Evangelical Broadcasters Sue Over IRS Ban on Political Endorsements

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Now that some nonprofit newspapers have begun to back candidates, a new lawsuit asks why Christian charities can’t take sides.

National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville

Bob Smietana / RNS

A group of evangelical broadcasters who hosted Donald Trump at their national conference earlier this year are suing the Internal Revenue Service over the so-called Johnson Amendment, a tax law that bars nonprofits from supporting political candidates.

Lawyers for the National Religious Broadcasters, along with two Baptist churches and a conservative group called Intercessors for America, argue in their suit that the ban on engaging in politics restricts their freedom of speech and freedom of religion. They further argue that the IRS ignores the politicking of some charities, while threatening to punish others.

In particular, lawyers for the groups claim that newspapers and other news outlets that have become nonprofits in recent years, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, endorse candidates. Why can’t churches or other Christian groups, they want to know, do the same?

“Plaintiffs believe that nonprofit newspapers have a clear constitutional right to make such endorsements or statements,” read the complaint filed Wednesday in the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division. “Plaintiffs simply contend that they should also have the same freedom of speech.”

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law that has long been the bane of conservative groups and, in particular, preachers seeking to become more involved in politics. The ban on taking sides in campaigns—including endorsements or campaign contributions—applies to nonprofits that fall under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code.

For years Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group, organized “pulpit freedom” Sundays designed to have preachers violate IRS rules by endorsing candidates from the pulpit. As president, Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to give more leeway under IRS rules.

The current lawsuit pitches its argument toward similar religious freedom principles. “For too long, churches have been instructed to remain silent on pressing matters of conscience and conviction during election season or risk their 501(c)(3) status,” said NRB President Troy A. Miller in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

But the growing number of nonprofit newsrooms has added a new twist to the arguments over the Johnson Amendment that has to do with fairness. Those newsrooms, the complaint argues, should be required to abide by the same rules as other charities.

“Hundreds of newspapers are organized under § 501(c)(3), and yet many openly endorse political candidates,” lawyers for NRB and its co-plaintiff argued in their complaint. “Others make statements about political candidates that constitute forbidden statements under the IRS’ interpretation of the statutory prohibition against supporting or opposing candidates.

The Institute for Nonprofit News, with about 450 member organizations, including RNS, does not accept members that endorse candidates.

“Nonprofit news organizations do not endorse candidates and, under IRS guidelines, should not favor any candidate for public office in coverage or other action,” the INN’s guidelines for members state.

Karen Rundlet, the CEO and executive director of the INN, told RNS in an email that grants made to nonprofits often bar those funds from being used for political activity.

The complaint points specifically to the Inquirer’s candidate endorsements, as well as articles critical of candidates in other nonprofit publications from 2012 to the present, claiming all violated IRS rules with impunity.

While nonprofit newspapers such as the Salt Lake Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times no longer make political endorsements, the Inquirer does, in part because it has a different ownership structure.

“The Philadelphia Inquirer is owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, but the newspaper remains a for-profit public-benefit corporation,” Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, told RNS in an email. “As a for-profit entity, The Philadelphia Inquirer is permitted to publish political endorsements, as it has for decades. It does so following thoughtful research on candidate policy positions, qualifications, integrity, and track record.”

In their complaint, lawyers for the NRB and its fellow plaintiffs said that, despite the Inquirer’s structure, dollars from a nonprofit are funding political endorsements.

A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. The NRB did not respond to a series of questions from RNS about the lawsuit.

Darryll K. Jones, a professor of law at Florida A&M University who blogs about nonprofit law, agrees that the IRS is allowing the Lenfest Institute to “have its cake and eat it too,” he said by email.

“Other exempt charities can farm out their political speech to subsidiary organizations without diminishing their tax-exempt efforts,” he said. “Churches cannot do so because farming out political activity necessarily diminishes or even precludes the accomplishment of the church’s tax-exempt and (oh, by the way) constitutionally protected effort.”

If the IRS refused to bite on ADF’s pulpit actions, said Jones, it is because the IRS likely knows the Johnson Amendment would not hold up on constitutional grounds. On their part, many nonprofits appreciate the rule, Jones said, because the restriction keeps them out of politics.

“They can say, look, we’re not going to be involved in that. We’re not going to be involved in politics. We are out here to do our charitable deeds, and we don’t want to be on one side or the other,” Jones said.

Jones believes courts are likely to dismiss most of the NRB’s claims, especially its due process and equal protection assertions, which he said obscure the main point of their lawsuit.

But, he said, “Once you get through all the unnecessary weeds, the complaint makes a legally irresistible argument, the logic of which can’t possibly be avoided.”

He added that politicking by nonprofits would likely have negative outcomes. “Everybody’s going to do it, and then there’ll be sort of a race to the bottom,” he said.

A 2019 survey from Pew Research found that Americans would prefer to keep religion and politics separate. Nearly two-thirds (63%) want houses of worship to stay out of politics, while three-quarters (76%) say churches and other congregations should not endorse candidates.

The NRB hosted Donald Trump at its annual convention in Nashville this past February, where the former president promised to return Christians to power if elected for a second term. Before Trump spoke, Miller told those in the audience that the group was hosting a presidential forum and that the speakers did not represent the official views of the NRB.

The former president appealed to religious broadcasters to join his side.

“If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told a gathering of National Religious Broadcasters at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center.

- More from Bob Smietana

Ideas

How to Find Common Ground When You Disagree About the Common Good

John Inazu

Interfaith engagement that doesn’t devolve into a soupy multiculturalism is difficult—and necessary in our diverse democracy.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

How do Christians live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control?

In 2020, Tim Keller and I coedited a book titled Uncommon Ground. Our project convened a group of evangelical and evangelical-adjacent friends to reflect—as the subtitle said—on how Christians can live faithfully in a world of difference. Since then, however, I’ve rephrased the question for my own work. We should be faithful, yes, but also neighborly. And our world is not just host to real difference of belief; it’s also a world we don’t control.

I owe this subtle but important reframing to my friendship and work with Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America. The most important interfaith organization in the country, Interfaith America does not advance a soupy multiculturalism that pretends that all roads lead to heaven or that our differences don’t matter. It takes religious particularity seriously, identifies conflicts and tensions created by that particularity, and works to find common ground across religious differences.

I met Eboo nearly a decade ago. On that first meeting, we talked about the challenges of having young kids, busy travel schedules, and public writing commitments, as well as the importance of interfaith cooperation. Since then, we’ve spoken, taught, written, and built together.

As a Muslim, Eboo does not believe in the saving work of Jesus Christ—and that difference between us is no small thing. We have other differences too: Eboo tells more stories than I do. I drink alcohol, and he doesn’t. His language is usually more colorful than mine. We are friends in spite of our differences.

What does this kind of friendship have to do with Christian engagement in the world? Almost everything.

My question of how Christians can live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control is the interfaith question. It asks how we can be fellow citizens, coworkers, and friends with people who do not share our belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This question has become increasingly important in a cultural context where Christians are too often seen as self-interested and unconcerned for our neighbors of other faiths and no faith, in our politics and in our personal lives.

There’s nothing relativistic or wishy-washy about the interfaith question posed this way—nothing to suggest we should water down our beliefs or pretend they don’t matter. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas often says that few statements are more incoherent than “I believe that Jesus is Lord, but that is just my personal opinion.” The gospel is either true for the entire created order or a lie that has captured the hearts and minds of fools (1 Cor. 15:12-19).

The universal truth of the gospel compels me to want all to come to know it, Eboo included. But I’m also convinced that the gospel is best advanced through persuasion, not coercion or control. Eboo knows I want him to become a Christian. He also knows I believe his conversion doesn’t depend on me—and that our friendship doesn’t depend on his conversion.

Jesus is the author and perfecter of our faith, and the Spirt is the one who convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. As a Christian, my calling is not to force people into our faith but to live faithfully as their good neighbor. It is to bear witness to God’s story unfolding in creation.

That can include partnering graciously with those who do not see things as we do. In my work as a law and religion scholar, I have often advocated for greater liberty for others to live according to their own faith commitments, even though this increases their opportunities to advance beliefs and practices I find false and misguided.

For his part, Eboo wants to help Christians be better Christians. He doesn’t believe Jesus is Lord, but he does—just as Jesus promised—recognize Christians when we are behaving like Jesus’ disciples (John 13:34–35). He believes that when American Christians love God, love our neighbors, and demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit, all Americans benefit.

I have my own interests in this partnership. I want to destigmatize interfaith among evangelicals leery of the word by demonstrating that Christians can hold our convictions firmly and partner generously with non-Christians across many domains: friendship, advocacy, religious freedom, charitable services, education, and more. And I want to help show the interfaith community that evangelicals—especially younger ones—are eager for these partnerships.

One of my initiatives with Eboo, which this essay serves to announce, is called Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy. For the past two years, we’ve cultivated friendship and trust among a group of people whose voices collectively offer a counternarrative to the assumptions of the Christian and post-Christian right and an increasingly dechurched and unchurched left. We believe Christians can be friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens with those who don’t share our faith—and that we can do so within the fullness of our Christian identity.

This is the first of a series of essays at CT which will explore what that means between now and Election Day. Each essayist believes that the reality of an interfaith America provides an opportunity for Christians to engage our neighbors with confidence and compassion. It is an opportunity to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Eph. 4:1–2, NASB).

As I wrote in Uncommon Ground, “Many of our differences matter a great deal, and to suggest otherwise is ultimately a form of relativism.” The Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy essay series will not minimize our differences. “But we can still choose to be gracious across those differences. When we demonize the other side, we miss important insights that can only be learned through charitably understanding a different perspective. We lose the possibility of finding common ground,” which in turn means losing chances to advance common interests and bridge relational distances.

My friendship with Eboo is one example of how we can find common ground with others despite real differences in our understanding of the common good. My hope is that in the years to come, this kind of friendship will become commonplace among my fellow Christians. And my prayer is that the essays that follow in this series will encourage and equip evangelicals in our diverse democracy as they ask what it means to be a good and faithful neighbor.

John Inazu is a law professor at Washington University. His most recent book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024). He serves on the board of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and is a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum and Interfaith America.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

- More from John Inazu

News

Deep in the Heart of Megachurch Country, Dallas Mourns a Summer of Pastor Scandals

Emily Belz in Dallas

One leadership failing after another has affected more than 50,000 congregants in North Texas. Will the hurt they’ve experienced lead them out of the church?

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Facebook

On a recent Sunday morning, Gateway Church, one of the largest nondenominational megachurches in the United States, sprang to life.

Golf carts ferried people from distant parking spaces to the front door. The airport-terminal-sized campus in Southlake, just outside of Dallas, filled with people.

They purchased coffees from the café in the lobby, and children played in the two-story indoor playground. In the service, cameras on booms dipped to grab shots over the crowd as the worship band led the congregation in Gateway Worship’s top single, “Who Else.”

They sang out, “Who else is worthy? Who else is worthy? There is no one, only You, Jesus.”

The words that are universally true for Christians may seem especially true in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, as the area is called, which has seen a string of at least eight pastors step down from megachurches in the past few months over moral failings, mostly sexual in nature. The leaders oversee at least 50,000 in-person churchgoers.

In June, Gateway’s founder and senior pastor, Robert Morris, resigned following a report of his repeatedly molesting a 12-year-old in the 1980s. Other Gateway leaders have also left in the aftermath, including Morris’s son James Morris, who was planning to succeed his father as leader of the megachurch.

The week of this particular worship service, there was more fallout: Gateway asked another one of its executive pastors, Kemtal Glasgow, to resign after an undisclosed “moral failing” that the church said was not related to Morris’s alleged abuse.

The eight departed pastors include prominent names like Morris and popular preacher and Bible study author Tony Evans, and in three other cases, pastors were arrested for sexual crimes. The size of the churches magnifies the damage to local congregants, North Texas churchgoers told CT, and the series of failings hangs over everyday conversations about church.

Attendees were hesitant to go on the record, but several told CT how they felt hurt, angry, and unsure whether to stay at their churches. Meanwhile, remaining pastors, some of whom CT interviewed, were angry and shocked themselves. They sought to counsel distraught congregants, fill the leadership voids, navigate communicating developments in investigations, and figure out how to restore trust between churchgoers and church leaders.

Megachurches often describe themselves as a “refuge” from bad church experiences, according to Hartford Institute for Religion Research director Scott Thumma, who has researched megachurches for decades. The founder of the Vineyard movement, John Wimber, described his church as “a second-marriage church” of “refugees from various religious systems.”

On this Sunday morning in late August, Gateway acknowledged that the thousands of worshipers might be upset, triggered, and questioning whether to leave the church or even their faith.

In early August, Gateway entered 40 days of prayer and fasting, including praying for anyone “wounded by any form of abuse … that God would bring his comfort.” Author and pastor Max Lucado has taken over as the interim pastor of Gateway, although he remains a preaching pastor at his longtime church in San Antonio, Oak Hills Church. On Sunday at Gateway, he prayed for the congregation processing abuse from its leadership.

“Do not allow the evil one to lead anyone away,” he prayed. “Protect that precious heart that is already fragile … protect these young people … protect those souls who have been triggered, whose memories have been stirred. May they hear you say, ‘I am with you, I am with you to the end of the age.’”

“I beg your blessing on the metroplex,” he added, praying against the “principalities and powers” that have “darkened the clouds over this region.”

The list of local churches with leaders failing over the summer is long.

In June, Evans resigned from the megachurch he founded, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, after admitting to an undisclosed sin.

“While I have committed no crime, I did not use righteous judgment in my actions,” he told Oak Cliff. Since his resignation, Evans has not shared further details of what happened.

Stonebriar Community Church, founded by Chuck Swindoll, fired one of its longtime associate pastors in July after an undisclosed “moral failure.”

Three other pastors of large churches were arrested. The senior pastor of North Dallas Community Bible Fellowship, Terren Dames, was arrested in May for soliciting a prostitute, and the church fired him. The founding pastor of Koinonia Christian Church, Ronnie Goines, was arrested for sexual assault in late July. Lakeside Baptist Church’s youth pastor, Luke Cunningham, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a child after church leaders learned he had been accused of abuse at a previous church and reported him to police.

In late July, Josiah Anthony, lead pastor of the megachurch Cross Timbers Church, resigned for actions that were “inappropriate and hurtful” to church staff, elders of the megachurch said in a statement. They later added that they learned he had a pattern of inappropriate communication—sometimes sexual—with women in the church and on staff.

Executive pastor Byron Copeland took over as interim lead pastor at Cross Timbers but then, a few weeks later, he abruptly resigned. Copeland was a former pastor at Gateway, and a staffer there had previously accused him of pressuring her to drop her complaints of a hostile work environment under a different pastor.

It feels like an avalanche to Dallas churchgoers.

“It’s strangely localized and time-bound. I don’t know how to account for that,” said Rob Collingsworth at Criswell College in Dallas, who is plugged into Baptist church circles through his work with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The churches involved in these scandals are either nondenominational or part of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Some locals have talked about the rapid spate of pastor removals as a spiritual attack, but Collingsworth said that could lead to the perception that victims reporting abuses are the source of the evil. He sees the cascade of events as a “righteous pulling back of the curtain. … [Would we] be better off with Robert Morris still in the pulpit?”

Still, Collingsworth knows that these pastoral failings could shake faith in the church as an institution. He and his wife have friends at Gateway who are considering finding a new church, but the friends don’t know where to go because they “don’t know who to trust.”

Because megachurches are such a feature of evangelicalism in Dallas, with their massive campuses visible when driving around many parts of the city, a crisis can affect a large segment of the Christian community. It’s like if Ford has a crisis in Detroit, “everybody is affected,” said Dustin Messer, the vicar of All Saints Dallas, an Anglican congregation downtown.

“We get folks coming from other churches who have been wounded,” he said. “Every week.”

For the fall, All Saints is planning a course for people who are coming to their church from church hurt.

“This is happening at a high tide of institutional distrust in American culture, anyway, and a low tide of measured social capital,” said Nathaniel Strenger, a psychologist in Dallas who has a theology degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. When people are detaching from churches because they don’t feel safe, he added, “you’ve got more and more isolated individuals.” Then those individuals turn to mental health professionals for emotional support instead of their churches, he said.

One local megachurch pastor who wished not to be named, to protect the privacy of people coming to his church, said his church had received “hurt people” from these other churches after the crises.

“They are a little more skeptical about me, the leadership at our church, than they were before,” he said. “And I don’t blame them a bit.”

The pastor also said he felt like everyone had some culpability for a church culture that embraces leaders who are focused on “fame instead of faithfulness. … It’s setting people up for failure.”

After the lead pastor of Cross Timbers resigned, Toby Slough, the founding pastor, came back to the church to preach. He thanked the people who had the “courage … grace and integrity” to bring their concerns to the elders about the pastor: “I know that wasn’t easy.”

Slough acknowledged that the congregation was probably feeling sadness, shock, and anger. He said he was sad too.

“I’m grateful the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, aren’t you?” he said. “My prayer is that we would let unchanging truth be our guiding light, even when it doesn’t feel that way.”

And he said he understood the tendency to want to find another place to go to church.

“That would be easier,” he said. “I’m just asking you to hang with us in the months ahead. … We’re not going to act like this didn’t happen and move on. We’re going to give everybody time to grieve.” He read from Lamentations 3: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed.”

While the fallout for congregations is significant—not to mention those directly mistreated and abused—churchgoers said they often feel relationally distant from the big personalities leading their churches.

Jim Denison was the senior pastor of Park Cities Baptist Church, a Dallas megachurch of about 10,000, until he left in 2009. He referred to himself as a “face up on the screen” and compared it to being a mayor of a small town or a president of a university.

The congregation didn’t have a close relationship with him, and he feels that, at some level, these senior pastors are replaceable.

And Dallas megachurches operate like large businesses, said Denison, who now leads the Denison Forum in Dallas. He sees church responses, which often include quick resignations and little explanation, as “fiduciary protection of the institution.”

“Dallas is only here because of banking during the frontier era and now oil,” he said. “It’s a very business-centric sort of context. As a result, everything is run in a business sense.”

That means these churches have resources and a sort of professionalism when it comes to dealing with a crisis. That could be used to cover up wrongdoing to protect the institution, but it also could be an asset, Denison said.

But when allegations are revealed in a slow drip, or multiple staff have moral failings, that creates a trust issue that “snowballs so fast,” he added.

When Denison was a megachurch pastor, his church discovered a staff member had embezzled a large sum of money, he said. Within a day, the church had a forensic accountant on the scene, a meeting with trustees and the finance committee, and a game plan. The church had a $14 million budget and a large staff, so it could handle the situation as a large business would.

“I was so grateful for the business sense that they brought, in terms of how to manage this crisis,” he said. “They realized far before I did that what we really would have would be a crisis of confidence. Can the church members trust us with their money?”

He said by “God’s grace” that attendance and giving didn’t drop as a result. But the church leadership also realized they couldn’t let it happen again.

“We had to bring in all new [financial] controls, and pray and ask God to keep us from having another failure in the same direction,” he said. “The mistake churches often make is they promise the same people will do it differently this time. … You have to bring in a different set of people who already bring their credibility into the room.”

But there’s a balance: Denison thinks that megachurches must do a better job of making sure a business culture doesn’t overwhelm a ministry culture, and that they have pastors who can keep the focus on the life of the church.

The bottom line is that the way a megachurch handles a crisis matters, and a congregation could respond with more unity after a crisis rather than with distrust.

Lakeside Baptist Church has about 1,400 in attendance on a Sunday, a little smaller than the 2,000 that researchers consider a megachurch. The news of abuse allegations against Lakeside’s youth pastor “blindsided” the church staff, said Malcolm Yarnell, a teaching pastor there and a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“It was, to say the least, the most difficult month or two of any of the church staff’s experience,” Yarnell said. The church is a member of MinistrySafe, an abuse prevention training program, but Yarnell said they are planning to beef up their policies. The church also stated that if the SBC had a working database for abuse offenders, “we would likely have never been exposed to Mr. Cunningham.”

The Sunday after alerting police about Cunningham, Lakeside gave a report to the congregation on what happened. A few days later, leaders met with youth and their parents.

They had pastors and professional counselors present to answer questions and talk through trauma, related to this incident or not. Yarnell said the response was positive, even though everyone was shocked.

It helped that Cunningham’s alleged crime happened at another church, and no one had reported abuse at Lakeside. But Yarnell said the church would be prepared to address that openly if it did come up.

“What hurts the congregation is when the church leadership doesn’t come forward and put everything on the table,” said Yarnell. “Healing begins with the truth. It cannot begin any other way than with the truth. … True pastors must protect the flock even at cost to their own lives.”

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

Triumphalism After Dobbs Was a Mistake

Marvin Olasky

Guest Columnist

The pro-life movement has forgotten its roots. We need to get back to basics.

Bloomberg / Getty

I’ve been in the pro-life movement for 40 years. My wife founded the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center (ACPC) in 1984 and later chaired the national umbrella group for such centers, Care Net. I chaired the ACPC for a while and later chaired meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington, DC.

We’ve also personally helped unmarried women unhappily surprised by pregnancy. One lived with us for nine months, during which time she gave birth. Another got married in our living room and also gave birth, although happily not in our living room. In 1988, 1992, 2021, and 2023, I produced four pro-life books on the history of abortion.

That personal history is why I don’t lightly say that much of the pro-life movement has lost its way. First Things recently opined, “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was a great victory for the pro-life cause.” No, it wasn’t: The number of abortions is apparently rising. Dobbs was a great opportunity for the pro-life movement to show our recognition that unwanted pregnancies are hard.

They are especially hard the small percentage of the time that rape or incest are involved, but they are hard all the time. A truly compassionate pro-life perspective shows that children need protection and their parents need support. But instead of emphasizing both, some politicians have talked so tough that it seemed pro-lifers might treat miscarriages as crime scenes.

Many pro-lifers failed to understand the mourning on the other side: 50 years of reproductive rights down the tubes. Some women had come to believe that the only way they could prosper in our society was through unfettered access to abortion. It was hard for many to imagine how they could flourish without it.

Pro-lifers had an opportunity to help women imagine meaningful lives even with unexpected babies. Our side should have acknowledged that Dobbs was scary to many women. We could have built a movement to support more generous family policies. Instead, many pro-lifers went for force first.

With Dobbs liberating states to legislate as they saw fit, some pro-life advocates competed to see who could back the toughest laws. Some pro-lifers in Oklahoma and elsewhere wanted women who had abortions to be charged with murder. The result was a transformation of popular narrative from concern for the unborn and their mothers to a thirst for power and control.

Some politicians used harsh language and aimed their scorn at abortion-minded women. Specific hard cases cast pro-life activists as hard-hearted. A half-century of pro-life understanding—you can’t save babies unless you love their mothers—evaporated. I sympathize with the desire to win big, but I’m also a reporter willing to acknowledge uncomfortable technological and political realities.

Today’s technological reality is that two-thirds of abortions occur via abortion pills, often ingested at home rather than in abortion centers. Closing down those centers is more and more like shuttering pornography stores rendered irrelevant by streaming services. Stopping pills by law would require opening mail, frisking visitors, and going after senders based in states (like New York and Massachusetts) that offer them legal immunity. Convincing parents, one by one and two by two, not to kill their unborn babies, is more important than ever.

The political reality is of two kinds. The obvious problem is that the identification of pro-life belief with former president Donald Trump and the Republican Party remade in his image has been a public opinion disaster. Some can write off polls as irrelevant when lives are at stake, but Abraham Lincoln wisely said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

The problem of pledging allegiance to an unethical leader doubled in my state of Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton, impeached following allegations of corruption and bribery, is the best-known pro-life spokesman. He fought Kate Cox, then the 31-year-old mother of two who sought an undesired abortion in an exceptionally hard case. Chasing her out of Texas was only a pro-life win in the style of an ancient saying, “One more victory and we are undone.”

The second problem, more complex than individual nastiness, is the denial of the reality that although God does not judge by appearances, most Americans do. The closer unborn children are to birth—the more they look like born children—the more their protection has broad support. Most Americans support abortion early in pregnancy, but only 22 percent nationally support its legality during the third trimester.

Instead of thinking like Lincoln and building off where pro-life support is greatest, some pro-life leaders are campaigning against in vitro fertilization, which produces the very earliest unborn children. The tiny ones deserve protection, but that’s the hardest case to make in terms of public opinion, especially since many couples turn to IVF over their inability to have children otherwise.

The overarching mistake is a default position of compelling rather than convincing. We’ve seen the results of that before. In the early 1990s, after Operation Rescue physically kept women from entering abortion centers, the willingness to identify as “pro-life” cratered in public opinion polls, and the number of US abortions was at an all-time high: 1.6 million.

The meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington that I chaired during that period featured fierce debates and some rethinking. On one side were “all or nothing” advocates. On the other were “all or something” proponents, who supported legislation to protect as many unborn children as possible, given public opinion, but emphasized helping to change hearts.

Many groups came to embrace the all-or-something approach. With technological help through an increased use of ultrasound, with much prayer, with God’s mercy, the number of abortions fell during Bill Clinton’s second term, throughout George Bush’s two terms, and throughout Barack Obama’s two terms.

The number apparently increased during the Trump term. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has decreased in some states but has evidently increased overall, with abortion pills leading the way.

That brings us to the current dilemma many pro-life voters face. Donald Trump has now sidelined the pro-life convictions he opportunistically expressed. He returned to his earlier acceptance of abortion and told his Truth Social audience that he favors “reproductive rights.”

And the Democratic Party is no haven for jilted pro-lifers.

While Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in her acceptance speech moved to the center on many questions, she moved to the left on abortion. Much as Dobbs fueled a triumphalism on the pro-life side, seven straight victories on state referenda concerning abortion have excited abortion supporters—and more referenda are on the ballot two months from now. As The New York Times reported, Democrats have “recast Republicans as the party of control and theirs as the party of freedom.”

So the final hard reality is that American pro-lifers do not have a party. But we can still remind both parties of what the Democrats’ 1968 presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, said: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”

For Democrats, that will require a reminder of what could have been. Until the Roe decision in 1973, leading Democrats included unborn children within Humphrey’s moral test. When my friend Nellie Gray started in 1974 what began the annual March for Life in Washington, she knocked on the doors of Ted Kennedy and others and initially expected to receive support. They demurred, but at first did so with words like those that became the title of the best book on abortion by a pro-choice writer, Magda Denes’s In Necessity and Sorrow.

Democrats did not always link abortion with virtue and opportunity. They could return to the Clinton mantra of the 1990s: Instead of seeing abortion as victory, they could defend its legality but work to make it “rare.” If they want to be a “party of freedom,” they could strive to reduce the sense of “necessity.” Part of that means working with pro-life pregnancy resource centers, not harassing them.

For Republicans, many of whom still consider themselves pro-life, a recognition of “sorrow” leads to greater moral sympathy and economic creativity. They should advocate cultural and economic changes that make more women and men feel it possible to have and raise a baby well.

One of my favorite pro-life leaders in American history, Mary Gould Hood, graduated 150 years ago from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She moved to Minneapolis and became a founding doctor at the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers. She also practiced at the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children, staffed by female physicians with an all-woman board of 50 directors.

Hood and many other late-19th century pro-life doctors, including Elizabeth Blackwell, Rachel Brooks Gleason, Alice Bunker Stockham, Prudence Saur, Jennie Oreman, and Mary Melendy, labored for decades to do exactly what we need to do now: show how it’s possible to have and raise a baby well, whether the mother is married (a great positive) or not.

Hood eventually moved to Boston and joined the executive committees of New England Baptist Hospital and Vincent Memorial Hospital. She culminated her 40 years in pro-life work by publishing in 1914 For Girls and the Mothers of Girls: A Book for the Home and the School Concerning the Beginnings of Life.

“What experience can be more sacred, or more marvelous, than that of the mother who understands that a new human has begun within her,” she wrote. “Motherhood brings with it cares and responsibilities, but it also brings the greatest of earthly joys.”

That’s what today’s pro-life movement needs to convey, not by might but by light that can illuminate an inner and outer glow.

Marvin Olasky is a writer and columnist for the Discovery Institute, Acton Institute, Current, and Religion Unplugged. He coauthored The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022.

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Church Life

Christian Formation for the ‘Toolbelt Generation’ 

Jen Hemphill

I always assumed my sons would go to college. When they chose the trades, it reframed my view of higher ed—and church community.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

I always assumed my sons would go to college. My husband and I were indelibly formed by our own college years of deep reading, endless discussion, and applying what we’d learned in the classroom to our faith and the world. University life helped us grow toward being “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16), renewed for the service of God (Rom. 12:2). I expected my children would begin adulthood the same way.

But in his junior year of high school, our oldest son announced his plan to work in the trades. It caught me off guard, and my husband and I needed more than a few discussions to come around. My husband is the first member of his immediate family to have earned a college degree. After one generation, I thought, were we already going backward?

Our son didn’t see his decision that way. Being at home during the pandemic had meant seeing his parents working on their computers while he did school on his, and the experience made him rethink college.

The more we talked, it became clear that he was serious—and so were his plans. That year, he worked with a professional carpenter to build docks for his rowing team. The next summer, he started working for a local renovation company where, three years later, he’s a full-time carpenter himself. By the time our younger son made the same announcement as a high school sophomore, we rolled with it.

So I’ve become the mother of two members of what The Wall Street Journal dubbed the “toolbelt generation,” and I’ve come to see why this path makes sense for Gen Z. Lately, it’s seemed like all the news about college has been negative: The price tag is too high. Graduates leave with debt it’ll take decades to repay—and they might not even find a job in their field of study. Enrollment is declining. Many of the kids who are in school aren’t sure why. And many campuses have been hijacked by over-politicized rhetoric, if not outright violence.

In that context, it’s unsurprising that more and more high school graduates are deciding the university is not for them. But what about the spiritual needs of young people going into the trades? While skilled labor itself can be spiritually and morally formational, my sons want Christian discipleship that acknowledges the importance of their vocational path—and I believe churches need to meet the unique spiritual needs of this growing population in their congregations.

My younger son plans to do HVAC work for at least a year, but he may still go to college because he wants to go to seminary someday. We’ve started looking into schools that offer some sort of liberal arts education alongside training in the trades, and we’ve learned that Christian options are multiplying.

In fact, as Nathaniel Marshall—a plumber by trade who writes on Substack at The Blue Scholar—has detailed, there’s a new wealth of Christian trades programs. Marshall maintains a list of high school and post–high school educational options, many of which come with the promise that by the time a student graduates, they will have learned how to think, paid back some or all of their minimal debt, and settled in a full-time job where they earn a living wage. Some of these schools are so new that they have their first cohort of students this coming fall or even next year.

That pairing of a liberal arts education in a Christian worldview with trades training or a heavy work-study program makes sense because, as Marshall argues, “blue collar work is not just the work of bodies: It is the work of whole persons.” It is, or at least can be, work “that recruits and forms my interior world,” “that orders the physical and social architecture around me,” “that has the potential to make me a better person by its dutiful practice,” and “that places me in God’s presence such that my work becomes prayer.”

One school on Marshall’s list particularly caught our attention for our younger son: the College of Saint Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio. Its founder, Jacob Imam, believes that study of our faith and skilled labor are meant to be joined. “A deep love of study and work emerged from the heart of the Church; from the person of Jesus, the Word become carpenter,” he wrote this summer. “Our society cannot enjoy the goods of Christ without Christ himself.”

But what about our oldest, who’s still disinclined to pursue any higher education? My husband and I don’t want him to miss the spiritual formation that college offered us as young adults. We want him to “be transformed by the renewing of [his] mind,” and to “be able to test and approve what God’s … good, pleasing and perfect will” is (Rom. 12:2). Could this happen without college?

“The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake,” author Matthew B. Crawford said in a 2009 New York Times essay: “Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid.”

To an extent, I’ve realized my question about spiritual formation outside of college is based in the same kind of mistake. I need to repent of being an education snob.

My oldest son is developing critical thinking in a community of like-minded people even though he’s not reading and discussing great literature or philosophy or history in the classroom. He’s renewing his mind while integrating his body in his work, and perhaps this is part of what it means to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1). He isn’t discussing books with his coworkers, but they are having what Crawford calls “a sort of conversation in deed.”

As Marshall writes, such skilled labor “has the distinct capacity for integrating your entire being; its dutiful practice can (and will) train your morals, emotions, and intellect along with your senses and spirit; it makes you a dependable member of your family and wider community.”

A certain intelligence is born from paying close attention while doing work alongside others. Whether or not he can articulate it now, my son is learning to solve problems as he builds stairs, lays tile, and makes repairs both adeptly and efficiently. My son’s work community shows him the beauty of a neatly framed window. He learns the necessity of taking care—perhaps especially when he’s required to redo a task done wrong the first time. In many ways, his work helps him grow “in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52).

Yet for all that, my concern about spiritual formation is not only educational snobbery, and Marshall’s vision of skilled work as a source of spiritual training may be an illusion if trades workers are left to figure it out alone, outside of Christian community. Unfortunately, churches full of people who assume—as I once did—that college is the default after high school may find it all too easy to overlook the toolbelt generation in favor of college-oriented ministry.

Growing from small tykes until they graduated high school, our sons received teaching and mentorship in our church’s children’s ministry program and youth group. But since he became a bona fide adult in the workforce, our oldest hasn’t had the same dedicated support. He found he didn’t fit into the church’s “college-aged” bucket because he wasn’t in school. Young adults who don’t go to college, who live on their own and support themselves, navigate the world and their faith very differently from their student peers.

Thankfully, our oldest stumbled into the community he needed in one of our church’s small groups made up of 25- to 30-somethings. Though he’s younger than the rest, they quickly pulled him in for the kind of discipleship and mentorship, even friendship, we’d been praying he’d find. Congregations with Zoomers entering the trades should intentionally pursue this model for discipling a cohort of young people who otherwise might drift out of a church that seems to have no place for them.

As Gen Z increasingly takes up the toolbelt over the textbook, the church must be ready for that shift. While there’s potential for healthy formation in our oldest son’s work community, our prayer is that he will remain connected to the body of Christ. He needs not just skills and knowledge but the knowledge that comes from the love of God (1 Cor. 8:1–2). He needs a distinctly Christian community to speak into his life and work. He needs the church.

Jen Hemphill is a writer from Pittsburgh finishing up a memoir about rock climbing and motherhood. She writes at Pull-ups in the Basement on Substack.

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News

German Pastor to Pay for Anti-LGBTQ Statements

Ken Chitwood in Germany

Years of court cases come to an end with settlement agreement.

Pastor Olaf Latzel Appears in court in 2020.

Sina Schuldt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Nearly five years after a German pastor sparked controversy with comments about homosexuality, the legal dispute appears to be over with a settlement of 5,000 euros (about $5,550 USD).

Olaf Latzel, pastor of a conservative congregation in the state-privileged Protestant Church, called homosexuality “degenerative” and “demonic.” He condemned what he called the “homolobby” and slammed “these criminals” at a Berlin LGBTQ pride celebration, “running around everywhere.” Latzel made the comments during a 2019 marriage seminar. Only about 30 couples attended, but the seminar was later shared on YouTube.

He was charged with incitement of hate against a people group and found guilty in 2020 in the Bremen District Court. Latzel was ordered to pay a fine of 90 euros per day for 90 days—the equivalent of nearly $9,000 USD.

Latzel appealed and won in regional court. The judge ruled that, while offensive, the pastor’s comments were nonetheless protected by the constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

Prosecutors appealed that decision, and, in February 2023, the Higher Regional Court deemed the case “incomplete” and sent it back to Bremen.

Now, the Bremen Regional Court has suspended the proceedings, with one condition: The pastor must give 5,000 euros to the nonprofit Rat & Tat-Zentrum für Queeres Leben (Advice and Action Center for Queer Life) in Bremen.

Latzel has six months to transfer the funds. With that, the case against him will be dropped completely.

In court in August, Latzel apologized in a statement, admitting grave mistakes while at the same time saying he had been misunderstood. He said he “made statements that hurt people” and distanced himself from what he called a “linguistic slip-up that should not have happened.”

Latzel has previously said he condemns homosexuality based on his interpretation of the Bible but has nothing against LGBTQ people.

The judge said she found Latzel’s apology “authentic.” Frauke Wesemüller noted that the pastor’s words were “not good” but offered no ruling of the legal questions of whether the remarks in the marriage seminar violated human dignity or were inflammatory. Defining criminal insults to human dignity is “controversial among jurists,” the judge said.

Latzel—who had intimated he was willing to appeal a guilty verdict, taking the case all the way to the German Federal Constitutional Court—has agreed to pay the money. He told German reporters he was “grateful” for the outcome but did not want to comment further.

This is not the first time Latzel’s words have landed him in hot water. In 2015, he was investigated for comments about Buddhists, Catholics, and Muslims.

Latzel may also face discipline from Protestant authorities. The regional body of the church, where Latzel has served as a pastor since 2007, initiated disciplinary proceedings in 2020, but put them on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case. Church officials said in a statement that leadership will respond to the court decision “promptly,” once the case is formally closed.

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News

Should Christians Across Denominations Be Singing the Same Songs?

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Some traditions work to refocus on theological distinctives in their music as worship megahits take over.

Keagan Henman / Unsplash

If you feel like it’s hard to keep up with the cascade of new worship music, you’re not alone. The industry is producing new releases at a quicker clip, and the typical lifespan of a worship song—the time a song remains in regular rotation for church worship teams—has shortened.

Faced with a seemingly endless supply of new music, worship leaders are looking for ways to incorporate new music without skipping over the process of discerning whether the style and message of a particular song is right for their church.

For some, the ecumenicism of contemporary worship music is both a strength and a weakness, and they fear that not enough has been done to make sure that musical worship within their churches still reflects the theological commitments that bind them to a historical or denominational strand of Christianity.

Denominations are stepping in to help by offering new resources as guidance, or, in the case of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), holding on to their old ones. Last year, the SBC’s Lifeway Worship scrapped plans to shut down its online media database after an outcry from church musicians who trusted the site’s musical offerings.

“Leaders rely on us to provide some guardrails,” Brian Brown, director of Lifeway Worship, told CT. “If it’s been vetted by Lifeway, they have an added layer of confidence.”

Lifeway’s online resource isn’t as tech-forward but functions similarly to SongSelect, the popular Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) platform, and PraiseCharts. CCLI was formed to offer churches protection from copyright litigation, and PraiseCharts was founded by a worship pastor who wanted to create an alternative to mail-order music for church musicians, so they could have quicker access to arrangements of new worship songs like “Shout to the Lord.”

As the ecumenical digital songbook of new worship music has grown, the influence that denominations used to exert through their curated hymnals has weakened. Some leaders are concerned that the dominance of popular music produced by a handful of megachurches and artists—think Hillsong, Bethel, and Elevation—is washing away some of the elements of musical worship that reflect the doctrines and historical practices of their traditions.

In 2015, the United Methodist Church (UMC) launched its CCLI Top 100 Project, which resulted in “green” and “yellow” lists of popular songs and a set of downloadable criteria. Nelson Cowan, who now oversees the project, told CT in 2021 that sung doctrine is more than just an affirmation of the “right” words, “it’s doctrine we are learning and inhabiting and feeling and processing through song.”

Last year, the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians (ALCM) released its first list of vetted songs from the CCLI Top 100 list in its journal CrossAccent. Clayton Faulkner, dean of the chapel at Wartburg Theological Seminary and editor of CrossAccent, oversaw the pan-Lutheran vetting project.

“Theology was the main focus,” Faulkner told CT. “If a song isn’t theologically sound, it doesn’t matter if it’s singable.”

Faulkner and his team adapted the UMC’s criteria to reflect a Lutheran theological lens, emphasizing the centrality of the Trinity, sacramentalism, and liturgical time. Previously, Sundays and Seasons, an online and print resource for Lutheran churches, had suggested songs based on the liturgical calendar that aligned with Lutheran doctrine, but there was no centralized collection of evaluated contemporary songs.

Earlier this year, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) released its CCLI Vetting Project. Historically, the singing of Scripture has been central in the Reformed tradition, stretching back to Calvin’s preference for unaccompanied metered psalms, unencumbered by ornamentation and focused solely on the singing of Scripture.

“The Christian Reformed tradition has a history of being theologically mindful about what we sing,” said Katie Ritsema-Roelofs, who led the CRC project. “The denomination started with psalm-singing, and that deeply informs how we think about congregational singing.”

Keith Getty, cowriter of the popular song “In Christ Alone,” grew up singing metrical psalms in his Irish Presbyterian church. Getty has persistently spoken about the need for greater attention to theological depth and care in the writing of contemporary worship music.

He and his wife, Kristyn, emphasize “modern hymns” and are in the process of producing a hymnal with Crossway, scheduled to be released next year.

For this year’s annual Sing! conference, hosted by Getty Music in Nashville, the Gettys selected the theme “The Songs of the Bible,” reflecting their ongoing commitment to cultivating the practice of singing Scripture-focused music within the modern worship landscape.

“God is hugely concerned with what we sing,” Keith Getty told CT. “God has made us to understand him through what we sing.”

Kristyn Getty sees a return to a more Bible-centered mode of congregational singing as a way out of worship war skirmishes and conflicts over trends.

“Singing Scripture is a timeless call on our lives, throughout generations. To sing Scripture is to sing lyrics that have been around for thousands of years, not written in America or Europe. It’s a way to lift our song beyond the moment, toward something more timeless.”

The Gettys aren’t the only prominent figures in the contemporary praise and worship scene advocating for renewed attention to theological content in song lyrics.

Songwriter and worship artist Matt Redman recently wrote for CT that church musicians need input from pastors and theologians to enrich the worship of their congregations. Redman will appear alongside other songwriters and theologians at the upcoming WOR/TH conferences—convenings that aim to cultivate cooperation between artists and theologians. The responsibility of overseeing the singing of doctrine, he says, is too great for one person:

Many of us, myself included, admit we need assistance in that area. We likely didn’t come into this via seminary or intense theological training; we came in through the avenue of loving music and being able to play or sing.

We humbly recognize we cannot do this on our own. We need help from thinkers, theologians, and pastors. We need to be sharpened by fellow songwriters and worship leaders too.

Redman and the Gettys see a need to reanimate the global church’s commitment to singing songs with theological depth.

Neither Redman nor the Gettys write music for a particular Christian denomination; their songs are among the most widely sung contemporary songs in the global church, and their ecumenical appeal is what makes them so popular and powerful.

But some denominational leaders fear that there is a downside to primarily singing music that is theologically general enough to be sung by Baptists, Lutherans, Mennonites, Methodists, and Pentecostals. Vetting existing music isn’t enough to correct what they see as doctrinal vagueness; they want to instead support the creation of new music within their traditions.

In 2020, a group of songwriters and creatives in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) gathered to write new songs that more explicitly reflect the denomination’s commitment to missions and the global church.

Alliance Worship grew out of that gathering and continues to write, record, and release new music, including “Yesterday, Today, and Forevermore,” a reimagined version of the hymn “Yesterday, Today, Forever,” by the CMA’s founder, A. B. Simpson.

“There are thousands of worship songs being released every year that are nebulous, kind of a catchall,” Tim Meier, vice president for development at the CMA, told CT in 2023. “What would it look like to sing our theology again?”

Most of the individuals involved in vetting projects find a lot to love about popular worship music and recognize that many of their congregants have developed deep spiritual and emotional ties to particular songs, even songs that might have a theologically murky line or two. Ritsema-Roelofs pointed out that the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” doesn’t reflect a particularly Reformed view of heaven, but it holds a special power and taps into something for some (especially older) congregants that is more than just nostalgia and sentimentality.

“I’ve served in congregations where they sing a song with questionable or poor theology, but it’s a heart song,” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “Pastorally, you can’t take that away. There is soul work that happens when people sing a heart song, and it’s deeper than just making us feel good.”

In the list of CRC-vetted songs, the team includes notes about their strengths and “opportunities” (generally, for improvement or adaptation) and potential liturgical uses.

There are a few songs that get the equivalent of a warning label, such as Charity Gayle’s “I Speak Jesus,” for its “concerning association of depression with spiritual warfare” and treatment of Jesus’ name as an “incantation,” and Bethel Music’s “Raise a Hallelujah,” for its “overemphasis on human agency and human responsibility.”

Even though there are songs that get a “red light” from the CRC’s vetting team, the list isn’t meant to be a set of rules. Ritsema-Roelofs says she hopes that the list and the principles used to compile it will serve a denomination that already has a history of prioritizing the careful selection of congregational songs.

“We talk a lot about ‘song diet,’” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “Is the diet of songs in the church balanced? Are you singing psalms? Are you singing Scripture? Are you singing laments? Are you playing favorites with the members of the Trinity?”

One concern articulated by the CRC team was that the amount of individualistic language in popular worship songs is out of balance.

“When our primary language week after week is individualistic, it gradually forms us to contain worship to MY service, MY relationship with God, MY, MY, MY,” they wrote in an introductory note. “When we worship corporately we experience both the joy and the responsibility of living in community.”

In addition, the vetting team noted that popular songs tend to be songs of praise and celebration—an important part of any balanced song diet for a body of believers—and that making space for songs of lament will require intention and effort. “A continual barrage of ‘Be happy—God’s got this!’ minimizes pain and presents a problematic long-term understanding of God’s presence or absence in human suffering,” they wrote.

Despite different theological lenses and priorities, the vetting teams from both the CRC and the ALCM categorized the songs “Raise a Hallelujah” and “Battle Belongs” (by Phil Wickham) as “not recommended” or in the “red light” category.

Both groups noted the triumphalism in each song, as well as the use of battle/warfare language.

“Much care should be taken when singing about spiritual warfare. It is too easy to slip into making our neighbors our enemies,” the Lutheran team wrote in the comments on “Battle Belongs.”

Although lyrical content is the primary focus of these vetting initiatives, singability and playability are important aspects of song selection, especially in small churches.

“We looked at chord progressions and considered whether they are achievable for amateur musicians,” said Faulkner. “We also thought about whether a song can stand on its own when played and sung with just a piano and voices.”

When questions arise about the ethics of promoting or using the music associated with a particular megachurch or leader involved in a public scandal, local churches are entrusted with those decisions.

“Our goal in this process was not to give a stamp of CRC approval. Our primary goal here was formational,” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “We wanted to help people think about what their congregations are singing, because over time, it forms you. It forms your theology and faith. This was never meant to bring experts into a room to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do.”

As of now, the CRC doesn’t plan to keep vetting every new CCLI Top 100 (which is updated twice a year), nor does the ALCM. The UMC published an updated list of vetted songs in 2024. Alliance Worship will continue to write and record new music for the CMA, and the Gettys will launch the Sing! hymnal next year, offering their “vetted” collection of songs old and new.

Keith Getty says that the process of cultivating a body of theologically rich, musically accessible songs for the church is not a quest for perfection, and that getting lost in the minutiae can mean missing the beauty of the gospel.

“The gospel story is our strength and our song. I would warn against trying to take every single song and make sure it’s right,” he said. “It’s not about getting everything right, it’s about understanding the big picture and getting most of it right.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Rwanda Explains Why It Closed Thousands of Churches. Again.

Morgan Lee

The East African nation has shuttered 9,800 “prayer houses” because it wants safe buildings and well-trained pastors. Is that too much to ask?

narvikk / Getty

Rwanda has shut down almost 10,000 places of worship in the past two months, and now its president has proposed making churches pay taxes on their income.

The country’s crackdown on houses of worship comes as part of an ongoing push to protect Rwandans from church corruption and fraud and to ensure that their buildings meet certain physical standards.

Just weeks after winning his fourth term, President Paul Kagame condemned “mushrooming churches” that “squeeze even the last penny from poor Rwandans.”

“These unscrupulous people who use religion and churches to manipulate and fleece people of their money and other things will force us to introduce a tax,” he said in his first remarks since taking his oath of office on August 11.

The Rwanda Governance Board (RGB), which oversees the country’s places of worship, found that thousands of churches—many of them rural, Pentecostal congregations—failed to meet legal requirements around theological education, building codes, and sanitation regulations.

The RGB delineates between churches, which are officially registered with the government, and “prayer houses,” or places where Christians worship and which exist under churches.

In a statement to CT, the RGB confirmed that it had inspected 14,000 prayer houses in July and closed 70 percent of them “for non-compliance with established regulations including registration, building codes, safety, hygiene/sanitation, and financial or other exploitation of followers.”

“It should be noted that the closure of a prayer house does not necessarily entail the closure of the church the prayer house is affiliated with,” the statement added.

The board began shutting down houses of worship in July and stated that “relevant authorities will continue to collaborate with religious leaders” to ensure that the legal standards, ranging from degree requirements to garbage cans and parking lots, are met. Places of worship that have been closed can reopen if they demonstrate that the violations have been fixed.

This isn’t the first time Rwanda has taken action against churches for being out of compliance with government regulations. The country closed more than 7,000 churches in 2018 over health, safety, and noise issues. That year, it added further regulations, including banning church leaders from encouraging long fasts and requiring certain financial disclosures from churches and prayer houses.

It also introduced a requirement that each church must have a legal representative who holds a theology degree. Churches had five years, until September 2023, to comply with the law, and after a grace period, the RGB began enforcing the new standard.

Churches registering with the government must submit an organizational chart. Leaders in national positions, as well as those who supervise groups of local churches or regional parishes, must have a university degree with a certificate in theology or a theology degree, according to the board’s former CEO, Usta Kaitesi. (Kaitesi recently left after five years as the RGB’s leader and was replaced on August 16 by Doris Uwicyeza Picard, who formerly worked at the Ministry of Justice.)

Kaitesi emphasized that the education requirement does not apply directly to the leader of each church—a demand that would make it cost-prohibitive for most religious organizations.

“This structure allows the parish pastor to be accountable for what happens at the local church level,” Kaitesi told CT in March. “It doesn’t take our responsibility from the local church pastor, but you want them to know that if this is the doctrine of the church, and the church has told us this is the doctrine, they should have somebody with the capacity for supervising the implementation of the doctrine.”

Kaitesi believes that national umbrella groups—the Protestant Council of Rwanda, the Evangelical Alliance of Rwanda, the Forum of Born Again Churches for Rwanda, and Association of Pentecostal Churches of Rwanda—have a critical role to play in implementation.

“We encourage [all church legal entities] to belong to an umbrella, because we believe that umbrellas can do a lot of self-regulation, more than us doing too much regulation,” she said.

The government’s legal standards have largely worked well for historic denominations.

“What was introduced—not today but five years ago—is good for the church. The government gave us five years to comply and kept giving us reminders. That ended last year in September,” Anglican Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda told Religion News Service. “I think this was enough time to comply. We need to look at this from a positive side.”

It’s been much tougher for independent churches and congregations founded by a single person, many of which are smaller Pentecostal churches in rural areas.

Traditionally, Pentecostals and independent charismatic churches have said the Holy Spirit and the Bible equip them fully for ministry and that formal training is unnecessary, according to Reuben van Rensburg, a project manager with Re-Forma, a South African-based ministry that educates and trains church leaders.

These pastors “would have to have the right entry requirements if they were going to study at a tertiary institution,” he said. “They would have to pay for it, which most of them can’t, and they would have to leave their ministry or their family for an extended period of time, which they’re not willing to do.”

The legal crackdown has also spurred efforts to make theological education more accessible. The RGB announced a collaboration with Re-Forma last year, agreeing to accept the ministry’s certification as evidence that a pastor has obtained suitable theological training.

After a meeting in June, 31 denominations in Rwanda committed to participating in Re-Forma’s training programs, and RGB officials agreed to honor Re-Forma certification. With the change in RGB leadership, however, Re-Forma is uncertain whether this agreement will be upheld.

Many churches that meet the theological requirements have found it challenging to fulfill all the building-related requirements, which include regulations about the distance of toilets from the church entrance, paved access roads, and painted and plastered inside walls and ceilings. When the pandemic hit and the government closed all churches, it required them to install handwashing stations before reopening.

One Kigali church was closed at the end of July because it lacked a fire extinguisher, two garbage bins, and a lightning protector. The pastor, who noted that his congregation was previously closed for four months in 2018 because it was not soundproof, said they have since addressed the government’s most recent concerns. However, they are currently meeting only on Zoom and don’t have a sense of when the government will allow them to reopen.

Other churches were closed because they were not built on the minimum area of land required or lacked a proper waste management system, security cameras, or painted walls, said one denominational leader who asked not to be named for security reasons.

Fulfilling these requirements can seem arbitrary and spurious to some. In addition to the parking requirements, the government also requires greenery.

“Remember, we are in the dry season,” the denomination leader said. “Even if you plant the greening, it will not grow the same day.”

The government wants churches with air conditioning, high-quality sound systems, and accommodations for people with disabilities, seemingly on a par with the US and Canada, he said. Maybe that’s possible for Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches, which have operated in the country for more than a century and have their own revenue-generating projects, or for those with connections to outside funders like World Vision, which has implemented handwashing stations at some churches.

But for churches fully dependent on tithes, “You can’t expect it to be done in Africa in a short period,” he said.

The leader’s denomination is currently asking the churches that have not been closed to contribute to a fund to help reopen the closed places of worship. It is reaching out to contacts who can help them make their case to the government.

“We need serious prayers. It’s a movement that intends to limit the freedom of worship. And you know the consequences—if people don’t go to church, they will do other things,” he said.

Though many find the government oversight overwhelming, some Christians still see it as important.

“Churches are growing rapidly in many countries and such growth should not be at the expense of the safety of the congregants,” said Wissam al-Saliby, the president of the religious freedom advocacy group 21Wilberforce. “At the same time, the Rwandan government needs to make available a pathway for closed churches to meet requirements and to re-open. The possibility of redress and appealing closure decisions helps guarantee the right to freedom of religion or belief.”

Al-Saliby said he felt that the church leadership educational requirements were “disproportionate to the legitimate objectives the government is seeking.”

But he acknowledged the need for the Rwandan church to scale up and improve leadership formation. “Evangelicals grow through house churches and organic community efforts,” he said. “More often than not, theological education for church leaders follows growth rather than precedes it.”

Harvesters Church in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, was shut down on August 4 because the government was missing verification that its pastor had finished his bachelor’s degree in theology and leadership.

The pastor, Fred Kayitare, is optimistic that his congregation of around 500 will soon reopen and said he “totally agreed” with the theology training requirements. He described them as “for the goodness of the congregation.”

“I am the living example. I planted a church before I attended theological college. I can witness the change and transformation I acquired from school,” he said. “I’m another person now. And everyone at our church who knew me before can witness that. I even sent four other ministers from our church to the Bible college. We’re now five theology graduates from the same church.”

- More from Morgan Lee

News

Activist Lila Rose Under Fire for Suggesting Trump Hasn’t Earned the Pro-Life Vote

Harvest Prude

As conservatives see bigger shifts and divides over abortion, Live Action founder says she’ll keep speaking up for stronger policies.

Live Action founder Lila Rose

Courtesy of Lila Rose

“If you don’t stand for pro-life principles, you don’t get pro-life votes.”

That’s what Lila Rose, a leading pro-life activist, posted Monday on social media, in response to the latest move from Donald Trump’s campaign to moderate its stance on abortion.

It’s the line that put her at the center of controversy this week, with Trump supporters blaming her for jeopardizing the GOP ticket and calling her a grifter. The clash spurred further debate over what committed pro-lifers should do as they become increasingly sidelined by the Republican Party.

The online infighting comes at a moment when the pro-life movement is recalibrating after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and as national Republican leaders have backed away from making abortion central to the GOP’s 2024 campaign message.

“We represent a constituency that has no voice, who can’t speak for themselves, and so it’s our job to speak for them,” Rose, founder of the pro-life nonprofit Live Action, told Christianity Today. “We’re being told, You have to shut up and sit down, and you should just be grateful for whatever we give you. And if we play politics that way, the pro-life movement will become completely defunct.”

Rose, a former evangelical who converted to Catholicism, stands by her convictions without compromise: She doesn’t support exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother, and wants a federal abortion ban.

Republicans went back and forth on X over Rose’s implication that pro-lifers should withhold votes from Trump. The self-proclaimed “most pro-life president in history” appointed the justices who overturned Roe two years ago. But more recently, he’s leaned toward leaving abortion up to the states and even mentioned backing women’s “reproductive rights,” often used to reference abortion.

The stakes are high for voters who reject Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and her campaign’s emphasis on protecting the right to abortion. Liz Wheeler, a conservative political commentator, wrote that “refusing to vote for Trump is a vote for Kamala Harris, the most gruesome pro-abortion politician in our country.”

Conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair was among Rose’s most vocal critics, telling nearly one million followers on X that it was “evil” for Rose to try to suppress pro-life voters “in the most consequential election in US history.”

St. Clair, operations manager at The Babylon Bee and the author of a Christian children’s book on gender identity, has described herself as “rather libertarian on the abortion issue.”

She accused Rose of using millions of dollars from pro-lifers wastefully, such as hosting an event at a Ritz Carlton, while others said Live Action should spend more on donations to pregnancy resource centers or ads in states with abortion ballot initiatives.

Rose founded Live Action as a teenager, gaining national prominence 15 years ago through undercover videos at Planned Parenthood. The nonprofit has grown what it says is the largest social following among pro-life organizations. In an interview Wednesday with CT, Rose shrugged off the criticism.

“My job is to advocate for people who are in danger of being murdered, and they are little babies,” she said. “People angry with me on Twitter is a small price to pay for advocating for the interest of children in danger of abortion, who currently, foolishly, are being thrown under the bus by not just the RNC platform but by the latest statements from the Trump campaign.”

Several major pro-life voices came to Rose’s defense, saying the accusations were a “misrepresentation” of Live Action’s mission and clarifying that most of the expenses on Live Action’s 990 form went toward employee salaries and producing video content.

2 things are true: 1) @LilaGraceRose's work to change hearts & minds and expose the lies of the abortion industry is unrivaled 2) Harris & Walz are abortion fanatics & must be defeated. If they win they will abolish the filibuster & force abortion without limit on all 50 states
— Marjorie Dannenfelser (@marjoriesba) August 27, 2024

They also respected Rose’s position.

Trump supporters “want to destroy her because she’s not bending at the knee,” wrote Bethany Mandel, a conservative Jewish author. “Lila is verbalizing something I’m hearing *a lot* from pro-life voters: Their votes should not be taken for granted.”

John Shelton, policy director for former vice president Mike Pence’s foundation, Advancing American Freedom, said he believes the attacks on Rose are misguided. For voters who have abortion as their main motivating issue, Shelton said it’s reasonable that they would want to lobby for (or against) their preferred policies.

“She’s a winnable voter,” Shelton said of Rose. “All Trump would probably need to say is, Yeah, I take that back. Somebody told me to do that. … But I’m going to be the pro-life candidate. I’m going to find something that we can pass, and we’ll reduce abortions. And this conversation wouldn’t be happening.”

My personal message to the Trump campaign on abortion: pic.twitter.com/TrjQI2BQqE
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) August 28, 2024

While there have always been factions that have disagreed on political strategy, the recent fight highlights fractures in the pro-life movement that have been more on display since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Over the course of the presidential campaign, Trump has taken care to distance himself from stances like the ones Rose holds and to move to the political center on abortion. The evolution has come as some on the political right have viewed the Dobbs decision as an electoral liability that has cost Republicans at the ballot box.

On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” a phrase typically used to describe access to abortion. Also over the weekend, his vice presidential pick, Vance, said that Trump would veto abortion ban legislation.

Trump has also overseen an overhaul of the Republican Party platform on the issue of abortion. In July, the platform watered down its long-held stance seeking nationwide limits on abortion and moved to a position that opposes late term abortion, suggesting the issue is best left to the states.

While a small minority of conservative evangelicals have put their support behind Harris, Rose and others who are pushing for a more rigorous stance from the GOP don’t see Democrats as a viable alternative.

“I don’t want Kamala Harris in office,” Rose told CT. “And I also don’t want the Republican Party to increasingly become pro-abortion.” Rose has devoted episodes of her podcast to talking about the Democrats’ embrace of abortion as part of the 2024 campaign. The Democratic party platform includes a section affirming that they believe “every woman should be able to access … safe and legal abortion” and states the party opposes restrictions on the procedure, including on abortion pills.

White evangelicals are the only religious group with a majority opposed to abortion, with 73 percent saying it should be illegal in all or most cases. Public support on the issue has moved up and down, but currently 63 percent of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, Pew Research Center found.

Since Dobbs, Trump has articulated a more hands-off approach to abortion, holding that abortion policy should be left to the discretion of voters in each state. He’s also suggested he wouldn’t seek to restrict abortion medication.

Last September, Trump criticized Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing a Florida bill to prohibit abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, saying it was a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” At the time, he added that he wouldn’t sign federal legislation banning abortion at 15 weeks.

In previous races, Trump had to work against concerns that he would be too squishy on life: In 2016, he named conservative Supreme Court nominees and picked Mike Pence for vice president, who sponsored at least seven measures to defund Planned Parenthood in his time in Congress and signed every pro-life bill that reached the governor’s mansion during his tenure in Indiana.

At the time, that was key to Trump’s courting the evangelical vote. But in 2024, it’s unclear whether the majority of evangelicals will require Trump to articulate a pro-life position to earn their support. Instead, single-issue pro-life voters who question supporting Trump seem to be the ones on the defensive.

“Increasingly, his platform and his rhetoric is pro-abortion, and that should disturb and concern the pro-life movement,” Rose told Fox News.

Rose addressed the controversy on her podcast Tuesday. The episode title was “Trump Might Lose If He Keeps This Up.” She played a clip of Trump speaking at the 2020 March for Life, in which he pledged support for legislation that would prohibit abortion.

“Look at the departure. I mean, that was a great Trump right there. I remember the electricity in the pro-life movement,” she commented.

Given Trump’s current positions, Rose said she won’t vote for Trump. But she hopes he reverses course, telling CT she would be “happy to talk with Trump” or his team. Katelyn Walls Shelton, a fellow with the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, said she isn’t seeing defections toward the Democrat side but rather hearing pro-lifers question whether they will “vote at all.”

“I definitely hope that [Trump’s team] is listening. Because I think that if Trump changes course on this, he could be very inspiring,” Rose said.

After the episode aired, she tagged the Republican Party and Donald Trump in a post, essentially pleading with him to return to his previous positions on abortion. The message was clear: The ball is now in their court.“People say, Well, you’re suppressing the vote if you call out Trump for this. I’m not suppressing the vote if Trump does this—Trump’s suppressing his own vote,” Rose told CT. “The responsibility is on Trump to get people to vote for him and to win the pro-life vote.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Culture

What to Watch for in ‘Rings of Power’ Season 2

Compiled by Kate Lucky

The sumptuous Tolkien prequel has returned. Here’s what a few CT writers noticed.

Charlie Vickers as Annatar and Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor in Rings of Power.

Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

The first episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, season 2, are out August 29 on Amazon Prime. Christianity Today asked three writers to screen the season in advance and identify a theme for fans to keep in mind as they watch.

Evil in disguise

“Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light,” warns the apostle Paul (2 Cor. 11:14). So too in J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythology does the dark lord Sauron sometimes appear in “fair form.” In the guise of nobility, beauty, and goodness, he deceives and manipulates what he cannot win by conquest.

We never saw Sauron’s “fair form” in Peter Jackson’s justly beloved Lord of the Rings film trilogy. And in season 1 of Amazon’s prequel series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (ROP), we saw a Sauron who was more conflicted and confused than lovely. That season’s gimmicky reveal—the hapless cockney Southlander Halbrand was, gasp, Sauron all along!—was a cheap payoff for eight hours of otherwise impressive world-building and plotting.

Season 2 of Rings of Power is far stronger than season 1. It ramps everything up—including the action, violence, and gore (parental caution advised), as Amazon goes after the Game of Thrones audience. Happily, the show has fixed some of its pacing issues; though it occasionally struggles to juggle five locations and subplots, it also successfully stitches together the mass of jumbled, at times inconsistent narrative threads that Tolkien left behind. If nothing else, ROP is a sumptuous show, with lavish sets, costumes, and effects.

But the strongest compliment I can pay to Rings of Power season 2 is that its portrayal of Sauron, excellently done by Charlie Vickers, is unnervingly persuasive—fully embracing and making use of Sauron as a deceitful angel of light. Sauron, disguised as an emissary of the gods, worms his way into the confidence of elven master smith Celebrimbor and dwarven king Durin III with a light touch. He suggests and questions, and rarely demands; he plants ideas and lets them germinate; he flatters and compliments; he relentlessly appeals to pride, vanity, and ambition.

At one point, Sauron pushes too hard, and Celebrimbor calls him out on his tricks. The ROP writers don’t condescend to their characters; they don’t rely on the cheap trick of making the characters too dumb to figure out what’s going on until it’s time for the climax.

Instead, Celebrimbor both gradually succumbs to Sauron and is increasingly self-aware of what is happening, yet is still unable to stop it. This is the most affecting plot thread of the season, given real weight with Charles Edwards’ Celebrimbor. Tragically, it seems to resonate with the spiritual truths Tolkien likely had in mind—not only of Satan’s proclivity for disguise but for the powerlessness of our flesh to resist him without divine aid.

Paul D. Miller is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University and a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Present presence

Our normal relationship to time is full of unknowns. Despite our best efforts, we cannot predict the future.

But as a prequel, Rings of Power temporarily transforms us into seers, offering us the “before” of the story so we might better identify the “after.” For a few tantalizing hours, the viewer is omniscient. Even as we see something “new”—backstories we didn’t know before—we’re reveling in affectionate nostalgia for something old: The familiar books and films that ROP both precedes (in narrative time) and follows (in “real-world” time). Janus-faced, we look to both the future and the past.

J. R. R. Tolkien, meanwhile, seemed to endorse a different view of time than what’s offered by our frantic 21st-century schedules and hour-long episodes of television: a particular emphasis on the present, on what’s now rather than what’s next. The most important moments in the Lord of the Rings unfold gradually along arduous journeys, during joyous feasts, and in quiet conversations between friends. Tolkien’s wisest characters—Elrond, Tom Bombadil, and Gandalf—fully inhabit the present; they realize that struggle is essential, that renewal cannot be rushed.

“Time is the process of creation, and things of space are results of creation,” wrote rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Tolkien’s books are about that process—the slow work of character development and world-building and good triumphing over evil.

But in this second season of The Rings of Power, even the sagest elves (Galadriel and Elrond, for instance) are caught up in urgency and haste. The journey is rushed.

Perhaps this breathlessness can be instructive for the viewer. These days, most of us are challenged by “the present.” Like the prequel, we are always looking backward at what’s been and forward at what’s to come. How do we attend simply to what is?

Some moments of ROP allow for such contemplation: a defiant craftsman composed in the face of evil, the quiet love of a brave captain. Here, the frenzied storytelling finally finds its flow. In such moments, the viewer is reminded that presence is all we really ever have. Fearful foretelling is the realm of Saruman and Denethor. We, as Christians, are called to “be still, and know” that the Lord is God (Ps. 46:10). The present is the single moment in which we can both delight in the light and defy the darkness—in and through and by the grace of God.

Gracy Olmstead is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The American Conservative, The Week, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and is the author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind.

Genuine friendship

Unlikely friendships abound in season 2 of Rings of Power.

Nori the Harfoot (Markella Kavenagh) and The Stranger (Daniel Weyman) journey together to the desert region of Middle-earth’s Rhûn, hoping to find answers about The Stranger’s identity.

Sauron establishes a bond with Celebrimbor, telling the elven smith, “There is no place for half-truths between those who have worked so close as you and I.”

But as Sauron’s dark power spreads, relationships fracture. Hearts grow corruptible. Convictions turn shaky.

In short: Friendship in ROP is wielded as a weapon. Words are used to cajole and manipulate; actions only serve to further selfish interests.

In modern-day parlance, we would call such friendships “toxic”—one person tries to exert control over another, exulting in their influence. Sauron engages in deceit and sows seeds of doubt to make Celebrimbor, and everyone else in Eregion, bend to his will.

Yet, however powerful Sauron appears to be, he’s also pitiful, someone who will never be able to enjoy the freedom that comes in relationship. Grasping for power and dominion over Middle-earth, he is the biggest loser when it comes to making friends.

Friendship, after all, is a gift. It is to be held lightly, woven in faith and trust that one is here for the other’s good, and vice versa. It does not fashion another in our own likeness, to yield to our wants and needs wherever and whenever we demand.

Nori and The Stranger’s friendship exemplifies this beautifully and serves as a foil to Sauron and Celebrimbor. When The Stranger gets separated from Nori, he encounters the enigmatic Tom Bombadil, who tells him that he has to choose between finding his friend and seeking his destiny.

It’s an impossible choice, perhaps, but The Stranger decides that friendship is worth more than self-discovery.

“We’re very different creatures, Nori, when all is said and done,” says The Stranger after he rescues Nori.

“Not so different at all, if you ask me,” Nori replies.

Scripture tells us that genuine Christian friendships are founded on mutuality. As the apostle Paul writes to his friends in Rome: “I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong—that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith” (Rom. 1:11–12).

Nori and The Stranger seek each other’s flourishing. And their unlikely friendship also involves some measure of risk, forged out of a willingness to learn about another’s culture and way of life. It is not transactional or quid pro quo.

Rings of Power’s latest season challenges us to redraw the bounds of our circles, to build relationships with people who might look or sound quite different from us. As we cultivate friendships with gentle wisdom and fierce tenacity, we make room for the surprising and edifying work of the Spirit.

Isabel Ong is associate Asia editor for Christianity Today.

- More from Kate Lucky

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Evil in disguise

Present presence

Genuine friendship

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