In a Polarized World, but Not of It

Matt Beech and Bruce Wydick

On Election Day and beyond, conservative and liberal Christians can better understand each other and be ministers of reconciliation.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

The political polarization of American society, impossible to ignore on Election Day, cuts across state lines, through families, and even into local congregations. Polarized America has polarized the American church.

The average American Christian can’t do much to reduce that polarization on the national scale. Yet Christians should be able to reduce polarization-induced tensions within the body of Christ. Understanding the causes and consequences of this division can help us move toward cures.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is currently best known for his work on childhood screen use and social media. But in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt discusses six elements of what he calls the human “moral matrix,” the set of moral foundations that act as guides to our moral decisions.

Backing this concept with careful research, Haidt lists six such moral foundations, or values:

Care for the vulnerable in society
Equality for everyone
Proportionality in reward and punishment
Loyalty to one’s family, country, or other groups
Authority and respect for it in our leadership and institutions
Sanctity as a sense of respect for the sacred

The root problem of American polarization, Haidt contends, is that political and social liberals tend to base their moral judgments on the first two of these—care and equality—while conservatives, like most people elsewhere in the world, tend to hit on all six.

This is all on average, of course. But on the national scale, these deep moral differences make it nearly impossible for liberals and conservatives to understand each other.

Arguments that hinge on sanctity or authority make little sense to liberals, for whom these are not high values. Meanwhile, views grounded solely in care and equality—to the exclusion of proportionality, loyalty, authority, and sanctity—will seem wildly imbalanced to conservatives, to the point that they begin to discount care and equality in elevating the other four values.

Inside the church, the consequences of this often-unnoticed moral divide are serious and numerous. Chief among them is radical self-selection. Self-selecting behavior begins outside the church, where we sort ourselves into different careers, neighborhoods, and social groups based on our politics. But it flows into the church too, and we self-select into fellowship with people whose social and political views are close to our own.

Some may argue that this self-selection is nothing more than Christian discernment. It’s true that any meaningful movement to counter polarization and move toward Christian unity must inculcate a deeper, purer Christian faith. But by sorting ourselves into groups with people whose politics are just like ours, we close off opportunities for relationship, dialogue, understanding, and healing.

Christians are not to live in fear (Luke 12:4–5, 1 John 4:18). But when the church becomes polarized like the world around us, we become fearful. We monitor who’s on our side and who isn’t. We fear admitting others from the wrong side into our congregations, small groups, and other institutions. We may even engage in ugly speech and actions toward those on the other side—or excuse sin on our side because we fear moral isolation and ostracism.

So how can we choose faith over fear? What do we actually do with knowledge of Haidt’s moral matrix? And how can we be ministers of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18) after this Election Day?

We call American Christians to make two commitments: (1) to embrace a full Christian orthodoxy that includes addressing the blind spots in our own moral matrices and (2) to love and understand our political enemies.

Each of the six moral foundations has strong biblical underpinnings found throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, in the teachings of Jesus himself, and in the rest of the New Testament church. And that means we as Christians can and should value all six of them, not only those that resonate with us or synchronize with our life experience.

With respect to equality, for example, Genesis 1:26–28 says all people are created in God’s image. Proverbs 22:2 states that the rich and poor are equal in the eyes of God. And Paul states clearly in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Likewise, the mandate of care for others is ubiquitous in Scripture. Both testaments demand care for society’s most needy and marginalized, including the hungry, wounded, sick, and oppressed (Isa. 58:10, Ps. 147:3, Matt. 10:8), as well as the elderly (Lev. 19:32, James 1:27), the foreigner (Lev. 19:34, Ex. 22:21), the orphan (Ex. 22:22, John 14:18), and the poor (Zech. 7:10, Ps. 82:3, Luke 14:13).

Politically conservative Christians must understand: The equality of human beings and care for the marginalized cannot be discounted within Christian orthodoxy.

But the work on the other side is equally difficult. Politically liberal Christians must understand that proportionality, loyalty, authority, and sanctity cannot be ignored. Social scientists tell us these virtues are upheld nearly universally by humankind—it’s Western liberals who are the oddity here. More importantly, these virtues deeply matter to God and are also ubiquitous in Scripture.

Liberals have made it their business to question authority, but any productive human endeavor is virtually impossible without some type of authority structure, as the Bible repeatedly recognizes (Mark 6:7, Rom. 13:1, 1 Pet. 2:13). Scripture often speaks to loyalty, too (e.g., Ruth 1:16–17, 1 Sam. 18, Prov. 17:17). Jesus even taught us that true love looks like extreme loyalty: laying down our lives for our friends (John 15:13).

Liberals tend to emphasize God’s grace, but Scripture always holds grace in tension with proportionality, the congruence of reward with merit (Rom. 2:9–10), which is the foundation for all notions of justice. Indeed, Matthew 25:31–46, a passage frequently cited by politically liberal Christians, strongly links the judgment of God to proportionality, as does the rest of the chapter.

Likewise, in conflicts between equality and sanctity, politically liberal Christians will gravitate toward the former. But Christian faith frequently demands deference to the latter (Ex. 20:11, 2 Sam. 6:3–8, John 17:17), sometimes even when we don’t fully understand the rationale. As part of reconciliation, politically liberal Christians must reassess their reliance on secular social movements as a basis for understanding goodness, beauty, and truth.

Grasping the full scriptural witness will help conservative and liberal Christians alike seek understanding across divides.

That requires listening to those on the other side, taking in their stories and seeing how that background has shaped their values. For some politically conservative Christians, for example, this may mean recognizing the existence of genuine injustice—past and present—in America. Across the political spectrum, it will mean remembering that our own moral foundations would likely be different if we had different upbringings and communities.

The earliest Christians were an extremely politically mixed group. They ranged from Simon the Zealot, who was bent on expelling the Romans from Israel, to a community of conservative fisherman, to tax-collector-for-the-Romans Matthew. Yet they came together and “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). And they changed the world.

By choosing the comfort of radical self-selection in a polarized time, we not only forgo the kind of fellowship embodied by that first community of Christians. We also miss the opportunity to worship and pray with believers across our own political divides. And if prayer is the Christian’s most powerful instrument for healing and reconciliation (James 5:16, Eph. 6:18), that is a grave loss.

On this Election Day and beyond, we can pursue reconciliation while holding true to our political convictions and even seeking to persuade our siblings in Christ to share them. We can be people of grace, truth, and prayer no matter how polarized our world becomes.

Matt Beech is reader in politics and director of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull (UK) and senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley.

Bruce Wydick is professor of economics at the University of San Francisco and research affiliate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action.

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Gen Z Is Turning Online for Spiritual Guidance

Jenna Mindel

My generation is spiritually curious. We’re just looking in the wrong places.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

As faith increasingly declines in American culture, Gen Z is left with fewer resources or people to ask about identity, belonging, and purpose. So it is no surprise that we are turning to the internet.

I’m a Gen Zer, and I’m familiar with this inclination: I’d rather check my Target app to locate an item rather than bother an employee. Turning to the internet for answers may read as antisocial on the surface, but it is a reflection of both America’s highly autonomous culture and Gen Z’s copious internet usage.

And of course, this translates to church. With dwindling numbers of Gen Zers attending church, it’s unsurprising that young adults are flocking to virtual spaces rather than physical ones for answers to their big questions.

I believe Gen Z’s religious “nones” are more curious about faith than the data leads us to believe. It’s easy to measure religious affiliation, but it’s harder to measure spiritual curiosity and openness. Online, we can see what questions younger generations are asking and who is stepping up to answer them.

One good example is Girlscamp, a podcast for post-Mormons to process their faith transition out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The host, Hayley Rawle, interviews post-Mormons, shares anonymous stories from her listeners, and shares her insights about different aspects of the Mormon faith.

On Girlscamp, Rawle encourages listeners to construct a new worldview outside of high-demand religion. She offers listeners a secular philosophy of relative truth as a solution for the rigid boundaries of highly demanding religions. I discovered Rawle’s podcast roughly a year ago. While her content is focused on Mormonism, she also openly critiques the Christian church and Western Christianity. Her podcast is just one example of how Gen Z engages with spirituality without the obligations of embodied community.

In my experience, many Christians my age are taught that religion is largely absent from Gen Z lives. There seems to be a mindset that people used to be religious but are no longer. But this is not the case.

On paper, Gen Z is becoming increasingly nonreligious because many identify as “nothing in particular” in religious affiliation surveys. With half of Gen Z identifying as nonreligious, it seems like a fair assumption that Gen Zers would not be interested in spirituality. However, our spiritual seeking just takes on a different name than previous generations.

Ryan Burge, associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, points out that the rates of “atheist/agnostic” identifiers have increased several percentages between each generation until the transition from millennials to Gen Z, when the category “nothing in particular” has continued to grow over time.

Talbot School of Theology philosophy professor Timothy Pickavance sees the growth in the “nothing in particular” category as an indicator of Gen Z’s open posture toward spirituality rather than a cynical atheistic one.

“This data points to Gen Z’s sensitivity to spiritual things and their longing for a deep spiritual life,” he said in an interview.

Gen Z’s participation in religion can be encapsulated by the term faith unbundled, coined by Springtide Research Institute, which describes the way people construct faith by combining elements such as beliefs, identity, practices, and community from a variety of religious and nonreligious sources, rather than receiving these things from a single system.

Podcasters and influencers—such as Rawle, who functions in some ways as a digital pastoral figure or spiritual director for her followers—are now one of those nonreligious sources. Guests and listeners are taught a secular “gospel,” where the good news is that they can tinker with their religious beliefs, keeping the doctrines they agree with and shirking restrictions or teachings they do not.

Nonreligious people can tune in weekly to the podcast, just as religious folks may tune in to Sunday service messages and learn something new about how to operationalize their spirituality. On an episode of Girlscamp, one guest spoke about keeping Sunday night dinners and having family members go around and share one thing they are grateful for in place of prayer. Instead of sharing a story from Scripture, this guest teaches his or her children a secular lesson about love or acceptance.

Christians and others who are religiously affiliated may find this ambiguous religious engagement inauthentic. But this openness of twentysomethings toward the immaterial world is fertile ground for meaningful conversations and engagement.

While Gen Z is abandoning traditional religious institutions, it is not abandoning spirituality. In the 1990s, a shift began from using the term religious to using the term spiritual to describe an individual’s moral and spiritual framework. Now, it has changed to “meaning making.”

God and community used to be at the center of religious life, but for Gen Z, those are no longer prerequisites for intentional, spiritual living. As Pickavance noted, “There’s still a longing and a clear intention toward spirituality that is not being brought into some specific tradition.”

Eliza Smith DeBevoise, a chaplain at Converse University, often counsels students asking big life questions. She thinks Gen Z is incredibly spiritual. “Whether Gen Z is religious or not, they are doing hard, hard work in spiritual formation,” she told me, “that, to be honest with you, I have not seen in older generations before who were more devoutly religious.”

DeBevoise affirms that students struggle with identifying with one religion, even if they have strong personal beliefs. She said even these devout students worry they will come off as closed-minded.

Like every generation that has come before, Gen Z has eternity set in their hearts. But this longing for something beyond oneself cannot be satiated on an individual spiritual journey. We need the church.

As Henri Nouwen writes in his book Spiritual Formation, “Spiritual formation is not an exercise of private devotion but one of corporate spirituality. We do have personal experiences of God, but together we are formed as the people of God.” The religious impulse humans feel is best fulfilled in the context of a faith community, and it is an impulse that the church can be poised to answer.

Digital guides like Rawle can guide individuals on their spiritual journeys without ever knowing them. This makes the stakes low for people who are interested in navigating religious deconstruction. While meaningful exploration of our spirituality can occur online, we were not made to answer these questions on our own and in a vacuum.

Young Christians, too, can be tempted to engage solely online with their faith. But podcasts, influencers, or Christian books should be catalysts for in-person community, not replacements.

While church communities are imperfect, the embodied community that comes with gathering week after week, month after month, and year after year is an essential aspect of spiritual life. When spirituality is practiced independently, it is incomplete.

Teenagers are spending on average about 9 hours a day on screens. While being a part of primarily online communities may be the norm for Gen Z, that should not be where the church should focus our energy. There are plenty of good online Christian resources to counter the secular or deconstructing ones, but what young people need more than just information is community—and that starts with embodied relationships.

I can speak to how authentic friendship can be a catalyst for faith because that was my story growing up. Because of the adults who invested in me, I had a safe place to navigate my questions about God. I knew no matter what that I would be loved and accepted.

Now, as Young Life leaders for high school girls, my fellow leaders and I are learning to pursue relationships inside and outside the church. We are tasked with creating alternative spaces outside of church where young women can encounter Jesus, such as joining them at school for lunchtime, taking them out to coffee, and attending their sports games. From there, we host Bible studies and have the opportunity to spiritually engage them and invite them into a faith community.

Beyond just criticizing the hours young people spend online, we need to offer them a compelling alternative: a loving, embodied, imperfect community.

As Mary Demuth wrote for CT in 2011:

We live in a mobile culture, which sometimes isolates us. We who create personas on the web, who perfect our hiding, may find attaching ourselves to a local church frightening. And yet God calls us there, warts and all. He calls us to covenant together with other Jesus disciples, to messy our lives with people we might not hang out with normally. In that beautiful conflagration of community, we learn the art of loving each other and showing the world outside our circle just who Jesus is.

For those who have avoided community for various reasons, yes, there is risk in being a part of an in-person faith community. You can’t be anonymous; you can’t log off when you feel triggered. But you also have the opportunity to be known and loved—something that an online community can never offer.

Jenna Mindel is a NextGen Accelerator Fellow with Christianity Today. She recently graduated from Biola University with a degree in journalism.

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Charlie Kirk Aims to Expand Turning Point USA to Evangelical Campuses

Kathryn Post - Religion News Service

But not all Christian campuses have embraced the conservative group.

Charlie Kirk

Olivier Touron / Getty Images

Just eight days shy of Election Day, 31-year-old political activist Charlie Kirk addressed a sea of college students in glaring-red MAGA hats at Grand Canyon University, near downtown Phoenix.

Sporting a black T-shirt emblazoned with “xy = man”—a confirmation of where he stands on the GOP’s 2024 litmus test issue—Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA as a college student in 2012, was interrupted as his audience erupted into a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Afterward, students grabbed up TPUSA swag that said “Republicans are hotter” and “dump your socialist boyfriend.”

“Gen Z is waking up … and voting,” Kirk posted on X later that day. “WATCH.”

Kirk’s fall 2024 “You’re Being Brainwashed” tour is an effort advertised as a way to help students “challenge left-wing indoctrination on college campuses.” TPUSA has already signed up nearly 800 college chapters, but the event at GCU, established by Baptists but now calling itself interdenominational, is part of Kirk’s recent push to populate evangelical Christian campuses with TPUSA chapters.

Since 2020, TPUSA chapters have appeared at more than 45 Christian colleges or universities, at least 35 of them affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the largest association of Christian schools. Only 21 chapters at Christian universities appear currently active, however, with even fewer officially recognized by the universities themselves.

Expanding to Christian colleges, some scholars warn, may divide their campuses. The group, whose website says it plays “offense with a sense of urgency to win America’s culture war,” gained notoriety in 2016 for its professor watchlist, which prompted harassment of faculty at secular as well as Christian colleges, who, TPUSA said, “advance leftist propaganda.”

Kirk has disputed the results of the 2020 election, questioned the qualifications of Black pilots, called George Floyd a “scumbag” and said a Bible verse about stoning gay people to death is “God’s perfect law.”

“The Democrat Party supports everything that God hates,” Kirk said at a recent campaign event he organized for Donald Trump. TPUSA did not respond to requests for comment.

Students at Christian colleges who have launched or joined TPUSA chapters said in interviews this fall that the group helps build community and gives them a place to discuss conservative values.

“They say that we are racist and homophobic,” said Payton Stutzman, president of the TPUSA chapter at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, without specifying who “they” referred to. “We’re really not. We really just want to get together and have a good time. The main things we support is a secure border, a good economy, and the freedom to raise our family the way we think is right. We are not here to push anybody’s beliefs down their throats.”

Sarah Stock, a junior political science major at Vanguard University, a Christian university in Orange County, California, started a TPUSA chapter last fall as an outlet, she said, for political dialogue in what she described as an otherwise apolitical campus.

Last year at a screening of Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman, a film in which Walsh, a controversial podcast host, talks about transgender issues, approximately 100 students attended. Among them was a group of friends who came up to debate the TPUSA members during a Q&A session.

“We all were like, I respect you have this opinion, and it’s great that we can talk about it,” said Stock, who said that after momentarily growing tense, the two groups ended up laughing together. “It was just this mutual understanding that you can love other people and still disagree with them.”

Generally operating in more conservative environments, TPUSA chapters on Christian campuses face less opposition than peers at secular universities but aren’t exempt from controversy. In 2023, Whitworth University put their TPUSA chapter on probation after a free speech event encouraged students to write whatever they wanted on a beach ball, vulgarities included. A year earlier, a now-defunct TPUSA chapter at Calvin University in Grand Rapids drew backlash after advertising a Kanye West-themed event in the wake of West’s antisemitic comments.

“The tone of TPUSA social media, and the tone of Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric, to me, it seems there’s a conflict there between kind of that brand, and the more thoughtful political discourse that Christian colleges historically have been working to cultivate,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University.

Since TPUSA launched its Faith Initiative in 2021, which partners with churches to host religious conferences, Kirk’s rhetoric about “reclaiming the country for Christ” has grown more bold, earning Kirk the label of Christian nationalist.

“If the church does not rise up at this moment, if the church does not take its proper role, then the country and the republic will be gone as we know it,” Kirk said at a May 2021 TPUSA Faith event at Dream City Church in Phoenix.

Kyle Spencer, whose 2024 book Raising Them Right chronicles America’s conservative youth movement, is unequivocal in describing Kirk as a Christian nationalist, but political commentator Isaac Willour, a graduate of the Christian Grove City College, called it an “obvious jump” to conflate “those who have a pop interest in TPUSA talking points” with “the actual radical right.” TPUSA, he noted, has distanced itself from radical conservatives such as Nick Fuentes and Morgan Ariel.

“There’s a very easy trap to fall into … that advocating for Christians who meaningfully use any kind of political process, anything that’s not really quietism, is Christian nationalism,” said Willour.

Stock said, “It seems like there’s a high demand for Christian nationalism in the media, but I think there’s a pretty low supply of it.”

Before TPUSA Faith, there was the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty, a think tank located at the evangelical powerhouse Liberty University in Virginia. The brainchild of Kirk and then-Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr., the center, founded in 2019, brought Trump allies such as Eric Metaxas and Rudy Giuliani to campus but ultimately lost steam as Falwell encountered scandal and eventually resigned.

Kirk’s legacy lives on in the school’s TPUSA chapter, which ballooned from 175 members over the summer to over 600, according to Stutzman, crediting the election. (He also touts its pickleball, trivia and Shrek-themed “drain the swamp” movie nights.) Voter registration has been a top priority.

“Right now, Virginia is in a spot where it could flip,” said Stutzman, who was doorknocking for the Trump campaign as he spoke to RNS. “While we can’t endorse anybody, we can support our values, and we can work with college Republicans and other clubs that can endorse people, and we can provide them resources.”

Many TPUSA Christian college chapters have hosted debate watch parties and have plans for election night gatherings. At Liberty, local and federal politicians are expected to attend the chapter’s formal election night gala.

JJ Glaneman, a sophomore at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, told RNS he’d also recently been doorknocking for Trump and GOP Senate candidate David McCormick.

Duquesne’s TPUSA chapter is unofficial. After attending TPUSA’s multi-day AmFest event in Arizona in December 2023, Glaneman filed to start a formal chapter in January but was denied by student government, who, Glaneman said, cited TPUSA’s values. Instead, Glaneman has co-founded a chapter of the 132-year-old College Republicans that they use as a “shield,” he said, to host conservative events on campus.

According to Matt Boedy, a professor of religious rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, TPUSA’s “star-studded” conferences, big-name speakers and viral political debates make TPUSA a more attractive option than a College Republicans chapter.

There’s also TPUSA’s funding. Tax filings from June 2023 showed that TPUSA took in $81.7 million, up from $2.05 million in 2015. Stock said that while her group could apply for “like $50 a year” from Vanguard, “we just get everything from Turning Point.”

Claire Bettag, a senior at St. Mary’s Notre Dame, said the Indiana Catholic school denied her attempt to found a chapter in 2022 due to TPUSA’s messaging on LGBTQ issues. Despite the rejection, Bettag has maintained an unofficial TPUSA chapter and a College Republicans club at the school and said TPUSA encouraged her to speak out when St. Mary’s decided to offer open enrollment to applicants “who consistently live and identify as women,” which included transgender students.

“We had met with the school board, the president, the vice president of the college, and we started multiple protests and did a lot of activism to get this policy reversed,” said Bettag. “I have confidence now to speak out about my conservative values that I never thought that I could ever have, and it’s because Turning Point really backed me up along the entire process.”

Saint Mary’s reversed its decision a month later, by which time, Bettag said, her unofficial TPUSA chapter had grown to 75 members.

Catholic University of America has also been hesitant to welcome TPUSA to its campus, as have some Protestant colleges. In 2021, Point Loma Nazarene University, a Church of the Nazarene school in San Diego, and Taylor University, an evangelical school in Upland, Indiana, said the national group conflicts with their mission statements.

The Grand Canyon University event shows that TPUSA’s efforts to enroll Christian students aren’t slowing down, and while Spencer said it’s still a question whether the campaign will translate to votes, Stutzman, at Liberty, said not all gains are political.

“Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s not just political warfare,” he said. “It’s spiritual warfare that we’re fighting as well.”

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Sarah Jakes Roberts Evolves T. D. Jakes’s Women’s Conference

Alyssa Gossom in Arlington, Texas

At a record-setting event this fall, 40,000 followers listened to her preach about spiritual breakthrough and surrender.

Sarah Jakes Roberts

Courtesy of Woman Evolve 24

Forty-five minutes into a message about John 11 and trusting in Jesus, Sarah Jakes Roberts kicked off her white platform sandals.

She paced and jumped barefoot on the stage at the center of Globe Life Field, where tens of thousands of women stood up as the music swelled.

“I can’t tell you about Buddha. I can’t tell you about Allah. But baby, I can tell you something about Jesus! He’s the sweetest thing I know,” Roberts shouted. “I know he causes all things to work together because there are some things in my life that should have never worked, but he worked ’em.”

Her long metallic earrings and flowing white top swayed back and forth as she preached to the crowd. “I need you to believe not that Jesus cares about you,” she told them, echoing back to the story of Mary and Martha, “but that he cares for you.”

This is Woman Evolve 2024, a three-day stadium event featuring keynotes from teachers like Roberts and Priscilla Shirer, worship sessions, and a range of panels designed to inspire Christian women.

Roberts in some ways has carried on the mantle of her famous father, T. D. Jakes, as a dynamic speaker and pastor. She co-pastors A Potter’s House’s One Church in Los Angeles alongside her husband, Touré Roberts, and the pair are assistant pastors at The Potter’s House in Dallas.

Woman Evolve is Roberts’s evolution of Woman Thou Art Loosed, which Jakes began as a Sunday school class in 1992 and developed into a best-selling book, a feature film, and a conference running from 1996 to 2022.

Its message of hope and healing is one that Roberts, 36, has personalized and built a movement on as she draws from her own struggles and experience surrendering to Jesus.

At 13, Roberts became pregnant and found herself living as a teen mom—a reality only exacerbated by her family being in the limelight. She later dropped out of college and left an abusive relationship. In ministry, Roberts began to share her story to help women who had experienced similar hardships, using her own vulnerability and painful past to point women to the faith that helped her get through.

The first Woman Evolve event took place in Denver in 2018 with around 2,000 women. This year’s gathering at the Arlington, Texas, stadium had over 40,000. Woman Evolve also organizes book clubs, runs a media outlet called Woman Evolve TV, and releases a regular podcast.

“One of the things that I asked God was that he would help me to create an environment where the girls who just want to know God and figure it out and walk it out with him feel safe enough to say, ‘I may not be perfect, but I am hungry,’ so he can meet them in the space of their hunger,” Roberts said. “That’s what Woman Evolve is. I don’t need you to come in here and be perfect. You don’t have to know all the songs or all the Scriptures, but if you have a heart to experience who God is, then I have a space for you at Woman Evolve.”

Last year, Sarah Jakes Roberts appeared in the Time100 with a blurb written by filmmaker Tyler Perry, praising her for finding her voice and speaking to “a generation desperately in need of compassion, teaching, and love.” While some Christians still have questions around Jakes’s views surrounding a decades-old controversy over the Trinity, Roberts remains hugely popular among millions of Black women, from faithful believers to lapsed churchgoers.

The women who gathered in Texas are drawn to Roberts and her messaging—they listen to her teachings and, like nearly 3 million others, follow her on Instagram, where she shares Bible verses, outfits, and snapshots from her life.

The registration lines for the Woman Evolve event spilled out into the parking lot. The attendees took selfies as they entered the stadium, in front of chrome signage outside and huge banners inside. Roberts’s latest book, Power Moves, published in April, was showcased and sold at various kiosks.

During a roll call on the first day, the emcee called out major cities and regions across the US. Plenty of locals from the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex screamed for their city, but there were also cheers representing travelers from all over the US, the Caribbean, and even overseas.

The woman sitting next to me flew from Atlanta. “I came here by myself, but I’m just so excited to be here,” she said. “I felt the Lord nudging me to come, despite the fact that I didn’t have anyone to come with me, and I’m glad I did.”

People came expecting to be changed, as the “evolve” in the event’s name promises, and Roberts repeated the theme of surrender, of refreshed faith, and of giving more of life over to God.

Worship included an anthem for the conference from Maverick City Music singer Naomi Raine, titled “Another Surrender.”

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“This weekend is about leaning in to what God knows,” Roberts said. “This is our surrender.”

The sessions were themed around surrendering mindset, heart, and ears and ranged from Scripture teaching and exposition to lessons that incorporated biblical themes into rhythms of daily life.

Shirer—a fellow second-generation Dallas Bible teacher, the daughter of Tony Evans—taught on the importance of remaining in Jesus as a foundation. “The older I get, the more endeared I am to longevity, to faithfulness, to consistency,” she said. “What is the assignment that the Lord has entrusted to you? Build a house on solid ground and remain.”

Nona Jones, the Christian tech executive who currently serves as YouVersion’s global ambassador, drew from 1 Samuel 16 to talk about rejection being a gift: “It just so happened that the king came looking for David in the place he was rejected. That’s why I need every sister in here to know that no matter who left you out in the field, God knows where you are.” (Jones is also a board member for CT.)

There were talks on how to manage money, relationships, body image, and mental health.

Workout coach and social media influencer Johanna Devries, known as growwithjo, led a 10-minute workout that included dancing to gospel music. “We’re taught that movement, that exercise, is to get our body right,” she said. “But that’s not what it’s all about—movement is a catalyst for the joy you need to step into your day.”

During a discussion of addiction, trauma therapist Anita Phillips emphasized the importance of support systems, “community, therapy, medication … all the things.”

Financial educator Tiffany Aliche spoke about budgeting and why financial wisdom is an act of good stewardship. “We remember as Christian women that in our hands, with obedience to God, money can be a tool for good,” she said.

Women shared testimonies of surrender. Actress and comedian Angel Laketa Moore talked about handing over her career dreams and desires to God. “Maturing is understanding that this life isn’t about me offering everything I’m going to do. His take on what my life should be is more important than what my take on what my life should be,” she said. “As a woman of faith and someone who is a dreamer, the hardest thing for me is understanding that he is the real author, the ghostwriter of this book, and I need to see what his words are on the page.”

A young woman from Dallas told me how encouraging it was to hear these messages, to be surrounded by faithful women, after feeling as if she had been running “on fumes.”

She found herself crying on a stranger’s shoulder. She saw someone in tears on the way from the bathroom and formed a prayer circle around her. As she chatted with the women around her during breaks, she realized her testimony was just what someone needed at the moment.

Roberts offered an hour-long message—titled “The Moment of Increase”—that continued to root the event in the theme of surrender. She read from John 11:20–28, when Martha was upset that Jesus didn’t make it to her home before Lazarus died. Roberts reminded the crowd that Jesus’ care for us isn’t always what we expect, but we can still trust in him.

“I wanted to believe that I would never go through it, but now that I’m going through it, I have to believe that you will get me through it. I have to believe that you’ll give me wisdom,” she said, calling out to God.

“You have to believe something about God that you’ve never believed before. You’ll have to believe on a different level. If you’re going to have breakthrough in your life, it’s not going to happen because you stayed seated in your grief,” she said. “Baby, I may be grieving, but I’m still believing.”

Alyssa Gossom is a writer and content editor for RightNow Media and writing contributor for R. H. Boyd Publishing. She is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and has been published in various outlets including The Union Review, Fathom magazine, and Family Christian.

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News

The Evangelical Voters Who Changed Their Minds

Harvest Prude

Amid a hyperpartisan electorate, a minority plan to vote differently than they did in 2016 and 2020.

A voter in Falls Church, Virginia, marks her ballot.

AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough

This year, 81-year-old Lowrie Beacham is ending his lifelong streak of voting Republican.

“I have an unbroken record … although it’s about to be broken,” Beacham said. “I’m planning to vote for Kamala Harris, heaven help me.”

Eight years ago, Beacham served as a Republican poll worker in Orange County, North Carolina. In 2016 and in 2020, he cast his vote for Donald Trump. January 6, 2021, was the day things changed.

He and his wife watched Fox News for six hours as the Capitol was overrun with disgruntled Trump supporters. “I cannot tell you how appalled we were,” he said. “We were hoping that the next day the Congress would impeach him and convict him.”

Instead, he watched national Republican figures, like South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, make peace with Trump. “That’s when I said, ‘That’s it, we’re leaving.’” By January 12, the Beachams had changed their party affiliation to register as Independent.

Even though he has misgivings about Harris and disagrees with the Democratic Party’s policies, Beacham decided to vote for Harris to defeat Trump. He hopes the party will one day return to one he can support. “I didn’t leave the Republican Party,” he said. “The Republican Party left me.”

Swing voters are a minority, especially among today’s hyperpolarized and partisan electorate. Most Americans make up their minds well before November, typically falling in line with their party affiliations.

The majority of white evangelicals have remained a reliable Republican voting bloc. Lifeway Research found in September that Trump’s support was at 61 percent among likely voters with evangelical beliefs, compared to 31 percent for Harris. Only 8 percent were undecided or supporting another candidate.

Election watchers are paying more attention to voters like Beacham, whose decisions around who to vote for or whether to vote are underscored by ambivalence, frustration, and concern. These are feelings that evangelicals across the political spectrum have grappled with for years.

In Time magazine, electoral psychologists Michael Bruter and Sarah Harrison recently wrote,

In many ways, next week’s decision will not be made by hardcore supporters for either camp but rather by the many citizens across the U.S. who have become largely disillusioned—sometimes hopeless about democracy and society and will use their ballot to express a wide range of fears and frustrations. Much of this will have nothing to do with whether they like Republicans or Democrats better, or the public policy they would prefer for the country. More and more, people want to use democracy to claim that the system is not working or feel respected and listened to by political elites than to influence policy or seek representation.

That includes Christians who have reconsidered their political approach during the Trump years. These evangelicals align with some of the common traits that researchers identified among persuadable voters: They considered themselves politically moderate, did not particularly like either candidate, and were mostly disengaged from political news.

Caleb Martin, a Presbyterian in his 30s, falls into that camp. Though he’s a Republican, he has opted to write in a candidate in the past two presidential elections rather than cast a vote for Trump.

His reluctance to support the former president, he said, “really boiled down to character.” Trump’s previous divorces and history of making vulgar statements were turnoffs.

“The way he would speak to people, the way he would treat his opponents verbally … I don’t feel excited or proud to have this person represent our country on the world front, even though I mostly align with his policies,” said Martin, who lives in Illinois.

But after Joe Biden’s presidency, Martin is worried that another Democratic administration would raise taxes and extend abortion rights. Now, he’s “ready to focus more on policy than character.”

He’s voting for Trump for the first time.

“I’m at the point where I’m like, I just don’t want to see another version of these last four years,” he said. “There are still policies that Trump is saying he supports that are generally Republican policies that I still agree with.”

Evangelical voters and regular churchgoers are less likely than other voters to see a presidential candidate’s “personal character” as a deciding factor, according to Lifeway Research. Fewer than half name it as a priority, instead ranking issues like the economy, immigration, and religious freedom as top considerations.

The majority of Harris supporters say character and position on abortion are their top issues. Only 6 percent of evangelical voters rank abortion as their No. 1 factor in selecting a candidate. Pro-life voters have opposed the GOP’s shift on abortion and even Trump’s stance to leave the issue to the states, but they still plan to vote Republican because they find the Democratic platform on abortion even more unpalatable.

“Crucially, not all citizens see their role as voters in the same way. … We find that some voters see themselves as ‘supporters’ who will likely vote for their ‘camp’ whatever may be,” wrote Bruter and Harrison, “but others see themselves as ‘referees’ who will assess the worth of the candidates and their programs, and try to pick whoever they think would be best for the country.”

Grace Miller, a retiree in Georgia, voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, but she’s not sold on Trump or Harris this time.

In 2016, Miller didn’t know much about Trump but was convinced by arguments that he was a successful businessman and would manage the country well.

In 2020, Miller became convinced that Trump did not respect the Constitution and opposed his efforts to overturn election results in Georgia. “Also, his claim to be a Christian or using the name of God began to seem more and more to me as a deception,” she said.

In a poll this year, most Americans said they didn’t see Trump or Harris as particularly Christian and didn’t describe either presidential candidate as “honest” or “moral.”

Miller wasn’t happy with her vote for Biden and doesn’t see Harris as an improvement. “I’m just horrified by some of the policies and principles that Harris represents and stands up for,” she said. “I just think Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is not of God.”

“I don’t want to abstain from voting. … I feel a responsibility to vote in a way that pleases and honors God and brings Jesus to my fellow citizens,” she said. “I have no idea what that is. I’m just praying earnestly, and so far, I haven’t gotten a clear answer.”

A YouGov poll in February found that 85 percent of registered voters had already definitively decided who they would vote for or had enough of a commitment to a candidate that they didn’t think they would change.

Vocal supporters on both sides can be frustrated by undecided voters when they think their candidate is the obvious choice.

Trump supporters assume if Miller won’t vote for Trump that means she’s voting for the Democratic candidate, so they ask how she can be a Christian and vote for Harris. Other fellow Christians discourage her from voting third party, saying any vote not for Trump or Harris is a waste.

Poll numbers might not be able to capture all the voters who change their minds last-minute on who to vote for or whether to vote at all, according to Bruter and Harrison, authors of Inside the Mind of a Voter. “At times, it may be hard to realize the prevalence of individual change because a lot of voters will cancel each other out,” they wrote.

Miller has largely stopped talking to others about her decision. Instead, she talks to God about it.

“I’m not just totally sitting here with my hands folded, waiting for God to tell me. I do my homework. I do my research. I’m digging into the different parties and their platforms, I’m digging into both Harris and Trump,” she said. “I’m using my reason, which God gave me, but I’m still going to rely on him.”

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News

Meet the Evangelical Expats Staying in Lebanon

Jayson Casper

Brent Hamoud, Emad Botros, and Daniel Suter

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Courtesy of Brent Hamoud, Emad Botros, and Daniel Suter

The warning issued by the American embassy on October 14 could not have been clearer: US citizens in Lebanon are strongly encouraged to depart now. But this message, coming as Israel increased its attacks on Hezbollah, was only the latest in several weeks of diplomatic efforts to reduce the American presence.

Back on July 31, already fearing an escalation of violence, the embassy was discouraging would-be tourists with its highest of four alert levels: Do Not Travel. For those inside Lebanon, it urged: The best time to leave a country is before a crisis, if at all possible. Major airlines had already canceled flights to and from Beirut, leaving only the national carrier to facilitate evacuation—and its outbound flights were booked weeks in advance.

Ever since Hezbollah—a Shiite Muslim militia designated by the US as a terrorist entity—launched missiles across the border in support of Hamas’s attack last October, foreigners have lived under a cloud of uncertainty that Israel might eventually bomb the airport, as it did in the month-long war in 2006 that left many expats stranded. Americans would have little hope of leaving through Syria, and Lebanon has no official relationship with Israel to permit crossing the southern border.

And then Hezbollah pagers exploded throughout the country.

With dozens dead and thousands injured, the next day, September 18, the embassy warned of a reduction in routine care at hospitals. On September 21, it told citizens the Lebanese government could not ensure their safety, mentioning the possibility of increased crime, sectarian violence, or targeted kidnapping.

And on September 28, one day after a massive Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the embassy sent its nonessential personnel home and opened registration for US citizens to request assistance in leaving.

Several US citizens paid thousands of dollars to place their families on private yachts to nearby Cyprus. Others frantically called Middle East Airlines (MEA) to secure embassy-reserved seats to anywhere else. And among the missionary community, the chatter was incessant: Are you leaving? What are your contingency plans? Will your organization make you go?

Some decided to stay.

CT interviewed four Christian foreigners to learn how they made the decision to remain in times of war.

Each had already endured the constant hum of Israeli drones hovering over their neighborhoods. They learned to distinguish between the noise of warplanes deliberately breaking the sound barrier and the similarly ear-popping sound of a missile strike bringing down a Beirut apartment complex. And some have wondered if they might become a target of random Shiite anger or if the Islamist kidnappings of foreigners during Lebanon’s civil war decades earlier could be repeated.

The sources represent different categories of Christian workers.

A Swiss family living in the foothills outside Beirut believes that angels closed their ears of their children at night, allowing for consistent sleep even when explosions—slightly muffled by the distance—woke the parents consistently at 3 a.m. An Egyptian with Canadian citizenship said the blasts were so loud he sometimes thought they had happened just across the street—only to look out the window and see smoke plumes rising across the valley two miles away, not far from his church outside Beirut.

An American married to a Lebanese woman said that while the bombings did not threaten him directly, he was deeply troubled as each missile resulted in more deaths and displaced families. And a single American woman raised in urban poverty amid gang warfare stated casually, “I grew up rough, but gunshots and bombs are not the same thing.”

A Shared Resilience

This woman, a Black millennial from Ohio, has been granted anonymity because her organization works in other Middle East nations where witnessing to Muslims is illegal. But she was eager to tell her story as an “anomaly” in the missions world.

Her agency, she said, prefers to stay put during a crisis—and pray.

She had been in Lebanon for only six months when the war in Gaza began. Within her circle of 30 foreign Christian friends, only she and her teammates, a couple with two young children, did not evacuate. Most returned to Lebanon, as the war did not initially expand beyond the southern border, and perhaps the time away helped to induce greater calm. Amid the current escalation, several still remain.

Her work is to promote a “tent of praise” movement in collaboration with local churches, emphasizing prayer and worship. But as the violence increased, she bought just-in-case plane tickets for October 15 and remained in daily communication with her organizational leaders in the US. A few days before that date, as MEA shuttled thousands to safety, her American mentors boarded a nearly empty plane to Lebanon to check in on her. The visit strengthened her commitment, which solidified further as she joined 200 Lebanese in worship during a 50-hour vigil. Some spoke in tongues; others, exhausted from dancing, banner waving, and intercessory prayer fell asleep in the pews.

The theme, planned months in advance, was “Rise up, Esther.” And it was “for such a time as this,” she realized, that she was in Lebanon, to stand with the people and petition the King for an end to the war. Inspired by their resilience, she identified with the struggles of the Lebanese—a people exploited by regional powers and valued only for their role in advancing a political agenda. The situation resonated with her Black experience, as she recalled that the history of transatlantic slavery gave her people a similar ability to endure difficult circumstances and yet find hope.

But she stated that many get this war wrong.

“Gen Z is almost completely pro-Palestinian,” she said. “And in Lebanon, I’ve never seen such hatred toward Israel that people will not even speak its name.”

As a child of 9/11, she is amazed at how quickly US attitudes have flipped: One generation was overtly anti-Muslim, the next widely receptive to Palestinian propaganda. Few of her friends in America know that Israel is saving civilian lives by issuing evacuation orders for most of the buildings it then bombs. And fewer, she contended, understand the eschatological place of the Jews in God’s end-times agenda.

Israel is not a godly nation, she said, and God will judge it for its excessive violence in Gaza and Lebanon. But the love of Gentile Christians for Jews must provoke them to jealousy, per Romans 11, for their coming salvation and the peace of Israel.

“Lebanon is entering a new season,” she said. “But my view is not common among believers here.”

Fix What Is Broken

More in line with Lebanese sentiment, another American also remains.

“Israeli aggression threatens our well-being,” said Brent Hamoud, programs officer at Tahaddi, a community-based organization engaged in poverty alleviation. “They will not force us to leave, and staying is a small act of resistance.”

He never even looked up flight schedules.

Tahaddi is located on the edge of Dahieh, the Shiite-majority southern suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah held political and social control. The Israeli bombing campaign targeting militant leaders and infrastructure disrupted the charity’s operations, though its network continues to serve the neighborhood and those displaced from it with food and medical aid.

But Hamoud’s commitment to Lebanon runs much deeper than solidarity and service. His grandparents were missionaries at the evangelical Dar El Awlad orphanage for over three decades, and his father was raised in its care. Hamoud returned in 2007 to follow in their legacy, serving at-risk children for the next 12 years. And Ruth, his Lebanese wife, whom he married in 2012, made it known early in their friendship that her future was in Lebanon.

By 2019, Hamoud felt uncomfortable with the traditional missions model and broke ties with his sending agency. Taking on a local salary was not difficult, as the value of the Lebanese lira enabled a middle-class lifestyle not very different from that in America.

But only a few months later, the failed Lebanese popular revolution against a corrupt political class was followed by the near total depreciation of the currency. Ruth effectively lost her life savings as the lira crashed and banks prohibited the withdrawal of funds. After that, they navigated COVID-19, the 2020 Beirut blast at the nation’s main harbor, and shortages of medicine, fuel, and electricity.

When the bombs dropped across Lebanon, the couple asked themselves, What is one more crisis to endure?

Friends and family back home in Minnesota worried about them, and Hamoud and Ruth took these concerns to heart. But their core needs were provided for, and their children, ages 7 and 9, were emotionally stable. Had the children been experiencing severe trauma, that would have forced them to consider leaving more seriously.

“Our kids know that explosions happen here while there is ice cream in every freezer in America,” Hamoud said. “But we discuss the situation and why this is home, and where God wants us to be.”

Ruth is additionally tied to another 250 children as the early childhood education coordinator for Beirut Baptist School, overseeing dozens of teachers and staff. Their departure from Lebanon would impact many beyond themselves.

Yet the impact of the war is substantial. Hamoud applied the words of Jesus to militant groups anywhere in the Middle East—those who live by the sword die by the sword (Matt. 26:52)—and noted the sabers and AK-47s on their various emblems. He has little sympathy for their plight.

A ceasefire in Gaza, he believes, would have kept the war out of Lebanon—and foreigners here. Prior to the war, neither Hezbollah nor other local actors made their evacuation necessary.

“Stop the fighting,” Hamoud said. “It will open up pathways to fix what is broken—which characterizes so much in the region.”

This Is Our Home

Amid such brokenness, Emad Botros said, is the freedom of Lebanon.

As an Egyptian, Botros values the nation’s open spirit and religious liberty, in comparison to the land of his birth. Much of it rests on what he called the “Christian culture” anchored by historic Christian presence. Botros fears it will be lost if the chaos of war further stimulates Christian emigration; instead, he will stay to strengthen the church.

But as a Canadian citizen, his first impulse was to evacuate.

“Better to leave for six months and come back than to risk the trauma that might prevent you from ever returning,” said Botros, a global staff worker with Canadian Baptist Ministries. “God wants us to serve here but not to be a martyr.”

Botros first came to Lebanon in 2000 as a student at Arab Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS), where he met Almess, his Iraqi wife. They married in 2004 and spent two years together in Egypt. Over the next decade, they emigrated to Canada when Almess was granted refugee status, they had two children, and they ministered among the local Arab population.

In 2014, Botros returned to ABTS and today is an assistant professor of Old Testament. But in 2020, the seminary transitioned primarily to online education; he could do his job remotely. Botros thought of Almess, who had lived through the Iran-Iraq war and US invasions, and feared another conflict experience might incapacitate her. His teenage sons might suffer long-term trauma. The family spent a few weeks this summer in Egypt just to rest from the stress and sound barrier reverberations.

His older son hated being away. The family returned to Lebanon before the full outbreak of violence, but he yearned to be back with his friends. It would be shameful to leave, the 19-year-old told his father, reflecting a Middle Eastern mentality. We have to show solidarity, said the younger son, a social justice–oriented 17-year-old. Over the past ten years, each had merged their various identities ever more closely with Lebanon.

His wife’s voice was decisive.

“Almess told me Lebanon is our home,” said Botros. “I realized she was right. It was no longer just a mission field—friends were now family, and you don’t leave your family in times of trouble.”

ABTS has since welcomed over 150 displaced individuals onsite, a mix of Christians and Muslims known to its community. Botros’s apartment is a five-minute walk from campus, and he regularly wanders through its gardens, interacting with and encouraging those who have lost their homes.

Many of these are from Resurrection Church of Beirut, where he serves on the pastoral staff. Its building is near the line dividing the Christian and Shiite sections of Hadat, separating Dahieh from the presidential palace. Although the church is undamaged, bombing in the Muslim area has been intense.

“The war is terrible,” Botros said. “I have little mental capacity to work.”

His dissertation on Jonah has fallen by the wayside. But three weeks ago, Botros preached on the wayward prophet, whose preferred solution to the evil of Nineveh was its destruction. God, however, wanted its repentance. Similarly, rival parties in the Middle East speak of wiping each other out. A more biblical perspective, he said, seeks justice with mercy and forgiveness of sins.

“Hamas and Hezbollah militants are still human beings, even though we condemn them—and Israeli actions as well,” Botros said. “Continued destruction will only create a new generation of enemies.”

The Country We Love

Daniel Suter, a missionary from Switzerland, encounters both sides. His Lebanese friends blame Israel for every bad thing that happens; his friends in the West reflexively support everything Israel does. But with tears in his eyes, he said that 2,350 Lebanese had died since the war began, some of whom were relatives of his close friends.

“It breaks my heart,” Suter said. “This is the country we love. It hurts.”

The Youth With A Mission (YWAM) building he served in—until the roads became too dangerous for the 30-minute drive from his home—displays a sign proclaiming Jesus in English and Arabic, with a picture of a cross and a heart in between. It is located in Damour, a Christian village on the coastal highway from Beirut to Sidon, yet every route he could use to get there has been bombed.

Damour was the site of an infamous massacre by Palestinians during the Lebanese civil war. The next village over is still home to some Palestinian refugees, and few Christians will ever set foot there, Suter said. Syrian migrants work the banana groves that stretch from the road to the seashore, resented for receiving aid from international agencies that is less forthcoming for disadvantaged citizens.

YWAM’s community center somehow brings everyone together.

When the war in Gaza began, the YWAM Lebanese leader asked Suter, Is this where God called you? If so, stay. Another foreign missionary left abruptly, citing the mental health of his children. Don’t Lebanese have kids, too? one staffer retorted. The challenging conversations strengthened Suter’s commitment, and he said his local friends were “chill.” They had lived through war before.

His wife Bettina, however, was tightly integrated in the Christian expat community and its constant conversations about whether to stay or leave. They had moved to Lebanon in 2015 and had lived through its many crises with their three young children already. But war was different—I didn’t come to Lebanon to die, she said—and the worry was paralyzing her.

Prayers for guidance brought no clear word from God for either of them, Suter said. So the couple agreed to separate temporarily, as Bettina and the children returned to Switzerland. As the situation stabilized with war concentrated in the south, they came back three weeks later.

Ministry continued normally, and the family spent this past summer in Switzerland for ordinary church visits and vacation. But while they were away, Israel assassinated two adversaries: a top-level Hezbollah militant in Beirut on July 30 and the leader of Hamas as he visited Iran the next day.

Their sending church urged the family to delay their return by a month.

It was a month well spent. Bettina had an encounter with God, Suter said, who asked if she was willing to surrender everything. The experience was gut-wrenching but profound—and it made her ready to return.

Suter also realized he had been rash. He had sent his family away with naive optimism that the airport would not be bombed. Looking back, he said he would not have managed well a separation of months or longer. Contingency planning was necessary, and he prayerfully engaged in it in consultation with Swiss leaders.

The pager attack, one week before their return, only strengthened their resolve. And as they waited at the airport gate on September 23, they received reports that the widespread Israeli bombing had begun. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese were displaced, now also from Tyre, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. The war was no longer only in the south.

The family moved into guest housing at the Damour center and joined in caring for the 300 people taking shelter at the village school. Their kids worked as hard as the parents, Suter said, learning the impact of war while still sleeping soundly at night. But when school started, they received the local YWAM office’s blessing to return home and shift their service to another center in Burj Hammoud, a Christian neighborhood in the capital city with many Syrian refugees and displaced Shiites.

And in consultation with their church, they adjusted their evacuation trigger. When Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon on October 1, local analysis suggested they would remain safe in their home in the foothills; however, if Israeli forces headed north toward Beirut, then the Suters would evacuate to Switzerland.

“Now, I am assessing risk; before, I was ignoring it,” said Suter. “You can cowardly leave or cowardly stay. I want to be here for the right reasons, not the thrill of adventure or fear of boredom back home.”

He hopes his story will encourage prayer for Lebanon, perhaps inspiring others to come and serve. Meanwhile, the missionary from Ohio anticipates the arrival of three new teammates who are already preparing to join her. Hamoud wants Gaza’s Palestinians to have their basic right to life restored. Botros wants concerned Christians, instead of just sending funds for emergency aid, to address the root cause of displacement and lobby their governments to end the war.

None saw themselves as heroes, nor did they blame anyone for leaving.

“The old missions paradigm was to move overseas and die there—I loved that as a youth, and it inspired me to serve,” said Suter. “But staying does not automatically bring God glory. What matters most is faithfulness to God’s leading. There can be phases in our calling.”

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Ideas

Jesus Is Still Right About Persecution

David Platt

Nine truths believers need to understand to pray well for the suffering body of Christ.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Getty

I recently sat with a Nigerian church leader who showed me a chilling video that I cannot get out of my mind. Militants from Boko Haram, a terrorist group that has brutally attacked churches in this region for years, filmed themselves standing over a small group of Christians and telling everyone who would listen that they intended to kill all Christians until they submit to Islam. Then they beheaded our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Horror like this has moved me to pray and work for years on behalf of those suffering for their faith. As part of my ministry with Radical, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to Christians who have faced violence, social pressure, or jail for evangelism, church planting, or merely holding fast to their faith.

At the same time, I recognize that for many Christians, examples of persecution can feel distant, abstract, unrelatable, or overwhelming. Many persecuted Christians live in countries we have never visited and places we may struggle to pronounce. We also live in a 24-hour news cycle that inundates us with stories of war and terror, numbing us to the cost of following Jesus for our church family around the world.

But starting the next two Sundays in November, designated by the World Evangelical Alliance as the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, and beyond, I want to invite you to join other believers around the world in interceding for those who claim Christ and suffer for doing so. I also want to dispel some myths about persecution and help you understand what persecution means and how it plays out in the world. In light of God’s command for us to remember and pray for those who are persecuted as though we are physically with them (see Heb. 13:3), I hope that learning more about persecution will help us be the global body of Christ he has called us to be.

Persecution is harassment or opposition for following Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, the term Jesus uses for “persecuted” means “pursued with hostility.” He goes on to describe how this can mean everything from people ridiculing, shaming, excluding, or lying about you to people arresting you, imprisoning you, driving you out, or destroying your life (see Matt. 5:10–12; 10:16–33; Luke 6:22–23). Notably, persecution is when these forms of resistance come specifically because someone is following Jesus. In Matthew 5, Jesus says to expect this hostility that occurs “because of righteousness” and “because of me.”

Persecution is not anything hard that happens to a Christian. Followers of Jesus face all sorts of tribulation in this world, just as Jesus promised (John 16:33). Often, such suffering is common to the experience of non-Christians as well. Believers and unbelievers alike receive cancer diagnoses. Believers and unbelievers alike experience suffering due to conflict or war. Believers and unbelievers alike walk through emotional distress and relational strain.

But hardship is not the same as persecution. Just because you’re a Christian and you’re feeling the effects of a fallen world doesn’t mean you’re being harassed or opposed for righteousness’ sake.

Persecution happens underground and above ground. Many Christians envision our persecuted family meeting in secret house churches. Many years ago, Radical started an event called Secret Church. This is based on times with Asian believers when I have been snuck into locations where everyone else in the room faces almost certain imprisonment if they are caught together.

But many Christians don’t realize that persecution also happens in countries where our brothers and sisters gather in open (and even large) church buildings where they are led by seminary-trained pastors. I just met with a pastor in West Africa whose church compound regularly filled with over 500 worshipers and was suddenly attacked one day by militants who began burning buildings, cars, and people. Just because Christians gather in public doesn’t mean they’re doing so without peril.

The reality of persecution can vary within countries. Take India and Indonesia. Christians may comfortably gather on Sunday mornings in the southern India state of Kerala. Meanwhile, mobs burned more than 200 churches in the eastern state of Manipur last year. A couple hundred miles southeast in Indonesia, Christians may be protected on one island and opposed on another. Just like the country where you live, safety and security can vary from region to region.

Persecution may come from the top down, from the bottom up, or from both directions. Some governments around the world forbid citizens from following Jesus and gathering together as a church. But persecution isn’t always initiated by ruling authorities. When my friend Zamir became a Christian, his brothers nearly beat him to death, and his father kicked him out of his home. Other friends of mine, whom I’ll call Samil and Aanya, were disowned by their family for following Jesus. When the couple went back years later to try to share the gospel with their parents, Aanya’s dad poisoned her to death. In some countries, political forces and family and friends work together to persecute Christians. For example, the North Korean regime prohibits Christianity, and authorities rely on family members, friends, or neighbors to report Christian activity to them.

Persecution can mean death—or discrimination. As I shared earlier, the stories of persecution in Nigeria are horrifying. For several decades now, militants have kidnapped, raped, and killed many of our brothers and sisters. At the same time, persecution of the church is not always this severe. Based on conversations I have had with brothers and sisters around the world, a Christian entrepreneur in a Middle Eastern country may lose the right to run a business—or the customers to support one. A new follower of Jesus high up in the Himalayas may lose the right to water or electricity in his or her village. A church in a Southeast Asian city may be forced to pay extra (and sometimes exorbitant) fees to rent or own a building.

In Europe and the Americas, believers often preface any mention of persecution in their lives by saying, “It’s not near as bad as what our brothers and sisters around the world are experiencing,” and that is unquestionably true. But that doesn’t mean it’s not still persecution when a British Christian is arrested for praying silently outside an abortion clinic or an American Christian is fired from his job for expressing his views on biblical sexuality.

Persecution follows identification and proclamation. From the beginning of the church in the book of Acts, persecution has occurred whenever people have professed or propagated faith in Jesus. The Greek word for “witness” in Acts 1:8 is martus, from which we get the word martyr. As long as my friend Halima stays private and quiet about her faith in Somalia, then she can avoid persecution. But as soon as she communicates that she has turned from Islam to follow Jesus, she will likely be killed. Depending on the Indian state, sharing the gospel with someone else could land you in jail, while leading someone to Jesus and baptizing them could mean a decade of imprisonment.

The purpose of persecution is to silence witness. When persecution first broke out against the church in Acts 4, Jewish leaders commanded Christians “not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus.” Peter and John responded by saying, “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (vv. 18–20). After gathering to pray, early Christians were “all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly” (v. 31).

This is important to remember when Christians in freer parts of the world often say things like “I witness by being a good person or by doing good works.” This may sound good to us, but it’s not what the Bible means by witnessing. In many parts of the world, our brothers and sisters in Christ are fairly safe if they are no more than good people doing good works. But when they speak of what they have seen and heard, they suffer.

Persecution is guaranteed not just for other Christians but also for us. In light of all of the above, it’s a matter of obedience to God to pray specifically for our brothers and sisters in parts of the world where persecution is fiercest (Heb. 13:3). This cannot be overstated: We have a biblical and familial responsibility to pray and work for our brothers and sisters, particularly in countries like North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan. At the same time, God also makes clear in his Word that “everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12). Notice the words “everyone” and “will.” Persecution is not a “maybe” for “some” Christians.

If you are not experiencing persecution to some degree, you need to ask the question “Am I professing and propagating faith in Jesus?” In other words, are you clearly and uncompromisingly identifying with Jesus; humbly and boldly proclaiming Jesus; telling people about his life, death, and resurrection; and calling others to repent and believe in Jesus because their life now and forever in heaven or hell hinges on their response to him?

If we are not professing faith in Jesus like this, then we need to realize as we pray for the persecuted church that our lives are actually sympathizing with their persecutors. That may sound like an offensive overstatement, but consider this: If the purpose of persecution is to silence witness, and you or I are silencing our own witness, then we are reflecting the persecutors, not the persecuted.

But if we boldly identify with Jesus and testify to him, then we are identifying with the persecuted church as we pray. And according to 2 Timothy 3, we can be sure that persecution is coming for us. The more we give our lives to following Jesus and making him known in our neighborhoods and all nations, particularly in places where the gospel has not yet gone, the more we will experience persecution. Let’s intercede for our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ around the world to be faithful to the end, knowing that every Christian needs similar intercessors to do the same.

David Platt serves as a lead pastor for McLean Bible Church and is the author of books including Radical and Don’t Hold Back. He is also the founder of Radical, an organization that helps people follow Jesus and make him known in their neighborhood and all nations.

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Church Life

Shout to the Lord in a Foreign Language

Jaewoo Kim

Worshiping God with words we don’t understand may seem strange. But I consider it a spiritual practice.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Wikimedia Commons

Several years ago, my team led the Congolese worship song Yezu Azali Awa at a live album recording in South Korea. No one in the worship team or the congregation was from the country, and no one spoke the language.

But the song’s simple refrain and uplifting melody was easy to grasp.

“Jesus is here with us,” we sang over and over again in Lingala and then later in Korean.

I didn’t choose this tune to make worshiping in another language feel novel or, worse, gimmicky. Instead, I wanted to sing it because of how the song communicates the nearness of God’s presence and our unswerving trust in his faithfulness.

Leading worship and singing in languages I am unfamiliar with is something I have practiced for over two decades. I have done so in a house church, at conferences held by seminaries and mission agencies, and in various cities around the world, like Seoul and Wau, South Sudan.

As a worship leader, I understand the complexity and vulnerability of effectively leading songs in a language you don’t know. Often, these worries arise: What if I mispronounce a word and bring dishonor? What if people think this is cultural appropriation? What if they just can’t engage in authentic worship?

Some people may also scoff at the idea of singing in a language that the majority at church don’t understand. It might not seem helpful or edifying to do this. Singing becomes harder when we don’t know the pronunciation of words, and we may feel tempted to zone out if we have no idea what we’re singing. We can wonder whether we’re really worshiping because we feel so distant from the songs.

But there are certain merits to worshiping in a language that we don’t comprehend.

Worship in a foreign language allows us to gain a glimpse of how every culture and every language illuminate and express God’s attributes in distinctive ways that we’ve never encountered or imagined.

When I first heard the soulful Arabic worship tune Anta ’Atheemun (“You Are So Awesome, O Lord”), I felt uncomfortable with singing “Allah” in its lyrics because of the word’s associations with Islam. But after learning that Arab Christians use this word to refer to God, I was struck by how God’s greatness and abundant grace have been praised for ages in a language and musical scale I was ignorant of.

Worship is not always about singing and experiencing music that we are comfortable with, agrees Jo-Ann Richards in a recent email conversation.

“If we love each other, we will create space in the corporate worship service for our brothers and sisters to express their worship to God in ways that they can relate to on a heart level,” wrote the founding director of CREW 40:4, a Jamaican nonprofit that creates culturally relevant expressions of worship.

Singing in a language you do not know also honors the breadth and depth of the church.

Global student exchanges, immigration, refugee influxes, and labor migration are making many Western congregations increasingly diverse. This presents an opportunity not only to worship alongside believers from other parts of the world but also to learn from their unique forms of cultural expressions in worship.

Over the years, people have approached me after worship services to thank me for singing in their mother tongues. I remember multiple instances of believers saying to me with tears in their eyes, “Thank you for singing in my language. I never expected to hear it used in worship here. I was deeply moved.”

The church, while existing locally, is a globally and historically connected community. Even if no one present speaks a particular language, singing it can provide an opportunity to emphasize the unity of the global church. We can venture out to sing in unfamiliar languages, with the option of providing translated lyrics in a common language.

When we do so, we build empathy and solidarity with believers in other parts of the world who are suffering. This is an embodied expression of rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).

Some of the worship songs I lead at various events are in Karen, the language of a stateless people group in Myanmar and Thailand. Their plight often does not receive much media attention. When I led the Karen song See-P’truh-Nah (“God Is Good”) last year at a church in Seoul, a group of Karen refugees were present and expressed surprise that I knew a song in their language.

I have also introduced songs in Arabic and Farsi, such as Abaan alla- dhi fi (“Our Father in Heaven”) and Roohol Ghodos (“Spirit of God”), at multiple churches in North America for their Sunday services or mission events. This provides a way for them to stand with Christ followers in the Middle East whose voices often seem to be missing in evangelical spaces.

Nevertheless, I recognize that singing in a language no one knows has its challenges, especially for very large-scale gatherings.

The Fourth Lausanne Congress in Incheon, South Korea, this year had more than 5,000 Christians from over 200 countries attend in person and around 2,000 participate online. Throughout the weeklong gathering, Korean band Isaiah 6tyOne led most songs in English, singing some verses in Spanish and Korean and one song in Chinese. Northern Irish worship leaders Keith and Kristyn Getty sang in English and Spanish. The songs chosen were also predominantly written by Western or English-speaking composers.

“We acknowledge that we were not able to achieve the same level of diversity in our times of worship through music,” Evi Rodemann, the Congress’s event coordinator, told me in an email. “Given the logistical and organizational considerations, we focused on integrating two bands into the program to ensure a high-quality and cohesive musical experience.”

As a worship leader, I can imagine how arranging for songs to be sung in a foreign tongue at a large international conference might be hard. Learning an unfamiliar song and making it engaging for the congregation takes effort and intentionality. Honoring the song’s cultural origins through ensuring good pronunciation, while aiming for musical excellence at the same time, might require more hours of practice.

If the song lacks readily available charts, recordings, or licensing, creating such resources from scratch and integrating them into existing worship planning and media platforms may also be time-consuming.

Despite these challenges, lifting praises to God in a language we don’t know can be a meaningful spiritual practice that deepens our awareness of the all-encompassing and steadfast love that Christ has for his bride, the church.

To do this well congregationally, we can begin by adopting an attitude of humility and curiosity.

Before I introduce a song in an unfamiliar language, I make sure to check with a native speaker to ensure the words I want to articulate are said correctly. “My pronunciation won’t be perfect, and if I mispronounce anything, please forgive me and teach me so I can do better next time,” I often confess.

We can also choose to broaden the sources of the music we select for communal worship.

Every song is born out of a specific context. When we sing a song from another part of the world, we not only bring a particular culture’s language into our congregation but also welcome that country’s story and its lived theology in word and melody.

This is an exercise in mutuality: It moves us away from a posture that reflects a need to “sing our songs” to one that demonstrates greater openness, saying “Let’s sing each other’s songs,” argues Ian Collinge, a UK-based musician and intercultural worship trainer, in the book Arts Across Cultures: Reimagining the Christian Faith in Asia.

My organization, Proskuneo Ministries, and Songs2Serve provide ready-to-use songs in languages such as Arabic, Korean, and Spanish. The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship has a multilingual hymnal, Psalms for All Seasons, and a Spanish and English bilingual hymnal, Santo, Santo, Santo. The Global Ethnodoxology Network offers a large collection of Christian songs written by artists around the world. And the Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) is also making its songs searchable by language.

My multiethnic, multicultural worshiping community in Clarkston, Georgia, has immigrants and refugees from Myanmar, Syria, and South Sudan. We sing songs and take turns reading each verse of Scripture in Arabic, Burmese, Korean, and Spanish. We pray out loud, simultaneously, in our primary languages. And we have chicken shawarma, japchae, and mac and cheese casserole together.

Doing church in these ways might sound messy, even unappealing. But it’s a wholly intentional approach, even when cultural and linguistic differences may make interactions frustrating and cause misunderstandings to arise.

While we need more time and effort to clarify and over-communicate so that we can better understand one another’s intentions and create more-inclusive liturgies of worship, my church has tasted, seen, and experienced the joys of worshiping in languages we don’t understand with Jesus followers from around the world. For the young people in my community, doing so has become the norm.

When we witness to the diversity of the church in our rhythms of worship, we hear Christ’s prayer—“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10)—being answered. We get a foretaste of the nations bringing their beauty and honor into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:24, 26). We contribute to an aural depiction of Scripture’s declaration that every tongue will acknowledge “that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:11).

However we may fumble or feel uncomfortable when singing in a language we do not understand, we yield the entirety of our human faculties, especially our capacities for comprehension and speech, in loving surrender unto God when we do so.

And with one voice, no matter how discordant or incomprehensible, we join with our siblings in Christ to declare, Yezu azali awa. Yesu woo-ri-wa-ham gge. “Jesus is here with us.”

Jaewoo Kim serves in public relations and ministry development at Proskuneo Ministries and is the author of Willingly Uncomfortable Worship.

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News

Argentina Moves to Officially Celebrate Its Evangelicals

Sofía Castillo

Leaders are grateful for the government recognition but hope for further progress.

Vice president of Argentina, Victoria Villarruel, delivers remarks during a celebration for evangelical and Protestant churches in Buenos Aires on Monday, October 28, 2024.

Photo courtesy of ACIERA

Today, October 31, Reformation Day, evangelicals in Argentina have an extra reason to celebrate, as their country officially recognizes the National Day of Evangelical and Protestant Churches.

A bill calling for this recognition was approved by the lower Congreso de la Nación chamber, the Chamber of Deputies, last year. In April, the bill was unanimously approved in the Senate Chamber and then signed by president Javier Milei.

“Today we are not celebrating a religious holiday,” said Christian Hooft, who leads ACIERA (Alliance of Evangelical Churches in the Republic of Argentina), at an event celebrating the day last Monday. “We are celebrating the historical identity of the faith of millions of Argentine citizens.”

Argentina’s evangelicals have long sought this recognition. The country’s Supreme Court has ruled that the country has no official or state religion, and its constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but it also states that “the federal government supports the Roman Catholic apostolic faith.”

For Renata Viglione, a Christian psychologist who coauthored the current bill, the new law recognizes religious freedom rights. “We were the only faith community that did not have its own commemoration, unlike other religions. It is not a law out of gratitude for the social work [that evangelicals do in the country], but a human right as citizens,” she said. Commemorative days for Catholicism and Judaism were established in 1995 and one for Islam in 1996.

Being added to the calendar of official commemorations constitutes an evangelistic opportunity to make the church and Jesus Christ known and to proclaim the gospel, Viglione stated.

Last Monday, ACIERA celebrated the National Day of Evangelical and Protestant Churches at the Palacio Libertad building in the city of Buenos Aires. The celebration was attended by more than 1,600 people from all over the country, including Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim leaders. Tango dancers performed along with 40 musicians and 100 singers.

“On Monday, the Lord was glorified,” said Chris Swanson, senior director of crusades and development at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which will hold a Franklin Graham festival in Buenos Aires in 2025. “This event represents the new value that the evangelical church in Argentina has in the eyes of authorities, which I believe will open doors, God willing, for there to be even greater freedom, and outreach for the gospel.”

At the event, Argentine Vice President Victoria Villarruel, who is Catholic, acknowledged the evangelical community’s work in “helping the most vulnerable communities” and highlighted the social and spiritual character of the work that both Catholics and evangelicals do in the country, a task “inspired by Christian love and understanding, [which] is the fundamental pillar for building a more just and unified Argentina.”

The country’s evangelical community represents 15 percent of the country’s population according to the latest CONICET survey conducted in 2019, an increase of 9 percentage points over 2008. The same survey showed that evangelicals make up 20 percent of Argentinians between 18 and 29 years old and 26 percent of those with only a high-school education.

This bill was not the first one proposed at the Congress to honor evangelicals. Rather, it was the culmination of a 10-year process involving multiple political parties and expressions of faith, dating back to deputy Pablo Tonelli’s proposal in 2014.

Dina Rezonivosky, a deputy from the Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change) party who herself is evangelical, introduced bills in 2020 and 2022; in the latter year, deputy Vanesa Massetani (of the Unión por la Patria party) presented her own proposal.

In 2023, three more deputies from the Unión por la Patria offered additional bills. The various versions were eventually unified in a consensus bill that passed the Chamber of Deputies. Approval by the Senate and the president’s signature followed this year.

“[The National Day] is a recognition of the tireless work of pastors, leaders and Christians who anonymously visit schools, hospitals, prisons, and police stations and work for the peace of the nation,” Amilcar Matosian, who is part of the Buenos Aires Pastoral Council, told CT. “Our values for the common good, dignifying work, families and development are not seen in any event, but they are part of our culture expressed in every family and believer.”

Viglione added that the new law is the result of ten years of tireless outreach to government officials, pastors, and the community as a whole, and that it opens up greater opportunities for evangelization at the national level. “It shows us that it is not necessary to hold a political office to have a law approved. It is enough to be obedient to the Lord’s calling for each one, and to present petitions to the authorities as a citizen. We have all been called to proclaim the gospel, and that is the main objective of this law,” Viglione stated.

Leaders say there is still work to be done.

For starters, outside the city of Buenos Aires, the government does not legally recognize non-Catholic churches as churches.

“This is a first step toward the still pending modification of the Law of Worship or the creation of a new Religious Freedom Law that recognizes evangelical entities as what they are: churches,” deputy Rezinovsky told CT.

In the city of Buenos Aires, churches have achieved a more favorable legal status thanks to the modification of the Civil and Commercial Code through the Supervisory Board of Companies this year.

“In practice, we are a foundation, civil association, or development society, but nothing is further from reality,” said Matosian.

ACIERA leaders noted that another needed step is establishing evangelical chaplains in the security forces, hospitals, schools, and prisons in all Argentine provinces.

This year, the Ministry of Security of Buenos Aires created its first general evangelical police chaplaincy section, which will report to the chief of police, and invited the city’s council of evangelical pastors to appoint a representative as chaplain. Other provinces that already have evangelical chaplains are Misiones, Neuquén, and Chaco.

At Monday’s celebration, speakers highlighted the role of the evangelical church in Argentine society, including their work in rehabilitation centers and prisons and their anti-addiction and food bank ministries.

Felipe De Stefani, ACIERA’s vice president for management and planning, acknowledged that progress in these areas has been long overdue for the church in Argentina. Historically, the associaiton focused primarily on the city and province of Buenos Aires. Since Hooft became president in 2021, ACIERA has broadened its work by adding representatives from other provinces to its board of directors, as well as organizing annual meetings and other gatherings across the country.

“These factors have contributed to a deeper nationwide reach in ACIERA’s actions and have helped increase the unity of the Argentine evangelical church,” De Stefani told CT.

In his remarks on Monday, Hooft called on the church to exercise forgiveness towards those they have felt wronged by and abandon positions that cause division, which “paralyzes and inhibits us as a nation.” He added, “We must perceive and call things as they are, not get distracted, speak the truth, and leave euphemisms aside.”

Hooft also highlighted the important role of the evangelical church in seeking positive change while lamenting the poverty rate and the cultural and moral degradation Argentina is facing.

Evangelical leaders hope that Argentina is on the verge of spiritual awakening.

“Today we see a church united as never before. It engages in debate and discussion, but it works in unity for the extension of the Kingdom of God,” De Stefani said. “This portends a time of real revival in Argentina. It is coming.”

- More from Sofía Castillo

Culture

Exorcism Movies’ Terrifying Truth

Paul Marchbanks

These films are far from theological treatises. But at their best, they depict the reality of evil—and the power of Jesus’ name.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Pexels

As an uprooted sixth grader in the early ’80s, I was willing to try anything to make new friends—including attending my first horror film. The low-budget B movie about a resurrected mummy who plagues college students now seems quite tame, but it scared me out of my seat (and into the theater lobby) twice. A few years later, the adaptation of Stephen King’s werewolf-filled Silver Bullet so unsettled me that for long afterward I had to gird my loins each time I ventured into our neighborhood’s shadowy woods.

Should I have averted my eyes altogether? Or did my terror—detached from an actual, immediate threat—prepare me for real-world trauma? Can believers who have received a spirit not of fear but of “power, love and self-discipline” (2 Tim. 1:7) possibly justify toying with trepidation, even in imaginary spaces?

The poet Samuel Coleridge threw down the gauntlet in the early 19th-century culture wars when he declared that reading about “giants and magicians and genii” as a child granted his mind “a love of the Great and the Whole.” C. S. Lewis echoed these sentiments a century later. He held that the fear engendered by certain types of adventure and fantasy fiction could ennoble readers of all ages, teaching us that “immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones” exist to combat evil. Instead of tossing scary, supernatural stories into the bottomless pit, both writers contend that such tales prepare the mind to embrace deep truth.

Fictional threats—zombies, vampires, and hostile extraterrestrials—are one thing. Thrillers about real terrors—kidnappings, torture, serial killings—hit harder, having stolen their dramatic force from real-world crimes.

Tales dramatizing spiritual warfare, however, are another species entirely. For the believer, they can feel too scary—not equipping us to combat evil but overwhelming us with their power.

Exorcism movies are experiencing something of a renaissance. Several recent titles—The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), The Exorcist: Believer (2023), The Exorcism (2024), The Deliverance (2024)—coincide with the 50th anniversary of The Exorcist (1973), which splattered the silver screen with the foulest language and images imaginable. Such cinematic offerings seek not to subtly disrobe that dark expert at angelic disguise (2 Cor. 11:14) but to blazon the depredations of a leonine prowler seeking someone to devour (1 Pet. 5:8).

The boy who fled into the theater lobby now draws others toward films as a vocation. (I’m a literature and film professor.) And though I don’t teach classes that focus on horror, I do incorporate the occasional exorcism tale into my introductory film course. Features like Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (a personal favorite) take our struggle with “this dark world” as seriously as the early Christians did (Eph. 6:12).

Revisiting such fare, particularly in late October, reminds us that the “spiritual forces of evil” identified by Paul should be treated more seriously than Halloween’s flippant displays of gore and ghoulishness would suggest.

Though far from theological treatises, each of these exorcism movies does pose questions about the nature of demonic possession—about good and evil, free will and fate. If submission to God ensures that Satan will flee when resisted (James 4:7) and believers can resist any temptation they face (1 Cor. 10:13), then do demons only gain entry when invited—like the vampires in old creature features? Once they acquire a foothold, does removal require outside intervention? What role does the host play in their own emancipation?

Hollywood would have us think the answers as numerous as the directors tackling the subject. The Pope’s Exorcist configures possession like a mousetrap that springs once a vulnerable, already-traumatized innocent enters its domain. Exorcist: Believer places a little blame on its possessed adolescents for attempting to contact a deceased parent with candle and pendulum in hand but similarly avoids censuring them for the havoc they wreak once possessed. Instead of beginning in medias res, with each possession already in motion, both stories spotlight their victims’ childlike before to throw their monstrous after into greater relief.

Scripture itself provides no single pathway into possession. Readers are left to imagine how the seven demons cast from Mary Magdalene (Luke 8:2) entered her in the first place and whether any particular sins committed by the superhumanly strong tomb-dweller in Gerasenes granted Legion entry into his mind (Mark 5:1–20).

There is, however, a clear escape from demonic influence, always involving either the person or name of Christ. Whether Jesus himself casts out the demon or his disciples do so in his name, the message is the same.

Fortunately, films involving exorcisms often not only acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil but also point to the one who is able to overcome it. The question is “Who can access his power?”

Rescue traditionally rides in on the cassock of a priest armed with Scripture, holy water, and an enviable supply of conviction. In the 1973 original, faith and experience fail to prevent Father Merrin’s untimely death; he only saves young Regan by committing suicide once he’s drawn the demon into himself. The Pope’s Exorcist grants Christ a bit more power, its priestly duo effectively wielding the Word of God (Eph. 6:17) after confessing to one another those sins Satan will otherwise use against them. Once again, a priest saves an innocent via demonic absorption—but this time his partner’s invocation of Jesus’ name prevents any fatalities.

The Exorcist: Believer kicks precedent to the curb. A swelling musical score marks Father Maddox’s dramatic entrance, feigning deliverance via priest. But his efforts are abruptly interrupted when his neck is telekinetically snapped. The script’s effort at inclusivity (with help from cowriter and CT podcast guest Scott Teems) demands that salvation arrive with the help of assorted neighbors, four ideologically contrary parents, a nurse, pastors from different traditions, and a motivational speaker who vaguely invokes “the name of all holy beings” and equates “faith in each other” with faith in God.

Lee Daniels’s The Deliverance shares standard features with its forebears, including a haunted house and a couple deaths to signal the demon’s power. But it takes a hard right toward the unexpected idea that a laywoman’s faith is enough to repel the Evil One. The pastor who attempts the “deliverance” of young Dre dismisses the need for a professional intercessor, proclaiming that one need only act with the authority of Christ to drive out a demon. When she fails in her own attempt, she explains with her dying breath that she faltered due to fear.

It is left to her listener, a single mother who has long spurned religion as a “fix” every bit as addictive as the alcohol she regularly imbibes, to prove the adage that “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18) and to drive the demons from her own children. Carrying the burdens of sexual assault, emotional abuse, divorce, and financial strain has long impaired Ebony Jackson’s ability to parent her three kids. Stressed, snappish, and regularly drunk, she reacts to her children’s plights with either aggression or slurred speech. She is the last hero one would expect in an exorcism movie.

Could she also be the perfect hero? When her possessed children’s inexplicable behavior drives her to her knees for the first time in her life, the prayer that follows is dragged from the depths of her soul, just as the tortured cry “Jesus” later bursts from a frame contorted by the demon’s onslaught.

And it is enough.

Scripture offers a number of direct alternatives to fear and its maverick cousin, anxiety, including confidence (Ps. 27:3), courage (Josh. 1:9), peace (John 14:27), and delight (Ps. 94:19). Fitted together, a beautiful tableau emerges of the equipped, stalwart Christian. The Christian’s virtues are akin to a stained-glass window, translating the blinding sunlight of the Spirit into colors we can bear.

But in every rose window, lines of lead help delineate the design. Contrasting darkness makes adjacent colors pop. In the same way, fantastic, disturbing dramatizations of sin and suffering accentuate the virtues extolled by Paul in Philippians 4:8. “Whatever is true” comes into greater relief when juxtaposed against the enticing deceit of the Adversary.

Victory doesn’t require a demonology expert or priest, holy water or magical incantations. At their best, exorcism movies remind us of the Spirit-filled power available to every believer. With Christ before us, we can ourselves become the “immemorial comforters and protectors.” There’s no need to hide in the lobby.

Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at Cal Poly State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”

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