Women Agree: Alcoholism Is a Big Concern in Their Circles

Responses to our May/June issue.

Illustration by Christianity Today

When we shared Ericka Andersen’s essay on Christian women and alcohol, “The Secret Sin of Mommy Juice” women shared their stories with us.

“I’ve been sober for 13 years!” wrote one social media follower. “By the grace of God. The glamorization of alcohol is REAL until you have a ‘problem’; then it’s straight-up judgment and gossip.” Another said, “I just lost a Christian friend to [alcohol abuse] who is a mother, and it’s been so heavy on my heart. This is such an important conversation.”

Readers lamented the societal pressures, gender inequities, and marketing ploys encouraging women to drink. “Masking hardship with substances as a coping mechanism and then making it a joke is one more way we let women (moms in this case) down,” one commented.

Recent data shows middle-aged and older Americans, namely women, are drinking more aggressively and more often. At the same time, no-alcohol beer sales are up and creative mocktails are increasingly featured on bar menus. Recent poll data shows young adults in the US are drinking less than in prior decades; daily marijuana users outnumber daily drinkers for the first time. Substance use trends are shifting, and the church will need to listen and care for women who struggle with alcohol as well as other substances.

Kate Lucky, senior editor, culture and engagement

Was Paul a Slave?

My Acts commentary does suggest that Paul was likely descended from freed slaves (likelier than not in Rome, after Pompey’s conquest, since only slaves of Roman citizens became libertini, as in Acts 6:9, at their emancipation). But that Paul himself was born a slave would conflict with the widespread understanding of Acts 22:28, where Paul was born a citizen.

Craig S. Keener, Wilmore, KY

It is more than early church historians who record that Onesimus was bishop of Ephesus, for a bishop of the same name is mentioned in Ignatius’s letter to the Ephesians in AD 107 as he was to be martyred in Rome. And he evidently borrows from language found in Philemon. Clearly the letter meant much to Ignatius and to the first Christians who incorporated the letter into the New Testament.

T. C. Schmidt, Fairfield, CT

The article seems to defend the probability that Paul was a slave by a negative tactic: casting aspersions on English-speaking scholars who by ignorance ignore the possibility that Paul was a slave.

There’s another viable explanation of Paul’s interest in slavery, servanthood, bondage, and liberty. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor points to an undisputed aspect of Paul’s background that radically influenced his writing and self-understanding: his thorough knowledge of the Septuagint—the Greek version of our Old Testament.

In the Septuagint, doulos, meaning “servant” or “slave,” is mentioned over 300 times. Approximately 70 refer to the respectful relationship to a person in authority, usually a king (e.g., David to King Saul); and at least 150 refer to the title God gives to those who serve him. This leaves less than 30 percent referring to actual slaves or servants.

Making this connection, it becomes clear that Paul saw himself in the same lineage as the great leaders of God’s ancient people, speaking not under the authority of a king whose rule would lead to slavery, but under the authority of the rightful king, Jesus.

One does not need to speculate that Paul had been a slave to see why Paul would use this language for himself: Called into God’s service on the Damascus road, he could do nothing else. All of us, no matter what our background, have been called to the same role—allegiance and eternal liberty as servants, indeed, slaves, of Jesus Christ.

David Renwick, Washington, DC

How to Pray with ADHD

I only figured out I have significant ADHD at 64 years old. Suddenly I understood so many issues, concerns, behaviors, and relationship pain over my life. It’s a condition that affects many Christians, and having it discussed in articles in CT is so affirming. I completely understand the struggle to read the Bible and pray daily; I have struggled with this my entire life and felt so guilty! Now I have some new strategies for it.

Rebecca Clark, Tucson, AZ

As a spiritual director, I ran into this with clients who had ADHD. I wasn’t familiar with how much that can affect people’s ability to concentrate. I scrambled to understand, and the Lord led me to some practices that enabled them to develop a quiet time they could do, the way God created them.

Chris Taylor (Facebook)

The Struggle to Hold It Together When a Church Falls Apart

Even the smartest, kindest, most well-meaning people are human. The reason we need a Savior is the same reason we have conflict in our churches. And we all bring different perspectives with us. If there’s no clear, uncontested right and wrong, it may be best to remain faithful, humble, and understanding of others as much as we can, and trust in the Lord when we can’t.

Dave Porter (Facebook)

I’ve been through it, and it really shapes the way you think of church involvement. It was 45 years ago, and some of my friends still haven’t found a church. It took us a long time to become members of a church again.

Debbie Garber Billman (Facebook)

Yes, Charisma Has Its Place in the Pulpit

The guardrail that often gets overlooked is the New Testament’s bias for team leadership. The Twelve recommended the Seven in Acts 6, and wherever Paul established a church, he left elders, plural. A team could bring their charismas to the table, share the load, watch over one another to keep their personalities in check, and honor God as the strong, singular leader of his people.

Paul Allen, Michigan City, IN

Criticizing Critical Race Theory—and Its Critics

The last sentence sums up the integral misconception held by critics of CRT—thinking evangelicals have been commissioned to change secular worldview and believing that is our purpose. A worldview cannot be changed until the heart has transformed. Our influence should witness to the lost, not impose our view on an unbelieving society.

Linda F. Howelton, San Antonio, TX

Can a Secularizing Nation Have a Christian Soul?

No one is a ‘secularist’ even if they think they are. Everyone has a spiritual religion with doctrines. It’s just a matter of what religion you practice.

Tim Aagard (Facebook)

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Responses to Our May/June Issue".

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News

The Christians Trying to Restore Our Faith in Elections

Harvest Prude

In the wake of unprecedented public distrust and safety threats, officials and volunteers are committed to protecting the vote.‌

Illustration by Tyler Comrie

Christine Johnson is the type of American who kisses her ballot and thanks God whenever she votes.

Johnson has volunteered as a poll worker in Minnesota for over 20 years; she currently serves as an election judge in a blue district.

“I love being a part of the process,” Johnson said. “I love helping my neighbors vote.”

One of her favorite sights is when parents bring their children to learn about the voting process. It’s touching to see the reverse as well, she said—adult children helping their elderly parents who are determined to vote in person navigate the polling site.

To Johnson, Election Day feels like a holiday. She knows what this November 5 will look like for her: She’ll start the day before the sun rises, getting dressed and packing a change of shoes, “because you know you’re going to be in a church basement or a bad chair or a bad cement floor all day long.”

She will brew a thermos of coffee to get her from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., when she and her Democratic counterpart will drive the completed paper ballots from their polling site—sometimes a school gymnasium or house of worship—to city hall.

There may be 15 or so election workers, mostly volunteers, working at her site. They set up the machines, post signs directing voters where to go, and go through a checklist of their duties. Then comes another special moment. The group will get in a circle, raise their right hands, and recite an oath “to be impartial and to follow the law and to get it right,” Johnson said. “I get kind of choked up when I do that oath every election.”

Her civic involvement stems from her faith. Shortly after becoming a Christian as a teen, Johnson started taking more interest in the world around her. In college, she was the lone freshman subscribing to periodicals to learn about political theory and systems of governance.

“This is such a rare and precious thing that we get to choose our leaders, and I don’t take that for granted at all,” she said. “I feel for people who … don’t have a constitutional republic or any form of say [in their government]. That just hurts my heart.”

The US election system relies on hundreds of thousands of volunteers like Johnson. But the role she has long seen as an opportunity to serve is now the target of a maelstrom of suspicion from a vocal segment of Americans, including some of her fellow conservatives and fellow Christians.

Partisan attacks on election administration methods, election results, and election officials are not new, but they have become a defining feature of today’s political landscape, with the “stop the steal” rhetoric and claims of election fraud that emerged after Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in 2020. It seems harder than ever for election workers trying to keep the process fair and trustworthy.

In a recent poll of election officials, more than one-third said they experienced threats, harassment, or abuse due to their work. Half voiced safety concerns for their staff, and nearly all have been forced to improve their safety measures.

“It has become more normal, if you are a public servant, to endure threats of intimidation and harassment at pretty significant levels,” Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security, told CT.

Even formerly innocuous roles—city council, county clerk, election workers, or volunteers in civic service “as retirement jobs”—have “these horror stories of [getting] voicemails of somebody threatening to kill their grandchildren,” she added.

Christians called to serve in these roles have found some comfort in their convictions—but they’ve also felt the sting of neighbors and churchgoers demonizing their work.

Kentucky secretary of state Michael Adams recalls his wife and daughter peeling his campaign sticker off their cars after dealing with public confrontations in the parking lots of grocery stores, pharmacies, and even their church.

Secretary of state was supposed to be a relatively boring office. Wonky. Administrative. At least that’s what Adams told his wife, Christina, when he was eyeing the position after years as an attorney working in election law.

He was elected in 2019. He took office weeks before a global pandemic turned routine questions of election administration into fraught public health and safety concerns. Misinformation and deepening institutional distrust inflamed the country’s partisan tensions.

“What used to be a very boring office, and what he assured me was going to be just a very boring term, turned out not to be,” Christina Adams told CT. “It was definitely not what he pictured going in.”

Michael Adams worked across the aisle with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear during the early months of the pandemic to give voters more time and options to vote. With bipartisan support in the state legislature, Kentucky expanded absentee and early voting access and opened countywide polling centers. Turnout was up, with three-quarters of voters in the June 2020 primary voting absentee.

Some Republicans criticized the changes. Social media trolls did their worst. Hate mail arrived in Michael Adams’s inbox and at his house. Even a false alarm by his new home security system had the family initially terrified that one of his online attackers had decided to follow through on the barrage of death threats.

“We were on edge, a bit more than I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Christina Adams said. “That was the first time I was actually nervous for our safety.”

It was hard for Michael Adams to watch all the politics around his job—a job that was supposed to be boring, a job that was supposed to combine his legal expertise with his Christian calling to public service—disrupt his family’s life.

The controversies around the tight presidential vote in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia in 2020 are well-known. But even in deep red states, and even in the years since, the work of state and local officials continues to be shaped by election-related conspiracy theories brought by concerned voters.

Adams said it used to be that only a handful of secretaries of state faced intense pressure and controversy, often because they were in purple states with close races. “The rest of us kind of thought, Well, there but for the grace of God go I,” Adams said. But by the 2022 midterms, “We all felt that way.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has found 1,546 proven cases of election fraud. These include anything from mailing an absentee ballot for someone who has died to voting despite being ineligible to tampering with or damaging ballot drop boxes.

More than 1,313 of the cases tracked by Heritage resulted in criminal prosecution, while the rest led to civil penalties, judicial findings, or other actions. That tally spans over a decade of elections—meaning in any given state, in any given year, there could be up to a handful of illegitimate ballots in a particular race, nowhere near the level needed to swing an election.

The think tank notes that the database is nonexhaustive. But even based on Heritage’s numbers, “the amount of proven election fraud is miniscule,” the Brookings Institution wrote.

Yet it seems like there’s more distrust than ever around the election system. Americans hear more about suspected or alleged fraud. In Colorado, former county clerk Tina Peters claimed she was “called” to expose election fraud in 2020 by revealing voting machine data; she lost her job and faced 10 charges of official misconduct and tampering with the election.

Former president Donald Trump’s allies filed 62 lawsuits following the 2020 election, mostly in battleground states that Biden won. All but one of the lawsuits, including those that reached the Supreme Court, failed, according to one USA Today analysis.

The outlier was a case in Pennsylvania where a judge ruled that voters could not return and “cure” their ballots in the days following an election if they had failed to provide proper identification at the time of voting. The ruling did not affect the outcome in the state, where Biden won by over 80,000 votes. But that hasn’t always slowed the suspicion and vitriol.

Claims of a rigged election have continued to feature prominently in Trump’s reelection bid. And the lawsuits, allegations of wrongdoing, and misinformation have convinced a sizable share of the GOP that Trump’s loss was illegitimate: In a poll from last year, only 57 percent of Republicans believed Biden legitimately won.

Threats to poll workers and election officials have gotten so bad that the Justice Department launched a task force to deal with them. Workers have reported more than 2,000 threats in the past three years. Around 100 are being investigated.

One prominent case from 2020 involved two officials in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. They were accused by Trump ally Rudy Giuliani of committing election fraud. Freeman received over 400 threats and had to move from her home. Last year, they won a $148 million defamation case against Giuliani. But as for all the threats, only one person ended up facing charges.

Freeman, who is a Christian, said upon winning the lawsuit that “my friends say that God knew who to give this assignment to because ain’t no way we could do this. God chose me to go through this because he knows that I would tell everyone whose path I cross about Jesus.”

In Kentucky, Michael Adams also found faith to be a lifeline.

“I can’t imagine doing this job, or any job, without having faith,” Adams said. He described one incident where people marched outside the state capitol with AR-15 rifles during a protest over COVID-19 restrictions. “I do think a lot of people have prayed really, really hard for me the last several years.”

While he was in the thick of the online hate, several people from his family’s church reached out, even a few who were on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

“I felt like that was probably the Spirit encouraging us,” Christina Adams said. “It was actually encouraging to know how many homes were open to us, should we need to leave ours. That’s what really touched me. I mean, maybe five or six said, ‘You need a place to stay, come on over.’ … That meant the world.”

When Adams ran for reelection, Republicans recruited two challengers for the primary, both of whom campaigned on claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Adams won 118 out of 120 counties in 2023. In the months since, things have settled down—somewhat. As a keepsake of more turbulent times, in one corner of his office he keeps a red posterboard sign: FIRE MICHAEL ADAMS.

Adams said he’s worried less about threats than about whether his office will have enough poll workers or polling locations. It takes 15,000 people to run a statewide election. Adams’s staff is around 35.

“You do the math. I have to rely on volunteers, thousands and thousands of volunteers,” he said. “I think it’s healthy for our system that it’s, number one, primarily citizen operated, volunteer operated. And, number two, that it’s citizens from both sides of the aisle.”

But that means relying on people’s willingness and civic-mindedness to step up to the plate and volunteer. This becomes harder in a fraught atmosphere. After Kentucky voted to allow abortion protections in the state constitution in 2022, some Kentucky churches serving as voting locations faced enough scrutiny that they decided not to do it again.

Church doors are still open to voters in Glendale, Kentucky, population 2,227.

Mike Bell—called Brother Mike Bell by congregants and townspeople alike—dreamed of being the mayor growing up. He’s as close as you can get in his tiny unincorporated town. He’s on steering committees, chairs the Hardin County Water Board, is chaplain to the chamber of commerce, and is also probably one of the most famous voices in town.

Bell calls basketball and football games, trading his preacher cadence for drawn-out vowels—“Te-e-rrrrry Buckle!” he demonstrated at his office—and rhythmic cheers. Kids love it so much they use clips of his voice as their ringtones.

Bell’s office at Glendale Christian Church is dotted with references to It’s a Wonderful Life: Behind a coffee cup with a picture of George Bailey on it is a certificate of Bell’s baptism, very faded, along with a few dollars—the first $15 he ever made from preaching.

“Glendale is kind of like Bedford Falls,” he said. “And I’ve lived a wonderful life. You know, sometimes I wonder if God’s already given me heaven.” (He added with a chuckle, “But then the next day he gives me a little hell, so I know it’s not.”)

Bell’s life demonstrates one of his core beliefs: that Christians are called to serve their neighbors and communities, not exist apart from them. “To be a real preacher, you got to be down there with them,” he said. “Jesus walked among them. You got to walk among them.”

So he’s opened the church’s doors to the Lions Club, the town’s business association, a local quilting group—and, again this November, to voters.

The church has served as a polling site on and off for over three decades, a commitment that costs them about a week with all the setup and teardown of equipment. Bell would bring doughnuts and coffee for poll workers.

“It’s a great opportunity, because you’re being a part of the community,” he said. He wants to see more Christians be active in politics—not necessarily talking politics from the pulpit but serving at the ballot box and taking the time to vote.

Hardin County clerk Brian Smith agrees. Being a Christian in public life is his way of trying to make his community better. When concerns around election processes or results come up, he says his faith motivates him to respond to people’s concerns with respect, try to get things right, and be transparent about mistakes and human error when they are made.

But when he’s not buried in records or working on election-related duties, he can often be found chatting with people lined up to renew their license plates or update their driver’s licenses.

In his office, he keeps packs of water bottles to hand out when the line gets long.

Smith believes addressing election-related tension and regaining trust will require more civic involvement. And he’s starting early, wheeling the county’s voting machines into elementary schools for mock elections.

Second graders voting for superhero candidates—say, Hulk for sheriff—vote on the machines, print their ballots, and scan them in. Officials go through the process with them as if it’s Election Day.

When kids filled out the wrong spot, Smith’s staff showed them how to document a spoiled ballot. When characters like Wonder Woman and Captain America tied for county clerk, they double-checked the results and went on to a coin flip (in Kentucky, tied races are decided by the casting of lots).

“It was a great lesson that every vote counts. If a vote can end in a tie, you better believe that your vote counts,” Smith said. “We used that same equipment and then we hand-counted the results, and it matched our machine results. The kids got to see from a very early age what election integrity is all about.”

The civics lesson was such a hit that a nearby middle school invited the clerk’s office to operate their student council election.

“I gotta tell you, those kids took their jobs seriously,” Smith said. “They made sure everybody got just one ballot.” After ballots were counted, Michael Adams made an appearance to certify the results.

In Minnesota, Christine Johnson also wants to repair the rifts in trust, for the sake of poll workers’ safety and for the sake of democracy.

When people accuse the process of being rigged, Johnson recalls the checklists volunteers follow, how they make sure people from different parties tag-team on all the key tasks, the layers of audits, and the way the paper trail is double- and sometimes triple-checked.

“I can’t speak for every state,” Johnson said, “but when it comes to the care for the ballots and the process where the voter is having their input, it’s like, oh my gosh, our city clerk, she just runs such a tight ship.

“I just tell people, well, my experience is that you have nothing to worry about.”

Johnson has found that her firsthand experience is rarely convincing.

“They’ll say, ‘Well, maybe that’s okay there, but how do you know it’s good everywhere else?’ Or they’ll bring up other states. Or they’ll go, ‘Well, you know, they would be able to trick you too. They’re going to do it secretly behind the scenes and you wouldn’t even be aware of it.’”

She’s not sure what election officials can do to combat the distrust. “Sometimes I’ll even say to some of the more skeptical friends, ‘You know what, you should sign up. You should have your own experience.’

“And you know,” she added, “no one’s ever taken me up on that.”

Harvest Prude is Christianity Today’s political correspondent.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Election Interference".

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Ideas

The Soul of MAGA

Mike Cosper

The loves and desires that draw evangelicals to Donald Trump.

Illustration by Anthony Gerace

Donald Trump stands wrapped in the arms of Secret Service agents—their dark sunglasses and suits blending like a many-armed, many-eyed modern seraphim. Blood streams from his right ear, and his face is contorted with rage, determination, and pain. He thrusts his fist skyward. Behind him, the Star-Spangled Banner yet waves. You couldn’t pose a more iconic image if you tried.

In the months before the assassination attempt, I watched dozens of old Trump speeches and read a stack of his biographies, trying to understand the unique charisma that enabled him to transform right-wing politics in the US and that coalesced in a movement to Make America Great Again—or what we simply call “MAGA.”

Enough ink has been spilled on this subject to turn the ocean black, and most of it has been decidedly negative, attributing the movement’s success to “white rural rage,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” or various forms of Christian or ethnic nationalism. Some have pointed to the economic turmoil of the past two decades as the force that galvanizes MAGA—the dot-com boom and bust, the gig economy, the economic crises of 2007 and 2008, and the looming specter of AI and automation, which threaten the middle class and the manufacturing economies. But here again, the conclusions tend to be negative: grievance, discontent, and economic anxiety.

While I see truth in these diagnoses, I’m not convinced they get at the root of what compels MAGA. As Augustine put it, a people is “united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” Which is to say that people’s affections—their loves, desires, and longings—tell us far more about them than their grievances, their discontent, or for that matter their policy positions.

Any political movement would be expected to rally to their candidate after an assassination attempt. But Trump’s bond with his voters is unique in American culture, and that bond was formed via the larger-than-life images, stories, and portrayals of him in pop culture. The post-assassination-attempt photo—in the context of stories cultivated for decades—propped him as not just a politician but a symbol of the good life.

And that’s why MAGA loves him.

Since riding down his gilded escalator in 2015, Trump has held the attention of Americans in a kind of vise grip, making our politics reactive to him, what he said at a rally, on The Sean Hannity Show, or on social media.

The power Trump wields comes from the status he secured long before he ran for office—not as a politician or a real estate tycoon but as a celebrity.

Ever since his foray into public life in the 1970s and ’80s, Trump was eager to make headlines. According to his niece Mary Trump, Donald not only craved that attention personally; it was part of what his father, Fred, expected of him—the primary benchmark of his success for the family business.

By the end of the 1990s, despite multiple bankruptcies and a variety of personal scandals, he firmly established his place as an avatar of the rich and powerful. In 1999, Rage Against the Machine recorded a music video for the song “Sleep Now in the Fire” featuring day traders with signs that read, “Trump for President.” A year later, the same idea was a punch line in an episode of The Simpsons.

On its own, that kind of fame eclipses what most presidential contenders could achieve in long and illustrious careers of public service. It would pale in comparison to the fame that was to follow the advent of reality television.

The Apprentice featured Donald Trump on 14 seasons between 2004 and 2015 and was a ratings smash. With Trump starring as a real estate mogul in search of his next protégé, each season featured a dozen contestants competing in games and stunts meant to prove their entrepreneurial savvy, loyalty, and leadership ability.

The show came at a moment when Trump desperately needed an infusion of good publicity and—for the first time in his life outside of the Trump organization—a steady paycheck. As Maggie Haberman describes in Confidence Man, “The disparity between the world created on the show—a commanding businessman flying from one site of luxury to another—and Trump’s reality was jarring for those who worked on the show.”

The series concocted a jet-setting lifestyle of luxury and success that starkly contrasted Trump’s reality, a “crumbling empire” of “well-worn carpets” and “chipped furniture.” Producers masked the worn and beaten state of the executive offices they leased from him at Trump Tower and the seedy vibes of his rundown New Jersey casino. And while a string of bankruptcies, bad deals, and financial disputes were a matter of public record, Trump wasn’t running for public office in 2004. What harm could there be in NBC propping him up as a mastermind and mogul?

It wasn’t the first time a benefactor subsidized Trump’s mythos for self-interested reasons. In 1990, he was drowning in bad investments and debt. Newspapers in June of that year reported that creditors would be providing him with a personal spending allowance of $450,000 a month—a move that both constrained his spending and enabled his lavish personal brand, which they saw as critical to the marketing strategy for their investments in his properties.

Fred Trump himself was a successful and cutthroat developer, with the sense of thrift, scarcity, and urgency typical of first-generation immigrants. His financial success bankrolled many of Donald Trump’s business ventures and floated him when he teetered on the brink of failure.

But as Mary Trump recalls, “Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him. … Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition.” In Donald, Fred Trump saw someone who could make the Trump name great among Manhattan developers, extending his success into social and political circles he’d never been able to break into.

Many trace Trump’s turn to politics back to 2011, when he became a loud and harsh booster of the “birther” conspiracy theory suggesting Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen. But his foray into presidential politics was more than two decades earlier, in 1987, when he took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” it read.

The talking points were co-crafted by Roger Stone, a Nixon-loving political consultant who was part of Trump’s 2016 team and was later convicted of obstruction of justice, false statements, and witness tampering during the probe into Russian interference in that election. (Trump pardoned him in December 2020.)

In 1987, Stone, as Haberman describes him, was already known as a bit of “a schemer,” someone willing to play dirty in politics in order to win. In Trump, Stone saw a charismatic figure with the bravado to say and do anything to generate attention and headlines.

Stone gave Trump a taste of political life, helping him meet with donors and politicians and give speeches in New Hampshire. Trump ultimately decided not to run in ’88, but he attended the Republican National Convention. Haberman describes the scene: “Trump was mesmerized, enraptured by the display around him. It was like a giant sporting event, except in honor of one man. ‘This is what I want,’ Trump said.”

The presidential debate of 1960 has long been seen as a turning point in American democracy. It was the first televised debate, and John F. Kennedy appeared young and energetic on screen, with a breezy, calm, and in-command demeanor. Richard Nixon looked tired, unkempt, and uneasy in the studio lights. We know what happened next.

Half a century later, Trump’s media savvy connected with an electorate who spent a lifetime watching, on average, six hours a day of television. Such consumption isn’t without effect. As David Foster Wallace once said, “Television, from the surface on down, is about desire.”

The goal of network (and social media) executives isn’t to challenge or confront or even entertain us; it is much more simply to keep us watching. They achieve this by entertaining and even challenging us, but they mostly achieve it, Wallace says, by presenting us with a world of people who are more beautiful than us doing things that are more interesting than we do. Wallace writes:

We gaze at these rare, highly-trained, unwatched-seeming people for six hours daily. And we love these people. In terms of attributing to them true supernatural assets and desiring to emulate them, it’s fair to say we sort of worship them.

This liturgical quality in media is like that of religious iconography in the Orthodox Christian tradition. It’s not so much that the icon is worshiped or prayed to; rather, it is prayed through. The image provides a glimpse of the good life—and the worshipers engage in acts of prayerful imagination, envisioning their lives caught up in this vision of the good.

Your favorite television shows offer something similar: a vision of life with deep friendships, meaning, and purpose. Reality television invites viewers to imagine themselves finding true love, home sweet home, or an unimaginable windfall of wealth. Trump was part of the iconography of The Apprentice: a successful power broker, beloved by his kids, married to a supermodel, wealthy beyond most people’s imaginations.

Those who entertain us aren’t merely journalists, personalities, or actors, Wallace says. They’re “imagos, demigods.” For a populace whose spiritual and moral imagination was formed by decades of immersion in television, Trump didn’t descend an escalator when he announced his run for the presidency in 2015; he descended Mount Olympus. To be hit by a bullet and rise again, undeterred, fist in the air, shouting, “Fight, fight, fight” was proof, once again, that he was larger than life.

Augustine’s great political work, The City of God, was written after the sacking of Rome by a horde of barbarians. The defeat was devastating to the Romans, including many of its great Christian thinkers. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, wondered, “If Rome can perish, what can be safe?” Some began to wonder if the empire’s turn to Christianity a century earlier had been a mistake. Why hadn’t the Christian God protected them in their war? Would they have fared better by staying loyal to Jupiter?

In response to these concerns, Augustine urged his fellow Christians to reject the paganism that imagines God (or the gods) as orchestrating world events according to their own hierarchy of power or, worse, according to a hierarchy of human righteousness:

For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke … so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them.

What distinguishes the gold from the chaff, Augustine says, is not primarily what people believe but what they love. If their affections were rooted in the greatness of Rome, the city’s fall was cause for despair. But if their affections were elsewhere, if what they loved and longed for was the heavenly city, then suffering ought to refine and concentrate their faith and make their testimony more beautiful.

“Two loves have made the two cities,” he wrote. “Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.”

As James K. A. Smith puts it, “There’s no ‘city limit’ sign to the earthly city precisely because the earthly city is less a place and more a way of life, a constellation of loves and longing and beliefs bundled up in communal rhythms, routines, and rituals.”

In ancient Rome, a robust civic tradition of storytelling, mythology, and philosophy carried these rhythms, routines, and rituals from generation to generation, shaping the affections of the Roman people for Rome itself. Our experience is no different. Smith says you can be assured that when someone asks you to “pledge allegiance” to anything, they’re asking for your heart.

But the quest for our affection spreads far beyond the overtly political. Throughout our lives, we’re confronted by stories and habits meant to seduce in one form or another—whether they’re seeking our votes, our attention, or our credit card numbers.

Evan Vucci captured the iconic photograph just moments after President Donald Trump’s ear was injured during the attempt on his life on July 13.

For many, this accounts for the unique affection and bond followers feel for Donald Trump. Their common love isn’t just Trump the televisual demigod who descended from Trump Tower to make America great again; it’s also the world that gave us Trump and shaped his own imagination: the world of television. It’s a world that offers the grandiose and immediate, a world where complexity is flattened, suffering has a clear purpose, and conflicts are resolved by the top of the hour. It’s a dreamworld, a utopia—and utopia is the perfect word to employ, since it actually means “no place.”

When our moral imaginations have been shaped by what is both idyllic and unreal, it leaves us vulnerable to all manner of demagoguery. We long for a good life and sense that it’s just out of reach; the demagogue gives us someone to blame.

Along with Augustine’s way of understanding the role of affections in politics, The City of God offers another interesting reference point for our moment. Many Christians—myself included—shared a sense that in 2016 the barbarians were at the gates. Christianity was being pressured in the public square in new and alarming ways. Same-sex marriage became the law of the land in a blink, and bakers and florists who conscientiously objected to participating in those weddings went to court to guarantee that. So did nuns who didn’t want to buy birth control. The first bathroom laws and accompanying culture wars were just beginning.

Donald Trump’s promise to “make America great again” seemed to dangle the possibility of a return to an era with a different moral and spiritual ethos, and an anxious political coalition greeted him as a modern Horatius, the legendary soldier who stood alone on a bridge to defend Rome from the Etruscans in the sixth century BC.

As Trump amassed delegates in the primaries, and as other candidates dropped from the race, conservatives—and conservative evangelicals in particular—found themselves at a crossroads: They could either join this coalition that had declared war on a common enemy or find themselves politically homeless. Some declared “never” and stuck to this conviction. Others, fearing the progressive barbarians at the gate and further social alienation, allied themselves with Trump.

When November came and Trump delivered a stunning Electoral College victory, his disruption of the Republican Party became a wholesale realignment. There would be no return to the Republican Party of the past, no 2016 postmortem to consider how the party could have nominated someone like him. Instead, there were judges to nominate, a legislative agenda to pursue, and a new leader in the White House shaping the national discourse in ways that were, at various turns, shocking, funny, confusing, and terrifying.

From the Trump supporter’s perspective, it was the opposite story of Augustine’s Rome. The faithful had rallied and defended the nation from the pagan hordes. And yet, eight years later, it’s worth questioning if that was the right take.

Yes, Trump delivered three US Supreme Court justices who delivered a judgment that ended Roe v. Wade and returned abortion rights to the states. But since then, abortion rights at the state level have expanded radically, the actual number of abortions in the country has gone up, and the pro-life cause disappeared from the Republican Party platform.

In the case of progressive sexual and gender ideology, there has been a reactionary turn in recent years, particularly evidenced by the rollback of “gender-affirming care” for minors and new rules against biological men competing against women in nearly all levels of sports. But before one credits that rollback to Trump, it’s worth noting that most of it began after he left office, during the Biden presidency, and that it was more the result of slow, scientific review and of liberals who were “mugged by reality” (to use Irving Kristol’s phrase) when they saw transgender male athletes showering in women’s locker rooms.

Trump’s supporters may counter that he’s better than the alternative, that he’s a check on progressive overreach, or that we ultimately needed someone willing to fight, even if he is rough around the edges. His evangelical supporters simply haven’t yet noticed the devastation around them.

Seeing through this lens, that iconic image of a bleeding Trump is far more disturbing. In it, I see something other than the courage and resilience of a man who avoided an assassin’s bullet—though I do see that aspect of the photo. I’m grateful he survived, grateful a murderer couldn’t rob Americans of their choices at the ballot box, and grateful the Trump family still has their husband, father, and grandfather.

But as a milestone in American politics, it breaks my heart. It is not the first act of political violence since Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015—a period when violence has come to our nation’s Capitol, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court. I fear it won’t be the last.

I lament that rather than offering words of peace or patriotism, Trump expressed the most visceral sentiment of his movement: “Fight, fight, fight.”

And I lament that such a moment was captured so artfully, so perfectly, so iconically. It’s fuel for the flames of disordered love. I pray for the day when Christian affections will see the picture as tragic rather than triumphant, a cause to weep rather than a catalyst to rage, a call to repentance rather than a vision of the good life.

Mike Cosper is the senior director of CT Media, host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, cohost of The Bulletin, and author of Land of My Sojourn and the forthcoming The Church in Dark Times.

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Culture

Humility in the Age of Cancel Culture

Mike Cosper and Frank Bruni

Mike Cosper is joined by Frank Bruni for a conversation about the root of polarization.

Illustration by Ronan Lynam

In a special episode of The Bulletin, Christianity Today’s senior director of CT Media, Mike Cosper, interviewed New York Times columnist Frank Bruni about his book The Age of Grievance. Where polarization has split churches, families, and friendships, Bruni suggests that the root of this polarization is grievance, an animating impulse in our culture that focuses on scarcity instead of abundance. This conversation offers a way forward for Americans or anyone who looks at the culture and wants something better.

Frank Bruni and Mike Cosper

Mike Cosper: There was one element in the book that I was a little surprised by, and I’m curious for your thoughts on this.

A notion that’s missing from the book is the idea of forgiveness. And I don’t mean that in a religious sense but in the interpersonal sense, in the cultural sense. I remember years ago reading Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. She makes the claim at one point where she says we can’t have a culture without forgiveness.

She says vengeance encloses both the doer and the sufferer in this relentless automatism of action, which will never come to an end. In contrast, forgiving is the only reaction which doesn’t merely react but acts anew and unexpectedly. And the idea is that forgiveness is this moment where we can start fresh.

I’m curious: Is there a role for forgiveness in our culture to do the constructive kind of things you talk about in the book to move things forward?

Frank Bruni: I do think there’s a role for forgiveness.

It’s one of the things we must work our way back toward. It’s the opposite of cancel culture. In various passages, I do talk about how we must get away from this tendency to judge people too quickly. In the last chapter of the book, the concept I explored at great length is humility. I think forgiveness and humility are more than kissing cousins. I think they’re conjoined twins.

MC: I love the idea of how we carry ourselves into forgiveness. In public conversations—whether it’s online or face to face—when we think about our politics, can we carry ourselves, our positions, our convictions in a way that we’re humble enough about them that we don’t have to react so viciously when we encounter an idea that’s different than our own?

That comes back to the fundamental issue—maybe it’s a shrinking appetite. Certainly, it’s a shrinking space for a kind of vision of pluralism. It seems you’re saying we must try to carve out this space that says we have to live in a world where people are fundamentally opposed to many things that you might think and believe. We still must find a way to live at peace with them. We don’t talk or think like that; the tendency is to think in terms of winning and losing.

FB: There are even aspects, I think, of modern child rearing. Certain economic groups send the message that you deserve a world precisely to your liking. You deserve a world purged of offense and insult.

It’s not an accident that Jonathan Haidt and his coauthor titled their book about this The Coddling of the American Mind. They were talking about a generation of students being led to believe that they should never encounter anything that unsettles them or complicates their lives.

When I talk about humility, what I mean, in part, is recognizing that we do not get circumstances that are always exactly to our liking. Other people’s dissenting views have as much right to exposure and discussion and oxygen as yours do.

We have somehow come to a political culture right now where people believe the minute we say, “Maybe you have a point,” we’ve lost the argument. We have too many actors in our politics and outside of our politics who think that impassioned equals virtuous, everything is overwrought, everything is all or nothing; and in fact, they end up doing damage to their own cause as they also do damage to the fabric of public life and the fabric of our culture.

MC: In the church, we often talk about first-order and second-order issues. First-order convictions are things like the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed—our fundamental sets of convictions. And then second-order issues are the things that divide Christians from one another, like the way we think about baptism or church polity or women in leadership versus men in leadership.

One of the things that is frightening in our moment is the way infighting in the church over second-order issues is rising to a first-order level. We are becoming a people who are saying, “This is the hill I must die on.”

FB: Whether it’s in churches or other segments of society, we really don’t seem to value and recognize the importance of coming to some sort of truce and having the collective peace that we used to. In some ways, it’s individualism run amok.

We’ve not only evolved into being a surprisingly and depressingly pessimistic people, but we’ve also turned into a surprisingly and depressingly narcissistic society. As I said, we don’t get circumstances that conform exactly to our liking. At no point in our lives should we be told to expect that.

We should be told to absolutely work toward justice. While we’re doing that, we also have to recognize dissenting opinions and not automatically see those people as evil.

Often, if you met them and talked to them, you would understand there’s a life story. There are reasons why they believe what they believe, but we’ve become extremely and toxically individualistic. In most cases, the price of waging this fight within the church or the public square is not worth it.

MC: You give a lot of space toward the end of the book to some visions for how we solve this. A lot of it comes to education, and the two things that struck me were the way you talked about civic education and the way you talk about media literacy, which I think is a huge issue in our moment.

The underlying question that I found myself asking after reading it is, Are you optimistic that solutions like that could be adopted and work? Could those kinds of things really be transformative? And what does a road map for that kind of transformation look like?

FB: I don’t think those two things can save us on their own in and of themselves, but I think that they can be part of a much longer recipe of getting to a healthier place as a country.

What’s so difficult about this is we have the tools to improve in all the ways we need. But one of the daunting things about it is it’s not just one thing. It is political reforms coupled with educational reforms coupled with spiritual investigation coupled with a whole lot more.

But I do think that it should not be that difficult to do something. One thing I do with my students at the university level is talk about where they get their information. We talk about what they’ve bookmarked, who they followed, what they like. And then we discuss where that has led them.

Some questions I ask them include:

Did you set that up intentionally, or did you make a couple of decisions and then the algorithms kicked in?
Does your media diet represent what you really intended?
Is it aligned with your values? And if the answer is “not exactly,” how about taking a moment right now and rearranging the pieces a little bit?

I’ve had this conversation with every class of students I’ve taught. It needs to begin when they’re much younger, and I think it needs to happen at the kitchen table as well as in the classroom. If we’re going to solve this, we all must look at how we behave in our private lives. We must ask if we are living as we would like other people to live, if we’re modeling the behavior to which we want young people to aspire.

Frank Bruni has been a journalist for more than three decades, including more than 25 years at The New York Times as op-ed columnist, White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief, and chief restaurant critic.

Mike Cosper is the senior director of CT Media, host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and cohost of The Bulletin.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Guest Appearances".

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Theology

The Uneasy Conscience of Christian Nationalism

Russell Moore

Instead of worldly control of society, Christ calls for renewed hearts.

Illustration by James Walton

Too many of us assume that Christian nationalism promises a road map to a New Jerusalem or a New Rome or a New Constantinople. That’s understandable, given the triumphal and martial rhetoric of would-be theocrats. But what if the actual road map is to none of those places?

What if the new Christian nationalism wants to take us not to the rebuilt shining city on a hill of Cotton Mather’s Massachusetts Bay Colony but just to double coupon night at the Bellagio in Las Vegas?

Journalist Jonathan V. Last noted years ago, when staying at a Vegas resort and casino, how momentarily moved he was by the hotel’s commitment to help their guests save the earth. Last noted the card on his bathroom sink asking guests to conserve water by using each towel multiple times. On the bedside table, he saw another card asking visitors to safeguard natural resources by opting not to have bed linens changed.

Then he looked out at the front of the hotel, where two massive fountains stood “spewing precious water into the arid, desert air.” That’s when, he wrote, “it struck me that the … concern for the environment might simply be an attempt to save on laundry costs.”

The stakes aren’t very high at one Vegas hotel, but it’s a deal that reveals an impulse in fallen human nature, in a way that’s a win for all the parties involved. The guests get to feel like they’re doing something virtuous, and the house gets to keep more of the chips. It’s a microcosm of what Martin Luther identified as the psychological game behind Johann Tetzel and others selling indulgences to medieval Christians.

Paying the money helped ease the consciences of those fearful of purgatory while at the same time helping to raise money for building St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The indulgence hawkers could tell themselves they weren’t in the business of nonprofit fundraising or commercial real estate but in the mission of saving souls. And the indulgence buyers could reassure themselves with penance, which was, and is, much easier than repentance.

Tossing a coin is easier than carrying a cross. Actual contrition, confession, and surrender are intangible, internal, spiritual realities that require entrusting one’s forgiveness to the promise of an invisible God. Indulgences, on the other hand, come with receipts.

For Luther, the crisis of it all was not just that the church was corrupt but, more importantly, that the reassurance bought with this type of indulgence actually kept people from seeing what really can overcome sin and wipe away guilt—personal faith in Christ and him crucified.

“Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep,” Luther asserted in the 50th of his theses.

In our time, the indulgences are more akin to a hotel’s green initiative than to the construction of St. Peter’s. The new Christian nationalism—like the withered old state churches of Europe and the secularized old social gospels of mainline Protestantism—defines Christianity in terms of reforming external structures rather than of regenerating internal psyches. Unlike the older theological liberalisms, though, Christian nationalists seek solidarity not in the actual mitigating of human suffering but in the mostly symbolic boundary markers of taking the right amount of theatrical umbrage at culture war outrages, at having the right kind of enemies, at “owning the libs.”

The uneasy conscience of Christian nationalism pretends that our problem is the opposite of what Jesus told us: that by calling ourselves an orchard we can bring fruit from diseased trees (Matt. 7:15–20), that by controlling what is on the outside of us we can renew what is inside (Matt. 12:33–37).

This message is popular in all times; prosperity gospels and fertility religions always are. An extrinsic religion enables people to claim Christianity without following Christ and enables powerless, prayerless, porn-addicted culture warriors to convince themselves that they are goose-stepping to heaven. By assuaging our guilt with our political choices, we can convince ourselves that what we find in our new Bethel is Jacob’s ladder to heaven when it is really just Jeroboam’s calf of gold (1 Kings 12:25–31).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Philip Yancey, a longtime columnist here at CT, along with other Christians, met with the disillusioned Communists of the regime, including the propogandists at the Kremlin newspaper Pravda. The Bolshevik experiment, of course, had subordinated personal ethics, much less personal faith, to the collective cause—to the supposed “worker’s paradise” of the future, which would justify every lie told, every dissident exiled, every life extinguished along the way.

What Yancey found most poignant was not just that Soviet communism had failed, but the particular way it failed. As he mused:

Humans dream of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, wrote T. S. Eliot, who saw many of his friends embrace the dream of Marxism. “But the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be.” What we were hearing from Soviet leaders, and the KGB, and now Pravda, was that the Soviet Union ended up with the worst of both: a society far from perfect, and a people who had forgotten how to be good.

We should not pretend that we could not see the same thing with a lifeless, politicized dystopian Christian nationalism as we saw with a hollowed-out Soviet empire. What a tragic end it would be to wind up with a society as debauched as ever and a people who have forgotten how to be saved.

The way forward is what it’s always been. As Luther said in his Heidelberg Disputation, “The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. The theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is.” Sometimes that means nailing a word or two to the castle door. Sometimes that might mean letting goods and kindred go. The whole of the Christian life is about repentance. That repentance must be about the renewing of our minds and the renovation of our hearts, not just the laundering of consciences that are no longer bound to the Word of God.

Now, as always, every day is Reformation Day.

Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief.

Church Life

Slaying Dragons in Our Modern-Day Quest

Timothy Dalrymple

We at Christianity Today are the storytellers. You are the dragon slayers.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

As I write this, the Olympics are streaming into our living rooms. I watch with a particular interest. In what seems like another life, I was a national champion gymnast and Olympic hopeful before my career ended in a catastrophic spinal injury. But I love the Olympics with every fiber of my being and enjoy watching how elite athletes respond to the planetary pressure of the world’s biggest competition.

Often, when they commence the competition, the athletes are on their heels. The moment has finally arrived. They’re daunted. Afraid of making a mistake. This makes them passive, tentative, and ironically more likely to fall. They had set out on a good quest to slay the dragon. It turns out that when they get there, the dragon is enormous.

If they’re lucky, they have time to recover. The men’s gymnastics team in Paris competed the first round on their heels—and fell. In the second round, they came out charging—and won the first men’s team medal in a generation.

This is one of the things you learn as an athlete. You cannot wait for the dragon to attack you. You need to attack the dragon.

What’s the dragon of our time? Is it outside the camp, some external enemy that threatens the future of the church, perhaps the progressive program of a hostile secular culture? As much as I disagree with that program, I don’t believe it is. Or is it a certain individual or circle of individuals, false shepherds, who have betrayed the faith and misled the faithful? I don’t believe that is the answer either.

Let the church be the church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Let us preserve our first love, and the deceivers will not seduce us. In other words, the dragon is not them. The dragon is us—the sin in our hearts, the beam in our own eye, the ways we so easily lose sight of our Savior, neglect our first love, and tear one another apart in pursuit of worldly ends. That dragon is destroying and dividing the church. That dragon is robbing the world of its witness to the kingdom of God’s grace and truth.

With this issue, we announce the first campaign in our 68-year history. The One Kingdom Campaign is our good quest—and our invitation to you—to defeat the dragon together. It is an effort to reenchant the church with Christ and his kingdom, recast a captivating vision of what it means to follow Jesus and regather a community around that vision. It is an effort to help the church be the church again.

To be clear, we are not the dragon slayers. You are. The little old lady who has taught Sunday school every week for 50 years is. The missionary who sets out to the far corners of the planet is. The businessperson or scientist or artist who infuses their faith into everything they do. The pastor who preaches faithfully. The parents who show the love of Christ to their little ones. Even the wounded believer who speaks up and says the church can do better.

You are the dragon slayers. We are the storytellers. Christianity Today is a great storyteller for the global kingdom of God. We need the stories that lift up the eyes of the church, that show what God is doing all around the planet. Stories that unite us across continents, across generations, and across ethnic and political divides. Stories that remind us what it means to love Jesus and represent him even in the darkest places of the world.

We will continue to share more with you about this campaign—but for now, most importantly, we ask you to prayerfully be a part of it. We cannot do this without you. See the brochure with this issue we have included, or visit OneKingdom.ChristianityToday.com, to learn how you can join this quest. Because it’s your quest as much as ours.

We must attack the dragon. And it’s going to take all of us.

Timothy Dalrymple is president and CEO of Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The King, the Dragon, and the Kingdom".

- More from Timothy Dalrymple

News

What It Takes to Plant Churches in Europe

Ken Chitwood

Where some see ambition as key to evangelism, others experiment with subtler ways of connecting to people who don’t think they need God.

Luigi Olivadoti

The goal is audacious. But as far as James Davis, founder of the Global Church Network, is concerned, Christians need deadlines. Otherwise, they will never do what they need to do to fulfill the Great Commission.

His group gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, last September with 400 ministry leaders from across Europe who committed to raising up and equipping more than 100,000 new pastors in the next decade. The network plans to establish 39 hubs in Europe, with a goal of 442 more in the years to come, for training church planters, evangelists, and pastors to proclaim the gospel.

“A vision becomes a goal when it has a deadline,” Davis said at the event.

“So many Christian leaders today doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts. It is time for us to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs. We will claim, climb, and conquer our Mount Everest, the Great Commission.”

Davis has a number of very motivated partners in this project, including the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The network also counts The Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, the Church of God in Christ, and OMF International (formerly Overseas Missionary Fellowship) as members of a broader coalition working to complete the Great Commission in the near future. If it turns out their European goal is a bit beyond reach, they will still undoubtedly do a lot between now and their deadline.

And the Global Church Network is not alone. In Germany, the Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstgemeinden (Association of Free Church Pentecostals) has announced plans to plant 500 new churches by 2033. The group, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2024, told CT it is currently planting new congregations at a rate of about seven per year. Raising up new pastors is key to its growth strategy.

And the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland (Association of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany) has planted 200 churches in the past decade. It has grown to about 500 congregations with 42,000 members. The Free Evangelicals also have plans to launch 70 new churches by 2030, at a rate of 15 per year, and then start another 200 by 2040.

“Goal setting is a bit of a thing in Europe,” said Stefan Paas, the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Church Planting in the Secular West.

He’s not convinced it’s a good thing for Christian missions, though. In fact, he doesn’t think ambition, verve, and goal setting actually work.

Paas’s research shows that supply-side approaches—the idea that if you plant it, they will come—seem promising and often demonstrate early success, but the results mostly evaporate. While it is widely believed that planting new churches causes growth, he said, that’s not what the evidence shows.

“Yes, newer churches tend to draw in more people and more converts, but they also lose more,” Paas told CT. “There’s a backdoor dynamic where people come into newer churches but then leave.”

He examined the Free Evangelicals’ membership statistics from 2003 to 2017 and found that church plants often correlated with quick growth but then slow decline.

“It’s one thing to draw people, and another thing to keep them,” he said.

Part of the problem, according to Paas, is that the things that attract people to new churches, like great music, dynamic preaching, and a sense of real passion about something happening, don’t translate into deeper discipleship. People don’t get more involved or committed, and when church stops being new or exciting, they fade away.

This is why church plants often seem very successful in urban contexts, where lots of new people arrive every day; it can ironically prove easier to attract new converts in deeply secular contexts, such as former Communist countries. But getting people to come in the front door is not as big of a challenge as connecting in deep, meaningful, and life-transforming ways. Many newcomers don’t last.

Paas says Christians should focus more on contextualizing, trying new things, and training pastors to build real relationships. While Davis and others argue ambition is necessary to mobilize people to evangelize the world, church plants in Europe succeed through experimentation and creativity, according to Paas.

“Experimental spaces and fresh expressions are much more important than traditional church plants,” he said. “Innovation is much more important than growth-driven entrepreneurship.”

One church doing this is in Eisenach, a small town with about 42,000 inhabitants in the eastern German state of Thuringia. Eisenach has historical ties to the Protestant Reformation—Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach both lived there, though at different times—but today about 70 percent of the population has no religious affiliation. They are, as the Germans say, konfessionslos (“without confession”).

“Belief is just not a thing here,” said pastor Cordula Lindörfer. “When Eisenachers are in trouble, or in crisis, they don’t think of God or the church. They never look to the supernatural. They just don’t see it as relevant.”

That can make planting a church rather tricky. So Lindörfer and her team, with the support of the Association of Free Evangelical Churches, decided not to start with a Gottesdienst (church service) but to focus first on three other G’s: gemeinschaft, geniessen, and gestatten—community, enjoyment, and permission.

At StartUp Church, their plant in Eisenach, the team invites community members to monthly brunches to discuss topics like whether “justice for all” is a utopian pipe dream or something that could be achieved. The church’s first event, back in 2020, was at a pub. They advertised it as a meetup to “discuss doubts, beliefs, talk about God and the world.”

Today, StartUp has a weekly gathering at a local bar named Cat’s Leap, and families socialize at a local park.

At one recent gathering, people explored the different possible perspectives in the story Jesus told about workers in a vineyard all getting paid the same, even though they worked different amounts (Matt. 20:1–16).

Lindörfer said most of the people who come to StartUp are between 30 and 40 years old. Her own job is less that of a typical pastor—she doesn’t do a lot of preaching and teaching—and more moderator and convener.

“Eisenachers are all ready for a conversation; they all have opinions and ideas,” she said. “For me it’s all about creating a space where they feel welcome, where people come to connect rather than compete.”

Paas thinks this is probably the real future of church growth in secular Europe. Success will have less to do with big goals and more to do with the difficult ones, and it will focus on the daily work of making friends, building connections, showing people God’s love, and inviting them to imagine that Christian faith could be relevant to their lives.

Anyone who thinks that church planting in Europe is going to be quick and easy should probably stay home, Paas told CT. “Otherwise, you’ll get disappointed; you may even lose your faith,” he said.

Paas hasn’t lost his.

When he surveys the mission work taking place across the continent, he finds hope in the promise, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18–31, that God uses foolish things to accomplish divine purposes.

“I know this is God’s work,” he said. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”

Church Plant Struggles to Take Root in Liechtenstein

Driving south on European route 43, you might notice there are only five exits for the country of Liechtenstein. Or you might not notice, given how quickly the 24-kilometer-long German-speaking monarchy flies by.

Sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland and surrounded by the Alps, Liechtenstein is one of the world’s smallest nations. It is also one of the richest. Liechtenstein’s gross domestic product is a staggering $197,000 per person. That’s more than twice the economic value produced in the United States every year and more than three times the value produced by Germany, which is considered Europe’s “economic powerhouse.”

So most people, if they think about Liechtenstein at all, don’t think of it as a mission field.

But most people are wrong, according to the father-son pastor team Paul and Mike Clark. Since June 2022, the Clarks have been trying to plant a church in Liechtenstein.

“Here there is just as much need for the gospel as elsewhere,” son Mike Clark, 44, told CT on a walk through the capital of Vaduz, a town of about 6,000 people located down from the castle where the monarch, Prince Hans-Adam II, lives with his family.

About 70 percent of the 40,000 people are Roman Catholic. There are some small minorities of other religious groups—8 percent of the country identifies as Reformed Protestant and 6 percent as Muslim—but most people are counted as Catholic.

“Don’t let the official statistics fool you,” Mike Clark said. “Only about 10 percent of these people are in church on any given Sunday.”

Convincing Liechtensteiners to consider going to church—and to an evangelical church at that—has proved to be quite challenging in a country defined by private capital and established Catholicism. Few people seem interested in conversations about faith. Few seem to feel they have spiritual needs. The idea of something different than nominal Catholicism is very foreign to them.

“We’ve tried just about everything to connect with people,” said Paul Clark, a 72-year-old American who has spent decades in Europe. “Setting up an informational table in Vaduz’s city center. Starting a gospel choir. And now launching an Alpha course in the summer,” which teaches the basics of Christianity.

The gospel choir was popular, but no one came back to the church to visit. Getting permits from city hall for the Alpha course demanded lots of time and energy, but the classes weren’t especially popular.

Maybe it will turn out that people are just not that interested in church. Currently, there are actually more casinos (seven) in Liechtenstein than non-Catholic congregations (five). There are only two evangelical churches: Free Evangelical Church in Schaan and Life Church Liechtenstein in Eschen, where the Clarks minister to a small group of people and dream of reaching many, many more.

Life Church meets once a month in an office park on the outskirts of town. The church’s setup is simple: a few rows of plastic chairs, a drop-down screen with a background image of the Alps, a smattering of tabletops in the back, and a mix of homemade cakes and store-bought chips and guacamole for visitors to snack on.

Paul Clark leads worship on acoustic guitar alongside a young man from Brazil playing cajon. One Sunday, about 25 people came to the 4 p.m. service. Most were from partner churches in eastern Switzerland and western Austria. They sang “10,000 Reasons” and “Goodness of God” in German. Paul reminded them what the church plant is all about. Quoting the German lyrics of “Shine Jesus Shine,” he prayed that Jesus would shine the light of his Father’s glory on Liechtenstein.

If numbers remain low, they might close by the end of 2024.

“In my experience, if a church isn’t gaining traction in the first couple of years, it won’t ever,” Paul Clark said.

Luigi Olivadoti

Church plants in Germany, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland show the challenges—and opportunities—for evangelicals in Europe.

He knows what he’s talking about. Paul Clark first came to Europe from Michigan in the 1970s with Teen Challenge. He met his wife, Mechthild, who was also working with Teen Challenge, in West Germany. In the past 50 years, the couple has helped establish six European churches in collaboration with the Association of Free Church Pentecostals. They’re in the German states of Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Thuringia.

Mike Clark followed in his parents’ footsteps and has helped start ministries in Missouri, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

Both the Clarks, however, say Liechtenstein may be the toughest place they’ve ever tried to tell people about Jesus. Planting a church has been harder here than anywhere else they’ve experienced.

“There’s a cost for following Christ here,” Mike Clark said. “It’s not your life, but it is a certain loss of anonymity and the social pressure that comes with saying, ‘I follow Jesus.’ ”

But the father-son pair remain resolute. They believe—or maybe hope is a better word—that some hungry souls have questions about faith that they can’t explore in the context of the Catholic church. They want people in Liechtenstein to have a local evangelical option. Today, many would have to go out of the country for that.

In fact, the original idea for the plant emerged when visitors from Liechtenstein came to the Clarks’ more established church, FCG Bregenz (Free Christian Church Bregenz) in Austria. Similar to Life Church, FCG Bregenz operates out of an office park. It’s located in a former textile factory area on the shores of Lake Constance, in a building with a modern, postindustrial feel.

Heading over to Austria, as boundaries between some of the richest nations flitted by, Mike Clark noted, “Borders are no big deal when it comes to commerce in this part of the world.”

He added, “People shouldn’t have to cross borders to come to Christ.”

FCG Bregenz is very international, though, as are many evangelical churches in Europe. Austrians attend services, but so do people from Germany, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, as well as expats from Kenya, Syria, and the United States.

Mike Clark himself grew up in Germany; studied theology in the US; earned a doctorate in law in the Netherlands; and, with his wife, Laura, spent 15 years in church emergency and development aid work before feeling the call to plant a church in Austria and then another in Liechtenstein.

The Clarks founded FCG Bregenz in 2016. Mike Clark, who was ordained in a Pentecostal church in 2004, has led it since 2020.

He brings all of that experience to ministry and his cross-cultural identity comes through when he preaches. When he pops on stage, worshipers might think they are at church in the US. With his beard, skinny jeans, gray sweater, white tennis shoes, and iPad, “Pastor Mike” looks the part of a hip megachurch pastor. But then he starts preaching in excellent German.

About 60 people attend his Austrian church on a given Sunday, and about that many watch online. According to Mike Clark, FCG Bregenz is one of several churches planted in the westernmost Austrian state of Vorarlberg in the past 10 years. Most of the churches in the network have fewer than 50 worshipers every Sunday, which makes FCG Bregenz a leader. The church has become a training ground for church planters looking to evangelize more Europeans.

Evert van de Poll, a Dutch missiologist, said Europe presents a particular challenge for evangelism. The weight of a cultural Christian heritage and a century of secularization means few people are seeking out churches.

New forms of individualized spirituality can be quite popular, but that rarely translates into curiosity about spiritual experiences at an evangelical church.

Van de Poll said he has seen evangelicals successfully reach out to migrants and refugees in Europe. And some churches—in Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and even rich little Liechtenstein—are trying a more seeker-sensitive model, with contemporary worship, relevant preaching, and a message that the gospel matters today.

But what works on one side of a European border, Van de Poll said, doesn’t necessarily work on the other.

“You’d think that the basic principles are the same, but borders matter,” he said. “Pastors and missionaries need to appreciate Europe’s diversity and the dividing lines between different states; cultures; and their varying degrees of Protestant, Catholic, or secular influence.”

This may be the lesson the Clarks learn from Life Church in Liechtenstein. Despite their success in Austria and their varied international experience, nothing seems to be taking root in the affluent topology of Europe’s smallest German-speaking state.

Maybe next year, if the church can string things together that long, a few shoots of life will appear in
the soil.

But maybe not.

“If nothing comes from our efforts … we are probably going to close up shop,” Paul Clark said. “But God called us here, we know that.”

Evangelicals Flourish in One Town in Switzerland

For a small town, Buchs has a surprising number of churches. The municipality on the eastern edge of Switzerland has a Roman Catholic community, of course, and a Swiss Protestant congregation, but it also has an Evangelical Alliance church, a Free Evangelical Church, a New Apostolic Church, an International Christian Fellowship, and the nondenominational GRACE.Church.

In fact, there is about one evangelical congregation for every 1,000 people, which has earned Buchs the nickname “Canaan on the Rhine,” a promised land for Swiss evangelicals.

Only about 2 percent of Switzerland identifies as evangelical. But in Buchs, for some reason, about 10 percent of people worship at an evangelical church.

Why is this town different?

The pastors leading churches in Buchs have a few theories. There may not be a sociological explanation, they say—the Holy Spirit works in ways beyond human comprehension.

“There is something prophetic in this place,” Ben Stolz, pastor of GRACE.Church, told CT while sitting in a Buchs café drinking a cappuccino. “The town has a deep spiritual background.”

Ulrich Zwingli, the 16th-century Reformer, was born just outside of Buchs. The farmhouse where he was raised still serves as a place of pilgrimage and spiritual reflection.

More recently, the charismatic preacher Leo Bigger was born in Buchs. Raised a Catholic, he was a disco promoter and had his own rock band before becoming an evangelical and rising in the leadership of the International Christian Fellowship (ICF). Today he’s the pastor of the largest Protestant congregation in Switzerland, ICF Zurich, and the fellowship has grown to about 60 congregations in 13 countries. One of them is in Buchs, of course, led by wife-and-husband team Sarah and Werner Eggenberger.

Stolz’s church attracts about 150 people on an average Sunday, with another 30 or so checking in online. The nondenominational congregation is one of the largest in the city and is known for contemporary worship, a relaxed atmosphere, and topical sermons.

Stolz, who grew up in Buchs, describes it as a “modern,” “living” church. He dreams that one day Europe could be “dotted with vibrant, healthy communities” like GRACE.Church, “where people come to know Jesus Christ, experience healing, and thrive through their growing knowledge of the love and grace of our wonderful God.”

Some people, he knows, find that vision upsetting and even offensive. Several years ago, the Catholic theologian Günther Boss, just across the border in Liechtenstein, used GRACE.Church as an example of what was wrong with modern Christianity. He said its theology was thin, its sermons “repulsive,” and it was simultaneously too modern and too old-fashioned.

“In their form they are very jazzed up, youthful,” Boss told the Liechtensteiner Vaterland, one of the country’s two daily newspapers. “But in their content they are reactionary and have very narrow moral ideas.”

Such criticisms are not uncommon in Europe. Free churches—those that operate without state-granted privileges—are often stigmatized as strange, antisocial sects. In Buchs, however, there are enough evangelicals that most people know one, and here attacks carry less weight than they might elsewhere.

“We go to each other’s weddings, attend one another’s funerals, celebrate births and baptisms together,” Martin Frey, the pastor of an official, authorized Swiss Protestant church, told CT. “This helps educate people about the free churches and makes the ‘sect’ image seem outdated.”

Frey considers Stolz a friend and likes to drink coffee with him at the café. He works with other evangelical pastors in town too. They have theological differences, of course, but he knows them, relates to them, and can see how invested they are in meeting Swiss residents’ spiritual needs.

People in Buchs find something in an evangelical church, according to Frey, that they can’t find in more mainstream religious communities.

“To raise hands, to stand and sing, to proclaim in tongues is very, very far away from the typical Swiss mentality,” Frey said. “The Swiss tend to hold back.”

Yet some people in Buchs feel they’ve connected with God and other Christians only when they stop holding back—overcoming or at least overlooking their own instinctual restraint.

Olivier Favre, a Reformed Baptist pastor and sociologist who coedited Phänomen Freikirchen (Free Church Phenomenon), argues this is the key to evangelicals’ success. They understand human needs. They show people how to connect to each other and have a relationship with the divine.

“In our very individualized society, where many are alone, the idea of a personal relationship with God, belief that he answers prayers, that he can heal the sick and effect miracles, meets a spiritual need,” Favre writes.

In this way, of course, Buchs is no different than other European countries. The town may have a unique history, a sense of spirituality, and enough evangelicals that they’re not seen as odd and marginal as they are in other places. But still, people are people. Europe is Europe. And efforts to evangelize are all pretty similar.

At a recent vision Sunday at GRACE.Church, Stolz laid out a plan to grow the church. The formula is friendship and faithful Christian witness, he told CT. He hopes this will soon lead to the construction of a new building in which to worship, making one of the many churches in Buchs a little more visible.

He wants GRACE.Church to be like a light to people in the dark. Or a warm fire for those who are cold.

“People are lonely,” Stolz said, “and the churches here in Buchs are here to help build connections.”

Ken Chitwood is CT’s European correspondent.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "That Europe May Know".

- More from Ken Chitwood

Ideas

Against the Culture of Demonization

Timothy Dalrymple

President & CEO

The problem is not when the Christian is in the conflict—it’s when the conflict is in the Christian.

MidJourney / Christianity Today

I grew up in a small evangelical church in California’s Central Valley where there were more blue collars than white. About 25 families filed into the pews each Sunday; they were loving, generous, and thoughtful. We camped the Sierra Nevadas, backpacked Yosemite, and set crab traps in Half Moon Bay. We studied the Word, shared meals when misfortune struck, and made more after-church trips to Taco Bell than any human being should be able to withstand. It was evangelicalism of the sunny California variety that wore its conservatism with T-shirts and surfer shorts and a breezy, convivial disposition.

When I think about that church, imperfect though it was, I am immensely grateful. It inoculated me against the poisonous caricature I would hear so often in the years following—especially in secular universities—that evangelical churches were fortresses of ignorance and prejudice.

When I left academia in 2009, it was partly out of disillusionment. The humanities departments seemed less interested in intellectual inquiry than ideological conformity. I distinctly remember a doctoral seminar where one of my colleagues dismissed the entire history of Christian missions as nothing but rapacious colonialism. There’s much to lament in that history, I agreed, but surely there were some missionaries, some of the time, who had some good intentions?

As a matter of intellectual honesty, it seemed the least my interlocutor should accept. Instead, she had me hauled in front of the professor for the thought crime of “defending an evil institution.”

This was only one in a long series of such experiences. Too many lectures felt like recruitment for political programs, too many seminars like competitions for who could be the first to take offense. Advance a thesis that defied the trends sweeping through the humanities departments, and no amount of evidence and argumentation were sufficient; advance a thesis that served a favored cause, and very little evidence and argumentation were necessary. After all, once you have abandoned the concept of a unitary truth, why not choose a story that serves your tribe? Who cares about accuracy when you can deliver “justice”?

So I left academia to help launch a new media enterprise. It’s ironic now to remember the idealism that accompanied the emergence of the blogosphere and social media in those years. The digital landscape was a wide-open expanse where we could reimagine a public conversation that was charitable, informed, and willing to challenge partisan conventions. Perhaps Christians could shape a form of public engagement that simultaneously defended Christian values and exhibited Christlike virtues. Perhaps social media could be what the university should be: an open marketplace of ideas where the best arguments win on the merits.

Over the years that followed, however, new media businesses established financial models that incentivized the worst in human behavior. The road to wealth and influence led through virality, and the surest path to virality was to stir up tribal animosities. Technology ethicist Tristan Harris calls it a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” Affirm your audience’s prejudices and presuppositions, stoke their fears, heap scorn on the other tribe, and you collect a passionate and growing following, which you can monetize through speaking and writing engagements.

Put differently, the quickest way to build a readership was not to establish expertise and credibility over a long career of faithful work, but to achieve viral fame by playing into the tribal antipathies of one group or another. What started as attention harvesting became rage farming.

In the early years of virality culture, the dividing lines cut between large groups of people, such as conservative evangelicals and progressive mainliners. Eventually, it became clear that social media platforms could increase engagement further and deliver more finely targeted advertising (which is to say, make more money), by funneling readers into ever-narrower subcategories. Larger communities of common conviction became divided and subdivided into warring camps; each camp was served by its own information sources and united in shared hostility to those around them. The anger we feel for so-called betrayers of our tribe is far greater than the anger we feel for those who never belonged to our tribe in the first place.

So we arrive where we are today, where evangelicals are bought and sold in the scorn markets and pitted against one another for profit. Where writers and readers alike are addicted to the dopamine of division. It is like the humanities departments where I once lived and worked.

Everything is reduced to the political. Facts don’t matter if the story serves your tribe. Careers are made not by loving and understanding others but by mocking and mischaracterizing them.

To be clear, Christianity Today has never argued that Christians should withdraw from political life. Although the dead are not raised by politics, the living are served by it.

The problem is not when the Christian is in the conflict. The problem is when the conflict is in the Christian. Our engagement with one another and with society should follow the pattern of Christ and not the culture.

Christianity Today has never fit neatly into anyone’s political agenda because we are more committed to the kingdom of God than to the interests of any party or country. This frustrates those who would patrol the boundaries of political conformity, but we view it as essential to our calling. And we decline to participate in the outrage cycle.

Our calling is to advance the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God. We tell those stories when they are encouraging and when they are hard. We invite orthodox Christian voices to make their arguments for contrary points of view. We seek to understand and exemplify what it means to follow Jesus in our time. CT is comprised of directors, executives, staff, writers, and readers who hold different political stances. We view this as a strength and not a weakness.

One of the songs we sang in that church in California’s Central Valley was “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love.” Experiencing the love of the body of Christ left its mark on my soul. As Jesus said in John 13, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (v. 35). And as he prayed to the Father in John 17, it is because of the unity of the church that “the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (v. 23).

This is a weighty thing. The love we show one another, the unity we show to the world, bears testimony to the divinity of Christ and the reality of the love of God. The Church bears the image of Christ to the world, yet today that image is contentious and fragmented.

The kingdom of God is always confounding the expectations of the world. It takes what the world has turned upside down and inverts them back to their right order. It lifts the humble over the proud, the meek over the mighty, the powerless over the powerful. It is profoundly countercultural.

Perhaps the most countercultural thing Christians can do in this present moment is to refuse to demonize one another. Christians with sound hearts and minds will reach different conclusions on what love requires of them in the upcoming election. Support whom your conscience bids you support. But let your first love be your first love, and let our love for one another be our witness to the world that Christ is alive and at work among us.

Timothy Dalrymple is president and CEO of Christianity Today.

- More from Timothy Dalrymple

News

Died: Daniel Bourdanné, Millipede Scientist Turned IFES Leader Who Loved Christian Books

Maude Burkhalter

The Chadian student ministry leader spent his final years promoting publishing in Africa.

International Fellowship of Evangelical Students / Edits by Rick Szuecs

Daniel Bourdanné, a scientist from the central African nation of Chad who inspired young evangelicals around the world as the general secretary of IFES and a longtime champion of Christian book publishing in Africa, died on September 6 at age 64 as a result of cancer.

After years of ministry to students, Bourdanné became general secretary of IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) in 2007, serving in this role until 2019. An avid reader (and sometimes writer), from 2018 until his death, Bourdanné worked with Africa Speaks to promote Christian book publishing across the continent.

Bourdanné spent much of his life in Francophone nations including Togo, Cameroon, and Côte d’Ivoire before moving to Oxford, England, when he became IFES general secretary. At the time of his death, he was living in Swindon, England.

“God sent me into the world from this continent, and he brings me back with the world to this same continent, so that I may complete my role as a missionary of the African church,” Bourdanné said in his farewell speech in South Africa in 2019 at the IFES World Assembly.

“Daniel was proud to be African,” said Tiémoko Coulibaly, general secretary of the IFES national affiliate in Mali. “Though he lived in the West, his heart remained in Africa, the continent of his birth that he never gave up on.”

The son of a pastor, Bourdanné was born on October 18, 1959, in Pala, Mayo-Kebbi Ouest, Chad. At age 10, he lost his father, whose death forced Bourdanné to begin working in the fields, chopping wood, and raising vegetables for his mother to sell. These responsibilities were compounded by a civil war that lasted from 1965 to 1979 and took the lives of thousands.

A few months before the war ended, Bourdanné won a scholarship to pursue studies in animal ecology at the Université du Tchad. He then earned a bachelor’s degree in natural science at the Université of Lomé, Togo (formerly Université du Bénin).

In 1983, Bourdanné moved to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire to pursue a doctorate in animal ecology. In 1990, he defended his dissertation on millipedes, subsequently becoming a member of the International Society of Myriapodologists.

As he pursued his education, Bourdanné began working as a high school biology teacher. However, his passion to share the gospel with students had been sparked much earlier. “At the age of 14 in a Bible study on Revelation 1, I first grasped the vision and passion to see students saved for the Lord,” he once said.

“Directly or indirectly, universities profoundly influence and guide the future of human societies,” he wrote in an article on student evangelism published in the Dictionnaire de théologie pratique in 2011. “Students are often at the forefront of social change around the world. Indeed, when they move together, fueled by their energy, vitality, determination, passion, imagination, and creativity, they have the power to move society.”

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In 1990, Bourdanné began working with IFES as a traveling secretary; he was named regional secretary for IFES Francophone Africa (GBUAF) in 1996.

When he became general secretary in 2007, succeeding Lindsay Brown who had held the position since 1991, the IFES movement was 60 years old and established in over 150 countries. Still, during his 12-year tenure, the movement grew significantly, especially in the diversity of its leadership.

Under Bourdanné, IFES gave more space to theologians from the Global South. In 2007, he appointed Christy Jutare of the Philippines as the first female regional secretary of IFES to lead the Eurasia region. In ⁠2011, he appointed the first two student representatives to the IFES board of trustees. In 2016, he revived a global theological and missiological reflection journal (Word and World).

When asked about the highlights of his tenure, Bourdanné stated that they included witnessing God “take the unusual path” when inviting unexpected people to join the walk with him, along with the joy of seeing God opening doors in difficult contexts.

He also noted a key challenge. “We celebrate our unity,” he wrote in his farewell email to the fellowship, “but we are human, so it is not surprising that sometimes someone may try to promote their agenda or preferences. … Having grown up myself in a context of war and tribal conflict, I was perhaps more sensitive to how this could become a threat to IFES unity.”

One of Bourdanné’s greatest passions was to enable the global church to hear from more African Christians. He did so by encouraging them not to follow a unique school of thought but to become prominent voices in the theological field.

“Some of us may side with Billy Graham,” he stated at the same 2019 speech. “Others [align] with John Stott, or with John Piper, and these differences enrich us more than they divide us.” But he added, “Among these three names, there is no African. Nor is there anyone from Latin America or Asia.”

Bourdanné’s love for students was only rivaled by his love of books. The scientist owned hundreds if not thousands of them, carefully housed in three different libraries—one in his home in England, one in his Oxford office, and one at a residence in Côte d’Ivoire.

At one point, Bourdanné’s passion for the written word led him to start a magazine. He and four friends pooled their resources to fund the first issue and invest in the publication. The magazine ran debt-free until the group disbanded, and aside from a one-time $80 donation from missionaries, they never relied on external help.

In 1995, Bourdanné became the director of the Presses bibliques africaines (African Biblical Press). In 2018, he joined the board of Africa Speaks, where he continued to serve until his passing, promoting the growth of the Christian publishing industry in Africa by encouraging African Christian writers to write and publish and by promoting their books.

Bourdanné believed that for African Christians, books could be catalysts for transformation. “Africa will not experience its publishing revolution until we win the battle for the love of books,” he wrote. In turn, this passion would “contaminate” Africa positively from the inside, he asserted, his metaphor inspired by Jesus’ words in Mark 7 that what contaminates (or defiles) a person comes from the inside out.

Bourdanné firmly believed that Africa needed to equip itself for its own progress, which required, in his view, a shift in mentality accompanied by fruitful collaborations with the West.

“What is the use of Africa’s Sunday fervor if the demons of corruption, conflict, and genocide resurface on Monday?” Bourdanné preached in Geneva in 2006 to an audience of primarily European evangelical leaders. “What is the point of our worship and prayers in Europe if our lives are still driven by the pursuit of maximum profit and if our churches remain divided?”

He called on European Christians to fight for change: “Our actions speak louder than our words. Victims of injustice must see the commitment of Western Christians in this area.”

Though he was more involved in promoting Christian literature in Africa than in writing it himself, he authored Ces évangéliques d’Afrique, qui sont-ils? (Who Are African Evangelicals? 1998), and L’Évangile de la prospérité, une menace pour l’Église en Afrique (The Prosperity Gospel, a Menace to the African Church, 1999), among others.

In 2018, Calvin University awarded him the Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life, noting his work in Francophone Christian publishing and his ministry with IFES.

“A quarter-century ago, Daniel saw a need for Christian students to have guidance, from a Christian worldview, on a variety of topics that were of great concern to them, and so he took action,” said Jul Medenblik, president of Calvin Theological Seminary.

Timothée Joset, a missiology professor at the Faculté libre de théologie évangélique (FLTE) in France and member of IFES Global Resource Ministries, said his friend Bourdanné introduced him to the complex issues facing Francophone Africa and global North-South relations.

“What also impressed me was his resilience. He was never resentful, even though he experienced a great deal of racism,” Joset said, noting an example so egregious that theologian N.T. Wright even mentioned it in an Easter sermon.

After IFES hired him as general secretary, “the British High Commission in Accra dragged its feet over Daniel’s application to come here, and then turned it down with minimal explanation,” said Wright. “Daniel then asked for permission to travel to the UK on his current visitor’s visa, and was told he could. But when he arrived he was detained for 22 hours, his mobile phones were seized, and he was flown back to Africa.”

Despite these incidents, Bourdanné inspired his peers through his consideration and humility. One of his students remembered fondly how Bourdanné personally sent him books, after the English postal system kept confusing his address with one in another country. Another international colleague recalled how he preferred sitting on the floor during conferences, to allow others to have a chair.

This modesty never kept Bourdanné from challenging his fellow Christians on issues he cared deeply about, such as evangelism. He served the Lausanne Movement as International Deputy Director for French-speaking Africa (21 countries), leading up to Lausanne’s 2010 conference in Cape Town, South Africa. When he left that position, he was appointed to the Lausanne Movement’s board.

“Can we be credible while proclaiming a gospel that ignores the exploitation of the weak by the strong? Can we continue to care only for the salvation of African souls while turning a blind eye to their social situation?” he asked in 2016. “In what way is the gospel good news for communities struggling to meet their basic needs? How can we remain silent in the face of rising social inequalities in Africa, or environmental issues? Proclamation and action must go hand in hand.”

Daniel Bourdanné leaves behind his wife Halymah, originally from Niger, and their four children.

- More from Maude Burkhalter

Books

Review

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

Justin Brierley

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

Christopher Lane / Getty

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

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

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

Philosophy to the rescue

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

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

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

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

Instead, something else came to the rescue: philosophy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“During those months,” she writes,

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

Faith in others’ faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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