The Black Women Missing from Our Pews

America’s most churched demographic is slipping from religious life. We must go after them.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Unsplash

When I was four years old, I went missing for three hours. While it was a common occurrence for my parents to not be able to find me because I was hiding between the racks of clothes at the Strawbridge & Clothier department store, this wasn’t the case. No, I was taken. A neighbor who lived up the street asked my mother if she could take me “around the corner,” which is just a hood way of saying “not too far,” to buy me ice cream.

Up and back, it should have been a 30-minute trip, but after more than an hour passed, my mother knew something was wrong. There were no cellphones back then, so I can only imagine the horror, the guilt, and the fear my mother must have felt. The entire neighborhood was searching for me, including the woman’s own family members, who, my parents said, “had that uncomfortable look on their faces.” People were worried because everybody knew Sandy meant no harm but her mental disability at times prevented her from appreciating the gravity of her actions.

Eventually, I was found, grinning from ear to ear, with dried ice cream around my mouth and Sandy holding tightly to my hand. Sandy had done exactly what she told my mother she would do: She took me around the corner to get ice cream, but then she walked with me two more miles to the mall. I have no memory of this event, although I do remember Sandy. Praise God, I was found, and I was fine.

That’s the way you want all missing stories to end—missing, searched for, found, and with no memory of anything terrible happening in between. But that’s not how all missing stories end, especially for Black women.

Despite Black women historically being considered the backbone of the church and earning the distinction of outnumbering men in the pews, there is a disturbing trend that we must address. Though we as Black women are among the most religious groups in the United States, there is an exodus of Black women missing from churches for a variety of reasons, and some of us aren’t just leaving a specific congregation; we are leaving the faith completely.

Aswad Walker of the Defender wrote about the top reasons Black millennials say they are leaving the church: (1) The church is too judgmental, (2) they are choosing traditional African spiritual practices, (3) the church is too anti-intellectual or closed to new information, (4) the church is too apolitical, and (5) not enough of their peers attend. Others have included the impact of patriarchy in the church and Black women not being able to adequately see themselves as image bearers of the triune God.

Do these conclusions surprise you, or are you familiar with what is being sourced as the reason for Black women leaving our churches?

I believe our collective eyes, ears, and empathy are the tools we need to make sure Black women aren’t invisible, ignored in the church, or unnoticed and unfound when they depart. Whether you are in leadership or are a lay parishioner in the pews, we each have a part to play in helping one another stay rooted where God plants us so we can flourish in our lives and local churches. Here are some suggestions for how we can begin to better address the issue of missing Black women in the church.

Act like family

There are three relationships with women in the family of God that I believe will help protect Black women from leaving: sisters, friends, and spiritual mothers/aunties. We all should be occupying these roles over the course of our spiritual lives. One of the beautiful things about being a Christian is that you automatically get adopted into the family of God (Rom. 8:15). You get a family of siblings, spiritual parents, and friends. Through these relationships, we are called to grow with one another and influence one another’s growth from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity (Prov. 27:17; Gal. 6:10).

We get the benefits of protection, accountability, knowing and being known, spending time with like-minded people, discipleship, spiritual nurturing, prayer partners, and friends to worship and celebrate with in a community of diverse and intergenerational wisdom that helps us develop holistically as women.

Relationships, even among family members, require work. They won’t always be easy, feelings will get hurt, and undoubtedly, we will be closer to some than to others, but at the end of the day, we ride with one another. If we stick together, love one another, cheer for one another, lift one another, wipe one another’s tears, pray together, and tell one another truth, we can be an unstoppable force in God’s kingdom.

Reprove and restore Black women struggling with sin

Words like reprove or rebuke are often frowned on in our current climate, which quickly labels things as spiritually abusive when they are merely biblical correction and accountability. To reprove is to correct or criticize someone with the intent of amending some fault. It can also be defined as “to scold or correct usually gently or with kindly intent.”

God is shown in Scripture as a loving parent who brings discipline to instruct and correct his children. However, as Christians we don’t always do this well. We can pick people apart with constant rebuke that is crushing instead of redemptive, or we can avoid reproving our sisters because we don’t want them to get upset or run away. However, the psalmist said, “Let a righteous man strike me—that is a kindness; let him rebuke me—that is oil on my head. My head will not refuse it” (Ps. 141:5).

Many times, women go missing when they are led away by sin because no one had the courage to offer a word of correction or warning. God calls you to do this for your sisters in Christ. Proverbs 27:5–6 emphasizes this point: “Open rebuke is better than love carefully concealed. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (NKJV). We weaken the church when we don’t cooperate with God in confronting sin—after examining our own hearts first (Eph. 4:25), then gently correcting (Gal. 6:1) and, when necessary, rebuking sharply (Gal. 2:11–14).

As members of a local body, this is an act of love. Love isn’t punkish. Love isn’t politically correct; it’s biblically correct. Love isn’t silent when you run out in the street like a child playing in traffic. We need to tell one another, “Don’t go down this path,” “That’s not a good look,” and “You need to pray about this.” We need older church mothers to say, “Baby, that’s not wise; that’s not right. You need to repent.” The goal is not just to call women out but to call them up into Christ (Eph. 4:15).

Support Black women

Women are so often stereotyped as being highly relational that we can assume building healthy relationships comes easily and doesn’t have to be taught. That isn’t the case. We all need our understanding and practice of relationships upgraded by the gospel.

We need to take the lead in relationship building. Jesus’ mission was about initiating and restoring relationship with us (Matt. 4:19); therefore, we need to lead the way in initiating loving relationships with others (John 15:12). When Black women are new to the church, it’s important that we remember what it was like to be in their shoes.

As an established church member, it’s your responsibility to pursue relationship, start the conversation, and offer to connect. Be consistent in reaching out and following up to invite women to activities and events at the church. Certainly, new members can and should pursue relationships, but current members should take the lead. Everyone wants to be loved by being chosen. Jesus modeled choosing us, though we’re unworthy of his friendship, so let us also choose others (John 15:16).

Missing Black women deserve to be sought after. Jesus coming to earth was a literal rescue operation motivated by his love (John 3:16). Love must precede any seeking actions (Isa. 62:12).

But it’s also important to discern if missing women have deconstructed their faith or are having a faith crisis. I’ve heard countless stories of women who left churches because they had questions about Christianity that no one answered. If you know someone in this boat, if they are willing to share, ask them questions so you can understand where they are coming from. Has there been a life stressor that has caused anger or disappointment toward God (a death, unanswered prayers, job loss, etc.)? Are they willing to share about their recent curiosity about other religions or ideologies and who has captured their attention?

Additionally, we must be prepared to counter and truthfully respond to doubts such as “Is Christianity the white man’s religion?,” “Are God and the Bible sexist against women?,” and “Is Christianity a safe place for the flourishing of Black women?” Validate, empathize, and normalize that having questions is good and that God can handle our questions. You don’t have to know everything to help Black women who are questioning or drifting.

We have to prayerfully appraise the signs of depression, stress, grief, trauma response, or other psychological issues. Sometimes women go missing or disengage and they haven’t even processed why. Asking great questions, letting the person talk, showing care for their mental state, and normalizing the impact of mental distress are very helpful when someone feels overwhelmed or stuck emotionally.

There is a difference in how our law enforcement system responds to people who are labeled as missing versus those labeled as runaways—those who are believed to have willingly left home aren’t searched for the same. We should be honest if we struggle with the same biases in the church. Are we seeing Black women as runaways or as missing women? Do we see Black sisters in Christ with eyes of grace and love or with judgment, contempt, and dismissiveness? Or, even worse, do we not see them at all?

God lets us go when we want to walk away from him, and he is always willing to receive us with open arms when we return. Sometimes the return may be coming back to the church for membership, or it could be just coming back to visit, have a conversation, or repair a burned bridge. Even more exciting, it may be a return to Jesus.

I am a prodigal daughter. I didn’t just walk away from a church, but I walked away from Jesus. However, I remembered my Father and went back to him (Luke 15:17–18). Like Nebuchadnezzar, who lost his mind, when I looked up to God, my sanity returned to me, and I came back to the Lord (Dan. 4:34–37). By God’s grace, I was received with open arms, just like the prodigal son (Luke 15:28–32).

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9, ESV). A vision for missing Black women is the heart of the gospel—a rescue mission. Jesus modeled that he will go to great lengths to come after his daughters, and he will often recruit you to be a part of his rescue plan.

Sarita Lyons is the author of Church Girl, as well as a is a wife, mother, speaker, Bible teacher, and psychotherapist. She is also the director of discipleship and women’s ministry at Epiphany Fellowship Church in Philadelphia.

This essay is adapted from Church Girl: A Gospel Vision to Encourage and Challenge Black Christian Women by Sarita Lyons. Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Sarita Lyons. Published by Multnomah, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Culture

The Still Small Voice in the Deer Stand

Brian Reisinger

Since childhood, each hunting season out in God’s creation has healed wounds and deepened my faith.

Ben Jessop / Pexels / Edits by CT

Each year, I walk into the quiet darkness to find those things I’ve lost.

The moment falls in late November, opening weekend of gun deer hunting in my native Wisconsin. Dressed in heavy clothing against the harsh cold, striding to the deer stand through the early morning darkness, I carry my rifle in careful wonder at what I’ll see.

Sometimes, as I reach my stand, there’s fog lingering even as soft gray light appears over the treetops. Other times it’s clear, and the great valley where my family and I hunt materializes before me all at once, with its gently rolling fields and curving wood line. Always the air is cold and clean, biting my face and creeping beneath my heavy coat, freshening my lungs and quieting my thoughts.

It’s here, in the high seat of my deer stand overlooking the past year, that I find those lost things—loved ones gone, feelings I’ve forgotten or lacked the courage to name, a sense of self known only to God and me. This time isn’t simply about finding a trophy deer. It’s about finding joy, pain, and renewal. My usual world is a whirlwind, but out in the woods I can hear God’s “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–12, KJV).

As our country has become more divided, participation in hunting has declined, and I find critics tend to envision a reckless blood sport, not realizing the care and consideration a good hunter brings to the woods. I grew up with deer hunting as an honored tradition, one where we learned about respecting the animal with an ethical hunt, honoring our natural environment, and carrying on a way of life where faith is found in living close to the land.

My main memories of deer hunting are about my grandpa on my mom’s side, Roman Ripp, hunting on land that was in our family thanks to my grandpa on my dad’s side, Albert Reisinger.

Grandpa Ripp is almost mythical in my memories—smiling broadly, singing songs in idle moments, and telling big-buck stories over his morning coffee with the flair of a classic American showman. He wore bright red hunting pants and an old-fashioned hunting hat with ear flaps, jauntily tipped atop his head. I still marvel at his sharpshooter’s aim.

He may as well have been Buffalo Bill Cody to me, and the setting for his adventures—and those of my dad, my uncle, and eventually me and my sister and friends—could not have been more sacred. It was the rolling Wisconsin farmland where I grew up, which my Grandpa Albert had worked since he was a child, climbing out of the Depression into the middle class so that my dad and mom could farm it with us.

Not long after I was old enough to carry on the tradition, Grandpa Ripp declared himself too old to handle the hardship of another winter deer hunt. He passed his stand to me, and I hunted it each year, carefully harvesting deer when I got the chance, missing enough to leave me wondering if I would ever shoot and track and regale others with stories as he had. When I graduated high school—excited to pursue a writing career, worried I was letting my dad down by not farming—Grandpa Ripp became an important mentor, introducing me to a newspaper editor who became my first boss.

One year, the chance came to make him proud. In the early morning light, a buck stepped out from the tree line. He was so big I swore I could see the fog of his breath mingling with mine, though he was much too far away for that—and maybe too far for a young hunter like me to reach.

I got him. That deer was my first truly triumphant moment at my grandpa’s deer stand, but also my last great moment with my grandpa. He had been slipping for a few months. I brought the antlers to his assisted living apartment in town, expecting he’d leap to his feet like always to greet me at the door, hear my story, and tell it back to me as if it were one of his own.

Instead, I saw just how far gone he was. His face lit up, but he couldn’t rise from his chair. And though I told him the story as many times as he wanted, he couldn’t repeat it back to me, let alone add his own visions of it to help me treasure the memory. We took a picture to preserve the best of the moment, and I left.

Grandpa lived several months longer, and he and Grandma Ripp moved out to the farm for their final care, where I drove out to see them each week. But his memory—the happy times, and his decline—became so tied to the annual deer hunt that it took many years in the deer stand I’d inherited to process our loss.

It was only in my deer stand, in the dark slowly becoming light, that I could really think of him. There, the distractions of the world fell away. The things I told myself all year about how I was doing could finally be separated, wheat from chaff, to see the truth. I learned to pray about things I hadn’t realized were weighing on my heart.

God is never “far from any one of us,” of course, “for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28). But in the stillness of the deer stand, his presence is more noticeable for me. Prayer comes more easily. Surrounded by God’s creation, I remember to say with the psalmist:

All creatures look to you
    to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
    they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
    they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face,
    they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
    they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit,
    they are created,
    and you renew the face of the ground. (Ps. 104:27–30)

I remember to meditate on God’s work in the world and in my own life. Since that moment with Grandpa Ripp, hunting seasons have come with both triumph and defeat—not only in pursuit of the next buck but also in moves across the country, career defeats, relationships lost and gained, and the grief that has come with the passing of our remaining grandparents and other loved ones.

I’ve also been able to pass on the tradition, to introduce a new generation to the stillness of the deer stand. My 15-year-old nephew has already harvested as many big bucks as the adults who hunt on our land. My two younger nephews have watched me harvest deer for years, and this year they get to try it themselves for the first time. And my wife and I have a daughter, our first child of just 9 months—old enough to appear in big-buck photos with her daddy that she’ll see years from now, if I’m fortunate enough to live out another legend this year.

But no matter what I see, as the dark turns to light, I’ll know I’m where I need to be: with God, honoring his creation, finding those things lost. And those things yet to come.

Brian Reisinger is a writer and the author of Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. He can be found at brian-reisinger.com and @BrianJReisinger.

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Culture

Play Those Chocolate Sprinkles, Rend Collective!

Haley Byrd Wilt

The Irish band’s new album “FOLK!” proclaims joy after suffering.

Courtesy of Rend Collective

Rend Collective is known for its joy.

The Northern Irish folk band has spent much of the past decade on tour—singing worship songs with charming accents, playing eclectic instruments, and sharing its relentless commitment to celebration. By the end of each concert, Rend Collective’s crowds are encouraged. And covered in confetti.

But joy within the group had started to wane, especially since the coronavirus pandemic. A year ago, the band was facing a decision about its future.

Last autumn “could have been a moment where Rend Collective could have decided to dissolve,” the band’s lead singer and founding member, Chris Llewellyn, told Christianity Today during an interview in downtown Nashville.

At the time, Llewellyn was emerging from a painful season of doubt. He’d been asking deep theological questions while contending with grief after his son’s autism diagnosis. He’d also finally acknowledged his long-running depression instead of trying to “wrestle it to the ground.”

Llewellyn explored his questions about faith in a September 2023 solo album titled Honest. It was his first public foray into songwriting outside of Rend Collective, and far more personal than most of his prior work.

After Honest, Llewellyn considered what kind of music he wanted to make going forward. Adding to the uncertainty, Gareth Gilkeson, Llewellyn’s primary cowriter and a founding member of Rend Collective, would soon be stepping away from the band.

Llewellyn wondered, “Is this the natural end of things?”

Now 39, Llewellyn has spent most of his adult life in Rend Collective. He began attending Rend back when it was a Bible study for young adults in his Northern Irish hometown of Bangor. The group was named after a call for sincere repentance in the Old Testament Book of Joel: ‘Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God’ (2:13). After the band sprang up from that study, he helped lead it to international success with songs like “Build Your Kingdom Here,” “My Lighthouse,” and “Counting Every Blessing.”

Thinking about Rend Collective’s future while driving late last year, he found himself unintentionally writing yet another worship song. That moment reminded him of his purpose.

“No. This is what you do,” Llewellyn remembered deciding. “The only two options are you’re either going to do this for no audience, or you’re going to do this as your job still. It’s not that you’re ever going to stop doing this.”

That drive resulted in one of Rend Collective’s new songs, “What I Was Made For”—the first new music the band has released in more than two years. Its lyrics recognize the purpose of every human being, to worship and glorify God.

“What I Was Made For” appears on the group’s new album, simply titled FOLK! The project has been both a hopeful rebirth for the band and a return to its roots, with all of the earnestness, joy, and stringed instruments that drew in early fans.

It also drips with matured Christian faith. The joy and hope of FOLK! aren’t shallow or unconsidered. They’re the kind that come in the morning, after a night of weeping (or many nights of weeping).

Llewellyn’s pain is apparent across the album. Yet his words of worship and simple professions of faith are all the sweeter—and all the more genuine and encouraging—for acknowledging it.

He told CT that voicing his doubts in last year’s solo album allowed him to write these new songs. It was almost “like running the faucet and getting all of the dirty water out,” he said.

“I did my worst doubting there—a prayer life with vocabulary that is unprintable—but that’s where the confidence comes,” he said. “Just sitting on the other side of it and being like, well, that’s by no means resolved—all of the questions still hang there—but I just think God is good.”

The fact that God is still there after all of that, he told CT, has given him confidence in God’s character. “It’s relaxed into a place of knowing that God’s got this, that he likes me, and this relationship is going to survive, whatever comes,” he said.

The album’s first song, “Abide in Me,” is a tender, intimate portrait of that relationship. Written from Christ’s perspective, it calls his followers to “build a home here inside my love” and to rest in his sovereignty and grace.

Another song on the album, “Better Than I Ever Thought,” evokes imagery from the parable of the prodigal son.

“I love the particular turn of phrase that the father sees the son from a long way off,” Llewellyn said. For him, that detail speaks to God’s watchfulness. One lyric in the song prompted some pushback: “Never guessed you were desperate for me to come home.”

Rend Collective’s record label flagged that line to Llewellyn, arguing that God isn’t desperate.

“I was like, ‘I think he is,’” Llewellyn recalled.

The writing process for “Better Than I Ever Thought,” as well as others on the record, was a drastic shift for Rend Collective.

“Prior to this, we’ve never had a song that wasn’t cowritten to some degree,” Llewellyn told CT. But now, “we’ve worked out that sometimes when somebody writes something, letting their story be their story is actually the most powerful thing you can do.”

Llewellyn and his bandmates see FOLK! as a success already, simply for that commitment to authenticity.

Cowriter Stephen Mitchell, 31, said FOLK! came about because Rend Collective “stopped striving.”

“Let’s just do what we want to do with the music, and if it works commercially, successfully, then awesome,” said Mitchell, who has been in the group since 2013. “If it doesn’t, then we’re at least being authentic to what we want to do.”

“Holy Trouble,” another song on the album, is one of his favorites. It is an anthem about Christ’s radical compassion, heart for the oppressed, and embodiment of perfect justice—and a prayer for the Holy Spirit to accomplish the same through the modern church.

Llewellyn and Mitchell are proud that their new music doesn’t rely on samples—snippets or components of a song that an artist records separately and then splices together later. Most of FOLK! was recorded around one microphone, with the instruments played at the same time.

“If there is a weird sound of a little crinkly percussion thing, it’s because somebody crinkled something in the room,” Llewellyn said. “We made the decision that we were going to do it the hard way: ‘Set up that mic. Bring that saltshaker over here. Okay, you do the saltshaker. I’ll slap the wall.’ It’s all like that.”

“Silver Or Gold”—jokingly known to Llewellyn and Mitchell as “Irish Pirates” because of the song’s forceful vocals—“is very much people hitting guitars, people hitting the wall,” Llewellyn said.

The band’s members also used small boxes of chocolate sprinkles “quite a bit” as percussion after discovering them while on tour in Europe.

The album’s final song, “Reap That Joy,” is especially “chocolate forward,” according to Llewellyn.

That song draws from his and his wife’s grief over their son’s autism diagnosis, as well as the hope they’ve found in the years since. It weaves gardening metaphors throughout, a love letter to his wife’s recent obsession with plants.

“Resurrection is one of the things that would be impossible for me not to believe in, because it’s happening on a microscale,” he said of the song. “It’s just woven into the pattern of how things work.”

Rend Collective’s own resurrection won’t stop with this album. A single, “Fight of My Life,” is set to be released in January, and the band is planning a special release for St. Patrick’s Day, as well as a follow-up album to complete FOLK!

“I don’t think Rend will ever have a period where it lies fallow for two years again,” Llewellyn said.

Mitchell feels the same way. “I just refuse to believe that the best days are behind me or the best days for the band are behind us,” he said. “We’re just getting started again.”

There’s an Irish drinking toast, he added at the end of the interview: “May the best day of your past be the worst day of your future.”

Llewellyn, inspired, couldn’t help himself. He was already making new plans. “I’d write that song right now,” he told Mitchell as they stood to leave.

Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS, a nonprofit publication from The Allbritton Journalism Institute.

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News

Wall Street’s Most Famous Evangelical Sentenced in Unprecedented Fraud Case

Emily Belz in New York

Judge gives former billionaire Bill Hwang 18 years in prison for crimes that outweigh his “lifetime” of “charitable works.”

Bill Hwang at federal court in New York on Wednesday, November 20.

Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Christian philanthropist and one-time billionaire Bill Hwang was sentenced to 18 years on Wednesday for Wall Street fraud that amounted to $10 billion in losses.

“I don’t remember a case where I had to deal with billions of dollars,” said Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan federal court, comparing Hwang’s crimes to those of Sam Bankman-Fried and Bernie Madoff. “There’s no precedent here.”

Hwang, 60, was at one time one of the wealthiest evangelicals in the United States, with about $30 billion to his name through his investment firm Archegos Capital Management, named to refer to Jesus.

He also started a Christian foundation with about $600 million of his wealth, the Grace & Mercy Foundation, which supports ministries around the world.

The sentencing hearing was filled with religious references: from the judge quoting a psalm in his sentencing to the defense citing Hwang’s Christian faith and philanthropy.

Archegos collapsed in March 2021, leaving banks with billions in losses because of Hwang’s misrepresentations to his lenders, a jury found. Hwang was convicted in July of racketeering, securities fraud, market manipulation, and wire fraud.

Hwang’s previous hedge fund Tiger Asia pleaded guilty to a criminal fraud charge in 2012; Hwang entered a $44 million civil settlement related to that case without admitting fault. He converted Tiger Asia to Archegos.

Referencing the Tiger Asia fraud, US attorney Andrew Mark Thomas described Hwang as a “recidivist” and said the Archegos fraud was not a “temporary aberration” of an otherwise virtuous man.

“You see someone who doesn’t learn the lesson,” Thomas said.

Hwang’s defense had asked for no prison time, which the judge said was “ridiculous.”

In filings for the sentencing, Hwang’s lawyers focused on his Christian faith and life of service. They brought up his philanthropy to 450 organizations through the Grace & Mercy Foundation as well as his devotion to his family.

The filings talked about his humble beginnings as a Korean immigrant to the US, working at a McDonald’s. They mentioned how he learned about faith and service from his pastor father and missionary mother and how he helped his legally blind brother.

But the judge said Hwang’s good works were “not balanced” with the severity of the crime he committed, which made a “wreckage of individual lives who trusted Mr. Hwang.”

“Why do good people do bad things?” Hellerstein asked at the hearing packed with Hwang’s friends and family. “Here’s a man spending a lifetime on charitable works who commits a terrible crime.”

In his first comments on the case, Hwang gave a short statement at the hearing, apologizing to those he hurt without admitting to guilt. His lawyers indicated that he plans to appeal his conviction.

“I feel really terrible for what happened at Archegos,” Hwang said. “I feel deep pain for all Archegos employees, the banks, and people who worked at the banks and suffered.”

Addressing the judge, Hwang said he hoped his sentence “will allow me to serve as much as I can, given the circumstances.” He added that he is “grateful to God for so many blessings I’ve had in my life,” mentioning his family.

Friends and family of Hwang’s submitted more than 500 pages of letters of support, forming a large book that the judge held up in the hearing, saying, “Your book of letters are a strong advocate for the kind of person and character that you have.” Many of the letters came from Hwang’s Christian friends and other leaders, as well as Grace & Mercy employees.

Among the dozens of leaders of Christian ministries submitting letters was the recently retired president of Fuller Theological Seminary Mark Labberton, who mentioned Hwang’s generosity to the school as well as his service on the board. Several other Fuller trustees wrote in support too.

Hwang’s pastor in New Jersey contributed, as well as Wall Street investors and an Orthodox priest who all met Hwang through one of his main initiatives, the Public Reading of Scripture.

Letters also came from the former head of The Bowery Mission, Ed Morgan; the founder of prison ministry Defy Ventures, Catherine Jackson; the head of Defending Black Girlhood, Lilada Gee; and the CEO of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), Hannah Song—all organizations supported by Hwang. Kevin Palau, son of evangelist Luis Palau and now the leader of the Luis Palau Association, also wrote in support.

As during his trial, Hwang read a devotional at different points during the day-long hearing.

“Bill’s only hobbies are faith, food, philanthropy, and books, and the project of his life is sharing them with everyone he meets,” the defense lawyers wrote in a pre-sentencing memo. “He has always lived a modest lifestyle,” they added, saying he shops at outlet malls.

The judge questioned this narrative of Hwang’s thriftiness, noting that Hwang had rented out an apartment in the ritzy Hudson Yards development in Manhattan for the trial. In filings, Hwang’s lawyers said he now has $55 million left of his billions.

The prosecution also raised issues with Hwang’s use of his foundation, Grace & Mercy, which he has given $600 million according to defense filings.

Thomas said after Archegos’s collapse, Hwang gave Grace & Mercy jobs to many of the company’s top lieutenants. “People who might testify against him,” said Hellerstein, finishing the prosecution’s thought.

Defense attorney Dani James countered that Hwang also gave low-level Archegos employees jobs at Grace & Mercy—arguing he was helping people rather than scheming to protect himself.

Hellerstein also said that banks were clearly greedy to enjoy profits from Archegos by lending billions, but “when you cheat a fool, it’s nevertheless cheating.”

Each of the ten guilty counts carried a maximum 20-year sentence, meaning Hwang faced the possibility of 200 years. Prosecutors asked for a 21-year sentence, saying that took into account Hwang’s “age and good works in his life.”

Hellerstein sentenced him to 18 years, plus 3 years of supervised release. Hwang was not immediately taken into custody; the judge set an additional hearing for December to determine possible forfeiture and restitution to injured parties.

“There’s nothing more difficult than sentencing. … How do you measure a person’s life?” Hellerstein wondered aloud in the sentencing. “A sentence has to take into account the good and the bad, and it can’t be done. … Yet we have to do it.”

Hellerstein, who is Jewish, quoted Psalm 82, about God judging “among those who administer judgment,” and said he would be held accountable for his work as a judge.

He told Hwang he knew that relationship to God was important to him as a religious man, but so is “man to fellow man.” Though the victims in this case “were institutions, they were also fellow people,” he said. The heavy sentence, he added, was a “symbol to others that if you don’t live by the law, you could be punished very severely by the law.”

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Theology

How a Dark Sense of Humor Can Save You from Cynicism

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

A bit of gallows humor can remind us that death does not have the final word.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

“A dark sense of humor can be an early sign of dementia.” I didn’t read that in a peer-reviewed medical study but on a social media meme, right before I left the platform formerly known as Twitter for bluer skies.

That means I have no idea whether the claim is true or false. But when I read it to my wife, she said, “Well, then, you’re in trouble. You think gallows humor is a fruit of the Spirit.”

I think she’s thinking of moments such as election night some weeks ago, when I raised my glass and said, “Next year in Guantanamo!” I don’t quite think dark humor is a virtue, but I do think it can be a blessing sometimes. And at least a little bit of it might be what we need to combat cynicism in a cynical time.

One of the hardest things for me to get used to as a young minister was the joking that would go on “backstage” at funerals. The funeral directors looked appropriately somber and sympathetic with the families, but the minute the elevator doors closed, they were telling jokes and one-upping each other with puns and anecdotes. Some of the most resonant laughter I’d ever heard was around a casket. I was unnerved.

I tried for a while to spiritually and psychologically diagnose this sense of humor: It was the result of routinization, perhaps. This had become a job for them, and with the familiarity of it, they had grown numb. That kind of dark humor is indeed a warning sign—maybe not of dementia, but certainly of cynicism. One can see this all over the place these days with the sort of “LOL, nothing matters” humor, a hyena-like quality of this twisted time, a way of signaling that one is not inhibited by the naive strictures of morality or sincerity or hope.

But not all of those funeral directors were cynical. For some of them, the humor, though dark, was a different kind of coping mechanism. The laughter was to keep them from normalizing the grim reality of their daily task. Laughing was a way of reminding themselves that death does not, in fact, have the final word.

In his book A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity, sociologist Peter Berger argues (rightly, in my view) that abstractions posing as “proofs of the existence of God” convince almost no one that God is there. Even if they do, they don’t settle the really important question: Which God is there? The God of the philosophers or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The God who is the “Ground of Being” or the God who loves you?

Instead, Berger argued that for many people, the most compelling “evidence” for God comes in the unplanned moments of ordinary life, when “signals of transcendence” seem to break through the everydayness of it all.

None of these signposts, he wrote, are decisive and definitive on their own. A baby is born, and you are overwhelmed by a love that seems to be about far more than just mammalian biology. By morning you can convince yourself that that kind of gratitude and awe was really nothing. But these realities—when faced honestly—evoke a longing that points us to something beyond the ordinary. It takes a decision of faith to find in these moments signals of transcendence, Berger wrote, but “the faith in these signals is not baseless.”

“It takes my own experience seriously,” he argued, “and dares to suppose that what this experience intends is not a lie.”

Of all these signals, Berger wrote, the one that intrigued him most was humor, and, specifically, the kind of humor that emerges in dark times.

“There is something profoundly mysterious and puzzling about the comic, most of all its power to provoke, for an instant at least, what is suggestively called ‘redeeming laughter,’ even in moments of singular terror or grief,” he wrote. “We all know that these emotions will return once the moment of laughter has passed. But in that moment, all the fears and sorrows of existence have been banished; in that moment, if you will, my laughter intends eternity.”

Berger asked whether this is all just an illusion—and, without a frame of trust in some larger reality, it would seem to be nothing more. But for that one brief instant, the darkness actually is broken. The fear and nothingness is replaced with laughter.

Elsewhere, Berger wrote about why we find things funny and located a crucial part of it in incongruence, the difference between the way things are and the way they should be. The incongruence itself, he argued, ought to be something of a sign that we are not quite at home in the world as it is.

Frederick Buechner argued that the gospel simultaneously inhabits the worlds of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale (not meaning made-up fiction but the reality to which fairy tales point, in which the tragic gives way to the comic). The parables of Jesus, he suggested, work that way—they take ordinary reality and turn it upside-down in shocking, surprising, incongruous ways.

“Switching on the lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed be he,” Buechner writes. He continues,

The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn’t see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn’t see it, and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims also to see as the invisible presence of God in the world?

If all that you see is comedy, you are in denial. If all that you see is tragedy, then you are in despair. But if you see them both, you will learn how to both laugh and cry—and sometimes to do both at the same time. You will see that the darkness around you (and sometimes within you) is real. But you will also see that it is not ultimate.

A little bit of gallows humor can break the spell, just for a moment. It can remind us that even when we laugh, there is much that is broken—and that even when we cry, underneath it all, there is joy.

A moment of laughter in grave times can shake us out of the fear that can come when we look for signs of God’s presence in a fallen universe. It can remind us that the sign is the absence itself—and of the pain of longing that it evokes. A little bit of humor in a dark time can shake us to hear the words our mothers in the garden needed to hear 2,000 years ago: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you …” (Luke 24:5–6, ESV).

Not all of us will ever get dementia, but all of us tend to forget. We see the tragedy and forget to laugh. We see the triviality and we forget to cry. A lot of dark humor can make us cynical, but a little bit of it can help us remember that on the other side of the valley of the shadow of death is a wedding—a party so full of laughter that we will never again think of any gallows, other than the cross that made everything sad come untrue.

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

News

Died: Rina Seixas, Iconic Surfer Pastor Who Faced Domestic Violence Charges

Franco Iacomini

The Brazilian founder of Bola de Neve Church, which attracted celebrities and catalyzed 500 congregations on six continents, faced accusations from family members and a former colleague.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Courtesy of Bola de Neve Church

Rinaldo Seixas Pereira, the controversial founder of Bola de Neve Church, which grew into a movement of 500 congregations around the world, died in a motorcycle accident in Campinas, Brazil, on Sunday, November 17. He was 52.

Apostol Rina, as he was known to many Christians, was returning home on Sunday afternoon after speaking at Pregadores do Asfalto (Asphalt Preachers), a bikers’ Bible study at his church, when he fell off his motorcycle and suffered multiple fractures. He died in the hospital later that night.

Bola de Neve Church began in an upstairs room of a São Paulo surf shop called Hawaiian Dreams in 1999. Though the church grew exponentially in the next 25 years, Rina himself suffered personal scandal and controversy, most recently battling accusations of domestic violence that led the elders to remove him as board president in June. At the time of his death, his wife, Denise Seixas, had a restraining order against him after both she and her son (Rina’s stepson) reported that he had acted violently toward them.

Nevertheless, Rina was remembered as “a revolutionary who won many unlikely lives for Jesus, who mobilized the Christian youth of Brazil,” wrote Fred Arrais, a Christian singer and pastor of the Baptist church Igreja Angelim in the northern state of Piauí, on Threads.

“You were a world changer, and in many ways, you changed our world and helped make it possible for us to reach hundreds of thousands of people in Brazil,” wrote Mark Mohr, vocalist of Christian reggae band Christafari, on Instagram. “You were a church planter with hundreds of congregations in over 30 countries.”

Rina was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on April 15, 1972, the eldest son of a Baptist couple, Lídia Colomietz and Rinaldo Pereira. He was born after a complicated delivery, and doctors had to remove him with forceps from his mother’s womb. He had two siblings, Daniela and Priscila, who both went on to become pastors at Bola de Neve.

As a child, he attended Colégio Batista Brasileiro and he later studied advertising, a degree he would one day deploy as a megachurch pastor. But as a young person, Rina drifted away from Christianity, and by the time he was 20, he was addicted to drugs and had contracted hepatitis. After an encounter he later described as giving him a “sense of death,” he reengaged with his faith.

Shortly after this experience, Rina began attending Renascer em Cristo, São Paulo, a congregation squarely within the neo-Pentecostalism movement that first developed in the 1970s and was known for preaching the prosperity gospel and spiritual warfare and broadcasting these messages through their own mass media.

After serving for several years as the leader of the church’s evangelism ministry, in 1999, Rina began his own church with the blessing of Estevam Hernanders, the founder of Renascer em Cristo. The new community would be strongly influenced by what Rina had seen at his former church but would be simultaneously friendly to youth.

A longtime surfer, Rina asked his friends, the owners of Hawaiian Dreams, if he could start a church in their store. When they agreed, at least 130 people showed up to the first meeting. In a story that Rina would recount numerous times, the space held no pulpit or even a table where he could place the Bible. But he improvised, borrowing a longboard and placing it on two chairs, a setup that became a signature feature for the community.

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The church’s surf culture wasn’t the only thing that intrigued newcomers. Renascer em Cristo had been among the first to embrace contemporary music as a way to engage and connect with young people. Bola de Neve went further, holding worship services with loud music and strobe lights in bars and concert halls. In the walls, illuminated panels sport catchphrases like “In Jesus we trust” (in English).

The church’s name, which translates to snowball, came from a vision about its growth—“a snowball that, starting small, turned into an avalanche,” as Rina described on the church’s website. In contrast to many evangelical churches in the beginning of the 21st century, the church catered directly to young people through its emphasis on contemporary worship, informal language in preaching, acceptance of tattoos, and a casual dress code. (Bola de Neve’s success in turn influenced many evangelical congregations to employ similar strategies to court young people.)

From the beginning, the church attracted artists, athletes, and other celebrities and maintained its cool reputation over time, counting surfer Gabriel Medina, model Sasha Meneghel, and actresses Fernanda Vasconcellos and Danielle Winits among its more famous attendees. Many of the local Bola de Neve churches also organized “fight ministries,” where congregants attended jujitsu classes, and sometimes took part in church-sponsored competitions.

Rina’s preaching frequently invoked the imagery of everyday life and slang. “In God’s house there’s no spilled milk, no burnt beans, no mushy rice, amen?” the surfer-pastor once preached from the pulpit, as recounted by Eduardo Maranhão in his book A Grande Onda Vai te Pegar (A Big Wave Is Coming for You).

Behind this colloquial style was an attempt ro help Christians respond effectively to contemporary culture. “Jesus used a unique and innovative language,” Rina wrote. “While he preached the content of the scriptures with great accuracy, he also presented biblical teachings in a new and thought-provoking way, through parables, comparisons and metaphors.”

To him, contemporary Christianity had become mild and conforming. “One of the biggest problems facing the church today is the loss of its countercultural essence,” he wrote on his website. “If it is not based on trust in God, the search for the Lord can lead us to strange and dangerous destinations.”

Though the church never announced an intentional international church-planting strategy, the Brazilian diaspora organized and opened local Bola de Neves (with surfboard pulpits) in countries as diverse as the United States, Mozambique, Spain, India, Japan, and Australia, allowing it to claim that it had congregations on every inhabited continent.

As it grew, Bola de Neve avoided much of the negative press coverage that characterized many neo-Pentecostal congregations. That changed this year.

In May, former members of a congregation in Santa Catarina state accused the church of mismanaging donations to a project meant to support female entrepreneurs. (In court, the church denied any irregularities.)

Days later, Christian singer Rodolfo Abrantes issued a video in which he said that he and his wife had been emotionally abused while both were members at the same Bola de Neve congregation and that leaders had accused him of owing money to the church’s record label, Bola Music.

Rina did not publicly comment on these accusations.

Soon they came closer to home. This same month, Nathan Gouvea, Rina’s stepson, said he had been beaten by his stepfather and mentioned him as directly responsible for the abusive management practices that have been reported in Santa Catarina. He also claimed Bola de Neve was a cult. “Everyone is scared to death of the apostle,” he said.

In June, Rina’s wife, Denise Seixas, a fellow pastor at Bola de Neve and Christian singer, obtained a restraining order from the court against Rina, accusing him of physical and psychological violence.

In her statement to the police, she said Rina had punched her in the nose. In audio recordings and videos leaked on social media around that time, Rina was heard swearing and accusing his wife of “hearing demons.”

In that same week, the elders removed both Rina and Denise as president and vice president, respectively, of Bola de Neve. The board also announced the establishment of an ombudsman channel (an email address where people could send complaints to) to address “possible failures and misconduct” and the creation of an ethics council to investigate and deliberate about irregularities.

In June, a former church employee told police that Rina had sexually harassed her. In her testimony, she noted several situations of inappropriate behavior that occurred between 2012 and 2017, culminating in an attempt from Rina to grab her. When she left the scene, she said, she had visible bruises on her arm from the encounter.

Following these claims, in July, a court in São Paulo ordered Rina to hand over all weapons he owned to the police within 48 hours. He informed them that the guns were stored at a gun club and allowed the police to access them.

Following Rina’s death, it remains unclear how the authorities and the church’s leadership will address the allegations of mismanagement, abuse, and assault. In the statement announcing his passing, Bola de Neve Church said only that “in this moment of great sadness, we pray for his family, friends and the entire church that was so blessed by his ministry, leaving a legacy that will never be forgotten.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

Ideas

Post-Election Gloating and Meltdowns Reveal Our Hopes and Fears

Kaitlyn Schiess

Dealing with emotions across political differences is the next opportunity for the church to work through division.

Bloomberg Creative / Getty

“There are a lot of big feelings in this room,” a friend whispered to me a couple of days after the election as the women of our church gathered for our weekly Bible study. We were there to continue our study of Ecclesiastes, but most of us were less focused on the Bible than we were on the tense mood in the room. At our “purple” church, no single emotional reaction dominated—the women filing into pews that morning were relieved, distressed, comforted, grieved.

Many churches like ours spent the lead-up to the election thinking about how to disagree well, how to seek unity amid diversity of opinion, and how to keep our focus on Christ without diminishing the importance of loving our neighbors through politics. But now that the election is over, churches—and families, friends, and communities—are grappling with a new question: “How do we handle our conflicting emotional responses?”

Unlike other national events—whether tragedies like school shootings or celebrations like Olympic victories—elections feel significant to everyone in very different ways. Some people walked into their churches the Sunday after the election with a sense of relief, even joy. Others walked into church with lingering dread or grief.

While the church may be comfortable responding to different emotions—after all, we are called to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn (Rom. 12:15)—this time, we are responding differently to the same event. We don’t only misunderstand each other’s emotional responses—we recoil at them. Before the election, we may have thought, How could you possibly think that? Now, we’re confronted with another challenging question: “How could you possibly feel that way?”

This new question is, in some ways, more volatile. We aren’t talking about different policy positions, political philosophies, or candidate preferences. We’re talking about something more visceral: how we feel about the state of our country, the well-being of our communities, and the kind of life we want to live. However, this shift to feelings may be exactly what we need to navigate the post-election season with greater faithfulness.

The 2024 election season, like every other election season, was never primarily about facts or data or policy positions. Deeper emotions, stories, and claims on our identity and sense of community were always humming under the surface of our political disagreements. Anyone who has ever gotten into a political argument with a friend or family member knows this. You may start out by explaining why you support a policy or prefer a candidate, but things only get heated when deeper differences arise: when your loyalties conflict, when your loves diverge, when your sense of identity is threatened.

Our policy differences are important, but they seem intractable in part because they are fueled by powerful stories about what it means to be human, what kinds of communities we want to live in, what is ultimately right and true. We are constantly formed by these stories, often without realizing it. When these stories clash, however, they reveal themselves as formative drivers of much of our political life.

During the 2020 election, I spent many hours in conversation with people at my church who disagreed with me politically. As one conversation moved from economic policy into underlying political philosophy, it got more emotionally charged. It was clear that the difference in opinion between us was masking something deeper.

Finally, the woman burst out, “Are you calling my dad a liar?” We disagreed about what economic policies would serve our country best. And underneath that policy difference was a difference in political philosophy. But neither of those differences were driving the emotion of the conversation. The real issue was about family loyalty, a threatened sense of personal righteousness, and conflicting ideas about what flourishing communities look like.

This focus on our emotional responses also has the potential to open up new conversations about our political differences. When we start by addressing the deeper feelings people have about politics—their fear, desire, anger, love—we resist the temptation to objectify our political opponents. We cannot boil them down to one belief or position; we must take them as whole people. Their political positions do not entirely define them, and they came to those positions through a complicated personal history: past pains and joys, family dynamics, and media consumption habits.

I have been speaking to groups of Christians about faith and politics for three election cycles now, and the single most helpful thing I have learned in the hundreds of conversations I have had is one question. When a political conversation gets heated or thorny, I pause and ask, “This seems important to you. Can you tell me more about why?” The vast majority of the time, the other person does not respond with policy details. They say something like “My dad taught me to care about this.” Or “I’m worried about my kids.” Or “Something scary happened in my neighborhood.”

While our different emotional responses to the election present a challenge to our communities, they also unearth a reality we have avoided for too long. Our political differences are not merely about policy details; they are about our desires, fears, loves, and loyalties. Our difficulty navigating these emotional differences might, in a strange way, bring to the surface the real challenge for political formation and discipleship today: confronting the stories our politics sell us and finding in Scripture a truer and better story.

While that morning in Bible study was emotionally charged, it turned out that Ecclesiastes offered us exactly the word we needed. This book, known for its pessimism about human endeavors and earthly pleasures—“meaningless, meaningless!” is the author’s refrain—surprisingly confronts the whole spectrum of emotional responses to the election.

We worship a God who can handle the emotional outburst of Ecclesiastes: delight at the joys of creation, devastation at their limitations, despair when all efforts at success and contentment fail. We worship a God who reveals himself to us in such a book. Nothing about our emotional reactions to the election surprises God. Ecclesiastes honors the full range of human emotions in response to a world that is somehow both beautiful and horrifying, joyful and devastating.

But Ecclesiastes doesn’t leave us there. For those leaning toward triumphalism and rejoicing, the wisdom book reminds us that failure and evil are mixed into all human work. For those leaning toward despair and gloom, Ecclesiastes reminds us that moments of joy and goodness remain even in suffering.

We should honor each other’s emotional responses to this election—they are legitimate, and they helpfully point us toward the deeper stories we believe about the world and our place in it. But we should also, in the days and months after the election, point each other to the truth in Scripture that we do not “understand the work of God, the Maker of all things” (Ecc. 11:5).

We do not yet know what God is doing—in our country, in our churches, in ourselves. But the instructions to us now are the same as those to the distraught reader of Ecclesiastes throughout all of history: “Fear God and keep his commandments,” knowing that “God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil” (12:13–14).

Kaitlyn Schiess is the author of The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here.

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Books

Review

The Quiet Faith Behind Little House on the Prairie

Monika B. Hilder

How a sincere but reserved Christianity influenced the life and literature of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In A Prairie Faith: The Religious Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, historian John Fry invites readers into a detailed exploration of the celebrated author of the Little House on the Prairie series. His goal is evaluating the nature of her Christian faith—a significant and humbling task for any scholar.

While other Wilder biographers have either ignored this topic or simply assumed that she wrote from a Christian perspective, Fry aims to address the question of Wilder’s faith in all its complexity. As historian Mark Noll points out in his foreword, the findings in this book “can supplement, modify, or, in some cases, overthrow what everyone thought they knew about an author whose books are still much read and, by many, much loved.” Thus, “fans of the Little House books eager to enlist the author for ‘their team’ may be disappointed with Fry’s persuasive conclusion.”

John E. Miller, an earlier biographer who wrote about Wilder in a series of books, concluded that faith was central to her life and outlook. By contrast, Fry argues “that while Christianity was important to Laura’s life, it was not central.”

In this multifaceted analysis, Fry explores several questions, including the following: What sort of Christian was Wilder, who regularly attended church but never joined any as a member? How did her parents influence her faith journey? What should we make of the affiliation she and her husband, Almanzo, shared with Freemasonry? And how can we square her Christian belief with demeaning references to Native Americans and African Americans in the Little House series?

As Fry evaluates possible answers, he paints a vivid portrait of the American frontier as it changed over the course of Wilder’s lifetime, which spanned the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Readers learn about her experiences of traveling through the Midwest in covered wagons, living amid what Fry calls the “Christian landscape” of the region’s small towns, and even discovering the emerging world of air travel.

Fry organizes the book chronologically, devoting detailed attention to each successive Little House book. Beyond the narrative itself, he includes a wealth of helpful material, including regional maps and an appendix on pastors serving in the churches of Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder began her writing career and lived for most of her adult life.

Fry’s afterword, which describes his own journey in studying Wilder’s life and thought, is interesting in its own right. Having grown up on a farm in Western Pennsylvania, Fry has a deep affinity with and commitment to studying its history. One cannot help thinking that this background leaves Fry ideally suited to offer insights that scholars in more urban contexts might neglect.

On the book’s central matter, categorizing Wilder’s faith, Fry’s scholarship aims to help readers guard against what he describes as the “tempt[ation]” common in contemporary America (and beyond, I might add) “to make assumptions about other people’s spirituality.” There are certain histories, he observes, that tend to classify believers of Wilder’s era as either fundamentalist or modernist, in keeping with the dominant theological fault line of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Wilder, he argues, cannot be easily placed into either camp. Rather, he regards her faith as “conventional across a great range of moderate Protestantism” and “entirely typical for many Protestants, especially in rural areas.”

Wilder’s parents raised her on morals informed by biblical principles, respect for the Bible, quiet observances of the Lord’s Day, and nightly prayers. She memorized Scripture, regularly went to church when not traveling, and attended Sunday school with Almanzo even when there were no preaching services, which weren’t always weekly occurrences in rural communities. As a teenager she wrote poetry that shows evidence of having internalized the Christian faith, and prayer was important to her in adulthood. Inside her Bible she kept a handwritten list of verses, copied from a 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, on facing life’s most difficult moments.

In weighing the evidence for Wilder’s personal faith, Fry underscores the overlap between her brand of Christianity and mere stoicism. As he writes, both Laura and Almanzo devoted themselves to the virtues of “frugality and hard work.” The Little House novels depict the hardships endured by nearly all rural Midwesterners in the late 19th century, but they focus more on themes of self-reliance than on God’s role in permitting the hardships or offering deliverance from them.

Fry notes that Wilder’s representation of Christianity “is oriented toward God’s rules for behavior and right living, not the gospel of God’s free offer of salvation in Jesus Christ.” In a 1936 talk, she listed the values that she hoped her books would convey to children: “courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness.” As Fry emphasizes, there is no mention here of the church or the Christian faith.

Wilder was typically reserved in how she expressed her faith. She was not comfortable with others’ public testimonies of their experiences with God. In her words, “It someway offended my sense of privacy. It seemed to me that the things between one and God should be between him and God like loving ones [sic] mother.”

By and large, Fry suggests, Wilder “nurtured [her] faith by what Reformed Christians call the ordinary means of grace: reading God’s Word, praying, and attending worship.” But her attendance wasn’t always consistent. It is noteworthy that Laura and Almanzo chose to attend the Methodist Episcopal Church not only because she disliked the Presbyterian doctrine of predestination but also because she disdained any expectation of strict Sunday observances. And Fry makes a noteworthy comparison of Laura’s limited church involvement with the full-on commitment of her Baptist friend Neta Seal.

Another eye-opening theme is Laura and Almanzo’s Freemason roots. Fry traces the Ingalls family’s lifelong involvement, observing that while Laura’s parents were church members as well as Masons, Almanzo and Laura never held church membership anywhere. Almanzo was a master Mason until his death, and until the 1930s, Laura was a leader in the Order of the Eastern Star, a Masonic auxiliary organization.

As Fry notes, however, Masonic membership was common for residents of small towns in the late 19th century. He observes, too, that leadership positions were not available to women in the Methodist Episcopal church that the Wilders attended. All this suggests that Wilder probably regarded her Masonic work not as incompatible with church involvement but as part of her civic duty.

Fry brings a thoughtful and nuanced perspective to critical controversies surrounding Wilder’s representations of Native and African Americans in her books. While concluding that some of her portraits are indefensible, he provides context.

In the Little House books, white settlers sometimes refer to members of the Osage Nation as “savages.” But the book’s settlers lived with a realistic fear of being massacred, given real-life memories of episodes like the 1862 Dakota War, when tensions with the federal government and newly arriving settlers precipitated a wave of killings. As Fry concludes, “there are no obvious winners and losers” in Little House on the Prairie. There is “no simple story line leading to the wilderness being tamed by the farmer or American Indians being driven away by whites. At the end of the book, in fact, both the Indians and the Ingallses have left their homes behind.”

Another book in the series, Little Town on the Prairie, shocks modern consciences by including a blackface minstrel show. Fry notes, however, that such forms of entertainment were regrettably popular during the period in which the story was set. Moreover, he finds no evidence that Wilder harbored any personal prejudice toward Black Americans.

In Fry’s judgment, the books’ depictions of the Native American and Black characters “show that Laura did not understand the Bible’s injunctions to love one’s neighbor in the same way that we do today.” Ultimately, however, he writes not in condemnation for his subject but in the “hope that having a greater understanding of Wilder’s actual life and beliefs will enable us to love her and others of our neighbors who lived in the past better.” In this, he has amply succeeded, producing a highly readable account of great value to scholars and Little House fans alike.

Monika B. Hilder is professor of English at Trinity Western University, where she is also codirector of the Inklings Institute of Canada. She is the author of Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C. S. Lewis and Gender and Letters to Annie: A Grandmother’s Dreams of Fairy Tale Princesses, Princes, & Happily Ever After.

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Culture

‘Bonhoeffer’ Bears Little Resemblance to Reality

Myles Werntz

The new biopic from Angel Studios twists the theologian’s life and thought to make a political point.

Fifteen years ago, scholar Stephen Haynes mapped out the many interpretations of the life of 20th-century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a conservative who sought to restore Germany—or perhaps he was a progressive who wanted to move past stale dogmatism. Bonhoeffer was a closet Anabaptist, concerned with questions of the church first and society second. Or maybe he was the model of a theologian who cared primarily for social action here and now.

Figures as complex as Bonhoeffer are notoriously difficult to interpret well. Bonhoeffer left behind numerous monographs, sermons, correspondence, and theological writing, and since his death, there have been as many volumes of personal remembrances by friends and colleagues. All of this creates a complex and at times elusive figure, difficult to categorize within contemporary ideological movements. If we aren’t careful, situating Bonhoeffer in our own moment can be an exercise in wish fulfillment.

This is the trap into which the new film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. falls. In the latest offering from Angel Studios, the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an empty container into which our own desires—in this case, desires for a faith that serves political ends—are poured.

In one sense, Bonhoeffer is straightforward biography and is to be commended for introducing us to influences on his life that are frequently underplayed in the popular imagination: his family, his friends in the United States, his contacts in church bodies across Europe.

We watch as Bonhoeffer is educated in the finest German universities and becomes deeply concerned with the political direction of the country. He teaches at a freestanding seminary in Finkenwalde amid the rise of Nazi influence on the German church. After the seminary closes, he joins the Abwehr, a German military intelligence agency. Viewers meet his brother-in-law, also involved in the Abwehr, who took part in a Hitler assassination plot. We see Bonhoeffer arrested and dying in the Flossenbürg concentration camp days before the prisoners there were liberated by the Allies.

These facts are uncontroversial. But Bonhoeffer is more speculative than circumspect. Atop the familiar scaffolding of the theologian’s life, the film constructs the story of a man who, from childhood, seems destined to leave behind prayer for conspiracy, Bible teaching for political espionage, and theology for activism.

Rather than depicting a man of deep theological convictions and subtle intellect, Bonhoeffer tells the story of a man for whom moral convictions are a flexible and useful tool, a man whose actions are determined not by concerns for the church’s witness but by perceived historical necessity.

It is the story of a Bonhoeffer willing to do anything—including disavow the teachings of Jesus as he understood them—to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Let us acknowledge that any biopic takes liberties with its subject. Screenwriters fill in gaps with imagined conversations and encounters not only to make a good film but also to demonstrate the individual’s character.

In this respect, Bonhoeffer is a typical film of its genre—even if the liberties it takes are a bit fanciful. For example, Bonhoeffer as a young man spent a year in New York at Union Theological Seminary, where he became acquainted with American racism and worshiped at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church.

The film stretches these facts, depicting Bonhoeffer as leading his own jazz combo at a Harlem nightclub, being beaten in a confrontation with a racist hotel owner, and becoming an impassioned advocate for the rights of African Americans. These embellishments, entertaining as they may be, are designed less to fill up airtime than to depict Bonhoeffer as a crusader developing an appetite for justice.

Theologian Bonhoeffer is further eclipsed by political agent Bonhoeffer as the movie unfolds. As the Nazis rise to power, he says things like “I can’t pretend that praying and teaching is enough,” and “My dirty hands are all I have left to offer.” His well-known underground seminary at Finkenwalde is treated not as a place to faithfully train ordinands in the Confessing Church but as a launching pad for a political counterattack on the Nazis. Toward the end of his life, he gives a sermon in which his famous “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” quote is interspersed with footage of a conspirator planting a bomb.

In one howler of a scene, Bonhoeffer disavows his pacifist teaching in Discipleship, insisting “I was right … before Hitler.” His friend and student Eberhard Bethge immediately challenges his teacher, asking whether Hitler was the first evil leader since Scripture was written. Bonhoeffer replies ominously: “No. But he’s the first one I can stop.”

If this scene included fireworks and a montage of Dietrich doing calisthenics to prepare for the weeks ahead, it could not have been more perfectly written for a spy thriller.

At the heart of Bonhoeffer is the overconfident depiction of the theologian as a would-be assassin. We know that Bonhoeffer was initially arrested not for an assassination plot (as the film depicts) but for his involvement in Operation 7, a scheme to smuggle Jews into neighboring Switzerland. We know that his primary intrigue through the Abwehr was passing information about the Nazis to his ecumenical church contacts in England and elsewhere—not, as the film depicts, trying to convince the English to supply a bomb to kill a dictator.

And finally, while Bonhoeffer undoubtedly knew of plans (which included family members) to assassinate Hitler, evidence surrounding his direct involvement remains murky and contested.

Among historians, the theologian’s relationship to an assassination attempt is a hotly debated question—less a matter of Bonhoeffer’s own words than informed conjecture about what he knew of his brother-in-law’s activities. But for the Bonhoeffer movie, there’s no debate: Dietrich Bonhoeffer not only knew of a plot to kill Hitler but also was intimately involved, his earlier convictions about how to understand Christ’s teachings rendered irrelevant by the rise of the Nazis.

Bonhoeffer’s real-life words complicate this narrative. “To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way,” he wrote in Discipleship. Years later, awaiting his execution, he doubled down: “Today I can see the dangers of that book [Discipleship], though I still stand by what I wrote.”

It is likely that Bonhoeffer knew of a plot to kill Hitler. But based on his writings, it also seems that his own forms of Christian resistance—spreading information to international contacts, assisting with sending Jews to Switzerland—were consistent with his long-standing convictions.

Undermining the Nazis with paperwork and diplomacy is far less cinematic than explosives, and the makers of Bonhoeffer may have changed their main character’s worldview for mere dramatic effect. But the ideological thrust of the film feels too on the nose to be justified by drama alone. What kind of connection is the film making by suggesting that Bonhoeffer changed his mind about the “narrow way”?

Perhaps it’s suggesting that the audience should also lay down their political naiveté and take up arms. Perhaps it’s suggesting that the way of Jesus is too soft for the hard realities of modern conflict and should be replaced by a more “realistic” approach. Ironically, this is the very approach the Nazis themselves take—replacing crosses with swastikas and Bibles with copies of Mein Kampf, turning to a stronger version of church when the old ways, governed by Scripture and sacrament, no longer fit the bill.

Early reactions to the film, particularly by the Bonhoeffer family, have identified a distorted legacy. The source of some of these distortions seems easy to identify. Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. plays off the title of conservative pundit Eric Metaxas’ 2011 Bonhoeffer biography. (Metaxas’ website references the movie in the context of plans for a forthcoming Bonhoeffer streaming series, and he’s promoted it on X.)

The similarity between this rendering of Bonhoeffer’s life and Metaxas’ own trajectory is telling. Though Angel Studios has downplayed any connection between Metaxas and this project, consider the similarities (beyond the film’s subtitle). Both movie Bonhoeffer and Metaxas begin as religious thinkers, become primarily concerned with political life, and ultimately dally with the use of force in service to their ideals.

Early on in the film, Bonhoeffer’s Harlem friend says that sometimes a punch is necessary; in 2020, Eric Metaxas made news when he punched a DC protester. The parallel is too spot-on to be mere coincidence. In his most recent book, Metaxas continues to marshal Bonhoeffer’s work toward his project of politics as the ultimate end of theology. His inflammatory rhetoric consistently equates the American left with the Nazis.

The portrait offered in Bonhoeffer does not square with the man who—even in the midst of the Confessing Church’s collapse—would speak of baptism as God’s way of creating a new kingdom, who desired “the resistance tasks of the church [to] terminate in word and discipleship.” In Bonhoeffer, we see an imprisoned Dietrich returning to preaching about Christ’s sacrifice and taking Communion only after his own attempts to save Germany’s soul through an assassination plot have failed.

Perhaps judgment of the film’s message should come from Bonhoeffer himself. From Ethics:

Radicalism always springs from a conscious or unconscious hatred of what is established. Christian radicalism, no matter whether it consists in withdrawing from the world or in improving the world, arises from hatred of creation. … On both sides it is a refusal of faith in the creation. But devils are to be cast out through Beelzebub.

Put differently, one cannot drive out evil with evil. Any attempt to bend the world through evil means is to refuse to believe that God is ultimately God, even in the age of Hitler.

The ultimate failure of Bonhoeffer is not just that it gets the history wrong. It also misunderstands how Bonhoeffer’s life was already an extraordinary example of Christian courage.

Especially in the aftermath of two assassination attempts on a former president, we do not need an argument for theologically motivated government overthrow; we do not need further justification for political violence. What we needed was a film about a man concerned with how God might be calling the church to be steadfast amid the great temptation to mold our faith to our politics.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

News

Died: Tony Campolo, Champion of ‘Red Letter’ Christianity

Daniel Silliman

The Baptist pastor and sociologist argued caring for the poor was an integral part of proclaiming the gospel.

Tony Campolo / edits by Christianity Today

Tony Campolo frequently started his speeches to Christian audiences by telling them three things.

First, he would tell them how many children had died from hunger or malnutrition-related diseases the night before—a number in the tens of thousands.

And Campolo would say, “Most of you don’t give a s—.”

Then: “What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said ‘s—’ than the fact that thousands of kids died last night.”

Campolo, a progressive Christian leader who courted controversy challenging evangelicals to see caring for the poor as an integral part of proclaiming the gospel, died on Tuesday. He was 89.

Campolo popularized the term red letter Christian—a reference to the way the words of Jesus are printed in many New Testaments—as an alternative to evangelical. He felt an alternative was needed because evangelicals had turned their backs on the good news, embracing right wing politics and comfortable, middle class conformity. But the best cure for evangelicalism’s ills, he said, was Jesus.

As he traveled relentlessly, speaking to up to 500 groups per year, Campolo urged people to let their lives be transformed by Jesus. And he told them that if their lives really were transformed, it would be good news for people who were hungry and oppressed.

“I surrendered my life to Jesus and trusted in him for my salvation, and I have been a staunch evangelical ever since,” Campolo wrote in 2015. “I believe the Bible to have been written by men inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit. I place my highest priority on the words of Jesus, emphasizing the 25th chapter of Matthew, where Jesus makes clear that on Judgment Day, the defining question will be how each of us responded to those he calls ‘the least of these.’”

A Baptist pastor and sociologist, Campolo attributed this vision to John Wesley. In a 2003 interview with Christianity Today, Campolo said he studied the founder of Methodism in a class on “Christian classics” when he was a student at Eastern College (now a university). He realized Wesley’s social activism wasn’t distinct from his conversion but deeply connected.

“The Wesleyan vision was warm-hearted evangelism with an incredible social vision,” Campolo said. “Out of this conversion grows the great Wesleyan revival with all of its social consciousness, attacking slavery, championing the rights of women, ending child labor laws.”

Born a second-generation Italian immigrant in 1935, Campolo had his first taste of social conflict in the church while growing up in Philadelphia. His family attended an American Baptist congregation in West Philadelphia, but it shut down when white people fled the city and their African American neighbors for the suburbs. Campolo’s father, Anthony Campolo Sr., decided not to follow. Instead, he took his family to a Black Baptist church nearby, and they worshiped there.

As a young pastor in his 20s, Campolo faced racism in the church again. He was working in a congregation near Valley Forge, in Pennsylvania, when General Electric opened a new research headquarters in the area, triggering a housing shortage. Black people in particular had trouble finding places to live. Campolo started pushing local leaders to fix the problem and soon found himself the head of a council working on fair and affordable housing.

The backlash was quick. Campolo was sharply criticized by white people in his congregation, who said he was going to hurt real estate value and the reputation of the church.

It was eye-opening for the young minister. “I did not expect that Christian people could be so openly racist,” he said.

Campolo left the church to get a doctorate in sociology and took a teaching position at Eastern in 1964. At the school, Campolo started getting students to volunteer with children in Philadelphia, first with college resources and then with his own organization, the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE). Shortly after it was founded, the EAPE helped start a school in the Dominican Republic and another in Haiti.

To recruit more students to spend a summer or a year doing missions, and to raise money for ongoing projects, Campolo started accepting speaking invitations large and small. His schedule sometimes put him in conflict with Eastern administrators, and his speeches often put him in conflict with conservative evangelicals.

In 1985, Campolo was accused of heresy. He was uninvited from a Washington, DC, youth rally organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) and Youth for Christ because he had written that Jesus is present in other people, that the fullest expression of God was in Christ’s humanness, and that while Jesus is the only savior, “not everybody who is saved by Him is aware that He is the one who is doing the saving.”

A panel led by theologian J. I. Packer reviewed the charges, grilled Campolo for six hours, and found him orthodox. He was “verbally incautious” and guilty of “unbiblical faux pas,” the panel concluded, but it was inadvertent and born out of his eagerness to evangelize.

Campolo, for his part, said the episode cemented his commitment to be a faithful critic of the church.

“I could have ended up as another career public speaker,” he said. “A career public speaker is not what I’m called to be. I’m called to be a critic. And this controversy has started the old juices flowing again.”

In addition to teaching, speaking, and running a missionary organization, Campolo was active in the Democratic Party. He ran a doomed campaign for Congress in 1976 and worked with President Bill Clinton on the development of AmeriCorps in the 1990s.

Campolo also became Clinton’s personal spiritual advisor during the scandal over Clinton’s sexual misconduct with an intern. He formed an accountability group for the president, along with evangelical pastor Gordon MacDonald and Methodist minister J. Philip Wogaman. When the pastoral counseling became public, Campolo was criticized for providing “spiritual cover” for Clinton and allowing him to feign repentance in order to avoid political consequences.

In 2008, Campolo worked on the Democratic Party platform. He was partly responsible for a plank committing the party to supporting programs that would “help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions,” even as it remained committed to women’s right to choose abortion. Campolo told reporters the language did not go as far as he wanted, but that he thought social programs, including health care, age-appropriate sex education, and food stamps could cause a dramatic reduction in the number of abortions.

Campolo regularly clashed with Christian conservatives for what he saw as their misplaced priorities. He consistently argued that Christians should support a political agenda that would help the poor.

“There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that call upon us to respond to the needs of the poor,” Campolo said. “And yet, I find that when Christians talked about values in this last election that was not on the agenda, that was not a concern. If you were to get the voter guide of the Christian Coalition, that does not rate.”

Campolo launched Red Letter Christians, a network for Christians with left-leaning politics, with fellow Eastern alumnus Shane Claiborne. The network grew to include 120 affiliated organizations and churches, as well as a popular podcast, an annual gathering, and social justice campaigns, such as events where Claiborne and a Mennonite blacksmith invite people to turn firearms into garden tools in fulfillment of Isaiah 2:4.

Campolo also continued to urge young Christians not to turn their back on the local church, even if they were disappointed in its evangelical witness. In one of his more popular books, Letters to a Young Evangelical, Campolo said that much of the American church was more committed to a middle-class way of life than anything in the Bible. And yet, he said, Christians’ commitment to the church shouldn’t waver.

“The church is still your mother,” Campolo wrote. “It is she who taught you about Jesus. I want you to remember that the Bible teaches that Christ loves the church and gave himself for it (Ephesians 5:25). That’s a preeminent reason why you dare not decide that you don’t need the church. Christ’s church is called his bride (1 Cor. 11:2), and his love for her makes him faithful to her even when she is not faithful to him.”

In 2015, Campolo stirred new controversy when he came out in favor of same-sex marriage ahead of the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Campolo had long said that same-sex attraction was not a choice and that most people could not change their sexual orientation through prayer or counseling, but he had not taken an affirming stance.

He said he changed his mind after spending time with LGBTQ Christians in committed, monogamous relationships and reflecting on the fundamental question of what marriage is for. Campolo, grounding the argument in his faith, said he believed the primary purpose of marriage is sanctification. A same-sex marriage should be affirmed by the church, he said, if it encouraged people to grow in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and the other fruits of the Spirit.

“Obviously, people of good will can and do read the scriptures very differently when it comes to controversial issues,” he said. “I am painfully aware that there are ways I could be wrong about this one.”

Campolo said he hoped his most lasting legacy would be the people he inspired to go into ministry. He estimated that more than 1,000 people heard God’s call to evangelism and missions through their work with EAPE and that perhaps as many as 10,000 were inspired by the hundreds of speeches he gave every year.

Campolo told CT that he dreamed of having those people’s names on his tombstone.

He is survived by his wife, Peggy, and their children, Lisa Goodheart and Bart Campolo.

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