All Saints Die

Our yearly reminder for Christians neither to run from nor to leap toward death, but to learn the art of dying well.

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

November 1 marks All Saints’ Day on the church calendar, when many denominations remember the communion of all believers of all time, including the faithfully departed.

That the church instituted this holy day should come as no surprise. We Christians have rehearsed our belief in “the communion of saints” since the institution of the Apostles’ Creed in the fourth century. Yet the concept of a fellowship of the living and the dead has an eerie ring to it, a feeling not assuaged by what All Hallows’ Eve has become in Halloween.

One liturgical prayer says God knits together his elect in “one communion and fellowship in the mystical body” of Christ. The haunting image of sewing together the faithful living and dead members of Christ’s mystical body leaves us with a lot to unpack. But since the phrase is tucked into a longer liturgical script, we usually don’t think about it much.

In fact, apart from Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and the occasional funeral, the Western church tends to remain relatively close-lipped about death and the relationship between the living and the dead. Unlike our brothers and sisters in much of the world, people in the United States usually die in institutions, not at home in the care of family.

A lack of exposure to dying and death both in the church and at home has led to the emergence of two kinds of responses to death—people who run away from it and people who leap toward it. Yet a third way is to learn the life-giving art of dying well.

Some of the most agonizing and tragic deaths I’ve faced as a doctor are those of patients who adamantly refuse to acknowledge their mortality. They desperately latch onto every bit of available technology to delay the inevitable, regardless of whether it causes more harm than good—often causing further medical complications to snowball.

Years ago, I recall attempting to resuscitate the same elderly, cancer-riddled man three times in the same night. After his heart stopped and he died the first time, I discussed gently with his daughters how sick he was and how his heart likely would not keep beating for much longer. But they wanted us to attempt CPR again. His eldest daughter told me that they are Christians who believe Jesus can heal. She said that they believe in miracles and that we doctors should do whatever we can to keep him alive. He died twice more that night, and our third attempt at resuscitation failed.

In his dying process, my patient was subjected to painful medical interventions with no meaningful benefit apart from a couple more painful hours of life. He was placed on a breathing machine, which meant he couldn’t speak, and was transferred from the cancer ward to intensive care. His family spent their final moments in a harried state of crisis instead of sharing their last moments sitting, talking, and praying together.

Later reflecting on that situation, I wrote in my book The Lost Art of Dying, “This has always struck me as something of a paradox. It seems curious that the people who believe most fervently in divine healing also cling most doggedly to the technology of mortals.”

Data shows this to be a widespread phenomenon. A study by researchers at Harvard University found cancer patients with high levels of support by their religious communities are more likely to die in intensive care on advanced life support. They are also more likely to refuse hospice and palliative care.

And although religious people often seek guidance from their clergy on medical care at the end of life, a subsequent study found that clergy know very little about palliative and other care at the end of life. They are prone to overstate the benefits and underestimate the risks of medical interventions in an effort to encourage faith in God.

Most people wish to die at home surrounded by loved ones, but highly medicalized dying usually requires a high-tech hospital. What’s more, overmedicalizing the dying process rarely reflects the resurrection hope of all saints. Although medical technology is indeed a wonderful gift from God, we must guard against making it an idol. The fact is, all of us will die. From dust we came, and to dust we will return (Ecc. 3:20).

Not everyone runs from death, however—some leap toward it. Death anxiety or inexperience or a penchant for control prompts “leapers” to determine how they can choose the timing and manner of their death. Some end their lives through conventional suicide, while others do so through physician-assisted suicide (usually lethal pills) or euthanasia (usually lethal injection). It is critical that the church understand these terms and the differences between them.

In Canada, where medical killing is now the fifth leading cause of death, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide were absorbed by the term MAID, or medical assistance in dying.

The language is quite clever. Who doesn’t want assistance in their dying? I certainly do. I want someone to bring a hot cup of tea or an extra blanket if I’m cold. If I’m feeble and frail, I hope for someone to help me out of bed to the bathroom. If I’m bedbound, I hope for someone to turn me regularly and give me sponge baths. I would love for people to read or sing to me while I’m on my deathbed.

But MAID is not about flourishing while dying, nor is it about nurturing life and community. Rather, it is about control and leveraging the goods of medicine to inflict death. It ends suffering by ending the life of the sufferer, and in the meantime, it relieves people of their responsibility to care for dying family members. It releases communities from their duty to address social isolation and absolves health care systems of their obligation to provide support services to the dying or those living with disabilities.

Canada’s MAID began in 2016 for terminal patients and expanded in 2021 to anyone with irremediable suffering. Let’s be clear about what this means. No longer must a person have a terminal diagnosis to be euthanized in Canada. If your doctor agrees your suffering is bad enough, then you, like an old dog, can be “put down.”

According to the government’s most recent annual report, 35 percent of MAID-seeking Canadians in 2022 said they wanted to die to avoid being a burden on family and caregivers. Another 17 percent said they sought MAID because of loneliness. Imagine: 2,264 people choosing death in one year simply because of loneliness! Still hundreds more may choose death because they can’t access or afford adequate palliative or disability services.

The line between prolonging life and delaying death is a very fine one. It takes wisdom and some medical knowledge and a good clinical team to know when enough is enough. But the line between caring for the dying and hastening death is a bold one.

The latter goes directly against the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” And to obey God’s law in this context is quite literally to choose life. “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life,” the Lord said, “so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years” (Deut. 30:19–20).

What do running from and leaping toward death have in common? They both fail to grant dying humans the reverence they deserve. The sad fact is that most people—especially Christians—aren’t prepared for death. This is a growing problem that pastors and other church leaders can’t afford to ignore in their congregations.

As Meagan Gillmore reported for CT earlier this month, one Canadian pastor said, “I think one of the strongest reasons why MAID has a lot of traction generally in our society is that nobody wants to talk about death.”

For years, I’d wondered how we could change the conversation and equip our patients to walk toward the inevitable. Then one day, in my reading of various books on the subject, I came across a concept known as the ars moriendi, which is Latin for “art of dying.”

I discovered an entire genre of literature—500-years’ worth of ars moriendi handbooks—on how to die well. The earliest version developed in the early 1400s after the bubonic plague, or Black Death, swept through Western Europe, leaving half the population dead.

The central theme of this genre was that dying well is very much wrapped up in how we live. If we want to die well, we have to live well. That includes cultivating a life of virtue, nurturing our communities, and attending to questions of salvific and eternal importance.

The ars moriendi handbooks became wildly popular and were translated into many different languages, circulated widely throughout the West and into the Americas. They were also adapted by a variety of religious and nonreligious groups. The genre remained popular for more than half a millennium.

It started to lose its cultural prestige about a hundred years ago in the wake of the First World War and the influenza pandemic, when it seems people grew weary of thinking about death. Also, as medicine advanced and hospitals proliferated over the 20th century, the need to prepare for death gradually withered away.

In my work, I have attempted to revive the ars moriendi for our modern, pluralistic context. I wrote the book for my patients, many of whom do not belong to religious communities. Yet we are all mortal, so we must all consider the status of our human relationships and the value we place on the medicalization of life and death.

All of us must answer questions about what it means to be human, about life’s purpose, and about what happens when we die. In our polarized world, where people increasingly approach the end of their lives by either running from death or leaping toward it, we must seek the wise path. Along with the psalmist, we should pray, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).

How might we cultivate a heart of wisdom with our mortal end in view? Across the ars moriendi genre, several themes emerge for how to practice living well to die well.

First, we must acknowledge our finitude, or finiteness. All the ars moriendi handbooks started from the premise that death is inevitable. That doesn’t mean we have to fixate on death, obsess about it, or grow overly morose. Nor does it mean we celebrate and glorify it. But it is precisely by numbering our days—by recognizing that life is limited—that we begin to understand how we might live well.

Second, we must nurture relationships and cultivate community. The ars moriendi handbooks all assumed that dying was a community affair. Yet communities today are fractured, and loneliness affects about a quarter of the world’s population.

I often encourage my patients to picture who they’d like at their deathbed and consider the state of those relationships now. If you know you’d like your children with you when you’re dying, and you’re currently estranged, then you’d best commit yourself to relational repair before it’s too late. Not only will your dying be better, but your living will improve, too.

Third, we must learn the benefits and burdens of medical interventions and seek guidance on using them prudently. I often encourage clergy to ask medical personnel to educate their congregations. Health professionals can also volunteer to share wisdom on clinical care at the end of life through classes, workshops, or even health fairs.

Churches already draw on the talents and skills of their members across many different industries—why not let clinicians teach congregations practical insights on dying well?

Finally, we cannot gain hearts of wisdom without considering the ultimate questions of human purpose and destiny: What is life for? Why am I here? What happens when I die? When it comes to answering these, Christians have a wealth of resources. Yet this is also where summaries like the Apostles’ Creed can bring our core doctrines into focus.

Do we believe, as the last line of the creed says, in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic (universal) church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting? As we gain confidence in our answers to these questions, we gain our greatest wisdom.

In the case of the ars moriendi handbooks, martyrs were seen as exemplars of faithful Christian living and dying. Illustrated versions even included images of martyred saints—Steven holding his stones, Catherine with her execution wheel. The idea is that all of us have much to learn from their lives and witness.

All Saints’ Day is the perfect time to reflect upon the living and dying of those who’ve gone before us—that great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us (Heb. 12:1)—and to consider what we can learn and apply to our own lives and deaths.

L. S. Dugdale is a professor and ethicist at Columbia University in New York City and the author of the book The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom.

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Ideas

The Antidote to Election Anxiety

Carrie McKean

Contributor

My community is the kind you see in articles hyping the threat of political violence. Reality is more mundane—and hopeful.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

If you look at a heat map of the last presidential election’s results, my West Texas home is fiery red. In my precinct here in Midland in 2020, former president Donald Trump beat President Joe Biden by a 72-point margin—and that made us one of the more politically diverse areas in our region.

Nearby precincts had margins as high as 92 points in Trump’s favor. In one rural precinct, 100 percent of the 36 voters chose Trump. I’d have to drive more than five hours to find a spot where Biden had a strong foothold, and on the trip, I could count on one hand the number of precincts that tipped even slightly his way.

I share all this because in these final days of the race, election anxiety is palpable and electric. Heart rates are elevated on the left and right alike, and plenty of Americans are afraid of the people in communities like mine. And no wonder—headlines shout all the ways Election Day could plunge us into full civic meltdown, especially if Trump loses, as he’s already setting the stage for a quest to reverse a result unfavorable to him.

“There’s people that are absolutely ready to take on a civil war,” a recent article warned. Given where I live, you’d expect me to know quite a few of them.

I don’t. And I think it’s important to say that out loud in these fearful and fractious days.

I’m not denying the potential for political violence, including among my impassioned neighbors. The truth is, our town had a handful of locals participate in the January 6 riots in 2021. Our most famous January 6 insurrectionist owned a flower shop at the time, a strange enough image to merit a feature in The Atlantic.

But she’s not revered as a local hero. She ran for mayor in 2019 and lost, garnering just 16 percent of the vote after being dismissed by most voting Midlanders as too “out there” and conspiracy-minded. In fact, she got so little local support after January 6 that she sold her flower shop and moved out of town. That ending might not make for a compelling article—but it does throw some cold water on the doomsaying dominating our collective storytelling right now.

I don’t know how the vote will go next week, but here’s one thing I can guarantee: Most Americans will feel unhappy, unrepresented, and unheard. I’m counting everyone who voted for the losing major-party candidate, everyone who voted third party, and everyone who was too discouraged by the choices put before us to vote at all.

Even millions who vote for the winner won’t be thrilled. Polling shows three in four Americans are part of the “exhausted majority,” those who hold dissimilar policy views but also think “our differences aren’t so great that we can’t work together.” Exhausted majority members aren’t raging partisans, and we make up a significant part of the population in every state. We’d all do well to remember that.

Last year, I met a left-leaning political organizer who was visiting Midland. At lunch, she confessed that she was surprised by how welcome and comfortable she felt in our town. I found it kind of amusing—even privately scoffed a little at how she’d so easily accepted stereotypes—until I went to California a few months later and found myself similarly taken aback by how normal everyone seemed. Hello pot, meet kettle, I thought, bemused and a little embarrassed by my own stereotyping.

In the months since, I’ve thought a lot about why that organizer and I both thought as we did—and how that same pattern repeats every day at every level of our national discourse. We’d each taken the bait offered to us by the loudest voices on our side, which portray fringy outliers across the aisle as representative of their side.

That kind of storytelling makes for good click-through rates on social media and offers a nice ego boost, like the boastful Pharisee praying, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11). It also deceives us about the stakes in our politics, needlessly heightens tensions, rips us apart, and blinds us to our own sins.

A couple of years ago, an editor at a prominent left-leaning magazine (given the “most liberal” ranking by AllSides) reached out to me to ask if I’d be interested in writing for them. This editor sincerely wanted to seek out more diverse perspectives for his publication. He asked me to send him some article ideas.

We emailed for months on topics ranging from clean energy developments to migrants to evangelical behavior in the voting booth. Though the exchanges were always cordial, we never could come to an agreement about an angle for an article. The stories I offered didn’t confirm his prior assumptions; they wouldn’t scratch the itch for his outlet’s subscribers. Fundamentally, I think he wanted a writer who said in a different accent all the things he and his readers already thought to be true.

This is not a problem unique to the left. Last week in The Atlantic, Elaina Plott Calabro told the story of how Sylacauga, Alabama, a small town near where she grew up, captured the national media’s attention for a short time this fall due to the hordes of Haitian migrants who had come to town.

Except, when she went to find those migrants, she couldn’t. Nor could anyone else. The “hordes” turned out to be a handful of people living quiet lives and working legally at an auto plant. “But that didn’t stop people from insisting that an invasion was already under way—the lull of narrative more compelling than a desire to reckon with things as they were,” writes Calabro. Right-leaning media had all but fabricated a crisis.

Reckoning with things as they are is demonstrably less exciting than indulging in our unfair stereotypes. It’s certainly not the stuff of the campaign trail. But for Christians living in this day, it’s exactly the path we must undertake as we get through this election, regardless of who wins.

Indeed, reckoning with the way things are is a profoundly spiritual undertaking. It requires discernment. It asks us to do the hard work of recognizing where love has been driven out by fear (1 John 4:18). It requires radical honesty—confession of our fears and all the ways we’ve knotted up our trust in God’s faithfulness with the outcome of an election.

A counselor once taught me a thought experiment for when I went spinning down the path of terrible what-ifs. He’d ask me, “What if the worst does happen? What then?”

So what if the worst happens next week? What if _____ wins the election?

Well, many people won’t trust the outcome, and there might be riots or violence. It could be worse than last time. But even if that happens, it’s incredibly unlikely America would descend into the sort of chaos we see in in other parts of the world.

Still, let’s go further and say that does happen. What then?

We might lose our freedoms. My kids might not enjoy the same hope for a future that I’ve always had. Another country might become more powerful. Our country might fundamentally change its culture or governance.

I don’t think that’s where we’re headed. But Scripture tells us nations rise and fall (Job 12:23) and yet God’s Word remains (Isa. 40:8). So even if the worst does happen, what then?

Well, God’s people have lived with much less in many times and places, including right now, all around the world. It would be difficult, no doubt, and that is not the future I want for America.

But for Christians, no matter how far we follow our worst fears in this thought experiment, we will find we are always met by the tender presence of God, who promises to be our ever-present help in times of need (Ps. 46:1). As David wrote:

If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
    and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
    the night will shine like the day,
    for darkness is as light to you. (Ps. 139:8–12)

This moment calls for proper perspective, not disinterested disengagement. Vote with your conscience, by all means. Pray as specifically as you feel called to pray for the outcome of the election. But as those who are allegiant first to the King of Kings, we also must ask God to reveal to us any places we’ve turned our political opponent into our spiritual enemy, trading a wild, uncontainable, not-fully-knowable God for a little wooden talisman that fits neatly in our pocket and looks remarkably like ourselves.

We must ask God to meet us in the place of our deepest fears and remind us that there is nowhere we can go to outrun his presence and no earthly ruler who can undermine his authority. Even if we live under unjust powers and principalities, God’s story carries on.

In an ancient and brief letter composed during a time of great persecution of Christians sometime between the apostles (AD 30) and the age of Constantine (AD 337), the unknown writer to Diognetus described the peculiarity of Christians. “With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign,” the author said. They’re ordinary. But he continued:

They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult.

As followers of Jesus living in the United States of America, practicing both discernment and radical honesty ought to move us to a place of collective repentance. We are too far from this early description of the church. Instead of echoing the Pharisee, we should sound like the tax collector, who “beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner’” (Luke 18:13).

No matter our politics, as followers of Jesus living in an age of contempt and despair, God may be giving us an opportunity to become peculiar again. I do not think the worst will happen, but if it does, his command for us remains the same (2 John 1:5).

A few weeks ago, I was exchanging texts with a reporter friend of mine who lives in New York City. In many ways, we come from different worlds. We often disagree politically, but our conversations are based in mutual curiosity and are always thought-provoking and civil. On that particular day, I was feeling fearful about the risk of coming unrest. “Rarely does the world come crashing down,” he texted back. “Things tend to just deteriorate until we don’t recognize or feel represented by them anymore.”

My first thought was that for many Americans, we might already be there. Plenty of people I know and love feel left behind and forgotten. And there is sadness in that, but also a strange comfort.

Regardless of what happens in this election, babies will still learn to walk. We’ll still take meals to our friends who are suffering. We’ll still assemble crews to clear rubble-strewn roads in the aftermath of devastating floods. We’ll still stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon dumbstruck with awe. It may feel like God is bringing us to our knees—and maybe that’s exactly what we need to be more faithful disciples—but somehow life carries on.

I don’t know what will happen on and after Election Day. What I do know of my red-state neighbors and blue-state friends suggests to me that the worst is far less likely than frightening headlines have led us to believe. But I also know we can be faithful followers of Jesus under any president or earthly power.

The morning after my text conversation, I woke up thinking about my reporter friend’s words in another light. What if we’ve been thinking about the wrong worst-case scenario? What if, for Christians, the worst is not political violence but the church becoming unrecognizable as ambassadors of Christ? What if we choose to pursue worldly power at the cost of our own souls? What if our witness is what slowly deteriorates until we no longer represent the one whose name we claim?

In that sense, maybe it’s true: The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.

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News

Steven Curtis Chapman Joins Country Music Royalty

Interview by Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

The Christian music star is the first in the industry to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry.

Jason Kempin/Getty Images

Five Grammys. Sixty Dove Awards. Fifty No. 1 radio hits.

Steven Curtis Chapman is not lacking in industry honors. But this week the Christian music veteran is getting a little extra special recognition. On Friday, he’s going to be inducted into the membership of the Grand Ole Opry.

After nearly 40 years in the industry, Chapman’s entry into the country music institution is a full-circle moment. He first performed on the storied Nashville stage as a 19-year-old aspiring musician, just starting his career. Now, he will have a permanent place there.

The Grand Ole Opry, a live radio program broadcast from Nashville since 1925, has a rich history, featuring some of the biggest names in country and popular music—artists like B. B. King, Mahalia Jackson, and The Beach Boys have all appeared as guests. Membership is a lifetime invitation to be part of the regular roster of Opry performers. There are currently only 74 members, including Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks, Luke Combs, and Lainey Wilson.

Country artist Ricky Skaggs surprised Chapman with the membership announcement during a live show at the Opry in July. Chapman will be the first contemporary Christian music (CCM) star to become a member.

Fans know Chapman as a prolific CCM artist—the writer and performer of “Dive,” “The Great Adventure,” and “Cinderella.” But he has deep roots in country music, owing much of his musical formation to hours spent listening to broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry as a child in Paducah, Kentucky. Chapman’s father, who was also a guitarist, dreamed of performing at the Opry.

Chapman said that the experience of singing in church with his family as a child gave him a love for faith-forward music that has kept him squarely in the Christian music space, despite opportunities over the years to cross over into the mainstream. But he has also always loved and appreciated country music.

He spoke with CT about his upcoming induction and the career trajectory that he never dreamed would lead him there.

There are a lot of awards on your shelves—5 Grammys, 60 Dove Awards. How is membership in the Grand Ole Opry different?

The Grand Ole Opry is part of this world of country music, and country music is a unique international language. I’ve been to China to talk with government officials about adoption advocacy with Show Hope, and when we do those kinds of things, I’ve learned that if I’ll just sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” suddenly the room is friendly and everyone is singing along.

Being a member of the Opry is being part of a very special family. You can look back at the history and all of the legends who have been there, and now you’re part of it. My dad had a dream of being on the Grand Ole Opry. That was the music he grew up with, Hank Williams and Bill Monroe. My dad played acoustic guitar, his best friend was a banjo player, and they played in a group together. He made trips to Nashville as a songwriter and was never able to afford a ticket to go to the Opry. He would sit in his car in the parking lot of the Ryman Auditorium and roll his window down to listen.

My dad laid that dream down when he gave his life to Christ. He knew he couldn’t chase this dream of making it as a country music star and be a good father. He had grown up without a father in his life, and he didn’t want that for me and my brother.

Being inducted as a member in the Grand Ole Opry, as the first Christian artist to be included, is a really cool “taste and see that the Lord is good” moment. It feels like God is honoring and blessing us in a really specific way—my dad’s still alive; so is my mom. So it’s a sweet moment for us to see the goodness of God in this journey.

You started your career at the Grand Ole Opry, but most of your fans think of you as a Christian artist, not a country artist. Did you ever consider trying to make it as a mainstream country artist?

I’ve always loved all kinds of music. The first song I learned on the guitar was “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash. I was six years old and singing about going to prison. But gospel music, Christian music, became so important in my life and in my family’s life when I was about seven years old. My parents had a transformative conversion experience at a revival that came to our church, and we began to pray together, go to church, read the Bible, and sing together. I truly saw my family change.

We would sing Bill Gaither’s “He Touched Me,” and I would see the tears in my dad’s eyes as we sang, “Shackled by a heavy burden / ’Neath a load of guilt and shame / Then the hand of Jesus touched me / And now I am no longer the same.” I knew this wasn’t just a song. It was really true, and I love music that talks about that. I still loved rock-and-roll. I wore out my Eagles and Doobie Brothers records, and I would listen to country and bluegrass. And all of that is part of my DNA.

But when I sat down to write my first song, “Well Done,” it was based on the story from Jesus’ parable about the servants entrusted with the master’s talents. It must have been something we were talking about in youth group or I was reading on my own. This was the kind of music I was most drawn to, and it wasn’t because I thought I could have a career in it. It was just what came out of me when I sat down to write.

Over the years, there would be occasions when people would say, “You know, if you just left God out of a few songs or made it a little more subtle, man, you could really go big in the mainstream.” And I always had the same response. I was never opposed to it. I have always been open to performing in different spaces and with artists working in different genres. I’ve played shows where I played before artists like Kiss and Ted Nugent. I’ve always loved those kinds of moments. Obviously, I would love my music to have as much success as it can. But if I have to leave out the truth of what makes my songs what they are, I’m not really interested. My goal from the beginning was to tell my story and the story of God’s love and how it transformed my life.

Storytelling has always been one of your hallmarks as a songwriter, and it’s such an important part of the country music tradition as well. What draws you to musical storytelling?

Well, that very first song I learned, “Folsom Prison Blues,” it was a story. I also loved Glen Campbell when I was a kid. He recorded all these great songs written by Jimmy Webb, like “Wichita Lineman.” It’s just a song about a guy who checks telephone poles and power lines, but somehow I felt the sadness, I felt his longing to go home. A great storyteller with a song can do that—make you feel something.

There was a songwriter named Dallas Holm who was probably my biggest Christian music influence early on. He didn’t write churchy songs. They were really just stories of his life, and they were really honest. You felt like he was sitting down and telling you his story.

And think about the role of story in Scripture. Jesus was a masterful storyteller. He presented the kingdom of God to us through story so many times. “The kingdom of God is like this.” It makes it so much more understandable and real.

When you think about the songs you haven’t written yet, what kinds of stories are you anxious to tell in the next chapter of your career?

You know, I think the question I’ve wrestled with secretly is “Does the world really need another Steven Curtis Chapman song?” I’ve given the world a lot of songs. But the truth is, as long as I’m breathing and experiencing life, I’ll probably be writing. Songs will keep popping up, and I’ll keep wanting to sit down and do the best I can.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Ideas

How Not to Vote for Barabbas

Domonic D. Purviance

A democratic process resulted in the greatest miscarriage of justice in human history.

Christine_Kohler / Getty / Edits by CT

In the heat of election season, I’m reminded of how politics in America has a way of dominating our culture like nothing else. Every election is declared the most consequential of our lifetimes. Every issue is described as existential in its stakes, and we are told that the entire future of our country—and the world—comes down to how we vote.

Part of why we get worked up about elections is what we believe about democracy. We believe voting is the primary way to solve critical issues of our day. Elections are where we fight for our beliefs, identify our tribes, advance our agendas. Democracy isn’t perfect, but there’s a reason so many countries have settled on it as their preferred form of government.

Yet when we look to Scripture, we find a cautionary tale about democracy that’s worth recalling each election season. Despite its strengths, democracy will always be limited by how the people’s hearts are aligned.

In Matthew 27:15–26, as well as parallel passages in the other three Gospels, we see the Savior, Jesus, shortly before his crucifixion. Just a few days earlier, he had entered Jerusalem triumphantly and was celebrated with cries of “Hosanna!” But now, though innocent of any crime, Jesus had been arrested and turned over to the Roman government. He was held on charges trumped up by the religious leaders in the city.

As was the custom during the time of the festival of Passover, the Roman governor of Palestine, Pilate, allowed the people to choose a prisoner to release. And this time, it came down to a vote. Pilate presented a choice between two candidates: “Jesus who is called the Messiah” and Barabbas, a known criminal and murderer who tried to save his people by overthrowing the Roman government in a rebellion.

Though Jesus had been beloved in Jerusalem less than a week before, the chief priests and the elders persuaded the people to vote to release Barabbas. And what was to be done with the innocent Jesus? “Crucify him!” they shouted.

This is primarily a story of Christ’s substitutional sacrifice for our sin. We see ourselves in Barabbas, the guilty one for whom Christ gives his life. We are just as unworthy as Barabbas, but God’s love is so gracious that he sent his Son to suffer the death we deserved.

But at another level, this is also a story of democracy—of how a democratic process resulted in the greatest miscarriage of justice in human history.

Pilate was responsible for administering justice, but he found it more politically expedient to let the crowd decide, to heed their vote and thus keep order and protect his own power. The chief priests and elders—the religious leaders who were supposed to guide the people in righteousness—instead convinced the people to vote for Barabbas. They envied Jesus and felt that he threatened their position of influence. And the people, though they knew Jesus was innocent, nevertheless voted for the criminal rather than their Messiah. A man who deserved punishment was set free, and the Savior of humanity was sentenced to death.

Barabbas is not the only figure here with whom we should identify: We have just as much in common with the crowd that voted to crucify Jesus. In the depravity of our sinful nature, we would never choose Christ if it were left up to us. By grace, we know that it is not we who choose Christ but Christ who chooses us. While in our hearts we cry “crucify him,” he still dies to save us.

Moreover, it’s important to note that it was not democracy that failed here. There’s no suggestion in any of the Gospels that Pilate fudged the results. If anything, he seems to have preferred to release Jesus, protesting his innocence: “What crime has he committed?” Though the answer was “none,” the crowd really did cry for Jesus to die.

Democracy is a comparatively good system, but it is merely a human system. It can only function justly to the degree that the people within it have aligned their hearts, motives, and interests with truth and righteousness. Otherwise, the depravity of human nature will bend even a perfectly functioning democracy toward injustice. Government “by the people” will always reflect the heart of the people in question. It was a government “by the people” that resulted in the crucifixion of “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col. 1:15).

The value Americans tend to place on politics and the democratic process makes it difficult to remember this inherent limitation. But as Christians, we must.

Though we have the civic privilege and responsibility to vote, we cannot put all our hopes on this or any election. Politics is not the only—or even primary—way to solve critical issues of our day. Remember, early Christians changed the entire Greco-Roman world with no political power.

Like the crowd at Pilate’s palace, we can be seduced into misusing and misunderstanding our votes if our hearts are not fully turned toward God, if we do not trust him alone to heal this broken world. Barabbas tried to “help” God save his people by overthrowing Rome, even if that meant committing murder. To vote for Barabbas is to put faith in anything other than God, including an election, to bring about God’s purposes. But our faith must be in the true Savior, who gave his own life to save ours.

Politics has its place, yet our primary mandates as Christians are the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. And though we’re privileged to live in a functional democracy, that democracy will become dysfunctional and unjust if we put all our hopes in elections and not in Christ.

Domonic D. Purviance is a writer, men’s ministry leader, and finance and economics expert. He cofounded King Culture, a nonprofit organization that equips men to reflect the selfless leadership of Christ.

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Theology

Biblical Beasts and Where to Find Them

Paulo Nogueira

What do scriptural accounts of monstrous beings like Leviathan and Behemoth tell us about our experience of the sacred?

Edits by CT / WikiMedia Commons

When I started reading the Bible as a teenager, I was shocked to read the Revelation of John for the first time. I had no idea that Scripture, a book that had an image of such a loving God—I had started with the Gospel of John—could have so many violent scenes and so many monstrous beings in its last book.

Then I discovered that the presence of monsters is not exclusive to the Apocalypse. The attentive reader of the Bible has already noticed the number of beings in the Old and New Testaments that do not correspond to the conventional forms of humans and animals that we find in the world on a daily basis.

The Bible makes references to sea monsters, such as Leviathan, or land monsters, such as Behemoth. The celestial world is also inhabited by unusual beings, such as the seraphim or the cherubim, not to mention the hybrid beings, the “living creatures,” which we find in the Book of Ezekiel.

However, it is in apocalyptic texts that these beings are most frequent and are the best known. This is the case with the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of John. The presence of these strange beings surprises us and makes us ask, Why are there so many beings in the Bible that do not have counterparts in the real world? What role could they have in Scripture?

The response to these questions holds significant value for readers of Scripture, as these monstrous beings potentially promote violent actions, some of which are in divine service. Because of their presence and powerful actions, monsters must be incorporated into a broader view of biblical interpretation.

Biblical interpretation in history has dealt with these strange beings in various ways. One way was to interpret them allegorically. Each part of them would correspond to a doctrinal or moral element. This was the preferred view of the ancient and medieval church.

Then, in modern research, it has become more common to understand these beings as metaphors for historical elements. In fact, the monsters of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature are ways of representing imperial powers, such as the Seleucid or Roman empires.

However, this approach solves the problem only superficially, the question remaining as to why these powers are described in such bizarre ways. Nor does the political interpretation of monsters explain all the monsters in the Apocalypse, much less the violence promoted by divine agents at the end of time.

More recently, some interpreters have begun to ask new questions about these strange beings. They have come to the conclusion that it is not enough to list monsters and acknowledge their presence; a proper approach is needed to understand them.

I argue that monsters are, fundamentally, cultural creations through which we express our tensions toward society and ourselves. They inhabit the mythology of peoples and the depths of our psyche, emerging within our dreams. Therefore, an experience of the sacred also passes through the articulation of monsters, both internal and cosmic. This perspective has a clear consequence in the interpretation of the Bible: As Scripture addresses the fundamental dramas of the human soul and of creation, it also manifests the actions of monsters in all their power and ambiguity.

The theory of monstrosity, as this approach has been conventionally called, seeks a complex understanding of culture by formulating the following proposition: It is possible to study a culture based on the monsters it creates. This perspective began to be considered in the 1990s in cultural studies, gaining applications in literary research as well. I will focus on three of its central ideas.

The first is that cultures often depict what they perceive as external to themselves as threatening, dangerous, destabilizing, animalistic—that is, as a monster. They do so not only through concepts but also and above all through hybrid and grotesque images.

The beings on the edges of the world—think of exotic peoples or imaginary beings from outside the known world—are the other, a threatening other.

None of this is new. After all, we know very well that human groups tend to define themselves with positive, “civilized” characteristics, attributing to people outside their group a character that is not only threatening but also destabilizing. We are aware of the devastating effects of this position in multicultural and multiethnic societies like ours.

The novelty of the theory of monstrosity is its second emphasis, inspired by psychoanalysis: The monsters we identify as external actually reflect internal ruptures and traumas. What I project onto the other as monstrous in some way refers to myself.

It is no wonder, theorists of the monstrous would say, that in 19th-century Victorian England, literature began creating monsters. Confident in science and progress and holding a key position among imperial powers, the British faced threats that emerged from within.

Think of Count Dracula, a vampire and undead from the East, who visits London in search of a woman who will free him from his solitude. Or the creature of Frankenstein, a monster in whom the most forbidden and fascinating fantasy of science is realized, creating life by usurping the divine place.

By creating monsters, people point to something threatening that is “out there” but also to a danger that is “here,” within themselves and their culture.

The third element of the theory of the monstrous guides us to pay attention to monsters’ forms: Monsters are frightening because they are aberrant images and as such must be seen and imagined not just as mere allegory. After all, these images provoke emotional reactions. Monsters are hybrid beings, malformed, gigantic, grotesque. This is society’s way of questioning the world and its categories, considered normative.

I return to my question, now focused on the biblical world: “Why are there so many monsters in the Bible?” This is a delicate issue that affects our beliefs and sensibilities. After all, we always think of the God of the Bible as a loving Father and the story told in the Bible as the story of salvation.

The fact that divine agents present themselves as monstrous and violent is the critical point of our reflection. I am of the opinion that this question, even if it does not receive quick and easy answers, should be on the agenda of a critical theological reflection.

After all, Christianity, a religion that should spread the message of God’s love for humanity, has also manifested itself as a religiosity of violence and hatred, promoting war, slavery, oppression, and death. Facing the monstrous aspects within our traditions and especially in the Bible is a way for us to vigilantly deal with this potential for destruction and violence that exists alongside love and solidarity.

The monsters in the Apocalypse of John offer insight to the master narrative of early Christianity about the future of the world governed from the divine throne. The book of Revelation is about the eruption of divine power over the cosmos, including society and the powers that govern it. In this sense, the Apocalypse offers a total narrative of a radical ecology. The plagues executed by the angels affect not only people but also the stars, the waters, the plants, and the empires of the earth.

In this vindication of the suffering of the righteous, all levels of the cosmos and all expectations of power are shaken. However, the execution of divine judgment and the establishment of the reign of God cannot take place in the outdated categories of the society that it is seeking to supplant. The “I am making everything new” (Rev. 21:5) also applies to the language and categories used to narrate this “end of times.” Therefore, nothing in the Apocalypse is narrated in everyday language; everything is presented for the first time in its depth, in an unveiling (apokalypsis) of reality.

The monsters are the agents of this narrative. The oppressive Roman Empire is revealed in all its demonic power in the monsters presented in chapter 13, whose strength comes from the red dragon with seven heads and ten horns—another monster, presented in chapter 12. This dragon, in turn, opposes the “woman clothed with the sun” (v. 1), causing chaos and trying to devour her son.

The Roman Empire, which conceived of itself as the guarantor of an era of peace (the Pax Romana), is presented in terms of cosmic, demonic chaos, destabilizing the world’s order and challenging God himself. Presenting the Roman Empire’s oppressive power in the form of a monster serves to reveal its true identity.

But the monster described as external also refers to the internal. God and the angels are also presented with violent and disruptive characteristics. In the first vision of Revelation, Jesus appears as the apocalyptic Son of Man—dazzling and exalted, holding stars in his right hand and carrying the key to Hades. A sword emerges from his mouth. This powerful figure of the cosmic Christ rules both the celestial and lower worlds.

But in chapter 5 at his enthronement, Jesus is presented as “the lion of the tribe of Judah” (v. 5) and then as a slain lamb. Here he passes from the image of one animal (victor) to another (victim), without any reference to his humanity.

These presentations of Christ, at the same time as a cosmic being and as a slain animal victim, so far removed from each other, connect him with the experience of humiliation and the hope of exaltation of his followers, the readers of the book. Christ’s followers experience the empire as demonic and themselves as vindicated victims, but neither of these views uses historically situated categories.

Only the monstrosity of external and internal images allows them to imagine this world of inversion of positions and of radical experience of the sacred. Without monsters, the language of the Apocalypse would have lost all its power. The suspension of common-sense categories allows for a full religious experience, even if it is often violent.

In a world of extreme violence and internal violence, the violence that is suffered and the violence that is imagined (or desired) must also be visited. The reader of the Apocalypse—and of the entire Bible—is invited to a radical experience of God, in which the reader’s and his ways of naming the world do not occupy the center.

This destabilizing experience, though shocking and uncomfortable, removes the reader from the role of a powerful interpreter. It challenges the idea of controlling or viewing the sacred as something entirely external and objective. The encounter with God is an experience that causes us fear—not a reverent and formal “fear” but an experience that theologian Rudolf Otto called a “tremendous and fascinating mystery.”

There are authors who insist that the origin of religion—and in Judaism and Christianity it would be no different—is in an experience of the sacred perceived as powerful, disruptive, and violent. In this sense, reading Scripture is not the reproduction of a position of power, equated with Western projects of civilizing culture.

The Bible, with its monstrous beings, leads us to an experience of radical otherness, which is reflected outside and inside us, inserting us into a radical ecology in which God manifests himself, destabilizing categories and creating new worlds that were previously unimaginable.

Monsters strip us bare, pushing us beyond the comfort of self-centered interpretation, allowing us a radical experience of God amid the drama of his creation.

Paulo Nogueira holds a PhD in theology, is a lay member of the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil, and is a professor of religious studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas in Brazil.

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Ideas

Digital Sloth in the Online Arena

Scott Gustafson

How our internet use is prone to the ancient vice of akrasia.

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

The Stoic philosopher Seneca once wrote of the gladiatorial games in Rome, “Unhappy that I am, how have I deserved that I must look on such a scene as this? Do not, my Lucilius, attend the games, I pray you. Either you will be corrupted by the multitude, or, if you show disgust, be hated by them. So stay away.”

Technology has afforded us many innovative tools in recent decades. But it has also created a new amphitheater that beckons us through culture wars, politics, and election cycles. This digital spectacle hosts all things immoral and illegal—radical groups, bots with immense power, outrage entrepreneurs, and a flood of misinformation. And we clamor for the show. Seneca’s “multitude” is an omnipresent legion, and its gate of entry is in our pockets.

The ancient vice akrasia is a lazy inclination toward base desires that we know are bad for the soul. Among other woes, Jesus blasted the pharisees for their akrasia and hypocrisy (Matt. 23:25). Akrasia is prominent today in the digital spaces: We know better than to scroll and click, to trust the algorithms, to believe everything.

But we are too lazy to turn off the flood of information. We love it too much. The online world with its cultural and political drama is the new amphitheater, and our akrasia is leading to consequences beyond entertainment.

One of these consequences is that our world is shifting toward extremes as politics, celebrities, and ideological groups—from Islamic jihadists to leftist anarchist movements to militaristic white nationalist groups—shape us online toward hostility and violence.

The online mob has the ability to sort us and shape us. Digital platforms profit from algorithms that serve up stimuli making us fearful or anxious. Screens warp our conception of reality: everything is performed, cropped, and filtered. Media outlets and political parties shape reality according to alluring but reductive dualisms, false gospels that proffer empty redemption.

A repeated liturgy molds us and curates our heart one email, post, or news headline at a time, and we can’t look away. We are growing cold toward other human beings and being pulled toward radicalization.

Even politicians now are using synthetic media and deepfake audio, images, and videos: all stunningly real compilations of things that never happened. Once primarily the purview of the porn industry, now some bad actors use artificial intelligence tools to target public opinion and elections and stir general chaos. Domestic disinformation accounts propagate an increasing amount of junk and conspiracies, deliberately flooding digital spaces with material designed to overwhelm and create confusion.

Lest we blame everything on bad actors, these systems work so effectively because of our psychology, vices, sociology, and desires. Technology serves us what we want. Human systems are extensions of our collective heart, which cannot be trusted and is inclined toward evil. Algorithms and their masters amplify the dissatisfaction and clamoring of our souls. Indulging, we ignore cognitive bias and the inherent dangers of a polluted space, letting the amphitheater shape us.

Seneca was not alone in avoiding the spectacle. In the early years of the church, Tertullian wrote from Carthage in AD 200 on the ethics of Christians attending the “games.” Tertullian’s treatise De Spectaculis (“On the Spectacles”) implores Christians not to attend because the spectacles were steeped in idolatry and elicited powerful “mass emotions” toward violence and bloodlust.

Tertullian dissuaded Christians because the games had an insidious, indoctrinating effect that would push them into the ways of Rome. After all, he implored, if something is not permissible to say or to do, why would we listen to or watch it? The coliseum was where demons lurked, Christians were executed (like Perpetua and Felicity in Carthage), and temptations were celebrated. There—under the guise of entertainment—power, might, and violence were elevated. The amphitheater was a place of anti-God worship.

Our amphitheater feeds and amplifies cultural lusts, hostility, and vice. It cultivates desires and directs worship. At the amphitheater in the ancient world, you might have seen friends or enjoyed play-acting, but you also might have witnessed Christians being torn apart by lions or the guileless run through by highly trained gladiators. The results are similar in our day; the colosseum has simply modernized into a heretical online mob with AI-enabled gladiators.

Ancient philosophers encouraged enkrateia, or self-discipline, to fight the vice of akrasia. Paul wrote of this same self-control as a fruit of the Spirit, a power to proactively curates desires and affections instead of passivity. Augustine implored us to turn our restless hearts toward the Creator. Tertullian encouraged Christians to think about the greater “spectacle” of the Second Coming, the New Jerusalem and the Last Judgement.

For Christians, who are called to emulate Christ’s virtues, to spend their mental energy on “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy” and “think about such things” (Phil. 4:8), the old amphitheater and our current spectacle is not just counterproductive; it malforms.

The earliest Christians avoided the amphitheater. They abhorred violence, worship of the emperor, spurious mobs, and debauchery. Instead, they cultivated an alternative community that gently protested power politics and pagan Rome and patiently bore witness to the coming kingdom. Ancient philosophers, early theologians, and the witness of early Christians suggest we do the same.

Scott Gustafson is a researcher with the Extreme Beliefs group at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and the Ambassador Warren Clark Fellow at Churches for Middle East Peace.

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News

Candidates Break Out Faith References ‘For Such a Time as This’

Harvest Prude in Pittsburgh

During their final push, Trump and Harris extend more explicit appeals to Christian voters.

Kamala Harris speaking at a church (left) and Donald Trump being prayed over at the National Faith Summit (right).

Edits by CT / Source Images: Getty / AP Images

In a deep red swath of Pennsylvania, houses, roadways, and businesses are bristling with campaign signs, most bearing the name of Donald Trump or his Make America Great Again slogan.

Brodie Whitley, a Presbyterian living in Grove City, plans to vote for Trump, but her favorite sign has another message: “Politics are temporary. Jesus is forever.”

“That’s the sign I want,” she said.

Overall, there’s been less focus on religious outreach by either campaign this election cycle, less talk of religion, and fewer faith events. Most Americans don’t see either candidate as particularly religious.

But in the final days of the campaign, both former president Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are doing more to evoke God in their messaging—and to appeal to Christian voters in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan.

Trump and Harris have held events in Georgia churches in recent weeks. They each offered remarks to different crowds on how the country needs faith—with contrasting ideas of how to live that out in office.

The gathering was put on by the National Faith Advisory Board, made up of Trump’s former faith advisors and led by Pentecostal evangelist Paula White-Cain. The lineup listed several leaders who had been involved in Evangelicals for Trump events in previous campaigns: Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas, Jack Graham, Greg Laurie, Samuel Rodriguez, and Jentezen Franklin.

At an event outside Atlanta on Monday, Trump promised Christians they’d have the opportunity to influence a second Trump administration.

Trump told White-Cain that he’d reinstall a faith office to hear out evangelicals in the White House. (While president, Trump had scrapped the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which had been resurrected under Biden.)

Trump also talked about religion being under threat in the US.

“We’re going through a lot of problems in our country … and it’s less based on religion than it was 25 years ago and 50 years ago,” he said. “We were a really, people would say a Christian, and really religious, even other faiths country, and that seems to be heading in the wrong direction.”

Trump has repeated a similar message of faith under fire at other events, including at a “Believers for Trump” event earlier this month in Michigan, an initiative launched this summer to drive turnout among churchgoers in battleground states. Individuals can sign up to be a “Church Captain” to encourage their churches to vote.

The former president told the crowd in Georgia that Christians aren’t doing enough when it comes to this election: “I shouldn’t scold anyone, but Christians aren’t known for being very solid voters.”

Ben Carson, the Seventh-day Adventist doctor and 2016 presidential hopeful, leads Trump’s faith outreach. He told CT in a statement that the campaign will continue to remind voters that Trump “did more for the faith community than any president in history.”

Carson listed religious freedom, women’s sports, and abortion as key issues for faith voters. Though Trump has called himself “the most pro-life president” for appointing the justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, some evangelicals have been disappointed in the GOP’s shifting platform on the issue.

At a “Believers and Ballots” town hall at Christ Chapel in Zebulon, Georgia, Trump called religion “the glue that holds it all together” and repeated his concerns of how Christians are facing “persecution.”

“When you have faith, when you believe in God, it’s a big advantage over people who don’t have that,” he said.

A new survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution has found that Christian support for the candidates splits on racial lines.

Among weekly churchgoers, three-quarters of white Christians (76%) support Trump and 21 percent support Harris, while 13 percent of Black Christians support Trump and 85 percent support Harris.

Churchgoing Latinos are more evenly divided. Just over half side with Trump (55%) compared to 41 percent with Harris.

The Democratic candidate has also sought to appeal to people of faith, stopping by churches on Sundays as part of the “souls to the polls” drive to increase voter turnout among Black Christians. At each visit, Harris has reminded believers of the importance of taking time to vote.

At New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, she told congregants that “our country is at a crossroads, and where we go from here is up to us as Americans and as people of faith.”

“We face this question: What kind of country do we want to live in?” Harris said. “A country of chaos, fear and hate, or a country of freedom, compassion and justice?”

At other events, the vice president has spoken about growing up singing in the choir and going to Sunday school at a Black Baptist church she attended with her neighbor.

Harris grew up with a Hindu mother and a Baptist father and identifies as Baptist. She described her faith as being driven by a belief in a “loving God who asks us to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, and to defend the rights of the poor and the needy.”

Last week, Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she prays “every day, sometimes twice a day.” After President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, she called her longtime pastor, Amos Brown of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, to ask for prayer. “I needed that advice. I needed a prayer,” she said.

On Sunday at a majority Black church in Philadelphia, Harris said she drew inspiration from Paul. “In hard times when we may grow weary in doing good, we must remember the power that works within us, the divine power that transformed Paul’s life, guided him through shipwreck and sustained him through trials.”

She encouraged congregants to vote and said she was confident in the outcome: “When I think about the days ahead and the God we serve, yeah, I am confident that his power will work through us. Because, church, I know we were born for a time such as this.”

Some Christian voters would find analogies of trials and shipwrecks to be apt descriptors of this election year.

Back in 2016, Benjamin Carlucci, who lives in a Pittsburgh suburb, used to listen to both Ben Shapiro and NPR to follow the campaigns.

Now he’s changed his approach: “I pay attention but in less of a ‘I’m an active and informed voter’ and more of a ‘I can’t look away from a car crash,’” said Carlucci, an Anglican who works as a creative director for a nonprofit.

“I have this constant conflict in me where I want to completely disengage and just step away from it, but that also feels irresponsible, so I don’t. There’s just no way to be happy and engaging in the current political climate.”

While usually the economy would be Carlucci’s top issue, this year it’s Trump’s “refusal to honor the transition of power, things like that that I feel are fundamentally un-American.” He plans to vote for Harris.

Despite the occasional references to faith by the candidates, many Christians in Pennsylvania are turned off by the negativity, with tens of millions of dollars worth of advertising poured into their state.

“I’ll say this—speaking for the whole entire state of Pennsylvania—we don’t really want it to come down to Pennsylvania,” said Don Opitz, an ordained Presbyterian minister and chaplain at Grove City College.

While he doesn’t want partisanship in churches, he wishes more faith leaders would talk about how to apply “biblical wisdom, theological perspective, to the issues of the day.”

Too often, he sees political engagement driven by more negative impulses. “We let our politics get away with being a politics of accusation and projection. That’s the dark stain on all of us,” Opitz said. “It’s something that is genuinely sub-Christian that is happening.”

Whitley, who is supporting Trump in this election, has been going through the Book of Judges in a church group, which she has found an odd comfort.

The descriptions of leaders, “all these wicked, wicked people,” reminds her that whether her candidate wins or not, God is in control.

“Something that I rest very confidently on, and I know this will sound like a Bible answer, it’s not the person or the party that we have to put our faith or our trust in whatsoever. … Whatever candidate is put into that position for the next four years, eight years, whatever that looks like, God has the bigger picture.”

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Ideas

Christ and a Coin-Toss Race

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

As Election Day approaches, American Christians must remember to render “to God the things that are God’s.”

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

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

“Here we are, right at the end, and the election is a coin toss.” A friend said that to me just a few minutes ago, referring to the razor-thin polling margins between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. A few thousand votes one way or the other in as few as three swing states could produce radically different alternatives for the future of the country.

I wonder, though, whether as American Christians we ought to think of Election Day as a coin toss in a different way as well. Even in a more secularized society, the words “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17, ESV throughout) are still recognizable to most people. The account—from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—recounts Jesus’ response to the question of whether to pay taxes to the Roman emperor’s regime.

Like many other Scriptures, those words have been grossly misused. They’re quoted to justify churches engaging directly in political activism (often paired with a misreading of Abraham Kuyper’s famous declaration that there is not one square inch of the universe that Jesus does not claim as “Mine”). They are also quoted to make the case for a separation of Christian conscience from public justice (often with a similarly downgraded version of Martin Luther’s idea of two kingdoms).

Jesus’ words here actually speak sharply to what it means to be his follower in a time of pronounced divisions and high stakes. But to hear them rightly, we must pay attention to how Jesus discerned what was real and what was false. In many ways, his political situation—though radically different, set in an ancient empire rather than a modern democracy—was similar to the one facing us right now.

First, Jesus upended an artificial controversy to provoke a genuine crisis in his hearers. The question about taxes was posed by two very disparate groups—the Pharisees and the Herodians—but neither side was truly grappling with a theological dilemma. They were executing a strategy. They were humiliated by Jesus’ parables against them and so plotted “to trap him in his talk” (v. 13). This was a proxy war.

Jesus saw through the artificial controversy and the manipulative flattery with which it was framed: “Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God” (v. 14). It was not out of naive ignorance but “knowing their hypocrisy” (v. 15) that Jesus answered.

What Jesus recognized here was what journalist Amanda Ripley calls “conflict entrepreneurs,” those who have an interest in creating havoc and division for its own sake. If we are to seek “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:15–16), we should likewise be able to recognize that often what really matters is not what’s debated most fiercely around us. Such controversies may light up the limbic system, but often they distract us from what really matters, to the detriment of our neighbors and ourselves.

As Jesus upended the artificial controversy, he also upended the tribalism that undergirded it. The conversation about Caesar’s coin, after all, was not really about tax policy. The Pharisees knew that the throne of the kingdom of Israel belonged by covenant to David’s heir (2 Sam. 7:1–17), not to a puppet of some Gentile occupying force. So if Jesus told his hearers to pay taxes to Caesar, he’d be understood as negating that covenant promise. But if Jesus had answered that people should withhold the tax, this would be heard as Jesus urging insurrection against Rome.

Those who were “just asking questions” knew that they could use the question—particularly for those who cared about God’s covenant—to draw tribal boundaries. For the whole crowd, they could make taxes into a “You’re not one of us” question of identity. They chose this strategy of riling political passions because they “feared the people” (Mark 12:12). To deny the possibility that Jesus was, in fact, “the stone that the builders rejected” (v. 10), now made the cornerstone of a new creation, they sought to push him into existing divisions.

The trap aside, those divisions were real and serious. So too are the divisions in American life—and the consequences of this election are of crucial importance. But one of the reasons the country is exhausted is that so much of our political debate is not about politics at all. It’s about whether one is really part of the tribe—whatever tribe that is. To be excluded feels like a threat to our very existence.

Yet Jesus refused to join a tribe and instead asked for a coin. In this, he reordered the priorities of the entire conversation. “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” he asked (v. 16). Caesar, of course, had honored his own image, depicting himself as the son of the gods.

Jesus’ response made all that self-magnified glory look pitiful and small. He tossed the coin back to his interrogators and got to the question behind the question. Mark ends the story by recording that “they marveled at him” (v. 17).

As the American experiment continues to be tested in the years to come, those who love our country best will be those who are not Americans first. The sense of politics as ultimate leads us to do unspeakably awful things, harming our own country, because “desperate times call for desperate measures.” But Christians who are secure in our first priority—to seek the kingdom of God and to be citizens of that realm—can love our country well. We can render unto Caesar without veering into idolatrous worship of party, politicians, or democracy itself.

The New Testament honors the legitimacy of government—even really, really flawed governments like Rome. But that honor never includes making politics or government a source of identity or meaning in life.

We often can tell where our priorities are by what drives us to despair or to anger. I voted in this election, and if it goes a different way than I want, I’ll be worried and upset. But if I find myself in a frenzy or hopeless, I ought to rethink what it means to follow one who was tranquil before the government with the power to crucify him (John 18:33–36) while his disciples were fleeing, but then sweat drops of blood in prayer in the garden while those same disciples were asleep (Mark 14:37).

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Other passages teach us about the separation of church and state, but that’s not what this text addresses. Other passages teach about the duty to pay taxes; that’s not the reason we have this one. This is about something we all should remember as we make our way to Election Day: that we are first and foremost Christians. That we belong to God.

We owe it to the legacy of George Washington and James Madison and Harriet Tubman and all the Americans who came before us to guard the institutions and freedom they handed on to us. We owe the same to the generations to come. Politics matter. But when politics start to define us, to control our sense of who we are, to keep us in a state of artificial exultation or artificial doom, we should recognize what’s happening.

Someone is handing us a coin. We should toss it back.

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

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

Books

The Christians Living Under Buddhist Nationalism

Interview by Angela Lu Fulton

Yale scholar David Moe explores the faith and identity of ethnic minorities in his home country of Myanmar.

Children and their parents praying in a temporary church at a camp for internally displaced people in Myanmar.

The rural Chin village in the mountains of Myanmar where scholar David Moe was born in 1983 no longer exists. This village of 70 Christian families has moved twice, higher and higher into the mountains.

Moe’s desire to become a pastor led him to pursue higher education outside of Myanmar, and today he is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in Southeast Asian studies at Yale University.

Yet he hasn’t forgotten the community that raised him. His new book, Beyond the Academy: Lived Asian Public Theology of Religions, argues that highly educated theologians should dialogue with those outside the ivory tower and engage the perspectives of grassroots Christians—those without theological training. For the book, Moe interviewed 15 grassroots Christian leaders in Myanmar who hail from the Chin, Kachin, and Karen communities.

These Christian ethnic minorities live in a unique context: In Myanmar, Buddhism is the state religion, and Buddhists make up 90 percent of the population. Most of the country’s elite, including the ruling military junta, are from the Buddhist Bamar ethnic group.

After Myanmar gained independence from the British in 1948, the new Buddhist nationalist leaders argued that those who weren’t Buddhist or Bamar were not true Burmese, leading to decades of discrimination and oppression of ethnic minorities. The 2021 military coup ramped up fighting between armed ethnic groups and the military junta yet also rearranged loyalties as interracial and multiethnic groups banded together to resist the coup.

Christianity Today asked Moe about the gaps between academic public theology and the faith of Myanmar villagers, the role Buddhist nationalism plays in Myanmar, and the intertwining of religion and identity that has led to a rise in Christian nationalism among Chin refugees in the US. The responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Can you tell me about your journey from a small village in Chin State to the Ivy League?

I was born and grew up in a village called Khin Phong. I went to school there and served as a Sunday school teacher at the village church.

I am the first graduate from our village school to get a PhD. The school was established in 1946, two years before Myanmar gained independence from the British. My late mother never went to school, but she was a very faithful follower of Jesus Christ. She always encouraged me to be faithful to Christ and serve God. I see my mother as a role model for my Christian faith.

I started my theological journey at a seminary in Myanmar because I wanted to be a pastor. Then I had a chance to go to Malaysia for my MDiv. In Malaysia, I had a chance to come to the US for further graduate studies. When I finished my PhD in theological studies, I didn’t immediately find a job. The military coup happened in 2021, so I couldn’t go back to Myanmar.

I applied to be the pastor at two very small Burmese churches in the US, but I was rejected. Then I had an opportunity to teach at Yale, focusing on Southeast Asian studies, religion, politics, and ethnic identity.

My scholarship engages four different communities: the academic community, the Burmese Christian community, the public society, and the political state. I feel that I’m in the right place.

In seminary, you began reading Asian liberation theologians like Taiwan’s Shoki Coe and India’s M. M. Thomas. How did their ideas differ from the kind of grassroots faith that you saw in your church growing up?

I love academic work; that’s why I’m in academia. But particularly when it comes to the discipline of public theology, academics are only engaging with other academics. That is not quite relevant for real life. If we are concerned about public life, we need scholars to engage with grassroots people.

Of course, we are not endorsing everything grassroots Christians do. They also have limitations, but if we want to understand public life—the common good in society—we need to engage with grassroots Christian churches that are witnessing about Jesus Christ without knowing any theology. They are just living their lives.

Because of my background, I see myself as a theologian who bridges the academy and the grassroots church.

What are some of the gaps that you found between academics and grassroots Christians?

Theologians in the academy talk a bit too much about politics and political power while sometimes forgetting about spiritual power. This gap is especially noticeable in Africa and Asia, where people are mostly thinking about spiritual power in their daily life.

When it comes to salvation, some academics focus too much on physical liberation. But these grassroots Christians talk a lot about life after death, about spiritual salvation.

Another gap: Academic theologians focus too much on the prophetic role of Jesus Christ without sufficiently addressing his priestly life and its implication for pastoral work. Myanmar ethnic minorities relate Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to their pre-Christian cultural practice of ritual sacrifice, which is similar to what the Israelites practiced in the Book of Leviticus.

I asked one of the grassroots church elders I interviewed what his favorite book of the Bible was, and he said Hebrews because “it focuses on the sacrificial role of Jesus Christ as the priest.”

Could you explain a bit more about the religious makeup of Myanmar? Why is it that most of the ethnic majority, Bamar, is Buddhist, while most ethnic minorities are Christian?

There are two main factors. First, as I just mentioned, the pre-Christian cultural practice of rites among ethnic minorities paved the way for the gospel. The second is that ethnic minorities practiced spirit worship based on oral tradition; they didn’t have any written documents. When the Western missionaries came, they helped develop literature in the region, translated the Bible, created a Burmese-English dictionary, and started schools and medical clinics. This is how ethnic minorities came to love Christian missionaries. On the other hand, Bamar Buddhists already had literature because Buddhism is a systemic religion. They had a systematic way of thinking, so Western missionaries did not convince them to become Christian.

For us Chin people, we lived high up in the mountains northwest of India, so not many Bamar Buddhist missionaries reached us. However, in the lower regions, where Bamar and Karen minorities lived together in the same cities, some might have been evangelized.

How did Buddhism become intertwined with Bamar identity, leading to Buddhist nationalism?

That began in the colonial period under the British (1824–1948) when Buddhist nationalism first emerged as the anti-colonial movement. During that time, Western missionaries also came to Myanmar, so for the Buddhist nationalists, Western missionaries and the British colonizers didn’t seem that different.

After we gained independence from the British in 1948, Buddhist nationalism turned into an anti-ethnic minority movement. Many Buddhist nationalists believed that ethnic minorities easily embraced Western Christianity. That’s why they faced discrimination in the Buddhist-majority country.

Growing up in the village, did you ever hear of the term Buddhist nationalism?

I did not. I only heard about this term after I entered the academic community. However, I did experience it. We understood Buddhist nationalism as lumyo-gyi wada, which means the “domination of the majority race.” The leaders promoted Burmese as the national language at the expense of ethnic minority languages, nationalized Buddhism as the state religion, and privileged the Bamar majority Buddhists.

When I was in the village, we felt it was natural that the majority had control over the minority. I knew that ethnic minorities faced discrimination based on their identity. The idea was that to be Bamar is to be Buddhist, and to be Chin is to be Christian. Even if ethnic minorities changed their religion to Buddhism, they couldn’t change their ethnicity, so they would still face discrimination.

When you asked grassroots Christians about their thoughts on Buddhist nationalism, some said they thought it was a myth, as they had only had positive experiences with Buddhists, while others said it was reality. Were you surprised by the answers?

I was a little surprised, but I understand their response is based on the people they encounter. It’s fair, because when we say “Buddhist nationalism,” we are not saying that all Buddhists in Myanmar are bad. I approach Buddhism paradoxically: There is the moral rule of Buddhism and the amoral rule of Buddhism.

In the West, the common perception of Buddhism is the Dalai Lama version of Buddhism, which is filled with peace and compassion. But they have not look at the ugly side of Buddhism, where Buddhism is misused as a political tool for violence, identity-based discrimination, and nationalism. This is more apparent in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka. We need to look at both the beautiful and the ugly sides of Buddhism so we can fairly engage with moral Buddhists who also hate Buddhist nationalism.

Due to ongoing fighting between the military and armed ethnic-minority groups, 70,000 Chin refugees now live in the US. How have they brought over this idea of blending religion and nationalism?

Many Chin refugees hate Buddhist nationalism back home in Myanmar, but when they come to the US, they really love Christian nationalism. Some display flags in their churches and homes. I ask them, “You say Buddhist nationalism is a problem in Myanmar, but how come you don’t think Christian nationalism is a problem?”

I think they justify this by arguing that Christianity is above all other religions. They also say that the US is built on Christian principles. They think Democratic presidents are anti-Christian.

Do many support Donald Trump for president?

Absolutely. They really love him because they believe he can make America’s economy great again and that he will protect Christian identity. They also view Trump as powerful and think that he has accomplished what he promised to do.

In your book, you note that Kachin Christians often justify their fight against the Bamar military by pointing to the Bible. Could you explain more about that?

After the coup, I interviewed a couple of Christian activists who say they love the Old Testament because it is explicit about evil and how God’s chosen people fought against their enemies. Because they believe the coup is evil, they like passages in Psalms—for instance, Psalm 1:1–2—that call God’s people to fight and resist evil. Moses is their role model.

Your book also includes a quote from some Kachin Christian who said they “would not go to heaven if there are Bamar there.”

Even before the coup, Kachin Christians faced a lot of discrimination. For them, being Bamar, being Buddhist, and being part of the army are inseparable. They don’t like Bamar people. It’s as if the anti–Buddhist nationalists have become the anti-Bamar people.

This is a radical view that shows how much Kachin people hate Bamar Buddhist nationalism. That’s why they say if there are Bamar in heaven, they would choose another place because they would not want to live together with them in the future. Of course, this is not the correct view for Christians, as we have to love Bamar even if we hate some policies or Buddhist nationalism.

You did a round of interviews before the 2021 coup began, then another round almost a year after the coup. Did you find that your interviewees’ answers had changed in that time?

The leaders I talked to still saw the military junta as the same—evil.

However, the way some Christian minorities saw Buddhists became more positive after the coup because there was an opportunity for interreligious resistance to the coup.

As I said earlier, Buddhist nationalism first emerged as an anti-colonial movement, then as an anti–ethnic minority group movement. But after this coup, Buddhist nationalism turned into an anti-democracy movement, which opened up the opportunity for some ethnic minorities and Bamar people to work together as they resisted the coup.

Are you seeing more people from grassroots backgrounds going into the academy and helping bridge academia with what is happening on the ground?

I think it’s growing in that direction, especially in my community. There is a paradigm shift among the younger generation. But we need to push the boundary of contextual theology and engage with the grassroots people. Engaging grassroots Christians and including them in academic writing is very difficult. It’s easier to engage with another academic book than with the people. I think many people know it’s needed, but I think many people are lazy.

Many scholars of world Christianity celebrate how Christianity moved its center from the West to the Global South. I don’t think they pay enough attention to how Christianity is flourishing particularly among the ethnic minorities and poor people living in the Global South. It’s not just a demographic move but a socioeconomic move toward the poor, the marginalized—people who are similar to Jesus’ disciples in the first century.

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

Ideas

A Vision for Screen-Free Church

Brad East

Contributor

Too many of our worship services are digitally indistinguishable from secular spaces. Church can and should be different.

Edits by CT / Source Image: Getty

Some years ago, author Hal Runkel trademarked a phrase that made his name: screamfree parenting. It’s a memorable term because it captures viscerally what so many moms and dads want: parenting without the volume turned up to 11—whether of our kids’ voices or our own.

I’d like to propose a similar phrase: screen-free church. It’s a vision for an approach to Christian community and especially public worship that critically assesses and largely eliminates the role of digital devices and surfaces in church life. But the prescription depends on a diagnosis, so let me start there.

Consider the following thesis: The greatest threat facing the church today is not atheism or secularism, scientism or legalism, racism or nationalism. The greatest threat facing the church today is digital technology.

At this point, you’re already either vigorously nodding or rolling your eyes. This is one of those claims for which true believers are zealous converts. The point of what follows, however, is not to mount the full argument on behalf of my claim; that would require another article altogether, and we would never get around to the details of a screen-free church. But I do want the idea to seem plausible to you, so let me address the skeptics at the outset. If you’re not the choir to whom I’m preaching, honor me by suspending your disbelief for a few minutes.

It’s unlikely that many Christians are conscious techno-optimists, arguing explicitly that digital technology is basically good, maybe even a gift from God for use in worship. The uncritical integration of screens in American churches, however, suggests that in practice this is what many of us believe.

Yet the observable effects of a screen-mediated life should quickly disabuse us of that notion. Count the ways digital technology influences us: it speeds up our lives; shortens our attention spans; decreases literacy; distracts from duties and loves; fosters an “itch” we constantly feel the need to scratch; draws us from faces and bodies and the outdoors to screens and artifice and the indoors; blurs the line between virtual and real; increases loneliness and isolation, anxiety and depression; elevates safety and risk aversion over courage, adventure, and risky behavior; and much more besides. These effects are a threat to vibrant faith for many reasons, not least that people incapable of focus will be incapable of prayer.

In short, a simple exhortation to be a little more careful—to limit your teen’s screen time or put the phone down during dinner—is not a sufficient remedy. As Marshall McLuhan observed 60 years ago, the “conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

Strong words, but McLuhan knew what he was talking about. He articulated a fundamental principle that he learned first from the Psalms: “We become what we behold” (see Psalm 115:8; 135:18)—and there are some things not worth beholding (Phil. 4:8). Speaking presciently about our own time, McLuhan went on to say that “subliminal and docile acceptance of [forms of media] has made them prisons without walls for their human users.” Have you ever read a better description of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire of misery?

But neither is it the right tack to reject all technology. Christians are not called to be Luddites, and the church is not anti-tech. Anything made by humans is a kind of technology, and understood in this broad sense, technology is at home in the church. The church quite literally could not exist without it. We have every reason to trust that God imparts and blesses a variety of technological uses and gifts to humanity in general and Christians in particular—to better love him and serve our neighbors.

Yet to say this is emphatically not to let us off the hook about screens. Technology use requires discernment, spiritual and otherwise. Christians, especially evangelists and evangelicals, are quick to see potential uses to advance the gospel but slower to see the long-time formative impact of a technology on a community over time. If, though, we become what we behold, then we’d better be shrewd about adopting new objects for beholding.

To echo McLuhan’s more famous line: If the medium is the message—if the vehicle of the gospel has the potential to speak alongside, or even louder than, the gospel itself—then we must be vigilant about the media that fill our lives and, above all, our public gatherings of worship. My contention is that the overwhelming evidence for the deleterious effects of a screen-mediated life should make us extremely wary of welcoming this particular technology into church.

Now, let’s say you’re intrigued. It’s probably hard to imagine your congregation, let alone the bigger one down the road, minus screens and digital devices. We do live, after all, in the digital age. What would a screen-free church look like? How would you even get people on board?

The first thing to know is that this is not only possible but already happening, probably in your own town or city. “High church” liturgical traditions like the Eastern Orthodox often have sanctuaries devoid of screens and other evidence of digital technology. At most, the priest has a microphone for the hard of hearing or if it is a large sanctuary.

That may strike you as awfully close to the Amish. Fine—so long as we agree the comparison isn’t a critique. The Amish are a sophisticated technological culture with wisdom to share. The question they pose is not “Won’t you join us, back in the 19th century?” It is instead “How have you too discerned God’s will for technology in the life of his people?” The answer, far too often, is “Oh … we haven’t.”

So screen-free church is possible in the year of our Lord 2024, even for the non-Amish. But I realize the Orthodox may seem quite distant from your congregation, so let’s start small before we think big.

Begin with smartphones themselves. Every church of every kind should foster—through some combination of quiet example, tacit incentives, gentle encouragement, and direct prescription—public liturgical space absolutely free of smartphones.

Pastors should lead the way. If they never say no to technology, then a yes means nothing. Children learn this lesson very early. Only in a relationship where a denial is possible does an affirmation take on meaning. Congregational leadership is worth its salt on tech issues when and only when it can point to technologies it discourages or refuses to permit in the sanctuary. If it simply throws open the doors to all and sundry, then it has to that extent forsaken its charge to care for the flock.

Practically, let pastors leave their phones in their offices or, even better, at home. No one should use smartphones in any public roles of leading worship, whether clergy or laity, whether reading Scripture or leading prayers.

By the same token, pastors should not invite people to “open up their Bible apps.” Such an invitation is well-intentioned but doubles, as McLuhan would remind us, as an occasion for distraction. Why? Because in opening their phones, parishioners will see a text message they missed, a social media alert, or an update on a football injury. Instead of focusing its attention on the Word of God, the congregation has inadvertently been summoned to do anything but.

One way to encourage screen-free worship is to set up boxes, lockers, or “pockets” just outside the entrance to the sanctuary. Depending on your church’s size and comfort level, these could range in terms of their security. (I’m well aware that people are anxious about losing their phones. All the more reason to leave them at home.) In this case, churches would be following the lead of many middle and high schools, where educators have finally realized that students can’t learn with smartphones in their pockets, much less on their desks.

The knock-on effects of a phone-free sanctuary are plentiful and salutary. Teenagers would have no brief against their parents—Why can’t I use mine, since you’re on yours? Attention would be focused on the Lord and his ministers, the words and the prayers, the bread and the wine. Physical Bibles might reappear. Songs might be memorized. Sermons might be absorbed! Boredom would have to be suffered rather than digitally medicated. This is all to the good.

If this brief sketch sounds wonderful, maybe too wonderful, I promise you it is far easier to accomplish than it may sound. Whereas if it sounds fanciful, allow me to point out that this is not a call to return to the way we worshiped long ago in Bible times. It is the way we worshiped in this country less than 15 years ago.

What else might be done to promote a screen-free church? Let me close with a list of five practical examples.

First, pastors should broadly encourage a culture of scriptural literacy by inviting or even expecting people to bring physical Bibles to church. Christians of every age, but especially children, teenagers, and young adults, will not become literate or think of their faith as related to the practice of reading without the omnipresence of books in their lives. In the church, that means the Bible. If the only Bible Christians know is on an app, we’ve already lost the battle.

Second, pastors should severely curtail the practice of livestreaming worship. I’ve laid out a full case elsewhere for churches turning off the streaming faucet, so to speak. One option is to record the sermon or the whole service and to share a password-protected link later that day solely with members of the congregation. That way, the church can welcome and remain connected to those who are homebound or unwell or otherwise unable to make it without communicating (again, via the medium that, all by itself, speaks a message of its own) that “streaming from home” is equivalent to being present in the body.

It isn’t. No pastor should say, “Thank you for joining us, whether here in person or online.” Nor should the shape of the service in any way be adjusted to make it more palatable to streaming technologies. Believers who gather together as a body should never feel like fans of a band or standup whose performance has been arranged primarily for “live recording.” That kind of Netflix Special–ification of Christian worship is everything wrong with today’s digitized church.

Third, pastors should limit or eliminate reliance on videos for announcements and illustrations. Screens are tools of distraction because their power to capture our attention makes them irresistible vessels of entertainment. Our eyes always want more, just as our bellies never have their fill of sugar.

But church is not meant to be empty calories—or extra ones. It is meant to be a feast, a spiritually nutritious meal hosted by the Lord himself. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred (and I’m generous with that one exception), videos in Christian worship serve only to distract, dull, overwhelm, or entertain. They are a Trojan horse for superficiality. They promise engagement but invariably overshadow the words of Scripture or the sermon, which are undeniably less entertaining, less engaging, than whatever a video might have to offer. It turns out that preachers who rely on video are unwittingly putting themselves out of a job.

Fourth, does it follow that churches should therefore rid the sanctuary of physical screens altogether? I understand why many would hesitate at this point, even if they agree with me regarding the greater screen-free vision. Perhaps the church is large, and screens project an image of what is happening on the stage or before the altar. Perhaps screens are reserved exclusively for text: the words of a song or a passage from Scripture. Surely such minimal use is permissible?

Maybe. But since I’m trying to cast a vision and expand our imaginations, suppose for a moment what would be lost without screens—and thus what would be gained.

One desirable loss would be the temptation to stare at a screen instead of the embodied human being(s) in front of the assembly. This is difficult when screens proliferate in liturgical space, because they draw the eyes—and thus the eyes of the heart—this way and that.

Another loss would be the felt need by pastors and church staff to do something with the screens once available. This is one more demonstration of McLuhan’s rule: Screens are not neutral. Sitting there blank is not an option; we feel they ought to be filled, put to use, somehow. Like the television, they beckon to be turned on. Yet if they weren’t there at all, they couldn’t ask to be used in the first place.

Fifth and finally, everything I have suggested so far would both build on and require the creation of a new ecclesial and congregational culture. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, leadership coach and former pastor Carey Nieuwhof looked a decade ahead and saw a church transformed by the move online. In truth, he wasn’t so much predicting the future as prescribing how he thought faithful churches ought to change in the present moment of technological and social destabilization. Accordingly, he argues that “growing churches [would become] digital organizations with physical locations.”

As a description of the vision animating (or terrifying) church leadership today, Nieuwhof’s forecast was on target. As a recommendation of how Christians should face the digital age, his advice couldn’t be more wrong.

Either way, his comments are useful because they encapsulate the implicit and often explicit culture of our congregations. They clarify the conversation.

Here are the stakes: Our churches feel no different, digitally speaking, than our public schools, universities, retail stores, restaurants, and places of entertainment. They’re awash with screens, smart devices, QR codes, videos, canned music, links, social media—all of it. The tsunami of information continuously assaulting our eyes, minds, and hearts is just as powerful, just as loud, just as overwhelming within our spaces of worship as without.

It shouldn’t be. Church should and could be different.

Granted, change would entail a minor, or not so minor, revolution. If, however, digital technology is indeed the greatest threat facing the life, worship, and mission of the church today—if it reliably robs us of attention, literacy, courage, and inner peace—then we shouldn’t be surprised. A screen-free church may be a big ask, but in response to such a threat, anything faithful is bound to be.

Let’s not worry about how difficult making the necessary adjustments would be. Let’s worry about the threat itself, then act.

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.

- More from Brad East

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