An Eclipse Is Evidence of Things Unseen

Astronomy teaches us to see the light in the world’s darkness.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Unsplash

At the climax of the crucifixion story, darkness comes over the land. Jesus, crowned with thorns, cries out. The earth quakes; the temple curtain is ripped in two. God’s moment of greatest love seems like defeat: a fissure between heaven and earth. But, the Gospels hold, this isn’t the end of the story. The darkness ends, and Sunday morning comes. The stone in front of the grave is rolled away. “Do not be afraid,” an angel declares. “He has risen.”

I’ve often wished I had been there to see this cosmic event with my own eyes. To witness it. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt this was the Son of God. Alas, I wasn’t. I’ve seen no visible stone rolled back nor angelic appearances to light my shadowy doubts or fill those tenacious cracks of spiritual night.

But I have seen a total solar eclipse.

I witnessed the eclipse in 2017, camping in the Smoky Mountains. It’s easy to describe the events leading up to it: the eight-hour drive, the worry about clouds, the marshmallows, mosquitos, and building excitement. But how to describe when the moment hit?

Here are some words I wrote down: wind, cold, 360-degree sunset, crickets, stars, the end of the world.

You see it coming. There’s a shadow, a hundred miles wide, racing toward you, faster than thought. And then it hits. In my memory, it’s like plunging under water. The sound all changes, with a swoosh, like in movies. And the light—it’s not water you’re swimming in. It’s liquid metal. Everything silver, platinum, bizarre. The sun is gone, replaced by an ink-black pupil surrounded with a wild white iris of solar atmosphere.

“Or a morsel of bone,” writes author Annie Dillard in her essay “Total Eclipse.” “I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky.”

Awful in all the senses of the word. In Scripture, when people encounter angels, they respond with terror and worship. A total solar eclipse is the same. Indeed, I’ve read that in the year 840, Emperor Louis of Bavaria saw the world plunged into eclipse for five long minutes and died of fright. In Syria, one of the earlier records of an eclipse, about 1223 before Christ, is accompanied by a note. It says, “Two livers were examined: danger.”

To experience a total eclipse is to cry out, to feel the earth shake, to feel a fissure between heaven and earth. But also to be full of awe.

In 1806, a condemned criminal, brought from his dungeon to witness the eclipse, raised his manacled arms to the sky.

“There seems an instinctive sense … akin to awe … whispering to our spirits,” wrote James Fenimore Cooper in reaction to that same eclipse. “Never have I beheld any spectacle which so plainly manifested the majesty of the Creator, or so forcibly taught the lesson of humility to man.”

My memory struggles to hold the totality of it all. I know my mouth hung open, overcome.

And then the sun comes back again. A sunrise in midday. The great stone in the sky rolled away, and light returned.

Some might object that any parallels between the events of Easter and the events of an eclipse go too far. What mystery is there in something I can explain to children with a bright flashlight and supplies from Walmart?

A quarter-inch ball of Play-Doh can, when aligned just right, represent the moon and cast a small shadow over a one-inch marshmallow earth about 30 inches away. Even if you want to get into the complicated orbital mechanics that make predicting eclipses a graduate-level mathematics exercise, we understand how the moon’s orbit is tipped, like a gyrating hula hoop, relative to the earth’s. We can calculate the sun’s small tugs that make that hoop precess like a top, compute its rocking like a child’s circus mobile.

Nothing particularly extraordinary: just a 2,200-mile-wide rock blocking some light. No mystery here: just an 80-million-trillion-ton orb of iron and silicon swinging between us and our life-giving star at 2,300 miles per hour.

I am reminded of Moses, when he climbed Mount Sinai to learn God’s laws and asked to see God’s glory. God allowed Moses to glimpse just his back as he passed by—face in full eclipse. When Moses returned, the Scriptures say, his face was radiant from even this obscured glance.

Eclipses have no practical benefit. They have nothing to add to crop production or most modern scientific studies. They seem to be a chance alignment, a coincidence of a moon 400 times smaller and also 400 times closer than our sun. In fact, in a few hundred million years, the moon will have receded far enough from the earth that total solar eclipses will no longer happen.

And yet, for now, every couple of years (for a narrow strip at least somewhere on the earth), they do. In my years as an astronomer, the more I learn of this delicate dance, with its precessing nodes and pirouetting axes, the more, I realize, my face begins to glow.

“God laughs and plays,” David James Duncan wrote. And Carl Sagan, for all his agnosticism, was right when he said, “We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”

Still, I approach with caution. The number one rule of solar-eclipse watching is to not look directly at the sun. Except during those few moments of complete totality, you need to use specially designed eclipse glasses that block 99.99 percent of the light or use the reflected light of a pinhole camera, which effectively does the same.

There’s a similar theological truth. On that mountain God hid Moses in the crevice of a rock and covered him with his hand until he’d passed by. And me—where does God place me that I might glimpse his glory, except perhaps in the crevice of long shadows, like those cast by a rugged wooden cross?

“Every object near a star wears a cone of night,” writes astronomer Chet Raymo. “Near every star there is a ring of cone-shaped shadows that point into space like a crown of thorns. … Every particle of dust in the space of the solar system casts its own tiny pyramid of darkness.”

On a chalkboard I can draw lines and circles showing how the moon, earth, and planets carve narrow cone-shaped shadows in the sun’s light, 100 times taller than they are wide. How the part of the earth and the moon facing the sun are experiencing daytime, and as the earth spins into its pyramid of shadow, we experience night.

Night is a thorn we cannot escape; only from space can we see its sharpness.

In college I spent a significant amount of time pondering the problem of pain. I dove into apologetic, intellectual solutions, like the need for choice or freedom or contrast to bring out joy. Good in a classroom but weak in the face of real, lived pain. Why can a good God allow for all the suffering, all the evil that blankets this world? I still have no answers.

But I do have eclipses.

An eclipse is a reminder that shadows have tips and that night exists only in the narrow shafts of shadow. When we experience a total solar eclipse, we experience the very peak of the moon’s night, stroking the earth with the lightest brush of an ink-dipped feather. Blink and it’s done. But it’s enough to remind us of this gift: In space, night has edges. We live not in a universe of darkness but in a universe awash in light.

As Raymo adds, “Earth’s cone of night is the Paraclete that brings the gift of deep space and deep time.”

I do not know why, if God is loving, he tolerates evil. But I do know that, astronomically speaking, it takes night—real material darkness—to see. Without the narrow cracks of night in the sun’s encompassing light, we’d know nothing of distant galaxies, of forming stars. Earth and heaven are connected through the narrow night.

Job, brave enough to confront God in his pain, receives what I’ve long considered a not-so-comforting reply: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? … What is the way to the abode of light?” And yet, my friend Anna pointed out to me, Job responds with favor. God gave Job, apparently, exactly the answer he needed.

And I’ve been given an eclipse, a sliver of night, a fissure through which the universe shines. In the dark, in the tip of the moon’s shadow, I behold an abundance of mathematics, motion, and awe. The light of the world descends to darkness but then comes again—a hint of resurrection light.

Luke Leisman is a research professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and blogs about astronomy in everyday life at Substack.

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The Christian Faith of ‘Shogun’s’ ‘Blue-Eyed Samurai’

Kaz Hayashi

The real-life John Blackthorne was an Englishman who came to be known as Anjin. What the letters he left behind reveal about his relationship with God.

Cosmo Jarvis as John Blackthorne (third from left) in Shōgun on FX Networks.

Courtesy of FX Networks

In Shizuoka, the prefecture of Japan where I grew up, you can find a park dedicated to the first Englishman to enter Japan. A small public space along the water in the city of Itō, it commemorates Miura Anjin, or William Adams, who arrived in the country when his ship washed up on its shores.

Captured by local leaders, Anjin was put in the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu—the first shōgun (a chief army commander who ruled Japan) of the Edo period—which led to his ascendancy as the first Westerner to become a samurai, earning him the nickname of “blue-eyed samurai.” Itō’s annual Anjin Festival in August commemorates his accomplishment in building the first Western-style ships in 1604, and Japan has honored him by registering his burial mound, Anjin-zuka in Yokosuka, as a national historical landmark.

Shōgun (2024), currently playing on FX, takes its inspiration from the lives of Anjin and Tokugawa. Set in the year that Anjin first stepped foot in Japan, it tells the story of an English ship pilot named John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) who washes ashore and is taken captive by Japanese bushō (“warrior lord”) Toranaga Yoshii (Hiroyuki Sanada). Blackthorne soon becomes entangled in Toranaga’s political rivalry with four other bushōs and ultimately witnesses the rise of Toranaga as a shōgun. Writers and producers Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks based their TV series on James Clavell’s bestselling novel with the same title published in 1975, which sold over 15 million copies and subsequently became a popular TV show in 1980.

Just as the original novel grew the general public’s interest in Japanese culture, the 2024 FX adaptation undoubtedly will inform many about Japanese culture and history. “Shōgun has probably conveyed more information about Japan to more people than all the combined writings of scholars, journalists, and novelists since the Pacific War,” wrote Japan scholar Henry Smith in 1980.

Similarly, the recent television series has garnered wide critical acclaim, as a reviewer for The New York Times noted, especially compared to its ’80s counterpart. But what many of the viewers will rediscover, or perhaps even learn for the first time, is how Christianity manifested in Japan, just 50 years or so after it first arrived.

The portrayal of Christianity in Shōgun

From the first episode, Shōgun establishes that by 1600, Portuguese Catholics had been richly profiting from trade in Japan for decades, keeping the country’s whereabouts hidden from their sworn enemies: the European Protestants. It’s this international religious and political conflict that sends Blackthorne and his Dutch ship Erasmus to Asia in the adaptation, with the explicit command to “plunder any Spanish territory.”

After Toranaga and his men take the crew of Erasmus captive, the prisoners fear that the Catholics are behind their incarceration. At one point, a Portuguese Catholic priest serves as an interpreter for Blackthorne. When the priest introduces himself as “a servant of God,” Blackthorne responds with the derision “your God … you papist prick.” He later rips off the rosary of the priest, stating, “I am not one of them,” and stomps on the cross. The priest then describes Blackthorne as a “devil, murderer, and pirate” who ought to be executed.

This scene is inspired by a historical account of Anjin that he describes in a letter from 1611. He negatively recounts how, soon after his arrival, a foreign Jesuit—his “mortal enem[y]”—came to serve as his translator.

The dramatized conflict between Blackthorne and the Catholic priest reflects the wider Protestant-Catholic religious and political turmoil during the 16th and 17th centuries. After the Protestant Reformation began in Wittenberg in 1517 and spread throughout Europe over the subsequent century, it fomented tension between Catholics and Protestants, at times resulting in armed clashes. Sometimes this violence escalated into significant bloodshed, including the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).

It was also during this period that Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus (better known as the Jesuits) in 1540, and Catholicism at large made a renewed effort in world evangelism. In 1549, the Spanish Jesuit Francis Xavier and his associates arrived in Japan as the first Christian missionaries, and the Roman Catholic faith soon spread across the country, reaching many, including the nobility.

The relationship between these distinct parts of the world also had economic consequences, allowing Portugal and Spain to monopolize trade with Japan. The unexpected arrival of the British Protestant sailor thus presented a religious, economic, and political threat to the (Catholic) Portuguese and Spaniards in Japan.

Miura Anjin / William Adams

The real-life Anjin was indeed a British navigator who left his wife and two children in England and boarded a doomed Dutch ship at the beginning of the 17th century. Just as the show portrays Toranaga granting Blackthorne the rank of hatamoto (a title given to upper-class samurai who were vassals to the shōgun), Anjin also became a hatamoto of Tokugawa and served as the counselor of foreign trade.

James Clavell, who wrote the original novel, as well as the writers of the FX adaptation, took several creative liberties that diverge from the historical account, however. Many of these differences are geographical, including changes to the hometown of the protagonist (from Kent County to London) and the part of Japan he arrives in (from Oita to Shizuoka Prefecture). But the adaptation also shows Blackthorne having a relationship with Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai). (In real life, Anjin took a Japanese wife and had a son named Joseph and a daughter named Susanna.)

Gracia Tama Hosokawa

Toda Mariko is loosely based on a historical figure commonly known as Gracia Tama Hosokawa. Born Akechi Tama, she was the daughter of Akechi Mitsuhide, who is infamously known for assassinating his lord in what became known as the Honnō-ji Incident. Due to her father’s treachery, her husband Hosokawa Tadaoki hid her in the mountains of modern Kyoto Prefecture for several years. Even after she returned to her husband’s palace in Osaka, she remained in confinement until her death.

One day while her husband was off to battle, Hosokawa secretly attended a Catholic Easter church service. Although this was the first and last time she attended a church service, her interest in Christianity led to her subsequent letter correspondences with Jesuit priests and ultimately her conversion. About a decade later, Tadaoki sided with Tokugawa in Japan’s largest samurai battle against commander Ishida Mitsunari.

Although sources differ on how Hosokawa died, when Ishida sought to take Hosokawa as a hostage, she either took her own life, was put to death, or was killed in a fire. As Hosokawa died in 1600, the presence of Mariko in Shōgun, which takes place later, is completely anachronistic. Additionally, the show’s portrayal of Mariko’s frequent interactions with Jesuit missionaries and her coming and going differ from the historical Hosokawa, who spent her life in seclusion. Mariko’s openness about her Christian identity, however, reflects Hosokawa’s strong faith and determination to hold to her beliefs even to the point of death.

A genuine faith?

Viewers may question whether Anjin was genuinely a Christian. In Shōgun, Blackthorne is foul-mouthed, engages in extramarital affairs, and irreverently steps on a cross. But an analysis of six letters written by the real-life Anjin between 1611 and 1617 indicates that his faith may have played a more significant role in his personal life.

Anjin explicitly refers to Jesus twice in his first letter, dated October 1611, which entreats the name of Jesus Christ when requesting that the recipient of the letter report his survival to his wife and children in England. He writes, “I do pray and intreate you in the name of Jesus Christ to doe so much as to make my being here in Iapon, knowen to my poor wife.” He also concludes the letter with a similar request, asking the Almighty God that his wife, children, and acquaintances would hear of his letter and that they would send a reply.

Anjin’s six letters from Japan refer to God a total of 47 times. When describing the hardship he and his crew went through as captives accused of thievery, he praises God for showing them mercy in saving their lives. He also claims that God has blessed him for repaying the evil actions of his “former enemies” (i.e., the Spaniards and Portuguese) with good. He writes a familiar ecclesial blessing: “to him only be all honnor and praise, power and glory, both now and for euer, worlde without ende” and confesses God as the creator of heaven and earth. These references to God support that, at least in speech, Anjin confessed his belief in God’s presence and guidance in his life.

By the time Anjin arrived in Japan, Christian persecution was already underway. In 1587, the imperial regent of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, described Christianity as an evil religion from Christian nations and Japan as protected by its own gods. He therefore issued edicts requiring his permission for daimyōs (powerful landholders) to become Christian, prohibiting them from forcing conversion upon his subjects, and expelling Christian missionaries. A decade later in 1597, Toyotomi crucified 26 Catholics (including both Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries and Japanese believers) in Nagasaki.

Anjin arrived in the neighboring city of Oita only three years after this tragic event, and his letters attest to increasing Christian persecution during his time in Japan. In a letter dated January 1613, he refers to the presence of many Christians according to the “Romishe order,” but already in 1612, the Franciscans were “put down,” and only the Jesuits remained in Nagasaki.

In 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu issued an anti-Christianity edict, banning missionaries and making it illegal to become Christian. Anjin witnesses to Tokugawa’s persecution of Christians in a letter dated in 1616–17. He reports that Tokugawa deported foreign Roman Catholics and commanded the burning of churches. Additionally, following the death of Tokugawa, his son (Tokugawa Hidetada) was against the “Romish relligion” and prohibited daimyōs from converting to “Romish Christiane.”

The series of executions of Christians in Japan reflects the increasing severity of persecution during Anjin’s life until he died in 1620: in 1616 in Edo, 23 were martyred; in 1614 in Arima, 43 were martyred; and in 1619 in Kyōto, 53 were martyred.

Japan entered into a permanent state of national isolation in 1633, and during this period, the kakure kirishitan or “hidden Christians” concealed their faith to avoid fierce persecution. Japan hunted down Christians by requiring every Japanese family to register at a Buddhist church, making people step on a fumi-e (a picture with Christian symbols such as Jesus and Mary), and granting rewards to anyone who reported a Christian. Captured Christians were tortured until they renounced their faith, and those who did not abjure were brutally executed.

Though he was a foreigner, Anjin’s story nevertheless illustrates the complexities that Christians faced in the 17th century. As evidenced in his letters, his continued belief in God may attest to his perseverance of faith despite his spiritual isolation. Additionally, his rise to a position of influence reflects how others valued his knowledge, skillset, and social capital, despite his foreign Christian identity.

On the other hand, despite Anjin’s Protestant identity and presence in Japan, Protestantism did not take root or spread in Japan during his lifetime. And while Anjin retained his belief in God, the question remains: Did he conceal his faith in response to the increasing hostilities against Christians in Japan?

In fact, Anjin’s faith is clearest in his first letter, whereas in his later letters from 1617, the expression of his faith is limited to formulaic conclusions that either entrust the recipient to the “protection of the allmighty” or pray for the recipient’s prosperity.

Despite the lack of explicit faith declarations leading up to his death in 1620, one can hope he was inspired by the courageous faith of other Japanese Christians, like Hosokawa, who once told a priest that her conversion happened “not by the persuasion of humans, but only by the grace and mercy of one and only almighty God, in whom I have found that even if the heavens changed into the earth and the trees and the plains ceased to be, I, by the confidence which I have in God, shall not be moved.”

Kaz Hayashi (PhD, Baylor University) is associate professor of Old Testament at Bethel Seminary/University in Minnesota. He was born and raised in Japan, attended high school in Malaysia, and now resides in Minnesota with his family. He is a fellow of Every Voice: A Center for Kingdom Diversity in Christian Theological Education.

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Books

Review

Faith Deconstruction Can Be a Search for Answers or a Search for Exits

Travis Dickinson

Christians should encourage doubters’ questions. They should also discern what those questions might be seeking.

Rayson Tan / Unsplash

Wrestling with Christian faith—questioning, doubting, reforming, and even falling away from it—has been part of the Christian tradition as long as there’s been a Christian tradition. Christianity asserts some big claims about the world, and a healthy faith can mean wrestling with these claims at some point along our faith journey. The result can be a more robust faith, even if it is a somewhat reformed faith.

The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond

Alisa Childers (Author), Tim Barnett (Author), Carl R. Trueman (Foreword)

Tyndale

304 pages

$11.99

But this is certainly not how it goes for everyone. Sometimes one can’t get past an objection that calls the truth of Christianity into question. Other times, living by ethical claims that run counter to current cultural norms proves too heavy a burden. Sometimes the sheer audacity of the claims of Christianity leads people to dismiss them as unbelievable and unserious. And then there’s the presence of scandal and abuse within the ranks of church leaders. With church-related trauma all too common these days, some people simply want out.

These experiences, often lived out on social media and other online channels, travel under the banner of faith deconstruction. Deconstruction is one of those terms that feels familiar, even if most people know little about its roots. While it began as a term of art with 20th-century postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida, I suspect most faith deconstructions aren’t being informed by a study in Derridean semantic theory! Today, deconstruction may refer to a wide variety of experiences.

To help with the confusion, Alisa Childers and Timothy Barnett offer their new book, The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond. As their subtitle makes clear, Childers and Barnett take a critical stance toward the deconstruction movement. Their tone is decisively polemical toward what they identify as a grave danger facing the church.

Two potential misunderstandings

Before going further, it’s worth highlighting a couple ways the book might be misunderstood. First, it is not primarily a book for those going through deconstruction. As the authors stipulate, its primary audience is “Christians who are experiencing deconstruction from the outside.” The book, then, is written for those who are watching someone else, perhaps a family member or a friend, go through deconstruction. And the authors hope we might be equipped to watch and potentially guide that process in fruitful ways.

The second possible misunderstanding has to do with the target of the book’s criticism. Childers and Barnett have a rather narrow focus. This is seen in their definition of deconstruction. They say, “Faith deconstruction is a postmodern process of rethinking your faith without regarding Scripture as a standard.”

Those who see deconstruction in a more positive light probably won’t appreciate this definition. One might even see the book’s criticisms as aimed at a straw man that doesn’t resemble one’s own experience of doubting or questioning Christian faith. But this could be because the book isn’t aimed at addressing every possible variety of deconstruction.

As I understand the authors, they don’t have in mind someone who merely doubts the truth of Christianity, or even someone who is abandoning the faith after evaluating it on the basis of the evidence at hand. Instead, they are responding to those who use subjective standards—what they call a postmodern process—to come to views that align with cultural norms rather than biblical norms. While this may not be everyone’s form of deconstruction, the authors argue that it is (all too) common and support this claim with a raft of statements from leading voices in the deconstruction movement.

Truths of fact and preference

Childers and Barnett make use of an analogy made famous by the ever-prescient 20th-century theologian Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer imagined a two-story building to illustrate two different kinds of truth.

On the lower story, we have objective truths, such as those found in science and mathematics. You would operate in a lower-story framework if, for instance, you were constructing a bridge, fixing your automobile, or doing your taxes—all tasks that can’t be completed without reliance upon objective facts. On the upper story, however, we have the truths of preference and what we take to be personally meaningful. Within the upper story, you might give opinions on your favorite ice cream, how someone should decorate their house, or what you personally find inspirational.

In sum, lower-story truths are facts made true by the way the world is, whereas the upper story is composed of subjective truths that are, in a sense, up to us and our preferences.

In many deconstruction stories, argue Childers and Barnett, lower-story truths play a minimal role. In other words, we see little concern for evidence that either does or does not substantiate the truth of Christian claims. Instead, we often hear assurances that one had to follow one’s heart or be true to oneself.

In a related vein, deconstruction narratives sometimes report a process of discovering that certain Christian doctrines are toxic or oppressive. It’s often quite unclear what makes a claim toxic or oppressive, and in many cases the accusation amounts to an expression of subjective distaste. But this shifts the claims of faith from the lower story to the upper story. If a particular flavor of ice cream is distasteful, then by all means reject it. But this doesn’t work so well for lower-story matters like medical diagnoses. The truth about one’s medical condition might be quite unpleasant to hear, but it would be foolish to reject the bad news simply for its undesirability.

Connecting this theme to the Christian faith, Childers and Barnett acknowledge that we may find some parts of it distasteful. But such evaluations, they argue, should take a back seat to considerations of objective truth and falsehood. Just like a medical diagnosis, what ultimately matters is whether the claims of Christianity correspond to reality.

Recovery or ‘improvement?’

It is sometimes said that the deconstruction movement is an extension of the Protestant Reformation. After all, reformers like Martin Luther rejected key doctrines professed by the church. Seen in this light, Luther was deconstructing the faith long before there were any YouTube and TikTok channels.

Childers and Barnett see little affinity between the Reformation and the contemporary phenomenon of deconstruction, as they’ve defined it. The thrust of the Reformation was a return to biblical fidelity. Proponents of deconstruction, on the other hand, seek to “‘improve’ [Christianity] according to their own personal beliefs and preferences rather than to recover the original, which they feel is harmful or oppressive.”

The authors admit that there are “many areas where the church has lost its way.” But even if people have legitimate concerns, this calls for a spirit of reformation, oriented toward the recovery of biblical truth rather than an impulse for wholesale deconstruction.

Childers and Barnett make the point that virtually all deconstruction stories mention the place of questions in launching the deconstruction journey. Questions should be encouraged, they emphasize, and they chide Christians who give overconfident and pat answers or, worse, no answers at all. But we have to be mindful of where the questions are coming from and what their askers might be seeking. As the authors observe, “Some questions seek answers, and some questions seek exits.” They advise taking care to discern where people are in the deconstruction process and assessing their readiness for substantive conversations about faith. Where we see that readiness, we engage their questions as best we can.

What comes next

Childers and Barnett are primarily focused on deconstruction. But deconstruction is a fundamentally negative project. When we deconstruct, we take something apart. What good does that something provide when it lies before us in pieces? At some point, we will replace our deconstructed view with another view about reality and the good life.

While there are a lot of ways, both good and bad, to take something apart, I’d suggest that a more important focus is the process of putting it back together. I fear that in all our discussions about deconstruction, we lose sight of what to do in light of the beliefs we’ve discarded.

To be clear, there are some really ill-advised ways to rethink our faith, and The Deconstruction of Christianity does a worthy job of highlighting them. Unfortunately, people can sometimes blow up their faith in ill-advised ways. Rethinking one’s faith can be an emotionally charged experience, and for some, it will be difficult—if not nearly impossible—to do it in a very principled way. So it’s going to get messy.

What comes next, though, is what’s crucially important. Now that we’ve called it all into question, what will we believe? How will we go about determining it? Will we be as tough on our new view as we were on traditional Christianity? Or will we just accept uncritically whatever is culturally fashionable? Deconstruction may be difficult and painful for many reasons, but the hardest work lies in what comes next.

Travis Dickinson is professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University. His books include Wandering Toward God: Finding Faith amid Doubts and Big Questions.

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How Do LGBTQ+ Students Fare at Christian Colleges? It’s Complicated.

Justin Dyer and Jenet Erickson

Our research, based on large-scale student surveys, finds a surprising and complex interplay of religion and mental health at US universities.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

In 2021, the Religious Exception Accountability Project (REAP) brought a lawsuit calling for “an end to the U.S. Department of Education’s complicity in the abuses and unsafe conditions thousands of LGBTQ+ students endure at hundreds of taxpayer-funded, religious colleges and universities.”

The underlying premise of REAP’s suit is that the federal government “is duty-bound by Title IX and the U.S. Constitution to protect sexual and gender minority students at taxpayer-funded colleges and universities”—and this means ending religious exemptions for schools, including many Christian colleges, which order student life according to traditional theologies of sex and gender.

The REAP case, which is ongoing two years later, is not the only reason the experiences of LGBTQ+ students on Christian campuses are closely scrutinized, of course. And neither is REAP the only voice claiming Christian colleges are subjecting thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of LGBTQ+ students to abuse and its effects, like poor mental health.

Until recently, there have been no studies testing that claim by comparing the mental health of LGBTQ+ students at religious and non-religious universities. While the individual stories of students are necessary, it is equally necessary to have rigorous, empirical studies evaluating the proposition that religious universities are causing harm. Our article, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders (one of the top journals in the field), is the first analysis of this kind.

Using data collected by the Healthy Minds Study, we examined over 135,000 university students from around the nation, around 30,000 of whom self-identified as LGBTQ+. We were able to sort students according to the type of school they attended, as determined by the universities’ self-descriptions as Catholic, evangelical, or an “other Christian” university (including Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Nazarene, and Lutheran schools). The data didn’t measure whether schools required students and/or faculty to sign a statement of faith or campus life code; it looked only at their denominational affiliation.

With this information, we were able to compare LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ students at these religious universities to those at non-religious universities. Part of our purpose was to identify as many nuances as possible. Wheaton College psychologist Mark Yarhouse has noted that LGBTQ+ students on religious campuses are not a monolithic group. They hold “a range of beliefs and values regarding their sexuality and behavior”—some combine a traditional sexual ethic with same-sex attraction, for instance—and their stories resist a simple narrative.

We therefore examined not only whether LGBTQ+ students had better or worse mental health (as measured by reports of suicidal thoughts and anxiety) at one kind of school or the other. We also wanted to see how these students’ engagement with religion and spirituality (as measured by religious activities) might affect their mental health at religious and non-religious colleges.

So what did we find? The answer, unsurprisingly, is complex.

Initially, we hypothesized that student and university “fit” would lead to reports of better mental health. We hypothesized that non-religious students would do better at non-religious universities and that religious students would do better at religious universities. Further, while research has overwhelmingly shown that religion is correlated with better mental health, we hypothesized that LGBTQ+ individuals wouldn’t benefit as much (or perhaps not at all) from being at a religious university.

But our findings didn’t support our hypotheses.

First, we found that religiosity was correlated with better mental health regardless of LGBTQ+ identification.

We also found that students who are less religious, whether LGBTQ+ or not, often reported better mental health while attending a religious university. (Religious students seemed to do just as well at any school.) For instance, students who said religion was unimportant to them typically reported better mental health if they attended a Catholic university than a non-religious university. And those who engaged in no religious extracurricular activities or were not religiously affiliated tended to do better at evangelical schools than non-religious ones.

Remarkably, this pattern held even after we controlled for a host of factors such as the size of the university, whether the university was public or private, the region of the country in which the university was located, the number of extracurricular activities the student was involved in, the student’s relationship status (married, single, divorced, etc.), whether the student was international, the student’s race, and more.

Our study couldn’t determine exactly why students who don’t value religion would experience better health at schools that do. But it’s possible that non-religious students benefit from being in a more religious environment because they’re less likely to encounter or engage in risk-taking behaviors. Ample research has found that religious people are significantly less likely to develop substance use disorders and behavioral disorders such as gambling disorder, compulsive sexual behavior disorder, and gaming disorder.

Two other findings are noteworthy too. One is that LGBTQ+ students reported better mental health at “other Christian” universities compared to non-religious universities. This again was not in line with our initial expectations.

The other is that one group of LGBTQ+ students was at greater risk at evangelical schools, while another group of LGBTQ+ students was at lower risk at those same schools. The difference seemed to be their engagement with religion, a difference we did not see with non-LGBTQ+ students.

For LGBTQ+ students at non-religious universities, the rate of suicidal thoughts varied by approximately 20 percent depending on whether or not the students were religious. For LGBTQ+ students at evangelical universities who participated in religious activities, that rate dropped to just 6 percent. However, for LGBTQ+ students at evangelical universities who did not participate in religious activities, the rate jumped to a staggering 34 percent—about one in three.

This suggests that LGBTQ+ students’ mental health may only benefit from being at an evangelical school if they themselves are religious. LGBTQ+ students who are not engaged in religion may feel doubly disconnected.

What does this mean for religious universities and LGBTQ+ students who attend evangelical schools? One big implication is that we should not see these students as a monolithic group. Some are likely to thrive in evangelical institutions, while others will be at higher risk of suicidal thoughts.

It’s important to recognize that our research can’t determine why some LGBTQ+ students struggle with their mental health at evangelical schools. It could be that these students disengage from religious activities because of how they’re feeling, not the other way around.

Also, students (and their families) select the universities they attend. In many cases, students pick a school they feel fits their needs—and sometimes that may mean a religious school for a non-religious and/or LGBTQ+ student. Our study suggests that even without religious engagement, they may do much better in that environment than they would elsewhere. But the REAP lawsuit could make that choice impossible.

Instead of that maximalist approach, religious universities should examine themselves to determine how to best serve all their students. We’d also like to see further research into this question of how LGBTQ+ students fare at religious schools. Our findings did not support the picture of widespread harm some have painted, but neither could our data answer every question that could be raised.

Justin Dyer is a professor of religious education at Brigham Young University and a fellow at the Wheatley Institute.

Jenet Erickson is an associate professor of religious education at Brigham Young University and a fellow at the Wheatley Institute.

- More from Justin Dyer and Jenet Erickson

News

The Regulation Suffocating Christian Ministries in India

Surinder Kaur

Designed to monitor foreign funding, more recently FCRA has crippled numerous organizations. Is it intentional?

Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Home Affairs building at Rajpath in New Delhi, India

saiko3p / Getty

Christian ministries operating in India are continuing to lose the government’s authorization to legally collect foreign donations, in what is amounting to a devastating financial blow to many organizations.

This March, Vision India, an organization that provides leadership training for Christian young people, was unable to renew its Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) license.

“A week prior, the government conducted an enquiry, and a week later, refused the renewal,” said Vijay Mohod, director of Vision India.

The then–prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, introduced FCRA during the Emergency period in 1976, claiming there was foreign interference in domestic politics. The first FCRA required organizations intending to receive foreign contributions to register with the Ministry of Home Affairs. The subsequent iterations in 2010 and 2011 made this policy stringent, requiring organizations to renew their FCRA licenses every five years, among other new clauses, and its most recent iteration, passed in 2020 and amended in 2022, is even more restrictive. One clause, for example, requires all FCRA organizations to have their accounts at a specific branch of a bank and prohibits interorganizational grants.

Theoretically, these five-year licenses are renewed based on an organization’s annual submission of reports, detailing the foreign funds received and demonstrating they were properly utilized for their stated, approved purposes. However, as Christian ministries have failed to see their licenses renewed, some leaders have questioned if the government has an ulterior motive.

“So many organizations depend on foreign funding,” said archbishop Anil Joseph Thomas Couto, general secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI). “If they don’t receive funds, then many of their projects have to be kept on hold or completely removed.”

The first sizable organization of any faith to lose its FCRA license was Compassion International in 2017. At the time, the organization brought about $45 million annually into India, more than any charity.

As CT reported in 2017, Compassion was desperate to stay in the country:

[Compassion] talked to Indian lawyers and accountants. They testified before the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee. They asked then–Secretary of State John Kerry to mention them to his counterpart in India. (He did.) They asked sponsors to write their members of Congress. (More than 35,000 did.) They asked everybody they knew in positions of power both in the US and India for help.

“All along, both Compassion and its local offices remained committed to addressing the concerns raised by the government, but to no avail,” said the ministry’s president and CEO Santiago “Jimmy” Mellado.

He traced the license loss back to 2011, when India strengthened FCRA, giving it the power to regulate organizations it disagreed with philosophically. (Previously, an organization’s FCRA license had practically been for life.)

For many, the move was also seen as another step toward Hindu nationalism and authoritarianism since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election in 2014. While the Home Ministry cites compliance issues and misuse of foreign funds, many NGOs accuse the government of taking an increasingly harsh approach to compliance that raises minor technicalities or directly targets groups over their ideological stances.

Last year, the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI) and the Church of North India lost their licenses. The license of EFI, the umbrella body for evangelicals in India, was refused renewal for the stated reason that it would affect “prejudicially” the “public interest” and “harmony between religious, racial, social, linguistic, regional groups, castes or communities.”

“Given that EFI is involved significantly in interfaith, charity, and prayer initiatives to build bridges in society and to promote reconciliation and social harmony, it came as a surprise that the government would categorize us in this way,” said Vijayesh Lal, general secretary of EFI. “I have been told that perhaps we were punished for speaking about religious freedom for Christians and others through our various reports and because we have challenged violence against Christians in the Supreme Court as well as several anti-conversion laws in various high courts—but I hope that is not the case.”

In January, the Indian government canceled World Vision’s license after initially suspending it in 2022. Though the ministry, which has a presence in more than 6,000 “urban, rural and tribal communities,” has not left the country, it said it was “profoundly disappointed” and has still had to close projects and lay off staff supported by FCRA funds. The organization said that the decision would “have a significant impact on many vulnerable people across the country in the coming years.”

“The axe seems to be brought down more stringently on Christian organizations who may have made slight mistakes in some aspects or compliances of the law,” said archbishop Cuoto.

Though CBCI’s license was renewed last year after being on hold, the government has denied a license for the National Biblical Catechetical and Liturgical Centre (NBCLC) in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), and several other Catholic dioceses under CBCI in India have reported that their FCRA licenses are on hold, says Couto.

The loss of an FCRA license for another Christian organization, the Church’s Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA), has been crushing, says bishop Subodh C. Mondal, CASA’s vice chairperson.

“CASA’s entire work is jeopardized. They had to terminate close to 350 staff in India,” he said. “Ninety percent of their work is affected by this. We will apply afresh for FCRA.”

In many cases, the reasons stated for cancellation of FCRAs are often unclear and sometimes even illegitimate, said one leader of a reputed Christian NGO who spoke to CT on conditions of anonymity.

“It raises doubts about whether the current administration truly intends to allow any organization to operate and receive foreign funding in India going forward,” he said.

There seems to be no discernible pattern to the denials or cancellations of FCRA statuses, says another widely respected FCRA expert, who also requested anonymity.

“There is no clarity in terms of the reasons that they are giving. One cannot identify what went wrong and where,” said the expert. “Because [FCRA] is an internal security legislation, the courts also have held that the government is under no obligation to make it public (to elaborate on or explain the objections).”

The crackdown extends far beyond Christian organizations. Prominent secular human rights groups, humanitarian aid organizations, and policy groups have also lost their licenses. This includes Oxfam India, the Centre for Policy Research, CARE India, the Programme for Social Action, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Amnesty International, as well as the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and Charitable Trust headed by former Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi.

According to the Ministry of Home Affairs’ FCRA website, about 16,000 NGOs and associations hold active FCRA licenses as of April 2024. The Home Ministry has revoked the FCRA registrations of over 20,701 NGOs or associations, but the website does not state how far that number dates back to.

In July 2023, a group of retired civil servants and officials called the Constitutional Conduct Group sent an open letter to Amit Shah, the minister of home affairs, expressing concern over what they termed the “harassment” of NGOs through selective FCRA enforcement. The letter urged the government to “cease needless harassment” of organizations providing vital services, especially to India’s “most marginalized and disadvantaged sections.”

NGOs have fought the Home Ministry’s decisions through appeals. But few exceptions have been made; in 2022 the government reinstated the FCRA registration for the Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa, less than two weeks after initially declining to renew it, citing vague “adverse inputs.”

The one-off reversal has done little to quell overall fears and outrage from NGOs and civil society advocates, who argue the widespread crackdown poses an existential threat to India’s democratic fabric and constitutionally protected rights like freedom of association. Critics contend the Modi government is intolerant of dissent and unwilling to accept criticism of its Hindu nationalist ideology and policies.

They allege the FCRA enforcement is being used as a systemic tool by the government to financially choke and muzzle NGOs working on issues like minority rights, human rights, transparency, and the alleged discrimination toward and religious persecution of minorities like Muslims and Christians under the rule of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. There are also concerns that the disruption of NGOs providing critical services could have devastating impacts on poverty, hunger, gender equality, and marginalized communities.

“It will definitely impact the work most of the charity sector is doing. It has a double whammy effect—both the beneficiary and the benefactor are affected,” said the NGO leader. “The [charity sector is] working at grassroots levels, and those are the people who are most affected. Lots of people’s livelihoods depend on NGOs, for it is the only vocation they have.”

Foreign policy analysts warn the domestic NGO crackdown risks damaging India’s global reputation and making Western nations and donors more reluctant to donate aid, given fears they may be blocked from reaching legitimate organizations.

Though some Indian organizations plan to reapply for their FCRA licenses, a few, like the Centre for Policy Research, have sued the Indian government. The think tank, which lost its license at the beginning of 2024 for allegedly misusing foreign funds, stated that the government’s decision made no sense and was too harsh, calling it “incomprehensible and disproportionate.” (The organization’s license was due for renewal in 2021, but it has faced numerous bureaucratic obstacles since.)

Most, however, may not take the way of confrontation via appeals out of fear of further crackdown.

“It is foolish to live in Rome and fight the pope,” said the FCRA expert.

- More from Surinder Kaur

News

Easter Pilgrimage Bus Crash Shocks Botswana’s Christian Community

Morgan Lee

Leaders extend prayers and lament road safety after 45 were killed on the way to Zion Christian Church in South Africa.

Relatives of the victims of a bus accident mourn at the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) in Molepolole, Botswana.

Monirul Bhuiyan / AFP via Getty Images

Botswana will hold a national memorial service on Thursday for 45 people who died traveling to an Easter event in South Africa. An eight-year-old girl, Lauryn Siako, was the only survivor after a bus bound for Zion Christian Church crashed through barriers and fell 164 feet down a ledge last week.

In the days following the deadly accident, pastors in Botswana have appeared on national television to pray and to comfort the grieving.

“This tragedy calls us to come out of our sleeping moment and be ever praying and declaring the protection of God in any given situation,” said David Seithamo, the head of the Evangelical Fellowship of Botswana. “The nation should gather around to really support those that are grieving at this moment. When they mourn, we should mourn, but they should know that Christ remains our comfort.”

The pilgrims from Botswana were among millions who travel each Easter to Moria, a town in northeast South Africa and the headquarters for Zion Christian Church (ZCC, pronounced zed-c-c), one of the largest African-initiated churches in the region. ZCC has churches across Southern Africa, including Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Malawi.

The church has two branches, ZCC and St. Engenas ZCC. This year marks the 100th anniversary for the latter, and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa attended the celebration event. Though pilgrims also showed up at St. Engenas in 2023, this is the church’s first official pilgrimage event since the pandemic.

Given the number of tourists usually packing the roads over Holy Week, the South African government had previously checked the capacity of drivers and the safety of cars.

Siako told officials the bus was following two cars carrying church elders when it careened into the ravine. It was the first time that pilgrims from Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, took this route to Moria. One South African journalist suggested that they had opted for the winding mountain road to avoid the onslaught of traffic.

Jobe Koosimile, the former president of The Apostolic Faith Mission in Botswana, called it “just a miracle” that the young girl was able to survive.

In an official statement, Seithamo encouraged his fellow Chistians to keep praying for “the bereaved families and speedy recovery of the eight year old sole survivor of the accident.”

“We also commend the efforts of the Government of Botswana through the Embassy of Botswana in South Africa together with Government of South Africa for a surmountable help to the bereaved,” he wrote. “We implore Christian leadership to continue offering prayer and godly counsel to the bereaved families.”

African roads are notoriously hazardous. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for those on the continent for adults under 50; about 1 in every 5 deaths in Africa occurs on the road.

In Botswana, vehicle insurance companies have partnered with at least one national Christian ministry to promote road safety.

“Road safety is something that as the church, we are conscious of, whether it’s the Pentecostal church, the Organization of African Instituted Churches, or a mainline church, we really are conscious of and consider road safety something of critical importance,” said Koosimile.

“When it comes to national holidays, road safety is something that is emphasized on both the national radio and the national TV, and you’ll find that there are even roadblocks almost throughout the country, where our police and traffic officers do [road safety] campaigns. It’s something that is really strongly emphasized.”

Despite the country’s large geographic size—Botswana is slightly bigger than France—only 2.4 million people live there. About 80 percent are Christian.

“We have never experienced something like this in our nation. We have never had so many deaths like this in our nation. It has shocked almost everyone,” said Koosimile.

“Losing 45 people is not a joke for our very small population. It’s quite a tragedy. Mostly we are related, and [you’ll easily] find that one is related to one who is either affected or who [died] in the accident.”

Botswana is home to many Zionist churches and a sizable population of ZCC members.

The growth and prevalence of ZCC has “essentially sidelined the traditional Protestant churches that introduced Christianity to southern Africa,” wrote African studies researcher Barry Morton. “In addition to their vast membership base across the region, they also control extensive business empires in areas such as transport, agribusiness and insurance.”

Some estimate as many as 1 in 10 South Africans are members.

ZCC was founded a century ago by Engenas Lekganyane, a South African who grew up among Lutheran and Presbyterian missionaries and later joined Pentecostal, Zionist, and faith-healing movements.

According to Morton, “he took most of his theology from the then white-led Apostolic Faith Mission, a Pentecostal group he belonged to from 1910 to 1916. He incorporated many syncretic practices taken from African tradition.”

The two branches, both in Moria, are led by Lekganyane’s grandson (ZCC, represented by a star) and by his great-grandson (St. Engenas ZCC, represented by a dove). Their theology continues to reflect many of Lekganyane’s teachings, with uniforms and badges for members, an emphasis on healing and warding off evil, and the practice of ancestral intercession.

Despite the massive pilgrimages, the group maintains a degree of secrecy over its practices and beliefs.

- More from Morgan Lee

News

In Eclipse Darkness, Churches Will Proclaim a Great Light

Daniel Silliman

Evangelical congregations from Texas to Maine plan outreach events in the path of totality.

People observe the 2017 total eclipse in Illinois in 2017.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The plan in Vallonia, Indiana, involves moon pies.

The sun will start to disappear at 1:49 p.m. The wide blue sky that stretches over the cornfields and soybeans along State Route 135 will grow darker and darker, until, after about an hour and 15 minutes, the small farming community of 379 souls will be cast into night.

The moon—invisible to the human eye except as an empty space—will overshadow everything. For a minute, and then two, and then three, stars will be visible in the sky. The colors of the world will seem all wrong. And Vallonia will pass through eclipse totality.

At Driftwood Christian Church, people will look up at the sky and say, “Wow!” and “Ooo!” and “Look at that!” And they will munch on moon pies decorated with the words of Jesus in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness.”

Pastor Daniel Ison said it was the church’s evangelism committee that came up with the plan. They bought the cookie-and-marshmallow snacks and wrote out the Scripture verse, over and over, hundreds of times.

The Independent Christian Church of about 170 doesn’t know how many visitors they’ll get. But they expect a lot of people will drive out to see the eclipse on Monday, April 8. The celestial phenomenon is a rare thing and there won’t be another one in the contiguous US for another 20 years. So the congregation decided to open up the church, its bathrooms, and the field around their building to welcome out-of-town visitors to a celebration of creation.

“That God created something like this for us to enjoy—God’s just like, Enjoy my creation, on an epic scale!—I think you just have to be in awe,” Ison told CT. “Even the fact that the size of the moon and the distance between the moon and the sun has to be exact for this to be a thing—the majesty of it is amazing.”

Driftwood is one of many evangelical congregations in the path of totality that is planning a big event for the eclipse, a little more than a week after Easter. In addition to moon pies, churches from Texas to Maine will be feeding people ice cream, passing out eclipse-themed tracts, selling T-shirts that say “In him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5), and giving away NASA-approved eclipse glasses.

This week Christians are busy inviting friends, neighbors, and strangers to join them for an experience of awe.

“It’s an emotional thing to see a solar eclipse,” said Jeff Stone, a Southern Baptist in Kerrville, Texas, where totality will start at about 1:32 p.m. central time and last more than four minutes. “It’s technically amazing, but it’s also visceral. It’s a visceral experience and you start to wonder about the universe and God and everything God puts in your path.”

Stone, who is known in the Kerrville area as “Mr. Eclipse,” though he says people don’t call him that to his face, saw his first total eclipse in Mexico in 1991. He and his wife were so moved and amazed that they threw themselves into astronomy. They built their own telescope—four-feet long with an eight-inch mirror that they ground by hand, just like Isaac Newton, though Newton probably didn’t do it in his kitchen.

A few years later, Stone went to work for NASA at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. He worked for mission control, training future astronauts how to fix mechanical things in space.

He knows how an eclipse can change your life. And for him, science has always been a part of his faith, Stone told CT.

“I look at the night sky and think, Thank you, Lord, for the opportunity to see this,” he said. “I try to share that with other people and try to help them have that kind of wonder.”

Since Stone has retired, he’s joined the city of Kerrville’s eclipse committee and has kept up a full schedule of talks. A few weeks before Easter, he was averaging two talks a day in schools, churches, homeowners’ associations, Rotary clubs, and anywhere else they wanted him. He can talk for 10 minutes or 90 on the mechanics of eclipses, why they happen when they happen, and how to prepare to view them safely.

He always makes a point of saying the eclipse is part of the design of creation.

“That kind of gets people—surprises them,” Stone said. “We’re living in a weird time and people are sort of afraid to admit their spiritual side. Something like this draws it out of them a little bit. Our pastor has been talking about how you have to be aware of what’s going on around you and who God puts in your path, and I’m trying to do that.”

Nine hundred miles north in Carbondale, Illinois, Phil Nelson is also on the lookout for people God puts in his path. He has about 30,000 tracts to give them.

The tracts are printed in glossy color on high-quality paper. The front has an artist’s rendering of an eclipse. The back has a message: “God has a way for you to escape everlasting darkness.” Nelson expects people will keep them as souvenirs, so they will not only read them the day of the eclipse but save them, and read them again in the future.

Carbondale is the eclipse crossroads of America. It’s at the intersection where the path of totality will cross the path that the last eclipse cut across the country seven years ago. Back in 2017, 200,000 visitors showed up to witness the event in the Southern Illinois college town.

Nelson and members of Lakeland Baptist Church passed out eclipse tracts that year too, but they were disappointed with how few people wanted to engage in deeper spiritual questions.

“It was kind of a party scene,” the Southern Baptist pastor said.

He’s hopeful that this year, more people will ask questions. He expects some, at least, about the end times.

There’s an image going around social media making wild speculations about the prophetic import of the eclipse, claiming the path of totality will go through six places named Nineveh. Jesus once spoke about the “sign of the prophet Jonah” (Matt. 12:39), who went to the original Nineveh to proclaim God’s judgment.

The image is wrong. The path of totality will only pass through Nineveh, Indiana, and Nineveh, Ohio. It will miss the Ninevehs in Texas, Pennsylvania, and New York, as well as two others in Missouri and Virginia. A town in Nova Scotia with the same name will experience a partial eclipse. Also, Jesus is pretty clear the sign of Jonah is not an astronomical event but “the Son of Man” spending “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40).

Nelson said he’s “not a date-setter” anyway, and doesn’t think the eclipse portends the apocalypse. But if people ask him if the eclipse is a sign, he’s ready with an answer.

“It’s a sign that God is pursuing you,” Nelson will say. “He arranged the planet and the moon and the star to call you to himself. You came to Carbondale for this reason.”

Other evangelicals have similar plans to redirect end times inquiries.

“We’re not saying, ‘Repent, the end is near!’” said David DeFelice, an elder at Hope Church in Brunswick, Ohio. “You should repent. But we don’t know how near the end is.”

The Christian and Missionary Alliance congregation is calling their event “Glory in the Skies.” The focus will be on Psalm 19:1 and how the eclipse reveals something important about who God is.

“It points to a creator God who loves beauty and patterns of regularity,” said DeFelice, who worked 38 years as an engineer and communicator at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “It points to the design of an awesome creation and we want to point to that.”

The eclipse in the suburb 20 miles south of Cleveland will start at about 2 p.m. eastern time. The moon will completely cover the sun at about 3:14.

Hope Church expects to have anywhere from 500 to 2,000 people on its 10-acre campus when that happens, including children who’ve been let out of school for the day and immigrant communities who have been invited in Spanish and Ukrainian. The church also got a mini-grant from the American Astronomical Society to help pay for transportation and accessibility accommodations to bring out as many as 200 people with physical and developmental disabilities.

DeFelice hopes some of them will get an experience of community at the event and realize their lives would be better if they were part of the church.

“The slogan I came up with is ‘Join us! Don’t stay alone in the dark,’” DeFelice said. “There’s a real communal aspect to it, the awe and amazement you get, the applause and gasps. It’s better with a community.”

The pastor, Shawn Brennan, said the church has never done an astronomy-themed outreach event before, but it fits with Hope’s overall vision of serving the community.

“We want to care about what they care about,” he said. “I think the days of just existing and putting a sign out front are over. We’re trying to be intentional in our community, representing the heart of Christ and being an active presence.”

The idea for an eclipse event came up at a board meeting about six months ago, Brennan said. Three current and former NASA employees are leaders in the church, including DeFelice. He proposed they hold an event and give away NASA-approved eclipse glasses. He came up with a cool design that combines the Hope Church logo with an image of a solar eclipse and recommended the church order 5,000 of them for 59 cents apiece.

“The first thing that goes through your mind is What if it’s a crummy day in Ohio?” Brennan said. “But we moved pretty quickly to thinking this is a cool opportunity, and we’ve been praying for opportunities.”

The congregation has given away several thousand pairs of glasses ahead of the eclipse. And now people stop by the church almost every day to ask if there are any more. They often stick around for a bit, Brennan said, to ask a question about the church, share a prayer concern, or just talk about their life.

They sometimes seem surprised at how much they wanted to talk to a minister. And the minister, in turn, has been surprised at how effective eclipse glasses are at communicating the love and care of Christ to the community.

DeFelice, however, thinks it kind of makes sense. He says there’s something deeply similar about an eclipse and Jesus.

“You try to tell people about your faith and they don’t get it,” he said. “And it’s kind of the same way with an eclipse. People look at you, like, What’s the big deal? And you say, ‘Just trust me. It’s an amazing experience. Just give us a few minutes. Just try. It’s amazing.’”

So that’s why they’re giving out glasses. And why other evangelicals are giving out tracts, T-shirts, parking spots with bathroom access, and Scripture-adorned moon pies. It’s an invitation for people to come into the shadow of the moon—the path of eclipse totality—where they just might see a great light.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

Excerpt

How Can a Christian Perfectionist Find Rest?

Faith Chang

An excerpt from Peace over Perfection on the command to “be perfect,” the exhaustion of scrupulosity, and rest in Christ.

Annie Spratt / Unsplash / Edits by CT

When I finally came to the life-changing realization that I was a perfectionist, I told a close friend. She laughed. It was already obvious to her then, and in hindsight, it’s obvious to me now. Still, by the time I recognized it, perfectionism had already marked my walk with God for decades.

Peace over Perfection: Enjoying a Good God When You Feel You're Never Good Enough (Help for believers struggling with perfectionism and guilt in their Christian walk.)

Faith Chang (Author)

The Good Book Company

176 pages

$15.29

Psychologists who study perfectionism define it as a personality disposition characterized by extremely high standards and overly critical self-evaluations. These two characteristics are known as “perfectionistic strivings” and “perfectionistic concerns.” Most perfectionists don’t experience perfectionistic strivings and concerns in all areas of life. Rather, their perfectionism is focused on select domains such as sports, work, academics, relationships, physical appearance, or—as is my case, and that of many Christians— spirituality.

I am a Christian perfectionist. My perfectionism is an anti-Midas, turning moments dark at the slightest touch. It twists my view of the past. While I know it’s not fair to expect, say, 19-year-old me to have acted as I would now, when I look back, my predominant feeling is often regret. I should have cared more, known better, been different.

Perfectionism keeps me second-guessing my choices too. It brushes against the desires I have to do good, and what was once a joyful, exciting opportunity to love others becomes beset with self-doubt and questioning. Am I doing this for the right reasons? Is this really God’s will? What if I do more harm than good?

In the past, when I suffered larger failures and committed bigger sins, I often plunged into despair. You will never be good enough. You’re fake. Are you sure you’re a Christian? You are so self-centered, even now in your supposed repentance. Nowadays, my perfectionism tends to be subtler: a low-level guilt or anxiety lurking in my gut when I’m trying to rest; the feeling at the end of the day that I didn’t do all I should have, even when I’m not sure what I neglected.

Fear of failure, rumination about past mistakes, decision paralysis—given how distressing perfectionistic concerns are, it can feel natural to conclude that our perfectionistic strivings are themselves the problem. That is, the problem with perfectionists is that we want to be perfect.

This is the assumption behind advice commonly given to Christian perfectionists: Focus on loving others instead. Believe the gospel more. Be humbler. Repent of your perfectionism. Just stop trying so hard. Not only do these proposed solutions often effectively add to our running lists of things we need to change about ourselves—to truly be perfect, we need to stop being perfectionists—they imply that our problem is a misguided, possibly sinful, desire for perfection.

But is that really it? Are we wrong to want to be perfect? Is the pursuit of perfection a fool’s errand—or, even worse, a symptom of people-pleasing, pride, or gospel-less religion, as some might suggest? Or could it be that something more is going on?

Years ago, I stumbled upon an editorial by theologian D. A. Carson that shed much-needed light on the heart of my own perfectionism. In “Perfectionisms,” published in Themelios, Carson describes genuine, Christ-centered believers who understand and love the gospel yet still struggle with despair over their sin. Up until then, I’d largely heard Christians address perfectionism in terms of pride or unbelief in the gospel. But Carson writes of a “species” of perfectionism that isn’t a matter of ego or doctrine. Rather, those who struggle with this type of perfectionism are “so uncomfortable with their wrestlings [over sin] because they know they ought to be better.”

This is the crux of the Christian perfectionist’s struggle: We ought to be better, and we know it. At the heart of it, we aren’t legalistically trying to earn our salvation or seek people’s praise. Rather, aiming to run hard after God, we feel daily the weight of our failures to love him and neighbor as we should. Most Christian perfectionists, buckling under the weight of a tortured conscience, sorrowful over even the smallest of sins, and desperately wanting to do right by God, are longing for a perfection commanded by God himself (Matt. 5:48).

So, the question remains: If the solution isn’t to stop striving for perfection, what do we do about our “perfectionistic concerns”? How can we pursue holiness without constant self-doubt when we know we’re going to sin again? How can we seek to obey God without being paralyzed by fear of stumbling? How can we have peace and joy in relationship with God when we keep failing him?

In other words, how can a Christian perfectionist find rest?

Jesus once spoke to those exhausted in their pursuit of God. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” he said. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28–30).

Although this passage is often used to encourage those who are tired in a general sense, Jesus was addressing something more specific and of particular help to the Christian perfectionist. In The Coming of the Kingdom, theologian Herman Ridderbos explains that the language of “yoke” was used in the Jewish tradition to refer to a confession of monotheism and a commitment of obedience to God’s law. This yoke was “taken up” when a person became Jewish and whenever they obeyed the law.

Laboring under the harsh standards imposed by the Jewish religious leaders, though, Jesus’ listeners had grown weary under what they thought were God’s demands. The religious teachers of the day had tied up heavy burdens and laid them on their followers without lifting a finger to help (Matt. 23:4). Knowing this, Jesus says, Take up my commandments, my yoke and my burden; learn from me instead.

Twice in this short passage Jesus promises rest, hearkening back to God’s words through the prophet Jeremiah: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls” (6:16, emphasis mine). Where is this ancient path? This good way we can walk in without weariness? It is with me, says Jesus. The rest Jesus promises we’ll find is the rest he gives, and we receive it in relationship with him.

Perfectionism is complicated. Its causes are varied and there is no quick fix to the anxiety, guilt, and scrupulosity that plague us. Thankfully, Jesus knows this, so his word to the weary is not simply do this or believe this more. It is relational. Come to me. Learn from me. As Christian perfectionists come to know God as he truly is, we will find that he is far more gracious, patient, gentle, righteous, and merciful than we may have dared to believe. And as we experience the way he deals bountifully with in-process people like us, our souls will begin to find the rest we desperately need (Ps. 116:7).

Our Savior does not berate us for being weary or shame us for our guilt. He sees us as we—failing him and eaten up inside because of it—do our best to follow him. Thus, with compassion, his invitation goes out: Christian perfectionist, come. Find rest for your soul.

Faith Chang is the author of Peace over Perfection. She serves at Grace Christian Church of Staten Island and on the editorial board of SOLA Network.

This article has been adapted from Peace over Perfection by Faith Chang. Published by The Good Book Company 2024 and used by permission.

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Maamoul: The Easter Sweet Loved by Muslims, Christians, and Jews

Jayson Casper

Experts debate the origin of the date- or nut-filled pastry, but Middle Eastern believers love the taste and the Good Friday symbolism in its shapes.

Maamoul, an Arab dessert for Easter

Noah Saob / Getty

The Middle East’s favorite sweet symbolizes Good Friday.

Maamoul is a buttery cookie baked with semolina and stuffed with dates or nuts—usually walnuts or pistachios. Seasoned with a variety of spices, for centuries it has flavored the Easter holiday for Christians, the end of Ramadan for Muslims, and Purim for the Sephardic Jews of Jerusalem.

Three shapes are common: an elongated oval, a circular ring, and a rounded dome. Patterns are pressed into the dough by tweezer or with a traditional wooden mold, often in the shape of a sunburst and sometimes with a cross.

For Christians, the oval resembles the sponge given to Jesus to drink from. The ring, his crown of thorns. And the dome is shaped like his rock-hewn tomb, sealing its scented treasure within.

“Is that so?” asked Hoda Khoury, a Lebanese mother of three adult children, hard at work preparing the sweet. “That’s nice. That would make maamoul a Christian tradition.”

Not all believers know the deeper meaning.

Recipes vary, as do the names. Called kakh in Egypt, kleicha in Iraq, and kombe in southeast Turkey, experts have differing opinions on the cookie’s origin. Many find traces of Pharaonic or Mesopotamian beginnings, some suggesting the imprinted patterns reflect ancient worship of the sun.

Charles Perry, translator of the medieval Baghdad Cookery Book, says maamoul descends from the Persian kulachag, perhaps reflected in the Iraqi name today. Lebanese historian Charles El Hayek suggests the cookie may have originated in the Neolithic period but that the modern sharing of the sweet began in Fatimid Egypt (A.D. 909–1171).

Ultra-modern is the chocolate filling—promoted by Hershey’s Middle East.

But the tradition of maamoul distribution began in Cairo, Hayek said, when the Islamic caliph ended the Muslim month of fasting by giving cookies to the masses on Eid al-Fitr, stamped with the phrase “eat and be grateful.” Some were even stuffed with gold coins. Eventually the royal generosity was taken over by domestic households, and Hayek believes the modern maamoul recipe developed during the period of Ottoman rule over the Levant.

Khoury continues the tradition today.

Imitating her grandmother, she does double duty with the dough. The first batch of a few hundred maamoul reflects their life in Beirut, the recipe learned from neighbors when her grandfather moved the family to the capital in 1925, long before Khoury was born.

The second batch of a few hundred akraas—a similar half-moon–shaped sweet from her ancestral hamlet of Maghdouche—reflects the diversity of the Middle East’s many religious communities. The Greek Catholic town only 30 miles south of Beirut did not have maamoul at all. Perhaps this is why she did not know the Good Friday symbolism.

But the great quantity she bakes is measured out carefully.

“If we make too much, we have to eat them ourselves—and they are not very healthy,” Khoury said. “But we don’t mind tiring ourselves out; homemade is much more delicious.”

The Arabic word for maamoul means “made.”

Arab hospitality welcomes neighbors, friends, and relatives for the exchange of mutual visits during Holy Week—Muslim and Christian alike. Two full days of cooking are necessary to prepare enough to go around; her son helps knead the dough and her sister stuffs in its contents. Khoury’s daughter is in Dubai, and though she is a talented cook, her mother fears the practice will die out with this current generation.

As do many older Jordanians.

Suheil Madanat was born in Jerusalem in 1959, the son of a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor in the old city. He looked forward to maamoul every Easter, but after moving to his native Jordan in 1976 he cringed as the tradition commercialized.

Sweet shops opened everywhere, even as modern city life eroded village values. Fewer and fewer visits were exchanged, and today many might only stop by to see their parents. Formerly head of the Baptist Convention of Jordan, Madanat blames the spirit of individualism that is spreading around the world.

He also laments that many Christians neglect the symbolism of maamoul.

“The stories abound,” Madanat said. “But people are more interested in eating than in understanding.”

Connections between the cookie and the crown of thorns are emphasized by Orthodox priests, he said, in line with their use of icons. Evangelicals focus on the spiritual truth and the historical account. Muslims, meanwhile, associate maamoul with no symbolism at all, as Islam denies the crucifixion of Jesus.

All are equally enamored with the taste, but the Orthodox are on to something.

“I think we need a combination,” Madanat said. “Anything you can touch, smell, and eat can become a tangible reminder.”

And for Nabil Shehadi, coordinator for the Alpha course in the Levant region, it could be a means of interfaith dialogue. He has not heard of a maamoul ministry, but thinks it would be a good idea.

As former vicar of All Saints’ Anglican Church in Beirut, he agrees that evangelicals tend to lack an incarnational spirituality that is more associated with liturgical traditions. The heavens declare the glory of God, he quoted, and everything in the world is meant to do the same.

Specifically, he wants a high theology of maamoul.

“Any food is a good bridge for bringing people together,” said Shehadi. “Imagine the impact on our Christian community if—like Muslims—we ate together every day for a month and invited our neighbors in.”

They could then tell the story of Easter via dessert, he said.

Muslims break fast during Ramadan at sunset, often in a communal setting.

Food blogger Sawsan Abu Farha said that it is uncertain how maamoul became linked with Easter and Eid al-Fitr. A Palestinian Muslim, she stated that one theory posits the “bland” outer shell represents the hard work of fasting during Lent and Ramadan but that inside, a “sweet reward” awaits. And even with Purim, Queen Esther’s hidden Jewish identity was the “rich filling” inside a “dainty pastry.”

All three holidays converge this year. Purim was celebrated on March 23, Easter will be on March 31, and Eid al-Fitr on April 9. (Orthodox Christians will celebrate Easter on May 5.)

CT asked three Arab Christian historians for the origin of maamoul symbolism; none could trace it exactly. Johnny Mansour, author of more than 35 books on Arab and Christian Arab history, leans toward the caliphal account, though some posit instead the Byzantine Empire.

Within the shared life of the Levant, Muslims influenced Christians and vice versa, Mansour said, even as each—like in Maghdouche—maintained independent traditions. But regardless of whomever first crafted the recipe, he speculated that the Good Friday connection developed organically, whenever Christians first baked maamoul.

“Many customs are not religious in origin,” Mansour said. “But people by nature provide interpretation, believing they are related to the sacred text.”

And then hand it down from mother to daughter, generation to generation.

Khoury, also, can now pass on this sweetened spirituality to her believing children. Regularly worshiping at a Baptist church in Beirut, she attended a Catholic congregation on Palm Sunday because she enjoys the traditional processional. Easter will be the same, as she resonates with the hymns of her youth.

For other feasts on the liturgical calendar, she is evangelical, even as she relishes the unique dessert delicacies of each. But along with Arab Christians of all denominations, she has a clear favorite.

“Easter is the holiday of holidays—because of the resurrection of Jesus,” Khoury said. “But everyone loves it for the maamoul.”

Additional reporting by Jeremy Weber

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