Sorting out Truth and Lies After Divorce

An excerpt from This Was Never the Plan: Walking With God Through the Heartache of Divorce.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, The Good Book Company

After my divorce, I questioned everything about myself, so whenever outsiders implied that I was even partly to blame for what happened, it hit a nerve. I still remember reading an article weeks after my ex had left that made me even more insecure, and that may or may not have inspired my purchase of a dartboard.

The author said, “After talking with thousands of married couples, I have seldom found a loving, submissive woman with a husband who is abusive or immoral.” He went on to encourage women to suffer with a quiet and patient spirit under any type of mistreatment. The article used Scripture to defend this position, sending me into a rage and solidifying my fear that most Christians were silently judging me for being divorced.

Please know I am not against submission. But biblical submission doesn’t mean putting up with abuse, and a lack of submission cannot be the underlying cause of a spouse’s abusive or immoral behavior. My ex felt that I modeled biblical submission and encouraged me to give talks on it, which I did. But my submission did not save my marriage.

At the same time, I wasn’t blameless in my marriage. Far from it. I acted self-righteously, believing I was never wrong. I said unkind things with a condescending tone. I was critical when I could have been compassionate. And that’s just for starters.

That’s the tension—discerning what is and isn’t actually ours to own. Some of us tend to blame ourselves for everything, constantly replaying what we could have done differently. Others of us instinctively excuse ourselves, shifting the blame elsewhere. And most of us swing between the two, unsure of what’s truly our responsibility. So how do we know what we are truly accountable for and what we’re unfairly carrying?

I had to learn to separate what was truly my responsibility from what others tried to put on me. Maybe you’ve wrestled with that too. Perhaps you’ve been unfairly blamed for things outside of your control, or maybe there are places where God is gently convicting you. We all need wisdom to see the difference. Divorce made me doubt myself, whispering lies that I was all too willing to believe. Here are some of the lies I told myself and the truths I needed to hear.

Lie: I wasn’t enough, or maybe I was too much.

I thought something was inherently wrong with me. Do you wonder whether your spouse would have kept their promises if you were more attractive, in better shape, smarter, more athletic, funnier, less needy, not so talkative, or more outgoing?

Truth: I am enough as I am.

My worth is not defined by my ex’s actions. We are all defined by God’s love for us. You are made in God’s image and are inherently valuable, deserving of love and respect, and God wants you to know that. Don’t let your spouse’s words or actions devalue you.

Lie: If I’d acted differently, this wouldn’t have happened.

I assumed it was somehow my fault. Perhaps you’re beating yourself up, wondering whether, if you’d been more attentive, supportive, or fun, or had taken on different responsibilities, this wouldn’t have happened.

Truth: You’re not responsible for someone else’s actions.

I wasn’t responsible for the choices my ex made. Everyone is accountable for their own actions, so don’t blame yourself or feel guilty about a situation you couldn’t control.

Lie: I failed to notice the warning signs or to fix the relationship.

I felt responsible for fixing our relationship. Perhaps you’re wondering whether you could have saved your marriage if you had noticed signs of trouble earlier and had initiated something—conversations, changes, counseling, or some other kind of intervention.

Truth: You cannot save a relationship by yourself.

Since marriage involves two people, I couldn’t put the burden solely on myself to figure out what was wrong. Each person needs to be honest about what’s going on with them. You might reflect on when your situation changed in order to learn from that, but don’t take responsibility for what isn’t yours to own.

Just identifying the lies and reading the truth won’t automatically change your perception. But it is a first step. Whenever you realize you are putting yourself down and accepting responsibility for what was never your fault, begin replacing it with the truth. Keep reminding yourself that you are a beloved child of God and ask him to keep putting what’s true in front of you.

I want you to heal from the pain you’ve endured. For me, an integral part of healing was looking at my own heart and seeing areas where I needed to change. We’ve all been wounded, and we’ve all wounded others. None of us are completely innocent.

If you’re like me, those words might make you feel defensive. Perhaps your ex deeply wronged you, but now somehow you’re the one under a microscope, with strangers and friends speculating on what you’re doing wrong. Please know that this chapter is not meant to elicit guilt or condemnation but rather to move you toward wholeness. Our sin entangles us—recognizing what’s holding us back will help us to grow and to heal.

Let’s begin by praying:

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
Point out anything in me that offends you
and lead me along the path of everlasting life. (Ps. 139:23–24, NLT)

Then, as you ask God to search your heart, you’ll likely become aware of ways in which you’ve been tempted to turn your back on God and find relief on your own. Satan wants to exploit your pain, pushing you into anger and bitterness or swamping you with guilt. He wants to pull you away from God when you need him most. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus told his disciples to pray that they wouldn’t fall into temptation (Luke 22:40). He knew that in the coming hours, days, and perhaps even years of suffering, each would have unique temptations that they needed to bring to God.

While everyone’s struggles are particular to their temperament and past experiences, we all contend with destructive ways in which we respond to ourselves, to others, and to God. Each destructive path will promise relief from the pain, but none will ever deliver. Only God can.

Vaneetha Rendall Risner is author of This Was Never the Plan: Walking with God Through the Heartache of Divorce. This article is a lightly edited excerpt from the book, published with permission from the Good Book Company.

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Books

Review

Put Not Your Trust in Techno-Kings

Jeffrey Bilbro

A new book on Elon Musk examines his wide influence, impressive achievements, and flawed ideology of centralization

Illustration by @‌richchane

Elon Musk may be the most polarizing figure in our polarized society—or at least Donald Trump’s only credible rival for that crown.

To show my cards at the outset, I’m not a fan. But reading Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, gave me a grudging respect for Musk’s real achievements. While venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proclaimed that “software is eating the world,” Musk pivoted to building rockets, cars, robots, tunnel-boring machines, and brain chips. His impressive record of making stuff—real stuff—sets him apart from most other tech titans.

Slobodian and Tarnoff are critical of Musk too, but they demonstrate how Muskism defines our economy much as Fordism shaped America’s 20th-century industrialization. Beneath the madness of Musk’s online trolling is a method we’d do well to understand.

But we should also recognize that, alongside its genuine successes, this method has a heresy at its core. As Christians, we await not a “Techno-king,” Musk’s official title at Tesla, but a Messiah whose kingdom is not of this world.

Muskism opens with its weakest chapter, which considers the motives that led Musk’s maternal grandfather to immigrate to South Africa, implying Elon shares his ancestor’s racism. While the authors acknowledge that Musk has a “conflicted” relationship with his birthplace and was “alienated by the machismo that dominated white South African society,” they still insist, “Apartheid South Africa was the cradle of Muskism.”

The chapter relies mostly on speculation about his childhood, and—given that Musk secured a Canadian passport and left the country at just 17 to avoid military service—it seems unwarranted to saddle him with the evils of apartheid.

The next three chapters are better. They chart the early years of Musk’s career and identify key features of his modus operandi.

First, when the dot-com crash led tech companies to consolidate markets to turn a profit, Musk “moved in the opposite direction.” He invested the millions he made selling his first startup into making rockets and colonizing Mars. You can’t disrupt the aerospace and automobile industries simply by spinning up new software; you have to solve difficult engineering and logistical challenges. Mars hasn’t happened (yet), but Musk’s SpaceX drastically reduced the cost to launch satellites and succeeded in ferrying astronauts where legacy giants like Boeing embarrassingly failed.

Second, while libertarian rhetoric is the norm in Silicon Valley, Musk tends to collaborate with the state and often profits by providing platforms for government infrastructure. Musk himself has noted how state investment creates opportunity for private profit, drawing a parallel between tech companies benefiting from federal defense research that led to the internet and aerospace companies benefiting from NASA’s research.

SpaceX got its start fulfilling government contracts, and Tesla survived hard times by landing a large government loan. While Tesla paid back that loan early, it continued to benefit from federal incentives lowering the price of electric cars, and SpaceX has thrived on NASA contracts and on selling its Starlink internet service to governments alongside individual customers.

The US and other governments now pay Musk’s companies for “sovereignty as a service” in the same way they hire private security contractors such as Blackwater or contract with Palantir for information analysis. In 2025, Musk’s xAI signed a $200 million contract to give the US government access to Grok, its AI tool. Muskism doesn’t seek freedom from government; it seeks profit.

Third, Muskism combines principles from software development with vertical integration in a model that Slobodian and Tarnoff call “lean Fordism.” Silicon Valley, the land of “move fast and break things,” gave Musk experience with the power of iterating quickly and learning from failure. As Musk has said of SpaceX’s philosophy, “If we’re not blowing up engines, we’re not trying hard enough.” He has adapted elements of Toyota’s “lean production” methods to give Tesla engineers quick feedback.

What makes Muskism distinctive is how it combines the “fail-fast experimentalism” of agile development with the vertical integration championed by Henry Ford. Ford’s own implementation didn’t always succeed, and by the 1990s, globalization made just-in-time supply chains the more popular solution to lowering costs. Musk bucked these trends by bringing more production in-house.

Instead of outsourcing electric batteries for his cars, for instance, he built the “gigafactory” to make components for Teslas. Amid rising tensions between the US and China, the return of tariffs, and the disruptions of COVID-19, Musk’s insistence on controlling the entire production process proved prescient.

The second half of Muskism examines what the authors call Musk’s “cyborg turn”—his growing interest in social media that culminated in his purchase of Twitter (now X); his work on AI and brain-computer interfaces; his concerns about the “woke mind virus”; his crypto boosterism; and his role in Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) program. Yet what the book terms a “turn” obscures the continuity between the various personae that Musk wears. “Carbon Musk” and “Cyborg Musk” share the same DNA.

At its core, Muskism is a response to the disruption and uncertainty of contemporary life. If you want security, you need to control essential infrastructure: cars, factories, rockets, the internet, social media, AI. If the wrong people control them, disaster may ensue, so guarantee that the right people have control.

But this approach doesn’t fundamentally challenge the underlying dynamics set in motion by highly centralized networks. A more radical response to the existential risks posed by our dependence on far-flung, brittle infrastructure would embrace creaturely limits and seek decentralized, resilient forms of exchange. Muskism instead demands access to the “God mode” of total, centralized power. As the authors note, rather than looking to escape from the matrix, Musk wants to control it.

If you squint, you can almost make out a more decentralized road not taken. Widespread batteries and solar panels could make the electrical grid more resilient, and crypto’s promise has always been its peer-to-peer transactions. But Tesla—or any hacker—retains control of all its cars and can use its cameras and microphones to surveil drivers. And crypto remains prone to corruption or to celebrity influencers—like Musk—who manipulate its value.

Twitter is a case in point. Musk became frustrated with its role in spreading “the woke mind virus,” but “instead of seceding from the network, he [determined he] would take control of it,” Muskism’s authors write. The company had plenty of problems when Musk purchased it, and while he may have made it more profitable, it’s hard to argue that Muskism has made X a haven for civil conversation (though it has become a valuable source of training data for Grok). The fundamental problem isn’t the algorithm; it’s the scale.

Musk has also taken this approach with AI. He founded OpenAI out of concern about the damage that a rogue or misaligned AI could cause. When he lost control of that organization, he launched Grok instead. Yet training a reliable, “truth-seeking” AI is proving as impossible as running a large-scale social media platform in a way that serves truth and genuine understanding.

Muskism’s authors chart major Grok missteps, including when it called itself “MechaHitler” after a video-game character. Musk has confessed that “it is surprisingly hard” to guide AI between the Charybdis of (pardon his language) “woke libtard cuck” and the Scylla of “MechaHitler.” It may even be impossible.

Slobodian and Tarnoff observe that one approach to security is to airgap a computer, isolating it from any network by which hackers might access it. Musk consistently opts against that kind of solution. Instead, he personally takes control.

This mentality guided DOGE’s efforts to centralize government data across many agencies in a quest for efficiency and power. But as the authors point out, “Silos are not necessarily bad things. . . . The barriers between them can be safeguards—checks against overreach, misuse, and surveillance.” Even when it seems to succeed, Muskism leaves systems hypercentralized and therefore vulnerable to unprincipled tyrants and unforeseen disruptions.

For Musk, this is where Mars comes in: It’s the escape hatch if there’s a critical failure on Earth. If that seems far-fetched, keep in mind that it may, in fact, be easier to fly to Mars than to engineer social harmony and truth-seeking AI. For the rest of us, it’s prudent to know more about the techno-king shaping our society, and Muskism is a perceptive introduction, though the book has plenty of flaws.

Sometimes the authors indulge in dark insinuations or criticize Musk for things outside his control. They focus on his forays into European politics without acknowledging that, in fact, immigration and declining birth rates pose wicked political problems that more centrist and leftist parties have failed to address. They ignore that Musk isn’t responsible for elite failures and rising populist frustrations across the West.

These missteps are a good reminder that we shouldn’t get distracted by Musk’s flamethrowers and memes. Muskism is and will continue to be an influential ideology, and Christians can recognize its genuine accomplishments while rejecting its fundamental heresy.

Our hope does not lie in gaining “God mode” access and controlling essential platforms. If we place our hope in the return of the King who rode into Jerusalem on an ass, we’ll be freed to take up the work of loving our neighbor without fretting about what the future holds or the next Herod who thinks he’s on the throne. Some of us might even be freed to reimagine transportation and energy and communication in radically decentralized, convivial, redemptive ways.

Jeffrey Bilbro is professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at the Front Porch Republic. His most recent book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.

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Ideas

Thou Art the Man

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

President Donald Trump’s diatribe against the pope—paired with his posting of a blasphemous AI-generated image—shows contempt for the things of God.

U.S. President Donald Trump walks to Air Force One on April 11, 2026 at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.

Tasos Katopodis / Stringer / Getty

After King David’s crimes against Bathsheba and her husband, the Lord sent the prophet Nathan to speak to him. Nathan began with a parable: a story of two men, one rich and one poor, the former rapacious and cruel and the latter his victim. As David was stirred to righteous anger, Nathan replied, in the famous rendering of the King James Version, “Thou art the man.”

That line came to mind as I read President Donald Trump’s weekend diatribe against Pope Leo XIV, which he soon followed with a post (later deleted) of an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus.

Trump shares image depicting himself as Jesus Christ. pic.twitter.com/LFsvjYGcgu
— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) April 13, 2026

Plenty could be said of the details of Trump’s comments about the pope. But more important, I think, is the posture this pair of posts evinces toward the things of God. Even if Trump is right on every issue he invokes—crime, COVID-19 closures, Iran, Venezuela, and the stock market—he’s still grotesquely wrong to elevate himself to the level of Christ and claim for himself authority over Christ’s church.

The elevation in that image is not debatable. It’s not generic self-aggrandizement. It’s not a classic political cartoon. It’s not, as Trump implausibly claimed, “me as a doctor, making people better.”

Nor is it just one more Trumpian exaggeration, as longtime commentator Geraldo Rivera suggested, and therefore something we shouldn’t take seriously. Nor yet is it something we should take “seriously, but not literally,” as is so often true of Trump. It’s sacrilege, plain and simple. It’s blasphemy.

I don’t say that because I’m “offended,” in Rivera’s term. My feelings aren’t really relevant here. I say it because I have functioning eyes, and I can see what this image is intended to convey.

And in case there were any lingering doubts, the president’s message to the pope clears them right up.

Donald Trump’s long post on Pope Leo. pic.twitter.com/gVDHDTdgXd
— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) April 13, 2026

Notice his phrase, over and over: “I don’t want a Pope who …” But where did he get the idea that his opinion would be relevant in the selection of a pope?

As an evangelical Protestant, I do not uphold the papacy. But Catholics are part of the body of Christ—“no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3). And the purpose of a pope is not to please a president, nor should the perspective of a president have any bearing on picking a pope.

The pope is, fundamentally, a pastor, one of many shepherds of the flock. As a pastor, he is not immune to critique. But as with every pastor throughout the church, whether ministering in a backwoods chapel or in the Vatican, the person whose opinion matters is God.

In a brief statement responding to Trump’s post on Monday morning, the bishop leading the US Conference of Catholic Bishops observed that “Pope Leo is not [Trump’s] rival.” The president, I think, would agree. His post suggests he sees the pope not as a rival but as a subordinate, one more “world leader” who ought to bend to his own whims as the most powerful man on the planet. He says Leo should “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” but his evaluation of Leo is entirely political.

Think again of that list of issues above: all politics. “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump began his post, talking about the pontiff in language straight out of an election attack ad. Even his claim that Leo was chosen to be pope only “because he was an American, and [the Catholic church] thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump” is classic Trumpian politics—he loves nothing more than taking credit for politicians he’s endorsed winning their races. All this makes perfect sense if Trump considers the pope as a politician, and one inferior to himself.

This brings me back to Nathan and David. When the prophet revealed the king’s guilt, David immediately confessed. “I have sinned against the Lord,” he said. And though his sins were forgiven, he did not escape consequences, because what he had done had “shown utter contempt for the Lord” (2 Sam. 12:13–14).

Though I’m generally aligned with the pope’s views of Trump’s war in Iran, I won’t put his recent comments, the statements that drew the president’s outrage, on par with Nathan’s message for David. Scripture unambiguously says Nathan was sent to David by God (v. 1), and I can’t assign the same authority to Leo.

But I will say that the president is dead wrong to position himself as the pope’s superior, whether implicitly with his words or explicitly in that blasphemous and pointedly timed image. And while taking down the Jesus image is a start, it’s not David’s swift and unqualified confession. Trump says he has “nothing to apologize for,” but I can think of at least two things: challenging the lordship of Christ and showing contempt for the things of God.

Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor at Christianity Today.

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News

10 Journalistic Reading and Listening Recommendations

Marvin Olasky

Ten prize winners who acknowledge sin but report redemptive twists.

Alif Caesar Rizqi Pratama / Unsplash / Edits by CT

At CT, we recommend books every week but not often specific articles. Today, though, the Zenger House Foundation is announcing its fifth annual awards for ground-level reporting consistent with a biblical ethic. I’d like to draw attention not to the foundation but the nine winning articles and one podcast.

CT published two of the winners that start off the list below. (Disclosure: I’m involved with Zenger House and serve as one of the five judges but recused myself from voting on CT articles.) I hope you read the articles below and maybe look through the 40 previous prize pieces from 2022 through 2025.

Here are brief descriptions of this year’s winners:

Mindy Belz in Christianity Today profiled surgeon Denis Mukwege, the Nobel Prize–winning founder of a hospital that has treated 70,000 women for injuries resulting from rape, mostly by M23 rebels trying to take over eastern Congo. The war goes on, and Mukwege, led by his faith in God, keeps fighting evil.

Emmanuel Nwachukwu in CT portrayed life in a refugee camp for Nigerians fleeing terrorists. Life, already tough for Jennifer Abraham, became even harder when assailants murdered her husband last year. She finds ways to feed their four children and says, “I don’t know when, but soon, God help me. Soon.”’

Sean Rubin in Plough told how his mother embraced Christ not through Bible reading, a sermon, or a “moment of decision” but via a winding road with a painting at the crucial turn. His story illuminates both God’s providence and a work of art studied for its mysterious illumination.

Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic described what witnessing numerous executions taught her about evil and mercy. She reports the pain experienced by victims’ families and how some on death row respond to compassion, raising hard questions about how we weigh justice and the possibility of redemption.

Elliott Woods in Texas Monthly showed—in words and pictures—striving and death amid the largest immigration-related disaster in American history. With awareness of border policy failure and sympathy for those desperately trying to improve their lives, Woods probed the intersection of meth-fueled smugglers and pocket prayer cards.

By offering a story of resilience and survival, John Woodrow Cox in The Washington Post provided a different angle on the flash flood that last July killed 25 campers and two counselors at Camp Mystic in Central Texas. Heroism merges with mystery, and a gripping image ends the story: “They bowed their heads.”

Joshua Rothman’s moving portrait of Dr. Greg Gulbransen in The New Yorker showed how one man turned a terrible tragedy—accidentally running over and killing his 2-year-old son in 2002—into a career dedicated to helping others through his “therapeutic workaholism.” He both saves lives and documents lives through photography.

Nancy Walecki in The Atlantic unspooled the history of her dad, who while running a guitar business counseled a generation of famous musicians. She drips in accounts of discount store competition, drug use, and hospitality, along with stories of personality and pathos among the music elite—and a religious awakening.

Coauthors Farnaz Fassihi and Hamed Aleaziz traced in The New York Times the journey of an Iranian convert to Christianity through Abu Dhabi, South Korea, Mexico City—and finally to California, where she hoped to be free from persecution. In February 2025, though, US federal agents shackled Artemis Ghasemzadeh and sent her to Panama.

In his weekly Church Politics Podcast, Justin Giboney leads a street-level and nonpartisan examination of Christian involvement in political issues. Fighting polarization by emphasizing discernment and refusing to dehumanize either right or left, Church Politics offers realistic hope to those who might otherwise despair.

Marvin Olasky is editor in chief of Christianity Today.

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Ideas

Fertility Treatment Beyond the Quick Fix

Matthew Loftus

Contributor

Restorative reproductive medicine is a great idea and can honor traditional Christian teachings on marriage, children, and sex. Just don’t oversell it.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Getty

Imagine yourself part of a young couple trying and failing to get pregnant. After years of being asked when you’ll have kids and less-than-helpful advice to “just relax, and God will take care of it,” you finally decide to see a doctor about the problem. After taking your history, doing a physical exam, and running a few simple tests, the fertility specialist tells you that in vitro fertilization (IVF) is your best option—and immediately starts talking about payment plans.

For many Christian women, regardless of their opinions about the moral and ethical problems with IVF, this approach to fertility treatment feels slapdash. And their other experiences with reproductive healthcare may be no better: Many women who aren’t trying to get pregnant but deal with chronic gynecological problems have grown skeptical of hormonal birth control, feeling their health care providers push it as a one-size-fits-all solution to any problem between their ribs and their knees.

This is the context in which some women are turning to an alternative approach called restorative reproductive medicine (RRM) to take charge of their health.

What is RRM? In short, it’s a two-step approach to women’s reproductive health: (1) find an underlying cause for whatever problem a woman may present, and (2) cure that problem with a wider variety of tools than the average obstetrician-gynecologist would be likely to use. RRM practitioners are trained in techniques like the Creighton Model FertilityCare System and the Billings Ovulation Method that were developed to bring scientific rigor to natural family planning while also honoring traditional Christian teachings about artificial birth control and IVF. They’re now trying to do the same for fertility treatments.

RRM is gaining popularity, in no small part because it’s personalized and focused on holistic health at a time when medicine is getting more corporate, more standardized, and less attentive to patients as individuals. As a physician, I constantly argue for and try to teach a patient-centered approach, and I hear from women whose experience with mainstream medicine made them feel like widgets on a conveyor belt. Modern medical systems too often dehumanize both doctors and patients, and IVF and hormonal birth control seem like shortcuts to fixing a lot of problems.

That’s not to suggest RRM is a universal fix. An American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) statement denouncing the approach makes a few valid points—for instance, the statement notes that RRM often focuses on endometriosis as a potential cause of infertility when it may or may not be responsible for a couple’s infertility. Endometriosis is very difficult to diagnose, and doctors have argued for years about the best way to treat it.

Some RRM providers specialize in long and potentially dangerous surgeries like the one writer Madeleine Kearns described in a piece for The Free Press. These surgeries have yet to be proven effective in the way other treatments have been. RRM practitioners are also not afraid to use well-studied hormonal treatments like progesterone or clomiphene to help women get pregnant.

RRM is a rival not just to mainstream reproductive medicine but to other political factions as well. We need more federal funds directed toward research on women’s health, including fertility. But that idea is at odds with last year’s government crusade to slash research funding.

RRM also sharply conflicts with other forces in President Donald Trump’s political coalition that are much more enthusiastic about IVF. For example, major Republican donor Peter Thiel invested large sum of money in fertility clinics, including a focus on international fertility medical tourism. If you’re unfamiliar with that phrase, one customer is a Chinese billionaire who used IVF to have dozens of babies in the US, then shipped them to various properties across the world. Also in the picture: a family with at least 25 babies (born via surrogates) who are now in foster care after alleged abuse and neglect.

Yet the ACOG statement—and similar critiques—doesn’t address concerns about standards of care that make women want to seek out RRM in the first place. Some say the profit motive drives fertility specialists to keep using IVF, but the likelier explanation is more mundane: It’s difficult to determine the underlying causes of infertility (and other gynecological problems). Often, no one can find a cause. Doctors jump to IVF and hormonal birth control because other patients would rather have a quick fix than an exhaustive search—and some have even sued their doctors when the process of treatment took longer than they wanted. I can’t say for sure that these patients outnumber those who would prefer RRM, but the general culture of medicine pushes practitioners to embrace quick fixes.

RRM is great because it reclaims the best of what medicine ought to be—a focus on patients as whole people that uses technology appropriately—but we should not oversell its potential benefits. One article about RRM used the headline “We Can Restore Fertility Without IVF,” and that’s only sometimes true. Some women won’t need IVF because RRM treatments have helped them get pregnant, but others will still need to decide whether to use it. For many women, hormonal birth control is still the simplest and most effective answer to their gynecological ailments.

Some Christians will conclude that the end of their journeys through infertility will be a witness to the age to come. With cultural conversations about fertility turning toward eugenics, and with crashing birthrates shaping the world over the next few decades, we need solid Christian public witness on sex and fertility more than ever before.

Restorative reproductive medicine could become a key facet of that witness by offering a robust approach to helping couples conceive, but we shouldn’t overstate its potential benefits or demonize mainstream practitioners. We also can’t be naive about the fact that it faces an uphill battle even within the Republican Party. Ultimately, we should recognize that shortcuts of any kind will take over medical care unless we give practitioners sufficient time and money to care for their patients well.

Matthew Loftus lives with his family in Kenya, where he teaches and practices family medicine at a mission hospital. His book Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press.

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Ideas

Threatening Profound Evil Trivializes That Evil

Justin R. Hawkins

President Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth speak often of Christianity—but they seem to have no interest in its vision for just warfare.

U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon on April 08, 2026.

Andrew Harnik / Staff / Getty

The US war in Iran is on pause, at least of this writing. An unstable cease-fire could end next week with a resumption of hostilities—or, potentially, with the conclusion of this war. The one silver lining of a conflict initiated without a clear or consistent rationale is that it can wind down the same way.

But even if peace comes that soon, American Christians can’t pretend we haven’t seen what our leaders have done this spring. Ours is no longer a government interested in haggling over the finer points of just war theory, a Scripture-shaped standard of ethical conduct in warfare, to defend a military intervention. It is instead flirting with dispensing with that standard altogether, using the language and symbols of our faith while ignoring its substance.

For nearly all of American history, our presidents and their staff spoke of military decisions in language and reasoning deeply shaped by just war theory. An idea developed by Christian thinkers for centuries, the theory requires those who make war to assess its justice both before and during fighting. For a war to be just, theorists like Thomas Aquinas have argued, it must be waged by the right authorities for the right reasons and in the right way, particularly where innocent civilians are concerned.

Christian critics of the theory argue that its terms are too flexible and imprecise. For example, CT’s Bonnie Kristian has written that just war theory “can all too easily function less as a limit than as a malleable justification for whatever we’ve already decided to do.” And while the abuse of moral concepts does not invalidate their proper use, Kristian is correct to say that politicians have often employed the categories of just war theory in service of manifestly unjust wars.

That very malleability makes all the more shocking those moments when leaders don’t bother with just war theory at all—when they make no attempt at an ethical argument and instead explain their plans in nakedly immoral terms.

President Donald Trump took this path the day after Easter, when he announced on social media that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” This threat of death not only of enemy combatants but of an entire country is unmistakably a threat of genocide and a violation of the agreement against genocide the United States signed in 1948.

You don’t need an exhaustive knowledge of just war theory to know that genocide is well outside its bounds. This threat merits the most strident and serious moral condemnation, for the very act of threatening such profound evil trivializes that evil. And Iranian civilians had good reason to worry that this was not mere bluster, because that threat came as the culmination of a long train of disregard for both the principles of just war theory and US law.

After Trump himself, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is the most prominent figure here. He speaks often of Christianity and has led prayer services at the Pentagon. In one of those meetings, Hegseth prayed for violence “against those who deserve no mercy.” At a press briefing in mid-March, he promised “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” And this past fall, Hegseth said that under his command, the armed services would be marked by “no more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”

Though it’s certainly strange to invoke a “merciful and forgiving” God (Dan. 9:9) in support of one’s intention to deny mercy to others, there’s no legal definition of “no mercy.” The threat of “no quarter,” however, is a legal phrase. Under conditions of no quarter, defeated enemy combatants aren’t taken prisoner or offered the chance to surrender. They are simply killed.

Because soldiers who have surrendered are no longer combatants, their deaths are not the same as battlefield deaths. Killing them is murder—according not only to just war theory and the Hague Convention of 1907, which the US signed and ratified, but also to the Department of Defense’s own Law of War Manual. “It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given,” the manual says. “Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter.”

For US troops to follow through on Hegseth’s threat of no quarter would violate the Pentagon’s own rules. And, as scholar Oona Hathaway of Yale Law School recently noted, the declaration itself is wrong: It may make an enemy more likely to fight to the death and therefore make the battle more brutal than it needs to be.

Unfortunately, these comments are neither untypical nor unprecedented for Hegseth and the administration he represents. Hegseth came to Trump’s attention by lobbying for pardons and clemency for several US servicemembers for actions including killing former enemy combatants after they no longer posed a threat.

And last year, Hegseth dismantled the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, which was designed to prevent civilian casualties during American military interventions, acting over the objections of military officials including the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since then, the preliminary findings of a Pentagon investigation reportedly say the US is likely responsible for the February strike on an Iranian girls school that killed at least 175 people, most of them elementary-aged schoolgirls.

Trump and Hegseth seem to want to wage war unencumbered by the task of protecting the dignity of human life. But that task is not about “politically correct and overbearing rules” or any other boogeymen of Hegseth’s imagination. Its source is the very Christian faith Hegseth has so often praised within the Pentagon. Just war theory is a distinctly Christian moral innovation that we must not discard.

Justin R. Hawkins is an ethicist and postdoctoral researcher at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

- More from Justin R. Hawkins

Books

Review

Are Christians Rude Dinner Guests?

Harvest Prude

Three books on politics and public life about the common good, ISIS brides, and Ronald Reagan.

Illustration by Christianity Today

This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.

**Amar D. Peterman, Becoming Neighbors (Eerdmans, 2026)**

The driving idea of Amar D. Peterman’s book is that, for too long, Christians have been rude dinner guests, and that needs to change.

Using the metaphor of a shared table where folks come potluck-style with their various offerings, Peterman argues that Christians often miss out. Either they’re boycotting the table out of fear they will be compromising their beliefs, insisting on hosting every time, or monopolizing the conversation rather than listening. Worse, some bring poison to the potluck!

Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local invites Christians to say yes to joining our proverbial neighbors at a shared table where “you never know what’s going to arrive” but everyone’s contributions are welcome. The goal, after all, is that everyone is filled, or gets to a state of flourishing. Toward this end, Christians have many worthwhile dishes to offer.

Though Christians hold that true flourishing is impossible without Christ, Peterman’s concern is that we should be able to treat our neighbors with lovingkindness, even when others do not embrace our faith. Peterman ties his thesis to the many significant moments in Jesus’ ministry that took place around a table and to the challenge Christ offers in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The idea of reframing a relationship with the public square into neighborly love is expressed beautifully at many points.

At times, Peterman overly relies on hypotheticals and generalizations. The journalist in me longed for the crispness of specifics (Which politicians are abusing our faith’s precepts, which pastors are pounding pulpits, which churches are making LGBTQ people feel unwelcome?). Leaving out such examples is only likely to either confirm people’s prior assumptions or alienate skeptics.

The book also contains questionable theological descriptions. For example, Peterson uses nonmale pronouns for God. In one instance, the Holy Spirit is referred to as “she.” Another example—grammatically bewildering more than anything else—is when Peterman substitutes “Godself” rather than he/him pronouns (“Why does God humble Godself to the form of creation?”). This is an inconsistent tic, though, since Peterman also uses male pronouns to describe God. On balance, these weaknesses make me hesitant to recommend it unreservedly.

**Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS (Random House, 2019)**

With the Middle East once again in the headlines, I’ve found myself thinking of journalist and academic Azadeh Moaveni’s book Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS, which was a pick several years ago for my book club that prompted one of its liveliest discussions.

The book attempts to unpack what would compel women to emigrate from all over the world to join the Islamic State, following the lives of 13 Muslim women who were recruited or compelled to join Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s caliphate. Moaveni doesn’t justify terrorists or excuse those who were culpable in the caliphate’s atrocities, but she aims to challenge stereotypical media narratives of bloodthirsty ISIS brides.

One of the most valuable contributions of Moaveni’s portrayal is how she takes the role of religion seriously, particularly the appeal to religion in propaganda campaigns that led some young women astray. One example is teenager Nour, from Tunisia. After she became more interested in religion and decided to wear a headscarf, her high school suspended her, and she headed down the road to radicalization.

The latter part of the book explores the dystopian life under ISIS, from whippings for running afoul of dress codes to how quickly wives found themselves widowed due to the high casualty rate of their fighter-husbands.

One of the book’s tenets is that Western culture and Islamophobia helped lead to ISIS recruitments. While there’s no doubt that the cultural and societal alienation some of these women experienced contributed to their joining ISIS, I found Moaveni’s description of other explanations in the lives of these women more helpful in understanding the phenomenon.

**Bob Spitz, Reagan: An American Journey (Penguin Press, 2018)**

Bob Spitz’s portrayal of Ronald Reagan does what a good biography should, especially for those of us who are particularly nosy—that is, it traces the whole package of the profiled, from familial background (an alcoholic father and devout mother) and religious influences (Catholic and Disciples of Christ) to romance and marriage (in Reagan’s case, marriages) and underlying personal motivations (overweening ambition).

The boy known as “Dutch” always had a taste and flair for stardom: He acted in school plays, played football, and became a local hero by rescuing over 70 people while lifeguarding a swimming hole close to his hometown of Dixon, Illinois.

He’d grow into a Hollywood star, but his acting chops weren’t up to snuff post–World War II, when Hollywood films called for more nuance and grit. However, he found other roles through which to play a part, such as his involvement in the Screen Actors Guild. A pivot to television, and then to being a spokesman for CBS’s General Electric Theater, gave his speechifying talents greater berth and gave him a taste for politics.

The book spends over half of its nearly 800 pages on Reagan’s pre-presidency life, and that is where Spitz’s work absolutely shines. His coverage of Reagan’s political career, however, from his treatment of Reagan’s time as governor to his time in the Oval Office, falls comparatively flat. Important contemporary political figures like Margaret Thatcher or Soviet leaders receive scant mention, and some signature policies were underwhelmingly covered.

Those looking for a good, if not exhaustive, overview of Reagan’s years in office will find that Spitz covers both the successes and failures of the 40th president. And as I do not expect biographers, particularly of politicians, to be hagiographers, I judged that Spitz struck that balance well.

Harvest Prude is national political correspondent at Christianity Today.

- More from Harvest Prude

News

The Mississippi Farmer Who Helped Resettle 150 Ukrainian Families

Hannah Herrera

As the US makes it more difficult for refugees to stay, Rodney Mast and his church community are rallying around their new friends.

A monthly social gathering of Ukrainian families and volunteers in May 2024 at Noxubee Wildlife Refuge near Starkville, Mississippi.

Image courtesy of Rodney Mast

Late March is corn-planting time, and from 4:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day, Mississippi farmer Rodney Mast hums along in his John Deere tractor, hundreds of unsown acres spread before him and a can of Planters peanuts by his side.

“This is the time of year that farm boys live for,” said Mast, who lives in Crawford, Mississippi.

But there’s more to Mast than meets the eye. On top of his tractor, two small flags ripple in the wind: one American and one Ukrainian.

Mast has helped more than 150 Ukrainian refugee families resettle in the US—24 of them in the rural Golden Triangle area of northeast Mississippi.

“If five years ago, ten years ago, someone would’ve told me that I would have created a little Ukrainian community here in Mississippi, I would’ve practically laughed,” Mast said.

Mast is a third-generation farmer, but his family has left behind a legacy of more than crop raising.

Mast’s grandparents moved from Indiana to Mississippi in the 1960s to help with racial reconciliation in a deeply divided post–Jim Crow South. Mast said his grandmother cared for sick neighbors and taught literacy classes for Black women. His grandfather provided jobs for their husbands on his farm, always treating them like equals. Mast said this example instilled in him a passion for cross-cultural ministry.

His farming background also uniquely prepared him to “do the task in front of him,” which is how his efforts with refugees began, he said.

“We have to do whatever the crop is demanding, whatever the weather gives us,” Mast said. “We have to adjust and roll with the punches.”

Rodney Mast with his family, including his daughter-in-law and grandson. Photo taken by one of the Ukrainian refugees.

In December 2018, Mast and his wife, Christine, hosted a child from Ukraine for six weeks through International Host Connection, a nonprofit that connects orphans with US families. This led to their 2019 adoption of three boys from Ukraine. The organization asked Mast to serve on its board, and when war broke out in February 2022, he traveled to Poland to oversee the evacuation and resettlement of orphans. He returned to Poland in June of the same year and, after making sure the orphans were situated, shifted his efforts to help Ukrainian families.

On April 21, 2022, the Biden administration created the Uniting for Ukraine program, which allowed an individual in the US to sponsor a displaced Ukrainian family for a period of two years. Mast researched videos about the program, thought it looked “pretty easy,” and proceeded with the paperwork.

While searching social media groups for potential Ukrainian families to match with, he had two criteria: eagerness to work and respectfulness.

The first family the Masts sponsored had five sons. Mast and his wife, parents of eight children themselves, immediately connected with them. “Our hearts went out to them,” Mast said. The family arrived that August.

Since then, Mast said he has become a “middleman and mentor” to hundreds of sponsors in the US, connecting them with Ukrainian families and providing resources and guidance as they navigate the process.

But sponsorship is only the beginning. It takes a village to care for these families, and Mast said the response from his community has been “overwhelming.”

Churches and individuals across northeast Mississippi rallied to support the newcomers. Ahead of their arrival, Mississippians donated clothes and household items and decorated apartments. Once the Ukrainians arrived, these Americans showed them how to enroll their children in schools, accompanied them to the doctor, and helped them open bank accounts and obtain phone plans.

Mast’s church, Redeemer Church in Starkville, Mississippi, has an average weekly attendance of 12–15 Ukrainians and hired a Russian translator for its sermons. Way of the Cross church in nearby Brooksville puts Russian text on the screen, and Emmanuel Baptist Church in Starkville has a Russian Bible study.

“It’s sweet and good when people outside of their familiar culture are mingled together under the banner of Christ,” said Kevin Shoemaker, head pastor of Redeemer Church.

Halyna Yefimenko, a young mother from southern Ukraine, arrived on September 9, 2023, at the tiny Golden Triangle Regional Airport with her husband and two sons. She was eight months pregnant. Waiting to greet her was the Mast family as well as her family’s sponsors, who drove them to their new home—fully furnished with donated furniture, beds made, pictures on the wall, and even groceries in the fridge.

Their sponsors organized a housewarming party for them, which families from the sponsors’ church, Way of the Cross, attended, bringing gifts and welcoming them to Mississippi. Church members also threw her a baby shower and were present at the birth of her child. Yefimenko was blown away.

“We have probably never received so much help in our lives,” Yefimenko said. She added that the example of their love strengthened her faith. “I believed in God before in Ukraine too. But when I moved here and met these people and I saw how they believe in God, my faith [has] become more strong.”

Kseniia Yermakova, who goes by Ksu, is an Orthodox Christian from Sloviansk, a small city in Eastern Ukraine eight miles from the frontline. Mast’s generosity and care deeply impacted her as well.

On the day the war began, February 24, 2022, Yermakova, who was living in Kyiv at the time, received an early-morning phone call from her best friend. “What do you hear?” the friend asked. As they were speaking, Yermakova saw and heard a missile slice through the sky. In that moment, she said, she understood the war had begun.

She and her now-husband fled on foot to her in-laws’ home in a suburb of Kyiv, not knowing it was occupied by Russians. The couple decided they couldn’t hide in the basement and wait for a missile to bury them with debris, so they fled to central Ukraine, Yermakova recalled. Her best friend left for the US, where Mast helped her resettle in Mississippi. She begged Yermakova to come too.

“We believed in Ukrainian victory so much that we thought that we are safe in our own country,” Yermakova said.

But in 2024, Yermakova and her husband began talking about growing their family and didn’t want to have a baby in a city with perpetual shelling. They decided to move to the US, and her best friend sponsored them. Through Uniting for Ukraine, even parolees could sponsor other families if they had sufficient financial means.

Yermakova’s parents and grandmother still live in Sloviansk despite her constant pleading for them to move to a safer part of Ukraine. Just two weeks ago, a Russian bomb destroyed her grandmother’s home. Her grandmother survived only because she had gone outside for a few minutes.

“I’m calling my mom every day to find out if they are still alive,” Yermakova said.

Yermakova said she carries a lot of sadness with her, especially for her family still in Ukraine, but continues to be impressed with the kindness of Mast and others in her small Mississippi town. Mast lent Yermakova and her family money for their resettlement process, helped them find their apartment, and provided furniture and household items.

“People here are [warm hearted], and they are generous, and they are ready to help,” Yermakova said.

Yet even after arriving in the US, the hardships have continued for Yermakova and thousands of other Ukrainian refugees. In the first month of his second presidential term, President Donald Trump halted the Uniting for Ukraine program. While Ukrainian refugees in the US are eligible to apply for re-parole, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS’s) slow processing times have forced Ukrainians out of legal status—and out of the country. Many have no home to which they can return. USCIS also increased fees for approved re-parole applications to $1,000 per person, which poses a great financial challenge for refugees, especially large families.

Mast has witnessed firsthand the toll this has taken on the Ukrainian community.

“They weren’t wanted there; they aren’t wanted here. They don’t know where to go,” he said.

Refugees are allowed to apply for re-parole six months before their current parole expires. Because of the long wait times, Yermakova applied even earlier, although USCIS noted that filing earlier would not result in a faster decision and could result in denial. Her family’s parole expires April 19, and with it her husband’s work permit and driver’s license.

They’ve heard nothing so far except that their case is still being processed. The family is exploring other immigration routes, including work visas and asylum. If those pathways aren’t possible and their parole isn’t renewed in time, they have no idea what they’ll do next.

Mississippians continue to rally around these families, joining calls with lawyers, lending money for fees, extending prayers, writing letters to USCIS pleading their Ukrainian friends’ immigration cases, and organizing social events, like an annual crawfish boil, to build community. Mast travels regularly to Washington, DC, to advocate for Ukrainian interests, including the Ukrainian Adjustment Act, which would provide a pathway to permanent residency for parolees in the US.

Vika and Bryan Jones from Emmanuel Baptist Church help Mast coordinate social events for the Ukrainian community. Vika, a Kazakhstan native, speaks Russian, the first language of many Eastern Ukrainians. She often acts as a translator for the refugees, including Yefimenko when she was at the hospital giving birth. The Joneses urge Americans not to forget the plight of Ukrainians.

“The war is still going on there, but it’s not new anymore,” Vika Jones said. “So I feel like people think ‘Oh, [Ukrainian refugees are] fine’ and everything, but they’re still struggling.”

Supporting Ukrainian refugees is part of the biblical mandate to love your neighbor, Mast said.

“God has very unique plans in our lives,” Mast said. “One thing I would express to other people that wonder, ‘How do we get involved in something like that?’ I don’t know. Just do the task that’s in front of you. Help the person that is nearby, and see what happens.”

- More from Hannah Herrera

News

Two States Test a New Pro-Life Law

Daniel K. Williams

Pro-lifers have just won legislative victories to restrict abortion pills in South Dakota and Mississippi. But will the laws work?

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Nearly two out of every three abortions in America today use pills.

These “chemical abortions,” as they are often called, are especially popular in states that prohibit abortion clinics. Last month the Guttmacher Institute released survey results showing that in 2025, women in states with abortion bans were more likely to obtain abortions by ordering abortion pills through telehealth providers than by traveling out of state to obtain either a chemical or surgical abortion.

These numbers are why contemporary pro-life activists have made stemming the flood of abortion pills into pro-life states one of their chief causes. One of the most significant pro-life legislative campaigns this spring, for instance, which has the support of Students for Life Action, is to get conservative state legislatures to pass laws restricting the distribution of abortion pills.

This proposal, which has been introduced in multiple conservative states, targets abortion providers by allowing the state attorney general to take legal action against those who unlawfully send abortion-inducing drugs into the state. One variation of the proposed bill would also allow women who use abortion pills, as well as their family members, to also bring lawsuits against the abortion pill prescribers.

The proposed legislation specifically exempts women who obtain abortions through drugs from being prosecuted, so activists have marketed it as a mainstream pro-life effort—rather than an “abortion abolitionist” approach—that will save unborn lives and protect women from telehealth abortion providers who cannot assist their patients in emergencies or other serious health complications from the drugs.

But even in strongly Republican, heavily pro-life states, the proposed legislation has faced substantial obstacles. Last year, Republican senate leaders in Oklahoma refused to bring one such bill to a floor vote even after it passed in the state house of representatives by a vote of 77–9. Students for Life Action blamed this defeat partly on the actions of one abortion abolitionist state senator who tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill to allow women who obtained abortions to be criminally prosecuted, a politically unpopular measure that divides pro-life Republicans.

This year, the mainstream of the pro-life movement—which advocates for legal protection for the unborn that penalizes abortion providers, but not women who obtain abortions—has been better prepared.

In March, the governor of South Dakota signed into law a measure making it a felony to market or distribute abortion pills in the state. And this month, the Mississippi state legislature passed a bill (which the governor is expected to sign into law) that would allow those who prescribe or provide abortion pills to be sentenced to up to ten years in prison.

Because abortion is already illegal (and unavailable) in both South Dakota and Mississippi, observers expect these bills to be used primarily against out-of-state telehealth providers. But some legal scholars say it’s unlikely that out-of-state abortion providers can be successfully prosecuted under these laws.

“I think lawmakers are imagining this will be primarily used against doctors or drug manufacturers in blue states,” Mary Ziegler, a scholar of abortion policy at the University of California Davis School of Law, told ABC News. “But it will be much harder for prosecutors to actually get those people into court than it will be for them to get someone whose partner has these drugs.”

Eight states (California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington) have “shield laws” in place that specifically protect medical providers of reproductive and abortion services from being extradited to another state, and ten other states have similar laws that generically protect medical personnel without specifically mentioning abortion. Telehealth abortion providers from one of those states who faced lawsuits in Mississippi or South Dakota could simply refuse to show up in court and rely on their own state to protect them from further prosecution.

The federal government could override these varying and competing legal situations by making telehealth prescriptions of abortion pills illegal. The government legalized this practice only in 2021, during the Biden administration, and the Trump administration has continued that policy.

The federal government could also restrict the sale of abortion pills more broadly. But that seems unlikely in the near term, as the Trump administration’s Food and Drug Administration expanded these sales by approving a new version of the abortion drug mifepristone last October.

For now, in the absence of federal regulation, these state governments are trying to restrict abortion pills on their own—but whether their efforts will be enough to overcome the legal challenges of prosecuting out-of-state providers is far from certain.

Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches.

- More from Daniel K. Williams

Ideas

The Iranian Church Persists

David Yeghnazar

Amid war, some Christians are evangelizing, preparing food for neighbors, and displaying other acts of generosity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Let me tell you about Yahya, whose real name I am withholding for his safety. He’s a leader in Iran’s house church movement, a Christian from a Muslim background, and a husband and father to a young family. Like many other Iranian Christians, Yahya has paid the cost of being a believer under the Islamic regime. He has been interrogated, detained, abused, and may soon be summoned to serve a long prison sentence for his Christian ministry. And now, like the rest of Iran’s 93 million people, he is a citizen of a nation at war.

“Life is hard,” Yahya told my team and me recently when we briefly spoke to him through voice messages that were interrupted because of a weak internet connection. “But we are continuing. And the Lord is showing his glory.”

These were not just empty words. At a time when many Iranians are afraid to travel inside the country, Yahya had just returned from a trip to several remote villages, where he had gone to serve the poor, share the gospel, and offer Persian New Testaments to curious residents. Five people gave their hearts to Christ over a few days.

Many other believers are also choosing to shine Christ’s light amid the war, which was largely paused on Tuesday under a fragile, two-week cease-fire. I hear the stories of these believers in the work I do every day at Elam Ministries, an organization that aims to strengthen churches in Iran and beyond. Even in this season of fear, turmoil, and uncertainty, Iranian Christians continue to be resilient, courageous, and hopeful. And each story brings a prayer of thanks to my lips.

The Iranian church was prepared for this moment because it has endured many trials. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Muslim apostasy has been anathema to the country’s ruling clerics. They insist Iranians from Muslim backgrounds must not be exposed to Christian teaching. The regime permits Iran’s ancient Christian communities—the Armenians and Assyrians—to worship in their minority languages. But Persian-speaking churches have been increasingly persecuted, particularly because many members are converts from Islam.

In the early decades after the Iranian Revolution, authorities martyred eight key Christian leaders. They threatened and eventually closed churches offering Persian services. In the ’90s, the regime banned Iran’s Bible Society. And today, it is against the law to sell or use the Persian translation of Bible.

Pushed underground, Persian-speaking Christians now meet only in house churches, facing constant threats of raids, arrests, interrogation, torture, and prosecutions that often end in prison. Yet many still choose to follow Christ.

Courage like Yahya’s—continuing ministry despite a pending prison sentence—is common. Countless brothers and sisters have stood firm under persecution while praying for and witnessing to their persecutors. When I asked one couple why they are ready to suffer for Christ, they said, “Because we have tasted and we have seen.”

Many Iranian Christians demonstrated this legacy of courage during other recent hardships. First came the brief but intense war with Israel (and the US) in June 2025. During that period, the underground church felt the same shock and fear as the wider population. Still, we heard many continued meeting for worship. Some opened their homes to those fleeing major cities. Others walked the streets to pray, even as bombs fell. Some found faith during the 12 days of war.

Then, earlier this year, Iran faced dark days when government forces killed thousands of unarmed Iranians. The crackdown left countless wounded and traumatized. Christians went into hospitals to pray with the wounded. They visited grieving neighbors. They offered comfort and shared the message of Jesus whenever possible.

Now, amid war, we see the same pattern play out. Through gaps in the internet blackout, I hear that many house churches are still meeting despite government checkpoints increasing the risk of being searched and arrested. Recently, a team member told me about a group of 9 Christians who continued to meet amid the chaos and violence. Friends and family members noticed the peace the Christians had and wanted to know more. They then joined the group, which has grown to 21, demonstrating the evangelistic work that has made the Iranian church among the world’s fastest-growing Christian movements.

Courage often finds its expression in action, and the generosity our organization sees on the ground is one example. In the early weeks of this war, a relatively new convert contacted his pastor and said he wanted to give his tithe to poor Christians in other cities. The pastor suggested to send money to a poor family caring for a grandfather with a disability in a distant city.

A few days later, members of another house church traveled independently to the same city to share the gospel and ended up at that family’s home. The church members reported the family told them, “We had completely run out of money, but then, at exactly the moment we needed it most, help arrived.”

We see the same Spirit-inspired outward focus in house church leaders, such as Parvin and her husband, Amir (again, not their real names). The couple lives in a heavily bombed area. But when our team suggested relocating to a safer place, they gently declined. “We want to stay and help people,” Parvin explained. “And if the situation allows, we also want to share the gospel.”

Since the start of the war, Parvin has been preparing basic food parcels for families in her neighborhood. Prices have been rising rapidly amid an already-devastated economy, and many are struggling to make ends meet. One parcel went to a single mother raising a child with disabilities. The woman had been anxiously wondering how to make her money last until the end of the month. “When she saw how God had provided for her, she started crying,” Parvin said.

The Iranian church is courageous, generous, and growing through a commitment to witnessing. This does not mean the church is perfect, nor that every Iranian Christian is perfectly or consistently courageous, generous, or bold. Believers in Iran are, like us, fallen human beings who must rely daily on God’s grace to be conformed to the image of his Son. Moreover, the church faces the same challenges as any rapidly growing Christian movement, such as ensuring good order, accountability, and orthodoxy. The additional challenge of persecution can also sometimes result in the scattering and isolation of believers.

Harder days may be coming for Iran, and more than ever the country’s people will need the church to shine as an embodied witness to the love of Christ. A lot of uncertainty lies ahead: While there could be greater freedoms for the Iranian people, there are also many dark possibilities.

The regime, though wounded, could cling to power and become more repressive. A deadly persecution of Christians and other minorities could follow. In recent decades, Iran has persecuted the underground church but has avoided widespread executions for apostasy, partly due to international scrutiny. But that could change.

If the Islamic republic remains, it may seek out those whom it views as the enemy within. House church Christians—which the regime already erroneously labels “Zionists”—would be easy targets. Some prominent Christian diaspora leaders have openly sided with opponents of the regime, such as Reza Pahlavi, which could make Christians appear as dangerous foes. History shows believers have been executed as enemies of the state during upheavals, including in the French, Russian, and Communist Chinese revolutions. Iran could follow a similar path.

The global church should pray against this outcome and be ready to support our brothers and sisters in the country. Here is how we can respond:

First, I believe we should shift our focus from geopolitics and place it on the church. It is easy to become preoccupied with Washington, Tehran, and the shifting dynamics of power. Yet Scripture consistently directs our attention elsewhere. In the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation, God works his purposes most decisively through Christ and his church.

Many Christians inside Iran are keeping this focus. Whatever the outcome of this war, people like Yahya believe what Iran needs most is the kingdom of God. Their identities and loyalties are tied to the heavenly, eternal kingdom rather than the rise and fall of earthly ones. They challenge our own walks with Christ: Are our own identities and loyalties firmly grounded in our heavenly citizenship?

Second, we should commit to sustained and informed prayer. Praying for protection, courage, unity, and continued growth among believers in Iran is one of the most meaningful ways to stand with them in whatever lies ahead.

Third, we should support practical efforts that strengthen the Iranian church. This includes providing Bibles, leadership training, and pastoral support—quiet, faithful investments that enable believers to endure and grow under pressure. Even in these difficult days, hope remains for Iran because, as Yahya told me with a quiet conviction, “The church in Iran is alive.”

David Yeghnazar is executive director of Elam Ministries. Born in Iran, his family has served the Iranian church for three generations.

- More from David Yeghnazar

Share

Lie: I wasn’t enough, or maybe I was too much.

Truth: I am enough as I am.

Lie: If I’d acted differently, this wouldn’t have happened.

Truth: You’re not responsible for someone else’s actions.

Lie: I failed to notice the warning signs or to fix the relationship.

Truth: You cannot save a relationship by yourself.

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Amar D. Peterman, Becoming Neighbors (Eerdmans, 2026)

Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS (Random House, 2019)

Bob Spitz, Reagan: An American Journey (Penguin Press, 2018)

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**Amar D. Peterman, Becoming Neighbors (Eerdmans, 2026)**

**Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS (Random House, 2019)**

**Bob Spitz, Reagan: An American Journey (Penguin Press, 2018)**