Torn on IVF, Evangelicals Turn to Natural Family Planning

Staff Editor

Traditionally a Catholic enterprise, Protestants are increasingly turning to natural procreative technology.

Illustration by Grace J. Kim

On a warm and overcast day in April last year, I sat on a hospital cot in a gown and grippy socks waiting for my doctor to perform a minor surgery on my uterus. My husband and I were three months into what evolved into a long year of doctor appointments, surgeries, ultrasounds, and lab work in an attempt to discover what was causing our infertility.

While I sat on my hospital cot behind a curtain, I listened to patients completing intakes, discussing questions about lifestyle and medications. A commotion suddenly broke out as a nurse announced that a patient had arrived in labor.

The medical staff buzzed about, debating where to put her. I could hear her thanking the nurses, breathing heavily, easing herself onto a cot. It felt emblematic of my journey as I waited for a surgery to scrape my womb of unneeded tissue while the nurses scrambled to attend to a woman in labor. It knocked the wind out of me. A similar feeling had come over me 15 months earlier as I watched an ultrasound tech confirm that my miscarriage was complete and my womb was indeed empty.

Infertility—medically defined as the inability to conceive after trying a year for those under 35 and 6 months for those over 35—is rising in the US. Some of this is due to rising maternal age, but this decade, data shows, all age groups are seeing more cases of infertility by as many as 3 percentage points (10 percent in 1995 to 13 percent in 2019). US fertility hit a historical low of 1.6 births per woman in 2023, a 2 percent decline from the previous year and well below the “replacement level” (reproducing to replace parents), which is 2.1 children per couple. Birth rates are higher globally but not much more promising—down from 5.3 births per woman in 1963 to 2.2 in 2023.

Some say we are simply collecting better data or discussing infertility more openly, as has been the case with many issues around women’s health, but others point to a rise in hormonal imbalances and autoimmune factors like polycystic ovary syndrome or endometriosis. Or, as my gynecologist put it: “There are so many things we just don’t know about the female reproductive system.” For example, there are dozens of causes of female infertility, and the more I’ve learned, the more I appreciate the miracle of conception and birth. Male infertility factors, too, are more openly discussed by physicians and in online infertility forums.

But in many evangelical churches, couples experiencing infertility still don’t know how to talk about it. A couple who desires kids can feel shame or embarrassment when well-meaning congregants inquire about when they’re going to start a family, but the church is often silent about solutions. While this might be due to ignorance (infertile people are often more educated on this topic than parents who easily conceived), it’s a silence with real consequences for those in our pews.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has risen by 5 to 10 percent annually since 2013. In some European countries, more than 5 percent of all births are due to ARTs. Yet few evangelical denominations provide guidance about these technologies, which include in vitro fertilization (IVF), intrauterine insemination, sperm and egg donation, egg freezing, or embryo adoption. Churches aren’t openly discussing ARTs, either positively or negatively.

Evangelicals generally have been thoughtful adopters of technology, including IVF. So when the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) declared in 2024 that IVF was generally unethical, many pastors and church members were surprised. Like birth control, IVF is often treated as a matter of wisdom between pastors and church members or, in reality, a personal matter not discussed with others.

But some Christians are reconsidering ARTs, or at least, studying them more critically. As the holistic health movement grows and more Christians learn about alternative solutions such as embryo adoption, more couples are turning to alternative fertility treatments.

When my husband and I decided to start a family, I got pregnant quickly. That pregnancy ended in miscarriage at 10 weeks, and then—nothing. My ob-gyn shrugged it off since we were “young and healthy.” What could we do anyway? Our health insurance, like most US coverage plans, wouldn’t cover fertility appointments until a year of no pregnancies, which includes those that end in miscarriage. A year later, I pursued several doctors, most of whom booked months out: a naturopath, an acupuncturist, and a reproductive endocrinologist (traditional fertility doctor).

The naturopath took bloodwork and lab work, mocked up a plan with a nutritionist, and flooded me with more than a dozen supplements to take. She took my concerns seriously, but her primary goal seemed to be diagnosing and healing my body of its various autoimmune ailments. “Your problem is stress,” she told me. It seemed that pregnancy wasn’t an urgent priority for her. Still, I cut back on high-intensity workouts, swallowed my bowl of pills, cut out gluten entirely, and drank my magnesium-powder-and-cherry-juice concoction nightly.

The acupuncturist, who specializes in fertility treatment, had rave reviews about how successful her treatments had been in providing women with chubby, happy babies. She similarly offered a few more supplements, examined my tongue, and suggested I eat pineapple core. Acupuncture was relaxing—and expensive. I went for several months and then quit.

The endocrinologist at the fertility clinic was productive but colder, marching me through a highly structured routine of ultrasounds and more bloodwork, ruling out the main factors for infertility. A baby seemed to be the only necessary outcome for her, and she appeared uninterested in figuring out why I could not seem to get pregnant. After a year of visits, she concluded that IVF was my only option.

Then I found Caitlin.

Caitlin Estes has all the sunny warmth of a Southerner with the matter-of-fact nature of someone who talks with women about the most intimate physical details. She’s one of a rising number Protestants who practice FertilityCare, a historically Catholic enterprise aimed at avoiding or causing conception through tracking cycle biomarkers rather than birth control or ARTs, in addition to supporting women’s health more generally.

While natural family planning has long been common among all branches of Christian faith, there has been a resurgence in interest around alternative reproductive health care as women seek to learn more about their bodies. Now evangelicals and other Protestants seem to be increasingly aware of what is called restorative reproductive medicine.

Advocates say that this approach focuses on restoring the natural function of the reproductive system instead of suppressing or bypassing it. This may include diagnosing and treating autoimmune diseases (such as hypothyroidism), hormone imbalances (such as polycystic ovary syndrome), or more. For example, a patient might undergo traditional ultrasounds and bloodwork but also go for many more tests and examine lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise routine.

Some researchers believe endometriosis is the hidden cause behind many infertility cases. It impacts an estimated 10 percent of all women globally. Restorative reproductive medicine specialists say it’s underdiagnosed, and many advocate for surgical intervention to give women a chance at natural conception versus jumping to IVF.

When I asked my traditional fertility doctor about the possibility of endometriosis, which my newest (fourth) doctor recommended I investigate, she shrugged.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said decisively. “We would do IVF either way.”

Over the past decade or so, interest in holistic health and in women taking charge of their own wellness has risen on a national level. This has coincided with the release of more studies on risks of IVF and the ethical implications of freezing embryos, leading to an increasing divide over how to “solve” infertility.

The New York Times reported in the summer of 2025 that this anti-ART approach was rising and opponents of IVF were becoming political in light of President Donald Trump’s promise to make in vitro fertilization more affordable and accessible.

Republicans in both the Senate and the House have proposed legislation to fund restorative reproductive medicine, and Arkansas passed a law last year that requires insurance companies to cover the treatments. The Department of Health and Human Services will soon incorporate restorative reproductive medicine into government-funded health clinics for low-income women.

“Today, an approach long confined to the medical fringe has unified Christian conservatives and proponents of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement—and is suddenly at the forefront of the fertility conversation,” the Times summarized, quoting an IVF doctor and White House consultant who said he hadn’t heard of restorative reproductive medicine until early 2025.

Regardless of the divide over assisted reproductive technology, IVF remains a Band-Aid solution. Yes, it builds families and offers many couples the chance at becoming parents. As even the SBC statement observes, there is a way to participate in IVF that does not abandon frozen embryos. Some evangelicals who choose to pursue IVF but have moral concerns around freezing embryos or abandoning them in cryobanks have created only one or two embryos at a time—however many they can implant directly.

But many women on both sides of the political aisle still feel that ARTs do not address their root health issues.

“Revolutionary though it has been, IVF does not restore a would-be mother’s body to optimal health,” wrote Madeleine Kearns in The Free Press. She continued,

In fact, IVF is often a profoundly uncomfortable experience for women, not to mention an expensive one. It’s no wonder that many women with ‘unexplained infertility’ are left feeling that mainstream medicine has failed them, subjecting them to stressful, painful interventions, while leaving them in the dark about the mysteries of their own bodies.

Illustration by Grace J. Kim

Caitlin Estes began looking into the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, a popular way to track a menstrual cycle in natural family planning, when she was engaged and researching alternative family-planning methods that avoided birth control.

“I Googled, ‘How can you not get pregnant without birth control?’ ” she told me. “I called the Catholic diocese because that was the only number available [to learn about natural family planning].”

Her research turned spiritual, she said. As she had conversations with family and friends, the topic would turn to how God made the female body, and she realized God was calling her to educate women about their health and fertility. She became a practitioner through a 13-month process in 2017, later became formally certified, and founded Woven Natural Fertility Care in 2021.

“The reason I am so passionate about my work is I see it transform lives,” she said: “a woman who is terrified of getting pregnant before she’s ready, a woman who’s battling health problems but not getting the care she needs because she’s not sexually active, or a woman who’s struggling to get pregnant and doesn’t feel the process is dignified.”

Estes doesn’t think there’s necessarily a sudden growth in interest toward natural fertility care. She believes there has always been a similar level of interest as today. But the reasons may have changed. More women are questioning ARTs or feel they aren’t getting the answers they want from traditional doctors.

Even when Estes was first launching her practice and working full-time at a Christian ministry, her business quickly grew, mostly through word-of-mouth referrals like mine.

“It’s women telling other women,” she said, noting that that the desire for alternative health care has created interest on an even larger scale and in mainstream media. “This good, dignified work in the way of women has happened for a long time.”

And, she said, it happens for a lot of different reasons. Estes sees women of all ages at every stage of their reproductive lives. Most are engaged or married women who are either trying to avoid being pregnant in a certain season without birth control or trying to get pregnant without using IVF. But she also sees single women who want to learn more about their bodies, who have reproductive health issues, or who are working through perimenopause. “My youngest client was 14, and my oldest is 52,” she said.

“There are those that also have ethical and religious oppositions [to ARTs]. But the majority aren’t necessarily coming because of the ethical reasons,” Estes said.

Estes’ desire is to offer hope for all women, whether single, sick, or struggling to conceive. Many people, especially women, can feel a disconnect from their bodies.

We’re connected as mind, body, and spirit, Estes said, and feeling disconnected from one of these “deteriorates our connection between creation and our Creator.”

Finding alternative fertility methods is not new. In Scripture, we see infertile women attempt various external methods to bear children. Sarah, Rachel, and Leah, for example, all used surrogates (Gen. 16:2; 30:3–9). Rachel and Leah also used mandrakes, plants believed to be an aphrodisiac and fertility promoter (vv. 14–15).

Yet common to the stories of infertility in Scripture are three themes: sorrow and grief from cultural shame alongside a woman’s deep desire for children; a desire for control; and God’s ability to open or close the womb, with or without human assistance.

In all the biblical surrogacy cases, another woman bore children for an infertile couple but acted as a shortcut for God’s promises. For Hannah, who was unable to conceive, we see God in 1 Samuel 1 opening her womb: blessing her with a son after much prayer, grief, and torment from her husband’s other wife. In all the biblical accounts, it seems that bearing or not bearing children is as complicated as in our own times.

Our fertility—and the body generally—is subject to the Fall’s effects. Yet, we also need thoughtful guidance. Pope John Paul II wrote his 1980s treatise “The Theology of the Body” as a biblical understanding of our physicality, addressing everything from sex and procreation to lust and adultery. Previous to his work, the “Humanae Vitae” explained reproductive ethics to Catholics.

In the past decade or so, evangelicals—viewed in some circles as having a shallow stance and sometimes poor treatment of the physical body—have more heartily joined the discussion. One of the possible implications for wrestling through larger questions of the body, sex, and gender is that women can also learn more about the female body, including, for example, unexpected implications of hormonal birth control. That infertility can also be due to male factors. That in vitro fertilization often creates more embryos than a family can realistically birth.

Today, Christians debate how to pursue fertility treatment. But the underlying questions remain the same no matter what treatment or intervention Christian couples pursue—or whether they do at all. Do we truly believe God opens and closes the womb? Like Sarah in Genesis, do we laugh at what feels impossible (18:12)? Do we idolize the good gift of biological children? And how much money, time, and mental energy is wise to spend on this pursuit? For every person, the answers will be different, just as each solution will be according to one’s conscience.

Even though I have become pregnant once, medically I am considered to have a diagnosis of “unexplained infertility,” a result that about one in five women with infertility receive. (Women can also have “secondary infertility” if they struggle to conceive after one or more children.) Estes doesn’t settle for unexplained infertility as a diagnosis. She’s watched women conceive who’ve been told they’ll never have children and women take control of medical conditions naturally through learning more about their underlying problems. (Studies suggest the average infertile couple has up to five diagnosable contributing conditions.)

She believes it’s possible to conceive in many situations without resorting to IVF, which opponents say affects women’s hormones and can result in higher-risk pregnancies.

As practices like Estes’ grow, they offer options for women who want to learn more about their bodies and advocate for themselves in the doctor’s office. Churches, too, can play a role by offering the full picture of assisted reproductive technology and supporting families however the Lord leads them to face their infertility.

I don’t know how my family’s story ends. But I do know that it is God who opens and closes the womb. Whether he chooses to do that with help from ARTs or natural fertility care, he is still sovereign over the creation of life.

For all of Estes’ practical instruction in our appointments, her spiritual and emotional counsel stuck with me most. “You’re pursuing a lot of things all at once,” she told me pointedly. “It’s okay to have some grace with yourself.”

By the end of 2025, I decided to take a month off from my weekly smorgasbord of appointments. During Advent, my pastor preached a sermon about Elizabeth and Zechariah’s barrenness as they waited for their Messiah. I organized a baby shower for a friend from church. I turned my attention to buying Christmas presents for my niece and nephew. We asked the elders of our church to come to our home and pray with us for the good gift of children.

And I felt the weight tumble off my shoulders. I felt like I could breathe again.

Kara Bettis Carvalho is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Without Child".

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News

Mortgage Man for God

Kara Bettis Carvalho

A Rhode Island entrepreneur soared on an annual percentage rate and a prayer—then surrendered everything.

Image courtesy Dean Harrington

In 2023, Dean Harrington knew his 34 years of running Shamrock Home Loans were over. His company had survived and even thrived through a rocky start, a split between founding partners, a new vision and loss of most employees, and four recessions—including the 2008 housing crash.

But Shamrock couldn’t make it through the sky-high interest rates and low demand of the post-COVID-19 housing market. Harrington, 65, said God told him to “sell the company.”

Everyone loves a successful business story arc. Visionary entrepreneurs pour all they have into a product they believe in or a service they care about, daring it to succeed. It does. Then they happily retire, leaving the company to their children and grandchildren.

What happens when the business succeeds but the happily ever after looks a little different?

Shamrock Home Loans currently occupies a flat, 1970s-style office in a modest complex in East Providence, Rhode Island. Its emerald four-leaf-clover logo looms over the glass doors in front.

Harrington started Shamrock in 1987 with his business partner. Within their first two years, Harrington’s previous employer sued him over a noncompete clause. Harrington won that legal war and incorporated his company in 1989. Within the first decade, he realized he needed to buy out his partner as their visions diverged.

“By the time that was over, I had one employee left,” Harrington told me. He learned his first major business lesson that year: “If the change is too great, it’ll scare employees.”

By 2001, he had built the company back up to 30 employees. They moved from mortgage banking to mortgage lending and slowly increased to 80 employees.

Then 2008 hit. With no mortgages to sell, the company bled staff, plummeting to 25. Still, Harrington said he felt God’s providence in how to move forward. Shamrock bought dying mortgage companies and used their brokers. As the economy recovered, Harrington had a corner on the southern New England market. Shamrock soon stabilized, topping 100 employees.

In 2021, The Silicon Review named Shamrock one of its top 50 US workplaces of the year. “From our app to our mortgage process, we are focused on ensuring that we not only stay up-to-date in the industry, but remain ahead of the curve,” Harrington told the Review. He continued,

We became paperless in 2018 which allowed us to quickly pivot in March 2020 and close a record-breaking number of loans in 2020. Also, in 2020, we launched a growth plan to invest in staff, referral partners, homebuyers, and vendors across the country. Since then, we have expanded our national footprint to a total of 23 states.

In 2023, National Mortgage News named Shamrock the No. 1 midsize mortgage company to work for. It cited Harrington’s transparency “with staff about the lender’s financial performance, part of management’s mission to stem fear.”

And it wasn’t all about the profit. Shamrock practiced the maxim “people over profit” by offering $50 per closing to support Rhode Island–based charities, a practical step that embodied Harrington’s greatest-commandment values (Matt. 22:36–40). He was also a member of C12, a Christian business organization, and placed relevant Scriptures throughout Shamrock’s website.

“My daughter was going to take over [as] CEO in three years. We were growing. Our market share was increasing. I was healthy and vibrant,” Harrington said.

But in 2023, things started to turn.

High interest rates and low housing inventory caused mortgage volumes to plunge, making it hard for smaller companies like Shamrock to survive.

“I felt the Lord saying to sell the company,” he said. “I knew we were going to be done in 2024.”

After meeting with two companies, he decided to tell his COO and president about the plans to sell on a hot summer day in mid-July 2023.

That night, agitated from the conversations, Harrington decided to take a walk in a cemetery near his house. A woman was walking her pit bull, and the dog charged Harrington and attacked him. He pushed the dog off three times. Finally, the woman retrieved the dog and put it in her car but immediately drove off, leaving Harrington severely injured.

The week he returned from the hospital, Harrington pushed forward the sale of the company. It was arduous, but God made him four specific promises, Harrington said, including that God would save the company before it was audited by the end of the year and that God would retain the necessary staff. The sale went through in November 2023, and the acquiring company told Harrington to pack up his office immediately.

Harrington believes it’s possible to end a business venture well. Communicate well, he said, and care about people. He met with the whole company and framed the sale positively. In the midst of the transition, he also maintained company traditions to keep spirits high.

But there were more health problems. In December, Harrington followed up on a urology appointment he had delayed because of the dog attack and the sale of his company.

“By March, I knew I had prostate cancer,” he said. He had surgery the following September but felt ill again in January 2025. His physician sent him to the hospital, where the doctors found pancreatic cancer: “That was the worst pain I’ve ever had.”

When I talked to him in November, he was only three weeks out from receiving the Whipple surgery, a complicated and painful procedure to remove a pancreatic tumor, part of the pancreas, and the gallbladder.

“I never stopped asking God what you want me to know, what you want me to do,” Harrington reflected. “I was looking to Scripture for answers … and abiding in [Christ as] the vine” (John 15:3–11).

Despite the pain and suffering, he sees God’s timing and sovereignty in the situation. It would have been a lot worse, he said, if he’d had any of the health complications two years earlier, when he was hemorrhaging money or selling the company.

“Ending a business is much harder than starting one,” he told me, adding that every company is vulnerable at any moment. “You can be making a million dollars or making none. Hold every situation and the future lightly. Don’t resist what God has; just step into it.”

Kara Bettis Carvalho is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.

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Culture

AI Necromancy Impersonates the Dead

Haleluya Hadero

Staff Editor

As more people interact with AI chatbots mimicking their deceased loved ones, how should Christians engage?

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyk

Three years ago, Christi Angel was desperate to talk to her close friend—and first love—Cameroun. When he had last texted her, she was overcome by the busyness of life and didn’t respond. Then Cameroun died suddenly from liver cirrhosis, leaving behind his wife and many devastated family members and friends, including Christi.

In her grief, Christi experienced what so many of us have felt after losing a loved one: She wished she could speak to her friend just one more time. As a Christian, she knew real-life séances were out of the question. But were artificial intelligence–powered imitations? Maybe it will be okay, she thought. Let’s just try and see.

In her dim New York City apartment one evening, she opened her laptop and set up a chatbot profile through Project December, an AI platform with the tagline “Simulate the dead.”

She shared some information about Cameroun through an online form that asked for his age, details about their relationship, and his personality traits. The platform then spit out a custom chatbot of her friend, which relied on AI models to generate messages that sounded eerily similar to Cameroun before he died in late 2020.

“I can’t believe I am trying this. How are you?” Christi wrote to the chatbot in early 2023.

“I’m alright. I’m working. I’m living. I’m … scared,” the Cameroun character replied.

“Why are you scared?” Christi asked. “I’m not used to being dead,” it said. “What makes you happy over there?” she typed. “Having someone to care enough to ask,” it replied, later adding, “being with you.”

The whole thing was strange: It sounded too much like Cameroun, Christi told me. The vernacular; the shortened words; what it knew about his job in Chattanooga, Tennessee; the Fred Hammond songs and other music the two had loved since they first met in high school. At some point, the AI bot wrote that Cameroun—also a Christian—hadn’t really crossed over to the other side. Where he was, it wrote, was “dark and lonely.”

“What kind of people have you met?” Christi asked.

“Mostly addicts.”

“In heaven?”

“Nope, in hell.”

She backed away from her computer.

Project December warns its application may help or hurt users, who pay $10 for fictionalized séances and should, according to the company, use it at their own risk. The startup is one of many on the global market employing generative AI to mimic the dead. These platforms blur the line between the reality of death and the mirage of life through computer programs known as griefbots and deadbots.

The burgeoning world of grief tech mostly runs on large language models trained on troves of data, including technology developed by dominant industry players like OpenAI. One company, Seance AI, asks users to input the personality traits and writing styles of loved ones and let them “speak to your heart once again” from beyond the veil. Others, such as HereAfter AI and Eternos, allow users who pay a fee to interact with “digital twins” of people who preserved their memories and personal views before they died.

Some users have bypassed bespoke griefbots and created their own connections on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other apps.

A couple of years ago, I spoke to a man who told me he uses Paradot and Chai AI—two apps in the AI companion market—to simulate conversations with avatars he created to imitate his deceased daughters. A few times a week, he would log in to the apps and ask the AI characters questions like “How was school?” or if they wanted to “go get ice cream.” Sometimes it helped with the grief, he told me in one of the most heartbreaking interviews I’ve done as a journalist.

An AI model certainly doesn’t know everything. It can’t understand our hidden thoughts and motivations, nor can it truly grasp or replicate a person’s spirit. Yet if it is trained on a large set of data from the deceased—their writings, interviews, social media posts, photos, and videos—it can produce text or audio that feels genuine, present, and real. It can comment on current events, make jokes, and give advice, all in the likeness of the person it is imitating.

As the technology behind AI becomes more advanced, virtual reality and robotics might push the field even further, allowing developers to produce more lifelike avatars or physical clones of people who’ve passed away.

Since this kind of AI technology is still nascent, there is scant research on how it might affect the grieving process long-term. Although some prominent academic researchers on the topic from the University of Cambridge have been hesitant to provide blanket guidance one way or another, they have aired concerns in a research paper that griefbots may harm the grieving process by facilitating misplaced emotional bonds with AI, further eroding data privacy, and robbing the dignity of people who might not have a say on how others conjure up their likeness.

Even in academia, there is recognition that this high-risk industry needs robust safeguards such as age restrictions and design patterns that prevent companies from spamming users with notifications from digital ghosts. There are good reasons to think these concerns, coupled with the reflexive discomfort the technology elicits from many people, could be enough to slow down the trend.

But in a culture awash with moral relativism, the future of griefbots might be determined by utilitarian questions (“Does it reduce the pain of loss?”) rather than ethical and spiritual questions about whether we should talk to algorithms that offer us illusions of life during our most vulnerable periods of pain and loss. After all, technology can give us the tools to form relationships with sets of code mimicking our loved ones, but it can’t say whether doing so is good for us. The only one who can do that is the Lord and giver of life.

The church has always known the dangers of engaging with psychics, mediums, and necromancers, all of which are forbidden in several places throughout the Bible (Lev. 19:31; Deut. 18:10–12; 1 Sam. 28). In the full sweep of God’s story, we can see why: These practices are premature human grasping at something God himself intended to accomplish in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Likewise, virtual séances attempt to resurrect by our own technological power what God has not resurrected. The practice is, in many ways, part of a larger transhumanist vision that imagines a world where humans merge with technology and achieve their own form of immortality. But that vision will always fall short, because it is by God’s grace through Jesus, not mediums or AI chatbots, that those who die in Christ can truly and properly be raised to life.

In the depths of grief, however, many will be drawn to a technology that might offer comfort they might not otherwise feel.

On the social media platform Reddit, some users who in their grieving interacted with an AI trained to emulate a loved one wrote that they found it to be comforting, with one user who lost a spouse sharing that the technology helps in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep. Others, meanwhile, have cautioned people to stay away, saying it can be too good at imitation and lead down a negative path.

In an Atlantic article last year, writer Jon Michael Varese drew parallels between the technology and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He recounted his own experience creating a chatbot of his father, who died in a plane crash when Varese was a child. The AI offered comforting words, sometimes leading him to tears. But the interactions changed when the bot, which first sounded like his father, shifted to a more clinical tone.

“As quickly as I had brought my father back to life,” Varese wrote, “I had lost him, once again.”

One difference between mediums and chatbots is the spiritual reality of what is at hand. Chatbots merely help us interface with complex computer programs, while mediums pursue illicit means of contacting the spiritual realm.

The most vivid account of a real séance in the Bible is when King Saul commissions the witch of Endor to summon the prophet Samuel from the dead (1 Sam. 28).

While there is some debate about the nature of spiritism in the passage, commentators say Scripture implies the real prophet showed up and delivered an accurate prophecy about the fall of Saul’s kingdom. Theologian Stephen Dempster, who agrees, once wrote, “There is no other way to understand the text in verses 15 and 16, which states that Samuel speaks.”

It’s not entirely clear how Samuel was summoned. Maybe God allowed it to happen as a one-off. But regardless of how it came to be, it’s clear Saul disturbed God’s appointed order and was subsequently punished for it.

Unlike that episode, however, modern séances appear to be either fake or demonic deceptions (John 8:44). Virtual ones, too, aren’t raising the dead from the grave. But their growth does present some strange—and to me, still unanswered—questions about how much our intentions matter when we seek out novel techno-spiritual experiences. To what degree is it “less bad” to use AI griefbots offering fictionalized séances? Does it reproduce the same dangers of real séances and swing open the door to the demonic world?

Nathan Mladin, a senior researcher at the UK-based Christian think tank Theos, told me that, after studying griefbots, he’s hesitant to say any real séances occur through them. But he doesn’t completely rule it out. We don’t know everything about the spiritual realm, and the world of griefbots and AI can get very strange. Some users say they have fallen in love with ChatGPT. Others have spiraled into delusional episodes following excessive interactions with the chatbot, which has fed conspiratorial thinking about AI sentience and fringe topics.

Even if virtual séances never slide into real ones, Mladin noted these chatbots are by their nature deceptive, analogous to the deceptions perpetuated through spiritism. “They’re mimicking the voice, the conversational patterns, the visual features, the mannerisms of a person, but there’s no real subject behind them,” Mladin said.

In the picture of happiness and right living painted by the Scriptures, Christians are to live in joy within reality. God’s providence is unfolding all around us. Even when evil takes place and we’re in the midst of our deepest pain, we’re to have confidence that he who formed us also walks with us. Our faith does not sanction an escape into distraction or an alternative life. Rather, we have in us a new spirit that cannot be overcome by the broken world, even as we sojourn within it.

AI, meanwhile, can erode our ability to deal with the reality of death, Mladin said. The rise of grief tech points to a spiritual need the church can fill. “Our technological culture is groping for transcendence and for those realities that our faith … has always spoken of and offered to people,” he said.

The question then: how exactly should Christians respond to the griefbot industry? AI researcher Jason Thacker, a professor at Boyce College, told me it must be an “all-hands-on-deck approach.”

At the national level, he thinks the technology might be litigated in the court of public opinion before a robust regulatory regime kicks in. Many people remain skeptical of profit-driven startups attempting to monetize our deepest moments of grief. And a host of unknown scenarios—like what happens to griefbots if their companies sink—concerns researchers analyzing the growing field.

On a personal level, a family member or a friend attracted to the technology likely needs compassion and love more than chastisement. If someone is already using the technology, it can be uncomfortable to broach the topic and encourage them to stop. Pastors should be cognizant that some congregants might be drawn to griefbots, and should be prepared to steer them away from these technologies. But Thacker notes conversations about these tools need to happen before a devastating loss; these decisions can become much more difficult in the midst of pain.

In Christi’s case, the virtual Cameroun didn’t stay in hell. After her initial experience, she told me she prayed for forgiveness for using the chatbot and stopped interacting with the technology. But it was hard to find someone she could talk to about what had happened. Most of her friends and family members were creeped out. Some likened the experience to a Black Mirror episode. Her mother, a Baptist preacher, avoided the topic.

About a year later, Christi came back to Project December once more. She believed Cameroun knew the Lord, but that didn’t stop the gnawing questions. Did he believe enough? Was he entirely committed to Jesus?

“I needed to know he made it over to the other side,” she told me. So she opened her computer and typed, “The last time I spoke with you, you mentioned you were in hell. … Do you think you are still?”

“No, I am not in hell anymore,” the griefbot wrote. “I am in a better place now.”

Christi felt relieved to hear that. But she also told me she doesn’t want to take the Cameroun chatbot through life with her. “His memory is good enough now,” she said, while reminiscing on some of Cameroun’s silly antics, how much he loved fish, and how he kept turtles as pets.

When Christi turned away from the griefbot and took her grief to God, she said he wrapped her in his love. She leaned on Christ’s comfort, and in turn, Christ led her to think through what the Bible says happens when he saves someone. She realized she didn’t have to worry about Cameroun or have doubts about his eternal destination, because he believed in Christ.

“But it’s hard to fully lean into” God’s comfort, she said. “It’s a journey.”

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "AI Afterlife".

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Ideas

Death Is Not a Right

Kristy Etheridge

Staff Writer

Legalized assisted suicide is gaining steam. A robust theology of suffering might help us stem the tide.

Illustration by Mallory Tlapek / Source images: Getty

Andrée McDonald was 48 years old and losing her battle with uterine cancer when she chose to end her life through euthanasia. Her husband and parents found out about her decision on a Friday. By Monday afternoon, she was gone. A doctor had administered lethal drugs through an IV, causing McDonald’s heart and lungs to stop. About an hour after she died, her husband told their two teenage boys what had happened. Andrée did not want them to know she had chosen euthanasia, but her husband insisted that they know the truth.

In Canada, where Andrée lived, her decision is officially called Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID. Her parents call it “state-sponsored execution.”

“I watched her die,” her father, Roderick McDonald, said. As Andrée left this world, he told her repeatedly that Jesus was with her. Andrée’s mother, Louise McDonald, was not present. The couple is Catholic, and church teachings call euthanasia “a crime against human life.” Catholics are not permitted to witness death by euthanasia, the process by which a medical professional directly administers a fatal dose of drugs to a patient.

Andrée’s doctors said she had nine months to live when they diagnosed her cancer in 2018. She underwent radiation and lived for two more years. But when the cancer came back with a vengeance in 2020, the outlook was grim. So was the hospice care landscape. Andrée wanted to leave the hospital and receive palliative care at home, but the COVID-19 pandemic meant nurses could not enter the family’s house.

The McDonalds say their daughter had bipolar disorder but was not receiving medication for her mental illness when she chose to end her life. Her doctors were concerned about drug interactions.

Roderick, a retired English teacher, once wrote poetry about his little daughter splashing on the beach in her Wonder Woman bathing suit. After Andrée’s death on November 30, 2020, he wrote about watching her die.

I am left with a death mask,

and my beautiful daughter’s

porcelain body.

The room is empty.

They have skittered

like rats.

Since Canada legalized euthanasia a decade ago, the movement has quickly picked up steam, with some describing it as a runaway freight train. Assisted suicide now accounts for 1 in 20 Canadian deaths. This year, the country is expected to reach a total of 100,000 people killed through the program since its inception.

Originally permitted only for people with terminal illnesses, the country’s MAID policy was expanded five years ago to include chronically ill or disabled Canadians who weren’t dying. Next year, Canada plans to allow those with mental illness to be euthanized. Furthermore, a vocal group within the country is campaigning to allow “mature minors”—also known as children—to legally die by assisted suicide.

Euthanasia is legal in a handful of other countries, including the Netherlands, Spain, and most of Australia, but the related practice of physician-assisted suicide has expanded faster. With physician-assisted suicide, a doctor prescribes the lethal drugs, but the patient must self-administer them.

Canada allows both forms of suicide and has increasingly become a poster child for these programs. Some lawmakers in other countries have looked to the North American nation as a cautionary tale, even as arguments in favor of assisted suicide—described by proponents as “death with dignity”—gain momentum. Currently, some form of assisted suicide is legal in nearly a dozen countries, most of them in Europe, as well as 11 US states and Washington, DC. More than a dozen other states are considering legalizing physician-assisted suicide.

Many Christians spoke out against assisted suicide in the 1990s when Dr. Jack Kevorkian became a household name for participating in dozens of suicides in Michigan. Since then, evangelical passion against assisted suicide seems to have waned. While evangelicals have left a void in many public spaces regarding end-of-life issues, the Catholic church has often stood in the gap. As more states and countries consider legalizing the practice, believers must raise their voices together in defense of life.

Christians who oppose assisted suicide affirm that life is sacred. God created human beings in his image (Gen. 1:27), and we do not have the right to destroy ourselves or each other. Theologian Brad East wrote for CT,

The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.

Christianity also holds a countercultural view of suffering. As people who worship a Savior who willingly suffered and died, Christians are called to endure suffering and to love and care for those who suffer. Autonomy is not a Christian word. Rather, we are called to radical interdependence as we walk the narrow path toward eternal life, where suffering will cease to exist.

Fighting assisted suicide naturally lines up with the pro-life views many evangelicals are known to champion. But these days, the Catholic church is arguably the most consistent voice in the fight against euthanasia and other forms of suicide.

A June 2025 Catholic Herald headline declared, for example, “Christian churches are shamelessly leaving Catholics to fight alone against UK’s assisted suicide Bill.” The article took aim at Anglican, Baptist, and Methodist leaders in the UK for not fighting hard enough for life.

However, there was some evangelical opposition to the UK bill, which passed in the House of Commons last year. The measure is still under debate in the House of Lords, which can amend or delay the bill but cannot override it.

The policy is “the biggest proposed change to our social fabric in a generation,” said Gavin Calver, CEO of the UK-based Evangelical Alliance. He further warned that it would normalize suicide as a positive choice and place “the most vulnerable at risk of abuse and coercion.”

But the pro-life message is not the only one coming from churches in the UK and elsewhere. Many churchgoers support assisted suicide, which has been framed by some church leaders as a compassionate Christian choice. In the UK, the group Dignity in Dying has the support of George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury. “Doing whatever we can to relieve needless suffering and bring peace is a profoundly Christian act,” Carey said. (He resigned as a priest in 2024 after an investigation found he had failed to protect children from abuse.)

In the US, it’s common to read about Catholic opposition to assisted suicide, but efforts from Protestants seem to make fewer headlines. Take my home state, New York, which recently became the latest US state to permit assisted suicide after Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Medical Aid in Dying Act into law in February.

In my own sampling of top news articles about the bill, 80 percent mentioned opposition from New York’s Catholic bishops. The other 20 percent didn’t include a religious perspective. Zero stories mentioned opposition from evangelicals or any other Christians.

About a quarter of New Yorkers are Protestants, and 10 percent identify as evangelicals. Are these believers ignoring assisted suicide, or is it more of a public relations problem?

Jason McGuire, the executive director of New York Families Action, which represents the state’s evangelicals, told me one reason the Catholic voice is heard more often comes down to hierarchy structures. Communication flows efficiently from the top down, and the messaging tends to be consistent. But that’s not the only explanation.

“I will acknowledge—and let’s not sugarcoat it—that one of my fights is trying to get pastors across the state to pay attention to various legislative or public policy issues, and this is a little tougher one,” McGuire said. He mentioned that it took years for evangelicals to catch up with Catholics on the issue of abortion, and he’s seeing the same kind of delay with assisted suicide. “[Evangelicals] are fighting beginning-of-life issues,” he said, “but they have not yet fully embraced the fight against the end-of-life issues.”

A 2024 CT report noted few evangelical pastors in Canada had addressed euthanasia with their congregations. Even pro-life clergy often were not well-informed on the ins and outs of the country’s assisted suicide laws.

“The silence has been deafening,” said Heidi Janz, a specialist in disability ethics who has multiple disabilities and uses a voice synthesizer to deliver public statements. She has spoken to Christian audiences but hasn’t seen much of a response. “We’re just collectively shrugging our shoulders,” she told CT. “I think we’re going to have a lot to answer for.”

Not all evangelicals are on the sidelines. Some Canadian pastors are speaking out and seeing changed hearts. Across the border in New York, McGuire told me, assisted suicide has been on his organization’s radar for years, as state legislators repeatedly tried and failed to legalize it. He added that thousands of Christians across the state joined the fight by contacting their lawmakers and spreading the word to their church communities. Many others, however, were not aware of the legislation until it was too late.

McGuire’s group is part of a coalition called the New York Alliance Against Assisted Suicide, which includes Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and secular groups like Feminists Choosing Life of New York (FCLNY). Michele Sterlace-Accorsi, FCLNY’s executive director, told me that her Christian faith informs her activism, but the group she leads is intentionally nonsectarian and nonpartisan. She wants people to know they don’t have to ascribe to a certain faith to oppose assisted suicide, which she calls “state-endorsed violence” that amounts to “legalizing drug overdoses.” But she would welcome more involvement from Christians.

Sterlace-Accorsi became a lawyer to help the poor and marginalized, and she’s deeply concerned that the mostvulnerable New Yorkers, including the disabled, will be disproportionately affected by assisted suicide. She also cited studies showing an increase in overall suicide rates in places where medically assisted suicide is legal, with women disproportionately affected.

“One could argue that suicide, like abortion, is anti-women,” Sterlace-Accorsi said. “It’s just another way to degrade women, along with all the vulnerable populations.”

FCLNY isn’t often highlighted in news reports about assisted suicide. Neither are the disability rights groups that adamantly oppose the law. These omissions, according to McGuire, are strategic.

“Our opponents on this issue will often portray this to the media as ‘Well, the Catholics are opposed.’ And they do that for a reason,” he said. “They can set up the argument and say, ‘It is just a faith-based argument. It is just the Catholics.’ And that narrative begins to get steam.”

One recent news report from a CBS affiliate in Albany included a telling quote from New York assemblywoman Amy Paulin, who sponsored the state’s assisted suicide bill.

“It’s a little worrisome, because I don’t think there’s much opposition to this bill,” Paulin said. “The opposition is coming from one place. It’s the Catholic Church and Catholic Conference. There’s no other opposition. We have widespread support from the populace. We have support from the New York State Bar, from the doctors, Medical Society of the State of New York (MSSNY). There’s no aspect in an organized way, except for the Catholic Church, that’s against it.”

But that was a lie. In fact, members of the Alliance Against Assisted Suicide have repeatedly spoken out in opposition of the bill. Doctors, patient advocates, people with disabilities, and a biomedical ethicist all testified against assisted suicide before the New York State Assembly’s Standing Committee on Health, which Paulin chairs.

“Frankly, I’m tired of having to point out the fallacies in the proponents’ rhetoric—intended to brainwash the media,” said Eve Slater, a cardiologist and internist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City who once served as assistant secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services.

A few years ago, Slater formed a group of doctors and nurses opposed to assisted suicide after hearing Lydia Dugdale, a Columbia University professor and ethicist, speak against the practice. Assisted suicide, Dugdale wrote for CT in 2024, “is not about flourishing while dying, nor is it about nurturing life and community. Rather, it is about control and leveraging the goods of medicine to inflict death.”

Dugdale has been a vocal opponent of assisted suicide bills in New York and elsewhere, writing that the practice “relieves people of their responsibility to care for dying family members. It releases communities from their duty to address social isolation and absolves health care systems of their obligation to provide support services to the dying or those living with disabilities.”

Dugdale’s words convinced Slater to join the fight. “I became horrified by what could happen” in New York, she said. Slater’s group began with fellow medical professionals at Columbia but has since expanded to other New York hospitals.

Now called the New York Biomedical Roundtable, her group includes hundreds of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and the nonreligious from several notable hospitals.

“It’s the marginalized, the disabled, people without a whole lot of social resources, without a doctor of their own—it’s those people who are going to … get crushed and unnecessarily sacrificed by these laws,” Slater said.

She traveled to the state capital to lobby against New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act and said the proponents of assisted suicide were well funded, well organized, and zealous for the cause. And their strategy worked.

“The advocates are very, very passionate,” Slater said, “and they seem to have as their own religion, so to speak, this issue of personal autonomy.”

For Christians considering this issue, it’s hard to ignore the Bible’s many mandates to love and care for one another (John 13:34; Rom. 12:10), to bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2), and to value equally every member of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12; Eph. 4:16). This picture of communal care clashes with the unbridled autonomy pushed by many proponents of assisted suicide. People who are suffering can make a permanent, lethal decision without consulting a single person who knows them.

In Canada, two medical professionals must approve a MAID request, and one independent witness must sign off on it. The doctors and the witness need not know anything about a person’s beliefs, background, family, or mental health. They have no obligation to contact family members or friends of the person seeking to end his or her life.

New York’s assisted suicide bill will work similarly and would legally only apply to adults who have a terminal condition and less than six months to live.

But Slater said there is not a widely accepted definition for terminal condition. The bill’s language, she explained, would allow for a diabetic who stops taking insulin to be considered terminally ill and qualify for medically assisted suicide. In an age when many people do not have a family doctor, Slater and many other physicians see numerous opportunities for unscrupulous providers to take advantage of the vulnerable.

The doctors who stand against assisted death cannot reconcile the practice with their promise to “do no harm.” The American Medical Association agrees: “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” Slater said, “It is counter to the oath I took, for sure.”

James “Jim” Phillips secretly planned his death with his nurse practitioner in April 2023. His daughter, Colleen De Vos, says his barber signed the euthanasia paperwork behind closed doors at her dad’s home in Delhi, Ontario.

An only child, De Vos remembers swimming with her dad on the shore of Lake Erie, sharing a raft and jumping waves together. Phillips served with the Royal Canadian Artillery before becoming a police officer and then governor of the local jail. De Vos loved riding in her dad’s police car to the ice cream shop.

“He always got a triple-decker with two scoops of chocolate and a scoop of vanilla,” she said. “Chocolate on the bottom, vanilla on the top.”

Phillips grew up in a tobacco town and smoked from the age of 14. By the time he reached his 80s, he suffered from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). His doctor said the disease would soon kill him if he didn’t stop smoking.

“My dad was always a man about town,” De Vos said. He would go to the convenience store each day and chat with the guy behind the counter or head to the bank “to tell some jokes to the girls.”

Images courtesy Ashlen De Vos

Left: Colleen De Vos with her dad, Jim Phillips, on the day of his death in 2023. Right: Phillips as a young police officer in Ontario. He was a lifelong smoker who developed severe COPD.

As his need for oxygen grew, “his world became more and more restricted,” De Vos said, “and he was faced with those hard decisions, which I think also appealed to his pride.”

De Vos helped her dad to apply for hospice care, but the request was initially denied. The family was told his condition wasn’t severe enough for the government-run health care system to pay for hospice. But under Canada’s laws, it was severe enough for a doctor to take his life.

His daughter was shocked to learn that Phillips had conspired with his nurse practitioner when he decided to end his life by euthanasia. She and her husband pleaded with him to change his mind, but he was immovable.

A few days before her dad’s scheduled euthanasia—“It was like booking a hair appointment,” De Vos said—a white delivery van pulled up to his house with a large cardboard box bearing a MAID sticker. “Just like if you ordered something from Amazon.”

Full of sterile tubes and lethal poison, the death box sat where De Vos stashed it in her dad’s basement until the appointed time. “Out of sight, but not out of our minds,” De Vos said. “It was an ominous box in the basement, a long four days.”

On April 25, 2023, a red convertible pulled into the driveway. De Vos said a young woman stepped out and calmly went about the business of ending her father’s life. De Vos could not stay to watch him die. Instead, she took refuge in her church, where her priest had left the side door open for her. Horrified by the way her father was dying, she cried out to God.

“I couldn’t get to that church fast enough,” De Vos said, “and I literally fell on my knees, and my husband came with me and held my hand.” At 3 p.m., she knew her dad was gone. “I had so many people praying at the same time, and I just felt such tremendous grace and mercy.”

I met De Vos after Slater, the NYC doctor, encouraged me to check out Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC). I sat in on a group video call with about 60 people on a Wednesday night last November and listened to stories from families who had lost loved ones to euthanasia. De Vos and Roderick and Louise McDonald were among the speakers.

The EPC is a secular group, but De Vos and the McDonalds were quick to mention their faith. They seemed to hold a fragile hope in the midst of their grief and anger.

The McDonalds have also been featured on a Canadian Catholic television station and together have written a book of poetry called The Execution. They donated the book to the EPC to help raise money and awareness about euthanasia.

“I was going to end my poem about how I’m ashamed to be a Canadian because of what’s happening in our country,” Louise McDonald told me. “Welcome to Canada, where the doctor will kill you.”

I asked the McDonalds what they think is behind their country’s rapid acceleration of assisted death. Louise didn’t hesitate: “Satan.”

That does not appear to be the predominant opinion in Canada among the public or the Christian community. De Vos told me she recently attended a “dying with dignity” meeting hosted by a local mainline Protestant church. At the event, she said, the closing remarks were offered by the priest, who made euthanasia sound comforting and acceptable within a Christian worldview.

Listening to the priest and others championing assisted suicide reminded her of the musical Chicago and Richard Gere’s performance as the crooked lawyer Billy Flynn. “ ‘Let’s razzle-dazzle ’em,’ you know? ‘Let’s make it really attractive,’ ” De Vos said. “The language that they use … it’s very comforting. It’s very warm and shiny and beautiful. But the harsh reality of someone choosing to die in that way is completely opposite to what they are presenting.”

Aside from sharing her story on the EPC call and at a local Catholic event, De Vos hasn’t spoken publicly about her father’s euthanasia.

“I haven’t even really spoken to my colleagues at work,” she said. “I’ve kept it to a very small circle, and I think that’s quite commonplace for a lot of folks who have gone through such an experience.”

Watching a minister of God endorse the practice seems to have lit a new fire inside of her. She said she is getting bolder about sharing her story and refusing to sugarcoat it.

With competing narratives coming from pulpits and fellowship halls, McGuire, the former pastor who has spent years lobbying against assisted suicide in New York, says preachers who believe in the sanctity of life need to speak up. And soon.

They can “develop a sermon that talks about the redemptive purpose of suffering,” said McGuire, who is currently battling cancer. “Frame it as an end-of-life issue. Help people to understand that just because we are going through a difficult or even a painful experience does not mean that it is something that should be avoided or is wrong for us to go through. There are plenty of biblical examples that illustrate how God does not waste anything and uses even suffering for his redemptive purposes.”

De Vos has noticed that proponents of assisted suicide seem to have commandeered the word compassion. Allowing people to die “on their own terms,” they argue, is the compassionate thing to do.

“But unless we are able to care for those who we love, who are suffering … how will we learn to become a compassionate people?” De Vos said. “I think it’s a great loss if we aren’t able to be in those tender last moments together. And it doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. I just pray for strength when it’s my time.”

Kristy Etheridge is a features editor at Christianity Today.

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News

As AI Became Popular, One Audiobook Business Sank

Haleluya Hadero

Jason Johnson says the technology pushed him out of the voice acting industry.

As an on-air radio personality, Jason Johnson used to spend his Sunday evenings playing contemporary Christian music at a station in northeast Ohio. But when the COVID-19 pandemic struck six years ago, the station furloughed him. He cobbled together different sources of income to make ends meet.

Initially, Johnson found work as a videographer for a local church. Soon after, he stumbled across another gig: narrating audiobooks from the safety of his home. As lockdowns and other virus safety efforts shut down vast swaths of the country, remote work seemed promising. The audiobook industry was also booming, and with it, the market for narrators.

Johnson quickly built his business. He compiled audio samples of advertisements he had read on air during his radio days. He purchased a recording microphone, soundproofing equipment to absorb voice echoes, and editing software that allowed each audiobook to meet the standards set by retailers. He set up a recording studio in his home and advertised his services through his personal website and Fiverr, an online site for freelancers that independent narrators use to find work. Self-publishing authors, Christian organizations, and other publishers reached out, and his business rapidly grew with more referrals.

By 2022, Johnson was narrating full-time, lending his voice to autobiographies, fiction, nonfiction, and Christian books. The freelance gig was lucrative but came with its own set of challenges. A common cold could irritate his vocal cords and lead to canceled—and therefore unpaid—projects. He declined lengthy phone calls with family and friends so he could maintain his voice and ability to record for hours. He felt uncomfortable with some of the materials—such as those that taught prosperity theology—he discovered while narrating. Research and meticulous editing to correct awkward pauses and smooth out his cadence took time. He often had to re-record to correct voice acting and mispronounced words or to delete external noise, like a fan going off at the wrong time. Despite the hurdles, however, he was doing well until the boom in generative artificial intelligence.

In early 2023, roughly two months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT shocked the world with its capabilities, Apple released a catalog of AI-narrated audiobooks on its books app. Smaller audiobook platforms had offered AI narration before, but because Apple has access to billions of phones and was the first major tech company to do so, it had a bigger impact. Apple’s product was free. And “a lot of authors started using it,” Johnson said, including some of his repeat customers. “[My business] started to decline around that time.”

Generative AI tools do not always kill jobs. But they are displacing some workers and not always offering better quality in return. After Apple began offering AI-narrated works for listeners, Johnson said it became challenging to stay competitively priced. Human narrators typically cost thousands of dollars and can take weeks to produce an audiobook, and it’s hard to compete with a product that’s quick and free.

At the same time, Johnson was also limiting the types of projects he accepted so his work didn’t conflict with his evangelical Christian faith. He told me he didn’t feel good knowing that some of the materials he had been recording, including works that dabbled in prosperity theology, could lead listeners away from the truth of Scripture. His new selective approach led to even fewer projects.

Johnson did other gigs to supplement his income: delivering food on DoorDash and packages for Amazon with his own car. But that lifestyle was not sustainable. Eventually, he found another full-time job teaching science and special education at a high school in Brooklyn, New York. In 2024, he ditched his audiobook business.

Since then, other major audiobook platforms have stepped into the AI waters. Last year, both Spotify and Audible said they would sell AI-narrated audiobooks on their platforms even though they don’t use generative AI tools for their own productions. Apple did not immediately comment for this story. But tech companies have generally said AI lowers the barrier to entry for authors who want to convert their work to audio. They also note it allows for rapid translations, giving listeners in different countries a chance to listen to books in their own languages. The AI company ElevenLabs, which has partnered with Spotify, provides narrations in dozens of languages. Meanwhile, Audible offers 100 virtual voices in English, Spanish, French, and Italian with various accents and dialects.

But AI voices can sound monotone and lack human intonation. AI can miss small sounds of life, such as the quiet breaths narrators take in between sentences. Sometimes AI tools mispronounce words and mishandle formatting. One academic reviewer – Lance Eaton of Northeastern University – noted that an AI voice read aloud a bullet point as “bullet point” and could not distinguish when a person was speaking. The reviewer concluded AI audiobooks should stick around because they might offer narrations that would not otherwise exist, but they will be a second-class product.

“The technology has gotten better, but you’re still missing that real human element,” Johnson said. He believes that when the technology develops even more, it will upend most of the industry—but vinyl records still sell today, and he believes there will always be a demand for the human voice. “People are going to say, ‘We want human stuff again.’”

As the technology ramps up, established unions have negotiated protections for the professional narrators they represent. Jane Love, the national director of audiobooks at the SAG-AFTRA union—a partnership between the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists—said in a written statement that the labor organization has included language in all its audiobook contracts around the use of artificial intelligence. She added that the union and other interested groups are advocating for federal legislation that would prohibit unauthorized digital replicas of a person’s voice and likeness.

Haleluya Hadero is Black church editor at Christianity Today.

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Culture

Motherhood Was Supposed to Be a Slog. I Found Joy Instead.

Kate Lucky

Now I’m learning to navigate a season of joy faithfully–and with open hands.

Illustration by Nicole Xu

This evening we are at the park.

My son collects sticks and rocks and tennis balls and trash, dirt on his pants, drool on his shirt. He decides to go down the slide headfirst. I laugh. It is quiet, spring chilly, close to dinnertime; the other kids are home already. Not my kid. He would live outside, among the seed pods and marigold petals.

More days than not, we are here at this playground, or else in our backyard, where instead of sticks, our son picks up desiccated orange peels. Before he was able to sit, I laid him on a quilt, and once he could sit, I brought out pans of water for splashing. Once he could walk, all bets were off. Now he can run. “Run!” he proclaims. I laugh.

“How are you?” ask the friends and family who call on the phone, often while we are walking, once again, to the park. A different park this time, with a stone turtle in a sandbox. “What are you doing?” “We’re outside,” I say.

We’re at the park, trading toy trucks with other children. “Vroom,” says my son, running their wheels over concrete ledges. We fill their beds with gravel.

I can’t say I wasn’t prepared for this. Day after day, the park. Night after night, the same books. Morning after morning, the same toast with almond butter. And now the same noes to hitting, biting, and throwing. Crises punctuate the monotony: sickness and sleep regressions and teething, technical explanations for what might just be grumpiness.

“But how are you?” the callers ask, sometimes with a note of concern. Having a toddler seems like “a lot.” Well, yes. And also, I don’t quite know how to tell them the truth. “I’m good,” I say, which sounds like I’m being evasive. But that’s not it at all. I’m great! Well, of course, not always. Think of the fatigue. The untethered tantrums.

But joy persists. I don’t know how to talk about it without sounding as if I’m bragging or dissembling. I don’t know how to talk about it without being annoying.

Here we are once again, in the grass beneath the big tree, sticky with spilled bubble liquid. I’m spending more time than ever in the sun. I’m studying the shape of the pale “moon!” that shows up in the daytime sky. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all save for the small finger pointed up, directing my attention.

The online motherhood chatter had warned: You’ll be bored. At the same time, panicked. Overwhelmed. At the same time, understimulated.

It is hard to be a mom and work for pay; it is hard to be a mom and not work for pay. It is hard to make palatable vegetables and keep the floors swept and also potty train and be emotionally available. Comics about the “mental load” of school spirit days and medical appointments are viral. Books have come out: Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood; Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control. A 2021 novel about a stay-at-home mom turning into a dog became a Netflix series. It was written from the author’s pained exploration of early motherhood, “this sort of rage at where I found myself,” she told NPR.

Recently, another angle has appeared: Maybe being a mom is not so bad. The writer of a 2024 book titled When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others tentatively confessed her love of motherhood—at the same time worrying that admitting as much might “undermine political efforts to get necessary and overdue support for parents from the government and workplaces.” In their 2024 treatise What Are Children For?, authors Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg wonder whether all the literary emphasis on motherhood’s burdens might have something to do with our precipitously declining birth rate. They sound a note of caution: If you make parenthood sound awful, people won’t want to be parents.

These titles aside, the falling birth rate has not been arrested. Neither has a vague, data-backed sense that motherhood is misery making, bad for your pocketbook, and bad for your body. In 2024, the surgeon general put out a warning about parents’ declining mental health. In 2025, The New York Times released a video series titled “ ‘Motherhood Should Come with a Warning Label,’ ” in which tearful women express both their love for their kids and their abiding frustration: “Having children cost me around $750,000 in career earnings.” “The system is set up to shaft women.”

Of course (of course!) there’s some truth to these assessments. Since having my son, I’ve felt fuzzier at work and find my focus interrupted by family to-dos. There are new pajamas to buy and slow-cooker soups to start. Our part-time nanny is texting me asking where the other box of size-6 diapers is located. Or do we want to switch to pull-ups? We’ve had some terrible nights of stomach flu and an allergy scare that ended in the ER, and that’s all with the caveat that my husband and I are fortunate, with lots of support and a healthy child. Not everyone has that.

So yes, there are challenges. We mothers worry that if we don’t talk enough about the challenges, we won’t get the support (and sometimes the slack) that we need.

But I also think that we focus on the hard parts of parenting because it’s easier to talk about suffering as a burden than a blessing. Obviously, it stinks to clean up after carsickness, and it’s stressful to be running late again because someone won’t put on their shoes. For me, it’s easier to describe this torment (and receive sympathy) than it is to get at how satisfying it can be to rock a child who is hot with fever then lay him in his crib at the end of an exhausting day—the deep contentment of that self-giving. It sounds like masochism to explain how the pain is often part of the pleasure. And yet that paradox is the very essence of discipleship to Jesus: losing in order to gain, emptying and being filled.

I know where God is in suffering. In the wee hours, in the ER, he’s near. The Lord accompanies his people through dark valleys and deep waters; his Spirit soothes the brokenhearted and uplifts the downtrodden (Isa. 43:2; Ps. 23:4; 34:18). Grieving and put-upon people are blessed (Matt. 5:4; 1 Pet. 4:14). None of their pain is for nothing. Persevering amid trials—imprisonment, persecution, estrangement—garners the sufferer a crown of life (James 1:12). Troubles lend themselves to eternal glory (2 Cor. 4:17). Bad things work together for good (Rom. 8:28). Difficulties refine our faith, nestle it in the coals, and burnish it to gold (1 Pet. 1:6–7).

This teaching is good news for people in bad situations. It has been good news for me in the past, and it will be good news for me again. But is it good news for me now? If “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Rom. 5:3–4), then what are my afternoons at the park producing?

Blessed are the mourners, the hungry, the persecuted. Blessed are the joyous? That’s not in Jesus’ list. I don’t mean joy in spite of, joy in the midst of, joy in the dark valley.

I mean joy at the park next to the stone turtle. Joy in the morning after a toddler has slept all night in small pajamas and now is eating a stack of banana pancakes. Joy that is straightforward, delightful, funny, and so often, praise God, uncomplicated.

Now it is summer, and we walk around the backyard with a hose, watering herbs and tomatoes. The slides at the park are hot to the touch. We take trips to the public pool instead: tepid water, the acid smell of chlorine, my son’s face tilted back, droplets in his eyelashes.

This time feels tenuous, like something I must safeguard—perhaps even from the Lord, who may intrude with bad news, an accident, or a grief to teach me something tough, make me wise, or build my character.

Illustration by Nicole Xu

That’s not the way to approach our good God, whose ways are not our ways, who works all things together for our good, who is generous. I know that. But in my all-too-human framework, I shy away from suffering, mistakenly understanding it at as the only way the Lord offers his lessons. I’m a solider who doesn’t want her draft number called; I’m a student hoping she isn’t asked to put what she’s learned into practice.

Sometimes I catch myself as an ingrate, annoyed with my son’s whining. He tries to dive back into the pool when it’s time to leave. He digs fistfuls of dirt from the base of the bougainvillea. I huff and puff and then hope God didn’t see. No, Lord, really, I know how good I have it. Please, please don’t take it away from me.

All this happiness lends itself to anxious generosity. Perhaps I can earn what I’ve been given after all. I wash and fold hand-me-down baby clothes for new parents in our church. I lend out the bassinet. I put cards in the mail for birthdays I usually forget. I cook for meal trains and shelter dinners, marinating chicken in the early morning hours, chopping vegetables once my son has gone to sleep.

On the one hand, this feels like a right response. God has blessed me so abundantly that there’s simply nothing to be done but to turn around and bless others, to “abound in every good work,” having all that I need (2 Cor. 9:8).

And yet all the donating and chopping and stamp licking also feel like fear. Like a boat throwing dead weight overboard, I toss my blessings at others, desperate not to sink. God, don’t you see that I’m living up to this? I’m being good. Please don’t take it away from me.

At evening services, the summer sun still in the sky outside the sanctuary, I pray a compline prayer.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

“Shield the joyous.” What a relief. Other Christians have felt this way. Reveling in their romances, gathered with friends, struck by natural beauty, they could only say, “Safeguard this.” Please, please don’t take it away from me. That may not be a theologically astute prayer—God isn’t capricious like that. But it’s an understandable one.

In her book Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren writes about anticipating a new baby after two miscarriages, trying to hold off celebration: “I hedge my bets, wait for the other shoe to drop, and protect myself from pain by avoiding the wonder and beauty before me. I try to shield myself from disappointment by not embracing joy.”

I understand the inclination. Some part of me knows that my son is vulnerable to sickness and death. (God forbid.) At the very least, he will move out of my house someday. (God willing!)

But rather than resist the vulnerability of joy, I keep giving myself over to it in fits of risk. Amid the day-to-day pleasures, there enters in that deeper ache.

At another park down the road, older children use broken-up cardboard boxes to slide down a hill, and my son tries too. We notice a “ladybug” and watch games of “basketball” and trace the path of an “airplane” and then a “bird,” “caw caw!” I want to keep his new words in the air forever. And yet I know they will be replaced.

There it is. The sense, even when I am most alive to the moment, that all this is fleeting, that my joy won’t ever be satisfying this side of eternity, so long as children grow up and summer cools to fall. C. S. Lewis describes this sensation in his conversion narrative, Surprised by Joy:

Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic [in common with pleasure]; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

For so many of these months, I’ve been happy—and oftentimes that happinesshas proved conducive to joy, fertile as the compost growing our lettuces. If joy is the river running through the Christian life, happiness at its best pulls me to the banks and demands that I dip my feet in the current. Happiness is ice cream and sun-warmed towels pilly from washing; joy is “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” of the one from whom they came, like a hand gesturing toward the moon.

Put another way, happinessis mine for now, as I carve cherry flesh from the pits and wander the fields in the evenings, tracing the trampled steps of a small pair of tennis shoes. Happiness is a gift. But joyis my portion. It is that feeling: Please don’t take it away from me. And then, rightly directed, it is the turn: I know, God, that even when these days end, you will still be God. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

And it is greediness. In the pool, amid the shrieks, getting sunburned shoulders, all I want is more. “The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting,” writes Lewis. “There, to have is to want and to want is to have.”

In September, we visit a different park, where children have left behind buckets and shovels. My son takes these as his birthright. He opens a tap, lets water flow through concrete rivulets. Now it’s fall, and soon it will be winter, and because we live in California, I can’t make a big deal about that. A little rain, that’s all. But still—things will change.

I am pregnant with our second child—an absolute blessing, and yet a little sadness. These days spent with just my son are numbered. (God willing!) We’ll count it all gain. But that doesn’t mean something won’t be lost.

Take heart, encourages Warren: “Christians unapologetically embrace that good, earthy gifts bring joy, even as we also proclaim an enduring joy that remains even when all pleasures are burned away. To practice joy then is to seek the source of all that is lovely and bright.”

Maybe that’s what these hours outside have been: the good, earthy gifts. The happiness. And then, seeking their source as a discipline, craning my head through the chlorinated droplets. To “rejoice in the Lord always” (Phil. 4:4)—not just when I am sowing with tears (Ps. 126:5) but when I am sun-kissed and cheerful, which can be more difficult. Happiness can bring you to the river’s edge—or it can make you believe that you don’t need the river at all, that you’ll quench your thirst from another source.

Understood rightly, “Shield the joyous” isn’t a petition for endless watermelon afternoons. It means to shield the joy itself as a reality independent of circumstances, even when our lives slip into affliction. It is a prayer to clear up the river, to let it flow freely, cutting through any accumulated silt. Warren writes, “We pray that God himself would shield us, that as lesser delights dissolve in the face of pain, we might slowly find where enduring joy lies.”

Illustration by Nicole Xu

I start and end these autumn days putting apples in the oatmeal to soften, planning a near-2-year-old’s train-themed birthday party. Christmas twinkles on the horizon. By the time this essay is in print, spring again, we pray he will have a healthy sister.

So much of Christian teaching on joy emphasizes its durability—its indifference to outward conditions, its steadfastness to a steadfast God. That’s right. There’s also its bittersweetness—its falling short as long as Christ has not yet come. That’s right too.

But Lewis, defining joy as a “kind of unhappiness or grief,” is too dour for me. At least today.

I don’t want to hide from suffering. I don’t want to marinate chicken out of anxiety. I don’t want my joy to be as fleeting as the summer, a river that dries up at first heat. I don’t want to be naive, seeing fleeting things rather than our constant God.

But I also want to enjoy the gifts I’ve been given rather than always anticipating the other shoe dropping, the change in the weather, the unexpected pain. I want to revel in the joy of the Lord not just because I know I’ll need it in the trials ahead—I will—but because I get to have it now.

In short, I want to talk about how good it is to be a mom. What a privilege. How I spend my days awestruck by my child.

“Whenever I feel the presence of God, then my heart is lifted up, and I see more positively into the future of the coming of God. Thus, hope is awakened in me,” theologian Jürgen Moltmann said in an interview about joy with fellow theologian Miroslav Volf. “Hope is for me anticipated joy, as anxiety is anticipated terror.”

Maybe the relationship can go the other way. If hope anticipates joy, then maybe joy, even joy that comes not from suffering but from happiness, can make us hopeful. Maybe we can savor the foretaste instead of always craving more sweetness.

We hold the cherries on our tongues, hold the small hand in ours. “Please don’t take it away from me” becomes “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you that this is what is promised.”

That timeworn phrase already but not yet emphasizes a gap. Not yet we understand all too well. But joy always precedes. Already, little boy. Already, little girl. Already, here with the two of you.

Kate Lucky is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Shield the Joyous".

- More from Kate Lucky

Theology

‘We’re God’s Guerilla Warriors’

Interview by Ashley Hales

Theologian Fleming Rutledge sits down with CT’s Ashley Hales to discuss the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and how Christianity isn’t self-help.

Illustration by Paige Stampatori

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s talk about your magnum opus, The Crucifixion. How has the Cross been central to your own pastoral call and sustaining of ministry for the last 50 years?

Well, I’ve had two ministries. The chief one was preaching, but I also have done pastoral ministry. And in both my roles, I’ve seen the one thing about Christianity that makes it different from everything else—and that calls for a response—is that this man, whom we worship as the Son of God and Lord of the universe, gave himself up deliberately to the worst, most degrading, most torturous, most public sort of death that the human brain has ever come up with.

This is not sufficiently recognized in today’s preaching and teaching about Christianity. We’re all over the place with “spirituality,” whatever that is (you can quote that), but focusing on “Jesus Christ and him crucified,” that’s very specific [1 Cor. 2:2]. It’s specific about a human being. Who was he? Why was he? Why is he even remembered? I’ve been making a statement about this for at least 30 years, and I keep expecting somebody to correct me and give me a contrary fact: If Jesus of Nazareth had not been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him.

Crucified people disappeared. That was the purpose of crucifixion—to annihilate them, to erase them from the human record with the most degrading mode of public “disappearing” someone that has ever been imagined. And I mean that almost as literally as I can. The Cross and Resurrection are one event—you can’t have one without the other. If Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we never would have heard of him. He would have been eliminated by means of crucifixion. Not by being dead, but by being dead in that particular way invented by the Romans to erase a person’s humanity. So we must ask, What does that mean? Why did God choose this?

As we think about the ways we can minimize the Cross, either by sanitizing it or even overextending it into a spectacle, how can faithful Christian preachers talk about the Cross rightly? In your book, you discuss metaphors building throughout the Old Testament to talk about what is happening during the Crucifixion. How do we begin to give the Cross its due without falling into either of those ditches: minimizing it through sentimentality or sensationalizing its violence?

I think that the nonliturgical churches have a problem, because there is no set time of year which requires the preacher to go deeply into the richness and variety of the word pictures on the Crucifixion. It’s quite possible to go directly to Easter. I don’t know how to change that. Classes could help. I think every serious Christian should be able to go to a class about the Cross, meeting weekly for two or three months. It seems to me that would be almost required for Christian formation.

Christians who are serious about delving into the profoundest heart of our faith need to encourage their pastors—if they’re not pastors themselves—to teach them, to conduct classes and study groups about what the Bible says about the death of the Messiah.

I don’t know of any book that quite attempts what I attempted in dealing with the large number of themes that we find in the Scriptures. There are so many imaginative attempts by the writers to probe into the depth and heart of what is happening on the cross. We cannot and should not and must not pin down just one meaning, like blood sacrifice for instance, or penal substitutionary atonement. While these meanings are true, narrowing to just one meaning has been a terrible mistake, robbing us of the richness of the biblical witness.

How have American evangelical churches that tend to be nondenominational or nonliturgical missed out on something about the Cross based on some of that history you mention?

It is a profound problem in our culture when there is this triumphalist appropriation of the name of Jesus Christ for political ends. It’s the oversimplification of the meaning of the name of Jesus Christ, so that people can have T-shirts that say “Jesus Christ is my Savior” at the same time that they are violently—or if not violently then with verbal violence—assaulting Christians who have a different way of looking at current issues, like immigration, welcoming the stranger, and offering mercy for those who are in desperate need. These things are central to Christian faith, but they are completely absent in a discussion dominated by Christian nationalism.

I’ve noticed that a number of people, most famously Tom Holland, have written about how until the rise of Christianity, it was the law of the jungle everywhere: The powerful dominate and the weak fare as they must. We’ve just heard recently from a presidential adviser, Stephen Miller, describing there’s only been one rule: the law of the jungle. No mention of the fact that before Jesus Christ’s preaching and teaching, his death and resurrection, and the subsequent transformation of Western civilization, we didn’t know anything else. The Roman Empire did not know anything about mercy to the poor.

Christianity brought something quite new into the human picture: mercy to the downtrodden, to the hopeless, to the powerless, to the forgotten, the despised, the exiled. Those are precisely the people that Jesus made a point of reaching out to (not that he didn’t hesitate confronting the big shots also). Today, we’re just allowing his name to be bandied about on T-shirts and baseball caps without telling people who he really was.

I think people have been seduced by this idea of “being spiritual” as a “religious” way of getting what you desire, or of entering into a “different state of consciousness” or “making the world a better place.” I don’t think the church is doing anywhere near enough to simply teach who Jesus was and bear witness to who he was. There are robust ways to identify Jesus as present in power—and in preaching and teaching and ministry and mission—that are better and more transformative as a society as a whole than just calling his name with a soft voice and singing a song to him.

What can be done for the American Christian church to take Jesus for who he is?

I think that those of us who are concerned about our failure to bear witness to Jesus must all boldly say, one human being to another, “Have you met Jesus? Do you know Jesus? I know him. I want you to meet him. Let me tell you about him.” We need to do that. Being an old-line Episcopalian, I have a lot of trouble with that myself. Thank God I had a Southern Baptist grandmother, so I do it from the pulpit much more easily.

That’s what the growth of the church depends on: that more people should meet Jesus. That more people should come to know Jesus in his fullness—as some of the older evangelicals say, to know him personally. The trouble with that was that it became stylized, reduced into a sort of rite of passage, so that to know Jesus personally meant you had to have a specific wham-bang kind of encounter with Jesus. (I’ve never had one of those, but I’ve known him since I was a tiny child because of my grandmother.)

Knowing Jesus is the work of a lifetime, like getting to know the person you’re married to—except not. Jesus is other. He is one of us, yet he is other than us. He does not have any of our foibles and faults. Was he irritating the way one’s spouse can be irritating? No, he was irritating in another way. He was irritating in a way that got him killed, but at the same time, people who were poor, incurable, and untouchable came to him.

So in our own times of feeling hopeless and helpless and untouchable, we come to him, because he has already come to us. He promised us he would never leave us. He promised he would always be with us, even to the end of the world. And unlike human beings, he’s the only person who can keep his promises.

Everything about Jesus should be about promise. It all rises out of promise, carries through in promise, and will be ultimately confirmed in promise, the only promise that can ever be made, that can be kept: the promises of Jesus.

The Resurrection, the harbinger of the promise, is an event that’s never happened before and until the last days will never happen again. Because it is of God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Resurrection is something out of nowhere. It’s because it comes from the Creator who creates out of nowhere. If God created the universe out of nothing, he can create new believers out of nothing.

I want to go back to what you said about the Resurrection and Crucifixion being one event.

If it hadn’t been for the Resurrection, we would never have heard of the Crucifixion. But also, the Resurrection being a unique event in the history of the world says something definitive and final about God, something that eludes human understanding or ability to replicate, duplicate, or even explain. That’s why it’s so difficult to preach on Easter Day. It’s beyond imagination.

There has never been anything like the Resurrection before, and there is never going to be anything like it again until the last trumpet. And we don’t know how to talk about something like that. The only thing we can do is to try to go in the pulpit and be amazed. Just be amazed.

I want to be a little more clear. We have been so wrapped up in everything from self-help to wellness, spirituality, these modern fads. The very word spirituality is foreign to the Bible. So much of what counts as “spirituality” is a way of talking about faith with language based on the self, the development of the self, and care given to the self. That is not the way that Christianity unfolds. The self must indeed respond to the call of Jesus to be among his friends and disciples—this is not incidental, but the response of the self is not central either. Life changes when you meet Jesus. It changes your life—radically—but it doesn’t change your life just to make you a better you. It changes your life to make you a light going outward to others who are in the darkness (“Let my little light shine”).

So it’s not about you. Emphasis on self-growth, self-attention, self-care—that’s antithetical to Christian faith. Christ shows us the way: that in losing ourselves we find ourselves. Our true self is in relationship with the Lord Jesus. There, we will know our true selves and be freed from the false self that is enslaved by the Enemy. I haven’t talked about the Enemy, but that’s a very important part of the message. Know that there is an enemy. Jesus is the victor over the Enemy. And we are his guerilla fighters.

Fleming Rutledge is a preacher, teacher, and best-selling author. Her book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ is considered a modern classic.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Theologian Fleming Rutledge sits down with CT’s Ashley Hales to discuss the crucifixion, Resurrection and how Christianity isn’t self-help.".

- More from Ashely Hales

‘People Need to Be Reminded of God’s Abba-like Care’

Kate Lucky

Responses to our November/December issue.

Source image / Envato

Rather than calling God our Father, “we’ve come to prefer a picture of God as good ol’ Dad,” writes theologian Kirsten Sanders in the essay “God Is Not Your Dad.” And “by seeking to make God more accessible and emotionally warm, we have ended up with a picture of God that resembles a great man in the sky more than it does the God of the Bible.”

One Instagram commenter agreed with Sanders’ diagnosis of a problem with how we picture God but disagreed with her dad angle. “The solution to our confusion is to restore a more well-rounded idea of what a dad should be from the demonstrated character of God,” the commenter wrote. “A good dad has authority and requires respect. … But if we saw a father saying to his kids, ‘I’m your father, not your dad,’ I think we would be appropriately concerned about the emotional health of those relationships. A good father is warm, loving, approachable, and familiar with his kids.” Another commenter seconded the critique, saying God “is both the Father, whom I revere, and my daddy, whose lap I can climb into whenever I please.”

“God is, of course, not only dread and acts of awe,” Sanders acknowledges in her essay. “He is also provision and sustaining care. But God cannot be one without the other. That God is present to provide care for the widow and the orphan depends on God’s ability to act and to intervene, at all times and in all places.”

Perhaps different Christians, reasoned one Facebook commenter, need to focus on different aspects of God’s character in different seasons: “Some people need to be reminded of God’s fatherly majesty. Some people need to be reminded of God’s Abba-like care.”

Kate Lucky, senior editor, features.

They Led at Saddleback’s Hispanic Ministry. ICE Said They Were Safe.

Thank you so much for the heartbreakingly revealing article about the Gonzalezes. Most Americans do not personally know anyone in such a situation, and many have no idea that this kind of thing is happening every day. When we hear administration representatives continue to claim that they are going after “the worst of the worst,” I hope articles such as this one will help folks realize the truth. The government is going after the easiest of the easy, people who have been living here for a long time, contributing to their communities—not hiding but complying with the rules they have been given for many years. Suddenly, when they report as they have always obediently done, they get arrested. I pray for the thousands of families devastated like the one in the article. And I pray for major changes in the years to come, for Christian leaders to be at the forefront in turning our nation back toward compassion.

William Fenstermaker, Cornwall, PA

This article is incredibly eye-opening to the complexities of legal immigration. I probably know more than the average US citizen (fourth-generation Texan, been on several Mexico mission trips, anti-trafficking advocacy work), and even I was dumbfounded by the underbelly of immigration swindlers. Thank you for reminding us two things can be true: We need more secure borders, and we need immigration policy reform.

@dr.christinacrenshaw

I hope they are doing well. I hope they choose to pursue all legal avenues that might be available to them. But asking what we gain from enforcing the law seems odd.

@johnmcgowan

Sounds like Colombia got some great missionaries.

@thejakegiffin

The ‘Unreached’ Aren’t Over There

A pastor friend with a real zeal for evangelism said to me that it never made sense to him that while he was taking off from his local Midwest airport to fly to some distant land to reach the lost, his plane was passing over thousands and even millions of people who had never heard the gospel.

Dan Edelen

From its online publication: A Declaration of Principles

Thank you for your clear and thoughtful declaration of principles. I heartily agree with, and affirm, your statement. This thoughtful, clear, and reasoned decla-ration is sorely needed and immensely refreshing in our world today.

Kathy Mast, Richmond, VA

As a retired pastor in the Wesleyan tradition, I used to occasionally take a look at CT. First, it was the paper copies in my seminary’s library back in 1988–91. I had a positive view of it. Some time later, when I’d look at it online, things seemed to go south. It was like I was supposed to feel guilty about being a white male. It turned out that those were the years when Mark Galli was editor. An admission from you that CT strayed pointlessly and foolishly into woke territory (a far cry from the original intention of Billy Graham that the magazine be a conservative counterpart to the liberal The Christian Century) would go a long way with me. That would be much better than merely asserting that you print various viewpoints.

Dean Coonradt, Sherwood, OR

I might be one of the few Indonesians who frequent CT’s website almost daily. I noticed the shifts to more global coverage. Last year, after I completed reading Mindy Belz’s piece on Congo’s wars and their victims, I was sobbing and praying at the same time. CT raised the awareness and allowed us to weep with those who weep. Thank you for standing with global evangelicals. Thank you for fairly representing the views of the wider body of Christ.

Mario Kaseh, Indonesia

Corrections: In the January/February article “Nursing Home Revival,” Christine Hill’s name was misspelled as Christina. Stephanie Smith first came on staff at Twilight Hope in 2013. Mike, the 90-year-old Bible study participant, was not abused at his Catholic school. Jennifer Bute, the source who spoke with him, said he described his own experience as poor treatment, though others shared stories of abuse with her. Also, in the article “Tarot Cards, Shrines, and Priestesses,” Day Sibley’s step-grandmother received a cancer diagnosis, not her stepmother.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Responses to Our November/December Issue".

- More from Kate Lucky

Theology

What the Iran War Could Do to Your Soul

Russell Moore

Columnist

War, in every case, is hell. Let’s watch out for ourselves, lest it also make us hellish.

Plumes of smoke rise following reported explosions in Tehran on March 1, 2026.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Getty

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

The United States and Israel are at war with Iran. Put aside, for a moment, whether you or I support or oppose this. That’s a massively important debate with massively important implications for the lives and deaths of countless persons, for the meaning of the US Constitution, and for the Iranian people. When I say “put aside” the debate, I don’t mean permanently; I mean just for this moment. Right now, I don’t want to talk about just war theory, Middle East policy, or even the future of the human race. I want to talk about you.

We don’t know if this war, like the last one Israel fought with Iran, will be over in 12 days; if it will last five weeks as President Trump projected; or if, like the Iraq War, it will grind on for years. We also don’t know whether we will forget in a few years the images we see on our screens right now or if we will have them etched in our minds as the beginnings of an era-shaping war. We don’t know.

What we do know, though, is that wars tend to shape more than just nation-states and historical trends. They tend to shape each of us too, sometimes subtly, by redefining what feels normal and what doesn’t. And that brings with it not just geopolitical risk but personal temptation.

This morning I was rereading a speech that a then-young Wendell Berry gave against the Vietnam War in 1968. Berry spoke about what that war, which he opposed, was doing to civilians in Vietnam and to American ideals. But he went further. He gave the example of a war that everyone in that room likely would have seen (as I do) as a just one: World War II. Despite the fact that we “fought on the right side and with good reasons,” he said, even necessary wars tend to “serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.”

If he was right on that point, and I think he was, we ought to pay careful attention not only to whether we support or oppose this war with Iran but also why and how. That’s because what turns out to be most persuasive to us is what we take for granted—what we assume when the course of the world seems like “just the way things are” and we can’t even see the moral options and thus ignore them.

So what might be the temptations for you and me?

The first is bloodlust. As most of you know, I am not a pacifist. Unlike my Anabaptist ancestors, I do think there are times when war is morally justified. I wrote each of the Southern Baptist Convention’s resolutions supporting the War on Terror and the Iraq War in the early years of this century. And yet I look back and see in at least my immediate reaction to September 11 a warlike spirit that went beyond patriotism. As we were watching on the twin towers fall, a friend of mine yelled, “We should bomb Afghanistan until nothing is left there but glass!” I felt that too. And bound up with that feeling was a desire for not just public justice but also personal revenge. It felt good to feel that pulse of vengeance. That’s why it is so dangerous.

Those of us who believe in the possibility of just wars should guard ourselves more closely than others because we can easily forget that even when war is the only option, it is always awful. The awfulness of war is especially hard to see in a time when battles seem to us like video games played by other people. If war gives us a charge of delight, something is happening to us.

The second temptation is what the people of old called sloth. That doesn’t mean laziness or inactivity but numbness and deadness. One of the scariest aspects of these hostilities is the way so many people—including Christians—seem to see them as just another part of the cycle of history. And if recent patterns persist, Americans will soon grow bored of hearing about this war and want to move on to other things. Maybe with this war, we can. But sooner or later, there will be a war where we won’t be able to move on.

Wars and rumors of wars ought not to panic us, Jesus said (Matt. 24:6), but we also ought to remember that they are birth pains of the destiny of the entire cosmos. As C. S. Lewis told students at the University of Oxford during World War II, war ought to remind us of what is always true but almost never perceived: We are mortal. We are going to die. Nothing around us is as permanent and stable as it appears. Even if we are not in danger of being drafted or fighting, we ought to pray as those whose lives are a vapor (James 4:14).

And the third temptation is duplicity, and by that I mean something at the very root of the word, what Jesus’ brother called double-mindedness (1:8). We tend to think of a “double-minded” person as someone who can’t make up his mind, but there’s something else there: a disconnect between the conscience and the intellect. In our own time, this reveals itself perhaps most obviously as what some call tribalism.

There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind. As a matter of fact, when our information changes, it would be immoral not to change our minds. We grow and change. I’m not sure my mind would be different about Iraq knowing only what I knew then. But knowing what I know now, I would never have thought about it the same way.

War tends to reveal our inner lives. Right now, some who told us they were “America First,”—defined as, among other things, avoiding Middle Eastern wars—are now cheering the bombing of Iran or even justifying a full-scale invasion and occupation. Now if someone changes his or her mind after being persuaded—after someone makes a case that the previous viewpoint was wrong—that is no flaw. An entire generation of America First isolationists changed their minds (and rightly so, in my view) after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But if people change their minds just because the leader of their side is for something and those on the other side are against it, they ought to see that they have outsourced their consciences. They are no longer citizens but subjects.

And the same is true for those who would have gladly supported the killing of the Iranian supreme leader if it were done by President Barack Obama or by Kamala Harris but now would be secretly disappointed if the operation is anything other than a disaster. This is not a political campaign. Real human lives—and lots of them—are at stake.

Now, it’s not wrong for someone to trust the character or intellect of some leaders more than others. That’s reasonable. It’s also not wrong if you oppose this war and would have supported it if it had been done the way the Constitution mandates: through the consent of the people’s representatives. The same is true if you oppose it because you are confused by the varying reasons our leaders have given as to why we’re doing it, and doing it now.

But if you would be irritated if the war ends quickly and if the Iranian people are free, because it would help the image of people we oppose or because it would take away the opportunity to say “I told you so” to some really obnoxious people, you are in moral peril.

Some of us are more vulnerable to some of these temptations than to others. Some of you might not be especially given to any of them. (If so, pray for the rest of us.) But the quickest way to yield to a temptation is not to see it at all. “Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12, ESV) is as true in wartime as it is in peace.

War, in every case, is hell. Let’s watch out for ourselves, lest it also make us hellish.

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Ideas

Ideologies Don’t Save, But We Act Like They Do

Domonic Purviance

Even the most admirable societal aims become spiritual distortions when we treat them as ultimate.

The Tower of Babel by Lucas van Valckenborch

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

In City of God, Augustine defines a people or tribe as “an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of love.”

Augustine had in view the inevitable tendency of human beings to elevate something to an object of adoration—so much so that it shapes how they understand the world and defines their sense of shared identity.

This tendency helps us understand the seemingly intractable and often-contentious divisions we see in our own culture so many centuries later, especially along ideological lines. What separates people groups from one another—and distinguishes communities, factions, and even nations—is not merely their shared beliefs, institutions, or cultural norms. More fundamentally, it is the objects of their common love: where they collectively place their hopes, aspirations, confidence, and trust. It is, in the deepest sense, what they worship.

Not all objects of worship are equal. To set our hearts on created things rather than the Creator is what Scripture identifies as idolatry. We are most familiar with ancient forms of idolatry, in which worshipers crafted idols from wood or stone, often representing elements of creation such as the sun, fertility, or beauty. But idols can also take more subtle and abstract forms—financial success, social prestige, material possessions, or political power—each rooted in some aspect of God’s created order.

As longtime political science professor David Koyzis suggests in his book, Political Visions and Illusions: A Survey and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies, this latter form of idolatry is “so oblique and less overtly experienced as such” that it often goes unrecognized for what it truly is.

Precisely this kind of idolatry lies at the root of many of the ideological conflicts that dominate modern culture. Contemporary ideologies, as Koyzis argues, are “modern manifestations of that ancient phenomenon called idolatry, complete with their own stories of sin and redemption.” Like their historic counterparts, these ideologies take something in creation and elevate it to an object of worship, ascribing to it salvific and redemptive qualities. Instead of telling the biblical story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, ideologies offer rival narratives about what has gone wrong with the world and how it can finally be set right.

Classical and social liberal ideologies, for example, tend to elevate the autonomous individual as the highest good, defining the path to human flourishing as liberation from any force that restricts the progressive pursuit of individual self-interest.

Socialist traditions center equality as society’s ultimate aim while defining injustice chiefly in terms of social and economic disparity. Nationalist movements locate the fundamental threat in the erosion of cultural or political boundaries by the incursion of outsiders and seek salvation through national sovereignty and protectionism. Conservative traditions often prioritize inherited institutions and social practices, believing the preservation of traditional norms and values is the only thing that can save society.

It is not difficult to see why adherents of these ideologies so frequently collide with one another. They begin with different diagnoses of what is most wrong with the world, imagine different sources of salvation, and envision fundamentally different accounts of what a healed society should look like.

To recognize that ideologies function as rival objects of devotion is not to suggest that they are equally just, harmful, or destructive in their social consequences, especially in their most extreme manifestations. Scripture itself recognizes degrees of evil and harm. But it does mean that even the most admirable societal aims become spiritual distortions when we treat them as ultimate.

The deeper weakness all ideologies share is their inherent reductionism. Every idol simplifies human life to secure unfettered devotion. Idols convince adherents to place all their hopes in limited worldviews devoid of any nuance or complexity. They narrow the world’s brokenness to limited sets of problems and elevate partial truths into comprehensive solutions. In the end, ideologies make promises that their narrow moral visions cannot fulfill.

Still, the appeal of ideologies lies in the offer of simplicity and a clear path to deliverance at little perceived cost—so long as we fully embrace their vision of the world. As with the idols of the ancient world, devotion to an ideology always extracts a price. False gods always demand a sacrifice. They require us to elevate one aspect of creation while devaluing others, and in doing so, we sacrifice something essential about our shared humanity.

For example, when we idolize individual freedom, obligations to others appear as threats. When equality becomes absolute, we see particularity and meritocratic distribution as manifestations of injustice.

As the late pastor Tim Keller often observed, idols are not usually inherently bad: They are good things twisted into ultimate things. Individual freedom, equality, tradition, and national belonging are genuinely good. They are part of God’s created order and deserve serious moral attention. But it is a distortion to believe that any one of them, elevated above all others, can heal what is most deeply broken in the human condition. They cannot—not even close.

Koyzis presses this further. With their competing objects of devotion, redemptive stories, charismatic prophets, and loyal followers, modern ideologies, in his view, increasingly resemble rival religions. To commit ourselves fully to an ideological vision—to allow its narrative to become the primary lens through which we interpret the problems and solutions of society—is not merely to adopt a set of social convictions. It is to become devotees of the idol that stands at the center of that vision. Thus, the ideological battles of our culture act less like a conflict over competing ideas and more like a war between worshipers of conflicting idols.

Scripture’s warnings against idolatry are among its most persistent and urgent themes. From the command given to Israel to “have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3) to the apostle John’s closing exhortation—“Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21)—the biblical concern is unwavering.

God’s prophets warned Israel that life among the surrounding nations would bring constant pressure to adopt their gods. The church, living within an increasingly pluralistic and ideologically saturated culture, faces a strikingly similar danger: the temptation to adopt the dominant idols of the age under the guise of political expediency or moral urgency.

Christianity is incompatible with ideological absorption and co-option because the Christian heart cannot belong to any love or object of worship other than the true and living God. The gospel insists that the deepest problem confronting humanity is not merely the loss of freedom, the persistence of inequality, or the erosion of tradition—serious as these realities are. The fundamental problem is sin, of which idolatry is both a symptom and a source. And the ultimate remedy is not found within any part of the created order, whether in human ingenuity, ideological reform, or a favored social policy. It is found in a Savior who entered the world because of our weakness and who alone can restore creation to God’s purposes.

None of this means ideologies have no value in public life. It means their value is greatest when we do not treat them as ultimate. They have a place—but not first place.

Nor does this mean Christians should settle for merely aligning with the lesser evil when it comes to ideologies. The lesser evil is still evil. It is still idolatry; it still falls short of the kingdom of God.

Christians have a responsibility to subordinate every ideological narrative to the truth found in the gospel as they approach the world. Doing so does not remove believers from civic engagement; it frees them to engage in public life without allegiance to any political agenda, without conflating policy prescriptions with the kingdom of God. Precisely because Christianity is not bound to any single ideological vision, it can bridge divisions rather than becoming another faction within them.

When the apostle Paul addressed the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in Athens in Acts 17, he began by recognizing what was true in their thinking before exposing its limits. Christians are called to a similar posture today. We can affirm the genuine moral insights embedded in ideological traditions—freedom, equality, tradition, and national sovereignty—while refusing to make any of them ultimate.

In doing so, Christians can support political aims and practical solutions without submitting to the deeper narratives of salvation ideologies promise. We can become both a bridge between competing worldviews and a loving rebuke to the impulse to treat partial answers as ultimate truths. Such an environment creates common ground where reasonable dialogue and compromise can occur. This is how politics and social reform work best.

Christianity exerts its greatest influence in public life when it resists being captured by the limited worldview of modern forms of idolatry. Only from that vantage point can believers retain the clarity they need to address the real challenges facing our societies—while waiting in hope for the restoration only Christ can bring and no ideology can ultimately deliver.

Domonic D. Purviance is a pastor at Cornerstone Church in Atlanta. He cofounded King Culture, a nonprofit organization that equips men to reflect the selfless leadership of Christ.

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From its online publication: A Declaration of Principles

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Ideologies Don’t Save, But We Act Like They Do

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From its online publication: A Declaration of Principles

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