Put Away Your Swords

Esau McCaulley

Jesus used his final moments with his disciples before the crucifixion to heal his opponent’s ear—and model the way of love.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In the Gospel narratives, a gaggle of soldiers came to arrest Jesus before his crucifixion. Trying to stop them, the apostle Peter brandished a sword to defend Jesus from danger but missed his target, striking one of the soldiers—ironically enough—on the ear. Jesus responded by using one of his final moments in person with his followers to teach them about the dangers of political and religious violence.

Jesus rebuked Peter with a much-quoted line: “Put your sword back in its place … for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Violence, Jesus taught, only begets more violence, creating a spiral that can consume individuals, movements, and sometimes even republics.

But Jesus did more than issue a policy statement. He healed the soldier who had come to do him harm (Luke 22:51).

This same soldier and his fellow combatants would continue with the arrest, and Jesus would become a victim of state-sponsored torture and death. The healing, then, was not a commentary on the soldier’s politics. Jesus did not heal because he believed the actions against him were just. The healing was a recognition of his enemy’s humanity, for there are moments to set aside politics and to see our opponents as fellow bearers of the image of God.

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, we find ourselves in one of those moments. Regardless of our party affiliation, it is appropriate to lament the attack, to grieve the passing of the father in the crowd who died defending his family, and to pray for all those impacted by this unjustifiable act of violence.

But for Christians, prayers are the easy part. Being honest about the state of our nation is more difficult.

It is disingenuous for us to pretend that this was unimaginable. We have seen too much death in this country to act as if anything is beyond comprehension: We have endured gunmen shooting at school children and at worshippers in churches and synagogues; at people in night clubs, grocery stores, and college campuses; and at young Black boys out for a jog. We have lost the right to pretend that it is unthinkable that someone would aim at a politician. There is a dangerous rage that has been bubbling over in every corner of this country, and, in Pennsylvania, it overflowed on the campaign trail, with tragic results.

Political violence has long been in our rhetoric as well. Our discourse on social media is a wasteland. Talk of civil war is everywhere in the background as we view fellow citizens who disagree with us as downright evil. We’ve learned to see our political rivals as an undifferentiated mass of misfits who threaten all we hold dear—as dangers to the republic.

Do not misunderstand my point. There are high stakes in politics. There are dangerous political ideas. There are some among the populace who want to undermine democracy. Policies have real-world consequences, and now is not the time to pretend otherwise.

But not every divergent opinion rises to that level. Our friends and neighbors who disagree with us are more than a collection of all the worst ideas from the other side. Yet we’ve become strangers to one another, and in our separation, discord has flourished. It is easy to denounce violence when it finally erupts; it is harder to admit that it has been all around us for quite some time, growing in the gaps made by our alienation.

It is not easy to place the beginning of the fear that I now feel for our country. I do recall a first stirring of it while watching the inauguration of former president Barack Obama in 2009. My now-teenage son was an infant at the time, but I woke him and placed him in front of the television. I wanted to be able to say that we watched the installation of our nation’s first Black president together. I was hopeful, but also afraid that he might be assassinated.

When Obama got out of the car to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I kept thinking, Get back in that automobile. It is not safe. That feeling of fear returned to me when I first heard the news of the attempt on Trump’s life. Things are not safe in this country and have not been for a long time. Each election has felt more fraught, divisive, and even dangerous.

Is there a path out of this deadly spiral? Yes. We must renounce the violence that endangers the entire social fabric. Jesus was correct in Gethsemane when he described hatred and murder as a social contagion that spreads from person to person. It is foolish to think that a disease that infects the rest of our lives together will not make its way to our elections. A nation that cannot protect its school-age children cannot protect its presidential candidates. A nation that cannot control its virtual rage will not control its rage in the flesh.

Words are not always violence. Violence is violence, but a “good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45).

We must begin to act like a people capable of holding free and clear elections rooted in principle and respectful, good-faith argument. All candidates must conduct the rest of their campaigns with an eye to restoring public trust. Every election is important, but the last few months of this particular race can set the tone for decades to come.

Trump, president Joe Biden, and any other third-party candidates should hold another debate in the coming weeks to give the United States the chance to see them present their vision for America. They should outline their actual plans for the country and make a case for why they deserve our votes. No more debates about who’s better at golf. The future of the republic is at stake.

Every American who cares about the future of democracy should vote, whether for one of these two or for a third-party candidate. A record turnout would reaffirm our commitment to the principles we hold dear. Even at this late stage, it would be a pledge to find a better way.

Peter was not the only early believer who used violence. Paul, who wrote a quarter of the New Testament, was involved in the killing of the first Christian martyr, Stephen (Acts 7). Paul’s change of heart occurred while he was on the way to arrest and jail even more of his then-opponents. His encounter with Jesus caused him to reject violence as a means of getting his way, and he spent the rest of his life traveling the Roman Empire to change lives without the aid of human weapons. He never converted a single person through the power of the sword. Instead, he made arguments. We need to make America argue with civility again, using data and reason—and love.

In one of Paul’s most famous passages, 1 Corinthians 13, he described love as a thing that is patient, kind, not self-seeking or boastful, not easily angered. He spoke of a love that keeps no record of wrongs. He called it the greatest of all virtues, and he had in mind the love that we might show each other as Christians (Gal. 6:10, John 13:35).

Nonetheless, love for others remains a central element of Christian teachings (Luke 10:25–37). Given the ever-rising atmosphere of hate, we would do well to recover this love as an operating principle within the church and to allow that love to spill out into the world. It might be our most important witness in this moment.

Esau McCaulley (@esaumccaulley) is the author of How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South and the children’s book Andy Johnson and the March for Justice. He is an associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College.

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Books

Hillbillies Deserve More than an Elegy

Amanda Held Opelt

VP candidate J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir told a compelling story about my home region in Appalachia. But it was not the whole story.

J.D. Vance

Drew Angerer / Staff / Getty

On Monday, Donald Trump announced his pick for vice presidential candidate: J. D. Vance, the junior US senator from Ohio.

Some would say Vance has had a meteoric rise, from venture capitalist to best-selling author, from junior senator to VP candidate, all in less than a decade. Like most people in America, I was introduced to Vance through his book.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is Vance’s account of his tumultuous childhood growing up as the descendent of disadvantaged Appalachian hillbillies in Middletown, Ohio. It was critically acclaimed by pundits and politicians on both the left and the right and was later made into an Oscar-nominated film. Both book sales and movie streams surged this week with the news of Vance’s nomination.

When I originally read the book, I was immediately intrigued by Vance’s story. He and I are the same age, and, like Vance, I too am a product of the Appalachian diaspora. His grandparents left the mountains the same decade as mine, his to the Rust Belt of Ohio and mine to the sunshine state of Florida.

Our stories diverge because my family eventually found their way back to Appalachia. I’ve spent most of my life in rural East Tennessee and North Carolina. My immediate family also enjoyed many more economic and educational privileges than Vance. Additionally, I was blessed with more spiritual resources than Vance, who indicates his grandmother read the Bible and prayed but wasn’t involved in a local church like my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were.

But in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy, I met many characters I recognized, folks whose struggles echoed those of my neighbors, classmates, and extended family.

There is much to admire in Vance’s book: his resilience in the face of many adversities, his service to our country in the military, and his skill as a dynamic storyteller. When I first read the book back in 2017, I marveled at how well Vance was able to capture the angst of the region in which I grew up. It was like he was giving us a tour of the interior emotional world of the white working class.

And so, perhaps inadvertently, Vance became the unofficial spokesperson for “hillbillies,” and Hillbilly Elegy became the de facto textbook on Appalachia for the entire country.

Over the last eight years, however, I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I talk to my Appalachian neighbors about Hillbilly Elegy (both the book and the film), they grimace. I can see in their faces a mixed reaction to Vance’s story, like they feel both kinship and shame when they read it.

For one, the book has only 21 footnotes. Vance himself admits in the introduction that the book is not meant to be an academic evaluation of either the Rust Belt or Appalachia, that it is simply a memoir. But reading it now, after seeing the reactions of some of my neighbors, I’m concerned by the phenomenon around the book’s success.

Moreover, reading it as a Christian, as someone whose faith commands love of neighbor, I feel a deep conviction about the problematic ways we tell stories about who we perceive to be “the other” in this country. I’m also concerned about the ways people on the margins have internalized stories told about themselves.

After Vance’s book hit the bestseller list, Appalachian scholars, activists, and organizers like Elizabeth Catte, Meredith McCarroll, and Anthony Harkins began to push back. They noted that Vance’s book sometimes relies on pervasive and harmful stereotypes about “hillbillies” and “rednecks,” often blaming all of Appalachia’s ills on what he believes are the social vices (feuding, heavy drinking, clansman retribution) of the Scots-Irish culture that dominates the region.

These wise Appalachians taught me that almost every well-established stereotype that exists in this world was created and cultivated by someone who stood to gain from its proliferation. Enterprising entities, including the “local color” literary movement of the late 1800s, the coal industry, politicians, and Hollywood producers, have all profited by telling a skewed, simplistic version of Appalachia that partitions them from the mainstream.

And despite all the progress we’ve made as a society in learning about the harms of reductive stereotypes, the redneck or hillbilly trope seems still to be fair game, enduring unchecked in the American imagination. My friends and neighbors carry the heavy load of shame that comes with these stories. I’m afraid that Hillbilly Elegy, whether by intent or by accident, did too little to set the record straight.

My concern with Vance’s book is not merely with what is said but with what is left unsaid. The story of this region and its people cannot be told apart from the oppressive influence of extractive industries like coal and timber. In this way, Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Pulitzer Prize–winning Demon Copperhead serves as a better depiction of Appalachia.

Vance makes a few passing references to the declining coal industry in his book. But for most hillbillies, coal is context—not a subtext or a footnote. Coal and timber destroyed the ecological base of a mountainous region that was formerly home to austere but thriving communities built on subsistence farming, hunting, and foraging practices. When the trees were felled to be sold or make way for mines, the soil eroded, and plant and animal life disappeared.

Coal companies made it so that working for them was the only viable way to support a family. Unsafe working conditions led to countless deaths and injuries. Miners were paid in company scrip, and their families were forced to live in company housing and shop in company stores. This created a crushing monopoly, making it nearly impossible for Appalachians in coal country to build any kind of wealth outside of the company.

When the demand for coal declined, many Appalachians were left with no jobs, no wealth, black lungs, and a devastated ecosystem. Moreover, coal companies continued to own thousands and thousands of Appalachian acres, even as mines were shutting down. Because companies pay only a fraction of the taxes that citizens pay on land, there has been far less tax money pouring into Appalachian communities for infrastructure, education, and health care over the years.

Drug addiction features prominently in Vance’s book. But there is little exposition on the predatory practices of drug companies that specifically targeted Appalachia for opioid sales in the 1990s. They chose Appalachia because they knew the region was full of injured miners and blue-collar workers.

In the end, one walks away from Vance’s story with the distinct impression that the misdeeds of his kin are unique and inherent not to his family, but to hillbillies in general. After railing against the “learned helplessness” he disdains in hillbillies, Vance writes of the harmful habits of his community: “These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.”

But a truly inquisitive and compassionate heart can see that’s not entirely true. The lives of most people who struggle—including hillbillies—are usually defined by both personal decisions and historic injustices, injustices that I hope are not beyond the knowledge or recollection of our politicians and lawmakers.

Hillbilly Elegy is certainly a fascinating account of one person’s experience. But if we are to understand a group of people we believe to be “the other,” we must lift the discourse from the anecdotal to the comprehensive, from the illustrative to the historically rooted.

The authors of Scripture tell meticulously detailed stories, such as the lengthy narrative of Israel’s enslavement, emancipation, desert wanderings, political exploits, and eventual exile. But persistence is required if we are to truly understand the triumphs and tribulations of characters like Moses, David, Mary Magdalene, or the apostle Paul. The Bible shows us that a person’s life is not merely made up of the sum of their own choices, but by a generations-long story that undergirds any given moment.

This long view of a person or people group’s history inspires in us the grace we need to love our neighbors well. Jesus made it a point to live alongside those he loved and to step into their stories. In Matthew 9, as Jesus traveled through towns and villages, he met people, healed them, and experienced their struggles. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (v. 36).

In a world of political discourse that is descending from divisiveness to chaos, from vitriol to violence, we need the patient, informed compassion that Jesus demonstrated. We need a capacity for long stories and sweeping narratives. We need to be willing to excavate a person’s story, all the way down to the deeper, historical, and ancestral tipping points that created the context for their life. In so doing, we better understand why our fellow citizens feel the way they feel and vote the way they vote. Facts must inform us, not stereotypes.

Appalachia is not a monolith. Neither are Black urban neighborhoods or Midwestern farming communities. If we are to love those who we perceive to be different from us, we must be willing to believe that their stories sometimes transcend our meager understanding of them. I, for one, am ready for my hillbilly neighbors to no longer be typecast for someone else’s gain, but to internalize a better story about themselves.

And so, perhaps, hillbillies don’t need elegies. Appalachia is not dead. God is at work here, in small churches that still meet on hillsides and “hollers,” in faith-based drug rehab centers, in food pantries, and in nonprofits working to reclaim and repurpose pilfered ecology through the care of creation.

More than elegies, we need protest songs, like the ones penned by the widows of coal miners and by Cherokee descendants weeping for the land’s loss of health. We need songs of lament, like the ones sung by the Israelites in exile, like the psalms, and like the mournful banjo-picked tunes that have sounded from the front porches of these mountains for generations. The Bible can certainly offer a tutorial on how to write such songs.

And I pray candidate Vance remembers that more than a death dirge, hillbillies need a proper Appalachian ballad. We need a hopeful and triumphant chorus that reminds us that a brighter future is possible if we rightly remember our past; a ballad that pays tribute to the resilience of a region that has always defied its most insidious stereotypes.

Amanda Held Opelt is a speaker, songwriter, and author of the book A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing.

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Theology

A Renewed Invitation to Seek the Kingdom

Timothy Dalrymple

In these fractured times, we want to focus on Jesus’ call to chase after his will.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

Consider this a reintroduction.

In our March issue, I explained that 2024 would be a transformative year for Christianity Today. This magazine is the first deposit on that promise. Everything from the wordmark to the colors, fonts, layout, and structure have been reimagined and remade. We hope you agree that this delivers a more compelling experience. We want each issue to be a jewel, a work of art, a feast of stories and ideas that conveys the richness of living and thinking with Christ and his church.

Over the remainder of the year, I will explain why we are charting this course. For now, I wish to explain the language you will often see alongside the wordmark.

Before I came to Christianity Today, I led a creative agency that helped hundreds of organizations refine their branding and messaging. Yet I have never thought about Christianity Today as a brand. It is an effort to illuminate what it means to follow Jesus faithfully in our time.

We have, however, a fundamental invitation. It’s not a tagline or a slogan but an invitation: Seek the kingdom.

I will say more about our calling to the kingdom of God in subsequent issues. For now, I want to say one simple thing.

The kingdom of God is elusive. Jesus likens it to a seed, a pearl, a treasure, a vineyard, and a banquet. He speaks of the “secrets of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 13:11) and calls us not to chase after the things of the world but to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (6:33).

“Seek ye first” was the first song I remember singing. It was before my baptism, before I knew Jesus, before I knew how beautiful and broken the world and the church could be. But it was, in its simplicity, the invitation that summoned me to Christ and to serving the reign of Christ’s love in the world.

Perhaps we don’t always recognize the kingdom when we see it. But we should know what it is not. The world today is fractured by wars and hatred, oppression and abuse, and scorn for truth and virtue. Our cover image shows a church, like the garment of Jesus at the foot of the cross, divided up for power and profit. This is not it. This is not the kingdom of God.

But we invite you to seek it with us. In Scripture. In the work of God around the planet. In the lives of individuals and families, near and far, who bring Jesus into broken places. Seek hope, seek Jesus, seek the kingdom, and perhaps together we will find it.

Timothy Dalrymple is president and CEO of Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Why Seek the Kingdom?".

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News

J.D. Vance, the VP Pick for a Party Made in Trump’s Image

Harvest Prude

The Catholic convert brings a fighter persona and outsider’s view to politics.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee

Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

Donald Trump’s first running mate, Mike Pence, appealed to conservative evangelical voters by offering what Trump lacked: political experience, a pro-life record, a steady demeanor, and outspoken Christian faith.

Two presidential elections later, Trump’s 2024 pick for vice president, J. D. Vance, appeals to conservatives by being like the former president: a fellow political newcomer, a populist, and a fighter unafraid of shaking up the system.

He’s “somebody who can carry on the core of what President Trump did in his first administration for a while to come,” said Aaron Baer, president of Center for Christian Virtue, based in Vance’s home state of Ohio.

Vance rose to national prominence through his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which drew attention to the lives and faith of working-class rural Americans.

Since then, he’s converted from evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism and from a Never Trump conservative to a faithful “Make America Great Again” Republican, successfully running for US Senate with Trump’s endorsement in 2022.

Political commentators are already talking about how a victory for the Republican ticket in November would put Vance in a strong position to contend for the nomination come 2028—under a national conservative or America First style of politics that comes as a departure from the old guard conservatism that someone like Pence represented.

“He appeals to the kind of younger, religious, political evangelical,” said author Hannah Anderson, who has written about rural life and ministry and reviewed Vance’s book for CT. “There’s a lot of questions of whether [the movement] will survive Trump, and if it’s going to survive, it’s going to be through someone like Vance.”

On the campaign trail, Vance regularly described himself as someone who will fight for Christian values.

“I just feel like people don’t actually have somebody that stands up and fights for them, that’s willing to speak loudly and powerfully on the issues that they care about,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “They’re really worried, whether at their workplaces or on social media, can they actually speak their mind, can they actually speak about Christian values without being shut down?”

Vance’s selection as the Republican VP candidate has excited some evangelical voters, even if they have reservations about his recent moves away from a strict pro-life stance and about his opposition to providing aid to Ukraine in its fight with Russia.

Like Pence, he is at home speaking to culture-war issues or family values that resonate with social conservatives.

Baer had been skeptical of a big persona coming in and running for office in Ohio, but he felt more assured after talking with Vance during the campaign. “He understands what’s happening to families and happening to kids, as well as or better than political leaders, better than a lot of folks who lead pro-family organizations,” Baer said.

As the Republican Party shifts on abortion, Vance, like Trump, has deferred to the state’s role in determining abortion policy, acknowledged exceptional cases where abortion should be permitted, and supported access to the abortion medication mifepristone, The Hill reported.

“I will not be celebrating the pick of a newly self-professed pro abortifacient VP,” Jordan B. Cooper, a Lutheran pastor and podcast host, responded on Monday, calling Vance “a coward who gave up his pro-life principles when it benefited him.”

Baer said the move on abortion was concerning from an electoral enthusiasm point of view as well. Trump has “been very strong for us on the life issue,” he said. “But that’s the kind of thing that could lose pro-lifers and lose Christians that need to turn out to vote.”

Vance also lines up with the former president when it comes to one of the defining moments of Trump’s political career—the fight to overturn the 2020 election results.

“He still retains that kind of religiosity, but he’s ‘the fighting religious person’ whereas Pence was not going to fight in that way,” said Anderson. “Pence wasn’t going to take part in January 6. Vance would have.”

Vance has said as much himself: He’s stated that he would not have certified the 2020 election results, had he been in Pence’s place, on January 6, 2021, and instead said he would have pushed for the states to send multiple slates of electors.

After the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday, Vance was also quick to blame Democrats for the shooting.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” he wrote on X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

So far, as a politician, the 39-year-old has carved out a reputation as being a young face of a conservative movement that embraces isolationism on the global stage, a protective trade policy over a free trade approach, and strict immigration and border policies. In the Senate, he’s been one of the most outspoken opponents to further financial aid to Ukraine, though that did not stop additional aid from clearing the chamber.

For a Republican politician, his targets are not always orthodox: On the Senate Banking Committee, he teamed up with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to go after big bank executives, though the effort also never passed.

At the time of his conversion in 2019, Vance had endorsed Catholic social teaching as his ideal for forming public policy, challenging the party to make social conservatism not just “about issues like abortion, but it has to have a broader vision of political economy, and the common good.”

His memoir detailed a fraught relationship with the church: Vance described his grandmother (and primary caregiver) as suspicious of organized religion, but she still taught him about Jesus and the Christian message. Vance had “an angry atheist phase,” but by the time he was leaving law school, he became reinterested in Christianity. As an adult, he never committed to a particular Protestant denomination, as he explained in an interview for The American Conservative, but converted to Catholicism at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati. If elected, he would be the second Catholic vice president—following the current Democratic president, Joe Biden.

“I became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true,” Vance said. “When I became more interested in faith, I started out with a clean slate, and looked at the church that appealed most to me intellectually. But it’s too easy to intellectualize this. When I looked at the people who meant the most to me, they were Catholic.”

Vance said in other interviews that his wife, Usha, who was raised Hindu, encouraged him to explore his Christian faith. Usha Vance is a corporate lawyer (who recently left her law firm) and is the daughter of Indian immigrants. The couple met at Yale Law School and married in 2014. They have three children.

Vance is a former Marine who went to Silicon Valley to work in biotechnology after law school. He also worked as a lawyer and venture capitalist in Washington, DC, before moving back to Ohio to mount his Senate campaign.

He beat out VP contenders such as South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In Monday’s announcement, which came after Trump officially secured the GOP presidential nomination for the third time, the former president said Vance “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for”: “the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.”

Five years ago, Vance criticized the way some evangelicals had embraced Trump as president. “But I also know that most of them aren’t doing it because they are sycophants,” he told Rod Dreher with The American Conservative. “They’re doing it because they don’t think they have a better option.”

In 2024, he’s challenged with convincing conservative voters that Trump is a good option—during a race when most Americans are dissatisfied with the names at the top of the ticket.

Vance seems to have little doubt of prevailing, however.

“What an honor it is to run alongside President Donald J. Trump. He delivered peace and prosperity once, and with your help, he’ll do it again,” he wrote in his first social media statement after the announcement was made. “Onward to victory!”

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Theology

Our Culture Is Obsessed with Being Seen. But Jesus Calls Us to Be Hidden.

Rich Villodas

In an age of social media celebrity and showy spirituality, we are invited into a holy unawareness.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash / Getty

If a good deed done is not posted on social media, did it really happen? If an act of generosity is not caught on camera and never goes viral, was it a worthwhile gesture? These questions, facetious as they seem, point out something I’ve observed in my own life: a deep desire to display my goodness to others. There’s even a modern term for it: virtue signaling.

According to Jesus, this is an ancient struggle, a primal temptation. We long to be known and seen, but if we aren’t careful, this longing can lead to a kind of performativity that corrodes the soul.

In Matthew 6—the center of the Sermon on the Mount—Jesus flips showy spirituality on its head: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen. … But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (vv. 1, 3). Jesus reveals a key characteristic of his narrow path: hiddenness.

That is an important word for those who, like me, intuitively strive to be noticed. Can you relate? Social media has created (or perhaps revealed) the hunger within us to be seen. As some have aptly said, the current generation of young adults—and emerging ones—can be described as “Generation Notification.”

Each time we get notifications—those coveted red or blue circles with a number in them—dopamine releases in our brains. The cycle is hard to break. Even if a comment is negative, receiving one is still addicting because being seen is better than remaining invisible.

To be known and seen is one of our deepest longings. But left to our own devices (pun intended), we get stuck in a never-ending cycle of performative spirituality, where we seek to get from others what can be given only by God.

Jesus’ warning to us, then, is not just good spirituality; it’s good psychology. To be his disciple requires being a whole person, not merely doing religious things. What often stands in the way is a lack of self-awareness—not knowing our inner selves. How do we overcome this?

To combat the unrelenting desire to be seen by others, we are called by Jesus to hiddenness. Once again, the paradox of the kingdom of God is evident. The narrow path of Jesus says that if we want to be strong, we must be weak; if we want to be first, we must be last; if we want to be great, we must be least. It’s the same pattern here: To be truly seen, we must be hidden.

This hiddenness is challenging because Jesus doesn’t primarily mean hiddenness from the world; he means hiddenness from ourselves. To better understand this, it might be helpful to contrast good self-awareness with bad self-awareness.

Good self-awareness sees areas of our lives that are constraining us. It helps us name the forces that keep us from living free, full, and loving lives. Good self-awareness focuses on our reactions and triggers. It reflects on the things we’ve done, and the things left undone. Good self-awareness leads to humility and invites us into a process of growth.

When Jesus says, “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matt. 6:3), he invites you into a “holy unawareness.”

Which leads me to the temptation of bad self-awareness. Self-awareness becomes damaging when the focus is on our righteousness, when we’re caught up in our own goodness, living a self-congratulatory existence. Bad self-awareness fixates on our deeds and exaggerates our spiritual growth. There have been many times when I’ve obsessed over my progress.

When I exercise, I tend to look in the mirror way more than I need to. After 25 pushups, my chest feels like that of a professional bodybuilder, so I go to the mirror to confirm my suspicions (and am sorely disappointed each time). My tendency to document my growth roots me in despair or pride, depending on the day. In all this, I’ve discovered that the most mature people are not consumed with their fruitfulness, nor do they wallow in their failures.

It’s exhausting to live a life of performance. Jesus offers a better way. Aren’t you tired of always having to be “on”? Isn’t it draining to work for constant approval? Do you ever feel as though God will be disappointed if you don’t have everything in order?

Jesus doesn’t lead us into a scrupulous spirituality in which we agonize over every decision. Rather, he calls us to examine the ground from which our good deeds grow. Why? So we don’t entrap ourselves in self-righteousness or idolatry: self-righteousness because our goodness can cloud the grace of God; idolatrous because, without knowing it, we worship acclaim from others instead of from God.

When our deeds are practiced in front of others, we forfeit the rewards we will receive from the Father. Instead of receiving commendation from God, we settle for admiration from people. Of course, Jesus is not saying that all recognition and reward is incongruent with life in the kingdom. He’s clarifying that to live for it is folly. Applause from others, social media likes—it all fades quickly. Only the affirming word of the Father can fill our hearts.

What does this hiddenness look like in real life? Because Jesus embodied it perfectly, let’s consider his life for guidance.

Let this blow your mind: Jesus spent 30 of his 33 years on earth (about 90 percent of his life) in relative obscurity. As someone who regularly leads and speaks in front of lots of people, I find this so challenging. Ron Rolheiser explained how we can follow Jesus’ example: “Ordinary life can be enough for us, but only if we first undergo the martyrdom of obscurity and enter Christ’s hidden life.”

To value hiddenness doesn’t mean we must become members of a monastery, tucked away from the world. Rather, hiddenness is freedom from the shallow praise of the world.

In the Gospels, Jesus is constantly swarmed by admirers of his teaching and miracles, yet he refuses to capitalize on it. In modern terms, he doesn’t post selfies (#LeperBeClean). On one occasion, when people are amazed at his miracles, here’s how Jesus responds: “While he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, many people saw the signs he was performing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them” (John 2:23–24).

Even when people want to make him a celebrity, Jesus holds back. He’s not wooed by platform. Even in his resurrection, Jesus prizes hiddenness. If it were me, I would show up at the home of those who crucified me to scare them to death and demonstrate my power over all things. Jesus, however, simply finds his friends and, rather than storming the world, tells them to share the good news.

To live this way is difficult, especially for those of us who use social media. It lures us into believing the primordial lie of the serpent: You can be like God (Gen. 3:5). Social media creates the illusion that we can know all things, be everywhere, and use our words for the sake of power. It’s the seductive lie that we can be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

What’s stunning about God’s kingdom is that even though he is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present, his presence and activity are often centered in places far from the masses:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene—during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. (Luke 3:1–2)

Luke lists all the political and religious leaders in power, then surprisingly highlights how the word of God bypassed them and came to John in the wilderness. The locus of God’s presence and activity is not found in the corridors of great power. The Gospels tell of a God who shows up in surprising places. His greatest place of action is hidden from the eyes of the socially powerful. His reach touches everything, but the center of it is hidden.

One of Jesus’ best lessons on the importance of hiddenness is something he says about the Holy Spirit. It’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it, so let’s slow down and take a look.

While wrapping up his time with his disciples before going to the cross, he utters this poignant line about the Holy Spirit: “When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come” (John 16:13). Eugene Peterson paraphrased Jesus’ words, saying the Spirit “won’t draw attention to himself” (MSG). That is why some people refer to him as the “Hidden Spirit.”

The Holy Spirit shows deference to Jesus. His inclination is to spotlight another rather than hog the limelight, delighting in making the Son central. Jesus says, “He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you” (v. 14).

Within the Trinity, there is no jockeying for position. The three persons are radically other-focused. Just look at how their interaction is recorded in Scripture. The Father affirms the Son. “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” (Matt. 17:5). The Son is always pointing to the Father. Jesus says things like, The Father is greater than all. I do only what I see my Father doing (John 5:19, 14:28). And the Spirit always points to the Son.

Here’s the main idea: If the Spirit is secure in the love of the Trinity and if the Spirit lives inside you, he wants to make you secure too. He wants to remind you that you are loved by God. You are accepted by God. But ordering life around that theological truth requires concrete, counter-instinctual practices. We must remind ourselves what it looks like to live an anti-performance life like Christ—and to get off the treadmill of endless posturing.

Excerpted from The Narrow Path by Rich Villodas. Copyright © 2024 by Richard A. Villodas. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Rich Villodas is the best-selling author of The Deeply Formed Life (winner of the Christianity Today Book Award) and Good and Beautiful and Kind. He is the lead pastor of New Life Fellowship, a large multiracial church with more than 75 countries represented, in Elmhurst, Queens, and Long Island, New York.

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News

El Salvador’s Prisons Are Full. Prison Ministries Are Not.

Franco Iacomini

Christian organizations are struggling to reach prisoners in a country where 1 in 56 people is in jail.

Inmates wait as 2,000 detainees are moved to the Terrorist Confinement Centre in El Salvador.

Handout / Getty

In just over two years, El Salvador’s government has sent 80,000 people to prison. With over 111,000 people incarcerated, the country has the world’s highest proportion of people behind bars—one inmate for every 56 people.

The current situation stems from a zero-tolerance policy toward the gangs that once proliferated in the country. Salvadoran gangs are considered transnational crime organizations responsible for taking murder rates to levels only seen during the 1979–1992 civil war.

In March 2022, President Nayib Bukele decreed a régimen de excepción (state of exception), which suspends a significant number of civil rights and makes it easier to arrest and prosecute suspected gang members. Though the administration initially promised the decree would last for a month, it has since been renewed 27 times by the Salvadoran congress, lasting nearly two and a half years.

El Salvador has never had a significant prison ministry presence. But for those few that have worked in prisons, the régimen de excepción has both presented an opportunity and revealed a set of problems.

On one hand, leaders say, there’s a real chance for a substantial number of inmates to turn their lives around through the gospel. “Most of them know they need a physical transformation. Evangelism may show them they need a spiritual transformation too,” said Raúl Orellana, a regional ministry leader who has served in El Salvador’s prisons since 2008.

On the other hand, for a variety of reasons, few Christians have shown interest in prison ministry, work that has only become more difficult as the government has increased restrictions on civilian visits in prison.

All of El Salvador’s detention centers in the country, except the maximum security penitentiary, have historically been open to ministers. “The government is very open to evangelical Christian churches that want to preach in prisons,” said Orellana—but the recent strong-arm policy against the gangs has also toughened access for churches and pastors.

A dozen or so years ago, pastors could spend evenings sitting side by side with inmates, counseling them and sharing the gospel. When he visited the prison then, Orellena recalled, he knew about the availability of drugs and electronic devices for inmates, and sometimes saw questionable visitors.

Now, greater government oversight of prisons has increased restrictions on evangelizing to the incarcerated. Many prisons have banned face-to-face interactions between pastors and inmates. Instead, pastors can only speak to groups for a maximum of one hour.

“I understand the authorities’ perspective,” said Orellena. “The inmates had total control and it shouldn’t have been like that. Today, the authorities are in control.”

Prior to 2022, in some prisons, several ministries came to preach every week. Today, prison authorities allow Christian groups to enter once a week on a set schedule, with some exceptions for evangelistic events. For example, for Mother’s Day this year, Kenton Moody, an American missionary who leads Vida Libre, a rehabilitation center for juvenile offenders, threw a big party in the Santa Ana women’s prison.

The ministry provided sodas, pan dulce, and Bibles for 10,000 people. Though authorities only allowed 2,800 women to attend, by the end of the service, 295 raised their hands in answer to a conversion call.

Troubles with gangs and government

Although leaders like Orellena and Moody say they have seen God at work in Salvadoran prisons, many Christians they meet are reluctant to participate in prison ministry, afraid of encountering dangerous criminals. For years, large parts of the country lived under violence and bloodshed caused by gangs like Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 (known also as 18).

Historically, the country has had one of the highest homicide rates in the world; at its peak in 1995, there were 139 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants. Since the beginning of the 2000s, MS-13 and 18 have fought a long-lasting territorial battle with a massive death toll. In 2015, the gangs decreed a ban on all bus routes in the capital, San Salvador, and on the first day of the ban, five bus drivers were killed. In 2016, some estimated that the groups had extorted about 70 percent of all businesses in the country, and the extortion rates were so high that they ultimately led to an increase in consumer prices.

Official numbers show a 70 percent decrease in the murder rate in 2023 in comparison to 2022, as a result of changes in the law and the application of the régimen de excepción. The government has edited the legal code to formally equate terrorism with local criminal associations, and a new law has criminalized tattoos, street graffiti, and any other mark that resembles gang symbols.

But the decrease in homicide rates has also come with a cost. Human Rights Watch has described the changes as a “we can arrest anyone we want” policy that allows detentions based on the appearance and social background of detainees, anonymous calls, or even social media posts.

In this environment, nearly anyone with any relationship to a gang member is at risk of being arrested and sent to prison. That includes former gang members that have served time and returned to civilian life, some of whom have converted to Christianity. Even pastors who minister to current gang members may be seen as collaborators or gang sympathizers and are at risk of incarceration.

“My work with the inmates and former prisoners used to be dangerous because of the gangs. Now it’s dangerous because of the government,” said Moody. “They can throw us in prison at any moment for allegedly helping the gangs.”

Local churches are afraid to risk getting into trouble with both the gangs and the government if they do ministry in prison, he said. “The pastors tell us, ‘How wonderful it is what you are doing,’ and ‘God bless you’—but they don’t participate.”

The continuing work of witness

Throughout Central America, evangelicals have nearly outpaced Catholics in numerical growth. In El Salvador, almost a third (30.9%) of the population now identifies as evangelical.

The percentage of evangelicals is highest in the poorer strata of society—the very segments from which people join gangs and end up in the prison system, says Stephen Offutt, the author of Blood Entanglements: Evangelicals and Gangs in El Salvador.

Between 50 and 70 percent of the people in El Salvador’s prisons come from evangelical families. “I would dare to say that everyone who is in prison has heard of Jesus Christ,” says Orellana, but he adds that the number of true converts is probably small.

For gang members tired of violence, Christianity offers one pathway out.

“Gangs allow people to get out if they show a real conversion,” said Offutt. It’s not as simple as declaring oneself a Christian and being free. “Those gang members that allegedly convert to Christianity are kept under surveillance because there are also fake conversions and fake pastors who try to manipulate the gangs.”

Under the régimen de excepción, some genuinely converted gang members are being dragged back to prison, opening a door for evangelism to take place where the institutional church cannot go.

“A disciple in prison can bring the gospel to many others,” says Lucas Suriano, Latin America coordinator at Prison Alliance, a North Carolina–based ministry that creates discipleship programs and distributes Bibles and Christian literature to inmates around the world.

Although no one sees what happens inside prisons like the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, the maximum security detention center for 40,000 people that President Bukele opened last year, Offutt is certain that God continues to work there.

“Some years ago,” he recounts, “I had a pastor friend whose house was in the shadow of a prison in El Salvador. On Sunday evenings, we could hear Christian songs coming from the prison.”

“People are trying to witness to the gospel in the best ways available. They are finding ways to worship there—it’s inconceivable to me that it’s not happening.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

Books

The Art of Fashioning the Soul

Lanta Davis

An excerpt on faith and sight from Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation.

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

I grew up fearing the power of the eyes. I was supposed to avert my eyes from certain television shows, movies, books, and images. When it came to men, I was afraid of my gaze—and doubly afraid of theirs. Just looking at the sale rack was risky if I wanted to avoid envy and irresponsible spending. Even at 40, I still hide my eyes when I feel afraid.

But I’ve come to realize that for all the time I spent worrying about where not to look, I should have spent a lot more time thinking about what my eyes should be fixed upon. I feared what I saw would corrupt me. It never occurred to me that what I saw could also save me.

Scripture tells us faith begins with a vision. “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John the Baptist declares in John 1:29 (NKJV throughout). See your salvation, he entreats us. Look and be saved. John’s words refer to another story of salvation through sight: the bronze serpent. When the Israelites wander in the wilderness, several of them die from poisonous serpents. Yahweh intervenes and instructs Moses to create a bronze serpent, so that “everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live” (Num. 21:8). Jesus compares himself to the serpent, saying, “As Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). The serpent of sin has bitten us, and its poison courses through our blood. But if we look at Christ, we will live.

Scripture includes a few suggestions on when to avert our eyes (1 John 2:16; Matt. 18:9), but far more frequently, it invites us to behold, to look, to pay attention. Behold often introduces the unexpected and captivating. It asks us (quite literally) to hold on to what we see, to contemplate and be transformed by it. When John tells us to “behold” the Lamb of God, he’s not just telling us, “Look over here for a second.” He’s telling us to look so carefully, with such utterly captivated attention, that we are changed by what we see.

The apostle Paul likewise directs us to gaze upon Christ so that we may be changed, speaking of Christians who, “beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Both John the Baptist and Paul are clear: We behold Christ so that we might become like Christ.

This idea may seem simple enough. Then again, Jesus walked on earth in flesh for only a short time, so how exactly are we supposed to “behold” him now?

Thankfully, we have an extra “eye” for just this occasion. It’s invisible, but it shapes how we see the visible world. It’s connected to the physical eyes, but separate too. Sometimes called the eye of the soul, it’s better known as the imagination. And it needs our attention.

We perhaps think about imagining as something active, a deliberate line of thought or game of make-believe. But ancient and medieval thinkers primarily thought of the imagination as something received. They used wax and seals to explain how the imagination shapes our spiritual and character formation. Our souls are like wax, they thought, pliable and moldable. Wax takes on the shape of whatever seal, or stamp, is impressed upon it. Imaginative forms, such as images and stories, are like seals that imprint themselves on us. We are transformed by—and into—what captures our attention.

Even the word imagination is related to imitation. Children imitate pirates, princesses, and superheroes, but they also imitate what they see their parents doing. And when we grow up, we don’t lose this imitative instinct. Our conversations may include a tangle of quotes from movies we love. We may echo the opinions of our favorite news channel. We may try to dress like our favorite musician or influencer. If something captivates our imagination, we cannot be objective observers. If we behold something, it becomes part of who we are and how we see the world.

But not all imaginative “stamps” are equal. Some are beautiful and good, and some quite ugly. Paul warns us in Romans 12:2 (CEB) not to “be conformed to the patterns of this world.” These “patterns” may appear true, but they offer a false vision of what is important. They distort and malform us, impairing our ability to accurately see God, ourselves, and the world around us.

Take the famous example of Don Quixote. He feasts so heavily on chivalric tales of knights, adventures, and courtly love that he puts on a coat of armor, hops on his old horse, and goes off in search of knightly adventures. No matter whom he meets or where he goes, he sees everything as if it were one of his adventure books: A rundown inn becomes a castle, and an unattractive, scheming woman a beautiful maiden in need of rescue. Most famously, Don Quixote chases windmills in the mistaken belief that he is ferociously fighting giants. He has been so shaped by the knightly imagination that no logic can ever convince him he is anything but a shining, heroic knight.

Today, we may not be putting on a coat of arms and brandishing a sword, but the patterns of our age—consumerism, nationalism, individualism, or moral relativism, to name just a few—can likewise distort our vision and influence our beliefs, practices, and character in ways that are not so different from Don Quixote chasing windmills. We too may be guilty of seeing a reality completely divorced from the reality we inhabit.

Indeed, some of the most pressing problems facing the church today are rooted in a failure of the imagination. We often approach them as if they were political or intellectual problems that could be solved with reason, but logic does not work on a diseased imagination. The only way to correct a malformed imagination is re-forming the imagination.

If we become what we behold, we must ensure that what we behold is what we want to become. Becoming a people transformed into the image of Christ rather than the patterns of our age requires reorienting our gaze and reshaping the wax of our imaginations. If we want our lives to reflect Christ, we must imprint his image onto our souls. If we want to align our lives with the gospel, we must let its story become our story.

Ancient and medieval Christians understood that something as powerful as the imagination must be shaped and disciplined. The first generations of Christians expressed their beliefs in both words and images. The fish symbol, for example, is one of the earliest, most basic professions of our faith: A fish, ichthys in Greek, acts as a symbolic anagram for Jesus (i) Christ (ch), God’s (th) Son (y), Savior (s). They also used anchors, phoenixes, palm branches, and many other symbols to profess their beliefs.

These simple symbols are an early example of a practice that forms the soul by forming the imagination. To ensure that their beliefs, practices, and character aligned with the gospel, ancient and medieval Christians practiced the “art of fashioning the soul,” a devotional exercise that intentionally selected and imprinted images onto the soul. For centuries, Christians trained their spiritual eyes with sculptures, symbols, and stories, frescoes and friezes, morality plays and mosaics. They etched glass and illuminated manuscripts, designed churches shaped like boats and crosses, and decorated the places of the dead with the art of resurrection.

No matter which of the many forms it took, this art for fashioning the soul always sought to imitate Christ. Since beholding Christ captivates, surprises, and transforms, so too do these works of the Christian imagination. Filled with distorted faces and penetrating eyes, surreal shades of gold and blue, roses made from blood, and rainbow-colored panthers, the historic Christian imagination invites us to stop, blink, and behold the utter strangeness we see.

Many evangelical Christians have, unfortunately, forgotten or otherwise neglected our inheritance of the Christian imagination. But these works can still help form our souls by training us to see the beautiful, upside-down truths of the gospel. Their strangeness disorients us, inviting us to look away from the unhealthy patterns of the world and to be stamped anew with love, gratitude, and a sense of wonder rooted in the good news of the gospel.

Behold, the historic works of the Christian imagination still implore us, and become like Christ. Look—and live.

Lanta Davis teaches classes on the sacramental imagination, beauty, and great texts for the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University. She is the author of Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation.

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Ideas

Christian Duty in a Spiral Toward Unrest

Bonnie Kristian

CT Staff; Columnist

Political violence looms large in our national history, to our shame. It does not have to define our future.

Former President Donald Trump is covered by U.S. Secret Service agents after an assassination attempt during a rally in Pennsylvania.

Anna Moneymaker / Staff / Getty / Edits by CT

Foreign policy theorists have a term for when two countries unwillingly drift toward war. It’s called a security dilemma, and as Harvard international relations scholar Stephen M. Walt has explained at Foreign Policy magazine, it’s a scenario where “the actions that one state takes to make itself more secure—building armaments, putting military forces on alert, forming new alliances—tend to make other states less secure and lead them to respond in kind.”

“The result is a tightening spiral of hostility,” Walt wrote, “that leaves neither side better off than before.”

It’s easy to understand how this plays out internationally, with armies and bases and bombs. If Washington is concerned about a rising China, for example, it might expand US naval presence in the Indo-Pacific. But then Beijing, seeing American warships massing off its shores, might reasonably conclude our plans are more aggressive than we’re letting on—and amp up its weapons development and naval drills in turn. And so we could go round and round until one side or the other, perhaps in an unintended failure of communication, starts a world-altering war.

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump on Saturday, it’s time to apply this concept closer to home: America’s right and left, Republicans and Democrats, are in a security dilemma. This tightening spiral of hostility is dangerous, and it must be unwound.

This is not a prediction of a second civil war in the style of the first, with large-scale armies and battles in the streets. I’ve long been skeptical of such forecasts, and I remain skeptical now. But an American version of Ireland’s Troubles, in which we live in fear of sporadic political violence, is increasingly plausible. All it would require is for a very small portion of the public, numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands at most, to see their rivals’ fear as fight and then match deeds to words.

Political violence is off the table for Christians, full stop. If we are to be “holy and pleasing to God,” living in “true and proper worship,” we will leave vengeance of wrongs against us in God’s hands alone. We will “not repay anyone evil for evil,” be “careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone,” and live at peace with all, so far as it depends on us (Rom. 12:1, 17–21).

Our citizenship is in heaven, and we do not “live as enemies of the cross of Christ,” on which Christ died for his enemies (Phil. 3:18–20; Col. 1:21). Jesus commanded us to “not resist an evil person,” to allow people of ill will to take advantage of us, to love and pray for our enemies, that we “may be children of [our] Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:38–45). If we love him, Jesus said, we will keep his commandments (John 14:15), including these very difficult ones that run contrary to our fallen instincts and corrupted common sense.

Ours is an increasingly post-Christian country, but let us not exaggerate the decline. It is still the case that a majority of Americans declare themselves followers of Jesus—people who have, whether they know it or not, committed themselves to serving a God of peace and acting as his emissaries.

For a country in which two of every three people claim the name of Christ to devolve into routinely hosting political violence would be a disgraceful and pathetic thing. Violence looms large in our national history, and that too is to our shame. But it does not have to figure prominently in our future.

There are Christians in the Republican Party, and there are Christians in the Democratic Party. Faithful followers of Jesus will vote for President Joe Biden (or whoever is on the Democratic ticket) this November, and faithful followers of Jesus will vote for Trump. This is a fact. It may be a regrettable fact; as a member of no political party who has never and will never vote for either man, I am inclined to say it is. But it is also a fact God can use for good, perhaps even for “the saving of many lives” by having voices for peace on both sides of the aisle (Gen. 50:20).

When two countries are in a security dilemma, the spiral of hostility tightens because neither side is willing to be the first to disarm. Neither is willing to take a step back down the spiral, to close a military base or call a warship back to port or dismantle a nuclear weapon. They are each unwilling precisely because they are afraid and do not trust the other’s attempts to allay their fears. The other side is wholly foreign, frightening, a threat.

But American Christians with different domestic politics than ours—however wrongheaded and mistaken and perhaps even deceived or stupid we believe them to be—are not a threat to us. They are not frightening. They are not our enemies. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” (1 Cor. 12:21). If we are the body of Christ, we remain of one piece even if the hand checks the wrong box on the ballot.

In our domestic security dilemma, then, Christians of all political persuasions have a duty to God and neighbor to be the first to “disarm.” That means, first, absolutely forswearing violence ourselves. It means obeying Jesus.

This obedience is not something anyone can learn overnight. It is a long-term project of endlessly reorienting our wayward selves toward costly, deliberate peacemaking against all our inclinations to fight. It is a project in which we will undoubtedly fail but must forever resume. It is a project in which the God of peace will be with us (Rom. 15:33).

Beyond that, we cannot control what others will do. As we were reminded on Saturday, the violence of a single person may change everything. Every professed Christian in this country could be wholly obedient to Christ and troubles might yet come.

But we each contribute, in some intangible and unmeasurable way, to the norms and culture of our country. We are each responsible, by simple virtue of living here, for standing in the breach against chaos, for doing constant maintenance to keep our free and functional society afloat. We each have some small influence on what Americans are like as a people, on what the United States is as a polity.

This is true even of those of us who are completely disengaged from politics and public life; think of how powerful a witness for forgiveness were the famously apolitical Amish when violence came to them.

The wisdom of our fallen world is a wisdom of violence. It is a wisdom of “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” of “disorder and every evil practice” (James 3:13–16). As true as it is that the political stakes are very high, that we are dealing with incommensurate aims for this country’s governance, this must not—cannot—be our wisdom. For “the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (v. 17).

Nowhere does Scripture guarantee that our peacemaking will bring peace to us, that it will be surprisingly successful, an unanticipated strategic asset. The final verse of James 3 promises peacemakers a harvest of righteousness, not triumph. Nowhere does Jesus say obeying him will be a backdoor to victory. Victory is his business. Ours is peace.

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

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Theology

Trump’s Would-Be Assassin and the Twisted Quest for Human Glory

Russell Moore

Political violence offers a false sense of meaning. The church must model a different kind of glory.

The Butler, Pennsylvania, fairgrounds where Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally.

Jeff Swensen / Getty Images

In the hours of confusion and chaos since the assassination attempt at a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, in which the former president was injured and several others killed or critically wounded, partisans of all sorts immediately began to speculate about the motives of the shooter.

For many, this raised a weighty question about radicalization and what’s gone wrong in American democracy. Others’ musings came from a hope to “own” the other side. Some noted that, whatever the shooter’s political views or lack thereof, this episode probably says as much about the mental health crisis in American life as it does about our civic crisis. But what if these two crises are not as unrelated as we imagine?

Most Americans recognize the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, along with presidents closer to our own time. Many would struggle, though, to remember when James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce were inaugurated. Yet even those of us fuzzy on much of presidential history can probably identify immediately John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald—just as many who couldn’t name one of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet secretaries know the name of John Hinckley, his would-be assassin. Household names of 1968 like Edmund Muskie or Curtis LeMay have faded out of our memories, but we still know James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan.

Psychologists tell us that people who engage in terrorism of any sort are often well aware of how lasting this kind of notoriety can be. For many, it’s the point of their violence. When all is stable, that sort of perversion can be channeled into more benign vanities. But when—as now—the country seems to be teetering on the edge of something awful, those perversions can turn violent. Under certain conditions, they can tip a society into a cycle of rage and horror.

How are Christians to understand this?

A Christian vision of human depravity recognizes that God is not the author of evil and that evil itself is rooted in human longings and desires (James 1:12–18). The Serpent of Eden did not create a desire to see food as good; it merely appealed to that longing in a way that drew humanity away from God (Gen. 3:1–6). Likewise, the desire to worship, created good, can be perverted into idolatry. The desire for intimacy, created good, can be redirected toward lust.

From Scripture, the Christian tradition classifies evil as rooted in the world, the flesh, and the Devil (Eph. 2:2–3). We recognize that human nature is itself corrupted. We understand that we live in a world that, as the apostle John put it, “lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19, ESV throughout). And we recognize also that evil is oftentimes provoked by the context of the world around us. The woman caught in adultery was not threatened with being hit by one rock from one man; she was at the mercy of a mob, the function of which undoubtedly amplified and stirred the individual sins of each mob member (John 8:1–11).

Human fallenness does not change with the times, but certain conditions can direct that fallenness in different ways. Lust and idolatry, for instance, are never absent this side of the apocalypse. But they may be present in a specific way in the ecosystem of temple prostitution, as was the case in much of the world of the early church. Likewise, the perversion of the desire for meaning and recognition is always around us and within us. But, during certain times of world history, this perversion gets expressed in political violence.

“You desire and do not have, so you murder,” the apostle James wrote. “You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (4:2). What is desired in a murderous rage? Often, it is the created but twisted longing for recognition—for notoriety—and meaning. Cain was incensed when his brother’s sacrifice was recognized and his own was not (Gen. 4:1–12), and the Bible tells us this darkness was not limited to a primeval moment of sibling rivalry (1 John 3:11–15).

We don’t know, yet, the specific motives or mindset of this killer. But we do know the inner violence of this time. We see it all around us in broken relationships, screamed accusations, and a social media atmosphere that almost all of us recognize as toxic, but which very few of us are willing to leave.

The vast majority of Americans, even those most inflamed by partisan political passions, do not resort to the kind of violence we saw in the attempted assassination of Trump or during the insurrectionist riots of January 6, 2021, or in the threats to the life of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Whatever their political views, most people want the same thing for someone who would murder this way: justice. Most Americans, though, also recognize that something is awry with our time: the conflation of politics with a sense of one’s belonging, of one’s identity, of one’s purpose and mission in life.

We are created to want glory, which includes recognition and ultimate purpose. But the glory for which we are created is the glory that comes through the power and wisdom of Christ. It cannot come from any of the substitutes on offer.

When we expect of politics what can only arise from worship, it’s all too easy to find ourselves speaking, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the language of spiritual warfare, making our political rivals not opponents to be persuaded but enemies to be vanquished. In that sort of cosplay apocalypse, one can feel “alive” and significant—for a moment—by hating the right people enough. And when we add to that the fact that a significant part of our population is struggling with mental health, we should not be surprised that the result includes bloodshed.

Experts tell us that shooters and other terrorists tend to be lone wolves of a certain sort: those who are isolated in real life but find a semblance of “community” online, frequently in radical and radicalizing spaces. The Bible tells us that sin often comes from the pursuit of a kind of “glory” given by other human beings rather than the glory that comes from God (John 12:43). That may be the glory of a specific community—whether real or virtual—or it may be a desire for glory in the minds of anonymous strangers in headlines and history books. We should see this pursuit for what it is: a satanic pull into mutually assured destruction.

The state has an obligation to fulfill—to prevent these acts of terrorism and to hold accountable those who carry them out. Civil society has a responsibility too: to conserve the sorts of norms that rule out political violence, even when “emergency” language might seem to justify it.

And the church has a mission here too. We need to proclaim a different sort of significance, a different sort of meaning, a different sort of belonging. We can remind ourselves that we need not clamor for our own glory, whether in heroic acts of goodness or in notorious acts of violence. We can find it by humbling ourselves before the future glory that is hidden now in Christ.

We can embody what it means to be a genuine community: one that sees the glory of God in the face of Jesus, not through the scope of a gun.

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

News

‘We Praise You That Trump Is Gonna Be All Right’

Harvest Prude and Kate Shellnutt

Evangelicals respond to the apparent assassination attempt at the former president’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

(Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Evangelical leaders and politicians offered prayers for former president Donald Trump and thanked God for sparing his life following an apparent assassination attempt at a campaign rally in western Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Thousands of supporters joined a prayer call hosted by America First Policy Institute, hours after a bullet fired toward Trump grazed his right ear while he spoke before a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“We praise you today that President Trump is gonna be all right,” said Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia pastor who serves as one of Trump’s faith advisors. “We thank you, Lord, that he was wounded but he was not killed. So we thank you that you were there. You preserved his life.”

Franklin has prayed for and encouraged Trump through three campaigns now, commending his leadership and love of America. Franklin’s voice quavered as he described getting the call that “President Trump has been shot.”

“He knows now, like never before, that he is not immortal, that one day he will stand before you in fear and trembling,” Franklin prayed. “God, make him a man on a mission now. Make him a man, oh God, who you have raised up, like you did King David for Israel. Raise this man up for America, to keep us strong and powerful.”

In the comments, supporters added amens and posted Bible verses. One commenter referenced Psalm 91, which is a prayer with themes of divine protection. Another viewer, Ethelene White, wrote, “The angels [encamp] around President Trump and the families of those who passed away and were injured in this process,” a reference to Psalm 34:7.

Americans across the political spectrum condemned the attack—thought to be a possible assassination attempt and consequence of the country’s heated political climate—which killed one attendee and left two more critically injured.

Trump was rushed off the stage by Secret Service personnel, giving his supporters a fist pump as blood flowed down the side of his face.

“God protected President Trump,” Sen. Marco Rubio said on X.

Trump said in an online statement he “knew immediately that something was wrong” when he heard “a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin.”

A campaign spokesman said soon after the shooting that the former president was “fine” and was with doctors. Secret Service communications chief Anthony Guglielmi said that the suspected shooter “fired multiple shots toward the stage from an elevated position outside of the rally venue.” He said Secret Service personnel “neutralized the shooter, who is now deceased.”

President Joe Biden offered a televised statement, saying, “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence” and “everybody must condemn it.”

The Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), all offered statements.

“The reality that this has taken place tonight should bring us to our knees,” ERLC president Brent Leatherwood said.

“We are praying earnestly for Mr. Trump and his family,” Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, said in a statement. “It is in no way premature to call for Americans of all ideological perspectives, Republicans and Democrats alike, to commit to bringing greater civility to their advocacy in the public square.”

A nearby Catholic church, All Saints Parish in Butler, had moved its Saturday programming due to road closures during the rally. “There are feelings of fear, hurt, anger, and sorrow in our community right now,” All Saints pastor Kevin Fazio said in a statement Saturday night. “As Christians, we need to remember that during times of darkness, we are called to reflect the light of Christ.”

The Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh also responded and called for prayer “for an end to this climate of violence in our world.”

Pastors and politicians repeated calls for unity, peace, and healing.

“No matter your politics, please pray for Donald Trump and pray for America,” Rep. Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota, said.

“Karen and I are praying for President Trump and urge every American to join us,” Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, said.

Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, thanked her father’s supporters in a statement that offered a window into how the event had impacted her personally.

“Thank you for your love and prayers for my father and for the other victims of today’s senseless violence in Butler, Pennsylvania,” she wrote. “I continue to pray for our country. I love you Dad, today and always.”

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee confirmed in a joint statement that Trump will still be attending the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next week to officially accept his party’s nomination.

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