Paternity Leave Made Me a Better Christian Dad

Andrew Egger

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

Redd / Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Egger is the White House correspondent at The Bulwark.

- More from Andrew Egger

Theology

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

Carrie Sheffield

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

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

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

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

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

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

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

God’s healing balm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honoring the dishonorable

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

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

Graham also wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Carrie Sheffield

Theology

Church ‘Homelessness’ Must Not Be Grieved Too Quickly

Russell Moore

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

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

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

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

I was not surprised at all.

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

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

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

What it really is, though, is grief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I say: Not so fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News

PCA Will Investigate ‘Jesus Calling’ Book

Emily Belz

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

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

Courtesy of Jesus Calling / Edits by Rick Szeucs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those supporting the measure said the reports would be useful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The PCA disagreed.

- More from Emily Belz

News

Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Abortion Pill Challenge

Harvest Prude

Pro-life doctors had argued the drug isn’t safe. Now Christians are looking for other ways to engage on the issue.

The US Supreme Court

Jemal Countess / Getty Images for Court Accountability

The Supreme Court rejected a bid for more restrictions on the drugs for medication abortions, ruling against a group that included pro-life Christian doctors.

The doctors had argued that one drug, mifepristone, was unsafe, and that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) failed to uphold proper procedure when it relaxed regulations to obtain the drug by mail and at later stages in pregnancy. Assisting patients suffering complications from the medication would be against pro-life doctors’ consciences.

Drug abortions constitute more than 60 percent of abortions in the US and have grown in popularity since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The court ruling was unanimous but on narrow grounds, holding that the doctors lacked standing, or the legal right to sue, because they were not the ones harmed by the drugs.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority. He acknowledged that the doctors are “pro-life, oppose elective abortion, and have sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to mifepristone” but said that they had not proved they would be harmed by the current regulations around the abortion drug.

“Under Article III of the Constitution, a plaintiff’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue,” he said. “The plaintiff doctors and medical associations do not prescribe or use mifepristone. And the FDA has not required the plaintiffs to do anything or to refrain from doing anything.”

Kavanaugh noted that existing federal laws would “protect doctors from being required to perform abortions” or act in other ways that would run afoul of their consciences.

One of the doctors who was party to the case, Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), told CT in a March interview that the pro-life movement has work to do in countering the argument that “abortion is good for [women].”

There are “a myriad of immediate complications that [abortion] can cause,” she said. “The abortion pill, which is now being pushed on women in really unsafe ways, causes a host of complications.”

Francis, a Christian, told CT Thursday in an email statement, “As an organization dedicated to serving both our maternal and pre-born patients, we are deeply alarmed that the FDA’s recklessness is permitted to continue unchecked, risking the lives and health of women across this country.”

AAPLOG represents over 7,000 physicians. Other groups party to the case included several individual doctors, who object to abortion for religious or moral reasons, and several pro-life medical groups, including Christian and Catholic organizations.

In the case, the doctors argued they may have to treat a woman who had taken mifepristone and suffered complications that would require an emergency room visit. That may require a physician with a conscience objection on religious or moral grounds to assist with an abortion.

During oral arguments, the Biden administration countered that the argument “rest[s] on a long chain of remote contingencies … and even if that happened, federal conscience protections would guard against the injury the doctors face.” Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, who brought the case, noted that, according to the FDA, between 2.9 and 4.6 percent of women taking the drug end up in the emergency room.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys also argued the case that overturned the right to an abortion nationwide established by Roe v. Wade.

Mifepristone, also known by its brand name Mifeprex, was approved in 2000 by the FDA as a way to administer chemical abortions during early stages of pregnancy. In 2016, the FDA held that Mifeprex could be used for abortions at 10 weeks gestation and allowed health care providers to prescribe it. The FDA also required, at that time, one in-person visit to receive the medication. In 2021, the FDA announced it would no longer require the in-person visit.

Pro-life organizations have long (unsuccessfully) petitioned the FDA to reconsider its approval of abortion drugs. The doctors asked a district court judge to pull back the expanded access to the drug and to rescind the FDA’s approval of the drug entirely.

The district court sided with the doctors and suspended the drug’s approval and its expanded availability in 2016 and 2021. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit partially reversed the lower court ruling, but it upheld the part that clamped down on expanded access to the drug.

The Supreme Court put the ruling on hold, allowing women to continue obtaining abortion drugs. Thursday’s decision, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, sent the case back to the lower courts.

The ruling left pro-life advocates “disappointed,” but advocates said they would continue to challenge the availability of abortion drugs in the country.

Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, said in an email statement that the organization will “continue to educate and advocate on the need for commonsense protections when it comes to women’s health and well-being and defending the most vulnerable.”

“New legal challenges may emerge, and the ERLC will look for opportunities to engage,” Brent Leatherwood, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, stated. “We all should be resolute in our efforts to elect leaders and support legislative solutions that protect innocent lives and defend mothers against the predatory abortion industry.” Students for Life of America president Kristan Hawkins, whose organization filed an amicus brief in the case, said in a statement that the ruling “is not the end of this case.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Books

A Writer’s Creative Calling Isn’t Found in the Middle of a Crowd

Interview by Karen Swallow Prior

Award-winning author E. Lily Yu speaks about her faith, her deep love of language, and the perils of “moving with the majority.”

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

E. Lily Yu is that rare creature: a writer of exceptional skill who is grounded in faith, literary history, and a lifetime of reading. Her short story collection Jewel Box was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, her novel On Fragile Waves won the Washington State Book Award for fiction, and Yu herself has received the LaSalle Storyteller Award and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.

Break, Blow, Burn, and Make: A Writer's Thoughts on Creation

E. Lily Yu (Author)

Worthy Books

240 pages

$19.77

In her new book, Break, Blow, Burn, and Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation, Yu meditates on reading, writing, and creativity while both celebrating and lamenting the current condition of these holy pursuits. Writer and English professor Karen Swallow Prior spoke with Yu about the relationship between Christian faith, the craft of writing, and the fearless pursuit of truth.

(Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

A recurring theme throughout your book is that good writing, like all good art, emerges from love rather than anger, anxiety, or contempt. You point out that “God created out of love and delighted in life, and when he looked upon his work, he pronounced it good.” As creators, we create best when we imitate the Creator. What are some cultural conditions that present obstacles to creating from love rather than from aggression or fear?

Setting aside for the moment the fact that love can be angry—that there can be loving anger—I think there’s a great deal of vagueness and confusion around the definition of love, which leads to people pursuing 50 different things, only one of which I recognize as deserving of the word.

In the book, I use Erich Fromm’s definition of love: giving out of one’s aliveness, out of what is most vital in the self. That is, in some ways, a very old-fashioned, forgotten, almost obsolete understanding of the word. We have to know what we are talking about before we can even describe what we are seeking or what is missing. And it takes a great deal of time to reach that point; as Fromm says, it is the love of a mature person. It is not a child’s love or a dog’s love. It is not the love of ice cream; it is not the love of money.

Throughout the book, you draw parallels between robust faith and robust art. Can you talk a little more about that correspondence?

I think the work of an artist can only be as deep as the artist herself, whether or not that depth is a permanent condition—whether or not it is achieved by the grace of God. Faith is one avenue that has been known for thousands of years to deepen the self past where we might expect it to go.

Drawing on observations from the essayist Sven Birkerts, you point out that as our world has grown more connected laterally, it has grown shallower and flatter as well. How do the shallowness and the flattening that you see in our creative life correspond to the shallowness and flattening that you see in our faith life?

Decades ago, Guy Debord and Neil Postman wrote about the transition of human society away from print, toward images. That was likely the first step into shallowness: the reduction of attention, of internal subjective engagement with words, to that which could be grasped visually within seconds.

That process has accelerated. It resembles a reversal of the spread of literacy. Prior to widespread literacy, images were all that we had. But those were meant to be pointers to a deeper truth. Giotto’s gold paintings were not supposed to represent the self or self-expression but a deeper relationship to God. So even those images were not functioning in the way that images are today: as marketing tools, as entertainment, as objects of consumption.

Can there be deep images? Certainly. Are we primarily creating and interacting with deep images? I do not think so. There’s a hypothesis that poor teaching of reading in younger generations has led to a greater embrace of the video format. That may be the case. It may also be that video and visual formats are easier to interact with, demand less from us, require less skill to grasp. But whatever the source, we are disinclined to grapple with difficult, thoughtful, deep texts and very much inclined to spend our time on screens. This has produced much shallower writing as well.

You have an entire chapter on vocation in the context of art and writing. Here, you use the powerful example of an orchestra inside a rehearsal room full of toppled chairs and music stands, with only a few instruments being played. But outside in the hallway are a hundred violinists brawling.

The point of the illustration is that all the violinists think everyone else should be a violinist and have persuaded everyone to play the violin. The orchestra, of course, is the less for it.

I’ve noticed in human beings, regardless of affiliation, a tendency to move with the majority, to agree with the majority, which makes living easier, which makes thinking easier. But it doesn’t make living deeper or better, and it doesn’t make thinking deeper or better.

There is also a deep insecurity in people who have not yet grappled with their own smallness, with the inconsequentiality of being a handful of stardust in a vast void, such that they require other people to reinforce their own sense of self. One way of doing this is pressuring others to conform to the exact same decisions that one has made personally, because to see other people making the same decisions is comforting and reassuring, whether or not those decisions are correct. You can see this in the church and in society, in every country, in every time, in every place.

It is both true that people whose lives appear similar to the lives of those around them can have deep faith, incredible character, and integrity, and also that those qualities can belong to people whose lives do not conform at all. The point is not nonconformity, which is very often as shallow and meaningless as conformity, but something else entirely. It’s not the image or the performance that matters here but obedience to the call.

The orchestra, in other words, needs all the players.

The orchestra represents a very specific instance of this. I think the body of Christ is called to work toward a single higher purpose, for which we are all in harmony but not in unison.

You mention in passing that many adults prefer the genre of young adult literature. Why do you think that is? And why is that a concern?

I think the vast majority of human beings have lost a great deal of the ability to concentrate for extended periods of time on complicated and ambiguous texts and on complicated and ambiguous art.

I’m not fond of genre distinctions in general—these are a recent marketing tool introduced in publishing to help categorize and organize the explosion of books coming to market. But if you look at the books that were written specifically for the YA market as opposed to books that were slotted into YA, which I think are two different phenomena, you see a tendency toward simplistic, Manichean situations of good and evil, simple ideologies, shallow characterizations, and thrills and exciting scenarios that don’t require a great deal of understanding to enjoy.

I don’t think this movement toward more digestible reading is limited to YA. You can see it everywhere, including in literary fiction and other genres, and I think it’s indicative of how we’re changing as a whole.

Related to this concern, you spend some time arguing against the idea that literature can or even should increase empathy. You question, as well, the idea that literature needs to be justified by its moral goodness. Following H. L. Mencken, you attribute this impulse to our history of Puritanical thinking. What do you think we lose in literary appreciation when we depend on these rationales?

I’ve never been particularly concerned with classifying human beings as good or evil, because we have the potential for both good and evil within us at all times. I am not a good person; I am not a bad person; I am a human being, with all that that entails.

What I think reading can do is remind us of the values that outlast millennia, that outlast empires, and remind us to search for what is greater than ourselves. The 21st-century focus on empathy as a means of developing morality has taken us to some very dark places, where feelings substitute for justice, for fact, or for truth.

You talk about how essential it is for writers to have a deep love of language. How is this inextricable from a love of truth?

Writing is a means of thinking. It is a way by which we come to understand what we ourselves think, and then revise what we think when we see how badly we have written it. Searching for precisely the right words, the right vessels, into which we can place our meaning in such a way that it can be received as completely as possible by our recipient has a great deal in common with searching for the truth. Writing is a means of finding the form in which to place the truth that—if we are lucky, if we have searched for long enough, if we have endured long enough—we have found.

Even a hundred years ago, this would have been a very rare way of looking at language. For most people, language is a means of getting what they want from the world and from other people. It does not involve an allegiance to the truth. Orwell, W. H. Auden, and Victor Klemperer wrote about this.

We see the sequel of the degradation of language they observed in the rush toward AI-generated text: the devaluation of the slow seeking out of truth, the slow seeking out of the right form with which to express that truth, in favor of what is fast, often incorrect, cheap, and easy. It is essentially an assault upon the reader’s time and attention. And it is done, as it was in Orwell’s day, in the search of profit, personal advancement, and convenience.

You write about the importance of solitude and courage in creating good art. Why are these so important to one’s craft?

Ultimately, the decisions by which we live our lives must be made individually, each of us for ourselves. Other people can advise us, but there has to be a moment of retirement, a moment of singleness, when you say, This is how I choose to live, this is what I choose to stand for. And to make that decision without solitude, to make that decision in the middle of a crowd, often a shouting crowd, means the risk of taking on the crowd’s values, as opposed to living by your own values, which are almost never found in the middle of the crowd.

I think courage has always been a standing apart. Kierkegaard talks about this in one of his posthumously published writings, “On the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual.’” He writes of the need to become an individual apart from the crowd, apart from the judgments of those upon whose approval your livelihood, your social standing, or your well-being depend. Courage is the ability to say, It will cost me a great deal, but I have examined the matter to the best of my ability, and I cannot do otherwise. It is very lonely. You have to say yes to that loneliness.

- More from Interview by Karen Swallow Prior

Theology

3 Ways I’ve Learned to Support China’s Christians Better as an American Pastor

Corey Jackson

Don’t let political rivalry define our perspectives of each other.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

I serve as senior pastor of a medium-sized church in Cary, North Carolina. Besides being multicultural and multiethnic, we are also politically diverse: There are Democrats, Republicans, and many politically “homeless” people who have a difficult time identifying with either party.

This year, like many pastors and church leaders in the United States, I find myself yet again leading my congregation through a season of deep division over the political future of our country.

But I have received valuable lessons in navigating these troubled waters from what might appear to be an unlikely source: Christians in China.

In the US, we often think about China in economic or political terms: trade deficits, global manufacturing, or the rise of Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism.

Narratives often pit the two countries as strategic rivals, breeding a sense of fear and competition. More than 4 in 5 American adults (83%) have an unfavorable view of China and its geopolitical role, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year. Survey respondents felt that China interferes in other countries’ affairs and that its actions do not contribute to global peace and stability.

As American Christians, however, we need to think carefully about our relationship with China. Instead of allowing cultural rivalry to become our driving perspective about China and its people, we are called to be Jesus-first, not economy-first or America-first.

The gospel has taken root in China, despite the indoctrination of materialistic atheism at every level of society and severe persecution under President Xi. Conservative estimates put the number of Christians in China at 40 million, while others say it is closer to 116 million.

How can the church in America support our brothers and sisters in China as they undergo these trials? We can refrain from escalating anti-Chinese rhetoric, embrace political advocacy, and learn from their example.

Sowing goodwill

Ongoing competition between the US and Chinese economies will likely fuel anti-Chinese rhetoric, aimed at swaying the American middle class in the voting booth in the upcoming November 5 election.

The vitriol often directed at mainland China inevitably impacts Chinese people living in the United States. Many of my East Asian congregants worry that there may be more incidents of anti-Asian violence if presidential candidates turn to anti-Chinese speech to motivate their support bases.

Their fears aren’t unfounded. Xenophobia against people of Asian descent has surged worldwide since the pandemic. Nearly 3 out of 4 Chinese Americans reported experiencing racial discrimination last year. And a growing number of Asian Americans are considering buying guns for self-protection, according to a CNN report.

As followers of Jesus, we can choose not to fuel conversations that bear anti-Chinese rhetoric online and in real life. Ephesians 4:29 charges us not to engage in unwholesome talk but to use our words to encourage others. James 1:26 says that if a person does not keep a tight rein on their tongue, their religion is worthless.

In learning to think Jesus-first, we can muster up the courage to verbally correct misconceptions and reject stereotypes about China and its people during election season. We can grow in loving our Chinese neighbors in America. Rather than engaging in speech that escalates anxiety about China and its people, we can sow goodwill in times of animosity by helping others discover how God is at work through the Chinese diaspora to expand the gospel within China and around the world.

The power of advocacy

Refraining from anti-Chinese rhetoric is one way we can use our words wisely. Another way is to speak up on behalf of brothers and sisters in Christ who face persecution or repression of their freedoms.

Within the Chinese house church network, pastors are routinely called in by police for “tea time” and are warned against preaching the gospel. Many consider it the norm to undergo home surveillance, face unannounced evictions, or lose access to basic utilities without notice.

Chinese Christians like Yang Xiaohui and Chen Shang (who use pseudonyms for security reasons) were thrown into prison in 2022 for participating in an alleged illegal religious gathering. While there, they ministered to their fellow inmates and jailors through sharing stories about Jesus and singing hymns.

They are not the only bold ones in a country that has banned evangelism: Chinese churches continue to send mission teams to share Christ on many Chinese university campuses, even though access to college campuses is more restricted than ever.

Our Chinese brothers and sisters are willing to face these trials because of their love for Jesus Christ. They continue to plant churches, raise up young pastors, and serve their local communities.

When we hear about these injustices facing Christians under China’s repressive government policies, we have an opportunity not just to experience or express anger but also to increase our love and compassion for the people of China. As we Americans know, living in a country doesn’t automatically mean we are endorsing its leaders.

Moreover, as people who do not live in a nation-state where Christians are being persecuted, we are called to advocate for those who suffer for their faith in Jesus.

We can become a voice for the voiceless, encouraging our leaders to urge the Chinese government to act as God’s servants for the good of the nation (Rom. 13:4). We can share about the plight of Chinese house churches in our small groups or sermons to help other American believers realize how costly it is to follow Jesus in China.

The way of the cross

Discouraging anti-Chinese rhetoric and advocating for our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ are important ways to support the Chinese house church. But we can also do so in learning from their example.

In America, identifying ourselves as either blue or red is becoming central to our Christian identity. I face pressure from the right and left to align myself, and my church, with various political causes or candidates.

In China, tensions exist within house churches concerning how to faithfully respond to the repressive regulations that Xi’s government is placing on religious groups. Some pastors feel that a more careful approach is needed, which means limiting in-person church gatherings or meeting online only. Other church leaders believe that greater boldness is warranted and that increased evangelism and church planting should be pursued.

Both American and Chinese Christians can find common ground here: We should prioritize the kingdom of God over the pursuit of our political privileges.

The Chinese house church, through the life of prominent pastor Wang Yi, can teach us about what this looks like. Wang was arrested on December 9, 2018, for preaching the gospel. He is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence on the trumped-up charges of “subverting state power and illegal business operations.”

Before Wang was arrested, he was warned many times to stop preaching. Instead, he intentionally gained 30 pounds to prepare himself for prison. He also readied his soul to suffer for Christ.

“The Church must be willing to fight to the death, not for the civil rights and legal statures that we can see, but for the keys to the kingdom of heaven and the power of the Gospel that we cannot see,” Wang and other pastors and elders from the Early Rain Reformed Church wrote in “95 Theses,” a document that outlines the church’s theology amid suffering.

“The Church should never give up her most important asset … the Holy Word.”

Wang Yi’s approach to living under political duress is an example of what it looks like to live fully surrendered to Jesus. While America and China may be experiencing geopolitical conflict, Wang exhorts us to remember that our highest allegiance is to Christ. Believers in both countries share and hold on to hope in Jesus, who has torn down the dividing wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14).

A surrendered life

Becoming Christians who are Jesus-first, rather than economy-first or America-first, is a process that requires humility, self-reflection, and conviction.

As American believers, we can consider how the choices we make, whether in public rhetoric or private voting, impact not only our economy and our security but also the growth of gospel witness in the United States and around the world.

And as we follow our Lord Jesus, who endured the cross so that a global people could be reconciled to God and to each other, we can resist perpetuating discriminatory speech and actions against people of Chinese descent. We can advocate for our brothers and sisters in Christ in China and pray for God to protect, encourage, and embolden them as they suffer for his name. And we can be renewed in our desire to preach the gospel and to live a life that is given over completely to building the kingdom of God.

Corey Jackson is senior pastor of Trinity Park Church in Cary, North Carolina, and founder and president of The Luke Alliance.

- More from Corey Jackson

News

Southern Baptists’ Nuanced Divides on Display at Annual Meeting

Kate Shellnutt in Indianapolis

From a wider slate of six candidates, president Clint Pressley takes the “strange honor” of leading the convention’s growing factions toward missional unity.

Clint Pressley, newly elected Southern Baptist Convention president

Sonya Singh / Baptist Press

In the weeks before the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting, newly elected president Clint Pressley finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s book on precision bombing in World War II, Erik Larson’s bestseller set in the lead-up to the Civil War, and a history of a 19th-century mutiny on a Royal Navy vessel.

A few years ago, these stories could have been a metaphor for the convention. Back then, an even more conservative wing had emerged with literal pirate flags and a rallying cry of “take the ship,” and the previous few presidential races pitted a Conservative Baptist Network (CBN) candidate against a more traditionalist nominee.

But the 2024 slate wasn’t split between two factions. Southern Baptists decided among six presidential candidates and took a historic three rounds of voting to elect Pressley—a sign of the ranging positions and priorities among the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

Pressley, a sharp-dressed 55-year-old North Carolina pastor, steps into the presidential role knowing the challenge of finding consensus among today’s Southern Baptist leaders from autonomous churches, who sometimes clash with each other on ministry styles, theology, or the work of the convention—and whose clashes are increasingly on display online.

He didn’t refer to the presidency as a battle to win but as a chance to dampen divisions and bring unity.

“As a convention, we want to be unified around not only our understanding of the Bible and love for the Bible, love for the gospel, and love for the mission. We’re unified around the Baptist Faith and Message that we affirm,” Pressley said. “There’s a lot that we can really be glad of.”

The biggest piece of business for Southern Baptists this year was a proposal to add a constitutional requirement that SBC churches name only men as “any kind of pastor.” A majority were in favor—61 percent—but the vote fell short of the two-thirds threshold needed to add it to the SBC’s governing document.

While Southern Baptists remain complementarian, they’ve taken nuanced positions on this particular move to restate their position in their constitution. They disagreed on whether to support the amendment, the rationale for doing so, and the importance of the vote at all.

Arguments for and against swirled online in recent months and at auxiliary events during the week of the annual meeting itself, held by groups like the Center for Baptist Leadership, The Danbury Institute, Founders Ministries, Baptist21, 9Marks, and The Baptist Review.

Jared Cornutt, a founder of The Baptist Review, said these networks can be helpful for fellowship and friendship within the convention. But they also risk fostering an echo chamber or a sense of tribalism.

“There are so many groups,” said Cornutt, who pastors a church in Birmingham. “We’re really seeing how diverse and divided we are.”

Pressley, lead pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church outside Charlotte and a council member for the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, had taken a stance in favor of the amendment, saying it “makes sense” with what he sees the Bible and the Baptist Faith and Message affirm about ministry roles.

But he also saw it as a move for clarity, not a response to a significant egalitarian presence in the SBC. Before the vote, Pressley said that, either way, “we’re going to have to be OK … and keep moving forward with the mission and what we do as a complementarian convention.”

The convention has held to that stance for affiliated churches without an explicit mention in the constitution. Last year, the SBC deemed Saddleback Church “not in friendly cooperation” with the convention over its female preaching pastors; this year, it did the same for a Virginia church that espoused egalitarian beliefs.

The SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission was applauded for its work on behalf of life and religious liberty, even though a failed motion to dissolve the entity garnered votes from a sizable minority.

From the convention stage and in related events, leaders acknowledged the disagreements among Southern Baptists but urged them to recognize their shared beliefs in Scripture, complementarianism, and evangelization, especially against a society moving further away from those convictions.

“Your enemy is not in this room,” charged pastor Dean Inserra in the convention sermon, lamenting that denominational infighting can hinder their gospel work.

Pressley has a solid conservative background and a history of involvement in Southern Baptist life. He was elected as the first vice president of the convention a decade ago, serving alongside former president Ronnie Floyd.

He currently holds a position on the board of trustees for The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—Pressley said its president, Albert Mohler, would be his first call in a time of crisis. He is pursuing a doctorate from Southern and holds a master’s from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Fellow North Carolina pastor Chris Justice, who nominated Pressley, said he “operates with a joyful orthodoxy, which will be a blessing for the SBC.”

Pressley came to faith as a teen and attended Hickory Grove before going on to serve on staff. After pastoring churches in Mississippi and Alabama, he returned as Hickory Grove’s senior pastor in 2010.

His church recently reported a volunteer to police over abuse allegations and disclosed the situation to the congregation. This week, he thanked the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force for its resources on addressing abuse. “We would not have known what to do had this not come up. So there’s some very real and tangible results that have already happened.”

Speaking after the annual meeting concluded on Wednesday evening, Pressley said it was a “strange honor” to have won the election, but “with all that’s going on in our convention,” he felt like now was his time to run.

“Part of the president’s job,” he said, “is to do all you can by way of influence to make sure that, as a convention of churches, we are focused on what our mission is.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

News

Why Does Southern Baptist Abuse Reform Keep Hitting Hurdles?

Kate Shellnutt in Indianapolis

Leaders and advocates are grateful for the convention’s support but frustrated at the inability to enact their plans.

Josh Wester and members of the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force

Sonya Singh / Baptist Press

Jules Woodson remembers the spark of hope she felt when a sea of yellow ballots went up across the hall at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in 2022. The vote in favor of abuse reform following a watershed abuse investigation was her sign that the messengers cared about victims like her and were willing to listen and make changes.

At this year’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, the recommendations on abuse reform passed again, with another wave of thousands of ballots, but she teared up for a different reason: disappointment over how little had been done.

SBC entities have pledged millions to fund the cause. The convention has repeatedly voted in favor of abuse prevention and response efforts by overwhelming margins. Task forces appointed by the convention president have volunteered their time to develop training resources, a database of abusive pastors, and an office to oversee the ongoing work of abuse reform.

“For messengers for whom abuse isn’t on the forefront of their minds, they think, Oh, we’re doing good,” said Woodson, whose testimony of abuse by her Texas youth pastor launched the #ChurchToo and #SBCToo movements six years ago. “But there’s so much more to be done.”

The abuse victims and advocates calling for reform in the SBC are now watching Southern Baptist leaders within the convention try to navigate the kinds of denominational hurdles and roadblocks they faced for years from the outside.

“We’ve been told over and over again, You can’t do this, you can’t do that,” said Mike Keahbone, a candidate for SBC president who serves on the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF). “You have to ask yourself, Why in the world are we being fought so hard on this issue? … Either you don’t really think there’s a problem or you’ve got something to hide.”

On Tuesday, the task force celebrated a new curriculum to help SBC churches respond to abuse, but the long-awaited database remains empty, and there’s no “permanent home” to oversee abuse reform once their work expires this week.

The messengers in Indianapolis voted to affirm those priorities and to pass the work of the task force onto the Executive Committee, the body that handles SBC business outside of the annual meeting, and its new president, Jeff Iorg.

“Abuse response and prevention efforts grow as we raise awareness, and so I’m thankful to see the excellent work done on the essentials curriculum,” said Keith Myer, a Maryland pastor who has spoken up for the cause, in a statement to CT.

“I’m concerned that a set of relatively simple components in an entire protection system feel controversial and unachievable. A database makes sense and solves the problem of communicating about bad actors across our 50,000 churches. A permanent home for abuse gives churches and pastors someone to talk to when they encounter a crisis, and solves the problem of finding help when they don’t know what to do.”

ARITF chair Josh Wester explained that they learned in January that insurance liability concerns prevented significant, robust reform efforts—including the database—from being hosted by the convention itself. After the task force suggested forming a new nonprofit to launch the database independently, they no longer had access to their funding. The entity heads who offered $3 million said it couldn’t be used outside the SBC.

Wester, a pastor from North Carolina, said the task force did all they could and that members were “beyond frustrated” to not present the database they had readied with over 100 names before hitting hurdles within the SBC. “You only have the means to take the steps you can pay for,” he told reporters. “It has been a real struggle for us.”

The task force has raised $75,000 on their own to fund the independent Abuse Reform Commission. They’re confident the Executive Committee won’t let the database website go empty for another year, and some survivors feel particularly hopeful about Iorg’s leadership. He steps into the role after serving as president of the SBC’s Gateway Seminary in California and has voiced a commitment to help.

Those pushing for reform knew the process would be slow—but it still feels discouraging that even the basic things and first steps they’d laid out aren’t happening yet.

Grant Gaines, a pastor from Tennessee, is concerned about losing the significance of the moment as implementation continues to get delayed.

“The survivors told us from the beginning this is going to be hard and to expect roadblocks, even from people you like and trust,” said Gaines, who put forward the 2021 motion calling for an investigation into the Executive Committee’s abuse response.

The concerns over liability and funding that the ARITF came up against over the past two years reflect some ongoing reservations about the convention’s attempt to address abuse—particularly as the dollar amounts continue to add up.

From the stage, Wester had to repeat clarifications that the abuse reform efforts don’t interfere with church autonomy and that abuse does not have to be widespread for the convention to improve its response.

“When it comes to sexual abuse, the problem for the Southern Baptist Convention was never that we had abuse occurring at wildly disproportionate rates or that our convention was shot through with abusers,” he told the messengers. “Instead, the problem that we faced is grappling with the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention, having more than 10 million members and nearly 50,000 churches, as America’s largest Protestant body, had no meaningful plan to help its churches prevent or respond to sexual abuse.”

Motions made to only hire legal counsel that reflect the convention’s values, or to launch an inquiry to tally the total spent on conducting an investigation into its abuse response, indicate that a faction within the SBC still holds a lingering sense of regret over the fallout of the 2022 Guidepost Solutions report.

Iorg mentioned that they’ve paid at least $2 million just to cover indemnity costs after two people named in the report sued (former SBC president Johnny Hunt and former seminary professor David Sills).

“We have to equip the shepherds to protect the sheep from the wolves. It can be done—it can be done within polity, it can be done well. And for a variety of reasons, it kept getting pushed off and people continued to get hurt,” said Bruce Frank, former head of the initial Sexual Abuse Task Force and a pastor in North Carolina. “Is $2 million a lot of money? Yes, it is—but it is nowhere near what it has cost survivors.”

Task force members and advocates are grateful to see the continued support for their efforts from the convention floor—but frustrated that the enthusiasm from Southern Baptists at the meeting hasn’t overridden the challenges that emerge when trying to enact change at the convention level.

Survivors decried entity leaders’ legal involvement with a Kentucky amicus brief last year that would limit their liability in sexual abuse claims, and a motion from the floor called for the SBC to censure convention president Bart Barber, Southern Seminary president Albert Mohler, and Lifeway president Ben Mandrell for approving the brief. The messengers voted it out of order on Wednesday morning.

Entities within the SBC have also been the subject of a Department of Justice investigation that began nearly two years ago and issued its first indictment last month.

Frank and Keahbone, both candidates who had been involved in abuse reform efforts, did not make the runoffs in the presidential race this year. In a forum on Monday night, Keahbone referenced people “stepping in our way” and “working purposely on the sides to make sure [the database] doesn’t happen.”

Gaines asked the task force if they would reveal who is responsible for obstructing their work and how, but so far those involved have not named names. In remarks to the media, Wester said he did not want to further “compound the problem by going into too much detail.”

Grateful for the work of @jbwester and the ARITF. Here’s the twofold question I was lined up at a mic to ask them. Didn’t have time to ask it, but would love to see the members of that task force address it if they’re willing. @keahbone #sbc24 pic.twitter.com/v46eJSXPbQ
— Grant Gaines (@DGrantGaines) June 11, 2024

Two years ago, International Mission Board president Paul Chitwood, North American Mission Board president Kevin Ezell, and Send Relief president Bryant Wright had offered $3 million from Send Relief’s undesignated funds to pay for the SBC’s sexual abuse reform programs. A spokesman for Send Relief told CT that its leaders have “not rejected any requests for funding that fall within the original intent of its commitment.”

“Send Relief is fully committed to the careful stewardship of the funds for sexual abuse prevention and response efforts within the SBC, in collaboration with the Executive Committee,” the statement said. “Currently the [Abuse Reform Commmission] is outside the structure of the SBC.”

Myer worries that confusion about the funding decisions could damage the sense of trust needed for broader cooperative efforts around the issue to be effective.

“When trust fails, you lose partners and resources,” he said. “If we can’t sort out something easy like saying, It is critical that we protect children and adults from being abused by wolves, how will we move on to more complicated matters?”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Books

Review

Kids Aren’t Cheap. That Doesn’t Fully Explain Why We’re Ambivalent About Having Them.

Bonnie Kristian

A new book explores why what was once a default life stage now feels like an increasingly fraught choice.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

In a recent Guardian article about “America’s premier pronatalists,” the journalist mentions her own assumption that “the main thing that [makes having kids] hard [is] that it’s now so incredibly expensive to raise children.”

What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice

Anastasia Berg (Author), Rachel Wiseman (Author)

336 pages

$20.75

“No,” the father of the profiled family replies. “Not at all”—and in a significant sense, I think he’s right. So do Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, authors of the newly released What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice.

That’s not to say Berg and Wiseman (or I) would ever be dismissive of the real financial hardships many would-be parents face. On the contrary, they devote the first of the book’s four long chapters to a sober examination of such “externals.”

But the delight of the book is that they do not stop there. Berg and Wiseman equally reject the assumption—seen in many lesser entries in the kids conversation—that the externals are the whole of the matter, that all this ambivalence would melt away with just the right package of policies to extend parental leave and make childcare affordable.

It wouldn’t, and What are Children For? is a welcome complication of that simplistic account. As the title signals, Berg and Wiseman aim to deliver a sharp cultural and philosophical analysis, giving rigorous but sympathetic examination to a “world that is both pro- and anti-natalist.” Though they embrace at the last moment a major claim they seem to resist throughout the text, their project succeeds.

A sea of options

Readers familiar with the Christian philosopher Charles Taylor’s idea of secularism in A Secular Age will be well-prepped to understand a core contention of What Are Children For?: that having kids once was not a choice, and now it is a choice, and this colossal change is integral to the modern experience of ambivalence about children.

Taylor defined secularism as what happens when a society changes from one “where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” Likewise, where once having children was “just what people did,” Berg and Wiseman write, now it is something we feel we must “weigh against a sea of other options,” many of them at least superficially easier, more pleasurable, less risky, and simpler to do well.

A quote Berg and Wiseman share from psychologist Nancy Felipe Russo, writing in 1976, drives home the recency and totality of this shift. Having children was then so assumed that “even if the perfect contraceptive were developed and used,” Russo thought, the “social and cultural forces that enforce the motherhood mandate would continue.” Today, in my judgment, the opposite is true: Even if all contraception were to disappear tomorrow, our agonizing would not vanish with it.

Nor would we be any closer to knowing how to decide. For many of our peers, Berg and Wiseman contend, “having children is steadily becoming an unintelligible practice of questionable worth.” With the internet’s help, we mainline reports of human evil and suffering, then doubt the wisdom of prolonging human existence. “We lack the resources to answer such questions,” the authors muse. “The old frameworks, whatever they were, no longer seem to apply. And the new ones have left us far less certain about the very desirability of children.”

Life, history, literature

What Are Children For? begins and ends with single-author sections, Wiseman writing at the start about her choice to pursue motherhood and Berg reflecting at the end on life after reaching it. In between, the chapter on externals is a well-rendered map to mostly familiar territory for anyone following the natalism debates: financial concerns, worries about lost freedoms and disappointing careers, inability to find a suitable romantic partner, and so on.

Key passages on the novelty of children as a choice are found here, as is a remarkably dreary section on modern dating, portions of which appear in a 2022 Atlantic essay, “The Paradox of Slow Love.” I don’t have room here to do it justice, but Berg and Wiseman’s sketch of a heightening wall between romance and family is alarming.

The second chapter, on the history of feminist debate over reproduction, provides valuable intellectual context—albeit context that, for readers from more conservative evangelical backgrounds, may explain others’ motivations and impulses better than our own. Some of the thinkers Berg and Wiseman explore here are far outside the mainstream, but their gravitational pull on the broader culture is clear.

Perhaps the strongest portion of this chapter is its critique of an all-too-recognizable male abdication of responsibility performed in the name of progress. “In center-left circles,” Berg and Wiseman write, “the conviction that women ought to be able to determine their own reproductive fates and exercise as much autonomy over their bodies as men has transmuted over the years into the presumption that the question of whether to start a family is the purview of women alone.”

Sometimes, they acknowledge, this male passivity may be well-intended: If motherhood is as costly as our culture has come to believe, “how could a man ask the woman he loves to submit herself to such a fate?” But sometimes, what “might at first seem like an act of selfless deference (if you want a child, we can have one) functions more like an evasive maneuver”:

Lukewarm offers of cooperation can stand in the way of making the choice confidently and without reservations. Who would want to bring a child into the world with someone who, when asked whether he wants to be a dad, has only a feeble “if you insist …” to offer in return? The remark “whatever you want—it’s up to you” is annoying enough when trying to pick a film to watch or a restaurant to order takeout from; it is unbearable as a response to the question “Do you want to have a child with me?”

The third chapter, on literature, extends this exploration of cultural context into the present day: “The motherhood ambivalence novelists are prescient,” Berg and Wiseman show, “insofar as the broader mood about parenting today is one of doubt.”

By this point, I must admit, I was growing restless, eager to get to the fourth chapter’s direct tackle of the titular question. But this final bit of scene-setting was perceptive too, offering a tour of a genre I knew to be influential but haven’t personally read. For those already reading this kind of literature—perhaps not very critically—I expect it will be enlightening.

A defense of life itself

In the last chapter before Wiseman’s conclusion, the authors deal with two primary arguments against children: “that life is an evil imposed on mankind” and “that mankind is itself an evil imposition on the world.”

To both, Berg and Wiseman give a simple answer: an affirmation of life. This is not an unsophisticated response—they grapple with serious philosophers over centuries of classical, Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian thought. But it is boldly asserted and unapologetically grounded in common human intuition and experience.

In brief, they argue that humanity has value; that alongside our capacity for evil is a real capacity to recognize and choose good; that we can pursue unconditionally and universally good ends, “like friendship and justice,” which “make it genuinely worthwhile to live a human life”; and that affirming this goodness doesn’t mean turning “a blind eye to our human struggles and failings.”

As for bearing children, Berg and Wiseman argue, bringing a new life into the world affirms about others what we already affirm about ourselves. In fact, they write, asking, “What are children for?” is essentially “to say, why affirm life?”

What, after all, is one asking for? A list of benefits? To affirm life is not to give it a theoretical justification, to acknowledge its merits and counter the charges of its detractors. In deciding to have children, one takes a practical stance on one of the most fundamental questions a person can ask: Is human life, despite all the suffering and uncertainty it entails, worth living?

This is a striking and provocative conclusion, not least in its conspicuously nonsectarian framing. Would I be convinced without already having a view of humanity that accounts for these tensions of goodness and evil, dignity and suffering, chance and virtue? I’m not sure. Reading as a Christian, I found myself agreeing with Berg and Wiseman on points large and small—yet often only incidentally. We’d come to the same place by apparently different routes.

Sometimes, this difference in perspective was constructive. I’d love to see the authors in conversation with the Catholic writer Timothy Carney, whose diagnosis of “civilizational sadness” in Family Unfriendly is deeply resonant with the closing notes of What Are Children For? And I’m still chewing on Berg and Wiseman’s observation that “of all miracles performed by Christ, he never helps a barren woman conceive.”

On the other hand, I can imagine how Berg and Wiseman would likely square their call to “affirm life” with the book’s multiple endorsements of abortion rights—but it’s not a connection I could make sense of myself.

A question only you can answer?

It is commonplace that a life choice so important as whether to have children is one we each must make exclusively for ourselves. Berg and Wiseman support that view, but all over What Are Children For? they seem dissatisfied with where it leads.

They reject a vision of the kids decision as a solitary quest of “‘finding yourself’ and discovering ‘what you really want’” to the neglect of “everything else you care about.” They chastise men who shirk their role in the decision-making process and mourn a similar isolation from friends and family. They chafe against the motherhood-ambivalence literature’s deep interiority, the way it deprives characters and readers alike of insight to “the infinitely many ways each of us can be opaque to ourselves, blind to our own weaknesses, deluded about our motivations.” And they praise a writer’s reminder “that what is at stake in the decision to have children is not just a series of personal experiences to be enjoyed and suffered but the possibility of human life.”

Altogether, this reads to me as much more than an invitation to public discourse. It sounds like a plea for community, for people with good counsel and real influence in your life, people who care about what you care about, who will tell you when you are misguided or self-deceiving, who will help you through this hard question as much as the challenges that will follow if you answer yes.

Yet for all that, the final line of the last cowritten chapter declares that because having children is such a weighty, life-affirming commitment, “only you can determine if it is the right one for you.”

In a narrow sense, yes, that’s true. I certainly don’t long for the bad old days of forced marriages or a brutal, totalitarian version of pronatalism. But we’re talking about affirming life here. Surely the life we’re affirming is life together?

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

- More from Bonnie Kristian

Share

Share

Share

God’s healing balm

Honoring the dishonorable

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Sowing goodwill

The power of advocacy

The way of the cross

A surrendered life

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

A sea of options

Life, history, literature

A defense of life itself

A question only you can answer?

Share