Make Christianity Spooky Again

Rod Dreher’s new book is a sprawling, vulnerable call to enchantment in a disenchanted world.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Rod Dreher has some advice for you. First, put down your phone, close your laptop, and turn off the television. Next, begin to pray. Don’t pray just anything; recite the Jesus Prayer, preferably hundreds of times. Now you are positioned to begin your quest. The object of the quest is beauty. Seek to behold divine glory in the work of the Lord’s hands, whether in his creation, icons, or saints. If you have eyes to see, each of these is a mirror reflecting the light of Christ in a dark but not forsaken world.

In a word, you must become a “practical mystic.” If you don’t, you’ll lack the resilience to weather a godless, disenchanted culture. You and your children will lose hold of the faith. Like the apostle Peter, you will sink beneath the waters; unlike him, no one will lift you up. Or so argues Dreher in his new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.

Dreher is an Eastern Orthodox journalist and blogger from Louisiana who has published five previous books and now writes a Substack with more than 20,000 subscribers. For 20 years he has commanded a sizable, committed, and diverse readership. Many factors explain his success, but four stand out and deserve attention before we turn to Living in Wonder.

The first is his restlessness, which is both tangible and infectious. Dreher is a lifelong seeker. He’s a pilgrim in search of the truth, and he won’t sleep until he finds it.

The second is his existential urgency. Utterly unfeigned, this energy corrals readers into a kind of compulsive vicarious participation in the trials and burdens, victories and defeats of Dreher’s many adventures.

The third is his transparency. Dreher’s writing is never detached; it is always autobiographical. Far from presenting a happy or successful façade, Dreher is vulnerable to a fault, consistently self-critical, and never the hero of the tale. At best, he is the mouthpiece of an experience or perspective, whether his own or another’s.

The last is his relevance. Dreher has always had his finger on the pulse of the culture. He has coined phrases now in common currency (“the Benedict Option” and “the law of merited impossibility,” for example); he has crowned politicians (a 2016 interview boosted JD Vance’s name recognition; political strategist James Carville touted his influence in Politico); and he has forged connections with a variety of public figures loosely bound by concern over the state of Western culture (Ross Douthat, Jordan B. Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Paul Kingsnorth, and more). Even Dreher’s unhappy, on-again, off-again relationship with conservative politics is a symptom of the times.

If Dreher is indeed a prophet of the Zeitgeist—whether heralding its advance or proclaiming its doom—then a new book from him is worth pausing to consider. And this one happens to be about angels, demons, exorcists, aliens, UFOs, visions, dreams, miracles, witchcraft, and the internet.

A disenchanted age

There are three major elements to Living in Wonder: a metanarrative of decline; an overarching diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription; and a set of practices for the individual reader. I began above with the third, so now I will focus on the first two.

Dreher argues that the contemporary West is disenchanted. This term can mean many things, but Dreher defines it as “the evaporation of a sense of the supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” A disenchanted society is materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic, and hedonistic. It is unspooky. It is not open to the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the inexplicable. It is closed off by design.

How did we get here? By a lengthy series of social, cultural, economic, scientific, and intellectual transitions, beginning in the late Middle Ages. We lost a sense of “the givenness of things,” to use Marilynne Robinson’s phrase. We began to think things are what we make of them rather than gifts from God to be cherished and stewarded. We strapped nature to a chair and tortured her for secrets. Alluding to Yuval Noah Harari, Dreher writes that “the story of modernity is of humankind exchanging meaning for power.”

We got power, all right. But was the exchange worth it? Dreher suggests not. In fact, he says, the tradeoffs are so drastic that, while we can’t go back, we can’t stay where we are, either.

Are things really so bad, though? Dreher grants all the objections: the lives of countless people improved by medical science, lifted out of poverty by markets, and ennobled by the franchise. Nevertheless, his reply is that of Jesus: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Matt. 16:26). The sum of all our progress amounts to nil if we lose God, and thus our own souls, in the bargain.

Dreher wants us to look around. The aura of autonomy and freedom has blinded us to our fetters. Self-creation is not liberation but bondage. Who, we might ask, is the self whose authenticity I am meant to serve? Who is the inner me whose birth I am supposed to midwife? By what measure or power am I to fashion myself—and in the image of what, except myself?

Stanley Hauerwas writes that “modernity names the time when people came to believe they should have no story determining their lives except the story they chose when they had no story.” The internet only supercharges this belief, Dreher says as he dubs it “a vast disenchantment machine.”

Online and off, this life of disenchanted self-creation hasn’t brought us the general satisfaction we expected. It has brought anomie, acedia, torpor, decadence, loneliness, anxiety, depression, pornography, addiction, deaths of despair, and declining rates of marriage, childbirth, and church attendance. Instead of doubling down on our errors, better to double back and see where things went wrong.

Rediscovering enchantment

Such is Dreher’s diagnosis and, short of drastic change, prognosis: “Living in disenchantment is killing us and destroying our civilization. … Either we will stop it or it will stop us.”

How to stop it? Dreher’s answer is re-enchantment:

Christian re-enchantment is not about imposing fanciful nostalgia onto the world, like coating a plain yellow cake with pastel fondant frosting. Instead, it is about learning how to perceive what already exists and reestablishing participatory contact with the really real. God has already enchanted the world; it is up to us to clear away the scales from our eyes, recognize what is there, and establish a relationship with it.

Here and throughout the book, Dreher draws on theologian Hans Boersma and others to articulate a “sacramental ontology.” As psychologist and blogger Richard Beck puts it in his 2021 book Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age, “‘Sacramental ontology’ is about how everything around us, everything that exists, points us toward God. All the world is a sign.”

This can be acted upon in one of two ways. The first is to deploy it as a lens to observe everyday life. God is no longer distant but can be found anywhere and everywhere, whether at Walmart or the auto shop, the voting booth or a neighbor’s backyard. Re-enchantment becomes a devotional or epistemic program for the individual believer, a matter of curating one’s routines to be mindful of the omnipresent Lord. Beck’s approach leans this way.

The second is to bite the bullet and proclaim, fingers uncrossed, that God works signs and wonders in the world today, just as he did in the times and stories of Holy Scripture. In this view, angels intervene in mortal affairs; demons assault and possess unsuspecting sinners; terminal illnesses are healed by divine miracle; young men see visions; and old men dream dreams (Acts 2:17). None of these things ever ceased. Christians in the West merely lost the desire or ability to see them.

Dreher wants to marry both approaches to a sacramental view of the world. Signs and wonders are occasional but not exceptional, he believes. They distill the essence of reality so that, having once beheld or believed in the extraordinary, our eyes might be open to it in the daily grind—we will, as the book’s title promises, live in wonder.

For this reason, the book is filled with story after story of the numinous and remarkable. The stories are not only others’ experiences but also Dreher’s own. He is neither defensive nor apologetic. His guard is all the way down. As he writes at one point, “I’m too old to care what people think.”

Hence the chapter on UFOs. Diana Pasulka uses the phrase “epistemological shock” to describe what happens to anyone who moves from skepticism to openness regarding aliens and other paranormal phenomena. But Dreher’s life as a Christian has been one long shock to what he thought he knew, and this book is where he lets it all hang out.

He’s in good company. With Jacques Vallée, Jeffrey Kripal, and Carlos Eire, Pasulka is part of a vanguard of thinkers unwilling to follow modernity in preemptively writing off the atypical, the paranormal, and the mystical. Andrew Davison, an Anglican priest and systematic theologian, last year published a book called Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe. The careful, subtle arguments of Davison’s impressive scholarship might be boiled down to say, “Christians should be in the alien business.”

Dreher is already there. His position is simple: Whatever the nature of the encounters to which so many people across so many cultures and continents bear witness, these stories are one more reason to resist disenchantment. Reality is not what the secular West supposes. The official story is false. Christians of all people should be the first to realize it. In fact, they should be leading the charge against it.

Let me put my cards on the table: I think Dreher and his allies are right on enchantment generally. I don’t have any difficulty believing the miraculous testimonies he shares, nor do I see why any Christian should. As Blaise Pascal wrote long ago, “How I hate such foolishness as not believing in the Eucharist, etc. If the gospel is true, if Jesus Christ is God, where is the difficulty?” That doesn’t mean everything Dreher reports actually happened, only that it’s possible.

But the one place I think Dreher begins to lose his moorings is in his discussion of aliens, the government, and Silicon Valley. By all means, these topics belong in the book. But Dreher is too confident in his assertions, too deferential to insiders, too quick to offer detailed hypotheses about what “they” are up to and why. On aliens—unlike angels—the apostle Thomas should be our model. Here, it is a virtue to doubt first and then verify.

Light from the East

The danger for every grand story of decline is that it overwhelms the reader. There’s not much to do at the end of the world except watch it go down. Thankfully, Dreher avoids fatalism and despair. We find ourselves, at most, “at the end of a world”—not the world, much less the only world.

If some of Dreher’s earlier work could be read as conflating the church with Western culture so that the future of one determines the future of the other, not so here. In a surprising twist, Living in Wonder turns out to be the book I always imagined when I first learned about The Benedict Option. Sex and politics are mostly missing in action. Dreher isn’t trying to intervene in worldly affairs; he’s trying to throw a lifeline to the lost, lonely, and adrift. The ethos of the book is not so much apolitical as post-political.

What matters instead, he argues, is attending to the world God has made, sacrificing our wills on the altar of Christ, and submitting to the power of the Spirit in the age of the Machine. If we do this, God is faithful and will keep us. Our seeming spiritual impotence, inherited from modernity, will not condemn us to alienation. The life of God is more powerful than that.

Moreover, the life of God is the whole ballgame. Moral rules, political order, social justice—these are goods the church nurtures and pursues. But they are not the end of the Christian life. God alone is our end, the final end of all creation. As Dante writes, “There is a light above, which visible / Makes the Creator unto every creature, / Who only in beholding Him has peace.”

But to see God requires repentance. In Dreher’s words, “If we want to live, we have to turn our lives around and walk away from the false parts of the Enlightenment and toward the true Light.” Such a total revolution is not primarily intellectual but affective and bodily: “We cannot think our way back to enchantment or unity with God. We can find it only by participating in his life,” that is, “by using our entire selves” in worship.

We must be wary of cheap substitutes, though. Dreher warns that churches “forever seeking the Next Big Thing to keep people entertained and in the pews” will not last in the long run. Sure, it’s “fun and exciting for a while, but it’s hard for church-as-spectacle to keep the show endlessly exciting. It comes to seem shallow and gimmicky, because, well, it is.”

At the same time, the solution isn’t “powerful exegesis of papal encyclicals, erudite sermons about the mechanics of salvation, five killer apologetic arguments to use against atheists, or any other canned strategy.” Rationalism is no alternative to emotionalism. Each is a misreading of what people in the West—especially young people—are seeking.

“They want to know whether life has any meaning or this is all there is,” Dreher recognizes. “They don’t want to know about God; they want to know God.”

At times, Living in Wonder reads like a tract for Eastern Orthodoxy. A convert himself, Dreher is likely to lead others eastward. So be it: I’m not converting, but neither will I gainsay him. The best books are not dispassionate treatments of neutral subject matter; they reach out from the page and seize the reader by the lapels. That’s what Dreher has done. He wants your soul for Christ.

Maybe you should consider giving his advice a try. Get offline. Go to the woods. Bring a Bible, a candle, maybe an icon. Say the Jesus Prayer without ceasing. Ask for a sign. Ask for the Lord. Ask for power. Then wait—and see what happens next.

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

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Books

Review

Devaluing Mothers and Children Devalues Us All

Kate Lucky

When a society expects economic “winning” from all its members, it loses sight of their inherent preciousness.

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

Last week, our household came down with hand-foot-and-mouth disease. Quarantined during an unseasonable heat wave, I sweated through a fever while dabbing ointment on the baby’s weeping blisters.

This was an apt time to begin historian and Christianity Today contributor Nadya Williams’s new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. “The devaluing of children,” she writes forcefully in the introduction, “is inextricably connected to the disdain our society conveys for the work of mothers.”

Doing that work—drawing oatmeal baths, dosing infant Tylenol—I felt gratitude for Williams’s insistence that my baby and I mattered, even flushed and enfeebled, needing so much and producing nothing. “Evaluating the worth of motherhood and children in economic terms,” Williams writes, “they are guaranteed to come up wanting.” But the doctrine of imago Dei means that we are valuable nevertheless. Sores and all.

By Williams’s estimation, our societal disregard for God’s image in mothers and children has a far-reaching impact. It means that we see pregnancy as a sickness to be prevented or solved by means of birth control or abortion. It means we reduce our children’s existence to an “assembly-line life,” obsessing over educational achievement and resisting the reality that “children, like all people, are unpredictable individuals and are not made for the convenience of their parents.” It means we force new moms back to work too early, pitting their careers against their children.

Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic begins by describing contemporary problems. But disdain for mothers and children, Williams demonstrates, was also characteristic of antiquity. Drawing on myths, literature, and histories from Greek and Roman writers, she describes a past in which women were sexually exploited, infants were left “exposed” on “village dung heaps,” and anyone who couldn’t achieve military victory on the battlefield was a second-class citizen by default.

It’s Christianity, she argues, that changed all of this—that gave us the human rights we take for granted, that blessed the meek and lowly instead of kowtowing to the powerful. “It is because of two millennia of Christian valuing of human life,” she states forcefully, that “we do not delight in the suffering of the weak.” Both the life of Christ and the writings of the church fathers demonstrate that “the church is responsible for caring for the bodies and souls of the neglected and the abandoned at all ages and life stages, because their lives are priceless.”

It’s a compelling argument, albeit a familiar one. What’s novel here are Williams’s through lines between the past and the present, some so bold they seem drawn in thick marker. Just as “the practice of exposure of infants” emphasized a “utilitarian commodification of infants and children as things,” she argues, so today “we see … the common practice of aborting children with Down syndrome.” Back then, the spoils were concubines and slaves. Now, they’re stock options. But in both systems, the people who matter are the ones out winning—not the baby with the viral infection, not the mother with sweet potato in her hair. Do we really, Williams asks, want to return to that brutal pre-Christian era?

Some of Williams’s assertions—that sending kids to school is a “severing of bonds” echoing the child’s separation from the mother’s womb, for instance—will be “agree to disagree” for many readers. (She acknowledges this.) Some of her evidence for cultural phenomena—the posters in her ob-gyn office, a new housewives show that she hasn’t watched—is thin, even if she understands the phenomena correctly.

But even readers who disagree with Williams’s strong stances on surrogacy, contraception, or working mothers will appreciate the connections she makes, which are compelling, creative, and challenging. And the basic point stands: People matter because they’re made in the image of God. When we forget that, a lot goes awry.

Gradually, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic becomes less about mothers and children and more about that “body politic,” all those “neglected and … abandoned at all ages and life stages.” Here, Williams turns her attention to single women and widows, the sick and the lame, victims of war and euthanasia. Flitting from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ healings and excerpts from the martyr Perpetua’s journal to the fiction of Wendell Berry and Augustine’s City on a Hill, she fleshes out the “doctrine of the imago Dei.” Part of its legacy, she argues, is a disposition to encourage “love for every human being, hurt or whole—man, woman, child—regardless of age, gender, social or marital status, wealth, ability or disability.”

Agreed, of course. But I wish Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic hadn’t ended up quite so broad, hadn’t veered from its initial focus on these two subsets of “the least of these.” By the end, those bold through lines have gone fuzzy around the edges, petering out in an encouragement to volunteer in the church nursery.

Perhaps the focus on mothers and children ended up feeling too narrow to sustain an entire volume. But I get the sense that Williams has more to say, if only because this subject—the value of moms and kids amid late capitalism and declining fertility rates—is so personal for her.

Williams shocked friends and colleagues by giving up a tenured professorship to homeschool her three children. She did so in conscious defiance of the prevailing view that an educated woman “could never be truly fulfilled or happy if her life sphere were restricted to the domestic life.” But it’s clear that motherhood, by dint of the book’s existence, can coexist with the life of the mind. Writing mothers need not think of themselves as “writers first” in order to write well; in fact, “their motherhood, writing, faith, and faithful service to those around them” are “interlaced in ways that cannot be easily disentangled.”

Once again: Agreed. This long aside doesn’t account for the mothers whose employment, by economic necessity or otherwise, takes them away from their homes into hospitals and restaurants and construction sites. But it does resonate with at-home desk workers like me, typing one room over from a napping baby. (He’s all better now.) Williams warns me that I write and parent in the face of social conditioning to “place [my] work—creative or merely corporate—ahead of [my] children.”

Sometimes, that conditioning matters not a whit. Sometimes, the baby asserts himself as an image-bearer. Sometimes, there’s no writing. That is, sometimes, hand-foot-and-mouth pays a visit. As Williams puts it in her analysis of Perpetua’s journal, “Motherhood is always a call to suffer, in ways big and small.” In that sense, mothers aren’t just people for the church to protect. They are people for the church to learn from.

Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

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Ideas

Time Is Not a Political Promise

Myles Werntz

Candidates say they’ll revive a gloried past or birth a better future. But Christians especially should know that isn’t how time works.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

American voters are divided over many issues this election cycle, but we’re united in a deeper expectation for our political parties: They promise—and we want them to promise—the control of time itself.

This promise takes different forms for different politics. Some candidates pledge to bring a better future. Others say they’ll return us to a better past. The direction of the promise matters less than the fact of it. Once we have decided that time can be thus managed, it’s just a matter of picking which time we prefer.

The two leading contenders this year have particularly obvious, dueling notions of time. The Harris campaign’s catchphrase, “We’re Not Going Back,” rejects the past, while the Trump campaign’s promise to “Make America Great Again” lurches in reverse. Despite their policy divides, both campaigns trade on dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and both look to some other time as the solution.

As a political strategy, it’s effective. Discontent with the present, Americans ask when, if ever, life was better than this—and both candidates have a ready answer. Former president Donald Trump’s reply is a particular rendering of the past, one that omits historical wrongs and insists old greatness can be recaptured. Vice president Kamala Harris peers into the mists of the future. She may not be able to offer certainty about what the future holds, but whatever its challenges, she assures, it’ll be better than what’s behind us.

This sense that the best kind of politics comes from some time other than now has become so common in American elections that we scarcely notice it. In 2012, it was in Barack Obama’s “Forward” and the Mitt Romney–linked “Restore Our Future” (the latter of which manages to look in both directions at once). The parties’ chronological orientations were reversed in 2004, with John Kerry’s “Let America Be America Again” and George W. Bush’s “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America.” Whether we visit the 1996 election, with Bill Clinton’s “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century,” or “We Are Turning the Corner” in Herbert Hoover’s ill-fated 1932 campaign, time—and how we conceive of it—is always on the ballot.

Across these varied campaigns, we should notice two common commitments. First is the assumption that the present is worse than some other time. Whether that time is decades beyond anyone’s remembering or in a future yet to be named, that time is not now. Imagine a candidate saying, You know what? This is pretty good. Let’s not change anything and just stay here. You can go ahead and declare that candidacy dead.

Second, these promises assume time moves in a straightforward manner. Life is either getting better or worse. We are in either a climb of progress or a slick decline. Republicans and Democrats alike presume that time can be reliably managed. What worked once will work again, or what is working now will only keep working better in the days to come. If we simply pick the best time and work to reach or return to it, we’ll have the lives we want.

But in the sober days of nonelection years, I think we really do know better. We know that time does not work this way. Time is full of ambiguity and reversals. It never lives up to its promises. Sometimes, a new thing appears, something no one saw coming.

For readers of Scripture, it should be a truism that time is not straightforward, that what is past cannot be repeated, that the future is out of our hands. That recognition is basic to what it means to be the people of God. This does not mean quietly suffering injustice. It does mean that, for Christians, living well within time requires getting comfortable with the fact that no time—past and future just as much as the unsatisfying present—will fulfill our hopes.

Consider a moment from Numbers 11 which encapsulates this dynamic. As the people of God traveled through the desert, they became discontented with their journey. They longed for the past—and the leeks and onions—in Egypt, forgetting that Egypt was also the place of their enslavement (v. 5).

The manna of the present lay amply before them, and God’s guidance was close at hand, but the people longed for quail. They wanted food that belonged not to the desert present but to the coastline they had not yet reached (v. 31). And God provided the quail, a food from the “future,” but it wasn’t a gift. It was a judgment on the people’s discontentment with the provisions of the present (vv. 31–34).

We can read this passage as a judgment against grumbling, but it strikes me that it’s better read as an exhortation to refuse wishful thinking about the past or future.

The past may well have had goodness—the food probably was better in Egypt!—but it also had suffering we’ve forgotten or been unwilling to acknowledge. Likewise, to “Make America Great Again” by somehow returning to the past would mean recovering the morals of a lost world and also its prejudices and injustices.

And the future may well have its glory—Israel was not wrong to look forward to leaving the desert!—but the future will also have its unfulfilled promises, its limits and fresh failures we have not yet anticipated. Hurrying to an unknown future may not bring the relief and liberation suggested in “We’re Not Going Back.”

Perhaps a Christian view of time should look less like yearning for leeks and onions or milk and honey, giving ourselves to whomever promises to transport us to the desired past or future. Perhaps it should look more like recognizing the goodness of the manna God continually gives.

In that spirit, let me offer three proverbs for resisting the false allure of political promises to control the direction of our times.

Time is filled with ambiguity. Christians believe God will accomplish a good end for the world. But that does not mean the future will unfold as we want or expect. For even when Christ came in “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4, ESV), the coming of the Lord occurred alongside the death of the innocents (Matt. 2:16–18) and the continued rule of Rome. When the words of deliverance came to Isaiah (14:28), it did not mean Assyria had disappeared. None of this means God is absent, only that no time will be all we’ve hoped until “the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

Time is an occasion to learn to trust God’s provision. Our best times offer signs that we can trust God to provide in full. The bread in the desert, given in time, anticipates the Bread of Life, given to sustain us eternally. Moments of justice appear in our politics, and the setting right of wrongs is to be celebrated. These are exceptions which will one day, in God’s kingdom, be the rule. Celebrate them for what they are, and do not despise them for being incomplete.

Time is full of surprise and reversal. When Israel was being led through the desert, water appeared from rocks, manna from the sky, and quail from far-off lands. Walls were overtaken by horns, and spies were rescued by women on rooftops. God provided for Israel’s common life out of nothing, defying predictions of demise.

But good times are interrupted, too. God is with us, but time is complex and, for us, unpredictable. Israel’s return from exile in Babylon was followed by conquest by a Greek empire, then another brief reprieve, then conquest by the Roman empire.

God is always working within time, and he is not surprised by its twists or even its hairpin turns. We often are. We can’t foresee when a terrorist attack, depression, or global conflict will set aside the best political aspirations. Historical trends are one thing, but history is another, and only a fool will say that time runs in one direction.

In this light, Christians in America (or anywhere politicians promise to deliver the past or future) should be patient in the face of time’s ambiguity. These proverbs invite us to be temperate in our celebrations, to avoid mistaking temporary goods for permanent ones, to celebrate blessings while planning for leaner times. They invite us to learn to trust in the God who provides for his people again and again—the God who is with us in all times, even now.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

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News

How Mexican Christians Reacted to Indigenous Inauguration Blessing

Franco Iacomini

“Not everything in our culture is bad or satanic,” explained a Zapotec evangelical leader.

Claudia Sheinbaum (center) takes part in an indigenous ceremony as part of her inauguration as the new president of Mexico.

Cristopher Rogel Blanquet / Stringer / Getty

On October 1, Claudia Sheinbaum became Mexico’s first female president. Like her predecessors, she was sworn in at the Palacio Legislativo de San Lázaro and gave her inaugural address in front of the Congreso General.

But her inauguration day also included a ceremony offered by a group of indigenous and Afro-Mexican women after she proceeded to the Plaza de la Constitución. The women, who represented several of Mexico’s 68 indigenous groups or were descended from free and enslaved Africans, handed her the bastón de mando y servicio. After Sheinbaum received the baton, a gesture symbolizing that the indigenous community had recognized her authority, she participated in a cleansing ritual led by a Mazatec healer.

The ritual, according to the official program for the ceremony, was to prepare her to exercise her leadership wisely and with prosperity, resulting in blessings such as health for all and good harvests.“Claudia, may the sacred elements accompany you, may the holy water always purify your soul, may the air always be with you, may our dear Mother Earth always bless you,” pronounced the celebrant, as incense burned. “We invoke the nahuales, the deities, and other divine beings and spirits that inhabit this place. We ask for life, enlightenment, and wisdom for the constitutional president, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.”

During the ritual, Sheinbaum and the representatives of the indigenous groups raised their arms with open hands and faced in each cardinal direction, asking the “divine forces of nature” for energy, wisdom, forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, and good health.

Then, the group turned to the “center of the earth”—which, for the ancient Aztecs, was located in the Temple of Tenochtitlan, one block from the ceremony site.

“From the center of the earth, we ask for forgiveness from our earthly mother. Because we have not respected her, we have suffered these climate changes with her,” said the celebrant as the event concluded.

Not many Mexican Christian leaders have spoken out in disagreement with this blessing, despite its nod to indigenous mythology and nahuales or naguales, guardian spirits that have the ability to communicate with gods and humans and to change their appearance from humans to animals.

“I don’t even know if the president has faith in those rituals,” said Luis Chávez, the president of the Unión Nacional de Traductores Indígenas, an organization dedicated to translating the Bible into the 68 indigenous languages and their 364 variations spoken in present-day Mexico. “But we understand that our peoples have a cultural identity, and not everything in our culture is bad or satanic.”

As a Zapotec whose community is based in the present-day state of Oaxaca, Chávez saw parts of the ceremony that he and other indigenous Christians could affirm.

“Although they are sometimes far from the Christian principles in which we believe, these rituals demonstrate principles of valuing life, nature and respect for authorities, whom our people recognize and obey,” he said.

Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known more commonly as AMLO, first incorporated the bastón de mando y servicio, an acknowledgment of the 23 million people (19 percent of the Mexican population) who still live in indigenous communities, during his 2018 inauguration. In November 2020, he took part in another traditional rite during a Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) event honoring those who had died in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Similar practices have also been adopted in other countries; former Bolivian president Evo Morales’ 2006 and 2015 inaugurations included traditional ceremonies, as did Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s 2022 inauguration.

Among the critics of the inauguration ritual was Father Eduardo Hayén Cuarón, parish priest of the Ciudad Juárez Cathedral and director of the weekly newspaper Presencia. “Everything seems harmless: women are lifted up, and peace, harmony, and good vibes are offered,” he wrote on X. “But we must point out that these are witchcraft rituals and are, in fact, a form of implicit worship of the devil.”

The cleansing ritual was a “shamanic ceremony,” wrote Aarón Lara, the president of the Ibero-American Congress for Family and Life. “Of course, it violates the secular state, which a few hours earlier Sheinbaum promised to uphold and guarantee for all citizens.”

A secular state since 1857, Mexico has nevertheless been a deeply religious country, one where Spanish colonizers built cathedrals over the ruins of ancient Aztec temples and many locals developed a syncretistic faith that is now deeply embedded in local culture. Contact of these indigenous belief systems with Christianity (and even with pre-Christian European influences that accompanied the Spanish colonizers) resulted in exuberant celebrations, like those of Día de los Muertos.

In many ways, these ceremonies are less about undermining the state’s official secularism and more about honoring indigenous cultures, something that has become more prominent in Mexico in recent decades, says Alejandra Ortiz, co-coordinator of the Logos and Cosmos Initiative in Latin America for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

On the other hand, some feel confused by the mixture of beliefs present in people’s daily lives. “I see [the ceremony and the reactions to it] as part of the extensive religious syncretism we have in Mexico,” said Sally Isáis, director of the missionary agency Misión Latinoamericana de México.

Isáis notes that although political parties don’t align with religion, they borrow its terms and images. For instance, Sheinbaum’s party, formerly called the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, now goes by Morena. “The very name Morena alludes to the ‘Brown Virgin,’ the Virgin of Guadalupe,” said Isáis, referring to the patron saint of the Americas and a title used for the specific appearance of the Virgin Mary in Mexico.

The nickname La Virgen Morena or La Morenita arose after Mary allegedly appeared to Nahua peasant Juan Diego in 1531 and he described the woman who visited him as having a dark-skinned face (in Spanish, piel morena). The story of the virgin appearing to a native led to a mass conversion of indigenous people—9 to 10 million people reportedly became Catholic in 10 years—but also led many new converts to see Mary as related to the local deity Tonantzin, the Aztec mother goddess. That aspect of Catholicism melded with pre-Hispanic religious practices to both aid the church’s popularity and help traditional belief systems survive.

Despite Mexico’s robust religiosity, Sheinbaum has a relatively ambiguous relationship with religion. Her father was the son of Ashkenazi Jews who left Lithuania in the early 20th century, and her mother was the daughter of Sephardic Jews from Bulgaria, but Sheinbaum does not practice Judaism. On some occasions, she has appeared in clothing adorned with Catholic saints. During her campaign, she met with evangelical leaders.

In her inauguration speech before the Congress, Sheinbaum defined herself as “a mother, grandmother, scientist, and woman of faith, and from today, by the will of the people of Mexico, the constitutional president of the United Mexican States,” she said.

Evangelicals represent around 14 million of Mexico’s 126 million inhabitants. There are no clear statistics on the number of indigenous evangelicals, but Chávez estimates that they may make up 20 percent of the community or about 4.5 million people.

That would make the proportion of evangelicals among indigenous people significantly higher than that in the country at large. And they face strong opposition in their communities, which has contributed to Mexico ranking 37th in the World Watch List, the religious persecution ranking compiled by the organization Open Doors.

“In some indigenous communities, those who decide to abandon ancestral and traditional beliefs to follow Jesus face ostracism, fines, incarceration and forced displacement,” states this year’s Open Doors report.

Evangelicals who refuse to make financial contributions to fund Roman Catholic celebrations may be punished by their neighbors, who cut off their access to services like electricity or water.

The US government has previously questioned Mexican authorities over religious persecution, including mistreatment of indigenous evangelicals. As recently as last year, the State Department’s international religious freedom office reported that diplomats had met with state and federal government officials responsible for religious and indigenous affairs as well as with Catholic Church leaders to express concerns.

In April, neighbors and local authorities attacked the 172 members of a Baptist congregation in the state of Hidalgo, cutting off power to their homes and blocking access to their church. Their attackers explained the raid as punishment because the Christians had not paid “their dues” to the Catholic Church and claimed the right to enforce the customs and traditions of indigenous communities.

Article 2 of the Mexican Constitution guarantees indigenous peoples the right to “apply their own normative systems in the regulation and resolution of their internal conflicts.”

When Christians outside of these communities label indigenous peoples’ practices as witchcraft, their disapproval can add to the pressure on indigenous Christians.

“There are segments of the Christian population who can go so far as to satanize all indigenous principles,” said Chávez. “I call on the church in Mexico and globally to continue teaching our people biblical principles without imposing different cultural forms. It is about respecting culture while teaching a better way.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

Books

Excerpt

After Making Baseball History, Branch Rickey Faced a Spiritual Crisis

Paul Emory Putz

How the famed executive who signed Jackie Robinson found renewed hope in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

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

On a summer night in 1956 at a camp center in the mountains near Estes Park, Colorado, Branch Rickey took the podium. His task: to deliver an address to the 250 young men gathered for the inaugural Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) summer conference.

Well into his 70s, the aging Major League Baseball executive felt swept up in the moment. “If this group here tonight were to find themselves dedicated to a common cause,” he exclaimed, they could transform the United States “before the next generation is over.”

Rickey’s speaking role on the first night of the conference reflected his importance to the fledging FCA. Their relationship had begun in August 1954, when an unheralded 29-year-old college basketball coach named Don McClanen met with the baseball executive, sharing his vision for an organization of athletes mobilized to instill Christian values in America’s youth. “If athletes can endorse shaving cream, razor blades, and cigarettes,” McClanen reasoned, “surely they can endorse the Lord.”

When Rickey responded enthusiastically, McClanen had the final piece needed to launch his movement. The organization that became the Fellowship of Christian Athletes was born.

The significance of Rickey’s support for the FCA can hardly be exaggerated. Rickey had an elite sports pedigree. He had played in the big leagues and then carved out a long career in the front office, building championship teams with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The latter, under his direction, famously broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.

Rickey was also a lifelong Methodist who remained committed to his faith. “I want to live the ideals of Christ every day, in business and on the athletic field,” Rickey explained. As the most prominent symbol of Christian faith in America’s most popular team sport, he was the prototype for the blend of sports and faith that the FCA sought to promote.

But the FCA provided something Rickey desired, too. In fact, a spiritual crisis in Rickey’s life the year before he first encountered McClanen had primed him to be on the lookout for something precisely like the FCA.

When McLanen came knocking on his door, Rickey saw something other than a no-name young man with big ideas and a bare resume.

He saw an answer to prayer.

Branch Rickey’s faith does not fit easily into the categories of “modernist” or “fundamentalist,” “mainline” or “evangelical.” One the one hand, he was a traditionalist who sought to follow the old-time Methodist religion passed down from his parents. Even as he made his way into professional baseball, he maintained his commitment to Sabbath observance, staying away from the ballpark on Sunday.

But he also supported ecumenical Protestant efforts to move beyond dogma and to find common ground on shared social issues. He read William James, the liberal philosopher of religion who located its power in the realm of personal experience. The church, Rickey believed, needed to help people see Jesus as a “live, dynamic force, willing to be put to the practical field test.”

The through line for Rickey’s faith, in both its traditional and modern forms, was that it needed to reach the individual person. In this way, his religious views were deeply tied to his view of America. He believed the country’s genius lay in the pioneering spirit of “rugged individualism.” By the 1920s, this led him to a growing concern with the influence of communism and socialism; collectivist systems, he believed, undermined the individual initiative that was necessary for the country to thrive.

Rickey’s suspicion of communism was heightened in the early years of the Cold War and the hysteria of the Red Scare. The entire country seemed to be on guard against the supposed threat of communism. In the minds of many Americans, it was lurking everywhere from the movie screen to the classroom—and, some believed, in the church as well.

In 1953, Rickey expressed his concerns to a Methodist official, asking about “the apparent socialistic tendencies” of some Methodist ministers and “the obvious identification of some of our theological professors with Socialism.”

Throughout 1953, Rickey’s worries about communist sympathizers within Methodism festered. Then, in November, Rickey’s faith received a shock. During lunch with his pastor, Robert Howe, and a Methodist bishop named Lloyd Wicke, the conversation turned to the Bible. Bishop Wicke, in Rickey’s telling, declared that the writers of the four Gospels offered contradictory versions of Jesus; he then informed Rickey that no one really believed that Jesus was born of a virgin.

When Rickey returned home, he reflected on Wicke’s comments, growing more and more disturbed. Was the bishop right? Was he mistaken to form his life around teachings found in a book full of contradictions?

Unable to sleep, pacing near the fireplace, he thought about throwing his well-worn Bible into the flickering flames. Rickey finally decided to lay out his frustration in a letter to Howe.

How could bishop Wicke, Rickey wondered, lead his congregation in reciting the Apostles’ Creed? How could he shepherd a Christian denomination when he did not believe basic Christian doctrines the laity took for granted? Rickey thought of his mother and father. “Neither of them would have been able to understand Bishop Wicke,” Rickey wrote, “but they always felt, I am sure, that they understood what Jesus said and by practicing what he preached they continuously increased their happiness and their belief in Jesus as the Christ.”

Rickey contrasted the bishop’s view of Jesus as a “social prophet” with his own view of a Jesus who “ministered to individuals, and right now.” The Sermon on the Mount, Rickey explained, “really makes me wish to be a good man—a better man. All of Matthew makes me believe that He is interested in me personally.”

Having vented his frustrations, Rickey ended his letter by resigning his membership from First Methodist Church.

Despite Rickey’s frustration, he stopped short of placing the letter in the mail. Rickey’s Methodist commitments were too strong, and the letter remained filed away with the rest of his papers.

Even so, it highlighted Rickey’s inner turmoil and his religious perspective. It revealed his continued focus on the practical usefulness of religion in an individual’s life. Rickey contrasted the bishop’s view of Jesus as a “social prophet” with his own individualistic conception of religion, highlighting throughout the letter what he called the “empirical knowledge” that grounded his and his parents’ belief in Christianity. By practicing their faith, they found it to be useful; by finding it to be useful, they found it to be true.

At the same time, the letter revealed the limits of Rickey’s pragmatism. Rickey was not a stickler for theological specifics, but for him Christian faith could only have practical meaning for an individual if it was grounded in core Christian doctrines about the deity of Christ and the reliability of the Bible. Rickey could not wholeheartedly follow a bishop who seemed to reject those beliefs.

In Rickey’s mind, more than his own Methodist faith was at stake—the future of the country depended on the continuation of personal Christian commitment. Theology and politics were intertwined. Bishop Wicke’s liberal theology and intellectualism could undermine America’s spiritual foundation and lead to communism.

Rickey’s shaken faith made him eager to connect with Christians who shared his approach to religion. In a letter to a friend a few months later, Rickey recounted it all: the lunch with Bishop Wicke, the letter he wrote but never sent, the distrust he felt for denominational leaders. “If I were ‘testifying’ in an old-time Methodist class meeting,” he reported, “I would close my remarks surely,—‘pray for me, my Christian friends, pray for me,’—and I would really mean it.”

Don McClanen knew nothing about this in April 1954 when he announced his FCA idea with a letter sent out to 20 prominent Christian athletes and coaches across America, including Rickey. The goal, McClanen explained in the letter, was to “provide an opportunity” for athletes and coaches “to speak and witness for Christ and the wholesome principles of good character and clean living to the youth of our nation.”

McClanen followed his letter with a summer road trip where he could make his pitch in person. In August, just before returning to Oklahoma, he met with Rickey in Pittsburgh. What was supposed to be a short conversation stretched for hours, ending with Rickey’s enthusiastic endorsement and support.

McClanen had the key leader he needed to provide respectability and legitimacy to his upstart organization. Rickey had renewed hope for the future.

By gathering Christian athletes under one banner, the founding of the FCA marked the beginning of a new era and the launch of a movement—the rise of a religious sports subculture that would come to define and shape what it meant to be a “Christian athlete” in the decades to come.

That subculture, in turn, was deeply shaped by the twin desires that motivated Rickey: finding an authentic faith that could speak to the everyday experiences of athletes and coaches, and connecting that faith with the destiny and direction of the American nation.

Paul Emory Putz is director of Truett Seminary’s Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University. This essay is adapted from his book, The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports (Oxford University Press).

- More from Paul Emory Putz

Culture

Forgiveness Is an Art

Sho Baraka

The new movie “Exhibiting Forgiveness” depicts the dysfunction of generational Black trauma—and the freedom that’s on offer.

Andra Day as Aisha and André Holland as Tarrell in Exhibiting Forgiveness.

Stories are an advertisement for the virtues we value. And today’s stories are dominated by narratives that glorify personal indignation and revenge: John Wick, The Bourne Identity, and practically any heist film.

Meanwhile, forgiveness often feels archaic. And many films that broach the subject can fail to capture the complexity of real-life absolution, which rarely comes with a cheap confession or an obvious transformation.

Titus Kaphar’s Exhibiting Forgiveness is a laudable exception in an era of justified anger. The protagonist, Tarrell, portrayed by André Holland, is a painter about to have his life interrupted by the return of his once abusive and drug-addicted father, La’Ron, played by John Earl Jelks. The soulful Andra Day plays Tarrell’s wife, Aisha, the psalmist who gives musical context to the family’s lament. (I endorse any excuse to have Andra Day sing, no matter how contrived.)

Tarrell is a celebrated painter. Much like his paintings, Exhibiting Forgiveness is intentional in its composition, designed to focus the viewer on what’s consequential. The mise en abyme of importance is that forgiveness, like art, requires sacrifice, audacity, and long-suffering.

Aside from being a reputable artist, Tarrell is a loving father to his son and a devoted husband to his wife. Despite these virtues, he cannot seem to outperform his past trauma. As Bessel van der Kolk states in The Body Keeps the Score, “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”

Tarrell believes he can shake his anguish without seeking help. His distress not only lives in his body, causing panic attacks, but also provides the impetus for his profound work.

The dilemma of art is that we can make something valuable while failing to resolve the pain that inspired it. Tarrell is loved by his agent—but possibly exploited. He is loved by consumers—which is a kind of voyeurism. Only a few are concerned with the soul behind the product.

The film presents its major conflict when Tarrell’s father returns, sober and saved, from a 15-year absence, seeking reconciliation from the son he neglected. Despite encouragement from Tarrell’s mother, Joyce, played by Academy Award nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Tarrell refuses to entertain the idea. Joyce shares a litany of Scripture to warn her son about the self-destruction of unforgiveness—but those seeds fall among thorns. Now, we discover the flaw in our protagonist. He is tormented by his own pride.

If you’re expecting sophisticated apologetics in this film, you will be disappointed. Kaphar has presented us with everyday people. Joyce is that one aunt who believes the truth of the Bible in her bones better than she can articulate it with her tongue. La’Ron is that uncle who has experienced the transforming power of the Spirit and now texts Scripture to you every day. They are just as obnoxious with their virtues as they were with their vices. But they both appear to understand the power of Matthew 18:21–35.

In this passage, Jesus presents to his disciples a parable of forgiveness that is layered with warnings. A servant forgiven of an enormous debt refuses to forgive a fellow servant’s small debt, leading to his own punishment and showing that we must forgive others as God forgives us. Once the master learns of the servant’s unforgiveness, he hands him over to jailers. This is a stark reminder that unforgiveness is itself a form of torment, a cycle that keeps us chained to bitterness.

The ironic tragedy in Exhibiting Forgiveness is that by withholding forgiveness from someone who once tormented him, Tarrell is tormenting himself. His false liberation is actually a prison. As Nelson Mandela wisely stated, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

Tarrell chooses the torment of resentment rather than the liberation of forgiveness because he doesn’t want to appear weak. But Christian forgiveness isn’t weak. It’s not a simple act of “letting go” or ceasing to hold something against someone. True reconciliation isn’t merely the absence of accusations; it’s the restoration of relationships to a state that existed before the offense occurred. Tarrell’s father has acknowledged his offenses, has done the work of repair, and desires that restoration.

Forgiveness, like art, is never finished. It is a daily practice of revision, a constant reconstructing of our understanding of both ourselves and those who have hurt us.

And, like art, forgiveness requires skill. It’s something that must be cultivated—through prayer, through practice, and through patience. Forgiveness doesn’t yield instant results, but it does yield enduring peace.

I found myself both applauding Tarrell’s progress and feeling unsatisfied with where he ends up. Forgiveness is a radical act, one that goes beyond human instincts and societal norms—but Tarrell doesn’t get radical enough. Without spoiling the film, I’ll say that the humanist in me was indulged, but the Christian had more questions. One of those questions: “Who is true forgiveness for?”

In a text exchange about the movie, theologian and friend K. A. Ellis shared this with me about forgiveness:

I’m learning from persecuted Christians that forgiveness is not solely for the guilty or the offended; forgiveness also serves as a witness to a watching world. Imagine millions of faithful Christians throughout history who, at their lowest moments, have uttered the same words as Jesus when he was hung on the cross: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Even as they’re physically punished, they pray forgiveness for those who hate and hurt them. … Such a thing is unfathomable apart from Christ.

Joyce encourages her son to be such a faithful witness. But she’s expecting the fruit of forgiveness from a tree that can only produce from the soil it was given. Tarrell was cultivated in anger and sorrow, but the very religion he mocks could be the rich ground he needs to flourish. In a moment of sincerity, he implores his father to continue to pray for him despite his refusing to embrace the biblical admonishment of his parents. His posture is “Be patient with me,” as the servant pleads in Matthew 18.

Exhibiting Forgiveness is an honest primer for the priesthood of believers. Some in the Black community might see the film as primarily dealing with the dysfunction of Black trauma. It could very well be that.

However, it can also be a kind of confession that leads to greater joy, fuller amnesty. This is artwork that can normalize forgiveness. As men reconcile with the trauma of their past, children will inherit the tools of emotional health, wives will rejoice, and our communities will witness redeemed portraits that reflect the forgiving Father in heaven.

It’s easy to get trapped in the colors of revenge and pain. Only through forgiveness can the full palette of life open up to us.

Sho Baraka is editorial director of Big Tent for Christianity Today.

- More from Sho Baraka

News

The Return of the Hymnal

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Evangelicals seeking permanence and rootedness are reclaiming the practice of singing out of books.

A hymnal is distributed to every seat in the sanctuary at a Baptist church in San Antonio.

AP Photo/Eric Gay

Before the service starts on Sunday morning at San Diego Reformed Church, the building fills with the sound of singing. Sean Kinnally, an associate pastor, leads a 45-minute Psalm-sing so the congregation can practice reading music together and using printed hymnals.

“We’re seeking to add more and more hymns—it’s a more robust form of worship,” Kinnally said. “There has been incalculable growth in the singing at our church.”

San Diego Reformed is in the process of shifting its worship toward hymnal-aided congregational singing. The congregation is part of what appears to be a growing number of churches working to recover the practice—never entirely lost, but not as popular as it used to be—of singing from books.

Hymnals offer perceived permanence and stability in a musical landscape that changes quickly and often. The decision to reintroduce congregations to hymnals is often an ideological one, especially for churches that made the transition away from them in recent decades.

But a notable number of churches are making that choice, choosing the printed page over lyrics projected onto a screen.

Dan Kreider, a composer, arranger, and music minister who designed the Sing! Hymnal, which Crossway is releasing in fall 2025, said hymnals aren’t going to replace projection or any of the tech tools that undergird contemporary worship music. But they offer something valuable and different.

“If you’re in a church that just goes with the most popular songs, where is your sense of permanence? Think of the kids growing up in your church. Where is their sense of permanence? What songs are they going to remember and sing as they age? The hymnal slows us down,” Kreider said.

Hymnals have often served to connect Christians to specific traditions. Lutherans form a liturgical link with Martin Luther, singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” while Wesleyans recall the spirituality of the first Methodists with “Arise, My Soul, Arise.”

Many denominations still print and distribute hymnals to help congregations shape their worship according to doctrinal and traditional distinctives. Some denominations have recently renewed efforts to strengthen people’s sense of musical connection.

The Christian Reformed Church of North America has a vetting project, offering guidance on the suitability of the theology of songs that worship leaders might choose for a service. The Christian Missionary Alliance is seeking to create its own modern body of worship music that foregrounds its theological distinctives. And the Global Methodist Church, formed this year out of a split with the United Methodist Church, is seeking to renew its Wesleyan identity, in part through a slim blue collection of 202 Charles Wesley hymns, O for a Heart to Praise My God.

Over the past 40 years, hymnal production has become increasingly linked to the worship music industry. Integrity Music printed its first edition of The Celebration Hymnal in 1997, which included a blend of contemporary songs and traditional Protestant hymns. The Sing! Hymnal is a collaborative project between Crossway and Keith and Kristyn Getty, two standard-bearers of the “modern hymn movement.”

Many of the hymnals and sacred songbooks published by worship music companies also establish historical connections, giving Christians a sense of rootedness.

Jesse P. Karlsberg, a researcher at Emory University and the project director of the digital publishing project Sounding Spirit, which is financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities, said that the printing of sacred music has always been commercial, religious, and social. And, he points out, there have long been efforts to revive music of an idealized past through the compilation of hymnals and songbooks.

“There are lots of examples of hymnals and songbooks that are basically retrospective,” said Karlsberg, who studies sacred music printed between 1850 and 1925. “At times there seemed to be a belief that what was needed was the music of the past, even if that was an imagined past.”

New hymnals, including the Sing! Hymnal,the Scripture Hymnal, and The Gospel Story Hymnal, don’t connect people to a specific denomination or a particular Christian tradition. But they offer rootedness through the tactile, concrete nature of a bound and printed book.

Many of the people involved with new hymnals believe that the physicality—singing from an ink-and-paper book instead of the more popular projected lyrics—matters a lot. They say singing from a hymnal shapes Christian spirituality in a deep and lasting way.

When Randall Goodgame, the creator of the popular kids’ musical program “Slugs & Bugs,” began writing songs for what would become the recently released Scripture Hymnal, he saw the music change children’s relationship with Scripture. The music allowed God’s Word to take root.

“I listened to people talk about how these songs impacted their kids, and I started to imagine churches and worship leaders and their congregations engaging with Scripture,” Goodgame said. “Think of the conversations we could be having if we were all just soaked in Scripture.”

The Scripture Hymnal includes 106 original songs that are all word-for-word settings of text from the Bible, written by Goodgame and a team of collaborators that includes fellow Christian artists Ellie Holcomb, Andrew Osenga, and Taylor Leonhardt. The commitment to singing Scripture alone is usually found in Calvinist Reformed churches, but Goodgame’s project isn’t rooted in that tradition. He said it grew out of a desire to offer more of the Bible to worshippers.

“We want leaders to feel good about challenging their congregations to learn Scripture through song, so we tried to make it beautiful and singable,” Goodgame said. “What we’re talking about is revival. If people in the church learn a ton of new Scripture, it will produce revival in their own hearts and in the church.”

Dan Kreider, who also designed and arranged the choral versions of songs in the Scripture Hymnal, said that the proliferation of new hymnal projects is an encouraging sign that worshipers are not just accepting whatever is new and popular but thoughtfully considering the music they want to sing.

Kreider designed and printed his first hymnal, Sing the Wonders, in 2016, for his home church. A conversation with one of his graduate school professors inspired the project.

“My hymnology professor said that the best hymnal a church could have would be one that a church could make for itself,” said Kreider. “That stuck with me. He was speaking of hymns as an identity around which a group of people could coalesce.”

Since that first in-house hymnal, Kreider has gone on to found the company Hymnworks and has designed more than 40 hymnals. Most of them grew out of word-of-mouth connections with other musicians and leaders who were intrigued by the idea of a bespoke hymnal.

In Kreider’s view, the rise of projection as the primary mode of reading and singing lyrics may be driving renewed enthusiasm for access to words and music on paper.

“We’re trying to curate songs that are rich in content, with lyrics that deserve to be chewed on. But with projection, they flash on the screen for a moment, then they’re gone.”

Kreider pointed out that because of the rise in self-publishing and increased access to custom printing, it’s become easier and more affordable for churches to commission their own hymnals. For most churches, he added, it is still cheaper to purchase existing hymnals, but that price gap is getting narrower.

“These are high-value, long-term projects,” Kreider said. “This is a project churches should think of in terms of shaping their musical identity for the next 15 years.”

Reintroducing hymnals in churches where they have fallen out of use requires both a shift in musical culture and the teaching (or reteaching) of skills like note-reading and harmonization. Some leaders and congregations are embracing this challenge, seeking out or creating new tools and resources in the process.

Isaiah Holt developed Sing Your Part, an app that teaches users to sing in individual parts and read music. He said the project grew out of the realization that if congregations are going to use their hymnals, they would need some education.

“Pastors reach out to us looking for a lifeline,” said Holt. “There are so many of us who don’t read music, but still, a lot of Protestant churches are using hymnals every week.”

Sing Your Part, which launched in June 2024, contains the full repertoire for seven hymnals and a large collection of songs in the public domain. Holt said 100 churches are currently using the app weekly. “How Firm a Foundation” is currently the most popular song on the app.

Holt hopes the app will help “breathe new life” into print hymnals. In just a few months, it seems to have helped churches put roots down into older Christian traditions of worship.

“Many church leaders we talk to are trying to help their churches reclaim something,” said Holt. “They feel like they’ve lost the musical literacy their ancestors had.”

Interest in traditional liturgy seems to ebb and flow in the trend cycle among American evangelicals, as does the search for historically informed musical worship practices. The current surge in demand for hymnals may be another cycle, and new volumes like the Sing! Hymnal and the Scripture Hymnal are meeting a demand for musical resources that can be held in hands and stacked on shelves.

Perhaps the interest will wane again in a year or two. But the people promoting hymnals say they really want the permanence that hymnals seem to offer.

“My goal,” said Dan Kreider, the minister behind the Sing! Hymnal, “is that every Christian could have, along with their Bible, a hymnal. We can’t take projectors with us everywhere.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Church Life

Lessons from Philippines’ Martial Law Still Hold for the Church Today

Interview by Caleb Maglaya Galaraga

Filipina social anthropologist Melba Padilla Maggay, who fought for democracy 40 years ago, critiques today’s evangelical politics.

A Filipino activist lights candles to remember victims of martial law in the Philippines.

Ezra Acayan / Stringer / Getty

One September day in 1972, Melba Padilla Maggay stepped outside to find Manila’s newspaper stands empty and massive lines for jeepneys, the Philippines’ local public transportation. Then-president Ferdinand Marcos had declared martial law, giving him wide-ranging power over the government.

At the time, Maggay was a journalist and a young Christian who had come to faith through the ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The nine-year period of martial law saw tens of thousands of Marcos’s critics thrown in prison and thousands tortured or killed.

In 1978, she and some friends started the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC) to wrestle with the question of how Christians should respond to martial law. Maggay and ISACC later joined the nonviolent 1986 People Power Revolution, which eventually deposed Marcos and restored democracy in the Philippines.

Maggay, who has long studied the intersection of religion, culture, and development in the Philippines, is a founding member of the international Life & Peace Institute and an ambassador for Micah Global, an international alliance of over 700 faith-based development organizations.

Currently, she is working to mentor a new generation and “disciple young people who will be formed in holistic witness, not just evangelism,” Maggay said. She hopes to raise leaders not just of churches or Christian organizations but of the Philippines’ barangays (“neighborhoods”), cities, and country.

Christianity Today recently spoke with Maggay about how Christians should respond to the current challenges facing the Philippines. The responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Several weeks ago, we marked the 52nd anniversary of the Philippines’ declaration of martial law. Today, the former dictator’s son—Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.—is now in office. Why is understanding that period of martial law important when viewing current events?

It’s hard to tell these stories, even though we’re talking about something from 40 years ago and people like me weren’t jailed and didn’t experience human rights violations from the martial-law years. But what I didn’t realize was that I was traumatized by the experience and the fact that the church didn’t understand the implications of martial law properly.

I was also traumatized when I was suddenly out of a job and could not exercise what I felt was my calling: journalism. [Marcos had shut down all independent media.] Some people, including Christians, thought martial law was okay because they thought the victims of human rights abuses were rebels anyway. But the whole country was traumatized without realizing it.

Because so many people didn’t fully grasp what happened to our country during this time, I’ve encouraged everyone to write down our stories. That’s why my book—Dark Days of Authoritarianism—is a book of personal accounts of people who lived through this period. Unlike ideology, nobody can quarrel with a story.

How did the church respond to the declaration of martial law?

At that time, I was a young Christian and a new university graduate. I was a cub reporter at the Manila Chronicle. Then, suddenly, there was martial law and the newspaper was shuttered. I spent the first three months of martial law visiting my friends in jail. The editor of The Manila Chronicle was the first to be imprisoned because he was investigating an incident of gun smuggling. I did not want to write for the newspapers allowed to operate at the time, as they were all run by Marcos’s cronies.

I remember that in our church, one of the leaders praised God for martial law. He said, “Now our freedom to worship is secure, and we are not going to [fall into communism].” But as I was sitting there listening, I thought, Wait, there’s something wrong with this. Why should we praise martial law? Just because of our freedom to worship?

Christians can praise God even in jail. The right to worship is not something that the state gives and takes away; you can worship God anywhere. Paul was a tremendous witness when he was in jail. So I told several leaders within the evangelical community, “Wait, why are we prioritizing our freedom to worship?”

If that’s the case, we are no different from lobbyists as we lobby for our freedom to worship.

It seemed that ISACC was at odds with a lot of the evangelical community when the group joined the nonviolent People Power Revolution.

There were two forces that disagreed with the People Power Revolution. One was the evangelicals; the other was the extreme left. The evangelicals didn’t want to join because they say faith has nothing to do with politics.

Like Protestants in many countries, the Protestants in the Philippines have been divided over whether they should put a greater focus on social justice or gospel proclamation. How can believers bridge that divide?

The dichotomy of When you’re for evangelism, you don’t care about social justice; if you are for social justice, you don’t care about evangelism is wrong. This is a legacy of Western dualism. But this dichotomy is too ingrained in our brains, and I think we should get out of that.

Filipino culture is very holistic. In fact, most Asian cultures are. That’s why religion in Asia has always been the basis for culture.

In the Philippines, we’re just labeled as Catholic, but the indigenous culture and religious imagination of Filipinos are strong. I have always said, “We are not Christianized; we simply adapted,” because that is a very strong feature of the culture. The Filipino always adapts.

Look at the Overseas Filipino Workers everywhere. Local cultures love them. Why? Because we adapt. In other words, people mistake that for conversion. No. Five hundred years of Christianity did not really change us.

In anthropology, there is what we call surface and deep structures of culture. The surface is easy to change. In our case, the anitos (“ancestor spirits”) were exchanged for saints with Caucasian features—then, the church, instead of huts or shrines near our houses. Stonemasons were called to build churches. It’s easy to change the surface. But the mindset has remained. In other words, we may have 500 years of Christianity, but when it comes to our idea of morality, nothing changed.

You mentioned that Filipino evangelicals seemed to withdraw from the public square during martial law. But what are your thoughts about those who preach dominionism, the idea that nations should be governed by Christians and biblical law?

That is also wrong. Today, Filipino evangelicals are entering politics in the same way evangelicals in America did in the 70s after they lost cultural power. The Filipino church is made in the image of the American Bible Belt. But the problem is that Christians should not use the coercive powers of the state to persuade people about the values of their faith.

This is why separation of church and state is in both countries’ constitutions. What the separation of church and politics means is that you tolerate everybody. We are now in a pluralistic world.

In other words, you do not coerce people to conform to your values. Paul said that “we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience” (2 Cor. 4:2). Fight for your values in the public space, but without using the coercive powers of the state, where there is a punishment for those who hold different values.

For instance, when it comes to same-sex marriage, the church has to stand for its values. In the same way, we must be prepared to tolerate other people’s values as long as they’re not criminal behavior.

Filipino evangelicals in political office share the same strategy as the Religious Right in America. Before, they didn’t want politics. Now that they’ve entered politics, they got off on the wrong foot. In other words, they are sensitive to values that are against us, like abortion. But they don’t speak out on issues of justice. That’s wrong. Christians, when they’re in politics, should be seen as people who speak for those who are voiceless.

Is there a better way for Christians to engage with politics or run for political office?

In the New Testament, dominion means servanthood. Leadership is servanthood.

The only meaning of dominion is that when we fell, we lost mastery over creation. But now, Jesus has given us power. Human agency was restored. That’s why I tell my elderly friends, “We can do something for as long as we are alive.” We have human agency, including the poor, who think they can’t do anything because they are victims of social forces around them. But no, they can take hold of these things. It is part of the restoration of dominion.

Dominion is not lording it over people. We should be servants to everybody. If you want to be a leader, you have to serve everybody. So dominionists’ take on dominion is wrong. In other words, we have power now to serve everyone. We have power, agency, in such a way that we can help all others in human society.

What is the most pressing challenge facing the Filipino evangelical church?

Developing a theology that will respond to our context of poverty and injustice, as millions of Filipinos are still mired by these societal ills, should be the first priority of the church. We have been reductionist in our understanding of what it means to bear witness. In 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul says “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” That’s the witness—not just formulas like “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” and “You will get saved and go to heaven.”

What does it mean to bear witness? To take every thought captive, whether it happens in theological circles or in the public square.

There’s a strong need for Christians to be biblically literate. The Bible is too important to be left to theologians. We have to go back to what the Bible says about all the issues around us. You should always think about it. It should be second nature.

What does God’s Word say here? That’s number one for me, making every thought captive to obey Christ, regardless of what ideas are discussed—social justice, university education, or the media.

Christians must be able to relate the Word of God to the everyday issues they face, whether personal or social. That is very important but not commonly practiced. People like “canned” Bible studies and are shallow in their grasp of the Scriptures.

You said in Transforming Society, “I do not like politics. Like many of that generation … of the early 1970s, the white heat I used to feel over political issues has been tempered by years of disappointment, or, perhaps, by the tiring and corrosive effect of having worked too hard and too long at social change with only marginal success.” What keeps you doing this work?

I am thankful that the Lord has kept me. I just turned 74, and most of my contemporaries are either dead or gone or have given up. Some of them say, “What can we do? We are old; we cannot go out marching the streets like we used to do. And the forces around us, like social media, are very powerful.” They feel nothing can be done.

But the meaning of the Cross is not just forgiveness of sin. The Lord Jesus did not die just to forgive us and give us a ticket to heaven. The Lord Jesus died for the redemption of the whole earth.

The missio Dei (“mission of God”) is not to secure a ticket to heaven just for us. The missio Dei is the redeeming of the whole creation, the new heaven and the new earth.

And we are being asked to participate in the remaking of that earth. That is my missional task: Obedience to what it means to be part of God’s agenda of remaking the new heaven and the new earth. But of course, many evangelicals don’t see this because they think the world is going to fall apart. So they let go of the environment, let go of social justice, and so on.

But anything that we do in the name of Christ will contribute to this remaking of the new heaven and the new earth.

Our problem is that we are only focused on Ephesians 2:9: “not by works, so that no one can boast.” We overlook verse 10. But verse 10 says, we are saved “to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” In other words, we were chosen and elected. God has an agenda that he is inviting us to participate in.

Additional reporting by Geethanjali Tupps.

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How Can Evangelicals Navigate Political Tensions? Practice.

Harvest Prude

This campaign season, Christians have tried to proactively address political polarization—starting with tough conversations among themselves.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Daniel Breed has heard all the politics-related horror stories: members leaving their small groups, new cliques forming, churches splitting entirely. So the Presbyterian pastor isn’t taking chances with his flock this year.

Emmaus Road Church in Appleton, Wisconsin, draws in around 200 faithful on a Sunday. It’s a mostly conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) church; some congregants sport Donald Trump campaign signs on their cars or lawns, and others voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Beyond the one-on-one conversations that crop up during the campaign, Breed hosts a faith and politics class in the months ahead of Election Day. Every other week, participants gather at their new church building downtown to share a meal, then divide into classrooms.

They discuss historical instances of evangelical involvement in politics, examples of faithful Christian engagement, and ideas for how to interact across the political aisle.

People need a place to process the fear and anxiety surrounding political issues, and Breed believes the close-knit church community is the right testing ground for listening and asking questions.

“I think it’s because we built a lot of social capital,” he added. “I haven’t had anyone leave because of these issues.”

Breed thinks churches need to be direct about these kinds of conversations and hopes more will see that, even though members “might have differing opinions, it’s possible to do that and stay together.”

Researchers are finding that polarization is currently at a height in modern history, with Americans less likely to hold a mix of liberal and conservative views and more likely to be entrenched in partisan camps.

By the last presidential election, nearly 80 percent of Americans had “just a few” or no friends across the political aisle, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Researchers have also found that people’s partisanship leads them to perceive others as “more extreme” than they actually are, leading to negative views not just of the opposing political party but also of the voters who identify differently than themselves.

And those who manage to keep across-the-aisle relationships often find they can do it only by barring political discussion entirely: Nearly half of Americans have stopped talking politics with someone due to differences.

But more evangelicals like Breed are done accepting the polarization in their pews and are calling on their fellow church members to engage with rather than avoid the issues that divide them.

In the aftermath of tensions surrounding the 2020 election, this year’s race has seen a batch of organizations offering mediators, curricula, and other resources to combat polarization. Some groups, like The After Party, are new and explicitly evangelical. Others, like Essential Partners, date back decades and are seeing there is fresh interest in their offerings due to today’s divisions.

In places where people are willing to lean into tough conversations, experts said they’ve seen encouraging results.

Essential Partners is one of these groups. It offers coaching, mentoring, and facilitating dialogue on particularly fraught topics—essentially, divorce-proofing institutions. The organization isn’t explicitly religious but has worked with denominations and faith-based groups.

John Sarrouf, a Christian and a coexecutive director at Essential Partners, has had plenty to do the last several years. He’s helped churches face local issues related to congregational merges, church summer camp programming, and COVID-19 policies. Currently, he’s seeing issues crop up around politics and the war in the Middle East.

Sarrouf has found two main reasons churches bring in organizations like his. About 30 percent of the time, it’s “inspiration.” They want to “get better at living together.” Then there’s the other 70 percent: “desperation.”

“Something has come up that’s really threatening that congregation or the denomination and their ability to live and work and worship together,” he said.

Conflict and polarization “flattens people,” Sarrouf explained. Suddenly, people go from Bible study partners and church committee friends to opponents. Eventually, stubborn polarization leads to people simply leaving.

“A lot of churches suffer from that. When there’s a conflict, there’s a divide. People stop showing up. Not because they don’t love the church,” Sarrouff said, “but it’s really exhausting to be in a toxic, polarized space like that.”

An important component of his work is to help people “rehumanize” their neighbors or fellow church members who are on the other side of a conflict. He nudges them to remember, That person was the first to show up with food for dinner when my mom was sick. Or That person who votes differently is the person in the choir who helps keep me on pitch.

Leaders can see changes in congregational interactions. People go from standing with stiff postures and avoiding eye contact to leaning in, smiling, and nodding. “It’s really life-changing for people,” he said. “People can get back to doing the important work that they want to be doing in a community.”

Sarrouf said he’s seen communities who have participated in resources like his have more tools to navigate conflicts well in the future and “become incredibly resilient to the next impulse or opportunity for division.”

“We tend to train people to do this themselves,” he said. “It’s not their first conflict. It won’t be their last. They have to learn how to do this and own it and make it a part of their everyday lives—so that it becomes just how they live together.”

Last month, a coalition of evangelical leaders released the statement “Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction,” which seeks to remind Christians what they have in common theologically even as people are divided politically. (Signatories include Christianity Today editor in chief Russell Moore.) Some churches plan to read the document publicly.

Moore is also a part of The After Party, a six-week video course launched this year that focuses on how Christians can develop a “Christ-centered political identity.”

Since it came out in April, The After Party’s program has been used by around 75,000 people through conferences, books, training for pastors and lay leaders, and small groups, according to The Washington Post.

Another group, the Mending Division Academy, established last year, has a particular focus on pastors whose churches are struggling with divisions. The organization is headed by Napp Nazworth, who resigned from The Christian Post in 2019 due to disagreements over a pro-Trump column. The group’s curriculum deals with everything from misinformation to polarization to deconstruction.

Bob Roberts, a Baptist pastor in Keller, Texas, has seen polarization on some extreme levels in his work overseas in Vietnam and Afghanistan. In addition to pastoring, he’s been involved in religious freedom advocacy and interfaith work abroad, which has heightened his concern over infighting among Christians at home.

“We’ve dealt with extremists around the world. Sorry to say we now have them in our own country,” he said. “And once somebody is truly radicalized in how they think, not just the actions they carry out, it’s incredibly hard to shift them. The most important thing to do is to get upstream of that and deal with it before they’re radicalized.”

Roberts wants to start with some concerning ways Christians talk to each other: How can you be a Christian and vote for this candidate? Or that candidate? You must not be a Christian if you vote for this candidate or that candidate.

Roberts cofounded the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, a group that brings together pastors, imams, rabbis, and leaders from various faith groups to foster peace in their communities and combat radicalization and polarization. His group has already worked with around 500 people and had several hundred download online resources.

One resource he uses for churches is the Peacemaker’s Toolkit. It explores how the Bible handles peacemaking and moves to how everyday Christians can practice this with each other. One small tool involves is pocket-sized cards with best practices: how to refrain from bad mouthing others on social media, how to verify information online, and how to listen well to people despite disagreeing with their point of view.

Left unaddressed, polarization spreads to a host of other issues—including weariness among younger generations toward politics and church spaces.

“One of the reasons they’re leaving is they’re just sick of how Christians talk to each other, particularly Christian leaders,” said Biola University professor Tim Muehlhoff. “A lot of the young generation, they’re done with the argument culture. They’re like, ‘I can’t do that. … I’m not demonizing the other political party.’”

Muehlhoff asked a group of students how many of them had stopped talking to a friend or family member due to political disagreements. Half of his class raised their hands.

Muehlhoff and fellow professor Rick Langer have asked Biola students to lean into these hard conversations. The two professors partnered with Pomona College, a private liberal arts school, as part of a group called Bridging the Gap, which pairs conservative universities with liberal ones to have one-on-one discussions. Biola students have also participated in a program called Unify America, which sets up Zoom calls between political opposites.

Participation in these projects has at times garnered criticism from fellow Christians or concerned parents, who have accused the professors of being “all winsome, no convictions.” Parents have worried that participation in the Zoom conversations would negatively impact their children’s faith.

Muehlhoff said one student told him, “I don’t think anybody trusts our faith. Everybody thinks we’re so fragile. Like, one call and we’ll walk away from the faith.” Nearly all the students are scared going into the discussion, Muehlhoff said. But they leave exhilarated.

Much of each call is spent finding areas of common ground—unreasonable professors, too much homework, plans for summer break. By the time the students get to the hard questions at the end—one example was discussing their definitions and views on marriage—they’d already established the camaraderie necessary to have a respectful discussion.

The students told him they left the conversations encouraged by being able to share their own views and learning about someone else’s. “Good, because you’re all doing it again,” Muehlhoff told the students. “I signed you up for a second one.”

Their work goes beyond the classroom. The two former pastors have also authored books on disagreeing well and combating cancel culture and now helm Biola’s Winsome Conviction Project, which seeks to help Christians counter polarization and unhealthy ways of communicating.

The project does this through weekend church retreats, public forums, events, workshops, and small groups. They tackle hot button issues, from abortion to sexuality. Basically anything, Muehlhoff said, that “is just splitting communities and churches.”

The project sprang out of the “concern that we just lost the ability to talk to each other as Christians,” he explained.

Too often, the church has added to the division rather than providing an alternative model for engaging with both non-Christians and fellow Christians, Muehlhoff said: “People are splitting over preferred pronouns. They’re splitting over Black Lives Matter. They’re splitting over … whether to have a smoke machine during worship.”

But often, just under the surface are the real concerns: The dispute over the smoke machine, Muehlhoff explained, represented to some members evidence that liberalism was infiltrating their church.

Some pastors are worried that proactively engaging these issues will lead to more problems. “The sentiment is ‘I’m not opening this can of worms because, quite frankly, I don’t know if our church will survive,’” Muehlhoff said. They think that “politics will do us in.”

But faith leaders may underestimate the appetite regular people in the pew have for talking about these issues. At one event in 2022 in Washington, Winsome Convictions set up chairs for an expected 250 people. Almost 600 Christians from area churches ended up coming, including many walk-ins.

At that same session, Muehlhoff recalled a woman coming with her adult son. The two had not spoken in two years over political disagreements, but the mom begged her son for one last favor: to come to the Winsome Convictions event. At the end, the son stood up during a testimonial session and said participating had led to the best conversation he’d had with his mom in a decade.

Breed also hopes that more Christians will lean into these discussions via formal curricula or one-on-one discussions in their churches rather than simply leave spaces where they don’t agree.

“My opinion is, if you can’t get along with Christians and you have to go somewhere else, those churches aren’t gonna last very long either,” he said.

And he thinks faith leaders will increasingly have a role to play.“The voices that their congregation is hearing outside of the gospel are going to be very, very loud. They are going to say things such as ‘This person is going to be the end of the republic. If you vote for this person, it’s going to be the end,’” Breed said. “They’re going to be hearing those voices loud. The question is, will they hear the gospel louder?”

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Lebanon Evangelicals Serve Shiites Displaced by Hezbollah-Israel War

Jayson Casper

Despite safety risks and strained resources, churches work hard to help Muslims unaccustomed to experiencing Christian love.

Shiite women and their children who fled south Lebanon for shelter in Beirut.

Marwan Naamani / AP Images

On September 23, Mustafa put his family of five on a small motorbike and drove seven hours north from Tyre to a village in the Lebanese mountains, weaving slowly through lines of gridlocked vehicles. Some in those cars—like his brother Hussein’s family of six—would not arrive for another two days.

The path normally takes two hours.

Mustafa, and thousands like him, were frantically fleeing Israeli bombs aimed at Hezbollah, the Shiite militia designated by the US government as a terrorist organization. Until that moment, he and his brother had been agricultural workers in a farm outside the city, living in a spartan two-bedroom apartment provided by his employers.

CT agreed to withhold his family name for security reasons. Mustafa is a Christian originally from Afrin, a Kurdish area in northwest Syria. Asked if he shared his brother’s faith, Hussein said, “Not yet.”

Their home nation does not recognize converts from Islam. And while Lebanon is the only Arab nation to grant freedom of conversion, Tyre is a socially conservative Shiite city under the political sway of Hezbollah.

This was Mustafa’s second displacement. In 2013, he and his brother fled the Syrian civil war. But over the past five years, as poverty rates tripled in Lebanon, the nominal Sunni Muslims found support from a local Christian ministry offering aid.

Eighteen months ago, Mustafa professed faith in Christ.

“I follow Jesus,” he said. “He saved me.”

When Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon, it issued evacuation orders to both Muslim and Christian villages in the south. But the large majority of the displaced come from Shiite areas suspected of housing weapons depots and underground tunnels—where resident Shiites may or may not align with Hezbollah’s Islamist ideology.

According to a survey conducted in early 2024, while 78 percent of Shiites viewed positively the militia’s role in regional affairs, only 39 percent said they felt closest to Hezbollah among Lebanon’s political parties, compared to 37 percent of Shiites who felt closest to none.

Only 6 percent of Christians had “a lot of trust” in the Shiite militia.

Within these realities, Christians are eager—and cautious—to help. Gospel commitments and national solidarity require hospitality. Sectarian guardedness encourages suspicion. And Israel’s bombing campaign creates fear that welcoming the displaced might make them a target.

Many are helping anyway.

Mustafa and Hussein found shelter in living quarters offered by an evangelical church in the mixed Muslim-Christian village where they sought refuge. A plastic rug covered half of the cement floor in their private allotment, with thin mattresses pressed up against the walls. Blankets and pillows strewn about were evidence of their children’s fitful night of sleep.

“This is our message: to show love in action as we lead people to Christ,” the church’s pastor said. (CT is granting him anonymity due to the uncertain political situation in Lebanon.) “As they receive, we teach them to give.”

His congregation currently hosts about 100 people, displaced from their homes in the south and in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. More than half are from neighboring Syria; the rest are primarily Lebanese Shiites. The pastor said 60 percent of the total are believers in Jesus. Others, like Hussein, are their relatives or Muslims already closely connected to churches in their original area.

They all pitched in to prepare 500 tuna sandwiches for local distribution.

Not Just Talk

Hezbollah’s current conflict with Israel began last year on October 8, one day after Hamas invaded from Gaza and killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, taking 250 hostages. The Lebanese militia initiated what it called a “support front” for Hamas, launching missiles that caused 80,000 Israelis to flee from villages near the border.

A similar number of Lebanese also fled from Israel’s retaliation, and for 11 months the two sides had kept their missile exchange relatively contained, aiming to avoid a larger and perhaps regional conflict with Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah as proxy forces.

That status quo held despite the deaths of 12 Druze children, hit by a Hezbollah missile in the Golan Heights, and Israel’s increased targeting of militia leaders inside Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. US-led negotiations to de-escalate or stop the fighting failed to overcome Hezbollah’s insistence on a simultaneous ceasefire in Gaza. And on September 17, Israel included the return of northern citizens to their homes as an official war goal.

Hours later, an attack of exploding pagers, and, the next day, of walkie-talkies—widely suspected to be conducted by Israel despite its official denial—killed tens and wounded thousands of militia members and affiliated medical personnel in Lebanon and Syria. Six days later, the bombing campaign began. Israeli officials reportedly stated their policy was “de-escalation through escalation.”

Lebanon estimates that the fighting has displaced 1.2 million of its 6 million residents. More than 950 public schools, warehouses, and other facilities now serve as shelters. Ninety percent of the displaced, nearly half of whom are children, are unable to meet their basic needs.

The above-mentioned mountain village pastor secured permission from the Muslim-led municipality to provide aid alongside several other relief groups in coordination with a local ministry run by a church elder.

One local assistance coordinator, a member of the heterodox Druze Muslim community, said “the church is number one” in providing help, while some other groups “say they are helping but are mostly just talk.”

But with classrooms throughout the country filled with families seeking refuge, he laments that his three children have nowhere to go for school.

The last Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, in 2006, sent 900,000 people from their homes. Then, churches and citizens of all sects rallied to help, but today, the resources are far fewer.

Many are reluctant to rent their apartments to displaced Shiites, afraid the refuge seekers cannot—or will not—continue to pay. Hyperinflation and a 98 percent currency devaluation had many Lebanese already scurrying simply to provide for themselves. Political gridlock has kept the nation without a president for two years, while the prime minister works in a caretaker capacity.

Who to Blame?

Many people blame Hezbollah.

“I am against Shiites in politics, but in humanity we can’t refuse to help them,” said the Druze assistance coordinator. “We suffered from Syria; we suffered from Iran. Maybe we are waiting for America to help.”

American and French diplomats attempted to broker a three-week ceasefire in Lebanon, and the Lebanese foreign minister stated that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had agreed. Days later, an Israeli airstrike using bunker-buster bombs leveled four residential apartment buildings and killed Nasrallah in his underground quarters. US officials denied knowledge of Nasrallah’s approval.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly agreed to ceasefire negotiations, then backtracked. Israel stated its war is against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. Netanyahu, addressing the Lebanese, referenced the campaign against Hamas.

“You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza,” he stated. “Free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.”

Lebanon has long officially supported implementation of UN resolution 1701, adopted to end the 2006 war. It calls for the disarmament of all militias and the withdrawal of Hezbollah beyond the Litani River, about 18 miles north of the Israeli border. But Lebanon’s 2008 effort to dismantle the militia’s private communication network failed after Hezbollah’s armed show of force in Beirut.

The United States is reportedly pushing now for Lebanese politicians to elect a president, who, under an unwritten but 80-year-old agreement, must be a Maronite Christian. Members of the Lebanese parliament, divided equally between Muslims and Christians, elect the head of state.

But Christians are divided into two main political parties and other smaller ones, some of which ally with Hezbollah as a political entity to win support from the Shiite electorate. Prior to the Israeli escalation, leading Shiite politicians repeatedly blocked completion of the voting process for the Christian president, insisting on a candidate sympathetic to Hezbollah’s cause.

But the two primary Christian party heads are understood to nurture presidential ambitions and have failed to work together consistently to represent their community.

“I blame Christian leaders—they work for their own interests, not the interests of our country,” the mountain village pastor said. “If you give the space to others, you can’t blame them when they take it.”

In 2000, Hezbollah won widespread social favor, even from many Christians, by compelling Israel to end its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, originally intended to impose a buffer zone against incursions of Palestinian militants. Since then, the militia squandered Sunni Muslim support by entering the civil war in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, publicly confirmed in 2013. Ordinary Christians joined many in disenchantment when Hezbollah sided with sectarian leaders against the 2019 popular revolution, ushering in the past five years of economic decline.

The militia’s support for Hamas prompted “We Don’t Want War” posters throughout Beirut.

Offering Christian Love

“We are angry. Without any consultation with the government, Hezbollah dragged Lebanon to war,” said Joseph Kassab, president of the Supreme Council of the Evangelical Community in Syria and Lebanon, who said no lasting peace can come through violence. “Many Christians feel that Israel has no restrictions in war, and the militia was wrong to provoke its enemy.”

The winds of change are blowing, however, said Jihad Haddad, pastor of True Vine Church in Zahle, a Christian town in the Bekaa Valley, as he modified a Chinese proverb: Some build walls to resist the wind; windmills would better serve ministry. Since Christians have no political voice in the current conflict, he is directing his efforts to support the displaced.

The relief center at the church already distributed 2,000 food parcels a month before the current escalation, with much grown on its own farmland. To care for the many now sheltering in schools, the church has adapted the parcels so they provide nutrition without requiring cooking. The displaced also face a shortage of blankets, but the church has already emptied its warehouse.

Haddad sees a revival on the horizon, but it is not easy. Lebanon, he said, is stuck between the “hammer” of Israel and the “anvil” of Hezbollah. Missiles have hit one mile from his home and, in the other direction, one mile from the church.

Perceptions of Gaza create poignant fear.

“We are very cautious about welcoming families we don’t know,” Haddad said. “Where Israel finds militants, they bomb them.”

The people of Zahle, he said, carefully check Shiites for affiliation with Hezbollah. True Vine has provided shelter in church apartments for 17 families connected to the congregation, as believers and others seek out what they hope is safety in a Christian location. But Haddad also fears that if the church were to become overwhelmed by housing all those seeking refuge, it could not provide services to everyone.

Church-based help across denominations has made a strong impression.

“If there had been no Christians in Lebanon, we would have been devoured,” stated Mohamed al-Hajj Hassan, a Shiite sheikh known for his opposition to Hezbollah, in a widely shared video clip of his television interview. “They are the ones who protected us and helped those who roam the streets. They are the ones who took in our women and children.”

Christians could have sided with Israel, he said. Shiites must now “reexamine our conscience and think about whether we may have wronged our partners in the country.”

Thimar / Edits by CT

Volunteers supported by Thimar prepare meals for the displaced

Such appreciation, however, does not make it any easier for evangelicals to open the doors of their institutions, said Nabil Costa, head of the Association of Evangelical Schools in Lebanon. Its 35 schools serve 20,000 students, a mix of Christians and Muslims. Lebanon’s government compelled a Seventh-day Adventist school in a Shiite neighborhood in downtown Beirut to provide shelter for the displaced.

Costa said evangelicals will be willing to open their schools once the government decides all private school facilities are needed to help. This can include discussion of how to cooperate with the education ministry to provide supplementary instruction for public school children forced from their classrooms.

The war has displaced 40 percent of Lebanon’s 1.25 million students.

Costa also heads Thimar, the local Baptist social service organization overseeing Beirut Baptist School (BBS), which negotiated with the government to transform its campus into a distribution center for the displaced. Located three miles north of the densely populated Dahiyeh area of Beirut, where Nasrallah was killed, the school’s vicinity is not currently threatened by Israeli airstrikes. But amid the ferocious echo of regular bombing, BBS assists seven nearby public and private institutions that host the displaced, providing 700 daily meals. Additional aid is provided to mountain churches.

“We have no right to reject refugees,” Costa said. But he cautioned the government, “Do not take advantage of our Christian love.”

Open Our Hearts

Some, even among the displaced themselves, are offering it freely.

On Monday, September 23, Laya Yamout woke at 6:30 a.m. to the sound of Israeli airstrikes. A registered nurse serving with Horizons International, she also volunteers at Tyre Church, founded by her now-deceased father 14 years ago as a church plant in the Shiite city. She had already curtailed her local movements as precision drone strikes targeted Hezbollah militants riding their motorbikes. Best not to be caught behind one, she said, in case they miss.

But this attack felt different. Four hours later, Yamout was visiting an elderly patient with dementia when another blast hit nearby. She rushed home, packed her bags, and drove 55 miles north to Beirut with her dog by her side. The 50 people in her congregation—nearly all Muslim-background believers in Jesus—eventually found their way to scattered locations, sheltering in schools, churches, or with family members. One returned to Iraq.

Yamout stayed with a friend in a Christian neighborhood of the capital.

“Honestly, it is safer,” she said. “I don’t want to have to flee again.”

The next morning, Yamout rose to volunteer at a clinic connected with a large Kurdish church in Beirut. On Wednesday, she went back to Tyre with two others, hoping to volunteer with the Red Cross.

After taking seven hours to reach Beirut two days earlier, it took little more than an hour to return home amid the “apocalyptic” scenes of stalled-out cars abandoned on the side of the road and a half-dozen smoldering buildings to the right and the left.

Almost immediately, she turned around. Tyre resembled a ghost town, with no water, electricity, or cell phone reception. The streets were emptied of nearly everyone but Hezbollah militants, but she was not intrinsically afraid of the environment.

Her father was jailed twice for his evangelism, and church property repeatedly vandalized. But over the years, Yamout said, Tyre Church won the begrudging respect of its community, and the road it is on became popularly known as “Church Street.”

Yet it was not safe to remain. Two believers slept on the beach in fear that their apartments would be hit. Yamout filled a 15-passenger van to return to the capital with the church families that were unable to find earlier transportation to safety.

On Thursday, she was back serving a clinic in a Christian town 50 miles north of Beirut that has received many people displaced from the Bekaa Valley. Each day on average she treated 150 people.

“Now is the time to open our hearts,” Yamout said. “We may never get this chance again.”

Lebanon has Christian content on the airwaves and churches throughout the country, but many Lebanese villages of all sects self-isolate from other communities. Ordinary southern Shiites who know few Christians now find themselves sheltering in Christian areas. They are deeply traumatized, Yamout said, but they light up with a smile when she tells them she is also from Tyre and takes time to listen to their stories.

At each school, Yamout works with the local church to follow up with any who show openness to the gospel. She advocates caution when extending hospitality since some militia members are likely to slip in. But while most are now fighting the Israeli ground invasion on the border, believers might show love to militants’ wives and children. Alongside them are thousands of Lebanese Shiites, unrelated to Hezbollah, who are meeting Christians for the first time.

Meanwhile, at the mountain village church where Mustafa, Hussein, and other “not yet” Christians shelter, they and their families eat around long plastic tables set up in the church parking lot. Mustafa hopes to return to Tyre but not to his hometown in Syria—it is too dangerous there. Despite the uncertainties of an indefinitely temporary residence, he is at peace in Lebanon.

“We don’t know what to do next,” he said. “Only God does, and we trust him.”

- More from Jayson Casper

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