What We Can Offer If We Uncircle the Wagons

Carrie McKean

Two new memoirs, Troubled and Between Two Trailers, make a powerful—if unintentional—case for the Christian ethos of family and community.

Keith Lance / Getty

Growing up, our car radio was always tuned to 90.7, American Family Radio. We lived about 15 minutes from the nearest town, so we spent a lot of time driving. If we were lucky, Mr. Whittaker’s warm, grandfatherly voice invited us to join him for Adventures in Odyssey. But more often, we’d listen to alarmed (and alarming) talks from Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, or Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, each warning my parents of all the ways the world was coming for us.

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class

Rob Henderson (Author)

336 pages

$19.49

Their message was convincing, and not only for my parents. I’d plug my ears when Ms. Barbie, my warm-hearted school bus driver who wore denim cutoffs and had brightly lacquered nails, sometimes tuned her portable radio to 96.9 KISS FM, “Amarillo’s #1 Hit Music Station,” and started singing along to secular music on the 45-minute ride to school. I felt palpable relief when I instead climbed aboard to the sound of Garth Brooks crooning about his friends in low places. After all, everyone in Texas knows God has a soft spot for country.

One of the strangest things about being raised in that embattled mindset was how my side seemed embarrassed of what we had to offer the wider world. We said we knew the truth about God and humanity, but I got the distinct impression that we were far from confident that the truth could hold its own out there.

My elders and the voices they heeded on the radio seemed to take a defensive posture, self-conscious about our intractable fuddy-duddy-ness and anxious that these commitments would cost us. It felt like they weren’t sure we could ever compete on a level field. We had God on our side, but they had MTV. Our only option was to circle the wagons and pray we could outlast the storm.

Seeing this attitude in the adults in my life wasn’t reassuring. Instead, it made me wonder: If we knew the truth, why were we so afraid? Now I see the youthful ignorance in that kind of binary question, but I earnestly wrestled with it in those days, and as I entered adulthood, I sought to become a Christian who didn’t meet the world with fear, defensiveness, and accusations.

Perhaps it’s this history that leaves me fascinated whenever I encounter people who aren’t Christians and yet independently arrive at truths Christians know—especially truths about how to order healthy, safe families for the flourishing and well-being of children. It helps me remember that even though Christians have at times advanced these principles poorly, sometimes doing more harm than good both inside and outside the church, the principles are true. We do have something to offer the world. And rather than circling up in fear or anger, we should make that offering in love, showing how a real and living God changes hearts, heals relationships, and restores lives.

I’ve most recently had such an encounter while reading Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson, released last month. Born to a drug-addicted mother and passed through ten different foster families before finally being adopted, Henderson chronicles a life of chaos. Reading about his movement from a childhood of upheaval to a distinguished military career, undergraduate education at Yale, and a PhD from Cambridge feels a bit like riding river rapids on a flimsy inner tube.

Rather than simply recounting his tragic and shocking experiences, though, Henderson moves from the particular to the universal with an expertise few memoirists have. With his own life as an example, he invites readers—especially those who dismiss traditional family systems as outdated, unnecessary, or worse—to turn a critical eye on their own assumptions. Upward mobility (along with trappings like elite education) shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself, he argues. But it may well be a byproduct of the pursuit of more important things: “family, stability, and emotional security for children.”

Though he’s not making this argument in the same way Dobson or former US vice president Dan Quayle did in the 1990s, Henderson arrives at a very similar conclusion: that a stable, nurturing, two-parent family confers considerable advantage to children. He also argues that the progressive elite’s public dismissal of traditional family values doesn’t reflect the reality of their personal lives, and he has the data to back it up. By 2005, Henderson writes, “85 percent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 percent.” Similarly, just 10 percent of students at Cornell University were raised by divorced parents, compared with a national divorce rate of 40 percent.

Henderson calls the claim that marriage doesn’t matter a “luxury belief,” a term he coined and defines in Troubled as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” If you’re like me, once Henderson helps you see one luxury belief, you start to see them everywhere: “Defund the police” is a slogan that might earn you some street cred as a student at an Ivy League protest, but it’s not a policy many residents of fragile communities want. Arguing that monogamy is passé might get you on the New York Times bestseller list, but it’s not how you get a table full of generations of family on Thanksgiving Day.

Henderson doesn’t root his arguments in a religious framework, but it’s easy to see the connection to a Christian ethos. While making a secular case for the importance of healthy families, his story and research also illustrate another value that finds ample expression in our faith: the transformative and redemptive power of community.

For Henderson, much of that community came outside the context of family, although not through a church. And though he doesn’t follow that trail far, it seems obvious that our culture needs these other sources for social stability and support. This is where the local church can shine—if we choose to open our circle of wagons.

Churches can be a profound force for good in families both in ministry and in mission. While there are obviously broken families both within and outside the church, research shows regular churchgoers “marry more and divorce less” than their peers, and an “active faith appears to be connected in some way with more stable marriages.” And local churches are well positioned to care for kids living in the rubble of broken families and the fallout of others’ destructive choices. God still places the lonely in families (Ps. 68:6), after all, and sometimes that looks like showing up for Grandparents’ Day or the father-daughter dance for a child who sits in the pew in front of you.

Another new memoir, Between Two Trailers, by J. Dana Trent, gestures at that latter sense. Trent tells stories from a childhood with drug-dealing, mentally ill parents. The book reads like a fever dream—fantastical and outlandish, yet heartbreakingly vivid and real. Between Two Trailers never makes clear how Trent came out on the other side, but little moments of grounding offer at least some of the answer: summers with her paternal grandparents and extended family, and Wednesday night dinners and youth group at a church that became Trent’s safe haven. The church was, she reflects, “an environment where people were required by sacred law to be nice to me.”

My childhood was marked by chaos and instability too. But unlike the memoirists’ families, my parents remained consistently plugged into churches, and when I reflect on those years, I think of all the people in those faithful Christian communities who looked past the drama and difficulties that came with my family and welcomed us.

Pastor Mike, Ms. Katy, Rex, the Longs, the Browns—not to mention myriad aunts, uncles, grandparents, and teachers. The list of names, too long for me to complete, points to the grace of God who always kept my head above turbulent waters. His people—some of the very same people who were worried about all the ways the world was coming for us children—were my life raft.

These days, my own children have a decidedly more mundane life. There’s not a lot of drama or chaos, other than when I try to get them out of bed and into a pew on a sleepy Sunday morning. But when we get to church, I know they are seen and known and loved. They are enveloped in a community of caring, safe adults who fill in the gaps left by the inevitable fallibility and shortcomings my husband and I have as parents. Even in the absence of capital-T traumas, as researchers at Harvard have found, grounding our children in a faith community offers a “protective factor for a range of health and well-being outcomes in early adulthood.”

I believe it—and the rest of a growing body of independent evidence that faith and the shape of life it demands is tangibly good for children. And why wouldn’t it be if we’re following our creator? Why would we be surprised to find an indelible connection between God and the good life?

Henderson’s book, while at times troubling, offered me an unexpected gift. Reading it helped me look at my messy, confusing, evangelical childhood a bit more charitably. I had long ago rejected the shrill and scolding voices of conservative evangelicals shrieking about the decline of family values as unhelpful and obnoxious. As it turns out, they got a lot right, even if I still think their delivery got a lot wrong (and even contributed to the coarsening and hardening of our culture).

Stories like Henderson’s and Trent’s—and even my own—also remind me of how badly the world needs a healthy church. Amid all the talk of deconstruction and dechurching, abuse of authority and political polarization, these stories refocus my gaze from the church in the abstract to the church where I take my children every week. They remind me of ordinary, imperfect congregations of kindhearted Sunday school teachers and long-suffering children’s choir directors and patient youth volunteers.

When I pay attention to what’s right in front of me, I see the way so many of my brothers and sisters in Christ steadily pull the awkward, the outcast, the uncomfortable, the uncertain, and the troubled into the fold.

For all the church’s flawed messengers, the message is still there. It is still true. Despite all the fear and outrage, the local church is still offering ordinary faithfulness to salve the wounds of a troubled world. We still have good news to tell.

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.

- More from Carrie McKean

News

Died: Beverly LaHaye, Pastor’s Wife Who Led Religious Right

Daniel Silliman

The founder of Concerned Women for America was credited by President Ronald Reagan with “changing the face of American politics.”

Concerned Women for America / edits by Rick Szeucs

Beverly LaHaye, a timid pastor’s wife who became a fierce champion for conservative Christian politics and a force mobilizing hundreds of thousands of religious women, died on Sunday in a retirement home in El Cajon, California. She was 94.

President Ronald Reagan once praised LaHaye as “one of the powerhouses” of the conservative movement and said she was “changing the face of American politics.”

Paul Weyrich, the conservative activist who helped start The Heritage Foundation and coined the term moral majority, called the group LaHaye founded in 1979, the Concerned Women for America (CWA), the most effective organization on the Religious Right. He told CT in 1987 that the CWA had “the best follow-through” of any political group he’d ever worked with.

At the height of LaHaye’s power, she could get the women she called “my ladies” to send more than 1,000 postcards to a US senator who had slighted her in a public hearing; 2,000 to support a Republican administration official who had been caught selling weapons illegally to Iran; 64,000 to support a controversial conservative candidate for the US Supreme Court; and 778,000 to protest a TV station that ran an advertisement for condoms during prime time.

LaHaye “gave a lot of women a language for understanding women’s conservative activism as absolutely necessary,” historian Emily Suzanne Johnson told The Washington Post. “Women have been the driving force of this movement in a lot of ways, particularly at the grass-roots level. I’m not sure that happens without Beverly LaHaye.”

Her success earned her the ire of those on the left, especially people concerned about LGBTQ rights. In 1993, the spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign called her “a professional hatemonger.”

LaHaye also became a subject of fascination for mainstream media.

According to the Chicago Tribune, LaHaye had “a spun-sugar exterior” but directed her organization “with the fervor of a general.” The Washington Post reported she “combined combative rhetoric with a cheery public image, handing out pink business cards and decorating her organization’s Washington headquarters with pink chairs and pink curtains.” And the Philadelphia Inquirer wondered how she could call herself a traditionalist while running a national organization with a $6 million budget, waging high-profile political battles, and drawing crowds that dwarfed those of her husband, the prominent evangelical minister Tim LaHaye.

LaHaye’s answer was that her husband, who would go on to co-author of the popular apocalyptic Left Behind novels, supported and encouraged her political activism. And she was just trying to answer God’s calling on her life.

“I think God just pushed me up out of my chair and said, ‘Beverly, go for it.’ Anything I’ve done is not my natural way, but God has put it in my heart to do it,” she once said. “You know, when you say, ‘Whatever Lord, wherever you send me, whatever you want me to say, whatever you want me to do, here I am,’ you better hang on. You better hang on tight.”

LaHaye was born in Detroit on April 30, 1929, the second daughter of Lowell and Nellie Davenport. Her father died when she was 2, and her mother was forced to move in with a neighbor and work for the phone company until she got remarried to a tool-and-die maker who worked at Ford.

Watching her mother, LaHaye later said she learned that “women can be very powerful, in quiet ways.” LaHaye had to summon that strength during difficult times in her childhood. Her mother got sick with a heart condition, and LaHaye took time off school to care for her and take over her domestic responsibilities while still a teenager.

At 17, LaHaye left home to study at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. There she met her husband Tim, then a 21-year-old veteran who had been an Air Force gunner in World War II and aspired to become a pastor. They got married a year later.

LaHaye left school to support her husband in ministry. In the early days, he made so little money serving Baptist congregations in Pumpkintown, South Carolina, and Minnetonka, Minnesota, that she had to work outside the home to financially sustain the family. Things changed in 1956, when Tim was called to a 300-member church in San Diego. Under his leadership, Scott Memorial Baptist grew into a megachurch.

In Southern California, the 27-year-old pastor’s wife threw herself into any work that needed to be done. When the position of church secretary was vacant, LaHaye filled in. When the church needed someone to direct junior Sunday school, she volunteered.

But LaHaye shrank from the spotlight when she was asked to lead Bible studies and speak to women’s groups. She was so shy that Tim called her a turtle.

“I had an inferiority complex,” LaHaye later said. “I didn’t really think I had much to offer the world.”

At the same time, she struggled with a “smoldering resentment” at the drudgery of household chores and the many menial tasks assigned to her as a wife and mother.

“Day after day I would perform the same routine procedures: picking up dirty socks, hanging up wet towels, closing closet doors, turning off lights that had been left on, creating a path through the clutter of toys,” she wrote.

While similar experiences pushed many women toward feminism, LaHaye came to think this wasn’t an issue of inequality and the unfairness of social expectations put on women. It was a spiritual issue. She believed she needed to learn submission, because “submission is God’s design for women,” and that would transform her experience of the daily tasks of a wife and mother.

“I wasn’t just picking up dirty socks for my husband,” she wrote in The Spirit-Controlled Woman. “I was serving the Lord Jesus.”

In the 1970s, LaHaybe began to overcome her timidity and start teaching others what she had learned. She and Tim started Family Life Seminars, offering eight lectures on the biblical principles they said that God gave to “guarantee the happiness and fulfillment He intended for the Christian home.” LaHaye spoke on overcoming anxiety, discipling children, “Spirit-controlled” family living, and sex.

When the youngest of LaHaye’s four children turned 18, LaHaye started publishing books. The Act of Marriage, which she coauthored with her husband in 1976, became a bestseller.

A “deliberately frank book,” The Act of Marriage told readers that “God never intended any Christian couple to spend a lifetime in the sexual wilderness of orgasmic malfunction.” In fact, “Spirit-controlled Christians” following biblical principles would “enjoy the beauty of sexual lovemaking more than anyone else.” It was commonly used in evangelical marriage counseling and premarital counseling, and the book sold more than 1 million copies a year for 20 years.

LaHaye became a political activist in 1978. As she frequently recounted over the years, she and her husband were watching the feminist Betty Friedan being interviewed on television, and she grew frustrated that Friedan acted like she represented all women. She didn’t speak for LaHaye. She didn’t speak for all the “average, normal, and traditional women” who were committed to their families, their churches, and the traditional values sustaining America, LaHaye said.

LaHaye decided to organize a coffee klatch for local women opposed to feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, and in the process she founded Concerned Women for America.

“I was just kind of swept along,” she explained later. “The hall owners said, ‘What’s the name of the organization?’ When I said, ‘We’re just a group of ladies in the community,’ the reply was, ‘We only rent to organizations.’ … Then I said, ‘Oh, Concerned Women for America.’ I laughed when I said it—I never meant it to be serious.”

More than 1,000 people showed up at the coffee and the CWA was soon organizing chapters across the country.

“Churchwomen all over America were hungry for someone to sort out the things that would affect families and the religious values systems they had,” LaHaye said. “From there, it took off like a prairie fire.”

In the early days, the CWA rallied opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have added a prohibition to discrimination on the basis of sex to the US Constitution. The CWA, along with other conservative activists such as Phyllis Schlafly, helped the amendment from being ratified by the required 35 states.

Under LaHaye’s leadership, the group also engaged with a wide array of other political issues. The CWA put a major emphasis on opposition to abortion and mobilized women to call for prayer in schools, abstinence-only education, and parents’ rights to exempt their children from curriculum they found offensive. The organization also advocated for more military spending and raised concern about the growing Communist influence in Latin America.

The CWA opposed legal protections for the civil rights of LGBTQ people and supported laws that would prohibit them from having contact with children. LaHaye argued that homosexuality was unnatural and that gay people recruited converts through sexual abuse.

“I’m not saying they all are,” she told the Chicago Tribune, “but the movement itself is aggressively trying to go after boys.”

By the mid-1980s, the CWA boasted 500,000 dues-paying members and nearly 2,000 prayer/action groups around the country.

“When they hear about issues, women are not content to sit back and say, ‘Well, somebody’s got to do something.’ They say, ‘What can we do?’” LaHaye told CT. “We try to give them not just prayer requests, but action ideas, too. There is action at all levels, whether a woman sits at home and writes a letter, or has time to go to the nation’s capital.”

LaHaye moved to the capital herself to be “closer to the center of the action,” as she explained to the Arizona Republic in 1985. She oversaw a staff of more than 25 people, including lawyers and professional lobbyists, who pushed conservative priorities in the Reagan White House and both houses of Congress.

On some occasions, LaHaye took center stage in the national political discourse. In 1987, for example, she testified on behalf of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who faced fierce opposition from liberals. She defended him at a hearing broadcast on live television and answered aggressive and tricky questions from Democratic Party leaders, including Joe Biden, then the senator from Delaware.

“Beverly would not hesitate to accept the opportunity to be the voice of Christian women,” according to a family-authorized obituary. “She always conducted herself with grace and dignity and spoke truth with strength and clarity.”

LaHaye served as president of the CWA until 2006. She retired from its board in 2020.

“Her life is a testament to the impact one woman with a vision and mission can have on the course of history,” said Penny Nance, the current president of the CWA.

LaHaye’s husband died in 2016 after 69 years of marriage. Her son Lee died the following year. LaHaye is survived by her children Linda, Larry, and Lori, as well as 9 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

More Pastors Are Leaving Ministry Over Church Conflict

David Roach

But experts say it can offer opportunities for leaders and congregations to grow.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

Conflict had become the norm at Trinity Church in Redlands, California.

The lead pastor left in 2022 amid a wave of disgruntled attendees. Following his departure, some church members remained upset at the congregation’s elders. In all, there had been at least a dozen situations that came up over a 14-year period.

When Doug Baker arrived as interim pastor, he knew the conflict had to be addressed. Trinity called in Peacemaker Ministries, a group that mediates conflicts from a biblical perspective. Over a weekend in March 2023, Peacemaker held 15 meetings with people embroiled in the church conflict, put together a plan, and peace began to emerge.

Healing started. Many conflicts were resolved. Some people forgave. Some left the church. Trinity, which now averages 500 attendees in Sunday worship, began to change.

The conflict resolution process revealed that the congregation didn’t feel as if the elders valued their opinions. The elders began to listen humbly, and they have kept listening. Two elders stand at the welcome booth each Sunday to hear people’s opinions about church matters. According to Baker, “conversations have opened back up.”

The situation at Trinity has “been better—much, much better,” he said. “There is a peace. There is a graciousness, a unity, a love for each other and for the lost. People are reengaging with ministry. We are seeing specific ministries thriving a whole lot better because people are not worried about the struggle. They are more concerned about the kingdom.”

According to church conflict researchers, Trinity illustrates some broader trends. Conflict often provokes pastors to leave their churches or at least consider leaving, researchers at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research found. Yet, conflict experts also say, that doesn’t have to be the result of conflict. Rather than provoking departures, conflict should be viewed as an opportunity for personal and congregational growth.

“All conflict produces friction, and friction will always produce heat,” said Tony Rose, a longtime Southern Baptist pastor who holds a master’s degree in conflict management and now consults with churches in conflict. “But the one who manages conflict properly turns that friction into traction, not heat.”

Church conflict is on the rise, according to a Hartford report released earlier this year titled “‘I’m Exhausted All the Time’: Exploring the Factors Contributing to Growing Clergy Discontentment.” The research was based on a survey of about 1,700 religious leaders in the fall of 2023. At that time, nearly three-quarters (72%) of US churches reported some kind of disagreement or conflict. That’s up from 61 percent in early 2023 and 64 percent in 2020, according to previous reports.

That conflict impacts pastors. More conflict in a church increases the pastor’s likelihood of leaving. Nearly 40 percent of pastors who have never considered leaving their present congregation reported no conflict in their churches. Yet only 5 percent of pastors who “fairly often” or “often” consider leaving say their churches are conflict-free.

Conflict in the church is not the only reason pastors reported thoughts of departure. Congregational unwillingness to meet new challenges, diminished congregational vitality, and attendance of 50 people or less also correlated with increased thoughts of leaving the congregation.

“However, these dynamics were less influential on thoughts of leaving one’s current congregation than the presence of conflict and poor congregational relationship quality,” the report stated.

Church conflict also increases a pastor’s chances of leaving ministry altogether. Ninety-one percent of pastors who think about leaving pastoral ministry “fairly often” or “very often” serve in churches reporting conflict. And 77 percent of pastors who have considered leaving pastoral ministry “once,” “twice,” or “a few times” report conflict in their churches. Of those who never consider leaving pastoral ministry, 63 percent serve in churches with conflict.

“What is positively associated with fewer thoughts of leaving,” the report concluded, is “being in a church with a bright outlook for the future, one that has less conflict, is more open to change and adaptation, and cultivates good, healthy relationships between the members and pastor.”

Peacemaker Ministries CEO Laurie Stewart said the research coincides with her experience in churches. “It does seem like church conflict has been increasing over the past few years,” she said.

Yet with proper strategy for managing conflict, Stewart said, it can be harnessed for good.

“Conflict is an opportunity for us to share the gospel,” she said. “The gospel isn’t just a one-time event where you pray a prayer and now you’re secured in heaven. It’s more than that. It’s meant to transform our lives while we are still on this side of eternity. One of the ways God gets our attention to help us realize our need for transformation by the Holy Spirit is through conflict.”

Careful listening is one of the most important strategies for managing conflict, Stewart said. So is avoiding the urges to divide, blame, and run away. Rather, tension should drive Christians to take responsibility for hurt they have caused and seek forgiveness. It’s not a quick process.

“Even in those situations where I think I did everything right, if I have caused other people harm or hurt their feelings, I’m still responsible for the harm I have caused,” she said. Even if believers have not sinned, they should learn to say, “I’m really sorry I hurt you. I care about you. What can we do? Would you please forgive me?”

Peacemaker Ministries applied these principles in one situation where two pastors clashed within a congregation. The church was convinced one of the pastors had to go. But after a mediation process, they reconciled.

“Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God’ [Matt. 5:9]. So if we are already adopted into the kingdom,” Stewart said, “we are peacemakers. We just don’t know how to do it, so we really need to learn how to do peacemaking.”

Rose added some practical pointers for navigating church conflict:

Remember that church conflict is normal. Even Paul and Barnabas had trouble getting along when they clashed over whether to give John Mark a second chance as their missionary traveling companion (Acts 15:36–41).
Don’t try to win a conflict. Instead, seek a win-win solution for all parties involved and adopt a sympathetic perspective.
Never address topics of tension in an email or text. Make a phone call at the very least. Talk in person whenever possible.
During conflicts, focus more on being a godly person than on obtaining a specific outcome.
Realize it’s not always wrong for a pastor to depart a church amid conflict. “If you change churches simply because of problems, all you’re going to do is exchange sets of problems,” Rose said. Yet, “there are instances when it’s time to go. There’s no guilt in that. You just have to weigh it out.”

While not all conflicts have happy endings, some do. The likelihood for happy endings increases when all parties remember that Jesus has called them to be peacemakers. Baker and Trinity Church learned that firsthand. Baker’s message for other churches and pastors in conflict is simple: There’s hope.

“There is always hope if we will be the people that we need to be,” Baker said. “You can’t control your reputation, but you can control your character. You have to ask yourself: What kind of person do I want to be in this moment? Then act that way and leave the rest up to God.”

David Roach is a freelance reporter for CT and pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.

- More from David Roach

Theology

Sports Can Be a Touchdown for Faith. Beware of Encroachment.

Justin Giboney

As a lifelong athlete and coach, I know sports build character. But I worry about the idolatrous, selfish culture of American athletics.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

When my wife told me that my son received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty at his football game, I was enraged. He’d aggressively thrown the ball back to the official he believed had missed a call. I flew into a lecture about leadership, respect for authority, and composure. I even called friends and family to register my disbelief and embarrassment.

But before I got too self-righteous, my parents—always eager to come to their grandchildren’s rescue—reminded me of the times I was far from a model of sportsmanship. I’ve had my fair share of penalties and made hotheaded remarks. I’ve come a long way, but I still haven’t fully mastered the art of balancing passion and prudence in the arena.

Accordingly, I beg your charity as I explain (and preach to myself) why I believe sports can be a helpful servant for Christians—and an awful master. We can value the virtues that sports teach and be encouraged when players like Justin Fields and Paige Bueckers boldly proclaim their faith while being wary of the culture of idolatry, pride, disrespect, and selfishness that crops up in every level of American sports, from peewee soccer to the NFL.

As a former college football player and a current Little League coach, I’m convinced sports are a great way to build character in children and teach the value of leadership and institutions. Youth sports provide social proof that diligence and teamwork are essential aspects of improvement. Children learn real-world lessons by overcoming the mental and physical obstacles sports present. Truths that are difficult to communicate in theory suddenly make sense on the field.

Sports are particularly valuable in a culture where children are being stunted and harmed by coddling. They can help us cultivate courage and mettle. Today, many seem to think that all toughness is toxic and that avoiding risk is the primary objective in childrearing. Some of us have deluded ourselves into believing society has evolved to the point that our children will never have to invoke a primitive grit or fulfill the role of brave protectors and watchmen (Deut. 31:6; Ezek. 33).

We live in relative peace and prosperity, yes. But we should avoid raising cowards just as intently as we avoid raising predators (Rev. 21:8). We can value our emotions without forgetting that fortitude is still a virtue (Prov. 31:17; 1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 2:3; 1 Pet. 1:5–6). A tackle won’t be the biggest hit our children take in life. We’ll need to train them to be tough as well as compassionate, and that involves risk. The controlled risks of sports afford us the opportunity to exercise love and discipline and to test our children’s resolve (Prov. 13:24).

Yet my lifelong love for sports has also shown me how sports can become idolatrous and appeal to our worst instincts. Since the ancient Olympics, sports have been connected to idols, and we continue that idolatrous tradition if we make more of sports than we ought, like Israel in Isaiah 44. Sports can be profitable as tools but are disastrous as gods.

Concretely, this means we shouldn’t encourage young people to center their lives around sports. An idol can never love you back (Isa. 44:18), and, like Gomer, sports are a promiscuous partner (Hos. 1). At some point, they will abandon (or betray) you. Whether through injury, team politics, roster cuts, or some other misfortune, everyone’s days on the field will end. The band stops playing for you; your jersey bears the name of another; and fans quickly move on. The transition from exceptional athlete to common person is disheartening and painful. It’s not so dissimilar to the experience of a forgotten Hollywood child star.

Too many athletes find themselves unprepared for this harsh reality, and some never recover. After sports, many spend their days haunted by a mixture of shame, regret, and bitterness about what could have been. How I wish they knew there’s always purpose and a future for those who know Christ Jesus (Jer. 29:11–14). But I understand how they become deluded. Without a redeemed perspective, the applause, recognition, and rivalry can be intoxicating. In the worst cases, sports can displace our devotion to God, ruin parent-child relationships, and make us selfish, prideful monsters. Jock mentalities void of discretion and humility don’t serve athletes well in the real world, and the formative aspects of youth sports can instill vices just as well as virtues.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen in pro and college sports numerous examples of the kind of inexcusable behavior I have in mind. During the Super Bowl, Chiefs star Travis Kelce pushed and screamed at coach Andy Reid. Players cursed at coaches and brawled during March Madness. After former NFL MVP Cam Newton was jumped at a 7-on-7 tournament he was hosting, sports analysts lamented the disrespect endemic in sports culture.

And the problem isn’t confined to the pros. Our youth sports culture is completely out of control. Not only does it monopolize family time and eat into church schedules, but it can disfigure whole families’ relationships to authority and institutions.

Far from being a friendly neighborhood game, modern Little League is the transfer portal on steroids. Kids jump from team to team to team to win championships or play a different position. I’ve seen children quit two or three teams in a single season because their parents’ expectations or demands weren’t met. Just like those who “church hop,” we’ve become consumers of institutions, and we don’t contribute or serve in turn.

As Yuval Levin explains in A Time to Build, we’ve lost our appreciation for institution building, because every establishment is now viewed as a platform for our personal ascendance. Like free riders, we use institutions without ever taking ownership, sacrificing anything for the greater good, or letting the institution shape us. We leave institutional maintenance to someone else, selecting what suits us best, just like an Amazon purchase, then throwing it away when we’re done. This teaches children nothing about overcoming adversity or sticking with their communities despite their imperfections and brokenness.

Sports can bring the worst out in players, parents, coaches, and fans. It can reflect the most negative aspects in our culture and cause disordered priorities. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Christians can make sure sports are serving us rather than us serving sports.

Let’s reclaim our Sunday mornings for God and reassert the limits of this tool of character building. Let’s keep our public witness at front of mind and ensure even our trash talk is without contempt or vulgarity. Let’s teach youth how to win with grace and lose with honor. Let’s use sports to grow more like Christ instead of making him compete for our affection.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, attorney, and the president of AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the co-author of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign's Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

- More from Justin Giboney

Theology

Your Neighbors (Probably) Don’t Hate You

Russell Moore

They might not even know you’re there. When paranoia eclipses our witness, here’s what to remember.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

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

Some colleagues and I happened to be meeting in New England this week, so we drove a little bit north to a small village in Vermont called St. Johnsbury, right in the line of the totality of the solar eclipse.

Even before the sky darkened, I was mesmerized by the people gathering in the town square, each with a sense of anticipation and excitement over the shared experience. We ended up standing on the front lawn of someone’s house, eating sandwiches while we waited for the sun to hide. The homeowners sat on their stoop and were not only unperturbed by our camping out on their property but seemingly enjoying the chance to welcome people to their place.

Several articles this week noted how the eclipse seemed to have the effect of bringing out kindness and connection, almost the way a natural disaster would, except in collective wonder instead of in common suffering or fear. Not only that, some studies are showing that this sort of neighborliness and openness is far more common than we think, eclipsed behind the maelstrom of division we see on social media and on cable news.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen describe our sense that the country is hopelessly and irreparably divided as “America’s reality distortion machine.” Most people aren’t fringe-right Christian nationalists or fringe-left campus activists. Those fringes, though, are amplified not only by the nature of our media but also by the incentives of politicians to cater to the extremes.

A couple weeks ago on my podcast, I asked social psychologist Jonathan Haidt some of the questions I’d received from listeners since the last time we’d talked, one of the primary ones being a question from school administrators about the use of smartphones in their classrooms.

The problem, several of these administrators said to me, is not that they receive pushback from the kids when they suggest banning phones during class hours but instead that they receive opposition from the parents. Haidt, though, pointed to research showing that, in most cases, upward of 80 percent of parents are fully supportive of schools carrying out such measures.

The key, he said, is that no one ever hears from the parents who are supportive. The schools get calls and emails and visits from the outraged parents afraid of their child being unable to be in touch with them at a half-second’s notice.

Haidt’s observation rings true to me. Very few people think to contact their child’s principal to say they’re happy with the way the school is being run. Very few people email their pastor to say that the church is benefiting them spiritually.

Part of that is for the same reason that news services don’t run stories about all the houses that don’t burn down or about all the bank CEOs who don’t embezzle money or all the evangelists who don’t have affairs. We tend to take such things for granted, and when something is going really well, we assume that it’s obvious and doesn’t even need to be said.

I caught myself realizing this tendency in myself a few weeks ago when I was saying to a group of people in another state how awed and grateful I am for my church, for the Christlike vibe there, for how I’ve never heard anyone say a critical word of any kind about the pastor, for the way my own sons respect and love their youth pastor. It struck me that while I often say these things about our church, I rarely say these things to the leaders at our church. I tend to unconsciously assume that everyone just knows how good the congregation and its leadership are.

In any environment, from a school to a church to a neighborhood to a country, the normies tend to go on with their lives, without saying much. When angry fringes emerge—on a campus or within a ministry or in a political party—normal people often assume that if we just get really still and try to keep the Eye of Sauron off of us, then the rage will magically settle down on its own.

The fringes know this. They know that the rest of us will start getting exasperated with the school board member, the chairman of deacons, or the tenants’ association president for the very fact that they draw fire from the fringes. Why are they so controversial all the time? the normies sometimes conclude and start to draw back. What we don’t realize is that this sort of mentality is exactly what extreme fringes count on in order to wreak havoc.

Every time another study comes out about how we actually are not as polarized as we seem, I worry that people will conclude that this means that polarization isn’t real . When the people who prize kindness and civility and decency and norms go quiet, though, the fringes become less fringy. People start to imitate what they see as “normal,” and if what they’ve seen as normal is crazy, the crazy soon becomes normal.

For Christians, this has implications for our witness. For an entire generation or more, we’ve taught church members and the next generations how to contend with a culture that’s hostile to them. Sometimes this is done in a good and biblical way, rightly emphasizing that following Christ is costly and that we should be prepared to be rejected, just as he was.

The problem is, without the balance of the Bible’s simultaneous emphasis on common grace, we end up not with countercultural Christians but with paranoid ones.

If you expect your neighbors to hate you, you will almost inevitably, preeminently armor up in a protective crouch. Imagine if someone sets you up on a blind date with the words This person might be the love of your life—or they might be an armed stalker who will chase you to the edge of the grave. That would change the conversation.

The end result is that, frequently, Christians in secular spaces have a lack of confidence, with a kind of inferiority complex about the gospel they carry. Yes, the gospel is countercultural, a two-edged sword, a scandal to the world, a contradiction to the status quo. But the gospel is also genuinely good news—speaking to the primal hopes and fears embedded in human psyches.

Often, the neighbors we assume hate us aren’t thinking of us at all—they don’t even know we are there. If those who really believe that their neighbors might well be their future brothers and sisters in Christ—that the gospel really can renew any heart, reconcile any person—are in a defensive crouch, then the only Christians their neighbors will see are angry people who would, like Jonah, be furious to see their enemies seek grace.

In reality, many unbelievers—especially some who are in the most disenchanted, nonreligious spaces—are curious about what motivates religious people. Some of them are more than curious. They are trying to imagine what it would be like to be the kind of person who seeks a God who might love them, to have an atonement that frees them from guilt and shame.

Sometimes those curious people seem the most eager to argue against Christianity. The closer they come to asking What if it’s true? the more vigorously they try to argue themselves away from that brink.

When we expect automatically that our neighbors loathe us, we tend to see every potential conversation about spiritual matters to be a competition of irrefutable arguments. We try to find the series of pithy zingers that would show that unbelief is irrational. Sometimes encounters over spiritual things are arguments like that, but they are rarely one-time confrontations that someone wins by audience vote like a college debate.

And the idea that such conversations must be like that can cause us to go silent until we feel that we are adequately prepared to answer any potential question about philosophy or archaeology or ancient Near Eastern history. No one ever feels adequate to demolish every potential argument, to answer any conceivable question. Such a mentality silences the kind of people who, in the Gospels, have the sort of witness that’s the most powerful—the kind that says, Come and see.

The country is kinder than what we see in our politics and our media. The reality is distorted, to be sure. But the more we normalize that polarization, the more real it becomes.

The more we automatically assume our neighbors hate us, the more we will start to preemptively hate our neighbors. Jesus told us that it’s insane to light a lamp and then hide it under a bowl (Matt. 5:15). In many cases in this crazed, angry time, that light can be eclipsed by something else. But an eclipse that goes on too long is indistinguishable from night, and a night that goes on too long is almost indistinguishable from death.

Your neighbor might hate you—but probably not.

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

News

Chuck Swindoll Retires from Texas Megachurch

Kate Shellnutt

At 89 years old, the Stonebriar Community Church founder says he still believes “one never retires from the work of God’s kingdom.”

Chuck Swindoll and Jonathan Murphy

Stonebriar Community Church video announcement / Screengrab

Key Updates

September 24, 2024

Swindoll Retires from Preaching
April 12, 2024

Chuck Swindoll Steps Down as Senior Pastor

September 24, 2024

Weeks away from turning 90, Chuck Swindoll has preached his final sermon at Stonebriar Community Church. Swindoll announced Sunday that “the time has come” for him to retire from the church he led as senior pastor for 26 years.

The founding pastor of the Frisco, Texas, congregation had transitioned from day-to-day leadership of the church back in May but continued to preach on Sundays. Jonathan Murphy, a preacher and seminary professor from Northern Ireland, succeeded Swindoll as senior pastor.

Swindoll says he and his wife will continue to worship at Stonebriar, and he plans to continue to serve through his radio ministry Insight for Living.

“I’ve always believed that age is merely a number; what truly matters is our commitment to fulfilling the divine purpose laid out before us,” he said in a statement to Stonebriar. “I want to embrace every day, every challenge, and every opportunity to impact lives, because one never retires from the work of God’s kingdom.”

April 12, 2024

Chuck Swindoll has said that pastors “should never retire,” and the 89-year-old won’t be stepping away from the pulpit even as his church welcomes his successor.

Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas, announced this week that Swindoll will transition to founding pastor, continuing to preach on Sundays, as Jonathan Murphy becomes its senior pastor on May 1.

“This is a very unique way of expanding, of ‘moving into another chapter,’ as we often call it here,” said Swindoll in a video clip alongside Murphy, a Belfast-born preacher who currently serves as chair of pastoral ministries at Dallas Theological Seminary.

With over 60 years in ministry, Swindoll is the oldest megachurch pastor in the country and one of the most influential. He has been vocal about his plans to remain active in ministry until his death.

“One of my great goals in life is to live long enough to where I am in the pulpit, preaching my heart out, and I die on the spot, my chin hits the pulpit—boom!—and I’m down and out,” he said at age 75. “What a way to die.”

In his new role, Swindoll remains Stonebriar’s regular preacher, while Murphy leads day-to-day ministries and fills in to preach when needed, according to the church’s announcement.

“We have the founding pastor being able to continue to preach as long as the Lord would have, and I can have a season as a senior pastor taking responsibility for the staff and caring for them and the ministry direction of the church at large,” said Murphy, who has been a guest preacher at Stonebriar and serves on the board for Swindoll’s long-running radio ministry Insight for Living.

The two have been preparing for the transition for several years, with Swindoll befriending and mentoring Murphy. The church’s elder board began considering him as a senior pastor candidate in 2022 and decided last month to bring him into the new role.

Swindoll will remain an elder, and Murphy will also join the elder board. “At the appropriate time in the future,” the church said, Murphy will also become the church’s primary preacher.

Megachurch researcher Warren Bird and William Vanderbloemen, the authors of Next: Pastoral Succession That Works, have written that an “intentional overlap plan” seems to be the strongest model for transition.

“Today, many long-term pastors experience a period of overlap with their successor as a way to help both the congregation and themselves adjust to the transition. It also allows a safety net if the transition hit unexpected challenges,” Bird, the senior vice president of research at the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, told CT. “A ‘known’ leader is often the successor, in this case someone who’s been a guest preacher from a nearby seminary much esteemed by the congregation.”

According to Bird, preaching is often the last duty for an aging pastor to relinquish.

He said that Swindoll’s setup at Stonebriar is similar to other long-serving megachurch pastors in their 80s, such as at First Baptist Atlanta, where Anthony George was announced at Charles Stanley’s successor years before Stanley stepped down at age 87. (Stanley also said he didn’t “believe in retirement” and continued his work at In Touch Ministries.)

The need for pastors to make plans for their successors has only grown more urgent in the US as clergy age; 1 in 4 senior pastors plan to retire by 2030.

Last year, Swindoll suffered a fall, experienced low blood pressure, and underwent an angiogram. He was away from the pulpit in January while recovering from an aortic valve procedure. He turns 90 this fall.

While president of Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS), Swindoll helped found Stonebriar Community Church in 1998. A Texas native, Swindoll had graduated from DTS and began his pastoral career in the Lone Star State in the 1960s.

Stonebriar drew in 1,500 weekly attendees within its first six months; CT dubbed it an “instant megachurch.” At its 25th anniversary in 2023, the nondenominational evangelical church outside Dallas reported 3,700 members, 300,000 square feet of building space, and an annual budget of $17 million.

Swindoll is known for his preaching. He has twice appeared on Baylor University’s rankings of most effective preachers, and a 2010 Lifeway Research survey of Protestant preachers found he was the country’s most influential preacher not named Billy Graham.

Murphy commended Swindoll and his congregation for their love for the word. “We talk about expository preaching, but I love that they’re expository listeners,” he said. “They come ready to hear from God, not to be entertained.”

Despite Swindoll’s remarks that pastors shouldn’t retire, he has also said, “There’s nothing wrong with retirement as long as you don’t stop living for God. You never retire from the Great Commission.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Culture

In ‘Civil War,’ What You See Is What You Try to Forget

Zachary Lee

The new dystopian thriller reminds viewers it’s not just what we witness that matters, but how.

Cailee Spaeny (center) as Jessie in Civil War.

Murray Close / Courtesy of A24

There’s nothing more frightening than the sound of a camera shutter in the new film Civil War.

Distributed by A24, the production company behind releases like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Past Lives, the movie depicts the remnants of a United States government battling the Western Forces, an alliance between Texas and California. If you’re looking for reasons—Why these factions? Why now?—you won’t find any answers. The film is frustratingly opaque on logistics, though we’re able to hypothesize based on a few offhand comments. (The unnamed president, played by Nick Offerman, is entering his third term and isn’t gun-shy about using air strikes against American citizens.) Even so, a California that cooperates with Texas seems far-fetched.

For writer/director Alex Garland, our incredulity is the point. “I find it interesting that people would say, ‘These two states could never be together under any circumstances.’ Under any circumstances? Any? Are you sure?” he told The Atlantic. By asking us to accept his premise, Garland forces viewers to consider the ideological divisions we take for granted. Turns out, the why doesn’t matter all that much. Dystopia, no matter how it comes about, is still dystopia.

What is clear, though, is that the war provides an opportunity for journalists, capitalized on by photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), her Reuters colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), and her mentor, New York Times reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). Their coverage of atrocities shapes our experience of this imagined future. Many of those chilling camera shutter sounds come from Lee, as she documents truly terrible scenes of domestic conflict with ruthless efficiency and pristine technique. It’s jarring to see pictures of military soldiers being executed or a civilian being set on fire with perfect ISO and aperture.

Ever in pursuit of a scoop, the three decide to embark on a road trip from New York to DC, where Lee hopes to photograph the president and Joel hopes to interview him. “We get there before anyone else does,” Lee says. Joel agrees: “Interviewing him is the only story left.” At the last minute, they’re joined by Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young photojournalist who idolizes Lee. Together they embark on a tour of the crumbling nation.

With every click, the photographers get more disconnected from the war they’re documenting. Cinematographer Rob Hardy and editor Jake Roberts use recurring shots of each photo’s aftermath to terrifying effect. When the camera falls from Lee’s or Jessie’s face, it’s like a mask coming off.

Whether she’s captured a candid of an abandoned mall or a soldier who’s bled out, Lee’s dispassionate poise is chilling. She’s seen one too many atrocities, and whether for self-preservation or by overexposure, she’s desensitized to the horrors around her.

Young Jessie, however, is different. Whenever she’s done taking a photo, at least at first, audiences see the toll the work takes on her. It’s a tragedy when her empathy gives way to detachment. Each time her camera clicks, her face is less frightened, more stoic.

Civil War is an ode to the harrowing work of war journalists. But the film also pushes back against the notion that the highest virtue a journalist can cultivate is the ability to remain unfazed. While objectivity is imperative, it should be no badge of honor when we’re able to cover the worst of the world and not be moved.

In one painful sequence, after the crew witnesses a wanton act of violence, Lee tells a visibly shaken Jessie, “We record so other people ask.” Lee’s investment in a story ends after the click; she leaves it up to her audience to explore bigger questions about pain and purpose. “You want to be a journalist? That’s the job,” she scolds. One can’t deny the journalists’ commitment to capturing the truth of what they see. But it’s nonetheless disturbing when they do so without emotion.

The psalms of David take the opposite approach to the one modeled in Civil War—all lament, rejoicing, and rage as they interpret the world around them.

In David in Distress: His Portrait Through the Historical Psalms, scholar Vivian L. Johnson identifies certain songs that directly correlate with what’s covered in texts like 1 and 2 Samuel. One of these is Psalm 51, written in the aftermath of David’s rape of Bethsheba and his murder of her husband, Uriah, as recorded in 2 Samuel 11.

Whereas the history in Samuel provides the objective account of what’s happened, the psalm offers an opportunity to flesh out David’s inner, emotional experience. As Johnson writes, “Seldom do the Samuel narratives reveal the private contemplation of David or report his gestures of contrition; in fact, the books of Samuel in general show little reservation in their disclosure of his most egregious deeds.” Psalm 51, she argues, where David details his remorse more fully than in 2 Samuel’s one-line confession “I have sinned against the Lord,” “provid[es] for the reader an elaborate and pious version of what David may have said subsequent to recognizing the gravity of his actions when he murdered the husband of his mistress.”

The role of the psalmist is different from the role of the journalist. But what we see in Civil War reminds us, as does Scripture, of how vulnerable we can be in the face of the world’s hardships. For every record of an atrocity is a journalist who wrestles with bearing witness.

Take, for instance, a Rolling Stone gallery of images from photojournalists in Gaza. The photos are difficult to sift through and only more poignant now that the death toll there has exceeded 33,000 people. The presentation of these photos isn’t careless or salacious; instead, each is accompanied by a contextualizing caption. Photojournalist Ahmed Zakot describes Gaza on October 9, 2023: “I took this picture from the 19th floor of a skyscraper in Gaza. In my 25-year career as a photographer, I never felt such fear and distress. I felt that I was filming a cinematic movie scene, I had to remind myself that it is all too real.”

I can be like Lee. When I see archival photos from history or even images of today’s faraway atrocities, I’m moved to protect myself by keeping it all at arm’s length. It’s no wonder—in our online, overexposed world, ghastly images and testimonies are just a timeline refresh away.

But while dissociation might be understandable, it’s not desirable. That’s true not only of pain but also of joy. There’s Job’s address to God: anger fully expressed rather than circumstances merely accepted. But there’s also the first chapter of Luke, which makes room for Mary’s song.

Whereas other gospels are quick to narrate the events of Jesus’ birth, Luke pauses for a look at Mary’s heart. Her spirit “rejoices in God my Savior”; she can trust in the promises foretold by the angel Gabriel since God has shown his faithfulness “just as he promised our ancestors.” Even as it records the facts, Scripture makes room for lament, celebration, and praise, not stoicism.

Civil War offers a similar reminder. It’s not just what we witness that matters but how. Even as we remind ourselves that “it is all too real,” we remember a loving God who’s present in that reality. May we care for our souls as we look closely at suffering. May we also allow our hearts to break.

Zachary Lee serves as the Managing Editor at The Center for Public Justice. He writes about media, faith, technology, and the environment.

- More from Zachary Lee

News

Make Nepal Hindu Again: Christians Concerned by Rising Religious Nationalism

Surinder Kaur

Hindutva ideology is crossing the border from India and making ministry more challenging for churches in the former Hindu kingdom.

Pashupatinath temple, a sacred Hindu temple, on the banks of the Bagmati River in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Boy_Anupong / Getty

More than 15 years after Nepal officially became a secular democracy, the former Hindu monarchy may have a religious extremism problem, incited and aggravated by its closest neighbor.

In an “alarming” development, Indian Hindutva ideology and politics have begun to spread throughout the country, as local experts and journalists report. This proliferation has resulted in a recent spate of attacks and restrictions on Christians reported within the country of 30 million.

According to local sources, at least five separate incidents targeting Christians have been reported in March and April of this year.

“The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) in Nepal is rapidly growing. Aiming to protect Hinduism, they degrade Christianity and badmouth us through social media and other sources,” said Kiran Thapa, who was arrested last month for praying for people in Kathmandu.

In March, Thapa and several foreigners, all Christians, were visiting the Pashupatinath Temple, a religious World Heritage Site deeply venerated by local Hindus. When they entered the temple, they came across an elderly couple who were suffering with pain in their knees and back. The group offered to pray for them with the couple’s consent, and they subsequently reported that they were healed. More people then requested prayers from the group and reported being healed.

“I had to request them to come one by one,” said Thapa.

After two monks asked for prayer and then reported that they too had been healed of their physical afflictions, a policeman ordered the Christians to leave the Hindu temple for praying in Jesus' name. As they were leaving, a man with an immobile hand followed the group out. When the Christians prayed for him in the street, having informed him that they could not pray for him in the temple, he also said he had been healed. Despite the miracle occurring outside the temple grounds, the incident angered the same policeman, who then got a senior police official to deal with the matter. According to Thapa, the officer began screaming at Thapa and arrested him.

“They threatened to kill me and bury me as an anonymous corpse near the ghat (riverbed). ‘If the law had not bound my hands, I would have killed you and buried you here,’ the officer told me,” said Thapa.

Thapa spent the next 24 hours in extremely poor jail conditions without a proper place to sit or sleep. The senior inmates made him sit near the toilet while lavatory waste gushed out into the cell, said Thapa.

Authorities released him after the temple management, which had filed a complaint against Thapa that falsely stated he was distributing Bibles, withdrew their complaint at the request of Thapa’s wife.

Several weeks earlier, evangelist Sajan Shrestha mentioned, a video was uploaded on Facebook showing members from HSS, an extremist organization whose name literally translates to “Hindu emperor army,” aggressively bullying Christians. The mob taunted the crowd, calling on them to tear the Bibles. All resisted but one, who tore the Bible and then was forced to trample the torn book under his feet. The extremists then heaped all the Bibles and set them on fire. They surrounded the fire and shouted slogans like “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail, Lord Rama).

“We are so sorry for our brothers who went through all this,” said Shrestha, who himself was harassed, detained, and interrogated by a pro-Hindu journalist and two plainclothes policemen on February 12. Earlier that month, the journalist had found Shrestha’s name after threatening two young Christian women who were distributing tracts in Lalitpur, the country’s fourth most-populous city. After local Christians protested, authorities released him from police custody.

Historically, Hindus in Nepal have been far less aggressive toward non-Hindus than their counterparts in India, Shrestha said. However, he has observed a concerning evolution of attitudes in Terai, a region in southern Nepal close to where the country borders India.

According to Shrestha, in the weeks leading up to India’s national elections, which begin at the end of April, Indian Hindu extremist ideologies seem to be gaining ground. He believes that Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is financially supporting these Nepali Hindu groups to deliberately fuel religious tensions, possibly for political leverage.

In March, seven Australians and four Nepalese were visiting a village in Terai when a Hindu group from another village confronted them aggressively, stating they couldn't be there and accusing them of trying to convert the locals to Christianity. The villagers subsequently called the police, who arrested the entire team.

Further, within hours of their arrest, a mob of around 40 people surrounded the police station, demanding the Christians be charged for preaching in the Hindu-majority area.

After being detained in Kathmandu for three days, the Australians were asked to leave Nepal. However, the government kept the four Nepalese, Adesh Gurung, Bijendra Mukhiya, Phurba Lama, and Siwan Rai, in jail for more than three weeks.

The four men were charged under Nepal's Penal Code adopted in 2015, which prohibits proselytization. More stringent anti-conversion laws were passed in 2017, under which a person can be sentenced to a jail term of up to five years and a fine of up to 50,000 Nepali rupees ($375 USD) as punishment.

“Even though the law states that the fine could be up to 50,000 Nepali rupees, the four Christians were released on a bail bond of 150,000 Nepali rupees each,” said one of the Australians to CT.

However, leading up to their trial, the four will have to return every three months to present themselves in the court while they are out on bail. Once the trial begins, they will have to be present for every court date (which could be once or twice a month) until the verdict.

The vehemence of the mob’s response surprised the Australian missionary, who told CT he had previously visited the Christian homes in the village without issue and intimated that Indian Hindu radicals have been crossing the border and inciting violence.

“This whole region has become more anti-Christian and zealous in trying to get rid of Christians in the last six months. The Hindu extremists are organizing people to report Christians,” he said. “In our case, the host did not report us, but someone reported our presence in the village, and it was surprising to see so many people gathered swiftly, which demonstrates their planning. Their minds are being polarized. The attitude of surrounding us, gathering quickly, and calling the police is coming over from the Indian border—hatred and extreme thinking.”

The HSS—the body promoting Hindutva in Nepal—was founded in the country around 1992 by several Nepali students who had been exposed to the ideology of the Indian Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) while studying in India.

Though the HSS has distanced itself from the RSS, the RSS nevertheless considers the HSS its international wing. With 750 branches in 45 countries, the HSS has chapters in English-speaking nations like the UK, the United States, and Canada, as well as European countries like Germany, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and others.

“The HSS is expanding quickly and promotes Hindu nationalism. Sadly, they often depict Christians in a negative light, portraying themselves as the better option. This has resulted in many incidents where Christians are targeted unfairly,” said Thapa.

The HSS is not the only group working to build a Hindu nationalist narrative in Nepal. The Kathmandu Post reported that at least 100 Hindu organizations are currently active in Nepal. The article and others also mention foreign influences, mainly from India, backing the Hindutva movement, adding complexity to Nepal's political landscape.

“There is a massive rise in the pro-Hindu movement across Nepal in the last two to three years,” said an official who spoke to The Kathmandu Post on condition of anonymity alleging that some organizations promoting the Hindu movement in Nepal are volunteer groups while “others have received funds from different sources inside and outside the country.”

While indigenous ethnic Nepalis are not traditionally Hindu, many Hindus have been successful in convincing them that their faith alone protects tribal identity. In contrast, Christians are cast as outsiders trying to erase and undermine local culture.

India and Nepal share strong cultural, social, and economic ties. They signed agreements in 1950 and 1960 to strengthen economic cooperation and promote trade. The open border allows free movement of people and goods, making Nepal one of India's top export destinations. India provides significant foreign investment and development aid to Nepal in areas like education, infrastructure, energy, and rural development. The two countries recently signed a deal allowing the Indian government to directly fund projects in Nepal worth up to 200 million Nepali rupees ($15 million USD), an increase from the previous 50-million-rupee limit per project.

Shrestha said that the Nepali Christian leadership is planning to bring this sudden rise in incidents against the Christian community before the authorities.

“We are planning to visit the prime minister [Pushpa Kamal Dahal] and human rights organizations and alert them about these incidents,” said Shrestha.

Despite the rise of radical Hinduism, Nepal's census shows a significant 68 percent increase in the Christian population in the past decade. The numbers further reveal a small decline in Hinduism and Buddhism followers, compared to the modest growth of the Muslim, Christian, and Kirat communities (indigenous ethnic groups of the Himalayas) compared to the 2011 census.

While Hinduism is still over 80 percent, its share has decreased from 81.3 to 81.19 percent, and Buddhism from 9 to 8.2 percent. Meanwhile, Islam rose from 4.4 to 5.9 percent, Christianity surged from 0.1 to 1.76 percent, and the Kirat community increased from 2.81 to 3.17 percent. (Nepal also has minor religions like Bahai, Bon, Jain, Prakriti, and Sikh.)

- More from Surinder Kaur

Books

Excerpt

Our Faith Is Not Too Fragile for Science

Jim Stump

An excerpt from The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

I sat by myself at one end of the boardroom, fidgeting with a few notes on the table in front of me. At the other end were about ten older men in suits and ties peering over their tables, arms crossed. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone just walking in to determine which end of the room held the power.

The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith

Jim Stump (Author)

HarperOne

272 pages

$23.49

After my brief opening statement, the rest of our time was set aside for “discussion.” The two-hour meeting felt more like an inquisition. The first questioner hardly let the silence settle after I spoke: “Jim, I went to school with your father. We even went on a mission trip to Mexico together. I’ve known you since you were a kid. What happened to you?”

I’ve replayed this scene in my head a hundred times, varying what I say in an attempt to get my accusers to stand up, shake my hand, and say, “Oh, now we see. That makes sense. Sorry for the trouble.” But every time it ends the same way: I have to give up my position as a tenured professor of philosophy and leave the college I’ve served for 17 years.

My crime? Believing what 99 percent of those who have a PhD in biology or medicine believe: that human beings evolved over time and share common ancestors with every other life form on the planet. But this was a small Christian college, one of the places where evolutionary theory is deemed incompatible with Christian beliefs. And not just incompatible—evolution is considered dangerous. These men believed that hearing anything positive about evolution would make students doubt the Bible. If you can’t believe the creation account in the very first chapter of the Bible, their thinking goes, then why believe any of it?

I do not believe faith is so fragile. I’d already shared with the panel examples of the ways faith and science can not only coexist but actually strengthen each other. But the rhetoric of prominent young-earth creationist groups so unsettled the college leadership that, after questioning me, they changed the official statement of beliefs that faculty have to sign each year.

To be fair, I wasn’t technically fired. I could have stayed if I agreed to the new rules. There are still a few other faculty members there who would admit behind closed doors that they accept evolution. But they can’t teach it as true, like they do photosynthesis or germ theory. They can’t publish scholarly work that defends it. And they certainly can’t have leadership positions in organizations that advocate for evolution—even if that advocacy comes from a Christian viewpoint.

That gatekeeping not only worries but saddens me, because my engagement with science has led me to a deeper, more authentic faith. It troubles me too, because time and again I’ve seen that this kind of hostility toward science leads Christians—especially students asking questions about the faith they inherited—away from Christianity by drawing a line that need not exist.

I do understand why some Christians draw that line, though. I think their logic works something like this: We want to convince people that the Bible can be trusted. When people today pick up a Bible and read a story from Genesis, they might be skeptical that it really could have happened just like the text says. That kind of doubt will eat away at the foundations of scriptural truth and make people doubt other aspects of what the Bible claims. To really counter these doubts, we must show that these stories could have happened just as described. That will convince people that the Bible is telling the truth.

But in practice, I find, it often works the other way around. When we shut down sincere questions about the Bible, we don’t convince people it’s telling the truth. We make them skeptical of our entire faith.

“My church lied to me.” That’s how author Philip Yancey answered on my podcast when I asked whether he was frustrated with how his church conditioned him to think about science. Yancey has written a lot of books critiquing the easy answers given by the Christian community to difficult questions.

He grew up in a fundamentalist church in Atlanta that denied there were ever dinosaurs, and they preached that Black people were cursed and could never be leaders. Yet when Yancey won a summer fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he discovered his mentor would be a Black man with a PhD in chemistry. That’s when he realized his church had lied about race. “Lied” is a pretty strong charge, but they were obviously wrong. He went on:

And if they’re wrong about race, maybe they’re wrong about evolution, maybe they’re wrong about the Bible, maybe they’re wrong about Jesus. And it was a huge crisis of faith. And the only way I dealt with it was just to back off from faith for a period of time. It took me—and is taking me—a long period of time to sort out. That’s what I do as a writer, to sort out what is worth keeping and what needs to be shed, because the church doesn’t always get it right. And if you get it wrong on science, if you get it wrong on one of these topics, you are opening the door to people just dispensing with everything that the church taught.

That’s a pretty good description of the way religious organizations push people away when they give scarcely credible answers to sincere questions. There is only a slight difference between answering a question with a far-fetched answer that must certainly be accepted as unquestionably true and not answering the question at all.

Toward the end of my time as a professor, a student came into my office in tears. She had just come from a Bible class where she asked a question about the way our faith tradition typically interpreted some passage. I don’t even remember now which passage, but I do remember the answer she said the professor gave: “You shouldn’t be asking questions like that.”

I wish what that student experienced from a Bible professor and what Yancey experienced from his church were isolated experiences. But I’m afraid they are not, and this habit of putting a swift and definitive end to questions is contributing to the well-documented dechurching of the American people.

One of the big reasons young people walk away from their faith is that their questions are not taken seriously. They have questions specifically about science, but church leaders don’t seem to realize this—or else they give answers that seem bizarre and outlandish compared to mainstream and well-confirmed scientific views.

The result is that people grow up in religious communities with a particular view of science that is so tightly wedded to a particular view of the Bible that it is essentially a package deal. Then, when they get out into the real world (or even just watch a nature documentary) and realize that their view of science is clearly wrong, they throw out the whole package. They dispense “with everything that the church taught,” in the words of Yancey.

Hearing from lots of former students who went down that path made me want to start addressing these topics with my current students, giving them a place to ask questions and showing that science doesn’t have to lead them away from faith. I wanted my students to see that they didn’t have to give up their faith because of science. Proclaiming that message is what led to my departure from the college, but I’m still working to show there is a better way.

Jim Stump is vice president for programs at BioLogos, host of the podcast Language of God, and author of The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith.

From the newly released book THE SACRED CHAIN: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith by James Stump. Copyright © 2024 by James Stump. Published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

- More from Jim Stump

News

More Porridge? Senegal Protestants Debate Exchanging Holiday Foods with Muslims

Jayson Casper

Ngalakh combines baobab fruit and peanuts to end Easter in West African nation, reciprocated by the sharing of meat breaking Ramadan’s fast.

Catholics pray during a Good Friday service outside of St. Charles church in Senegal on March 29, 2024.

John Wessels / Contributor / Getty

In Senegal, Muslims love to share meat. Christians share porridge.

Ending the monthlong Ramadan fast this week, the faithful in the Muslim-majority West African nation invited Christian friends to celebrate Korite (Eid al-Fitr), focus on forgiveness and reconciliation, and share a wholesome meal of chicken.

A little over two months later during Tabaski (Eid al-Adha), the mutton from sheep slaughtered in commemoration of Abraham’s sacrificing of his son will likewise be distributed to Christian neighbors. (Both feasts follow the lunar calendar and change dates each year.)

But for Christians, the sign of interfaith unity is the porridge-like ngalakh.

“Senegal is a country of terranga—‘hospitality’—and the sense of sharing is very high,” said Mignane Ndour, vice president of the Assemblies of God churches in Senegal. “Porridge has become our means of strengthening relations between Christians and Muslims.”

Sources told CT the holiday treat is highly anticipated.

In the local language, ngalakh means “to make porridge,” and the chilled dessert marks the end of Lent. Between 3 and 5 percent of Senegal’s 18 million people are Christians—the majority Catholic—and families gather to prepare the Easter fare on Good Friday.

Made from peanut cream and monkey bread (the fruit of the famed baobab tree), these core ngalakh ingredients are soaked in water for over an hour before adding the millet flour necessary to thicken the paste. The dessert is then variously seasoned with nutmeg, orange blossom, pineapple, coconut, or raisins.

Tangy and sweet yet savory, the porridge gets its brownish color from the peanut cream.

The Christian community in Senegal traces its origin back to the 15th-century arrival of the Portuguese. And Jacques Seck, a Catholic priest in the capital of Dakar, stated that ngalakh developed during the period of French colonialism as mulatto servant women prepared their masters a meatless meal during the Lenten fast.

Ndour said that over time the tradition extended to Protestants as well.

Its believers numbering only in the thousands, the Protestant Church of Senegal was founded in 1863, becoming more visible in the 1930s. Lutherans came in the 1970s and are the second-largest Christian denomination today, alongside Methodists, Presbyterians, and newer evangelical groups.

But for some, ngalakh is controversial.

“Evangelicals do not share this tradition,” said Pierre Teixeira, editor in chief of Yeesu Le Journal, an interdenominational monthly publication. “But the rare churches that practice it broadcast a film on the gospel before distribution.”

Teixeira, a former Baptist pastor, grew up in a Catholic home in Dakar. Recalling the porridge from his youth, he said it was a symbol of communion that commemorates the death of Jesus on the cross. But today the focus of Senegalese evangelicals is on societal integration. In the past 20 years, the small community has seen an increase in its students at university and efforts by believers to influence the marketplace and political arenas.

Ndour, raised in a Muslim home, believes the two activities are compatible.

“Easter is not simply the feast of Catholics, and ngalakh is the feast of all Senegalese,” he said. “It represents a path of understanding, through religion.”

While Protestants value the practice of terranga, some view an interfaith dessert as an extrabiblical barrier to evangelism that should be dropped as a local tradition. Others, Ndour said, do not distribute the porridge to Muslim neighbors lest they be obliged to reciprocally share in the Muslim Tabaski feast, which they view as prohibited given local interpretation of Paul’s warning about meat sacrificed to idols.

But many cherish the social custom within Senegal’s lauded religious tolerance.

“Ngalakh is a delectable dish meticulously crafted with love and passion,” said Eloi Dogue, vice president of Africa operations for Our Daily Bread Ministries. “It serves as a symbol of unity and goodwill among neighbors, particularly our Muslim friends.”

Islam came to Senegal in the 11th century through trade and spread through a combination of conquest and heartfelt conversion. Rejection of colonialism attracted many locals into Sufi orders emphasizing a mystical interpretation of Islam, which merged Senegalese and Muslim identities.

Other Senegalese interacted closely with the foreign authorities and assimilated their culture. But the French concept of laïcité combined easily with Sufi religious tolerance, and the Senegal constitution’s first article declares the nation to be a “secular, democratic, and social republic.” Its first president was a Catholic, and voluntary religious education at school allows parents—often in mixed marriages—to educate their children in the faith of their choice or none at all.

But Dogue, also international director of Dekina Ministries and former evangelism and missions executive secretary for the Association of Evangelicals in Africa, said the value of ngalakh is not only in coexistence.

“Yes, it is originally a Catholic tradition,” he said. “But it is also a means of fostering outreach and building bridges of understanding, bearing witness about God’s care, love, and goodness.”

Americans, he added, could similarly invite Muslim neighbors over to share their Thanksgiving meals.

Ndour grew up mostly ignorant of ngalakh in his village 95 miles southeast of Dakar. Aware of the local Lutheran mission headquarters, his family belonged to the Mouride Sufi order. He first recalls trying the porridge dish at age 15; however, it was life at university in the capital that introduced him to its true meaning.

But there he was also introduced to the assurance of salvation in Christ. An evangelical pastor shared his faith, and Ndour has been sharing his since. In this, the holiday meal can be used as a bridge.

“Ngalakh opens doors that were previously closed,” he said. “This can then allow us to talk about the true Easter sacrifice—which is Jesus.”

- More from Jayson Casper

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Key Updates

September 24, 2024

April 12, 2024

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share