In Pennsylvania, Locals Remember Corey Comperatore’s ‘Greater Love’

Harvest Prude, with Megan Fowler in Sarver, Pennsylvania

Communities surrounding Trump’s rally site feel the shock of the tragic shooting.

Matt Slocum / AP

Corey Comperatore loved reading Romans.

His pastor at Cabot Methodist Church, Jonathan Fehl, recalled how much Comperatore drew strength from the book. It was the first thing he’d recommend to new believers.

But it may be that Comperatore is remembered by another portion of Scripture, John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Comperatore was the kind of church member who showed up every Sunday, took part in small groups, became a member of the congregation’s board of trustees, and helped with building projects. He was an Army veteran, volunteer firefighter, and proud “girl dad”—a guy who did everything with “a heart of service to the Lord,” Fehl wrote.

His final act of love and sacrifice came on Saturday, when he yelled, “Get down!” before diving in front of his wife and daughters to protect them from a bullet intended for former president Donald Trump.

The 50-year-old died on the scene from a gunshot wound to the head.

Comperatore was thrust into national news, the single fatality of a shooting that has left his community in Western Pennsylvania in grief, shock, and trauma.

“There’s just a lot of sadness,” Brandon Lenhart, senior pastor at North Main Street Church of God in Butler, told CT. “That somebody lost their life in the event, that that happened in the small town of Butler. It’s not a way we wanted to be put on the map, quite frankly.”

His church is on the other side of town from the Butler Farm Show, where Trump’s rally was held. It’s a conservative area—“you see pro-Trump signs everywhere,” Lenhart said—and people drove in from surrounding towns to cheer on the Republican candidate.

Comperatore and his family came from Sarver, just 16 miles southwest of the Farm Show. It’s small, with a population of 8,486, and was once just a tiny milling village. Its Wikipedia page lists only two notable figures: a pageant winner, and now, Comperatore.

The drive from Butler and Sarver winds through hilly farmland, a patchwork of corn, soy, and wheat fields, pastures filled with grazing livestock, and hay bales dotting the horizon. Many of its residents find work at nearby manufacturing facilities. Comperatore had been an engineer at a plastics plant.

At the Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, hundreds gathered on Wednesday for a vigil in remembrance of their friend and neighbor. Many were dressed in red, white, and blue. They sat on slippery bleachers around the racetrack, wet from an afternoon downpour, to hear pastors, friends, and firefighters pay tribute to “one of the best men” they knew.

Members of Sonrise Community Church, another congregation in Sarver, offered prayers and sang before the crowd of 300. They repeatedly referenced Corey’s “greater love” and how he was willing to lay down his life for others. As his daughter Allyson wrote in tribute, “He truly loved us enough to take a real bullet for us.”

“You’ve heard about who [Corey] is. … We’ve also heard the most important part, about whose he is,” said Fehl, Comperatore’s pastor. “He knew that he belonged to Jesus Christ. That’s the reason he lived a life of service the way he did. He was a witness to the grace of God at work in his life.”

The crowd bowed their heads for the Lord’s Prayer and then lifted glowing candles and iPhone flashlights while MercyMe’s “I Can Only Imagine” played over the speaker.

One attendee, Bonnie Waldenville, came to the vigil because her husband graduated from high school with Comperatore. “It really hurts here,” Waldenville pointed to her heart, “for his wife.”

Adam Salinas, a local chaplain and pastor in the Pittsburgh area, came to offer support. He has prayed several times with the staff of local nursing homes in the wake of the rally. “It has been very sad for our whole community,” he said.

A private funeral will be held for Comperatore on Friday at Cabot Church, followed by a procession of fire trucks.

At every church in the area, you find people who knew Comperatore, who were at the rally themselves, or who are still feeling the ache of the shooting and the scare of what could have been.

“Jesus, we are at a different place than we were 24 hours ago,” David Janz, pastor of Butler First Church, a Methodist congregation, prayed on the Sunday morning after the rally. “Violence is all around us, but it seems to have come home a lot more strong and evident because of what happened last night.”

He prayed for Trump, the Comperatore family, and the two other individuals, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, who had suffered injuries during the shooting. He also prayed for the family of the shooter.

“We pray for them. We pray for our community. It doesn’t feel as safe as it used to,” he said. “Help us, Lord, to take these moments to fix our eyes again on Jesus.”

When Lenhart and his wife, Saralee, who is worship pastor at North Main Street Church, heard about the shooting, they were having a rare date at an Italian restaurant in neighboring Zelienople. They knew members of their congregation had been at the rally.

But getting back to the flock wasn’t so easy. The area had morphed into a crime scene: Choppers scouted the air and law enforcement shuttered roads near the rally location and the hospital where they’d taken Trump. “It turned a 15-, 20-minute drive into a 45-minute drive to take all the alternate routes back into town,” Lenhart said. “It was a bit surreal.”

They made it to a house around a mile from the Butler Farm Show grounds.

One of their congregants had fled there with around 20 other rally goers who couldn’t make it home. She’d gotten a VIP ticket and had been in the stands behind Trump. Less than ten feet away, one row behind her and down the bench a little, had sat the Comperatores.

“Bullets were coming through that section of the stands. She’s pretty traumatized by what she saw,” said Lenhart, who prayed and spoke with them, also suggesting further resources of counseling and therapy.

The next day, he addressed his congregation before worship.

“It’s a traumatic event,” he told them. “So what do we do with all of this? We don’t react. We become proactive. And you know what the believer in Christ does when there’s a crisis? Can I show you?”

Lenhart dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in a posture of prayer. The church applauded.

“I wanted to make sure people understood our response is not social media, our response is not vitriol, picketing, protesting,” he said in an interview with CT. “As believers in Christ, our first response is always to seek the Lord.”

Nearby churches are rallying to help the community process and heal. On Saturday, North Main Street Church is hosting a free crisis response event with the Christian counseling agency it shares offices with. Christian Counseling Associates will speak to attendees about the shooting and the fallout, then break into small groups for discussion.

Last weekend, Lenhart had stayed up wondering whether to scrap his sermon. Instead, he shared some reflections and quoted from Ecclesiastes and the book that happened to be Comperatore’s favorite, Romans.

“Regardless of what side of the aisle you sit on, violence is never warranted. And I think we can agree, hopefully as the body of Christ, that this is not only an abhorrent thing that happened in our local community, it’s something that, as believers in Christ, we should never celebrate on one side or the other,” he said. “We are told in Romans chapter 12 that we are not to overcome evil with more evil, but to overcome evil with good.”

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Church Life

Is God Calling Me to Obscurity or Influence?

E. L. Sherene Joseph

I want to write to build up the body of Christ, but platform building takes time away from my local congregation.

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

I recently spoke with a pastor in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His congregation is small—150 or so members—and his routine is busy, with duties extending far beyond the walls of the church building.

The pastor’s typical week is a testament to his dedication to his parishioners. Most of his time is devoted to visitation, prayer, and pastoral care, often in nursing homes and hospitals. He reserves Saturdays for sermon prep and tries to keep Fridays for time with his family.

Sometimes, the pastor receives invitations to go further afield: to speak at conferences, contribute to Christian media outlets, or even write books—all alluring opportunities and a sign of his intellectual prowess and extensive network in ministry circles. However, he typically declines when considering how much that work and absence would affect his flock’s spiritual growth. Instead of building a platform, he is nurturing a community. Or, in the words of author Jen Pollock Michel, he is leading a life instead of leaving a story.

I have struggled with that choice for myself. After graduating from seminary, I started writing and teaching at my local church. Because I didn’t need to make money from my writing, I’ve had the luxury of flexibility, and soon, looking for places to be published became a job in itself. It was gratifying and humbling to be invited to be a member of a writers’ guild and have others promote my work. But I also started to see that regularly writing for public consumption was complicated, hard, and unsustainable if I wanted to remain invested in my congregation.

I want to write to serve the church, but writing increasingly takes time away from my actual church. Suppose I spend all my time pitching publications, building my following, creating Christian content, and trying to make it in the “Evangelical Industrial Complex.” Am I still being Christ to others? Am I showing his love?

On the other hand, if I feel a calling to write and believe I have something worthwhile and faithful to say, is it wrong to use my talent to promote my work? Should I be content with obscurity, like the pastor in Pennsylvania? Should I sit with the woman whose mother died, whose husband walked away, or who got a phone call from her doctor about a CT scan? I have often asked myself whether I have the intelligence, wisdom, and resilience to navigate the life of a Christian writer.

This spring’s discourse among Christian writers on the dynamics of Christian ministry and the publishing landscape suggests I’m not alone in asking this question. The whole conversation is shaped by how technological changes have transformed how writing works. In some ways, publishing is now democratized. Between podcasts, social media, Substack and other newsletters, and video platforms like YouTube and TikTok, there’s no dearth of Christian content, and minimal barriers to entry enable many more voices to speak on theology, spiritual growth, and Christian living.

The trouble is what happens after entry. The journey toward recognition entails deliberately cultivating a personal brand and professional network. “Publishers are constantly evaluating book proposals, not on the content of the book alone, but on the platform of the author,” Michel wrote on Substack, in a post about deciding to quit publishing but keep writing. “Can this person write? Yes, it’s one question. But I’d argue it’s not even the most important one in the publishing calculus. Can this person sell? Now we’re talking.”

You have to build a robust digital presence and expand your audience. You hope other writers will promote your work just as you promote theirs—whom you know and tag on your social profiles becomes currency. It’s not enough to be gifted by the Spirit; you must market your gifts on social media. You create Instagram content, write nuggets of wisdom, and start doing reels in the hope that the more content you create, the more people will notice.

Is this how I should be spending my time? Where does it leave my lay ministry? Where does it leave people going through divorce, illness, and parenting struggles—or people just looking for community? If I write about Christ, am I neglecting his body? As theologian Nika Spaulding asked when I interviewed her, “Am I missing the imperative to prioritize the needs of the local church? Do I require a recalibration of aspirations and ambitions?”

I wrestle with this every day. I believe God calls me to faithful service where I am planted, to love God and love people in my local church—not to be a platform builder or influencer, seeking an admiring audience’s validation (and dopamine hit). But I also believe writing is a way God has equipped me to serve, and the publishing industry says I must build a platform if I want anyone to read my work. In my conversations with journalist and writer Devi Abraham, she observed that in American Christianity, like American culture more broadly, it seems “obscurity is not the answer for success.”

I don’t have a settled answer to these questions, but I do have more questions that may bring clarity—and a story that reframed my thinking.

Can we find contentment in obscurity? “I spoke at two rather large women’s events, and for the first time, did not incentivize anyone to subscribe to my newsletter,” author and ministry leader Sarah K. Butterfield said of a period in which she took a break from writing. “I showed up with the sole purpose of serving those who attended with no hopes of growing my following. The result was liberating!”

Do we have it in us to do likewise? How would our writing, pitching, and publishing habits change if we weren’t constantly trying to increase our readership? Is there a dissonance in our souls, such that we cannot be satisfied with the little and constantly find ourselves longing for more?

If God has given us a creative gift, what does it mean to use it for his glory? We must use our gifts for God and the extension of his kingdom, but what if the reach that he wants us to have in our ministries, either church or parachurch, was meant to be limited? What if he wants us to minister—or even write—to just a small number of people, not 20,000 books sold but faithfulness to the few in our circle? Our “platform” might be a local church or neighborhood.

“Serving in a local church and community is hard, challenging, and exhausting,” Bible teacher Jen Wilkin told me. But it is also gratifying to see, in person, people come alive in the knowledge of Scripture and love for God. In the digital cacophony of voices vying for attention and affirmation, we in Christian ministry need to find ways to build substantive relationships and foster the growth of spiritual depth in those within our literal reach.

I had a long chat about this with Al Hsu, associate editorial director at InterVarsity Press. Even in the publishing industry, he said, “Platform is not”—or should not be—“an end in itself. It is an extension of our mission and vocation.” Our platforms should align with our callings and whom we are called to serve, so platforms must look different for different people.

Can we be patient in our development? Like many writers, I’ve aspired to be like the leaders, teachers, and authors who have massive platforms and have reached fame. Perhaps I will someday, but they did not get to that level overnight. Prominent writers like Beth Moore and Ann Voskamp “labored largely unknown for years,” as writer Karen Swallow Prior has noted, “and, more importantly, didn’t set out in hopes of gaining the wide platforms they have.”

Author Christine Caine writes about how she was “developed, not discovered.” She desired to serve God at an early age, so when church leaders asked her to serve on the cleanup team as a young adult, she agreed. That led to greater responsibility and mentorship, and after years of wiping up messes, her faithful yes at 21 prepared her for the massive ministry she leads today. God developed her faith and skills in obscurity.

What do we actually want? Maybe God wants us to minister on a small, local scale. Or maybe he’ll help us write for millions. In either case, author Mary DeMuth said in our conversation, we must pay attention to our hearts. “Do we find ourselves loving the feed more than the people behind the feed?” she asked. “God is calling people to the context of loving humans with skin on, and we need to seek to bless them, love them, and know them.”

God calls us to a life of knowing him and walking with him, and we must cultivate that first. If a large audience is something God wants for us, he can bring it to pass. We need not waste our time striving for prominence and platform. We can grow where we are planted, grow in the knowledge of God, and practice his presence in the mundane. The true measure of success is not a follower count or sales record but our depth of fidelity to God.

I recently read a short history of the Frankish princess Bertha, who moved to Canterbury in the English kingdom of Kent around the year 580 to marry its pagan king, Ethelbert. Christianity had been introduced to England at that time but had not yet been widely established.

Bertha was a person of strong Christian faith. She married on the condition of being permitted to remain a Christian and brought a bishop with her to her new home. She corresponded with the pope, who later wrote that her “good deeds are known not only among the Romans … but also through various places.”

In 597, after years of Bertha’s apparently “unsuccessful” faithfulness, a mission team led by a monk named Augustine arrived from Rome. On reaching Kent, they preached the gospel to the king, who finally acknowledged Christ’s sovereignty. Many people followed the king’s example, and Canterbury became the center of Christianity in England. To this day, it is the spiritual home of many Christians.

Bertha left no writings and no record of public exercise of power. Yet her years of faithfulness helped lead to the evangelism of England and many other nations. Today, UNESCO recognizes her prayer chapel as the oldest place of unbroken Christian worship and witness in the English-speaking world. God used her prayers to do immeasurably more than she could have ever asked or imagined (Eph. 3:20).

He may use our obscure faithfulness the same way. While “we prefer the spectacular,” as author Skye Jethani has said, referencing the parable of the sower, “God is happy to work through the subtle. And while we think outcomes are based upon how God’s Word is proclaimed, God knows the outcomes are determined by how his Word is received.” Is our concern to build a platform for ourselves, or is it to be the hands and feet of Christ, sowing where we can and letting God give the increase?

E. L. Sherene Joseph is an adult third culture kid and writer who focuses on faith, community, and culture. As an immigrant to the United States, she shares her experiences of living between different worlds. You can find more of her work at www.sherenejoseph.me.

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Church Life

Pakistan’s Presbyterians Have United. Reconciling Will Take Time.

Isabel Ong

After 60 years of division, leaders hope that coming together will strengthen the church’s witness.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

On March 25 of this year, a group of Pakistani Presbyterian church leaders gathered in one of their homes. There, the 20 or so people decided to bring their factions together after years of contentious division. Later, they gathered for tea and seviyan, a sweet vermicelli dessert cooked in sugar and milk or oil, at Gujranwala Theological Seminary.

There were no contracts or legal documents to mark this momentous decision. “We just talked and trusted each other,” said Reuben Qamar, the leader, or moderator, of one faction.

The Presbyterian Church of Pakistan (PCP) has a long history in the country, where Christians comprise less than 2 percent of the population. The Presbyterian mission was founded in the 1860s, and its missionaries led mass conversion movements and set up schools and hospitals in the region. In 1961, it was declared an autonomous body and local leadership began stewarding it.

This was when the divisions started: first between the ’60s and ’70s, then in the ’90s, and more recently in 2018 and 2021, says Qamar, noting that the splits mainly occurred not because of doctrinal differences but because of power and corruption.

One major conflict arose when there was a dispute on whether a moderator could extend their term from three to five years. Some supported this change, while others did not.

By the end of 2023, the church was split into three factions: One led by Qamar, and two others by moderators Arif Siraj and Javed Gill, respectively. Each claimed to be the Presbyterian Church of Pakistan.

The root of the problem was discipline, says Majeed Abel, the executive secretary in Siraj’s former faction. Whenever conflicts arose, people took “refuge” in splitting and creating a “parallel church” with presbyteries that sometimes consisted only of one member, he said.

These divisions contributed to “the weakening of the church,” and the denomination’s nearly 300 churches were left in turmoil, Qamar also said.

There were disputes in the congregations, where people demanded that their pastor be installed and another terminated. Some of these disagreements turned into court cases, with pastors fighting to prove that they were the legally recognized leader of a church.

This year’s pledge for unity in the PCP arose out of the Presbyterian leaders’ shared desire to mend broken bonds. But unity—and what that looks like practically—has meant different things to different people.

For some leaders, returning to the PCP’s original mission—to carry out the Great Commission—was a big motivating factor in pursuing unity.

“The real mission of the church [was] being ignored. … We [were] going in the courts against each other,” said Qamar.

What convicted him to reconcile with the other factions’ leaders was the passage in John 17:20–23 where Jesus says, “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” “[Our] purpose is to share the gospel, to become the witness of Christ,” said Qamar. “As a church, we have to share the love of God with this world, and we can achieve these goals only with unity.”

Some leaders also felt a strong desire to restore the PCP’s good standing nationally and internationally. “The divide brought a bad reputation to the church, with the leadership being seen as power hungry,” lamented faction leader Gill.

For Gill, being one body in Christ looks like following the Presbyterian church’s constitution, which states there should be a “united assembly” under one leader as “we are ordered to have one shepherd and one flock.”

“Such divisions weaken the body of Christ, especially in Pakistan, where we already live under unfavorable conditions,” said Azhar Mushtaq, Pakistan Bible Society’s general secretary.

“The conflict affected our interaction with church leadership, making it difficult to identify the genuine leaders.”

At present, the leaders of the different factions meet every month and are planning to visit churches around the country together to advocate for unity. They are also hoping to hold a general assembly by September, where leaders will step down from their positions and let the house appoint a single moderator over the entire Presbyterian church body.

“Despite some bitter experiences, the entire leadership is now committed to forgiveness,” Gill said. The Bible verses that led him to pursue unity with the other factions was 1 Corinthians 1:12–13, where some say “I follow Paul,” and others say “I follow Apollos” or “I follow Cephas.” Is Christ divided?

Reconciliation is a slow work in progress, particularly at the local church level, say many of the leaders CT interviewed.

And there are some who oppose this move because they see each other as enemies, Qamar said.

“The presbyteries that were split … must be reconciled as well,” Abel said. While he is not involved in ongoing reconciliation efforts, he is “happy to reconcile” with the other groups.

“During the peace meeting, we have unanimously agreed to send a reconciliation commission to these presbyteries, but no one seems to be interested in that.”

PCP pastors like Sheraz Sharif Alam and Romella Robinson echoed their leaders’ concerns. The couple, who serve in Gakhar, Gujranwala—a two-hour car ride north of Lahore—have firsthand experience of how the PCP’s long-lasting divisions have impacted local ministry.

The PCP’s financial woes began in 2018. One faction controlled all the bank accounts and used up all the investments and money for litigation purposes and for securing favors from pastors, Qamar shared. Partners such as the US-based Outreach Foundation, which helps churches around the world grow their capacity and reach, stopped their funding because of corruption and the lack of an accountability system. Major projects in community development and mission work are currently halted.

Pastors like Alam and Robinson do not receive a salary. They rely on tithes and thanksgiving offerings like vegetables from their congregation to survive. The financial crunch means that some pastors must turn to other forms of work to support their families. And the PCP’s leaders have not said or done anything to change the current situation, they said.

“Right now, we are principally reconciled, but we are separately working,” said Alam, who also serves as general secretary in Qamar’s former faction. The people who will likely attend the upcoming general assembly are selected from a 2017 list of delegates, which does not include those who have become pastors in the last seven years, Alam added.

Greater transparency about efforts toward reconciliation among the factions would be beneficial, said Robinson. “Leaders must delegate their understanding and wisdom to the coming generation so that they will be able to become good leaders in the future,” she said.

Ongoing persecution against Christians in Pakistan may generate a deeper desire to set differences aside.

For the past two years, the country has ranked seventh on Open Doors’ World Watch List of the top 50 countries where it’s hardest to be a Christian. In 2020 and 2021, it was in the top five.

Last year, mobs in Jaranwala plundered, vandalized, and burned down 26 churches. In May, 72-year-old Christian Lazar Masih was attacked and killed by a mob in Sargodha for allegedly committing blasphemy. In July, young believer Ehsan Shan was sentenced to death for purportedly circulating blasphemous content on TikTok.

After Masih and his family were brutally attacked, PCP leaders and members from the three factions traveled to Sargodha. The group, including Abel, Qamar, and Siraj, met Masih’s brother, also a Presbyterian. They visited the place where the attack had occurred. They spoke with social activists and people from the local peace committee, some of whom were Muslim, and demanded that the people who attacked Masih should be brought to the courts. They campaigned for justice to be served with Christian politicians who were present, like members of the provincial assembly Ejaz Alam Augustine and Sonia Ashir.

Representatives from civic society and the government were “very happy to see us united and together in such an event,” Qamar said.

“This is the work of God, and I trust in God that the Holy Spirit will work in the church.”

Additional reporting by Asif Aqeel

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Ideas

Your Party Will Not Win This Election

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

And that’s a good thing—because how we think about victory is not only delusional but damaging.

Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump (L) looks at US president Joe Biden during the CNN Presidential Debate.

Andrew Harnik / Staff / Getty

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

With Election Day 2024 in sight, I can make one bold prediction: Your party is not going to win.

You might challenge me on this, saying, “But, RDM, you don’t know what party I, the reader, support.” That’s true—but I stand by my forecast. That’s because no matter what party wins the presidency, the Congress, or the state houses this November, no one is going to win.

I do not mean, of course, that one party or other won’t see its candidate in the Oval Office come January, or that we won’t see people being sworn in as members of Congress, senators, governors, and all the rest. That kind of winning will happen, as it always does. What I mean is that no one is going to win the way too many of us define winning in this strange era.

In his new book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, Yuval Levin points out a dangerous illusion of the present: the notion that after one decisive victory, whoever is “on the other side” will go away and will not need to be accommodated.

In truth, Levin argues, American life is pulled in two directions: toward what could be called “conservatism” in one direction and “progressivism” in the other. Those visions look different in different times—and, often, the two sides swap out on specific policy positions—but the basic tension is always there.

This is because, Levin writes, any group of human beings is going to have disagreements. A constitutional order doesn’t eradicate those disagreements but instead structures a careful balance between majority rule and minority rights.

Levin argues that one of the reasons—with some exceptions, of course—that local and state politics tend to be less toxic than national presidential elections is that, usually, those debates tend to be about issues more immediately recognized as practical—what roads get paved, what hospitals get funded—and thus “lend themselves better to bargaining and accommodation.”

At the national level, though, our candidates and our parties aren’t as much about specific issues as they are about tribal identity. Even when motivated by grievance and resentment, as national politics now are, the grievances and resentments are about far different things than, say, the issue of free silver in the William Jennings Bryan era or corporate monopolies in the Theodore Roosevelt era. What this leads to, Levin contends, is the current situation—in which presidential elections become about “political expression” rather than “civic action.”

When we peel down below issues of national scope, we often find that the fundamental problem is not that the “other side” isn’t going to accomplish what we want but that the other side exists at all. With that in mind, we can assume that this one election will put all that aside, and that those people, whoever they are, now permanently defeated and humiliated, will go away. But this is not true.

In his book Democracy and Solidarity, political scientist James Davison Hunter identifies this very dynamic as a culture logic that seeks not specific policy goals but something much bigger: recognition and status and identity.

When that isn’t achieved, we poison ourselves with fantasies that one day—maybe right now—we will finally enact revenge on those who have injured us by not conferring the status we believe we deserve. We want to find our own identity in the kind of “negative solidarity” that unites against a common oppressor. We start, then, to assume that every election is working toward a post-election reality where, as the old hymn puts it, “every foe is vanquished.”

In that kind of world, Hunter argues, in which the sense of status cannot ever be wholly fulfilled, the injury must be constantly emphasized. “Take away the injury, take away its cause, take away the revenge it seeks, and both meaning and identity for the aggrieved dissolve,” he writes.

If what we are seeking is not civic action but status, then outrage becomes authority. This quest for moral worth, status recognition, and self-esteem lends itself to precisely the kind of reality-television identity politics that we see right now.

This becomes a cycle. The more we expect of our politics to express who we are, the less we expect our politics to actually do. That kind of politics, after all, is going to result every time in what we’ve seen over the past 15 years: narrow majorities that teeter back and forth between the parties. Big goals—a New Deal, a Cold War victory, a moon landing—seem out of touch, so we replace those goals with what Hunter calls “millennialism.”

Millennialism is, of course, not a political doctrine but a theological one, rooted in the Book of Revelation’s language of a thousand-year reign of Christ and his people. From the very beginning, Christians have argued about what that means—is it a present reality in heaven or a future expectation after the reign of Christ, or something else? History shows that when those sorts of messianic expectations bubble up without the presence of the actual Messiah, they lead, at worst, to bloodshed—and, at best, to disillusionment and disappointment.

If Joe Biden (or whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be) wins, the Trumpists and whatever passes for the “right” these days will still be here. If Donald Trump is elected president, the “left” will still be around. Whatever your political views, you can’t have your millennium unless half the country is Raptured.

In his forthcoming book One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation, CT news editor Daniel Silliman looks at the 50th anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon through the grid of Nixon’s lifelong quest for approval.

Nixon’s father, Silliman recounts, ran a general store in what used to be a church, hollowing out the steeple so he could sit and survey the store from there, yelling criticisms at his son to work harder, do better. Silliman demonstrates how Nixon sought security throughout his life in the approval of the voters who would send him to office, in Dwight Eisenhower as a father figure, and in his own triumph over the “elites” from Harvard and Yale who had looked down on him.

Silliman argues that the reason we even have the Watergate tapes is because of that drive for approval. Who, after all, would record the audio of every single moment in the White House? Silliman compares Nixon’s motivation to the old Jack Chick tracts, “This Was Your Life,” in which, before the judgment seat, the sinner sees his entire life replayed in front of everyone (this tract terrified me as a child).

“Nixon had a similar fantasy—a complete recording, everyone on tape from his time in the White House,” Silliman writes. “But in his version, he thought, he would not be condemned but justified.” With a record of his accomplishment as president, he could prove that he had done a good job, that he was worthy of existing, that he was a great man.

The tapes, of course, did the opposite. They showed him to be exactly what he feared people would think he was: crooked, dishonest, a failure—the first president in history to be forced to resign.

Nixon was driven by the wrong things. He expected too much, and public opinion could never love him back. Politics could never be a judgment seat that could justify his life. In this moment in history, we expect something very similar out of our politics: a vindication of who’s right and who’s wrong, a separation of the sheep from the goats, a final and definitive victory.

If that’s what we think winning is, none of us will win. We will just descend more and more into resentment and outrage. We will turn on those we counted on to give us what they never could, or we will seethe in our fantasies of “next time,” when we (this time for sure!) will get that ultimate win.

That’s not what winning is. Until we lose that expectation, we will keep losing—not just as a republic but as people whose lives are meant to be about much more than keeping score.

No one will win this election, ultimately. No one will lose this election, ultimately. Maybe we should ask whether we are seeking something where it can never be found, and ask ourselves whether we should be looking Somewhere else.

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

News

Evangelicals Agree That Biden Should Drop Out

Kate Shellnutt

Poll: Black Protestants are among the only groups who remain confident in the president’s mental capacities.

Mario Tama / Getty Images

With mounting scrutiny over President Joe Biden’s fitness for the 2024 election, most evangelical Protestants believe that Biden should drop out of the race, though a sizable number of Black Protestants continue to back him.

A new poll from AP-NORC found that evangelicals agree with the rest of the country: 67 percent of evangelicals and 70 percent of Americans overall want Biden to withdraw.

Among both groups, fewer than one in five (18%) see him as capable of winning the election. Less than 2 percent of Republicans say Biden can win.

Concerns around Biden’s abilities accelerated after his performance in a debate with former president Donald Trump in June, and a growing list of Democratic politicians and supporters have come forward asking him to step aside.

In one interview, he said he’d only drop out if “the Lord Almighty” asked him to.

Black Protestants are more likely than the average American to want Biden to stay in; 45 percent say the president should continue running, but just 32 percent of evangelicals and 28 percent of Americans say the same.

Earlier this month, Biden, who is Catholic, talked about his faith while visiting a Black church in Philadelphia, where supporters came to his defense.

Just under half of Black Protestants say Biden can win in 2024.

Both evangelicals (74%) and Americans (70%) overall say they aren’t confident that the 81-year-old president has the mental capacity for office, far more than those who say the same about his opponent. Fewer than a third of Black Protestants say they doubt Biden’s mental capacity.

“The fact that our elderly leaders—one struggling to put sentences together, the other ranting with insanities and profanities—won’t leave the scene is about more than an election year,” wrote CT editor in chief Russell Moore after the debate. “It’s about what it means to live in an era of diminished expectations.”

For months, Americans have expressed disapproval in the presidential candidates from the major parties. Younger voters are particularly turned off: Over 40 percent of adults under 30 have an unfavorable view of both Trump and Biden, according to Pew Research Center.

In the poll, conducted days before last week’s assassination attempt, evangelicals were also somewhat torn on Donald Trump as a candidate. Just under half—46 percent—said he too should withdraw so his party can select a different candidate. Only a quarter of Republicans surveyed wanted Trump to be replaced on the ticket.

Evangelicals had some reservations about Trump’s character. In poll breakouts provided to CT, they were more likely to say neither candidate was honest (34%) than to describe Trump (31%) or Biden (28%) that way.

Yet most still believe he has the right vision for the country and can win the upcoming presidential election. Voters across parties agreed that Trump was more capable of winning.

Evangelicals also believe Trump is in better shape than Biden. Sixty-three percent were confident in his mental capacity.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Ideas

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.

- More from Esau McCaulley

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.

- More from Amanda Held Opelt

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.

Congrats to Senator Vance. A remarkable rise. His book Hillbilly Elegy is a must read. I hope he reconsiders his position on the abortion pill and helping Ukraine against Russia. I’ll be praying for him and his beautiful young family.
— Daniel Darling (@dandarling) July 15, 2024

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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