Sacred Tattoos Promise Spiritual Power. Can New Thai Christians Keep Them?

Pastors counsel believers with sak yant tattoos to let go of animistic beliefs and trust in God’s provision.

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

Chalolemporn Sawatsuk was a teenager in Kamphaeng Phet Province, in upper central Thailand, when he got his first tattoo.

The tattoo artist, a Buddhist monk, inked a pair of lizards onto the inside of his forearm, the same tattoo Chalolemporn’s father had. As he worked, the monk chanted blessings intended to imbue the tattoo with spiritual power that would increase Chalolemporn’s charisma and attractiveness. He also recited rules based on Buddhist moral teachings that the teen would have to follow to keep the power alive.

The tattoo seemed to take effect almost immediately, Chalolemporn said: Later that day, he convinced a woman to sleep with him.

Chalolemporn later received two more spiritual tattoos. Over the years, however, the enchanted images proved ineffective in keeping his life on course. In fact, his involvement in the world of illegal drugs resulted in a sentence of life imprisonment, before his talent in martial arts won him an early release and an encounter with a Christian friend led to his life transformation.

Sak yant tattoos, which date back centuries in Southeast Asia, were initially a way to enlist the help of local animistic spirits, but they later became tied to the Hindu-Buddhist yantras, or mystical geometric patterns, used during meditation. Sak yant adherents believe the tattoos secure specific benefits, including physical or spiritual protection, popularity, or success.

The intricate designs and patterns of sak yant have become popular with Thais and foreigners looking for a cool tattoo, but Christians are concerned about their spiritual implications. Thai pastors encourage new converts with sak yant tattoos, like Chalolemporn, to recognize that God has greater power than any spirit.

“[Sak yant] is visible on their body, whereas Christians don’t worship an image representing God,” explained Thanit Lokeskrawee, director of Chiang Mai Theological Seminary. “We need to have faith … in the invisible God, which really goes against the grain of Thai people.”

Skin-deep animism

Sak is the Thai word for tattoo, while yant means yantra. Historians believe the practice is at least a thousand years old, often used to protect men in battle. Although the tattoos predate Buddhism, sak yant and other animistic beliefs were incorporated into popular expressions of the religion once it took hold in Indochina.

Sak yant tattoos include various drawings, symbols, or words often written in ancient Khmer script. Adherents believe that only tattoos done by an expert who can properly perform the required chants and rituals carry spiritual efficacy. Today, sak yant artists are usually Buddhist monks or other types of holy men.

The rules that monks tell clients to follow in order to ensure the tattoo’s continued effectiveness include some seemingly arbitrary stipulations along with moral guidance. Chalolemporn, for instance, was told not to walk under an unfinished bridge. Breaking the rules supposedly saps the talisman of its power.

After receiving a tattoo, a sak yant adherent periodically participates in ceremonies intended to re-enchant the ink on their body. Every March, about 10,000 people travel to Wat Bang Phra, a temple 30 miles from Bangkok, for a festival to honor a famous deceased monk and to receive a fresh charge of magic for their tattoos. Videos of the ceremony show devotees seeming to enter a trance-like state as they jump, scream, and charge toward the stage. Many believe they are possessed by the spirits associated with their tattoos.

Decoding Thai spiritualism

Sak yant has grown in international popularity as celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Brooke Shields, and Ed Sheeran have obtained the tattoos. As a result of the increasing demand, more tattoo artists in Thailand are doing sak yant—sans monks or rituals.

In 2011, the Thai cultural ministry called for a ban on foreigners receiving religious tattoos out of concern that they were being placed on inappropriate parts of the body. In Thai culture, the head is considered holy, with lower areas of the body seen as progressively less so. Accordingly, a Thai may be offended by a sak yant tattoo on a tourist’s leg, since this is a less honorable location than the neck or upper back.

Many Westerners are drawn to the aesthetics of sak yant. However, they often struggle to understand the beliefs of Thais who use tattoos, amulets, and rituals to secure the assistance of spiritual forces.

Chris Flanders, a former missionary in Thailand and now professor of missions and intercultural service at Abilene Christian University, often compares the animistic spirit world to a technology his students are more familiar with: Wi-Fi.

Just as a cell phone is needed to connect to the invisible world of Wi-Fi signals, people whose worldview includes myriads of unseen spiritual beings that must be engaged or appeased must have the right device. For many Thais, Flanders said, the spiritual world is mysterious and scary yet also potentially useful—but only if people know how to tap into its power.

“Sak yant is a type of spiritual technology,” Flanders said. “It offers an opportunity to access the spiritual power that is all around us, but we’re just not aware because it’s invisible like Wi-Fi.”

Sak yant and the church

For Thai Christians, seeking spiritual protection or help through sak yant or other practices is clearly outside the bounds of their faith. Thai pastors say it’s not necessary for new believers to remove sak yant tattoos they got before conversion, especially since tattoo removal can be a difficult, expensive, and painful process. But even if the ink remains, pastors want to help eliminate the tattoos’ spiritual mark.

“I don’t have any problem with [Christian converts still having sak yant tattoos,] as long as they understand that the power is not in sak yant,” said Natee Tanchanpongs, lead pastor at Grace City Bangkok and a former academic dean at Bangkok Bible Seminary. “The power to protect them comes from the God of the universe who created them and is able to do more than we ask or imagine.”

Thanit, the seminary director, grew up in a Buddhist family and remembers noticing male relatives’ Sak Yant tattoos during childhood. He became a Christian after meeting a Thai evangelist while studying at a university. He has seen how Thai Christians struggle to fully let go of old ways of coping with fear or feelings of helplessness.

“When life is smooth and happy, [old beliefs] will hide,” Thanit said. “But once you get struck by a crisis, this kind of belief will float up and haunt you.”

In a pastoral role, Thanit says it is important to “discredit the influence” of sak yant tattoos and help Christians view them as simply ink patterns. But even for mature Christians who came to faith years ago, this can be a continuing challenge. Thanit isn’t always sure of the best way to help.

“I need God’s wisdom,” he said. “People in the past survived harm, fights, and wars with this kind of belief, so it’s not easy [to give it up].”

A different person

For Chalolemporn, the power and love of God provided something his three sak yant tattoos never could. As a teen, he showed promise in boxing, but he started hanging out with the wrong crowd and fell into drug addiction. When he ran out of money, he began selling drugs.

One day, Chalolemporn met another drug dealer in a rice field to settle a dispute, only to find the man armed with a sawed-off shotgun. Fearing for his life, Chalolemporn attacked, gained control of the weapon, and fired. Although he had intended only to scare the adversary away, the shot killed him.

Initially, a court sentenced Chalolemporn to death for his crime. However, the king of Thailand commuted his punishment to life imprisonment. At 19, he appeared destined to spend the rest of his days in Thailand’s harsh prison system.

While incarcerated, Chalolemporn restarted his martial arts career, competing in boxing and muay thai tournaments inside the prisons. He racked up victories and eventually became a national prison system champion. This success led to his sentence being reduced, a reward granted in Thailand to well-behaved prisoners who win martial arts competitions. At age 33, he was released.

The newly freed fighter wanted to continue his boxing career, but promoters were hesitant to work with a former death row inmate. During this time, Chalolemporn talked with a Thai Christian who suggested that he pray to God about his situation. Though the Christian faith was strange and unfamiliar to him, he and his wife, Sarunya, decided to ask God to give him a chance to compete.

Within a week, Chalolemporn was invited to enter a boxing match in China. However, when he arrived, he was told that he would not be able to fight. Discouraged and doubtful, he prayed that the fight would take place.

“If you are real, let me compete,” he remembers praying. “And then when I get back to Thailand, I’ll go to church.”

After a tense wait, he was informed that the match was back on. Since that first fight, he has continued competing in and winning international boxing and muay thai championships.

Chalolemporn Sawatsuk’s tattoos.

After returning home, Chalolemporn followed through on his promise. Another former prisoner who had become a Christian helped him find a church. From his first day at Tawipon Church in Ayutthaya, a city 50 miles north of Bangkok, he felt something he had been missing his whole life: unconditional love. The people were not judgmental of his past sins, nor were they worried about his tattoos.

“The Christians I met at church took no notice whatsoever of my sak yant tattoos,” Chalolemporn recalled. “All the people came up to me and said, It’s okay, welcome! Everyone loves you. God loves you. You have been redeemed.”

Chalolemporn says that God changed him dramatically as he learned about his new faith. Old vices gave way to an intense desire to honor his Creator.

His tattoos are still very visible, and they have even given him his nickname in the boxing ring: Kontualai, or “tattooed one.” But his belief in their power is gone. Instead, he prays to God for help and protection.

“Becoming a Christian was a really big change for me,” Chalolemporn said. “It was like becoming a different person.”

- More from James Thompson in Bangkok, Thailand

News

Died: Disgraced Southern Baptist Leader Paul Pressler

Daniel Silliman

The Texas judge behind the political strategy for the “conservative resurgence” molested and assaulted teenage boys, according to allegations eight men made in court.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Houston Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images

The things that Paul Pressler did in private changed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) radically and irreversibly.

In private, in a French café in New Orleans in 1967, Pressler planned the takeover of the largest Protestant group in America with Baptist college president Paige Patterson. He came up with the political strategy for the “conservative resurgence.”

In private, in an airport hotel in Atlanta in 1978, Pressler and Patterson gathered a group of ministers and established an informal network. They instructed those men to organize messengers to go to the SBC’s annual meeting and elect a president committed to using the position’s appointive powers to wrest control of the convention away from leaders they considered too liberal, too bureaucratic, and insufficiently committed to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

When a reporter with the Baptist Standard asked the Texas appeals court judge at the time if he was meeting with groups of clergy as part of a hardball campaign to elect the next SBC president, Pressler adamantly denied it. Then he questioned what would even count as a “meeting,” given the many possible ways you could define that word.

Then he allowed he was, in fact, doing some things in private.

In private, in a sauna at a Houston country club in the late 1970s, Pressler touched a young man’s penis, according to sworn testimony given in a lawsuit that was settled last year.

And in private, around the same time, Pressler started to molest and rape a 14-year-old, telling the teenager he taught in his Southern Baptist youth group that he was “special” and their “relationship” was special but needed to be kept secret because “no one but God would understand,” according to the allegations in the lawsuit filed in 2017.

Eight men ultimately came forward to accuse Pressler of sexual misconduct. All of them did it publicly using their names: Gareld Duane Robbins, Toby Twining, Chris Davis, Peter Wilcox, David Stripling, Sam Tejas, Mason Tabor, and Brooks Schott. The allegations stretch over decades and range from unwanted invitations to join Pressler naked in a hot tub to sexual assault.

Pressler denied all the allegations and fought the lawsuit in every way he could.

The court proceedings prompted the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News to launch an investigation of sexual abuse in the SBC. Reporters found credible allegations against 380 church leaders in 20 states and an apparently denomination-wide pattern of dismissing, diminishing, and hiding abuse.

The publication of the investigation—including the allegations against one of the architects of the conservative resurgence—hit the SBC like “the judgment of God,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, a captain in the conservative resurgence, wrote in 2018.

CT editor in chief Russell Moore, a former Southern Baptist leader who had long celebrated the triumph of the conservative resurgence, said crisis was too mild a word for the scandal. “It is an apocalypse,” he wrote.

The revelations about Pressler shattered an SBC legend that Moore and others had once eagerly believed:

Those outside the SBC world cannot imagine the power of the mythology of the Café Du Monde—the spot in the French Quarter of New Orleans where, over beignets and coffee, two men, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, mapped out on a napkin how the convention could restore a commitment to the truth of the Bible and to faithfulness to its confessional documents.

For Southern Baptists of a certain age, this story is the equivalent of the Wittenberg door for Lutherans or Aldersgate Street for Methodists. The convention was saved from liberalism by the courage of these two men who wouldn’t back down, we believed. In fact, I taught this story to my students.

Those two mythical leaders are now disgraced.

Pressler died on June 7 at the age of 94. His death was not publicly acknowledged at the SBC annual meeting held in Indianapolis a few days later. Multiple convention leaders later said they did not know he had died.

His death was first reported by Baptist News Global, an independent news outlet, after a Houston funeral home posted an online notice about his passing.

Pressler is survived by his wife, Nancy, daughters Jean Pressler Visy and Anne Pressler Csorba, and son Herman Paul Pressler IV. A memorial service was held in private.

He was born Herman Paul Pressler III on June 4, 1930. Pressler could trace his Baptist heritage back generations on both his father’s and mother’s sides. His father, Herman Paul Pressler Jr., was a lawyer who worked for the oil company Exxon. His mother, Elsie Townes Pressler, was a prominent leader in Houston’s social and civic affairs, serving on the city’s first municipal arts committee as well as the Junior League, the Women’s Auxiliary to the Houston Bar Association, the National Society of Colonial Dames, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Harris County Heritage Society. She was also a founding member of the family’s Baptist church and traced her ancestry to John Leigh Townes, a respected preacher known as “the Major” in northern Alabama in the early 1800s.

Pressler wrote in his autobiography that his favorite memories of growing up were duck and dove hunting with his family and riding horses on his grandfather’s ranch in the Texas Hill Country.

He grew up in the Baptist church and had a conversion experience at age 10. He bowed his head in a pew and accepted that he was a sinner.

“Jesus Christ shed His blood to pay for my sin,” Pressler wrote.

His family was not all overjoyed by his conversion, however. Pressler overheard his father telling his mother they should have become Episcopalian before their son came to identify so strongly with the Baptists. The elder Pressler had stopped going to Baptist services (though he still sometimes attended Sunday school) after a minister had “run off with a woman from the church.”

It was an early lesson for the younger Pressler about the long shadow cast by sexual scandals.

But Pressler came to believe that the real threat to Baptists was not the kind of sin and hypocrisy that hurt the faith of his father, but theological liberalism. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire at 16 and was offended when a local minister dismissed the idea of personal salvation as a backward cultural phenomenon peculiar to the South.

When Pressler went to Princeton University a few years later, he clashed with a chaplain who told him that large parts of the Bible were not relevant to modern life and with a professor who said some of the gospels were unreliable.

Pressler was not swayed in the slightest by these men. He graduated an avowed enemy of liberals, which he defined as anyone who thought the Bible contained errors or that it reflected, in any way, the time and culture in which it was written.

“Perhaps it was a good thing for me to be exposed to radical liberal theology,” he later said. “I promised God I would not sit back any longer.”

Despite his interest in theology and church politics, Pressler decided to go into law and politics. He attended law school at the University of Texas at Austin and ran for a seat in the state legislature while he was still a student and won.

Pressler took the lead on a number of legislative issues in the late 1950s, according to contemporary reports in Texas newspapers. He proposed giving cities the power to set curfews for people under 18. He tried to loosen regulations on drive-through banks. And he pushed to reduce the amount the state spent on old-age assistance, a welfare program that gave pensioners $5.25 per month.

At the time he was a member of Houston’s Second Baptist Church.

In 1970, he was appointed a judge. From that position, he believed he had the independence to lead an attack on the “liberals” in the Southern Baptist Convention.

“Because pastors in the churches were in sensitive positions, their identities would be protected as long as possible,” Patterson, the co-architect of the conservative resurgence, wrote in his book Anatomy of a Reformation. “Pressler, by then a judge, and I, as president of Criswell College and associate pastor at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, would draw whatever public attack might come.”

The key to the strategy, as Pressler laid it out for conservative ministers he met with privately in at least 15 states, was organizing a voting bloc at the annual conventions. The messengers needed to vote for Pressler and Patterson’s candidate of choice. That person would then appoint only conservatives to the boards of SBC entities. Over a period of about ten years, the conservatives would have control over every institution, completely taking power from the leaders that Pressler called “denomicrats.”

Pressler and Patterson also coached conservative ministers to stay focused on the issue of biblical inerrancy. Though there were important differences on other theological issues, the doctrine of the Bible was the best ground to fight on.

“We shouldn’t sit around and let the theological left-wing tail wag a conservative dog,” Pressler said. “I think it’s about time that basic Baptist theology flavors the boards of our institutions. If that gets anybody in trouble, so be it.”

Pressler liked to quote his ancestor, John Leigh Townes, who led a fight against the Stone-Campbell movement in the 1830s. Conservative Baptists needed to do their duty—“with meekness and mildness if you can, but forcibly if you must.”

Pressler and Patterson’s first candidate for the SBC presidency was Adrian Rogers, pastor of a Memphis megachurch. In 1979, he won on the first ballot, the first time that had happened in 120 years.

Pressler would later compare the convention fight to the pivotal Civil War battle at Gettysburg, when the Union Army stopped Robert E. Lee and forced the Confederates to retreat.

“But this time,” the judge said, “the right side won.”

Rogers’s victory was followed by the elections of fellow conservatives Bailey Smith, Jimmy Draper, Charles Stanley, Rogers again, Jerry Vines, and Morris Chapman, who won with 57 percent of the vote in 1990.

Some conservatives had qualms about Pressler’s political tactics. He was quoted as saying he was “going for the jugular” of the SBC and that he was more than willing to attack people who were conservatives themselves if they did anything to protect liberals. He plied a seminary student who worked as one of his opponent’s drivers for information and secretly recorded the conversations.

When questioned about the ethics of that, he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram it was routine to tape conversations in American politics.

“This Paul Pressler has caused more trouble than anybody I’ve ever heard of,” a pastor from North Carolina said at the time. “Everywhere there is suspicion.”

The conservative resurgence kept racking up victories, though, and opposition to Pressler faded away. As his political strategy moved from triumph to triumph, however, allegations about his private sexual misconduct kept threatening to come out.

While he was organizing the vote for Rogers, he was fired from a youth ministry position at an independent Presbyterian church (where he worked while maintaining his membership with the Southern Baptists). An 18-year-old had told the pastor that Pressler assaulted him in a sauna.

“I was absolutely not aroused,” the man later said in a sworn deposition. “I froze. … I was naked and trapped—miles from home—and I needed to get to safety.”

Then, in 1989, Pressler was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to head his administration’s Office of Government Ethics. Before he could be confirmed, Pressler withdrew.

He told Baptist Press he declined because of family obligations and his commitment to serving the SBC. Senior officials in the FBI told a different story. They said they uncovered “ethics problems” during the required background check. Patterson quietly assured allies that the issue was spurious accusations of homosexuality, which he claimed were completely unfounded gossip and slander.

No one in the conservative resurgence or SBC leadership appears to have investigated any further.

In 2004, the dark allegations threatened to come out again. A student in Pressler’s youth ministry at Houston’s First Baptist Church reported that Pressler pressured him to strip and spend time with him naked in a hot tub. A church committee reprimanded Pressler, telling him that a “vast majority” of the congregation would consider “naked behavior” to be “morally and spiritually inappropriate.” However, the church leadership also promised to protect “the cause of Christ and your reputation by not disclosing our conversation or other information pertaining to this matter outside of our committee.”

Pressler left First Baptist a short time later and returned to Second. The one church said it did not inform the other of the allegations.

That same year, Gareld Duane Rollins threatened to expose Pressler and go public with allegations of abuse stretching back decades. Pressler arranged a legal settlement, giving the man $1,500 a month for 25 years in exchange for a confidentiality agreement.

Rollins accepted, and the allegations were not made public. In 2017, however, after discussions with a prison psychiatrist, he changed his mind and filed a civil suit seeking more than $1 million in damages.

A Southern Baptist lawyer close to Pressler said the charges were made up “to extort money from the Southern Baptist Convention.” A total of eight men filed affidavits with allegations of sexual misconduct, though, and even those conservatives who had long praised Pressler as a hero of the faith recoiled.

The scandal has left the Southern Baptists deeply divided. Some see abuse reform as a pressing, urgent issue. Others consider it a distraction or camouflage for efforts to fundamentally change the polity of the SBC.

Current Baptist leaders and those who carry the flag of the conservative resurgence today were mostly silent at the news of Pressler’s death. Several of the men who accused him of sexual abuse, however, expressed relief.

Chris Davis, who is now a pastor, said he was on vacation at the beach and “joyfully overwhelmed by the outpouring of texts, calls, and posts from #SBCToo survivors, SBC pastors who care about abuse reform, and leaders driven from the SBC because of their principled stand.”

When Rollins heard the news, he started talking about the muscle car he had wanted as a kid. He told a Texas Tribune reporter that for the first time since he was abused at 14, he felt like better days were ahead.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

East Asians Leave Childhood Religion Most in World, but Remain Spiritual

Isabel Ong

(UPDATED) Pew survey of more than 10,000 adults in Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam examines Christians’ and Buddhists’ beliefs, practices, and affinity to other traditions.

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

The rate of religious conversion in East Asia is among the highest in the world: Half of adults in Hong Kong and South Korea have left the religion they were brought up in for another religion or no religion. Among Christians, substantially more adults in those two places left the faith than those who converted to Christianity. The region also has the highest levels of deconversion. More than a third of adults in Hong Kong and South Korea say they now no longer identify with any religion.

Yet at least 4 in 10 adults in East Asia and Vietnam who are religiously unaffiliated still believe in unseen beings or a god.

And about 80 percent of Taiwanese and Japanese adults say they burned incense to honor their ancestors in the past year.

These are among the findings of “Religion and Spirituality in East Asian Societies,” a massive report released today by Pew Research Center. While few people in the region pray daily or say religion is very important in their lives, many “continue to hold religious or spiritual beliefs and to engage in traditional rituals,” said Pew researchers.

Surveys of 10,390 adults in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—defined here as East Asia—and Vietnam were conducted between June and September last year.

Although Vietnam is located in Southeast Asia, Pew included the nation in this survey due to its adoption of Confucian traditions, its historic ties to China, and its embrace of Mahayana, a branch of Buddhism common across East Asia. (Last September, Pew released an in-depth survey on religion in Southeast Asia, highlighting six nations.)

Researchers acknowledged the complexity of measuring “religion” in the region, as this word often denotes organized, hierarchical forms of worship rather than more “traditional Asian forms of spirituality.” Translators of the surveys, which were conducted in seven languages through phone calls in the East Asian countries and face-to-face interviews in Vietnam, were also asked to choose the most generic possible word for “god” and to avoid terms that referred exclusively to a divine entity from a particular religion.

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Pew found that adults with no religious affiliation make up the largest share of the population in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Vietnam. In Japan and Taiwan, Buddhism closely beat out the nones.

Christians make up 32 percent of the population in South Korea, 20 percent in Hong Kong, 10 percent in Vietnam, 7 percent in Taiwan, and 2 percent in Japan. (Because the sample size of Japanese Christians is so small, Pew did not include the attitudes of this group in its findings.)

Pew researchers concluded that, while people say religion is not important in their lives, “when we measure religion in these societies by what people believe and do, rather than whether they say they have a religion, the region is more religiously vibrant than it might initially seem.”

Religion’s fluidity in East Asia was the report’s “most striking characteristic,” said Fenggang Yang, founding director of Purdue University’s Center on Religion and the Global East. Yang was an expert adviser to the Pew report.

“When they must choose a single [religious identity] … many East Asians report no religious identity, even though they may hold religious beliefs and practices,” Yang said. “The beliefs and practices may be provided by more than one institutionalized religion. This has been the East Asian norm for a long time.”

Christianity in East Asia

In the region, South Korea has the largest share of Christians who identify as born-again or evangelical at 51 percent. Christians over the age of 35 are more likely to identify as such compared to younger believers (54% versus 38%). South Korean women and Christians without a college degree are also more likely to describe themselves as evangelical.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of Vietnamese Christians, 36 percent of Hong Kong Christians, and a mere 8 percent of Taiwanese Christians describe themselves as born-again or evangelicals.

The low percentage of evangelicals in Taiwan may not provide a fully accurate picture as “a lot of Christians in Taiwan … don’t really know the theological or denominational differences” between labels like “evangelical” or “charismatic,” said Shirley Lung, sociology professor at the University of Denver.

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Christians are the most likely group to consider religion “very important.” About a third or more of believers across East Asia say this, along with two-thirds of Vietnamese Christians. Meanwhile, less than 20 percent of Buddhists in East Asia say religion is very important.

Most of the Christians surveyed say that they generally go to church, with 80 percent of believers in Vietnam responding they attend weekly, compared to 46 percent of their counterparts in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The newness of Christianity in Vietnam compared to other places in the region may be why church attendance there is high, says Hien Vu, the Institute for Global Engagement’s Vietnam program manager.

Vietnamese Christians “have had strong personal experiences of positivity through their faith, which has helped them build strong faith in Christ and at the same time, strong connections and trust with fellow believers,” she said.

Roughly 9 in 10 Christians surveyed say they pray to Jesus Christ. Compared to followers of other religions and the religiously unaffiliated, Christians are most likely to pray at least once a day: About half of Christians in Vietnam and South Korea and 40 percent of believers in Taiwan and Hong Kong say they do so.

Christians are also more likely to ponder existential questions on the meaning of life or to experience wonder about the universe, compared to Buddhists or the religiously unaffiliated. A majority of South Korean Christians (62%) think about this at least monthly.

South Korean Christians are the only ones in the region to have a wide age gap when it comes to who identifies as Christian: 35 percent of older adults compared to a quarter of younger adults.

In terms of evangelism efforts, most Hong Kong Christians say it is acceptable to proselytize (82%), while most Christians in South Korea oppose it (70%).

The majority of adults in the region did not attend a school with religious affiliations, except for in Hong Kong, where half of the adults went to a school that is associated with a Catholic or other Christian church. This is due to the large number of church-run schools in Hong Kong that proliferated under British rule.

Christians in East Asia are more likely to have attended Christian schools than Buddhists are to have attended schools with Buddhist ties. For instance, 22 percent of Taiwanese Christians attended a school associated with a Christian or Catholic church, compared to 10 percent of Taiwanese Buddhists who attended a school connected to a Buddhist organization.

The Pew report finding that more people in Hong Kong and South Korea identified with Christianity rather than Buddhism may seem counterintuitive to some, Yang said.

“People in the East or West commonly hold the stereotype that East Asia is predominantly Buddhist,” he said. “It is time to abandon it.” Religious switching

Many people across the region now claim a different religious identity from the one they were raised in. Pew researchers measured the rates of “religious switching” between major world religions, such as between Buddhism and Christianity, not within a tradition (for instance, between Catholicism and Protestantism).

Religious switching has led to a nearly 10 percent drop in the number of Christians in Hong Kong and South Korea. In both places, roughly 1 in 10 adults who were raised in a different religious tradition or who had no prior religious identity now profess faith in Jesus.

Yet, at the same time, a substantially greater number (17 percent in Hong Kong and 19 percent in South Korea) have left their childhood faith of Christianity for another religion or no religion.

These findings indicate that Hong Kong is an “open society” where religious affiliation is not a determining factor for strong social cohesion, said Wai Luen Kwok, associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. As there are many Christian schools in the city, “young students may receive religious education other than that of their families and may switch to another religion.”

Churches ought to find out why people are dissatisfied with the faith and choose to leave it, said Pan Chiu Lai, philosophy of religion professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Some people may be attracted to a “modernized” form of Buddhism flourishing in East Asia that promotes meditation or mindfulness, vegetarianism, and “a Buddhist worldview (without a Creator God) as a more ‘reasonable’ worldview compatible with modern sciences,” he said.

Pew’s findings on the large number of South Koreans who have left Christianity for another religion or no religion corresponds with a survey that Chaeyong Chong conducted recently, which showed that “Protestantism was the most common previous religion among the unaffiliated in South Korea,” according to the professor of social religion at Fuller Theological Seminary.

The number of people who identify as Protestant but do not attend church—known as “Canaan” Christians in South Korea—is also rising, said Chong. Their numbers have nearly tripled in 10 years, from 11 percent in 2012 to 29 percent in 2023.

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Overall, Taiwan and Vietnam are the only two places where Christianity has increased because of religious switching. In Taiwan, 15 percent of Christians were raised Buddhists. The percentage of Buddhists have also dropped in Hong Kong and South Korea by 12 and 15 percentage points respectively, and by 10 percentage points in Japan.

Vu, the Vietnam program manager, sees the high rate of religious switching in the region as hopeful because it “indicates a search for something greater than oneself and a quest for meaningful ways of living.”

Rates of religious switching in the world

Yet, the biggest winner of religious switching is the no religion group, which grew by 30 percentage points in Hong Kong and South Korea as well as nearly 20 percentage points in Taiwan and Japan. In Vietnam, the group actually saw a net loss: 55 percent of Vietnamese said they were raised without a religion, while 48 percent identify with it now.

Hong Kong and South Korea have the two highest rates of disaffiliation in the world. In Hong Kong, 37 percent of the population left their childhood religion and now no longer identify with any religion, while South Korea comes close behind with 35 percent.

“Koreans are more instrumentally religious, meaning that they use religion to get what they want rather than being interested in religion itself,” Chong said. “Add to this the fact that religious people (pastors and clergy) are often found to be involved in various social problems or to be immoral, and you have a recipe for disappointment in religion.”

In terms of how “sticky” a religious group is, or how good it is at retaining its members, Christians have an exceptionally high rate of retention in Vietnam (95%), while the East Asian countries range from 40 to 60 percent.

Affinity with other religions and traditions

Adults who say they have no religious affiliation make up about half or more of adults in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Vietnam. Japan and Taiwan also have a significant share of religiously unaffiliated respondents, at 42 percent and 27 percent respectively.

This group of people are least likely to say religion is very important in their lives. Yet many feel a personal connection to Buddhism or an Indigenous religion. For example, at least a third of religiously unaffiliated adults in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan say they feel connected to a Buddhist way of life.

Across the region, more than half of all adults in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan say they feel connected to at least one tradition besides their own.

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In South Korea, a majority of Christians, Buddhists, and the unaffiliated feel connected to the Confucian way of life. Meanwhile in Taiwan, a quarter of Christians and about 40 percent of Buddhists and the religiously unaffiliated say they feel connected to the Daoist way of life.

Christians’ affinity to other religious and philosophical traditions in the region is a positive finding as it “may reflect that many of them do not adopt a fundamentalist [or] exclusivist attitude towards other religions,” said Lai. Belief in the spiritual realm

Across East Asia and Vietnam, respondents are more inclined to say they believe in unseen beings, such as deities or spirits, rather than in a god. They are also most likely to say that mountains, rivers, or trees possess their own spirits, as opposed to believing that spirits exist in human-built landscapes and physical objects.

Education levels have a surprising impact on these beliefs. Respondents with higher levels of education, said Pew researchers, are more likely than those with less education to believe in unseen beings. Eight in ten college-educated Hong Kong adults say this, compared with those with less education (64%).

In South Korea, Christians are most likely to profess belief in unseen beings. Eighty percent of South Korean believers say so, compared to 62 percent of Buddhists and 41 percent who are unaffiliated. In other places like Taiwan and Hong Kong, Buddhists were more likely to say they believe in it than Christians. Christians are the largest group to believe in the existence of angels and demons. In South Korea, for example, more Christians than Buddhists say that angels or helpful deities exist (69% versus 54%) and that demons or evil deities exist (63% versus 47%).

They are also most likely to say that both heaven and hell exist, although there is a stronger belief in the former.

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The proportion of the religiously unaffiliated who say they believe in unseen beings ranges from 39 to 73 percent across the region.

Many in this group also continue to make food and drink offerings to care for their ancestors, with 92 percent of Vietnamese adults saying they have done so in the past year. At the same time, nearly all Vietnamese burn incense to honor their ancestors, along with 80 percent of Japanese and Taiwanese adults.

Religiously unaffiliated Taiwanese adults who engage in these practices may do so as a form of respect, said Lung, the sociology professor. “My guess is that this is something cultural, not necessarily something religious, that individuals have done since they were kids,” she said.

Belief in miracles, karma, fate, rebirth, and nirvana

People with higher educational qualifications in Hong Kong are more likely to profess belief in miracles than those with lower levels of education (65% versus 55%), Pew researchers found.

Hong Kong Christians ranked highest (85%) in saying that miracles exist, as did a substantial majority of Christians in Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam.

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Belief in karma is also prevalent across the region. While Buddhists are most likely to believe it exists, the majority of Christians in Vietnam (71%), Hong Kong (68%), and Taiwan (64%) agree. Christians in these regions are also likely to say they believe in fate.

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A sizable proportion of Christians also ascribe to beliefs in rebirth and nirvana.

Thirty-five percent of Hong Kong Christians believe that humans can be reborn—the Buddhist teaching of samsara—while 42 percent of believers in Hong Kong say they believe in nirvana, the Buddhist concept of liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

Relationship between religion and society

The Pew survey also measured the extent to which respondents agreed that religion is helpful to society in providing meaning and purpose in their lives, and that religion offers guidance to people to “do the right thing and treat other people well.”

Most respondents agreed with these statements, with Vietnam and Taiwan gathering more positive responses than other places. Japanese adults were least likely to agree.

Christians were a somewhat more likely than other groups to affirm these statements. Eighty-nine percent of Hong Kong Christians say religion helps inform and improve ethical behavior, compared to 78 percent of Buddhists and 76 percent of religiously unaffiliated people, Pew said.

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In terms of whether religious leaders should be involved in politics, people in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan were least supportive.

In all of the polled places, most respondents felt that religious leaders should not become politicians. Many also did not think they should not talk publicly about which politicians and parties they support.

Observing the remarkable changes in religious identification in the region, Pew researchers asked, “How meaningful is religious affiliation in Asia? Do the religious labels even matter?”

Pew believes they still do: “How people describe their present religious affiliation and their childhood affiliation tends to correspond with their level of religious belief and practice.”

Yang, the Purdue University sociologist, added that he doesn’t think people should “read too much into the finding that the most common religion is ‘no religion’ in East Asia,” he said.

“‘No religion’ has become a growing and concerning phenomenon in the West, but it has been a traditional phenomenon in East Asia because religious identity is not always the most important,” he said. Other new religious trends in the West, such as Sheilaism (which involves mixing elements from multiple religions into one’s spiritual beliefs), have also been common in East Asia for centuries, Yang added. “Learning about religion in East Asia may help to shed light on current religious change in the West,” he said.

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News

Sunday Silence: Gateway Church Doesn’t Tell Congregation About Historic Abuse Allegations

Kate Shellnutt

According to the Texas megachurch, founder Robert Morris properly disclosed his misconduct and has had “no other moral failures” since he touched a child in the 1980s.

Robert Morris last preached at Gateway Church on June 3.

YouTube screengrab / Gateway Church

Update: Robert Morris has resigned from Gateway, according to a statement released Tuesday, June 18, from its elder board.

Gateway Church did not address allegations of past abuse—or “moral failure”—by its senior pastor, Robert Morris, when it gathered to worship this weekend, just a couple days after a woman who said he molested her starting at age 12 in the 1980s shared her account online.

The Southlake, Texas–based megachurch made a last-minute change so that its executive pastor, Kemtal Glasgow, could take the stage instead of the guest speaker, Albert Tate, who was scheduled as a part of Gateway’s summer series and who was himself placed on leave last year by his church in California over inappropriate text messaging.

Glasgow, who said he was on his way to church when he got the call that he would be filling in that day, preached about patience, listening, and waiting on the Lord. His message was broadcast across Gateway’s 10 campuses, which draw around 25,000 people in-person each week. He did not mention Morris or any abuse allegations.

Morris, 62, founded Gateway in 2000, and it has grown to become one of the biggest megachurches in the US. He also has a global following, thanks to his programs broadcast on Christian TV and radio. Morris formerly served as a faith advisor to President Trump and had been an advisor for Mark Driscoll’s new church.

Nondenominational and charismatic, Gateway is one of the top producers of evangelical worship music. Singer Kari Jobe served as its previous worship leader, and Gateway Worship music was streamed over 300 million times last year alone. On Sunday, the congregation opened with one of its own hits, singing “Praise the Lord.”

Southlake’s campus pastor, Lorena Valle, also did not bring up the scandal when she spoke to the congregation. A recording of Sunday’s service was posted on the church’s YouTube channel. Comments were disabled.

Gateway did acknowledge the accusations in a statement to media including The Christian Post, saying the church had known of the allegations. Elders wrote that Morris had “been open and forthright about a moral failure he had over 35 years ago when he was in his twenties and prior to him starting Gateway Church.”

The statement came after an Oklahoma woman, Cindy Clemishire, shared her story on The Wartburg Watch on Friday. She told the blog that Morris stayed with her family in Tulsa while working as a youth evangelist and preacher in his early 20s and that he invited her into his room and touched her under her clothing and underwear when she was 12.

Clemishire said that the behavior continued over a four-year span and escalated to an attempt to have intercourse in his car when she was 16. Morris was married at the time and had a child.

In a statement to The Christian Post, Morris said, “When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying. It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years.”

According to Morris, he confessed and repented in 1987, when he was on staff at Shady Grove Church, which later became part of Gateway. Gateway stated that Morris had been subject to a two-year restoration process, including “professional counseling and freedom ministry counseling,” and that since implementing accountability measures, there have been “no other moral failures” in his life.

Clemishire said her father was angry at Morris when she told him about the situation and that he demanded the young pastor get out of ministry. According to her story in The Wartburg Watch, she said she later sought a settlement in 2005 to help cover counseling costs but refused the offer from Morris’s attorney since it included an NDA.

A former pastor at Gateway spoke out on X to urge the church to look beyond Morris’s alleged behavior to the bigger pattern of abuse by Christian leaders.

“The cycle is one that is a much bigger picture than just ‘moral failures’ and the debate about ‘restoration.’ It is a cycle of out of control power dynamics, and manipulation,” wrote Bob Hamp, a licensed therapist who served as the executive pastor of pastoral care at Gateway over a decade ago. “It is a cycle about belief systems in the church and the culture which set us up to support abusive people.”

Morris hasn’t shared a response with his congregation or on social media; he hasn’t posted since Clemishire’s story was published. CT has reached out to both Gateway and Morris for further comment.

The Fort Worth-area megachurch has not indicated that Morris will be subject to additional review or discipline as a result of Clemishire’s disclosure. Elders believed “the matter has been properly disclosed to church leadership” and referred to it as resolved.

The allegations are similar to recent accusations against Mike Bickle, founder of International House of Prayer Kansas City. Earlier this year, a woman came forward with allegations that Bickle began to abuse her in the 1980s when she was 14. The ministry cut ties with Bickle in late 2023 and has since closed.

In many places, the statute of limitations prevents criminal cases from going forward when victims disclose decades-old abuse, but more states—like Louisiana and Washington—are amending laws to allow civil suits from victims of child abuse.

Experts say victims of sexual abuse often take the guilt upon themselves and cannot see themselves as victims until years later. Young women and girls have historically risked being blamed for tempting ministers; Clemishire says she was “forgiven” by Morris’s wife after the story came to light.

Children cannot consent to sexual activity, however. And there’s a further power dynamic when clergy are involved. More experts view the relationships that were once deemed “affairs” as nonconsensual and abusive.

The way we talk about abuse by pastors is significant, according to Hamp, the former Gateway pastor.

“Take these three dynamics: the special leader, the mishandling of sin, and the minimizing labels laden with inaccurate implication, and the entire culture will fight about who was wrong and who should be forgiven and in doing will leave the dangerous dynamics in place. And it will happen again. And it will happen again. And it will happen again,” he said.

“Paul makes it clear that predators should be put out of the church. He does not distinguish which ones should and should not be based on position or popularity.”

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Theology

Bavinck Warned that Without Christianity, Racism and Nationalism Thrive

N. Gray Sutanto

The Dutch theologian argued the biblical worldview is fundamentally incompatible with ethnocentrism.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye

It’s no secret that Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck has enjoyed a renaissance in the past few years, as James Eglinton also pointed out in a previous piece for CT.

Ever since the English translation of Bavinck’s landmark work, Reformed Dogmatics, was released in 2008, there’s been a constant stream of fresh readings of his life and thought. More recently, new translations of lesser known but no less important texts include his Christian Worldview, Christianity and Science, and Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion; and new editions have been published of Philosophy of Revelation, based on his 1908 Stone Lectures, and The Wonderful Works of God.

Theologians like me are also rediscovering the neo-Calvinist tradition shaped by Bavinck and his fellow Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, and examining how these thinkers might engage with cultural issues today, including our nation’s reckoning with racism. And while many have recently (and rightly) criticized Kuyper’s checkered legacy on this issue, they have often neglected Bavinck’s contributions on the subject, which many scholars see as an improvement on Kuyper.

Bavinck’s assessment has enduring lessons for American Christians living in a polarized political climate. Similar to Bavinck’s own context of 19th-century Europe, those in the US today are confronted by the challenges of living in an increasingly post-Christian culture. This has led to heated debates on the identity of America, Christian nationalism, and how we can all find common ground amid our substantial differences.

Bavinck and Kuyper’s neo-Calvinist Christian worldview, for instance, affirmed the diversity of reality but saw that this diversity reflects a greater unity. Since the Creator is Triune, they observed, the world often conforms to patterns of unities-in-diversities. Yet Bavinck believed this motif held further implications for humanity itself.

As I’ve shown elsewhere, Bavinck argued that the image of God (imago Dei) refers not only to us as individuals but to humanity as a whole. As theologian Richard Mouw writes, Bavinck articulates how the image of God unfolds itself “in the rich diversity of humankind spread over many places and times,” as the human race disperses across the globe and develops organically differentiated cultures, languages, and contexts. These differences are not ossified or static but coalesce in beautiful and surprising ways through the Spirit-wrought union of God’s kingdom.

In short, Bavinck believed the glory of God is revealed more clearly through humanity’s diversity, and this diversity is held together by a common confession of Jesus as Lord. The global church is a corporate people from every tribe and tongue—a renewed humanity fulfilling its telos under Christ’s Lordship.

But Bavinck coupled this positive vision with harsh warnings against racism and nationalism. In two texts, Christian Worldview and Philosophy of Revelation, Bavinck anticipated the rise of Eurocentric nationalism. In a forthcoming book, I explore how Bavinck detected these developments in German philosophy at the turn of the 20th century—which eventually set the stage for Hitler’s regime, World War II, and the Holocaust.

Bavinck attributed these ideological changes to the decline of Christian faith in Europe. When humans cease to worship God, they will substitute divine with creaturely realities (Rom. 1:25). Thus, he said, any society that departs from the Christian faith will naturally nurture racism and nationalism.

If God is not the source of defining what is true, good, and beautiful, then morality must be grounded in humanity. And if humanity is not “generic” or “universal” but diverse and ever evolving, then one must decide which humanity at which point in history becomes the standard for moral evaluation. In Bavinck’s context, that benchmark was Aryan nationalism (which he referred to as “pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, and so on”), which saw the Aryan race as the apex of universal humanity and therefore the embodiment of normativity.

Bavinck cites some of the “eloquent” early thought leaders whose emerging racist ideology influenced Bavinck’s contemporaries—and whose ideas eventually led to reconfiguring Jesus himself as the ultimate symbol of the Aryan race.

Since every religion looks to a historical figure as the source for their revelation, the new German nationalism needed to refashion Jesus into “the purest type of the Aryan or Germanic race” in order to “retain” his authority. “Jesus did not come from Israel but from the Aryans,” they determined, because all other and past cultures are primitive, including the Jews. “How foolish is the one who believes Jesus was not a Jew, that he was an Aryan” writes Bavinck, “and that the Bible, in which every heretic finds his proof text, gives the evidence for the matter.”

This “revival of the race consciousness” was further reinforced, according to Bavinck, by the historical view many philosophers held in his time: that each successive stage of human history ascended to their present age, which (conveniently) was depicted as the most evolved and cultured. Thus, the Aryan stock is seen as the dominant and superior race to which all the greatest achievements of Europe (and hence the world) could be credited.

The result, Bavinck observed, was that the “so-called pure historical view turns into the most biased construction of history.” By locating ethics within their own history and projecting their culture as if it were the absolute norm, the Germans posited themselves as the arbitrator and pinnacle of history and eclipsed all other nations and people groups. They untethered their “master race” from accountability to a transcendent revelation of God, which allowed them to inflict oppressive coercion on all “inferior” races and reject any other culture from being a source of correction.

These ideas were coupled with the emerging practice of eugenics—where evolutionary theory and natural science were applied to the notion of creating a superhuman race (Übermensch). What if, for example, the process of natural selection by “survival of the fittest” could be accelerated by winnowing out genetic weaknesses to “purify and perfect” the human race? Thus, philosophers, scientists, and psychologists joined together in the goal to deliver humanity from its miseries—or, as Bavinck put it, “to improve the racial qualities of humankind in an artificial way.”

Bavinck connects these trending theories to the aspirations of German philosophers to present themselves as the bearers of some form of eschatological salvation to the world. He observes that these thinkers do not merely reject Christianity because they perceive it to be false, but because it is seen as bad for the future’s development: “If modern culture is to advance, it must wholly reject the influence of Christianity and break completely with the old worldview.”

Why? As Bavinck explains, whereas modern human hope was believed to be wholly “this-worldly,” Christianity was seen by his European contemporaries as “indifferent to this life,” since its hope ultimately lies in an otherworldly kingdom, eternity, heaven, and God. In other words, hope in tangible human achievements is surer than hope in intangible divine realities.

Seeing a particular human society or nation as the primary bearer of ethical civilization, Bavinck reasoned, fills the eschatological void left by removing Christian hope from modern society. If moral law is not found in the transcendent but in the immanent, then so is heaven. In this case, a utopian society is modeled by whichever nationality represents the “height” of humanity.

These ideological developments, which were all in vogue at the time, paint a bleak picture indeed. What was Bavinck’s response—and what alternative did he propose?

In his Philosophy of Revelation, Bavinck points out the insurmountable problems with transposing the scientific principles of naturalistic evolution onto the social history of humanity. This instinct reflects a form of monism, he argued, which reduces the rich diversity of created life into singular uniformity—as if an explanation that works well in one sphere can be used for all areas of life.

Attempts to craft a grand historical narrative often privileges one nation or people group over others, he further argued, and ignores the unity of the human race across time and space. More than that, claiming that each century is intrinsically and holistically better than the previous one fails to acknowledge that “high civilization” existed in antiquity, even more advanced than us in some ways, and that the same vices of ancient times still plague our contemporary cultures.

Instead of a linear story of progressive development culminating in one nation or master philosophy, Bavinck believed that history is pluriform, a rich and multifaceted maze, and that it recounts a united humanity—across all of its particularities, locations, and time periods.

And to avoid the supremacist instinct to elevate one nation or phase of history, Bavinck argued, the historical sciences must be rooted in Christian theism. That’s because historians require a unique, divine “revelation” to assert that “all creatures … are embraced, and are held together by one leading thought, by one counsel of God.” To believe in the unity of humanity, which is the “presupposition of all of history,” is a claim “made known to us only by Christianity.”

Rather than seeing one culture or ethnicity as the universal expression of true humanity, Christianity for Bavinck teaches that “the unity of humanity does not exclude but rather includes the differentiation of humanity in race, in character, in attainment, in calling, and in many other things.”

Bavinck writes that this “variety has been destroyed by sin and changed into all kinds of opposition” ever since “the unity of humanity was dissolved into a multiplicity of peoples and nations.” But instead of seeking the “false unity” of a worldly monism, preserving humanity’s rich differentiation requires that the “unity of all creation is not sought in the things themselves but transcendently … in a divine being, in his wisdom and power, in his will and counsel.”

In other words, affirming Christianity means rejecting humanly fabricated uniformity and embracing divinely ordained diversity. Only salvation in Christ and fellowship in his Spirit, divine revelation and redemption, can restore and achieve the ideal of humanity’s true, organic unity in diversity.

As human beings, our unity and differentiation, identity and dignity, are all ultimately secured in Christ—who Bavinck calls the “kernel” that revealed the “plan, progress and aim” of history, and who evacuated our sinful tendency to exalt ourselves as the historical ideal. In other words, history’s center, aim, progress, and ultimate end is not found in humanity but in Christ.

The only worldview that “answers the diversity and richness of the world,” writes Bavinck, is one that insists history is governed by divine will. Not only that, but we must believe God willingly entered into the world “historically,” in the person of Jesus Christ, to lift it “up to the heights” of “the kingdom of heaven.”

The heavenly utopia we seek, then, is not a result of human historical progress but a divine work of God: “If there is ever to be a humanity one in heart and one in soul, then it must be born out of return to the one living and true God.”

In today’s increasingly polarized age, Bavinck’s message of humanity’s unified diversity is more needed than ever. Instead of assuming our worldview is ultimate or superior to those in other contexts, Bavinck reminds us of the prophetic witness of God’s universal message of reconciliation embodied in Jesus Christ.

Bavinck’s anthropological reflections are certainly not perfect. He remains a man of the 19th century and, at times, reflects analyses or language that 21st-century readers would reject (for instance, his language of “high” and “low” cultures). But it’s remarkable that, at the turn of the 20th century, Bavinck foresaw the dangers of the emerging eugenics, racism, and nationalism in German philosophy—which were in vogue at the time, even among Christians.

In the centuries leading up to the horrors of WWII, when it was believed that the “German spirit shall heal the world,” Bavinck presented a transcendent eschatological vision—one advanced not by human hands but initiated by God’s divine will. And in a post-Christian era, then and now, Bavinck reminds us that the nefarious roots of racism and nationalism trace back to a rejection of Christian claims—which ground our dignity, our morality, and our ultimate hope in God.

N. Gray Sutanto is associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. He is author, editor, and translator of several books, including God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology and the T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism.

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Theology

Faithful Fathers

Brad East

Reports of the death of fatherhood have been greatly exaggerated. There are many good dads, like mine, quietly blessing their children.

Cohen / Ostrow / Getty / Edits by CT

Problems with fathers are nothing new. They go back to the beginning. Genesis alone is a vast catalog of fathers’ sins, whether those of Adam, Noah, and Lot, or the patriarchs themselves.

What about good fathers, though? Here is C. S. Lewis, writing in the 1940s:

We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man’s early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central.

I first read these words in my teens, when a youth minister—a spiritual father in his own way—began putting Lewis and G. K. Chesterton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in my hands. This excerpt comes from the opening page of a MacDonald anthology Lewis edited. The Scottish pastor, preacher, and novelist’s writings were crucial to Lewis’s conversion, so much so that Lewis called him “my master.”

Lewis writes that MacDonald had “an almost perfect relationship with his father.” This is remarkable on its face. But is it unique?

I don’t think so. Fatherlessness is a real problem, but reports of the death of fatherhood have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the reason Lewis’s comment resonated when I was in high school was that it named my own experience. True, few of us would reach for the phrase almost perfect to talk about our dads. But good, loving, and faithful all fit the bill. Some of us actually want to be like our dads when we grow up—even once we have, technically speaking, already grown up and become husbands and fathers ourselves.

You might not know this from how we tend to mark Father’s Day. Sometimes it takes the form of shaming fathers for their failures, real and imagined. In May, no one can say enough about the glories of motherhood. But once June rolls around, we overflow about the shortcomings of the modern father. Other times, in our (understandable) eagerness to praise God as the perfect father, our talk of fatherhood drifts into abstraction and out-of-reach ideals. Flesh-and-blood dads in the pews never quite measure up; who could?

For this Father’s Day, then, here’s my proposal: Rather than focusing on fatherhood in general, let’s talk about particular fathers. None of us has an abstract dad. The only dads around are three-dimensional. Some of them, true, are guilty of the many paternal crimes with which we are so familiar. But far from all. So what are the particular virtues of particular fathers, yours or mine?

When I think of my own father, three virtues come immediately to mind.

The first has to do with blessing. Fathers are agents of blessing. Children wither away without it; with it, they venture into the world as if cloaked by an impenetrable shield. Think of the tragedy of the Von Erich family, as portrayed in the film The Iron Claw: a father with six sons, five of whom preceded him in death, three by suicide.

My colleague Randy Harris (incidentally, another spiritual father of mine) recently spoke about the so-called Von Erich “curse”:

The movie would have us think that that’s not quite right. It’s not quite a curse. What it is, is what happens when sons chase an elusive blessing from their father that never really comes. And maybe I’m taken a bit with that reading because I’ve worked with students and ministers long enough to see what happens when a son or daughter doesn’t have the blessing of their father. … If you’re a father and you haven’t given your child that blessing recently, you might think about doing that. It’s one of the most important things.

We know from Scripture that a father’s blessing bears enormous significance. But what is it, exactly? It’s not approval or affirmation. Nor is it friendship or commonality. No, a father’s blessing is his favor—his unconditional, unapologetic, unquenchable yes to one’s whole being. It’s his love in the form of a lifelong gift, impervious to threat of loss. It’s the public declaration: “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

The biblical patriarchs’ blessings are one-time affairs, and are all the more vulnerable for that. In our lives, paternal blessing is less a single moment than a posture stretched out across childhood and beyond. A father’s blessing says, I am for you, come what may—even if what comes, as in the parable of the prodigal, is a son who spurns him.

I have never known a day in my life without my father’s blessing. It’s a security without measure, a gift without earthly rival. Besides faith in Christ, it’s the thing I most hope I am imparting to my own young children—more than happiness, more than health, more than a successful future. Thomas à Kempis calls life without Christ “a relentless hell.” I won’t say the same for a life without a father’s blessing, but our culture is awash in stories that don’t share my reticence.

This brings to mind my father’s second virtue: the will to break destructive cycles and the resolve to protect life-giving ones.

My father didn’t grow up wanting to be like his father, who was mean and distant and drank too much. By God’s grace, my dad entered college an atheist and left a married Christian. Meeting Christ meant a revolution for his trajectory as a man, above all as a husband and father. With the Spirit’s help, he would be faithful: to Christ, to his wife, and eventually to his three sons.

“Success” for him wasn’t measured by the standards of the world—pleasure, money, image, or other external marks. It was measured by fidelity. Not perfection, not sinlessness, but faithfulness. A faithfulness that included repentance, which is the only kind on offer for Christians.

There is a famous quote attributed to Frank Clark: “A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be.” A pessimistic interpretation would see this line as an elegy for all the ways fathers fail to be all they ought (or sought) to be. A more hopeful reading would see it as a vision of fatherhood that is both realistic—I will fail—and self-giving—I will succeed if my son surpasses me. If, in other words, my son becomes a better father than I was, and his son a better father than he was, and so on, forever. That is what my own father wanted.

Fatherhood as an aspirational, incremental, generational improvement—ensuring steps backward never surpass steps forward—requires a powerful resolve in two directions. On one hand, it means fiercely repudiating all the history, circumstances, and temptations that would make fidelity less likely. On the other, it means protecting, renewing, and handing on all the good we have received from others or built ourselves. This kind of fatherhood requires an indomitable will: the will to love, the will to sacrifice, the will to be faithful no matter the cost.

Third and finally, a dad is a teacher. Mine certainly was. Like it or not, all fathers instruct, and not only through example.

My catechesis came in the car. Little did I know that our minivan was not a means of transporting me to basketball tournaments around Texas. It was a devious device, somehow legal, designed to trap me for hours of undesired conversation: about God, about girls, about work ethic. About anything and everything I didn’t want to talk about. But what could I do? Even if I didn’t speak, I was forced to listen.

These conversations were seeds that, in some cases, took a long time to sprout, much less to blossom. And no doubt they sometimes were as painful for my dad as they were for me. But they were far more important than the usual lessons, some of which took (how to ride a bike or shoot a free throw) and some of which did not (how to fix a car or work a spreadsheet).

“You will know them by their fruit,” Jesus said of his disciples (Matt. 7:16, NASB). The same goes for fathers.

Last December, my brothers and our wives gathered in the back room of an Austin restaurant with a few dozen of my parents’ friends (and by “friends” I mean sisters and brothers in Christ with whom they have lived, led, rejoiced, wept, worshiped, and served since I was in diapers). We were there to celebrate my father’s retirement from the company where he had worked for more than 40 years.

My brothers and I each spoke, trying to explain what made our dad so good—as a mentor, as a teacher, as a faithful follower of Christ. For us, the question answered itself: This man lived a good life because he lived the good life. He knew what mattered and committed himself entirely to it.

Fathers live well not when their lives go well, but when they live as God wills regardless how life goes. Their children see it. I saw it. Such a life is itself all the blessing a child needs; it opens every right door and closes all the wrong ones.

My kids call him Pop-E. The eldest son, I raised my glass and told the room, I want to be like Pop-E when I grow up.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.

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Theology

Paternity Leave Made Me a Better Christian Dad

Andrew Egger

Time off at the very beginning helps fathers prepare to bring up their children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

Redd / Unsplash

When our first daughter was born, in the fall of 2021, she couldn’t nurse properly. For my wife, feeding her was an every-few-hours exercise in pure pain. Lactation consultants were consulted, to little avail; a minor tongue-tie operation, newly trendy in such cases, didn’t help either. We thought about switching to formula, but my wife was dead set on seeing nursing through.

So we triple-fed: She would nurse the baby through gritted teeth for as long as she could stand it, while I tried my best to distract her—singing songs, reading, putting something on the TV. Then I’d take the kid and finish the feeding by bottle while my wife pumped. As it turned out, the baby just needed to get a little bigger. By eight weeks, my wife’s pain was gone.

When our second daughter was born last year, the process seemed to restart—then unexpectedly cleared up in week two. The bigger challenge, it turned out, was managing the emotions of the now-toddler, who found herself, unexpectedly, no longer the center of the known universe.

After a period of protest, she settled into a new equilibrium. Yes, mom had a new baby, but she still had dad. For those first few weeks, the toddler and I were inseparable. (I made time for mom and baby too!) Soon, she had grown to like her little sister enough for us all to reintegrate as one happy family.

Both these stories have a key subtext: I was on paternity leave. Under my then-employer’s heroically generous, deliberately pro-family policy, I was free to take up to 12 weeks off per child to help my wife recover from childbirth and to bond with our new arrival.

I was lucky; that arrangement is rare. Most American fathers take only a short stint of paternity leave when their children are born, if any. Despite a growing number of companies and states offering some form of time off for dads—Washington implemented a 12-week standard for all federal employees back in 2022—and surveys finding that a majority of Americans support the practice, the median US father still takes just a single week of leave. Seven in ten take two weeks or less.

Some of this is simple corporate policy; many fathers would take more leave if their place of work accommodated it. But there’s also a reason so many companies get away without offering much: There’s still a good deal of complicated cultural resistance to new dads taking time off too, with masculine anxieties about being seen as insufficiently driven at work coming into play. Even in countries with generous government-funded paternity leave—South Korea and Japan, for instance—many fathers don’t take time off.

For conservative US Christians in particular, the concept of paternity leave can seem to cut against a number of our own political and cultural instincts. Some might roll their eyes at employers—to say nothing of taxpayers—being asked to foot the bill for a dad’s stay at home with a newborn. He’s not the one recovering from childbirth, after all, an important and essential biological distinction.

Others might see in a society that prioritizes maternity leave in particular a healthy assertion of traditional gender roles. That holds true whether a child is biological or adopted. Moms stay home with their kids—playing and nurturing, washing and feeding. Dads get back out there and work.

But the biggest driver of many Christians’ skepticism of paternity leave is the same as in the culture at large: simple inertia. People didn’t use to have the luxury of paid paternity leave, they reason, and they managed to make do. Having dad at home is an extravagance the baby won’t even remember.

Dads who do take leave often encounter this inclination even from well-meaning friends and acquaintances: How’s your time off treating you? Managing to fill up the hours? Bet you’re itching to get back to it, huh?

It’s past time for Christians to revisit this attitude. We know that fatherhood is no low calling, no secondary role. Fathers are primarily tasked not with paying for groceries and college educations—though that’s good too—but bringing up their children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4, ESV throughout). The Book of Proverbs is one long fatherly instruction in righteousness: “Hear, O sons, a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you may gain insight, for I give you good precepts; do not forsake my teaching” (4:1–2).

Scripture shows us good fathers who are immediate and intimate, wise and compassionate—welcoming home a prodigal son with a feast (Luke 15:20–24), prepared to die in peace after seeing a beloved child’s face one last time (Gen. 46:29). Ultimately, of course, fatherhood is a duty modeled for us by God our father—no absent provider, but a father who warmly invites us to approach him in love.

Do fathers need paternity leave to fulfill this calling? Of course not. But obliging a father to rush back to work just a week or two after birth stacks the deck against that vocation in all sorts of ways, even if, to start, there’s more diaper changing than “discipline and instruction.” All at once, a joint effort becomes a solo project on mom’s part to discover, navigate, and surmount the various challenges of early parenthood—the challenges through which one learns what it is to be a parent.

Almost by default, dad becomes a bystander to this process. Far from providing spiritual leadership to his family, he can find himself retreating into the role of secondary parent, somebody who’s happy to leave all the hard parts of the job to mom, the battle-tested expert who knows where the diaper rash ointment is and how to pick up a slippery infant from a bath.

I’m sure we ultimately would’ve muddled through the small challenges I mentioned above without the blessing of paternity leave. Triple-feeding our first daughter wouldn’t have been an option, so we would’ve just switched to formula. Nothing wrong with formula!

Still, after giving up on breastfeeding the first time, odds are we would have done the same the second time around too—and after two such failures to launch, why even bother to try again in the future, should we be blessed with more children?

Our toddler would have found other ways to cope with early sisterhood, as my wife with the thousand little struggles of early motherhood.

But I’m grateful both to God and to my former employer that, in those formative first few months, my family wasn’t obliged to figure out the contours of a new life in which I was only an occasional presence from the jump. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to pause my life as I knew it then for a few short weeks to accommodate our brand-new one—that instead of learning how to cram fatherhood into whatever gaps in my work, I was able to take my crash course in rudimentary fatherhood, then go figure out how my job was going to fit in with that.

So, companies: Offer it! Christians: Embrace it! Dads: Take it—and then spread the word!

Andrew Egger is the White House correspondent at The Bulwark.

- More from Andrew Egger

Theology

You Abused and Oppressed Me, Dad. I Forgive You.

Carrie Sheffield

How a community’s example of radical forgiveness helped me relinquish my own rage.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Father’s Day is a multibillion-dollar affair. In the weeks leading up to it, men’s ties, BBQ aprons, and golf-themed gifts fly off the shelves.

My own view on Father’s Day has a complicated history. After an abusive, impoverished childhood (detailed in my recent memoir, Motorhome Prophecies), I sometimes felt an anger toward my dad as intense as what Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist painter, felt toward his own father.

I first fell in love with this brilliant artist while visiting a museum dedicated to his work in sunny St. Petersburg, Florida. It’s a futuristic, fantastical building filled with spacious, airy light flowing through a glass atrium entryway attached to 18-inch thick concrete. It’s a captivating and fitting home for this revolutionary man who pushed the boundaries intersecting art, science, and metaphysics.

Dalí clashed for decades with his father, a mid-level civil servant who didn’t appreciate his son’s creative, rebellious nature or his association with the surrealist movement. Adding insult to injury, he disapproved of his son’s muse and future wife, Gala. Dalí said he considered his true father to be psychologist Sigmund Freud, and later, quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. Legend has it that Dalí gave his biological father a condom containing the artist’s own sperm, exclaiming, “Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!”

Obviously, that’s disgusting. But I confess there was a time in my life when I might have considered buying a sperm sample from a donor bank and sending it to my dad. I thought he’d die before I’d ever speak to him again.

God’s healing balm

As I shared earlier this year for CT, I grew up within an offshoot Mormon cult led by my father, who claimed to be a prophet. I lived with seven biological siblings in various motor homes, tents, houses, and sheds.

Besides time spent in homeschooling, I attended 17 different public schools. When I took my ACT exam, we lived in a shed with no furnace or running water in the Ozarks, where winter temperatures can hover around the freezing mark. Sometimes, we didn’t have food. I have two siblings with schizophrenia, including one brother who tried to rape me and one who accused me of trying to seduce him. I’ve suffered nine hospital visits for complications around depression, fibromyalgia, suicidal ideation, and PTSD.

My dad told my brothers they deserved their schizophrenia. And he warned me against leaving home for college, prophesying “in the name of Jesus” that I’d be raped and murdered. Despite all this, I landed a full journalism scholarship to Harvard, where I earned a master’s degree. Since then, I’ve largely enjoyed a productive career and a life filled with travel, adventure, and caring friends, though it’s been scarred with periodic episodes of severe depression.

Eventually, though I never thought it possible, I forgave my father for what he did to me, my mother, and my siblings. Only through an unlikely series of events did I reach the point of visiting this man’s birthday celebration, grateful for the gifts he did impart and able to forgive the mental agony that made me want to kill myself. (Sadly, three of my siblings have attempted suicide.)

The journey started with my Christian conversion, a decision that began the process of opening my heart to God’s healing balm of forgiveness. Shortly after my baptism, Anthony B. Thompson became a spiritual mentor to me. Anthony is pastor of Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and author of Called to Forgive: The Charleston Church Shooting, a Victim’s Husband, and the Path to Healing and Peace.

We met through a Bronx pastor friend named Dimas Salaberrios, who invited me to a Manhattan screening of his documentary, Emanuel. Coproduced with Viola Davis and Stephen Curry, it tells the story of the 2015 shooting of nine parishioners at Charleston’s predominantly Black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Anthony and I immediately connected over our shared passion for discerning God’s call on our lives.

Anthony’s wife, Myra, was among those murdered by the white supremacist killer, 21-year-old Dylann Roof. Mother Emanuel Church, as parishioners know it, is a historic church with a venerable history in the struggle for civil rights. Anthony and other family members of “the Charleston Nine” shocked the world with their incredible act of forgiveness in the face of such a heinous act.

Roof, a scrawny neo-Nazi with an allegedly violent father, had driven more than 100 miles across the state in hopes of sparking a race war. Instead, Charleston experienced the transformative power of forgiveness. Love and unity reigned, sparing the city the violence and destruction often seen after episodes of racial injustice. The words of the victims’ families carried enormous weight, and even though there was deep anguish in their voices, their message was loud and clear: Hate and vengeance had no place in their hearts.

As a pastor, Anthony followed up with the murderer and visited him in prison to reiterate his message of forgiveness, urging this intransigent monster to pray for God’s mercy and submit his life to Jesus.

For me, Anthony’s book on forgiveness proved invaluable. It knocks down all the major myths that keep us from practicing it. All too easily, we imagine forgiving others means downplaying or excusing the sin and harm involved. Or that forgiving makes you weak and passive. Or that forgiving means you must let an abuser hurt you again.

None of these statements are true. First and foremost, forgiveness is an act of obedience to God. And even if you don’t believe in God, science proves that forgiveness is a powerful, healing antibiotic for victims around the world. For example, scholars with the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health recently produced a randomized trial showing forgiveness improved depression and anxiety and promoted flourishing in five relatively high-conflict countries: Colombia, South Africa, Ukraine, Indonesia, and Hong Kong.

Forgiveness helps release us from the emotional and mental cancers of vengeance, insecurity, rage, and fear. It obliterates the power that abusers maintain over us by releasing their control over our minds and hearts. Though we still might suffer bodily, financially, or in other ways, we have begun to steel ourselves against the dangers of self-sabotage.

Anthony built an exemplary life as a pastor and is now a symbol of God’s redemptive power for millions of people. I knew that if he could forgive, then I could also.

With Anthony’s mentoring, along with numerous prayer circles with other Christian friends, I learned to release my visceral hatred of the man who’d brought me endless shame and regret. The man who spoke curses over me, abandoned me, and likely drove my two sweet brothers to insanity, stealing any possibility of a normal life.

The deep healing prayer ministries that helped me, including Sozo and deliverance prayer, involved a prayer minister or two talking and praying with me through specific events and traumas. We talked through how God was present in each of those moments and their aftermath, even if he seemed silent and distant. We reclaimed each moment and released the residual pain and sorrow in my heart and mind. Though pain returned, it gradually dissipated and is significantly reduced today.

In my late 30s, after years of not speaking to him, I visited Dad at home with Mom and my two schizophrenic brothers for a simple meal. It was surprisingly peaceful. Battling dementia, Dad was still coherent and able to hold a conversation, though there were moments when he seemed to drift off and his sky-blue eyes glazed over. There were no recriminations, no fire and brimstone accusations, no hateful sermons.

Honoring the dishonorable

We often get our view of God from our earthly fathers. That’s one reason our crisis of fatherlessness hits society so hard. Numerous studies show fatherlessness and paternal child abuse are crucial factors in whether a child drops out of high school, falls into drugs and gangs, commits crimes, or becomes a single teenage mother. Whether we suffer the trauma of abuse or abandonment, this often leads us to forget who our real father is—God, our infinite source of love, joy, and purpose.

Billy Graham said, “A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.” He’s right. My rage against my father manifested itself in how I disrespected myself, my romantic partners, and others in my life. I needed to forgive everyone in my life (including toxic coworkers, various church leaders, cheating exes, and others) and ask God to forgive me. There were LDS church leaders who hurt me, but many others who cared for and helped me. I needed to forgive all the hurt and release my anger.

Graham also wrote:

The Bible clearly says, “Honor thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12, KJV). This passage sets no age limit on such honor. It does not say they must be honorable to be honored. This does not necessarily mean that we must “obey” parents who may be dishonorable. We must honor them. Honor has many shapes and affections.

In many ways, my father lived a dishonorable life, but that doesn’t mean I should retaliate and dishonor him by sending him a package of sperm or yelling at him on my grandparents’ grave. It means I must live in a way that brings him honor, both to him as a person and to my family name. The more I study the effects of childhood sexual and emotional abuse, the more my heart grieves for the pain my father suffered.

For me, Father’s Day now means reflecting on the good my father gave me while forgiving the rest. Though I thought my father was the villain, I now see how he had suffered himself. He had been crushed by severe religious zealotry born of mental illness, the result of enduring sexual assault as a toddler followed by isolation as well as the death of his best childhood friend. He’s no more or less deserving of God’s mercy and compassion than I am.

I pray for his life, especially during his struggles at age 86 with Alzheimer’s. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Carrie Sheffield is the author of Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness. This essay is adapted from the book.

- More from Carrie Sheffield

Theology

Church ‘Homelessness’ Must Not Be Grieved Too Quickly

Russell Moore

It’s okay to mourn what’s lost without losing hope for what’s to come.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

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

In his New York Times column this week, my friend David French wrote about what it was like to be “canceled” by his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. He later told me how stunned he was by how many people responded immediately—grieving their own “cancellations” from churches or ministries they’d loved and served.

I was not surprised at all.

Most people, of course, aren’t canceled in the way we typically use that word, but in a way more like the situation described by the late Will Campbell. He wasn’t “fired” by the National Council of Churches, he would joke. They just unleashed a swarm of bees in his office every day until he voluntarily left.

Similarly, many people who feel “homeless” these days aren’t told by their home churches or traditions, “Get out!” Instead, they face a quieter form of exile.

They face those they love, who expect them to conform to new rules of belonging. Sometimes, that’s to some totalizing political loyalty. Sometimes, it’s to a willingness to “get over” their opposition to whatever their church or ministry leaders now deem to be acceptable sins. Sometimes, this doesn’t even happen to these people in their own churches but in their larger theological or denominational homes, or vice versa. It’s confusing. It’s disorienting. It’s sometimes angering.

What it really is, though, is grief.

People who’ve faced this in their own contexts often ask me, “How long does it take to get over this?” I usually quote the landslide-losing presidential candidate George McGovern when he was asked a similar question by later landslide-losing candidate Walter Mondale: “I’ll let you know when I get there.” But an earlier version of myself would have had a completely different view.

When I was a young doctoral student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I hosted a panel discussion on the topic of war and peace on our campus during the weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. I wanted a genuine debate—not just a caricature of one—so I sought to include a pacifist in the group, ending up with the pastor of a very progressive Baptist congregation in our community, one that had long parted ways with our denomination after years of controversy.

Afterward, the pastor said that he didn’t think those of us on the conservative side of the split really understood what it was like to lose a sense of belonging, a sense of home. “It’s like going through a divorce,” he said.

In all of my punkish arrogance, I responded, “Actually, it’s more like after the divorce when the ex keeps showing up on the lawn with a bullhorn, despite the restraining order.” My implicit message was, The controversy is over. We won. You lost. Move on.

All the ways I was wrong would require an entire book, but here’s one of them: I had no idea that trauma here was not a metaphor. What this pastor described was not about Robert’s Rules of Order or even about which systematic theology textbooks would be taught at the alma mater. He was expressing grief, and I did not know what that was like until decades later.

We would not tell someone who’s experienced the loss of a parent, sibling, spouse, or lifelong friend to “get over it” or “move on.” Most of us would do what Jesus did with Mary and Martha, grieving the death of Lazarus: weep right alongside those who experienced the loss (John 11:35). Many of us, though, are less sure what to do when we ourselves experience this kind of grief, this kind of loss. In fact, many people want to hear, in a moment of unexpected church homelessness, a word of hope.

I say: Not so fast.

The hope is real, of course—and that’s not just in the Book of Revelation kind of long-term view, but right now. God is doing something new. Old alliances are shaken, but new ones are being formed.

In the civic political space, many of us are finding that the fundamental division isn’t where we’re used to it being, between the left and the right, but straight through them. People with fundamental differences on important issues are finding that what unites or divides them is whether democratic principles and constitutional norms are needed to have those critically important debates.

The same is happening in the religious space. We are accustomed to the dividing lines we knew whenever we came of age: Calvinist versus Arminian, cessationist versus charismatic, complementarian versus egalitarian. The dividing lines are in different places now, and unusual alliances are forming. From the very beginning of the church, God has worked with what one scholar describes as “patient ferment.” Change is always disorienting, and often painful.

And much of what God has to do can only come out of this kind of shaking. “I think that to overcome regionalism, you must have a great deal of self-knowledge,” Flannery O’Connor once said. “I think that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the world, and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world. So that you have a great deal of detachment.”

O’Connor needed a rootedness—a sense of being a Southerner and of knowing other Southerners, specifically Bible Belt Protestants. She also needed, though, a kind of exile—the experience of being a Roman Catholic minority in Milledgeville, Georgia. Whatever is next—perhaps the conforming of the American church more closely to the global body of Christ—requires the kind of change that can feel scary. And many of us will grieve what is lost.

For some of us, we need to give heed to what Jesus said to his followers: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32, ESV throughout). Grief shouldn’t cause us to look perpetually backward. But many also need to remember too that Jesus, even as he said for us to expect it, recognized that losing one’s home base would be painful (Matt. 10:17–21).

The apostle Paul told us that we were to “rejoice” in our sufferings, but he did not tell us to see them as anything less than suffering. Instead, we are to see that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame” (Rom. 5:3–5). To short-circuit endurance and character to get straight to hope is to do something different than what the Holy Spirit does.

People who do not allow themselves the time to grieve what is lost, in my experience, often end up in bad places. Some of them wind up with a cynicism that sees all connection as suspect—and we know what happens to human beings when we give ourselves to isolation. Some of them, in the fullness of time, end up pursuing the mirror image of what they once had, as though the antidote to every problem were the opposite of it. Fundamentalisms of those on the right become fundamentalisms of those on the left, or vice versa. The end of that path is disillusionment and exhaustion.

That’s why T. S. Eliot, in my favorite poem, “East Coker,” writes:

I said to my soul, be still, and without hope
For hope would hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

For those who feel homeless, grieve with hope—but remember, there actually is a place called Home. And don’t forget that even in hope, it’s okay to grieve.

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

News

PCA Will Investigate ‘Jesus Calling’ Book

Emily Belz

The author of the bestseller died last year. The investigation will determine if the book is appropriate for Christians.

Sarah Young was the bestselling author of "Jesus Calling."

Courtesy of Jesus Calling / Edits by Rick Szeucs

The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) at its annual meeting on Thursday voted to investigate the Christian appropriateness of the best-selling book Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, who was part of the PCA and died in August last year at age 77. Young was one of the most-read evangelicals of the last 20 years.

Pastors in the denomination are concerned that Young’s use of the voice of Jesus in the book undermines the concept of sola Scriptura and might amount to heresy. The book was published in 2004, and criticisms of its theology from leaders in the denomination have already been widely circulated.

In addition to having a degree from the denomination’s Covenant Theological Seminary, Young was the wife of a PCA elder and missionary to Japan, Steve Young.

At the debate on the measure, the recent widower rose and spoke to the room of several thousand church leaders, asking the assembly to vote against the investigation.

“Her writings did not add to Scripture but explain it,” Steve Young said. “She would stand with Martin Luther and declare that her conscience was captive to the Word of God.”

He went on: “Sarah is a sister in Christ and wife who delighted in the law of the Lord, and on his law she meditated day and night. She was led to share her meditations with the world.”

Young herself said her devotions were meant to be read “with your Bible open.”

The measure passed by a relatively close vote, 947–834, with 20 abstentions. It directs two denominational committees to answer a set of questions on the book and to each issue a report.

The committees must look at the denominational agencies’ history with the book and must “assess the book’s appropriateness for Christians in general and PCA members and congregations in particular with special regard for its doctrine and method.”

One of the committee reports will come from Mission to the World (MTW), the denominational mission agency through which Sarah Young and her husband were missionaries. MTW’s report must “examine MTW’s relationship with the book, knowledge of its content, and any counsel given to the author” and “consider actions that MTW and the General Assembly should take in light of this study of the book and of the agency’s relationship to it.”

Those supporting the measure said the reports would be useful.

“This book in question is perhaps the best-selling book by any member of the PCA,” said pastor Zachary Groff, speaking in favor of the investigation.

Chuck Williams, another church leader, said he was concerned about anyone “claiming an immediate revelation from God.” (Young’s editors at Thomas Nelson said she was clear that she did not have “new revelations.”)

Those opposed to the measure thought it was an unusual undertaking for the denomination to investigate a book and thought it was inappropriate given the timing after her death.

A pastor from Tennessee, Daniel Wells, said he knew Young’s extended family.

“They are still grieving,” he said, urging a vote against the measure. “Romans 12:15 tells us to weep with those who weep. This overture would instead ask us to investigate this woman who has passed on.”

Church leader Jerid Krulish, speaking against the measure, noted that he was from Alaska, where people often consume a lot of fish.

“I know a fishing expedition when I see it,” he said to laughter in the room. “I find this to be disparaging and a waste of these committees’ time.”

Hymn writer Kevin Twit also rose to oppose the measure, saying that he hadn’t read the book but that John Newton’s hymn “Pensive, Doubting, Fearful Heart” also speaks using God’s voice, and he considers that not new revelation but a summary of ideas.

The original legislation (called an overture in the PCA) came from an individual, pastor Benjamin Inman. Most pieces of legislation come from a presbytery. The lack of support for the measure from a presbytery didn’t bode well for its chances at a denominational level.

But, this week, the denomination’s overture committee amended Inman’s legislation to be milder and more palatable to the assembly—removing his language condemning Young for publishing a book guilty of idolatry, for example—and recommended the gathered assembly vote yes on the amended version.

Inman’s original legislation called for the PCA to consider repenting for not disciplining Young for idolatry, though he acknowledged that “the author’s passing in August 2023 has carried her above the jurisdiction of the PCA.”

Steve Tipton, the chair of the committee that produced the amended legislation, said that the goal of the denominational report was not to condemn Young, although he said “we can all guess” what the denominational committees would say about the book’s appropriateness for Christians.

The PCA is a small denomination—with about 1,800 congregations to the Southern Baptist Convention’s 47,000—but it has broad intellectual influence, with authors like Young, Tim Keller, O. Alan Noble, Kevin DeYoung, and Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt. Jesus Calling sold more than 45 million copies.

Evangelical leaders have already criticized the book. Author Kathy Keller, wife of Tim Keller, said Jesus Calling undermined the sufficiency of Scripture. Blogger Tim Challies said the book was “unworthy of our attention.”

The PCA disagreed.

- More from Emily Belz

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In this series

Skin-deep animism

Decoding Thai spiritualism

Sak yant and the church

A different person

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Christianity in East Asia

Affinity with other religions and traditions

Belief in miracles, karma, fate, rebirth, and nirvana

Relationship between religion and society

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God’s healing balm

Honoring the dishonorable

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