The Squandering of ‘God’s Not Dead’

Joseph Holmes

The 10-year-old franchise is right that Christians face challenges. But its latest installment, ‘In God We Trust,’ is another disappointment.

David A. R. White as Reverend David Hill in God's Not Dead: In God We Trust

A decade ago, Barack Obama was president. Louis C. K. was hosting Saturday Night Live. And the first film in the God’s Not Dead franchise was in theaters.

You may know the concept: A college student stands up to an atheist philosophy professor who’s trying to bully his class into denying God. The two engage in several debates; the student successfully defends God’s existence. The professor ends up turning his life over to Jesus before he’s hit by a car and killed.

The movie was a massive box office hit, earning over $60 million on a budget of just $2 million. It’s not hard to understand why. Though much has changed in ten years, evangelicals then as well as now were reckoning with the prospect of an increasingly post-Christian United States. The rise of the religious “nones” had begun. Conservative Christians who felt that pop culture portrayed their views as stupid or evil—see The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show—finally got to see one of their own play the hero, trouncing a Richard Dawkins–like adversary. (And saving his soul too.)

But God’s Not Dead also met with criticism from Christians and non-Christians alike; it became the poster child for what’s wrong with faith-based films. Viewers mocked the movie for its bad acting and poor writing, and they condemned it for its dumbed-down arguments about God’s existence and its caricatures of atheist villains.

Alissa Wilkinson, film critic for The New York Times (also a former critic at Christianity Today and my professor at the late King’s College) has commented extensively on the failures of God’s Not Dead. “It’s always been easy to poke holes in the movie’s fast-and-loose relationship with reality and its essential fantasy of persecution,” she wrote for Vox in 2019.

“The film heralded a future,” she continued, “one that has since arrived, where culture is fully bifurcated—where the streaming services you subscribe to can double as markers of identity, and where selecting the inspirational Christian option means making a proclamation about your politics.”

That future has indeed arrived—and so have more God’s Not Dead movies. In God’s Not Dead 2 (2016), a teacher fights for her right to talk about Jesus in the classroom; a law is passed requiring pastors to submit their sermons for government review. In God’s Not Dead: We the People (2021), government atheists attempt to ban homeschooling.

And now, one more: God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust premieres in theaters on September 12. In this iteration, the government will no longer fund a women’s shelter because a Bible study is held on its premises. Reverend Dave, whose church supports the shelter, is persuaded to run for office so he can allocate money appropriately. At the movie’s end, onscreen text tells audiences to “vote.” God’s Not Dead has come full circle—from the relatively small stakes of a classroom and a passing grade to a call for Christians to grasp political power.

If it’s not already obvious, I’m no fan of the God’s Not Dead movies. But that’s not because I dismiss the concerns that motivate them.

There’s some potential in the In God We Trust story. Reverend Dave’s dynamic with his reluctant political strategist, Lottie Jay, is a classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington setup. One scene, in which Lottie advises her candidate before a talk show appearance and he interrupts her to pray, got a genuine laugh out of me.

Imagine a well-made, Aaron Sorkin–esque, legal-political drama from the perspective of the Religious Right. Such a film might pose questions like: What does it look like to have Christian convictions in a pluralistic, secularizing nation? How do Christians in positions of authority bravely speak scriptural truth while also loving their neighbors well? These questions are far from irrelevant for evangelicals like me.

But God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust squanders any opportunity it might have to weigh in on them. Characters don’t dialogue with each other so much as trade ham-fisted buzzwords. The acting ranges from wooden to wildly over the top. The religious and political arguments are lazy and surface level.

And crucially, reality is distorted. The bad guys are motivated by a shallow hatred of religion as something that stands in the way of personal power. The media and government are so universally anti-Christian that even in a state like Arkansas, cynical Lottie tells Reverend Dave to stop discussing his faith.

These distortions matter. Embracing a caricature of your opponents’ views makes you ineffectual at both loving them and addressing their real concerns. On the flip side, thinking that any politician who speaks about God publicly must be honest makes you vulnerable to charlatans. Insisting that Christians on “our side” won’t be seduced by political power makes us less watchful.

It’s not that Christian claims of marginalization are wholly wrong. It’s that marginalization hasn’t happened in the way that God’s Not Dead warned it would. The original film implied that sending kids to college would endanger their faith—though actually, the college educated are among the most likely to attend church. The US government has not stripped Christians of their rights; in fact, in recent years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled in favor of religious liberty. (Though what constitutes free exercise is far from settled; see Bethany Christian Services’s recent suit against Michigan.)

Instead of facing outright persecution for being Christians, Christian marginalization is happening around particular social issues as our culture increasingly demands conformity on gender, sexuality, and abortion. Most US evangelicals aren’t suing the government or giving apologetics-laden speeches to defend the Incarnation; we aren’t being imprisoned for being caught with Bibles.

But many US evangelicals are facing pressure—in workplaces, schools, and other organizations—to either quietly go along with norms that are now increasingly taken for granted or else face accusations of bigotry. And as this cultural pressure increases, so too is legal or policy pressure for pro-life activists or parents who hold traditional views on gender.

It’s far simpler to wail about “Christian persecution” than to deal thoughtfully and faithfully with this reality. The problem with “simpler” is it doesn’t actually help Christians navigate their world. Perhaps that’s why God’s Not Dead has largely dropped out of mainstream relevance. Its last two movies were both distributed as Fathom Events (an alternative to a traditional release), and hardly any reviewers covered them.

There’s one exception to the rule of this franchise: God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (2018). Reverend Dave works with his atheist brother to fight his church’s removal from school property but eventually realizes that his efforts are only contributing to hate and division on campus. He gives up the cause, even though he’s winning, and apologizes to everyone.

The movie is well written. It’s well acted. It portrays atheists sympathetically and gives them a chance to verbalize their legitimate grievances against Christians. In fact, you could argue that it went too far in the other direction, acting like any criticism believers faced was always their own fault.

What happened to the movie? Nobody liked it; it made only $7 million at the box office. And critics, both Christians and non-Christians, panned it. As Wilkinson put it, “In the end, this God’s Not Dead installment is just like the others: putting on a pious face but failing to imagine what real sacrifice might look like.”

I found most criticisms of the film to be “straining at gnats.” Giving up power is heroic, even if you wish someone gave up more. A Light in Darkness showed a willingness for Christians to start a dialogue, to apologize, to put down their defenses and listen. It began to make a case for the Christian way of doing things, with peacefulness and humility.

Ten years after its inception, it’s hard not to see the God’s Not Dead franchise as a wasted opportunity. The movies emerged at a time when Christians needed a way to wrestle with our decline in numbers and cultural influence. We needed stories about how to stand up for ourselves in the world as it really is without becoming what we’re fighting against. We still need those stories. Here’s to praying that in the next ten years, other storytellers come along who can do better.

Joseph Holmes is a Christian culture critic and host of the podcast The Overthinkers.

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News

Kenya Greets Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music with Excitement—and Skepticism

Moses Wasamu

Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music are popular with Kenyan Christians, but some are increasingly wary of their influence.

Chandler Moore of Maverick City Music and Kirk Franklin perform during the Kingdom Tour.

mpi04 / AP Images

In June, Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music’s Chandler Moore performed with actor and rapper Will Smith at the BET Awards. Smith premiered his single “You Can Make it” on a dark, smoke-filled stage, standing in a circle of fire with a small choir of vocalists in a raised semicircle behind him. The performance incorporated the sound of a gospel choir and solos by Franklin and Moore, but those nods to Christian music seemed to be in service of a message that was only vaguely spiritual, referring to heaven and hell but focused on personal struggle and triumph.

Though the performance boosted the single to No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot Gospel Songs chart, the performance sparked controversy in Africa, where Franklin and Maverick City Music would soon embark on their Kingdom World Tour (KWT). Some Christians there called the performance “satanic.” News outlets in Zimbabwe reported that some of the opening acts— including Annatoria, winner of The Voice UK and a recent Maverick City Music collaborator—had pulled out of the Harare concert. Others called for a boycott, telling fellow Christians to stay away from the tour, which also made stops in Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, and Kenya.

Few listened.

Before it finished in August, the KWT drew enthusiastic crowds across Africa, filling arenas and selling out its concert at Kenya’s Uhuru Gardens (a 60,000-person venue).

“It will be a moment in my life that I will never forget,” Franklin said in an interview. “To travel to many countries at one time and to feel the Black experience on this continent and on this planet, and to be reminded how unified we are as Black people—we are just separated by water. We are never separated by spirit.”

Though its overall commercial effect seemed minimal, Franklin and Moore’s BET performance prompted some soul-searching among African Christians about their relationship with American artists, even among those who attended the concert.

Daniel Shirima, a Kenyan emcee and event organizer, said that even as part of the crowd, he was preoccupied with the backlash.

“Many Kenyan Christians, including myself, feel blessed by their songs … but compared to the warm reception of past artists, this felt different,” Shirima told CT. “Some are questioning Kirk Franklin’s walk with God, influencing others not to attend or to feel skeptical.”

The KWT was Maverick City Music’s first performance in Kenya. The group had risen in popularity in the country during the 2020 pandemic, and songs like “Jireh” and “Bless Me” have become some congregations’ favorite worship songs.

Franklin has been popular with Kenyan Christians for over two decades and has performed in the country twice—in 2007 and 2011. Franklin’s 1998 album The Nu Nation Project achieved international success, going double platinum and selling over 3 million copies worldwide. For many Kenyan fans, that album was their introduction to Franklin’s music, and he has remained popular in the country, building a multigenerational audience with his eclectic blend of gospel, R & B, and rap.

The veteran Christian artist has faced increased scrutiny from American and African audiences in recent years in response to videos of suggestive dancing and rap lyrics that some perceive as irreverent or blasphemous. Kenyan gospel artist Jefro Katai said that a 2022 performance in which Franklin rapped the line “the Lion and the Lamb will bow down to the GOAT” (referring to the acronym for “greatest of all time”) gave listeners pause; some heard it as a sacrilegious suggestion that Jesus would pay homage to an artist.

“We are familiar with the teachings of Christ as the Lamb, and we are also called to be sheep,” said Katai. “I think many Christians heard that rap on a surface level and frowned on Kirk.”

The global reach of the American Christian music industry has meant that the public personas of its artists are up for global discussion. Katai said that African Christians have always had to evaluate the influence of American artists and negotiate which differences to accept as cultural rather than moral.

“American artists can have some tattoos and piercings, for example,” he said. “And some of them are liberal in their politics,” pointing out that some conservative Kenyans objected to Franklin’s willingness to appear publicly with liberal American politicians like Vice President Kamala Harris.

However, Katai said, most Kenyan Christians historically have been willing to overlook those differences when an artist’s music seems to be serving the global church. In Shirima’s view, music from the US has served and will continue to serve the African church.

“Africans are generally very supportive of artists whose songs minister to them,” Shirima said. “We’ve seen this with artists like Don Moen and CeCe Winans, whose songs are sung in our churches. We truly appreciate their talents and giftings.”

Kenyan Christians generally listen to an array of music from Nigeria, South Africa, and the US, in large part because of the production quality and because their local industry isn’t big enough to support full-time recording artists.

“That one can be a gospel artist as a profession [in the US] is quite encouraging. But the reality in Africa is that one also needs a second job to make it in gospel. I sense things are changing, but most Christians are still dealing with bread-and-butter issues,” said Kiarie Mwenda, a management consultant and a longtime fan of Kirk Franklin.

For some, the gap between the lived realities of African Christians and American Christian performing artists is a cause for concern. Some suspect that in addition to an imbalance in economic power between African audiences and American artists, there are competing worldviews.

Olivia Kibui, a recent graduate from Daystar University, is convinced that the interests of American Christian artists can’t be neatly separated from the global political and economic landscape.

“Any media from the US always has an agenda. Always. It is never just what you see. And all their machinery is usually involved,” said Kibui. She also insists that American Christian media is partly to blame for the surging interest in New Age and alternative spirituality.

“These tours have more to do with the ideals and ideas of men than God,” she said. “Kenyans since the ’90s have been followers of US evangelical ideas. Generally, American Christianity is very shallow.”

Not all Kenyan Christians are as pessimistic about the influence of American Christian media. Eva Ishengoma, a Tanzanian businesswoman now living in Nairobi, says that Kenyans value the music of Don Moen, Kirk Franklin, and Maverick City Music because it’s good music.

“Kenyans warmly welcome Christian musicians that come from the US. When secular musicians come, they are received well, so long as Kenyans love their music,” she says. “Africans are receptive to artists from the US as long as their songs are hits.”

In recent years, Christian artists like Travis Greene, Todd Dulaney, William McDowell, Lecrae, Andy Mineo, KB, and Trip Lee have performed in Kenya for enthusiastic crowds. The only recent example of strong opposition or backlash to a Christian figure from the US was to charismatic evangelist Benny Hinn when he visited earlier this year.

Although some opening acts dropped out of the Harare concert, the performance in Nairobi went as planned, with Zambian artist Pompi opening the show and performances by Malawian musician Jeremiah Chikhwaza and Bethuel Lasoi, a songwriter and worship leader at Nairobi’s International Christian Centre. The tour wrapped up in the UK at the end of August with a performance at London’s Wembley Arena.

The mixed response of African audiences to Maverick City Music and Kirk Franklin may be a harbinger of intensifying scrutiny American Christian musicians who seek to cultivate a global audience. As American artists leverage social media and translation to reach Christians around the world, their personas, affiliations, and politics are increasingly visible, and perhaps increasingly alienating.

And yet, the music of Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music has played a significant role in the faith journeys of many Africans, who have forged strong personal connections with the songs themselves and the musicians who wrote or performed them. For some, it seems unfair to brush aside the artists and music that have ministered to them so powerfully.

“On a personal level, the life and music of Kirk has kept me sober,” said Mwenda, reflecting on his decades spent listening to Franklin’s music. “And Maverick City got me through the COVID season.”

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Books

Review

Meet the ‘Precocious Atheist’ Still Pining for a Misplaced Faith

Justin Brierley

Donna Freitas hasn’t found Jesus on the other side of depression and trauma. But her search persists.

Christopher Lane / Getty

Donna Freitas’s spiritual autobiography, Wishful Thinking: How I Lost My Faith and Why I Want to Find It, stands in the tradition of the “dark-night-of-the-soul” memoir. But unlike mystics such as St. John of the Cross, who found their way through dark times into the light of faith, Freitas is unsure whether she ever believed in God to begin with.

A successful scholar and author of teen and adult fiction, Freitas was raised in a devout Catholic home in Rhode Island. She writes nostalgically about a childhood surrounded by spiritual memorabilia, such as angel figurines and Virgin Mary statuettes, beloved by her grandmother. Attending mass every Sunday was central to family life, especially for her Italian American mother, whose faith was simple, constant, and enduring.

However, belief didn’t come so easily for Freitas, who began to struggle with doubt from an early age. When an acquaintance described her as a “precocious atheist,” the label stuck. And despite going through the motions of confirmation in the Catholic church, she failed to inherit the devout faith of her mother. She writes with toe-curling embarrassment about her “angry atheist” phase as a young adult, including phone calls from college in which she told her mother that “your God is nothing but another Santa Claus.”

Philosophy to the rescue

As you may already suspect, this is as much a story about Freitas’s relationship with her mother as it is about her search for a relationship with God.

Despite a wealth of academic credentials—her research on the lives of young people has yielded notable books like Sex and the Soul and The Happiness Effect—the story Freitas tells is not primarily an intellectual quest. You won’t find any examination of core apologetics arguments, like attempts to reconcile science and faith or address the problem of evil. Belief in God is simply presented as something you either have or you don’t. And Freitas says she doesn’t have it. But she wishes she did, writing,

I may have lost my faith as a child, misplaced it very young. But I have never stopped searching to find it again because if my mother taught me anything, she instilled the notion that our belief in God is precious.

Freitas movingly describes how any hope of holding on to God seemed to disappear when she entered a period of deep depression in her early 20s. Although the darkness lifted eventually, it would return many times throughout her life. She knows that for many people, faith in God is the only thing that makes sense in the midst of such suffering. But the fact that she felt so alone in her “bottomless abyss” was the final confirmation that there was no divine hand waiting to pull her out.

Instead, something else came to the rescue: philosophy.

Freitas’s joyful discovery of the work of existential philosophers is an enchanting part of the book. She describes the emotional thrill of finding intellectual soulmates in Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. Their works not only spoke to her frequent encounters with the existential void within but also gave voice to her experience (or lack thereof) of faith.

The book describes Freitas’s attempts to find peace and wholeness through academia and philosophy, which are both touching and agonizing to read. Time and again, she reminds us how much she longs for the simple faith of her mother, and why it seems to remain tantalizingly out of reach.

The memoir is also instructive in framing how Freitas’s journey has been shaped by the Catholicism she inherited. Aware that her readership will likely contain more evangelicals than Catholics—her publisher, Worthy Books, caters largely to this audience—Freitas devotes a chapter to the wildly different assumptions about Scripture and practice embodied by the two groups.

She contends that evangelicals read their Bibles and examine issues like sex and relationships in ways that are rarely encouraged among lay Catholics. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but her analysis probably reflects the type of cultural Catholicism that dominates a university like Georgetown, where she studied as an undergraduate.

Ironically, despite her own unfamiliarity with Scripture, Freitas’s love of philosophy led her to pursue a PhD in theology. The avowed atheist found herself studying alongside Catholic ordinands and theologians. This turned out to be both a blessing and a curse in her ongoing search for God.

Tragically, Freitas became the target of an obsessive sexual pursuit by an abusive academic priest. When she reported him to the authorities, she says, the church was only interested in protecting the professor and its institutional reputation. It left her devastated.

Yet much good came out of her theological studies. She discovered the lives and writings of female mystics, such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. They struck Freitas as proto-feminists of the medieval age—as torchbearers who dared to approach God in ways that transcended the norms of their era.

Unexpectedly, the nearest thing to evidence for God came as Freitas’s mother was dying from cancer. As she considered the countless acts of kindness shown during and after her mother’s illness, she found herself compelled to revise her opinion of the Catholic church: Institutionally, its record might be deeply flawed, but its local members could still minister great healing and love.

“During those months,” she writes,

When my mother was first receiving treatment, God took the form of sausage and meatballs and big pots of tomato sauce and God was in those sick days offered by my mother’s colleagues. God was in the prayers answered that we didn’t need to utter because the parish community got there first and made it so we didn’t have to pray for those things at all.

Faith in others’ faith

Wishful Thinking is a beautifully written memoir in which the journey is more emotional than theological. This will doubtless result in frustration for some readers, as it leaves the author’s search for God frustratingly unresolved.

Ultimately, however, those female voices from centuries past and the continuing influence of her own mother (and grandmother) helped Freitas to retain some form of Catholic identity, despite having every reason to reject it. As she reflects: “Maybe it seems a little weird to call myself Catholic given how the jury is still out—kind of way, way out—on the belief front for me.”

The closest we get to a final resolution is a moving description of how, despite struggling to find God in church, Freitas now finds that the familiar words, actions, and rituals of the Catholic Mass allow her to connect emotionally with the memory of her mother and grandmother. If she has any belief at all, it is faith in their faith.

This is a personal journey, honestly told. But, as a Christian myself, I wanted to reach through the pages of the book and encourage Freitas to give up searching for the same experience of God that her mother found comfort in. Far better to go to the source, seeking the image of God found in the Jesus of the Gospels.

Perhaps Freitas would tell me that’s the evangelical in me speaking—always fixated on Scripture. But I was struck by how rarely the figure of Christ featured in a book about someone trying to make sense of Christianity. If you want to find God, surely that’s the place to start?

A notable exception comes when Freitas describes a sudden moment of clarity while reading Sartre during her philosophical awakening. The philosopher’s concept of “bad faith” refers to the danger of investing our self-worth in temporal things—careers, relationships, love—that will inevitably let us down.

Freitas acknowledges that, for Christians, Jesus must be the answer to Sartre’s “bad faith” dilemma. But, when plunged into the abyss of depression by relationship breakdowns and traumatic life events, she says she has simply never found Jesus waiting for her:

This is where the difference between a believing Christian and a faith-challenged person like me reveals itself. I plunge into that darkness and wish for someone to carry me to the other side of this hell. But the only way I ever get there is if I somehow find the way out again alone.

For a season, Freitas tried to implement Sartre’s solution—surrendering to the meaninglessness of life and perhaps finding a way to live above the maelstrom of the storm. But she struggled to make it work in practice.

However, I believe Jesus has a better response to nihilism than Sartre. In his famous story about the wise and foolish builders (Matt. 7:24–27), he pointed out how easily life lets us down when we construct it on the shifting sands offered by this world. Instead, he advised his hearers to weatherproof their souls against the storms of life by building on the rock of his own life and teachings.

That may sound like wishful thinking to some people, but it has proven a solid foundation for countless lives and even whole civilizations. I hope that Wishful Thinking (beautifully written as it is) won’t be Freitas’s last word on her search. In my experience, Jesus often surprises those who keep seeking.

Justin Brierley is a writer, broadcaster, and speaker in the UK. He is the author of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again.

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Theology

Will Your Presidential Vote Send You to Hell?

Russell Moore

Decisions made on Election Day have implications for Judgment Day. But let’s not confuse one day for the other.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

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

Since by nature of my work I’ve had to weigh in on a lot of controversial issues over the years, I’ve been cussed out a time or two. Sometimes, I’ve been yelled at with, “God damn you!” When an unbeliever says that, it’s one thing. Christians, though, mean it literally.

A family I know and love was rattled recently to get a note from someone they considered a longtime friend suggesting that the family was going to hell. The cause for the impending brimstone was not that the family denied the faith, embraced some heresy, or adopted some unrepentant life of immorality. At issue was that the family did not support a presidential candidate.

The note-sender put in all the provisions of “I’m only saying this because I love you,” which works for cruelty the same way “This doesn’t actually count as sex” works for people who want to sleep with each other without giving up their purity rings. Adding a “bless your heart” to the “God damn you” doesn’t really change it that much.

This sort of situation comes to me at least once a week these days and, in some ways, it’s jarringly new in our history. I can’t think of churches splitting over whether Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson should sit in the Oval Office, for example. I can’t imagine family members refusing to speak to one another over who voted for Jimmy Carter and who for Gerald Ford. That has changed over the past decade or so, and some of us aren’t used to it yet. I pray we never will be.

Much of this has to do with larger divisions in American life—the polarization of the populace, the tribalization of the parties, the trivialization of politics itself. And some of it has to do with changes in the American church.

A market-driven religion seeks to appeal to “felt needs” and especially to what drives the passions of the people to whom it wants to appeal. When the concern is what happens after death or how to be forgiven of guilt, a market-driven religion emphasizes those things.

And when the market secularizes to caring more about how to thrive in the workforce or how to spice up a marriage, a market-driven religion will reflect that. When the market further secularizes to the point that what people want is “red meat” about why their political or ethnic or racial “enemies” are bad, a market-driven religion can do that too. And it has.

That’s why we end up with an American religion in which people can gladly partner with prosperity gospel teachers who would be thrown out of a Billy Sunday crusade, not to mention the Council of Nicaea. These same people simultaneously denounce as maybe-not-even-regenerate those who are orthodox on every article of the faith but who won’t violate their consciences on supporting political causes or candidates they believe to be wrong.

In a politicized, secularized American Christianity, some seem to think that the apostle’s admonition to make your calling and election sure (2 Pet. 1:10) has to do with posting the right pop-political opinions on social media.

We live in a time when religious experience has grown cold and dead, and political affiliation feels alive and invigorating. Plus, it’s easy. Trolling your neighbors on social media for their politics may cost you some self-respect, but you can budget for that.

On the other hand, bearing witness to Christ and persuading your neighbors to give their lives to him requires something of you. Modeling Christ in word and life for your Haitian immigrant neighbors fleeing violence and poverty will require you to interrupt your life and comfort. Reposting memes falsely accusing them of eating household pets—because somebody’s cousin’s friend from high school said they did—takes only a few seconds.

While this might feel new to many of us, we should recognize that it’s rooted in something very old: an Americanized version of one of the earliest heresies in the church.

Much of the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters to the churches in Rome and Galatia, addresses a dispute about what it means to follow Christ and to be united to him in faith. Those the apostles pronounced to be false teachers suggested that the Gentiles seeking to follow Christ must first become Jews, with the marks of circumcision and the observance of diets and days. Concerning the teachers who insisted on circumcision for these Gentiles, Paul wrote to the Galatians, “To them we did not yield in submission even for a moment so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you” (2:5, ESV throughout).

For the apostle, those who added to the gospel were not thereby practicing addition but subtraction. A gospel of “Christ and” is another gospel altogether (1:6). Paul speaks of those who wish to add additional entrance requirements to the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected as “anathema,” as those who should be cursed (vv. 8–9). If one is united to Christ, the old categories are broken down, and people who ordinarily wouldn’t be united together—Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, zealot and tax collector—find themselves in this mystery where the only defining category is Christ and Christ alone (Col. 3:11).

The gospel, of course, works itself out in life—both in terms of how we live our lives personally and how we live our lives together, socially, culturally, and politically.

People can be committed, though, to the same goals of justice but differ as to how to get to them. The Bible mandates care for the poor. On some matters, the application is explicit and clear-cut: One should not exploit the pay of one’s laborers, for instance (James 5:1–6). On other matters, believers may disagree on exactly which public policies benefit the poor and what unintended consequences might actually hurt them. Somebody on that will likely be wrong. That’s why we have debate and moral persuasion.

Some Christians believe the pro-life vision of care for the unborn always requires voting for the Republican ticket, no matter what. Others believe the pro-life vision is harmed long-term by tying it to sexual anarchy, misogyny, contempt for the vulnerable, and mob violence. Some believe their consciences require them to vote for a candidate with whom they disagree, even on major issues, but who will respect the rule of law and the constitutional order. Others don’t believe they can vote for either candidate in good conscience.

As you know, I have very strong views on the presidential election. I have and will continue to make those views known. To do otherwise would be to violate my own conscience, and my own sense of what it means to love my country. Some people disagree with me—even up to half the country. I do not believe those viewpoints are morally or rationally equal, of course, or I wouldn’t hold the views I do.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I think that those who disagree with me are, by definition, not Christians. To do so would be to add to the requirement of faith in Christ a commitment to see the political and cultural stakes of the moment the way I do. That would be veering close to the Galatian heresy. And that, the Bible says, really does endanger our souls.

We have the obligation to speak out when support for any partisan movement or personality is conflated with Christianity itself. It’s especially odd when those who defend slaveholding or white supremacist Christians of the past as “men of their time” or as good Christians with “blind spots” are nonetheless willing to say that only those who vote the way they do can be genuine Christians.

More serious than all of the issues combined—more serious even than the future of the American Republic itself—is the conflation of the gospel with a human personality or power. When the church yawns at Trinitarian heresy or scoffs at what Jesus defines as the fruit of the Spirit but unites around a partisan identity, we are heading toward something closer to the imperial cult against which the risen Christ warned the first-century churches—congregations persecuted by that cult for refusing to say, “Caesar is Lord.” Decisions one makes on Election Day have implications for Judgment Day. But if we confuse one day for the other, we’ve lost more than an election. It’s bad enough when we say to our political opponents, metaphorically, “Go to hell.” It’s even worse when we think that’s the gospel.

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

News

Pro-Life Voters Find Trump Disappointing—but Harris Even Worse

Harvest Prude

At the debate, Donald Trump didn’t take a strong stand and continued to defer to the states, while Kamala Harris championed expansive abortion rights.

The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris took place Tuesday night.

Allison Bailey / AFP via Getty Images

During the first presidential debate between former president Donald Trump and vice president Kamala Harris, both candidates spent a few minutes discussing abortion policy, yet pro-life Christians didn’t get the conviction or clarity they were hoping to hear.

Trump twice declined to give a clear answer on whether he would veto a federal abortion ban should Congress pass one and reiterated that he believes abortion restrictions are best left to the states. Meanwhile, Harris said she would recodify Roe v. Wade if it came to her desk and didn’t say whether she supported any restrictions on abortion at all.

Trump appointed three of the US Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in 2022. During the debate, he referred to the justices’ “genius and heart and strength” and “courage” in the Dobbs decision.

He defended the move as something the majority of Americans wanted—to be able to vote on the issue themselves state by state.

“It’s a horrible place to plant your flag:, ‘Life is a state’s rights issue.’ No, it isn’t,” said Ryan Bomberger, founder of the conservative pro-life organization The Radiance Foundation. “Should civil rights have been a state’s rights issue? Because when that happened, it didn’t go well.”

Bomberger plans on voting for Trump but also said that seeing Republicans retreat on life has been “devastating.”

The discussion during this week’s debate reflected how pro-lifers have found their convictions on the sanctity of life sidelined by both major parties, with Republicans under Trump backing away from what has been a core voting issue for religious conservatives and Democrats doubling down on the right to abortion.

Trump didn’t voice any specific pro-life positions other than opposing abortion in the third trimester. He also sought to highlight Democrats’ extremism on abortion, accusing them of supporting “execution after birth” of babies.

Trump’s answer on a national abortion ban led to a back-and-forth with the moderator.

“If I could just get a yes or no, because your running mate, J. D. Vance, has said that you would veto if it did come to your desk,” ABC News moderator Linsey Davis asked, referencing a hypothetical national abortion ban. Getting such a bill over the finish line would require Republicans to control both chambers of Congress.

“I didn’t discuss it with J. D., in all fairness,” Trump said, then said that Vance might have a different view of the issue. Trump had previously also implied he wouldn’t sign a bill banning abortion nationwide.

“We’re headed back to this space where social conservatives aren’t sure what deal they’re getting with Donald Trump,” John Shelton, policy director for former vice president Mike Pence’s foundation, Advancing American Freedom, told CT.

Trump’s move toward the political center on abortion—or failure to speak with clarity about his position—means there is less of a contrast between the two parties when it comes to life.

“A lot of people are dispirited, demotivated,” Shelton said. Yet, “ultimately, you don’t necessarily have to trust that Trump is going to be great on this. You can just trust that Harris will be worse.”

On the debate stage, Trump said that bringing up whether Harris would sign a bill to codify abortion rights was a waste of time, since such a bill would require Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. “We don’t have to discuss it, because she’d never be able to get it,” he added.

Harris clarified that, should Congress pass a bill codifying a constitutional right to an abortion similar to Roe v. Wade while she was in office, she would sign it. She also came out swinging against states that have restricted or banned abortion.

VP Harris refuses to answer where she will draw the line on abortion.
— Tony Perkins (@tperkins)
VP Harris refuses to answer where she will draw the line on abortion.
— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) September 11, 2024

?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>September 11, 2024

Some Christian pro-life leaders pushed back on how Harris brought faith into her responses, referencing couples who “pray and dream” of building a family with reproductive assistance and suggesting that religious beliefs can align with abortion protections.

She emphasized the difficult position women are put in when they seek abortions and claimed, “One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government, and Donald Trump, certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”

Harris declined to give any specific limitations she would support on abortion and expressed incredulity that abortions at nine months occur. “Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion,” she said. “That isn’t happening; it’s insulting to the women of America.”

Trump referenced controversial comments by a former Virginia governor on third-trimester abortions. The majority of abortions take place in the first trimester (93%) with 6 percent occurring between 14 and 20 weeks and 1 percent performed at or after 21 weeks, according to Pew Research Center. The United States is one of a handful of countries that allows elective abortion past 20 weeks.

Since the Dobbs decision, a number of states have loosened restrictions or voted against placing more restrictions on abortion, including in Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas, leading some politicians and strategists to blame these electoral losses on a backlash to Dobbs and the GOP’s overall position on abortion. Since then, national Republicans have sought to back away from the issue.

Currently, 63 percent of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center. In contrast to other religious groups, a majority of white evangelicals oppose abortion, with 73 percent holding it should be illegal in all or most cases.

In July, the Republican Party watered down its previous position on abortion. It scrapped language that called for a national abortion ban, instead punting the issue to the states.

“I have to admit I have serious scruples following the number of shifts in the GOP platform and the general messaging that has pretty overtly abandoned pro-lifers and social conservatives,” said Marlo Slayback, director of programs for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. She said some are optimistic that Trump might reverse course once elected, but others aren’t convinced.

“They fear this will mark the inflection point of the GOP that historically stood by the pro-life cause, that the pro-life issue and even other issues important to social conservatives, like traditional marriage, will be abandoned in a misguided effort to win elections as Americans adopt more liberal views on these issues,” Slayback, a young Catholic mom who describes herself as a single-issue voter on abortion and life issues, told CT.

Overall, committed pro-life voters are unsatisfied with the lack of urgency around abortion. Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Andrew Walker told Politico that he knows “not a small number” of conservative evangelicals who are not going to vote for Trump over the issue.

“Former President Donald Trump no longer has a convincing case for why pro-lifers should vote for him,” bioethics professor Charles Camosy, who is Catholic, wrote for The Atlantic.

Abortion will be on the ballot in ten states this November: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota.

In most cases, the ballot initiatives would amend the constitution in these states to remove or ease restrictions on abortion. Nebraska is an exception: Voters will consider dueling ballot initiatives, one that allows abortion up until fetal viability and another that would leave the state’s 12-week ban in place and continue to ban abortion in the second or third trimesters, with some exceptions. The amendment that gets the most votes will be implemented.

One of those states is Trump’s current state of residence. He had previously criticized Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis for the state’s current abortion policy, which limits abortion after six weeks, as “too short” and a “terrible mistake.” When asked about how Trump would vote on a state referendum that would codify access to abortion, the former president said he would “be voting that we need more than six weeks.” Later, he clarified that would not vote for Florida’s initiative.

After criticizing Trump’s shifting stances on abortion, Live Action founder Lila Rose, an evangelical-turned-Catholic activist, said she hoped Trump would change his mind and earn back pro-lifers’ votes. During the debate, she wrote on X that she was glad Trump didn’t confirm Vance’s remark that he’d veto a national ban.

It was positive that Trump seemed to back down from JD Vance’s comments about vetoing an abortion ban.

Of course killing babies should be banned and if Congress sends you a pro-life law, sign it!
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) September 11, 2024

Other evangelical leaders predicted that despite their concerns on the issue, religious conservatives would come home to the former president when it comes time to vote.

Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, told Religion News Service that Trump’s track record on abortion outweighs his rhetoric this election cycle: “While his position on abortion may not be as absolute as some would hope, it doesn’t change the fact that he has been the most pro-life president in my lifetime and is the only pro-life presidential candidate on the ballot this election.”

Faith & Freedom Coalition head Ralph Reed said that evangelical support for Trump won’t waver because of Harris’s “extreme” positions on abortion.

Isaac Willour, a conservative commentator, analyst for Bowyer Research, and Pennsylvania voter, told CT he only expects defections if a second Trump administration actually expands “reproductive rights” and abortion access.

“I think a large swath of the pro-life movement doesn’t follow the ins and outs of everything that Trump’s been saying the past four weeks,” he said. “If he wins and then governs in the way that Trump who showed up to the March for Life would … I think the pro-life movement will welcome him back with open arms.”

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Ideas

Worship Together or Bowl Alone

Brad East

There’s already a local institution that meets our moment’s many social needs. It’s called church.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

From wherever you’re sitting, this likely feels like a low point for the church in America. (Elsewhere it’s a different matter.)

Some of our neighbors see the church as an agent of reaction, pressing the brakes on every major movement for progress since the country’s founding. Others believe the church is a wolf in the process of losing its sheep’s clothing, finally being revealed as toxic, abusive, and self-protective. For still others, the church is a nonstarter, even invisible. Perhaps older generations attended services at Christmas and Easter and more recent generations claimed they did. No need to pretend anymore.

For those of us who remain committed to church—even pastors, apologists, and Christian writers—it may feel tempting to meet this moment by downplaying the church as much as we can. You don’t have to go to church to be Christian, we might say. Christianity is about a personal, individual relationship with Jesus. What matters is whether you know him, follow him, love him, in your daily life. Organized religion may help some folks, but it’s okay if that’s not you. Try a sermon podcast instead.

I’d like to offer a different perspective. It isn’t exactly a theological case, though not because there isn’t one. As I’ve written elsewhere, theologically speaking, there is one reason and one reason only to go to church: God.

If the God of the gospel is the one true and living God, then every one of us should be at church every Sunday morning (and more). If not—if Jesus did not rise from the dead—then the church is built on a lie, our faith is futile, and “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:16–19). If the gospel were false, church would be a waste of time, even if it added decades to our lives and absolutely ensured our total personal flourishing. If the God of Abraham is fictional, if he is not the maker of heaven and earth, it would be better to live in the truth and be miserable than to playact the liturgy and be happy.

But by definition, Christians believe the gospel is true. And if it is true, then church—“the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15, NET) and Christ’s “body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23, ESV)—is a vital element of human life lived to the utmost.

That’s why the instinct to meet our culture’s critique or ignorance of the church by downplaying its import is so misguided. Church is not an optional add-on to Christian faith. It is how we learn to be human as God intended. Indeed, it makes possible truly human life before God.

Church has what we need, the purpose and community and cultivation of virtue for which the rest of our culture is grasping in the dark. It’s right here. It’s nothing to be coy or embarrassed about. It’s nothing to apologize for. Church is what people are hungering for, even if they don’t realize it. Sometimes we ourselves don’t realize it.

Consider some popular recent diagnoses of what ails our society, especially our families and young people. Jonathan Haidt’s An Anxious Generation indicts the “screen-based” childhood of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy decries the colonization of education and parenting by a faux-scientific, quasi-religious therapeutic worldview. James Davison Hunter, Yuval Levin, and Rob Henderson detail the economic precarity haunting the public square, and a growing list of writers including Richard Reeves and Louise Perry have analyzed our confusion about gender, embodiment, work, marriage, and raising children.

We’re even seeing secular thinkers exploring anew the practical and cultural benefits of Christianity—so much so that Justin Brierley has written a book titled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Besides recounting actual conversions, he engages intellectuals who want to be Christian but can’t (yet) bring themselves to convert, a notable development in a supposedly secular age.

Now step back and consider what these authors prescribe.

They tell us that people generally and children particularly flourish when parents are married, when families are intact, when households and neighborhoods are bustling with brothers, sisters, and cousins.

Kids need to be outdoors playing with friends, not indoors on screens. They need to be literate—readers of books that not only provide wisdom but also take them on imaginative adventures.

They need to be charged with good work, with helping their neighbors and serving the least of these. They need to be embedded in a variety of intergenerational social settings that teach them how to navigate uncertain and sometimes risky relationships with peers as well as adults.

And speaking of adults, children need mentors on whom they can rely. They need rituals that mark transitions, whether from childhood to adolescence or adolescence to adulthood. They need spaces in which to feel free to discuss and debate aloud, with friends and trusted adults alike, what it means to be male or female.

They need tech-free spaces in which to inhabit their bodies and be present to others: old and young, black and white, married and single, disabled and able-bodied. They need to suffer boredom—during a sermon, say, or a long budget meeting—and lack an obvious way to stanch it. They need to see adult friendships at both their best and their most challenging.

Now, if you were to design from scratch a local institution to fill to these needs for any child, individual, or family of any income bracket, you’d end up with something very like the church. Even those outside the church are beginning to realize this. See The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson lamenting “the churchgoing bust” (although he’s an agnostic) or Haidt speaking of “a God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart” (although he’s an atheist).

In saying all this, I’m not suggesting the church is reducible to its role in solving social problems. It is more than this, but it is not less. Besides, our social problems are spiritual problems too—and the church is also where we learn to pray, to worship with others, to see what should be obvious but all too often eludes our grasp: that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. The church offers us the solemnity of rites and practices that train our eyes and hearts to stay focused on Jesus in a culture of perpetual irony, cheap snark, and easy entertainment.

None of this should be a shock from a theological perspective. God founded the church. It is no merely human institution. We should expect it to be finely tuned to the complex needs of the human experience—to help us with everything from early socialization to midlife crisis to dying well.

It’s true, to spin off a phrase from Jesus, that the church was made for man (Mark 2:27). In a deeper sense, though, man was made for the church. Humankind is meant for fellowship with God, and we have a foretaste of that feast in the church, the body of Christ. It’s where we were made to flourish. For what makes us flourish most supremely is found most powerfully there, where we worship together, hearkening to the Word and receiving the sacraments.

You’d think that Christians would see the opportunity here—the chance to tell our society that we have what it’s seeking, that a local institution responsive to these social ills already exists. But for the most part we’re failing to seize the moment, and I think the reason is twofold.

At the cultural level, American Christians tend to treat the church as an embarrassing encumbrance or a bait and switch, something to be endured if you want to follow Jesus.

On the contrary: The church is the selling point. I don’t mean that we want people joining churches for the social perks. I mean that Christ himself has made the offer of the gospel one and the same as the offer of joining a people. Just as we cannot have the Father without the Son (1 John 2:23) or adoption by God without adoption by Abraham (Gal. 3:6–4:7), so we cannot have Christ without his body and bride (Eph. 2:1–22). It’s a package deal. The Lord and his family come together; either we have both or we have neither.

In a different context, the Protestant theologian Philip Melanchthon once remarked that to know Christ is to know his benefits. Something like that is true here as well: The church is a haven for humanness. It’s a school for learning to be human like Jesus, the one true fully human being. Accordingly, given the challenges of our day, the church is a training ground for antifragility.

Whatever you call it, the church is there for a reason. It is not an encumbrance. It is not organized religion you can take or leave. Minus the church, the gospel is bodiless, incorporeal, ghostly. According to Scripture, the community to which Christ has forever bound himself is none other than the church (Eph. 5:25–33; 1 Cor. 12:4–27; Rev. 21:1–14). The living God dwells there. In this world, therefore, the church is where fullness of life is found. Let’s act like it.

At the congregational level—and admittedly this is anecdotal—what I see is churches anxious about their falling status, nervous about losing Gen Z, and eager to give the people what (church leaders think) they want. The religious landscape has become a marketplace, and churches compete with one another by offering an ever-flashier product. More technology, louder worship, fewer rituals, catchier slogans, and a whole lot of therapeutic jargon. Something to be entertained by. Something to keep the boredom at bay. Perhaps even something to go viral on socials.

The lesson we should have learned long ago is that the more the church is indistinguishable from the world, the less the world has any reason to take an interest in it. The church cannot do better therapy than counselors, better concerts than rock bands, or better TED talks than best-selling authors. In a competition to entertain, the church will always lose to brunch and the NFL.

The more we try to play catch-up to Hollywood, Nashville, and Silicon Valley, the less distinct the church will be—and the less suited to its purpose of worshiping God and forming humans. The practical benefits of the church’s common life are not its proper center. They are byproducts of the Spirit gathering a human community around the incarnate Son of God, and they will deteriorate or vanish altogether if we are no longer centered on Christ.

Every generation of the church has some urgent question to answer. Ours is not about Christology or iconography or even soteriology. It’s about theological anthropology, the doctrine of the human being.

We Christians know something about what it means to be human—and the many ways being human can go wrong—and our society is desperate for answers to this question. Thankfully, our neighbors don’t have to read Augustine or Calvin or even Paul to figure it out. Being human isn’t something you learn by reading. You learn to be human with other humans, in company with the people of God. In other words, at church.

God has shown us how to be human in Christ, and we learn the lesson in his school, alongside fellow lifelong learners (that’s what “disciple” means, after all). Let’s have the confidence to show others. Let’s say with the psalmist, “Come and see what God has done, his awesome deeds for mankind,” and “let me tell you what he has done for me” (Ps. 66:5, 16). The world is knocking on the door. Let’s invite them to come inside.

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

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Theology

10 Prayers for a Volatile Election Season

Kimberly Deckel

From apathy to anger, how we pray for our country and its citizens matters.

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

I have often heard from others that written prayer seems less inspired than other types of prayer. While I understand this sentiment, I have found that in my own life and in the lives of those around me, there are times when we long to pray but just don’t have the words. In these moments and moments of communal prayer and lament, I find written prayers to be especially welcomed.

We’re in the last couple months leading up to an election some say is the “most important” of our time. As political presidential candidates vie for our votes, divisiveness and vitriol are at an all-time high in our country—not just in the public square but in the church as well.

For many of us, this moment in history may be one where we don’t have the words, but it is more important than ever for God’s people to lay aside the wrathful ways of the world and take up the ministry of reconciliation and intercession on behalf of our nation. We must lay our crowns down at the feet of our Savior, along with any judgment or offense causing us to withhold love from our neighbors.

We must turn our eyes upon Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith and the king of another kingdom altogether.

A prayer against apathy

God of empathy and compassion, we are grateful you do not sit idly by without concern for your people. In your deep love for us, you sent your only Son to walk among us, to know what it is to be human, and to suffer on our behalf. O Lord, as your humble servants, give us the ability to look upon others with the same empathy and compassion. Protect us from being so consumed with our own lives that we fail to notice what is happening in the lives of others and the world around us. Move in our hearts, O Lord, giving us eyes to see, ears to hear, and courage to act. We pray in your Son’s name.

A prayer for a Christlike spirit

Holy Spirit, you are the Comforter and Advocate, who was present with disciples even after Jesus ascended to heaven. We pray for an openness to your work in and through us. May we resist the temptation to get caught up in fruitless arguments and defensiveness. Strengthen us to serve and uphold one another and to put the needs and suffering of others ahead of our own. Especially during this divisive election season, we pray for a gentle, loving, and kind spirit—like that of Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit as one God eternally.

A prayer for nonviolence in our country

O Good Shepherd, you who gather us as lambs in your arms, carrying us close to your heart, we long for peace on earth as it is in heaven. In this election season, we ask that you carry our nation close to your heart. Protect us and guide us into the ways of peace. We pray specifically against violence at political rallies, polling places, debates, and other spaces where many are gathered. May we become a nation that turns our weapons into plowshares, taking on your posture of nonviolence. By the power of your Spirit, we ask for safety to prevail and that you would lead us into the ways of your peaceful kingdom. We submit ourselves and this prayer to you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

A prayer for the opposing candidates

King of the universe, you who reign over all things, we submit to you our thoughts, feelings, and frustrations about the candidate we disagree with. May we not look at them with contempt, and may we be reminded that they, too, are created in your image. We pray for protection over all political candidates and their families. We humbly ask, O Lord, that you act in mighty ways in our own hearts. Give us the humility that is needed to pray for all people, not just those who think or look like us. Direct, we pray, the next president of the United States with a heart for justice and truth. Deliver us from poverty, prejudice, and oppression. Regardless of who is elected, may your will prevail by the power of your Spirit,. We ask all these things in your holy name.

A prayer for a posture of humility and against defensiveness

God of humility, you humbled yourself to the point of death on the cross. You show us the way of the servant. Rather than being motivated by pride and self-righteousness, may we, as your people, clothe ourselves with kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Manifest in us the ability to hold in tension the disagreement of others and our own convictions with grace. Enlighten us, guide us, and strengthen us so that we may submit to your will through Jesus Christ, our High Priest.

A prayer for the ability to see things from others’ perspectives

Gracious and merciful Jesus, you spent time with those you knew would betray you, along with prostitutes, tax collectors, and others who were outcasts. We come before you, asking for the ability to hear and consider the perspectives of those with whom we disagree. Root us in your Word and cultivate in us the ability to compassionately and clearly articulate our convictions. Remove from us the need to prove our points and defend ourselves, and instead fill us with your overflowing grace. Enable us to look with tenderness upon the entire human family through your eyes, O Jesus.

A prayer for those who are marginalized around us

Christ Incarnate, we uplift those who are marginalized in our nation: the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the unhoused, racial and ethnic minorities, and those who do not find protection in the laws of this land. You came to proclaim good news to the poor, to restore the sight of the blind, and to set the oppressed free. May those on the margins of our society have a deep and true sense of your love for them. Protect the least, the lost, and the lonely, we pray, as a mother hen protects her chicks. Grant us the ability to love our neighbor and to exercise our right to vote with the interests of the least of these in mind—for we know that what we do for the least among us, we do also for you. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

A prayer for when we feel anxious about the future

God of Shalom, you say, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Today we bring to you our burdens, our uncertainties, and our anxieties. When we cannot sleep, when our minds won’t slow down, on the days when our palms are sweaty and our hearts race—when our imaginations get the best of us and we are full of despondency and anxiety about the future—calm our hearts, O Lord. In you alone, our souls find rest. In this chaotic world, we lay all our burdens at your feet, and we find safety and protection in your kingdom. In Jesus’ name.

A prayer for unity with our neighbors who vote differently than us

O Father, you who hear all our prayers, sanctify us for your good purposes, we pray. Show us how to love our neighbor as ourselves, even those who disagree with us, as you have commanded us. May we be leery of any unity that is used to manipulate and silence others, especially the least of these. When we find ourselves tempted to dismiss others’ thoughts and experiences, create in us the ability to seek understanding rather than to pronounce judgement, as well as the ability to see the humanity in others. Manifest in us the ability to think beyond our own political interests and to consider the interests of those who are different from us. We ask all these things in the powerful name of Jesus.

A prayer for the act of voting and the election outcome

Almighty God, prepare our hearts and minds as we head toward voting. We express gratitude for the right to vote, and we lament the brokenness of our democracy and voting system—a system that continues to suffer from inequity. Empower us, O Lord, to make decisions rooted in the ways of Jesus rather than the ways of the world. Give us wisdom and discernment as we cast our votes with a humble spirit, and let our voting be an act of prayer. May we be reminded that the candidates we vote for are not our savior, but you are the bringer of the heavenly kingdom, and our ultimate hope rests in you. We commend this nation to your care, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Kimberly Deckel is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She serves as as executive pastor at Church of the Cross in Austin, Texas.

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Culture

How Colombia’s Most Popular Christian Artist Landed in Houston

Hernán Restrepo

Alex Campos has a new home in Texas and a new musical focus—Latin worship.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

Colombian cyclists often refer to themselves as escarabajos or “beetles,” drawing a comparison between the journeys of the small bugs across their varied terrain with those of bicyclists pedaling up and down their country’s mountainsides. For one of Latin America’s most popular Christian artists—a self-proclaimed escarabajo—a grueling ride can help generate a new song.

“There is no recipe. I don’t have anything special. While I’m riding my bike, there’s a melody, a theme going around in my head,” said Alex Campos, who hails from Bogotá, a city that sits at more than a mile and a half high. “It’s about being connected, meditating not only on the Word but on the things that God does in your life—the good and bad.”

It may be true that Campos has no secret recipe for a hit song, but he has won five Latin Grammys over the course of his career and is one of the most influential Latin American Christian artists in the industry. His most popular songs, like Al taller del Maestro (“To the Master’s Workshop”), have crossed from Christian to secular radio stations throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He averages 1.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify and has 2.55 million channel subscribers on YouTube.

According to Colombian Billboard journalist Luisa Calle, who highlighted Campos’s “Pan Duro” as one of the best Latin American Christian songs of 2023, persistence and musical versatility have sustained his long career.

“Campos does not think that he has already achieved everything. He continues to evolve; he continues to innovate; he continues pursuing new goals,” Calle told CT.

Campos’s ability to work in various Latin American folk and dance genres has allowed him to collaborate widely and produce music that draws on a different combination of styles and regional musical traditions, said Calle. Campos has worked with not only an array of Christian popular musicians but also mainstream vallenato (a Colombian folk genre) and ranchera (a traditional genre rooted in rural Mexico) artists, including Fonseca, Silvestre Dangond, Jorge Celedón, and Yeison Jiménez. “Pan Duro” is a bachata (a dance genre originating in the Dominican Republic) song that also draws on bolero (a Cuban poetic song style) and ballad sensibilities.

“Colombian artists are very versatile because there is great musical diversity in our country,” said Calle. “Alex has been able to make the most of that.”

These days, Campos has given up the mountains of Colombia for Houston, Texas, a city whose downtown is nearly at sea level. The Christian pop star is now releasing music as an independent artist and attends the Spanish-speaking congregation of Lakewood Church, a move that reflects some of the broader trends in global contemporary worship music and transnational evangelicalism in the Americas. His latest album, Esencia, released on August 23, has a new sound, combining conventions of contemporary worship music from the US and Australia with style elements of Latin pop and other regional Latin American genres.

With Esencia, Campos continues to lean into his versatility as he starts a new chapter of his career, turning his attention to music that serves church congregations and contributes to a growing body of contemporary worship music written in Spanish, for Spanish-speaking communities (rather than translated). Campos has served as a worship leader and preacher throughout his career (he was featured in Hillsong’s 2012 Global Project), but the album marks his entry into worship music as a songwriter.

“I have wanted to make a congregational album for a long time,” Campos told CT. “Esencia is an album of music that can be sung in churches. I’m very excited about that.”

In the Latin American Christian music industry, as in the US, worship music has become the dominant genre within the niche, and artists who have written radio hits are increasingly seeing worship music production as both a spiritually fulfilling endeavor and a strategic career move. This trend has made waves in Brazil, as popular secular artists are crossing over into the Christian sphere to release worship tracks.

Christian music is one of the fastest-growing musical genres in the US—growth that is fueled by the popularity of worship music. Artists like Brandon Lake are finding success straddling the boundary between Christian pop or rock and contemporary worship. And as that boundary has become fainter, Christian artists are increasingly creating music for congregations and Christian radio.

Campos has been navigating the changing Christian music industry for years, but now he’s doing so from a home in a new country.

“It is difficult to let go of your culture, food, and family. We did not come because we wanted to, but out of obedience to God. It took me a year to understand his purpose for us here,” said Campos. “I feel like I’m starting my career all over again.”

Although he isn’t typically outspoken about his politics, Campos said that political changes in Colombia contributed to his decision to leave the country.

In 2022, former guerrilla leader Gustavo Petro, a leftist leader with an unfriendly relationship with the country’s evangelical churches, was elected president of Colombia. When he was mayor of Bogotá, Petro’s office refused to allow Góspel al Parque, the largest free Christian music festival in Latin America, to take place as planned in 2013. Some have perceived Petro’s election to the presidency as a sign that the country is becoming more and more politically fraught for Colombian evangelicals.

During a 2019 television interview, Campos was asked what he thought of then presidential candidate Petro. “If that man is elected president, I will leave the country,” he said.

Reflecting on the interview, Campos said, “I think I was expressing what many Colombians were feeling—that if a leftist government came to power, it was necessary to go out and look for other horizons.”

Campos moved to the Houston suburbs with his family in April 2022. He has found new career opportunities in Texas, but the transition has come with personal challenges. The musician struggled with depression during his first months in the US, a painful experience he says helped him empathize with other immigrants. It also spurred him to double down on his faith.

“Many of the Latinos who come here end up getting absorbed in work, and they move away from the church,” he said. “But we know that if God brought us here, it is because this country needs to be passionate about the Lord again, and Latino Christians are part of his plan to rekindle that flame.”

Campos speaks openly about his belief in God’s ability to heal and work miracles. In 2002, he was diagnosed with a tumor in his throat and lost his voice just days after beginning the tour to launch his first album. Doctors warned that his singing ability would be affected by the surgery to remove it, cutting his vocal capacity in half. According to Campos, when he went in for a consultation before his surgery, the tumor was gone.

“When I understood that God didn’t want my voice but my heart, I was healed.”

After that health scare, Campos embarked on a decades-long career that has made him arguably the most recognized Colombian Christian artist in Latin America.

Now he is expanding his reach in the US market, writing and recording songs in English and in Spanish. Campos’s 2023 album, Vida, included a song with English and Spanish lyrics. “Libre,” the single from his new album, also has lyrics in both languages and features popular American Christian artist Tauren Wells. The song, released on June 21 of this year, has over 1 million views on YouTube.

After a decade of being signed to major record labels such as CanZion or Essential Records (Sony Music), Campos is pursuing his career as an independent artist, an increasingly popular path for artists who can leverage social media to promote their music without the oversight (or overreach) of a major label. Last year, Campos managed and produced his own 13-concert tour around the US.

Lakewood Church in Houston, Campos’s new home church, is led by Joel Osteen and is one of the largest in the US. Costa Rican musician and preacher Danilo Montero is the pastor of Lakewood’s large Spanish-speaking congregation. Before Montero, the congregation was pastored by influential worship artist Marcos Witt.

The stability and support of Lakewood have allowed Campos to pursue his career as an independent artist and participate in worship music production and leadership in both English and Spanish. Although Campos is not on staff at Lakewood, he is an occasional collaborator with Lakewood Music. Campos said that Houston has been a good place to build relationships with other Christian artists and worship leaders.

“Recently the guys from Miel San Marcos [a Dove Award–winning Guatemalan Christian band] were at my house,” Campos said. “Bani Muñoz, Harold and Elena, Ingrid Rosario, or Thalles Roberto … There are a lot of people here to share coffee, lunch, a good chat. We are edified by living near so many fellow Christian musicians who have blessed us.”

As Campos has turned toward worship music as a songwriter, he has had to adapt his poetic lyricism and gift for imagery.

“His lyrics are quite complex; they are not the simple or conventional lyrics we generally see within Christian music,” Billboard’s Calle told CT. “I think the personal stories he describes in his songs—stories of struggle and faith—and his vulnerability help him to connect with people.”

Although Escencia is clearly a foray into contemporary worship music, Campos has not abandoned his interest in blending Latin American genres. As the album’s subtitle, “Latin Worship,” suggests, Campos is bringing those genres into conversation with the style and aesthetic characteristics of popular worship. Songs like “Libre,” “Gracias Cristo,” or “Te Amo” fit the canons of modern worship. But others like “Rumbo Pa la Iglesia” boldly mix musical styles as different as regional Mexican and joropo (a genre originating in the eastern Colombian plains). “Veo Tu Gloria” oscillates between Argentine tango and Puerto Rican salsa.

These days, Campos writes for the church as he navigates life in a new country and in the context of a new faith community, away from familiar landscapes. Last month, Hurricane Beryl brought huge pine trees down onto their house and car.

“Just as nature recovers over time, we too can find within ourselves the strength to overcome challenges,” Campos wrote on Instagram. “This incident is not the end, but a new beginning. It teaches us to value what we have, to be resilient and to trust that we can always rebuild and flourish again.”

Campos isn’t building a career from scratch, but he sees this season of his life and career as distinct, marked by writing music for the global church and helping define the evolving genre of Latin worship. He is still an escarabajo at heart, steadily and persistently moving along, traversing difficult terrain and finding ways to keep momentum.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m building a new career,” said Campos. “He has taken me out of my comfort zone, which just makes me more dependent on faith in Jesus.”

Hernán Restrepo is a Colombian journalist living in Bogotá. Since 2021, he has been managing Christianity Today’s social media accounts in Spanish.

- More from Hernán Restrepo

News

Bethany Sues Michigan for Denying State Contracts Due to Faith-Based Hiring

Kate Shellnutt

The Christian ministry says it is being blocked from helping hundreds of refugee children and families, despite its decades-long history of service.

Mike Kline (notkalvin) / Getty Images

After decades of resettling refugee families and placing unaccompanied refugee children in foster homes, Bethany Christian Services announced Tuesday that it is suing the state of Michigan for denying its contracts due to long-standing faith-based hiring practices.

Bethany—the country’s largest Christian adoption and foster agency and one of ten refugee resettlement agencies in the US—says Michigan’s requirement that partners must hire from across faith traditions is discriminatory and violates the free exercise clause as well as exemptions for religious nonprofits in the Civil Rights Act.

Plus, leaders say that restricting Bethany’s involvement hinders urgent efforts to care for vulnerable children and families.

This case represents the latest First Amendment legal tussle around Christian social service agencies, as more ministries eager to offer services find their basic statements of faith clashing with nondiscrimination provisions in grant programs and other government partnerships. Courts are left to weigh Christian organizations’ religious freedom protections against state regulations.

“We’re committed to serving everybody, but this is about who we hire,” said Keith Cureton, Bethany’s president and CEO since last summer. “Hiring rights is an important religious liberty that not only impacts Bethany but affects thousands of faith-based nonprofits and ministries.”

Bethany has been contracted by the state of Michigan since 1981. Last year, the organization helped over 600 refugees and immigrants and placed around 300 unaccompanied minor refugees in foster families in the state, according to its own tallies.

But in 2024, the Office of Global Michigan (OGM), the government agency that enlists local partners for immigrant outreach and services, began denying contracts to Bethany. According to Nhung Hurst, Bethany’s general counsel, the state indicated it had a new requirement that contracted organizations hire individuals of all religions.

“None of our contracts stretching back multiple decades with the state government have included such a requirement,” Hurst said. And no other organizations were affected by the new provision.

Bethany’s leaders said that before moving forward with the lawsuit they reached out to OGM 19 times and prayed fervently for resolution. Bethany is headquartered in Grand Rapids and serves more refugees in its home state than any of the other 27 states where it operates.

Christian organizations like Bethany play a huge role in refugee resettlement and foster care services, both areas that rely on contracts with the government. Even after a 2021 Supreme Court ruling sided with a Catholic foster agency that was denied a government contract in Philadelphia, the justices didn’t override a precedent involving the general applicability of state laws (Employment Division v. Smith), so cases continue to emerge around faith-based providers seeking government funding.

Bethany has been in a deadlock with the state before. When Michigan declared in 2019 that foster agencies couldn’t turn away LGBTQ families, the organization opted to change its policies in the state and then across the country. Leaders at the time argued that it was the only way for Christians to continue to care for kids in the system.

As the state of Michigan began challenging Bethany’s faith statement requirement, there were reported rumblings over the policy internally. In January 2024, a local TV news station in Grand Rapids reported on a “culture clash” at Bethany, with unnamed staff describing a stricter enforcement of the Christian hiring policy under Cureton and tensions as the refugee branch moved into the organization’s main headquarters.

When asked about the claims, Hurst said, “Like any organization, sometimes you have differences in implementation, but we are unwavering in our mission and our values and our statement of faith.”

Bethany asks its new hires to affirm the Apostles’ Creed. (Back in 2019, Bethany’s statement of faith was based on the evangelical Lausanne Covenant.) Cureton did not directly respond to questions from CT about whether it has additional faith directives for employees, such as around sexuality, but did say that no employees have been fired over the past year due to such requirements.

Among Christian nonprofits, Bethany’s requirements aren’t unusual. (World Relief, another refugee resettlement agency, asks that employees align with an evangelical faith statement. A note on its hiring page also references the “protections afforded World Relief as a faith-based employer.”)

Bethany’s lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity and the OGM has been filed in the federal district court in Grand Rapids. Hurst said she is unaware of any instances where Bethany has lost contracts in other states due to its hiring practices.

The exemption for faith-based hiring has faced challenges over the years, lately over whether Christian nonprofits can require employees to live according to conduct standards and “whether the state can discriminatorily disqualify from government benefits those religious agencies that stay religious by exercising their Title VII and First Amendment rights to hire those who share their faith,” according to Steven McFarland.

McFarland is director of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom at the Christian Legal Society, co-counsel of record for Bethany’s case. Over his career specializing in religious freedom cases, he defended Seattle Pacific University in a lawsuit over its evangelical faith statement back in 1984, only to see similar legal challenges continue to arise.

Currently, the Alliance Defending Freedom is suing Oregon for rescinding a state grant from a youth ministry over its Christian hiring practices. Last month, a circuit court decided that the ministry could receive the state funding as the appeal continues.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act has protected faith-based organizations from the government interfering with their hiring practices for six decades now, McFarland said. “For Congress in 1964, the First Amendment was clear enough, not to mention common sense, that what makes religious organizations religious is what they believe, communicate, and exercise through their staff.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Ideas

China’s New Adoption Policy Leaves Children in the Balance

Chelsea Sobolik

Suspending international adoptions hurts children who already have waiting families.

Blackstation / Getty

On September 4, the US state department informed adoption service providers and waiting families that the People’s Republic of China (PRC), would “no longer carry out foreign adoption work,” except in a few narrow cases.

Several hundred American families have been matched with children in China. Many families were scheduled to bring their children home in January 2020, the same month that China closed down due to its zero-COVID policy and have been waiting for over four and a half years to bring their children home.

Aimee Welch was about to travel to China in March 2020 to finalize the adoption of a 6-year-old girl. After an agonizing past few years, Welch reflected on China’s announcement, saying, “It’s a closed door with no closure. And to think about this little girl, we promised to come for her. As a 6-year-old, how could she process the reason why we weren’t coming when we said we could?”

For years, China was “a leading country of origin” for adoptions and had one of the smoothest and most efficient programs. According to state department data between 1999 and 2023, more than 80,000 children from China were adopted into the US.

The landscape of intercountry adoption has changed over the past twenty years, and there’s been a steep decline in the number of such adoptions. In 2004, adoption across foreign borders peaked at 22,988. In 2023, only 1,275 children were welcomed into families through intercountry adoption.

The reasons for the global decline range from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, sending countries halting their programs, and countries and cultures becoming more open to domestic foster care and adoption.

Another shift is that many of the children available for international adoption are older children and children with moderate to severe medical special needs. The waiting children are some of the most vulnerable, and for many, their only chance to grow up in a safe, loving, permanent home is having the option of intercountry adoption.

China’s announcement is devastating because it means that thousands of children will likely grow up in institutions and won’t have access to families around the world who would be willing to give them loving homes. It remains unclear and unlikely that China will allow the waiting families to finalize their adoptions.

The waiting Chinese children range in age from 5 to 16, and all have moderate medical needs. In addition to being separated from the families pursuing them, most of these children have gone without medical care and educational opportunities.

Christians should care about this announcement because God designed children to flourish in the safety and love of families. Each of these children is made in God’s image, and our hearts should be attuned to the suffering of the vulnerable.

Adoption is complex because it involves loss and sacrifice for all parties involved—birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. Even though adoption is intricate, it must remain viable for children around the world who long to be raised in families where they are known and loved, not in impersonal institutions.

Although many orphanages in China seek to care well for children, institutions aren’t able to offer a child the same benefits, love, and safety as a permanent family. Children flourish to their greatest potential when their physical and emotional needs are being met in individualized ways.

Research has shown that the longer children remain in institutions, the more developmentally behind they can fall in comparison to their peers who are not in institutionalized settings. While we have great respect for professionals caring for children, there is no substitute for permanent families. One of the positive shifts over the past few years has been from Christians who understand and support local family-based care and deinstitutionalization.

Beijing’s termination of intercountry adoptions officially began on August 28, one day before US national security advisor Jake Sullivan met with Chinese president Xi Jinping. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and top US government officials should swiftly urge China to allow the waiting families who’ve been matched to complete their adoptions.

It is crucial that our government use all mechanisms available to seek a resolution that allows these families to complete their long-pending adoptions and ensure that the rights and well-being of children remain at the forefront of any diplomatic efforts.

My own life was forever transformed because of international adoption. I’m an adoptee from Romania. My five siblings and a cousin were all adopted internationally from Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. I remember helplessly watching President Vladimir Putin sign a law that prohibited the adoption of Russian children by US citizens beginning in 2013. It struck me that had the timing of my own family’s adoption story been different, my very own Russian siblings might never have joined our family.

My husband and I welcomed our son home through international adoption from India last year. I have the unique vantage point of being both an adoptee and an adoptive mother. My son and I, though our stories are distinct, both know what it’s like to join a family through international adoption.

When we said yes to our son’s file, we gleefully texted friends and family, joyfully showed his picture to anyone who’d pay attention, decorated his room, prayed fervently for him, and achingly counted down the days until we could be with our son.

The same was true for many of the waiting families who’ve held space in their hearts, homes, and lives for the children in China they were pursuing. Their grief and uncertainty of waiting an additional four and a half years only to hear this announcement is truly heartbreaking.

Scripture reminds us that “the king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord” (Prov. 21:1, ESV). May we boldly ask the Lord to soften the heart of President Xi so that he might allow the waiting children to join their families. May we remember the adoptees from China, families who’ve adopted children from China, the waiting families, and the waiting children.

Christians must be at the forefront of fighting for what is right and just. We should use our voices to advocate for these children to be brought home into the permanency of loving families. Jesus loves the little children of the world, and so should we.

Chelsea Sobolik serves as director of government relations for World Relief and is the former director of public policy for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). She is the author of Called to Cultivate: A Gospel Vision for Women and Work and Longing for Motherhood: Holding on to Hope in the Midst of Childlessness.

- More from Chelsea Sobolik

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Philosophy to the rescue

Faith in others’ faith

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A prayer against apathy

A prayer for a Christlike spirit

A prayer for nonviolence in our country

A prayer for the opposing candidates

A prayer for a posture of humility and against defensiveness

A prayer for the ability to see things from others’ perspectives

A prayer for those who are marginalized around us

A prayer for when we feel anxious about the future

A prayer for unity with our neighbors who vote differently than us

A prayer for the act of voting and the election outcome

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