors share our faith. We can still look for points of overlap rather than demarcating lines of division.

Trusting that Christ is King no matter what and rooted in Christ instead of fear or anger, we can become known as people who with open hands offer life and hope to the world.

Kristen Deede Johnson is the dean and vice president of academic affairs and the G. W. and Edna Haworth Professor of Educational Ministries and Leadership at Western Theological Seminary. Her scholarship focuses on theology, culture, formation, and political theory. She is coauthor of The Justice Calling and is writing a book about openhanded discipleship, to be published by Zondervan Reflective.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

- More from Kristen Deede Johnson

News

‘Wesley Is Fire Now’ and Evangelicals Are Being Strangely Warmed

Clayton Sidenbender

Two decades after New Calvinism, some young Christians are turning to Methodist history for theological sustenance.

A student worshiping at the Asbury Revival.

Asbury University

Shawn Hamilton does what a lot of college-aged guys do on Christian campuses. He goes to class. He does his homework and reads his Bible. He plays video games, hangs out with his friends, and thinks about prevenient grace.

“The Holy Spirit tries to beckon people,” the 22-year-old told CT. “It’s more than just common grace, as Calvin articulates it. It’s the reason why all people can do good things. Because we are totally depraved, but it’s the Holy Spirit continuing in every life to give a little bit of light to respond to what God is doing.”

The focus on Wesleyan theology is perhaps a bit out of the ordinary.

But Hamilton attends Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, a school deeply grounded in the Wesleyan tradition. He was a Bible and theology major at Asbury University, so he’s interested in these kinds of things, and he also had a religious experience at a worship service at Asbury University as a freshman. His heart, as Methodist movement founder John Wesley famously described the experience, was “strangely warmed.”

“I felt an immense peace that I had never felt before in my entire life,” Hamilton said. “I cried in that moment because it was so warm and experiential, and that was a moment that really left me questioning, ‘What does it mean to be a Christian and live a Christian life?’”

After that, he found that the doctrines of grace and virtue developed by Methodist movement founder John Wesley in the 1700s started to make a lot of sense to him. As he tried to explain his experience of the Holy Spirit and his sense of what God wanted, Wesleyan theology felt like it fell into place.

Hamilton may not be unique here. There appears to be a growing number of young people drawn to Wesleyanism and Wesleyan-Arminian theology. Nearly 20 years after the rise of New Calvinism—when “Young, Restless, Reformed” Christians embraced the doctrinal system taught by French theologian John Calvin—there’s a new and renewed interest in another theological tradition, which has a bit of a different flavor.

Where Calvin taught predestination, Wesley believed that, through prevenient grace, God freed the human will sufficiently to accept or reject the offer of salvation. God predestined a plan of salvation, but not individual people.

Theologians in the Wesleyan tradition, like many Christians, emphasize the centrality, inspiration, and reliability of Scripture. They also teach the importance of sacraments. And many of them—though not all—are egalitarian, affirming that women can be gifted and called to ministry.

Wesley himself said he was just a “hair’s breadth” from Calvinism, and many Wesleyans, including Hamilton, think there’s just a different emphasis, not outright antagonism between the two positions.

However one thinks of the difference, it’s Wesleyanism today that has an energy and vibrancy drawing in people like Hamilton.

“Things have shifted,” said Brian Shelton, Asbury University’s Wesley Scholar in Residence. “Wesley is fire now.”

Groups of theologians are working to articulate Wesleyan theology in a fresh way. A small Wesleyan seminary has grown 500 percent in just six years. A new Wesleyan denomination, the Global Methodist Church, is sparking revived interest in the history and theology of the tradition and increased attention to spiritual practices, including Bible reading, worship, and prayer. Last year, a revival among the students at Asbury University drew international attention to Wesleyan spirituality.

Andy Miller III, a sixth-generation Salvation Army officer who has joined the Global Methodist Church and is currently a preaching and theology professor and president of Wesley Biblical Seminary (WBS), told CT this is an “amazing moment in Methodism.”

In addition to being president of a historically Wesleyan seminary, Miller leads More to the Story Ministries, which “exists to create content with orthodox Wesleyan convictions to serve the world in the name of Jesus Christ.” His weekly podcast boasts more than 750,000 views and downloads.

There is also a small fleet of Wesleyan institutions, including Seedbed, More to the Story, the Francis Asbury Society, the John Wesley Institute, the Fundamental Wesleyan Society, Firebrand Magazine, and Holy Joys.

Johnathan Arnold, who helped start Holy Joys in 2019, recalls he was steeped in Calvinist theology in high school. He read whatever was on his dad’s bookshelf and really loved a biography of Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. He also started reading contemporary Calvinist preachers and teachers, including John MacArthur, and watching videos of them on YouTube.

One day, however, he found a Q&A with a question that tripped him up on his path toward Calvinism. On the YouTube video, someone in the audience asked a Calvinist pastor how to explain to people who are not Christians that Jesus didn’t die for them.

“I thought, That’s a weird question,” Arnold told CT. “Surely he’s going to say, ‘Of course he died for the world. He’s not only a propitiation for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world’” (1 John 2:2).

Instead, the pastor said this was a complicated issue.

“That just blew me away,” Arnold, now 29, recalled.

It made him question whether Calvinism, which teaches a doctrine called “limited atonement,” was really biblical. He started looking around for other ways to systematize what Scripture said about God’s grace.

That’s when he discovered a book called Wesleyana, a collection of John Wesley’s writings. He liked what he read and found Wesleyanism to be a much more satisfying option. He started to identify as a Methodist.

Today, Arnold is senior pastor of Redeemer Wesleyan Church in Mount Pleasant Mills, Pennsylvania, and is president of Holy Joys. The organization seeks to equip local churches with Wesleyan-informed resources. It spends little time opposing Calvinism but instead tries to recover classical Methodist theology, much of it from the 19th century, developed by people such as Richard Watson, William Burt Pope, and Thomas Ralston.

“Of course, the name Holy Joys comes from John Wesley,” Arnold said. “In that little book, Wesleyana, that I read, one of the very first chapters is on true religion and in that chapter, Wesley says, ‘Christianity is holiness and happiness.’”

The Holy Joys Podcast has more than 25,000 downloads. A lot of listeners seem interested in questions about church structure, discipleship, and building a strong church community.

“Ecclesiology has really become the driving doctrine,” said Holy Joys board member David Fry, who is also senior pastor of Frankfort Bible Holiness Church in Frankfort, Indiana. “We want to write theology for the church and developing healthier churches.”

Chris Lohrstorfer, associate professor of Wesleyan theology at WBS, said Wesleyan ecclesiology offers a vision of the church as a community. Many people, in recent years, have craved a community-oriented Christian life, he said, and that has only increased in response to what some experts have called an “epidemic of loneliness.”

“The Wesleyan understanding of church and Christianity is … what our society is looking for,” Lohrstorfer said.

In addition to putting more Wesleyan sermons on its website, Holy Joys also has an event called the Holy Joys Healthy Church Conference. The first year, 50 people came. The second, that number almost doubled. Around 100 pastors and lay leaders came to the conference this year.

The next big project for Holy Joys is a new catechism, helping people teach its historic theological tradition in their local churches. The group has been working on this for several years.

The catechism won’t be the only new teaching document for a revived Wesleyanism. As CT reported in 2022, a group of 64 scholars from Wesleyan traditions came together to write a statement on the nature of God, Creation, revelation, salvation, the church, and eschatology or “the fullness of time.” The goal was to “shape the future of Methodism, define orthodox Wesleyanism, and ground more Christians in the story of sanctification and restoration through grace.”

Asbury University New Testament professor Suzanne Nicholson called it a “breath of fresh air” for Wesleyanism, presenting traditional teachings like sanctification in clear and compelling ways, that could connect with modern readers.

“This is a document that should lead people to joy at what Christ and the Spirit and the Triune God has done for us,” Nicholson said.

The interest in Wesleyanism has been bubbling for a few years, but an interest in the Arminian strain of Wesleyanism goes back even further. Matthew Pinson, president of Welch College, a Free Will Baptist school in Tennessee, points to the influence of scholarly work that started to come out in 2006 or 2007 in response to the new attention to Calvinism that CT chronicled in an article titled “Young, Restless, Reformed.”

“As young people started adopting Calvinism, and as they started bringing that into their classrooms in different colleges and seminaries,” he said, “professors and pastors who were against it began to see the need for more up-to-date theological material that would oppose it.”

Some dug into the works of Jacob Arminius, the Dutch theologian who critiqued Calvinism in the 16th century. Roger Olson, emeritus professor of Christian theology at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary, wrote Arminian Theology, which was published by InterVarsity Press in 2006. Olson said Arminius’s teachings had for too long been seen as obscure theological wrangling, when actually they speak directly to one of the most pressing spiritual questions today.

“It’s relevant because people today want to know if God is good,” Olson, a self-described “Bapticostal,” told CT. “And Arminius explained how God can be sovereign and good.”

A few years later, theologian Leroy Forlines published Classical Arminianism. Pinson in 2022 released 40 Questions About Arminianism.

Their tradition is not Wesleyan but what Pinson and others refer to as Reformed Arminian or Classical Arminian theology. Classical Arminianism holds to the more Reformed positions Jacob Arminius held, such as radical depravity and the traditional notion of original sin. Classical Arminians also believe in imputation of the righteousness of Christ and apostasy coming only through defection from faith and being irremediable.

Pinson said Arminius offers people the beauty of Reformed theology without the problems of modern-day Calvinism. Arminianism also opens up a pathway from Reformed teachings to Wesleyanism, since Wesleyans teach Arminianism too.

For Wesleyans, the theological question is mostly about sin.

“While all Christian traditions believe God transforms us to the image of his Son, Wesleyan-Arminian thought confronts the sin that holds us back and expects a victory,” said Shelton, Asbury University’s Wesley scholar in residence. “The sanctification offered by Wesleyan-Arminian thought is a hope that is offered with strength.”

Christopher Bounds, who teaches theology at Asbury Seminary, said many of the students drawn to this historical theology seem especially attracted to the way Arminius, Wesley, and Wesleyans talk about grace.

“The Wesleyan-Arminian tradition recognizes that even repentance in faith that saves us is a gift of grace,” Bounds said.

Some of the institutions promoting revitalized Wesleyanism have been explicitly modeled on the New Calvinist movement. Organizations such as Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, and IX Marks have been very influential and offer Wesleyans an example of how to promote their theological ideas.

“What do the Reformed got going?” said Fred Sanders, author of Wesley and the Christian Life and professor at Biola University. “They’ve got an infrastructure of generating a lot of online articles and a steady content stream.”

While Sanders teaches at the Torrey Honors College at Biola and is not a member of a historically Wesleyan church, he is contributing to a resurgence in interest in historic Wesleyan voices. He hosts a section on his personal website dedicated to the writings of 19th-century Methodist theologian William Burt Pope.

Some Wesleyans, watching the influence of Calvinists over the years, have felt compelled to offer an alternative.

“We have to be in the marketplace of ideas or we lose by default,” said Vic Reasoner, president emeritus of the Fundamental Wesleyan Society and director of the Francis Asbury Institute. “We have to be there to present our option. If people don’t know that there is this option in their pursuit of truth, they won’t even consider this option.”

Others just noticed a big void in popular presentations of Wesleyan thought and decided to fill it. That’s what happened to Jeffrey Rickman, who is pastor of Nowata Methodist Church, a Global Methodist congregation in Oklahoma and now hosts PlainSpoken, a YouTube channel that gets a few thousand views per video.

“There wasn’t really anybody doing it that I could see,” he said.

Starting a new organization to promote Wesleyan theology can provoke a good deal of trepidation, though. Matt Reynolds, president of Spirit & Truth, said he saw the need for a Wesleyan version of The Gospel Coalition for a long time. He kept meeting people who seemed to really need Wesleyan theology—spiritually hungry people, lacking in resources. But he doubted himself.

Reynolds finally asked a friend, United Theological Seminary professor David Watson, for his opinion.

“I think that God is calling me to do something here, but it sounds nuts to me,” Reynolds recalled telling Watson.

He explained his vision for a ministry that would go into local churches. They would train people, help them have a divine encounter to become empowered by the Holy Spirit, and mobilize them for mission. They would promote connections between Wesleyan churches and put on conferences and publish some stuff too.

“What do you think?” Reynolds asked when he finished. “Do you think I’m nuts?”

“No, I don’t think you’re nuts,” Watson said. “I think the Methodist world needs a ministry just like what you’re describing.”

Today, Watson serves as the lead editor for Spirit & Truth’s online publication, Firebrand Magazine. Watson champions the magazine as a place for “virtuous public conversations” in the midst of Methodist divisions. Firebrand launched in 2020, “around the time the United Methodist Church and Global Methodist Church rancor was reaching its high point,” he said.

Watson and others wanted to strike a semi-academic tone, publishing think pieces from the Wesleyan tradition that could help people who wanted to be more deeply rooted in the riches of Wesleyanism. The magazine could be a forum for debate among people who shared some key commitments and a theological vocabulary.

Today, the magazine gets about 40,000 hits a month, and the Firebrand podcast has about 1,500 downloads a month.

Firebrand and the other institutions promoting new interest in Wesleyanism don’t have the big names that New Calvinism did in the early 2000s. There are no figures equivalent to John Piper, Mark Driscoll, or Tim Keller. Partly this is intentional—a reaction to the perils of Christian celebrity. At the Asbury outpouring in 2023, one of the phrases repeated over and over was that there should be “no celebrity except Jesus.” Some Wesleyans argue that “radical humility” is an important part of the theological tradition.

“I would not expect, in any sort of Wesleyan-Arminian resurgence, that it would revolve around a certain personality or dogmatic preaching presence,” said Fry, the Holy Joys board member.

Historically, some of the most important early leaders of Methodism, including John Wesley, his brother Charles, and American bishop Francis Asbury, were not strong speakers, he said. They worked instead to build up the church and empower Christians to do the work of the gospel.

If a revitalized Wesleyan movement is successful, people in the movement say, it will not be because of one well-known preacher but many, many faithful ones.

Timothy Tennent, professor of World Christianity at Asbury Theological Seminary, said there’s reason to think that is going to happen. He pointed to the success of Seedbed Publishing House, which started 12 years ago and has published six of his books, including This We Believe! and The Call to Holiness, as well as a metrical psalter, a new hymnal, Bible study materials, and introductions to Wesleyan theology like The Absolute Basics of the Wesleyan Way.

Ryan Danker, director of the John Wesley Institute, said the book he co-edited with Asbury Seminary Professor Kenneth Collins, The Next Methodism, is one of Seedbed’s bestselling books. The popularity of the book shows the eagerness of regular churchgoers to learn more about Methodism.

The ministry also has a partnership with Zondervan, offers online courses, and launched an annual conference called New Room. Attendance has grown rapidly in the past few years, Tennent said.

Tennent is witnessing similar growth at Asbury Seminary. In his 15 years as president, he oversaw seven straight years of enrollment growth and the highest attendance numbers in the seminary’s 99-year history.

“I think there’s a lot of demonstrable evidence that Wesleyan theology now has a new surge and new voice that it didn’t have 10 or 15 years ago,” Tennent said.

Some of the leaders of this Methodist moment are cautious, though, about declaring it a revitalized movement, an Arminian comeback, or a rise of something that could be named “New Wesleyanism.”

Reynolds, at Spirit & Truth, says he sees a new spiritual hunger. Hamilton, the student at Asbury, just knows he’s found Wesleyanism to be really important to his spiritual life. Watson, at Firebrand, says maybe there’s not a full movement of new Methodism right now, but there could be soon.

“I think God is doing something,” Watson said. “I think God is raising up a new generation.”

- More from Clayton Sidenbender

Church Life

The Rural Cambodian Community that Fostered 76 Children

Erin Foley

Over 16 years, a Christian nonprofit moved dozens of Cambodian orphans out of institutions and into local families.

Sam Ang and his family

Photography by Amy Higg

In 2008, Keo Ravy and Amy Sullivan of Children in Families (CIF) drove to an orphanage outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to pick up two toddlers with severe developmental delays. They then brought the children to a rural village where they would meet their new foster families.

In the car, four-year-old Sam Ang, who was blind and could not yet eat solids, suddenly started violently banging his head against the car floor. Startled, Sullivan tried to stop him, unaware that due to neglect, this was his way of communicating hunger. As Sullivan pulled him into her lap, he began to calm down as he felt her face with his hands.

Sullivan, a CIF volunteer, recalled feeling worried about whether his foster mother would be able to care for him.

Yet that anxiety dissipated as they pulled up to the village in Svey Rieng province three hours later. A group of villagers stood by a house, waiting for their arrival. Ravy parked, opened the car door, and gently lifted the boy from Sullivan’s lap. Quickly, a woman ran up and whisked Sam Ang out of Ravy’s arms, hugging and kissing him repeatedly. She was his new foster mother, Pang Sokha. Smiles erupted on everyone’s faces, and several villagers clapped with delight.

This is the vision of the Christian nonprofit CIF: to provide resources for impoverished families to raise their own children or take in abandoned children instead of sending them to orphanages.

Sam Ang became the first of 76 children, most of whom have disabilities, to be fostered in the village and its surrounding communities. CIF has also supported 113 children at risk of family separation. Since domestic adoption became legal again in 2017, 47 families have adopted their foster children, transitioning them out of CIF’s program. (Cambodia made foreign and domestic adoption illegal in the early 2000s due to corruption and the lack of legal framework.)

“Our role at CIF is to help Cambodian parents fulfill their God-given responsibility to children, not to take their kids away,” said founder Cathleen Jones.

A different way to care for orphans

I first visited Sam Ang’s village in Svey Rieng in 2016, a month after I came on staff at CIF as its communication and media director. A coworker took me on her motorbike down a dusty path to a small farm on the outskirts of the village, where a grandmother and aunt cared for a little boy with cerebral palsy.

Abandoned by his mother at birth, the boy had been cared for by his extended family, who had little knowledge about his condition. He spent his first six years of life on his back, staring at the rusting, corrugated ceiling. After CIF intervened with medication, physical therapy, education, and the love of God, he began gaining strength and mobility. His grandmother and aunt caught glimpses of his personality as he started to communicate nonverbally. They pushed him in a custom wheelchair to visit neighbors, removing not only his isolation from the world but also their own.

I also witnessed a baby from a crisis pregnancy placed with a childless couple that had spent five years longing for a child. Tears streamed down my face as I watched them hold their dream in their arms for the first time.

This way of caring for neglected and abandoned children was completely different from how I viewed orphan care growing up, as some of my earliest memories are centered around orphanages.

When I was five years old, my parents moved to Mexico to work in a children’s home. We lived in humble but separate quarters, isolated from the other children. Most of the children still had living parents, but I was told they had been abandoned.

A few years later, we moved to Venezuela so that my parents could start an orphanage. The plans eventually fell through as the government began to create a more stringent legal framework around foreigners taking in local children. Still, I grew up believing the world was full of parentless children who were best served in orphanages.

That was an idea that Jones and her husband, Dale, initially held as well when they arrived in rural Cambodia in the early 1990s and were tasked with running an orphanage. Yet after caring for more than a hundred children, they realized that institutionalization left many with lifelong trauma that exhibited itself through addiction, difficulty bonding with their own children, perpetuation of sexual abuse, and inability to assess risk. They realized there was no good substitute for God’s design of children raised in families.

Globally, 80 percent of children have at least one living parent, but many families are forced give up their children because they can’t afford more mouths to feed. Due to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in the ’70s—which killed a third of Cambodia’s population—families lack access to basic sanitation, shelter, and food, let alone social services and birth control.

The Joneses realized that even the children without parents had extended family or community members who wanted to care for them. They started to wonder, Why not support children and their family units?

From orphanages to families

So in 2006, Jones started CIF, which focuses on emergency care for kids who were trafficked or living in abusive families, kinship care, or foster care. CIF provides each foster family with between $40 and $150 per month depending on the child’s disability, age, and medical needs.

In the beginning, it was difficult for orphanages to get on board with CIF’s vision. At most, they would hand over children with disabilities, who were the hardest to care for, while keeping the cute, healthy children who could entertain visitors and look good on fundraising material.

Jones also had to contend with the myth that Cambodians would not accept non-biological children into their families. After the Khmer Rouge, many families took in children whose parents were killed and raised them as their own. Yet as foreign aid flooded into the country in the 1990s, Cambodians started to see well-funded foreign orphanages as a better way to care for their children.

CIF believed the best way for foster care to flourish was within a community where several families could take in orphans and help each other raise them. Ravy, CIF’s Cambodia director, felt that the village where she grew up in Svey Rieng province would be a good fit. Why? First, the villagers didn’t discriminate against people with disabilities, which CIF observed in way local leaders showed respect to a young man with Down syndrome. Also, the village had access to a school and a clinic, it was safe, and it was close enough to Phnom Penh that CIF staff could regularly visit and monitor the program.

CIF and the UK’s Strengthening Families and Children came to the village to train 40 families interested in fostering. “You have the gift of time,” Jones told the families. “You have the space. You can give these children love. You can teach them to be Cambodian.”

The first families to take in foster children were Christians, as Buddhists in Cambodia feared that bringing a child with disabilities into the family would bring bad karma. But as they saw how much joy children like Sam Ang brought to the families’ lives, the stigma began to lift.

Other families in the village agreed to take in children with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and trauma. Soon, eight more children joined the community.

“Before we knew it, half the village had their hand up to foster,” Jones said. The waiting list grew exponentially, impacting surrounding communities.

When CIF places a child with a foster family, the paper signing and placement ceremony happen with pastors, village leaders, and other community members present. This way, the well-being of the child becomes the responsibility of not just the foster parents but also the community.

Families with foster children meet regularly to share their struggles and encourage one another. Having foster families grouped together also makes it easier for social workers to visit and address problematic patterns and concerns.

CIF has seen communities change their view of Christianity because of how the group involves the entire village instead of removing children from their families and cultures to mold their minds in an institutional setting.

When donors offer to provide wells or water filters, Jones and Ravy let the village leaders choose the families who are most in need of these projects, regardless of whether they are supported by CIF. Local staff also holds classes on topics like hygiene or parenting, which are mandatory for the foster parents and open to all villagers.

“[CIF] works with entire villages, so it’s not just our kids and families who benefit,” Jones said. “If a non-CIF family is struggling in one of our communities, we also support them.”

Orphanages’ chokehold

Today, CIF’s foster care program works in three provinces as well as Phnom Penh, each of which has at least three families fostering near each other for support. In total, it has placed 160 children into foster families. The organization says there are hundreds of vetted Cambodian families waiting to foster children. However, the organization recently had to pause adding new children into its program, as donations have dropped due to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 and donors looking to fund other areas of development.

At the same time, orphanages continue to house tens of thousands of Cambodian children because donors are willing to fund them, said Rebecca Nhep, founder of the Australian Christian Churches International (ACCI) Kinnected program, which also focuses on family care. Images of cute babies and children tug at donors’ heartstrings and loosen their purse strings. In 2021, American churches alone donated $2.5 billion to fund orphanages.

Yet Nhep believes the theology behind orphanages is flawed. When the Bible talks about looking after the orphans and widows, they should be viewed as a vulnerable family unit rather than separate entities, she noted.

Orphanages are also costly compared to family care. Cambodian orphanages receive about $50 million annually according to Sarah Chhin, the founder of M’lup Russey, an organization that helps young adults who have aged out of orphanage care. That funding could instead be used to eradicate the extreme poverty in Cambodia that causes parents to give up their children.

Christian orphanages see a spiritual dimension to their work, yet Nhep questions if it’s right to disciple children by taking them away from their family units.

“What aspect of the gospel promotes raising Christians by separating families?” Nhep asked. “We are told to go into the nations … not extract and take in, divorcing children from their social structure and culture.”

Back in the Svey Rieng village, Sam Ang grew up like his peers, riding bikes and learning to speak Khmer. With the help of CIF, the local school opened its doors to Sam Ang, making him its first blind student. Today, Sam Ang is training to be a massage therapist and is a competitive runner. At the 2023 ASEAN Para Games in Phnom Penh, he sprinted to a third-place finish in the 1,500-meter race with his sighted guide.

Sokha cheered him on from the stands, waving her arms and shouting, “That’s my baby!”

“Our family is so poor I thought I would have to leave and work in a factory to support my family,” Sokha told CIF. “But I love being a mom, and being a foster parent finally makes me feel valued for the work I can do as a mother.”

Erin Foley formerly worked in Communications & Media at Children in Families and authored the book Where They Belong : A Journey from Orphanages to Loving Families. This article includes excerpts from her book.

- More from Erin Foley

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A key cultural moment

Constraining sin

An uncomfortable question

Peace and trust

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In this series

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A different way to care for orphans

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Orphanages’ chokehold

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