We Need More Than Generalities About Beauty and Justice

Ashley Hales

Makoto and Haejin Fujimura’s new book aims to help Christians think deeply about how we live but falls short on details.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Baker

Haejin and Makoto Fujimura’s coauthored book, Beauty and Justice: Creating a Life of Abundance and Courage, posits that “beauty and justice are two sides of the same coin of the gospel.” Beauty by its nature will work toward justice, and justice is more than the absence of wrong: It is also beautiful. For readers who see beauty as less important than utility, or the work of justice as always exhausting or strident, the message that both are right responses of all who bear the image of God is welcome.

Beauty and Justice is the marriage of the authors’ vocations. Haejin, a lawyer and entrepreneur, shares stories of the humanitarian justice work her global nonprofit, Embers International, has executed in Indian brothel neighborhoods. Mako, a world-renowned artist, describes the intertwining of justice with his artistic process and the Fujimuras’ work with destitute children.

And the book is also personal. In the afterword, the Fujimuras include their wedding homily on Isaiah 61, given as a charge to them “to proclaim good news to the poor” and “to bestow on them a crown of beauty” (vv. 1, 3). Mako writes about the dissolution of his first marriage, the way he unexpectedly met Haejin in 2020, and their pandemic-era vows. They share glimpses of loss and pain—from Mako’s experiences at Ground Zero on 9/11 and his subsequent PTSD to Haejin rescuing trafficked children who live in despicable squalor. Yet these stories are often told from a distance.

As an observer, I get the sense that Haejin’s and Mako’s work and lives are better together than apart. But when reading a book on beauty and justice, I desire both an aha moment of realization and a story so well-crafted I can feel its beauty in both diction and syntax. While their painting and humanitarian work eminently show rather than tell, the telling in Beauty and Justice doesn’t quite deliver.

Perhaps the book falls short because, frankly, it’s hard to write about beauty and justice. Beauty always seems to catch us off-guard. It’s a feeling in the gut, an electric warmth, a mouth-agape moment that nails our feet to the floor. In a similar way, the longing for justice can feel like fire shut up in our bones: It can be hot, intense, maybe even full of tears. And when we try to pin down these words, they seem to slip away.

Mako agrees. He points out that beauty is “not so much a term to be defined but something to be experienced.” He mentions he’s tried to answer the question “What is beauty?” in all his books but has never felt successful. Even still, I applaud another attempt.

The couple’s vocations focus on what they call “generative living,” pursued in creating beauty and justice, that they define in five movements: genesis moments (creating into the future), grit, generosity, gratitude, and generational stewardship. Although the Fujimuras provide a general outline for this mode of living, echoing what Andy Crouch calls culture making, a reader looking for practical applications may expect more of a guided journey through the five g’s.

Because words like beauty and justice are so hard to pin down, the book kept circling around common themes. For those familiar with Mako’s previous works, much is replayed. Throughout the book he repeatedly returns to the concept of kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken vessels with precious materials. Mako championed the art and extended the metaphor to the Christian life over the last several decades, and it has since become ubiquitous in books and sermons.

Throughout, we read a plethora of abstract nouns. Beauty and justice “[require] imagination,” and they are “inherently relational.” “Beauty is a portal” that “can bring justice into our bodies.” Sometimes the images are even combined in one sentence: Haejin says we should believe that we are a new creation, “a winged horse that can and will fly, a Kintsugi vessel that is more beautiful and valuable because of its scars, not despite them. Therefore, we must grow our wings and train them to fly (our new wineskin).”

It’s understandable for writers to keep searching for adequate language for concepts as resonant as beauty and justice. I understand the words’ slipperiness. But at some point, we need stories and concrete language that not only tell but also show us how to make these concepts a reality in our own lives. The sentences in the book sound nice, but ultimately, I’m not sure what they look like on the ground.

Even though the book did not forge new trails, much of it is entirely correct. We read of the redemptive arc of creation, fall into sin, redemption, and unification of beauty and justice in the new heavens and new earth. The authors make thoughtful connections and write true words (“Sacrificial love leads to generative fruit.”)

But at the end of the day, what am I supposed to do with a sentence like that, standing in my kitchen on a Wednesday night with my elbows in dishwater? How do I make the connection between my ordinary chores and sacrificial love, and how do I imagine “generative fruit”? That’s what many Christians want to know.

The challenge for writers is not only to see and do but also to communicate in fresh ways what they have seen and done. One of the most affecting scenes in Beauty and Justice involves Haejin narrating the work of Embers International. Because of the Sahasee Embers Center the nonprofit runs in an Indian slum, a young boy whom Haejin calls Amir has received hope through an education outside thearea. As a low-caste child, he did not have a birth certificate and would have been educated in ways that affirmed generational poverty. Yet Embers International helped him obtain a birth certificate, an education, and a loving community.

On one of Haejin’s prayer walks, a volunteer at the center invited her to see Amir’s home. The stench was overwhelming. Approximately 1.5 million pounds of waste were dumped daily in the nearby landfill. Down a corridor, Haejin saw Amir’s home: a public toilet he shared with his alcoholic father. She knew that aside from Amir’s days at a private school, with both bussing and afterschool care provided by the Sahasee Embers Center, his days were as noxious as the systems that oppressed him.

Haejin, wiping away her tears, made a pinky promise with Amir where he promised to say hello to her the following day at school—she was doing all she could, while giving him dignity, to ensure he would keep coming. His chin glued to his chest in shame, he still grasped her pinky. The authors write, “From the public toilet to a private school to Sahasee Embers Center and back to the public toilet, Amir experiences heaven and hell every day.” I wish the book had more of these stories.

Make no mistake, I am a fan of the Fujimuras. Mako has an illustrious career and has remained faithful to the gospel. I have marveled at his works in person, lingering over their layers. They are breathtaking. My family has a copy of his illuminated Four Holy Gospels on our coffee table. Haejin’s systematic thinking combined with her compassion is a force to be reckoned with—and one of many reasons I wanted to read the book.

Although Beauty and Justice fails to deliver adequate language commensurate with its titular nouns, I commend the attempt. For what else might an artist or advocate—or any of us—do but try to show and tell of the goodness we’ve seen? We all fall short. Gratefully, we’ve got all eternity to witness to the inexplicable reality of both.

Ashley Hales is editorial director for features at Christianity Today.

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Ideas

A Case for In-Person Voting

By Chris Butler

Contributor

As a volunteer at a polling station, I saw what we lose when we choose convenience over communal participation.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

This piece was adapted from the Mosaic newsletter. Subscribe here.

This month, I volunteered as a poll chaplain in Chicago. Illinois residents were casting votes in primary elections for gubernatorial and congressional candidates, and I went to help at a polling place near my home on the city’s south side.

When I walked in around 5 p.m., the election judge at the check-in table was working through a pile of walnuts with an old metal nutcracker. She looked up, slightly startled, as though she hadn’t expected anyone to walk through the door. When I asked about turnout, she told me it was “pretty good.” But if it had been any slower than what I was seeing, I figured she must have had a lot of walnuts, because the place was eerily quiet.

What I saw was far from what I expected. I’m a pastor, and clergy like me sometimes serve as poll chaplains—a role for leaders who want to be a calming presence at polling stations during elections. I had come prepared for the last hectic hours of a contested primary, some of which I vividly remember from my days working in Chicago politics. I expected conflicts to defuse, people to pray with, and maybe a long line of voters who needed encouragement to stay the course. But none of that was needed.

During the last two hours at the polling place, only ten people came in to vote. Outside, there were no campaign workers on the sidewalk making last-minute pitches for their candidates, nor were there political organizers who stopped by carrying hot beverages for faithful precinct workers as they did back in the day. It was just one woman, alone with her walnuts, holding down the machinery of democracy.

The irony is that by every measure, a lot of people were voting in Chicago. On the morning of election day, city officials told a local paper that turnout through early and mail-in voting had outpaced that of from recent midterm primaries. Some 400,000 votes had been cast by that evening, and total primary turnout hit 26 percent (a modest but decent amount) with more mail ballots still to count. Yet the polling place felt abandoned.

This is a paradox I now often see with voting. We have made the process more convenient, and in doing so, we are making democracy a more independent and less communal experience. This is a problem, and Christians can understand something about it that our secular neighbors might be more likely to miss. Throughout Scripture, we see there’s something powerful about presence, physically showing up and being there with people. And extending that awareness to how we see democracy might be one of the greatest contributions we could make to our broader civic life today.

Being among others is most profoundly demonstrated in the Incarnation, which was a statement of God’s presence and closeness. Jesus showed up in a body, in a specific place, and among a specific people, to accomplish redemption. He was tired, hungry, and inconvenienced. Still, he was there, and we imitate him when we gather with other believers every week to display that we are indeed one body.

The church is not America, but the principle that there is something good and dignified about being physically present in meaningful moments, including elections, is not something we can easily set aside. Gathering to vote in person with fellow citizens can foster community and bipartisanship and allow us to carry out simple and unexpected acts of ministry. It shows our democratic way of life is not primarily an idea. It is a practice: local, sometimes inconvenient, communal, and irreplaceable. By reducing it to a transaction—fill out the form, seal the envelope, drop it in the mail—we might be preserving the mechanism while hollowing out its deeper meaning.

That said, independent forms of voting do present some benefits worth acknowledging. A 2020 Stanford study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most rigorous analyses available, found that universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall turnout by roughly 2 percent and has no apparent effect on either party’s share of turnout. But the same research found something equally important: Voter interest, not convenience, drives civic engagement. This means most people who vote by mail would vote in person. What mail-in voting changes is how, and with whom, they participate.

That distinction matters, especially for Christians who see their involvement in the democratic process as their type of ministry. Marsha Washington, an African American woman who volunteered to be an election judge in Chicago in the past election, told me she’s been volunteering in the role for more than 20 years. A typical day doing the job, which pays a small stipend, involves fixing broken equipment, dealing with provisional ballots, and enjoying moments of genuine human contact—including assisting people to vote.

During the election this month, Washington told me, she helped a middle-aged man with an intellectual disability who needed help casting his ballot for the first time. She read the ballot to him, which Illinois law allows, and helped him participate in the democratic process. Marsha, who is a Democrat, also told me that when she says goodbye to voters, she makes a point of saying, “Have a blessed day,” so people know she’s a Christian. That kind of civic ministry can happen between the parking lot and the ballot scanner, but it can’t happen through the mail slot.

Nationally, when and how we vote has become the subject of intense debate. On top of the recent Republican-backed SAVE Act, which would stiffen voter-identification requirements and make mail voting more difficult, President Donald Trump’s well-documented but perhaps less-than-principled opposition to mail-in voting (he and his family voted by mail in a special election this month), has created a landscape in which skepticism of mail-in voting feels like partisan territory. But the Stanford research makes clear that this type of voting has virtually no partisan effect. And my concern here is about our participation in the democratic process and whether we are weakening the very thing we claim to value.

The most important loss we suffer when we stop showing up together is the further untethering of Americans from each other. Some of the volunteers I met in Chicago know this and are doing their best to contribute in a meaningful way. Nathaniel Stuart, a 27-year-old man who lives on the south side, told me he became an election judge four years ago and keeps doing it despite unpredictable days, occasional conflict, and very little pay. Why? He said, “It’s a way of expressing love for my neighbors and my community.”

During the most recent election, Stuart watched a teenager come in to cast his first vote in a primary. The election judges in the room were excited and cheered for the teen, who will likely remember that experience for some time to come. Stuart, who is a Republican, also told me he sat next to his Democrat counterpart, a retired Chicago Sun-Times reporter, during the length of the election day and talked about their neighborhood’s problems. By the end of the night, the two were discussing the possibility of starting a local chamber of commerce to help businesses in the area.

“The more we leave behind in-person voting, the more we forget that our personal lives are located within neighborhoods and around people who have real concerns, who have real fears,” Stuart said.

While I am critical of any system that makes communal experiences feel less essential, there is certainly a need to accommodate voters who are sick, soldiers serving our country overseas, and people who are less mobile or lack transportation. We can’t totally discount convenience, and it’s good to explore other communal paths to increasing turnout, such as creating a federal holiday for voting, expanding polling locations in underserved areas, or otherwise ensuring people have the time to participate. Democracy is a team sport, and the benefit of our current system—a 2 percent bump in ballot returns—is simply not worth the further atomization of our civic life.

This year’s primary season runs through September. If your state has not yet voted, there will soon be elections to determine the candidates who will stand for the general election in November. Both the primaries and the general election represent opportunities for more than simply casting ballots. They are opportunities to remind ourselves that our destinies are tied together as neighbors who inhabit the same community.

You can vote by mail. But you can also choose to show up. However, showing up is so much more than voting in person. You can serve as an election judge. You can volunteer on a campaign for a candidate you support. You can come as a poll chaplain, or a poll watcher, or simply as a neighbor willing to drive someone to vote. You can bring your kids and let them watch what democracy looks like from the inside—not the broadcast or mail-slot version but the walnut-cracking, provisional-ballot-filing, cheering-for-a-teenager version. That’s democracy at its best.

Chris Butler is a pastor in Chicago and the director of Christian civic formation at the Center for Christianity & Public Life. He is also the co-author of Compassion & Conviction: The And Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement

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Ideas

What’s the Fix For the Affordability Crisis?

Compiled by Haleluya Hadero

Baylor University students tell us what they think about Zohran Mamdani, Ezra Klein’s Abundance, and the rising cost of housing.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

The Syllabus is a column that features student opinions on timely national and international topics. We aim to highlight how evangelical students in the US are thinking about important issues and how the Christian faith informs their worldview. Students should use this link to submit a response for April’s prompt: “How do you think about AI use, and how are your peers using the technology? What, if anything, do you believe the Christian faith has to say about how we use AI?” Responses are due by April 20.

For this column, students were asked, “Politicians and pundits offer different ways of solving affordability issues in the US. What do you like—or dislike—about the approach taken by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, center-left writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and the techno-optimist vision of “sustainable abundance” by Elon Musk? Is there another option, more free-market oriented or not, that you believe could help your generation with housing and other costs?” Here is what they said:

Let’s Listen to Klein and Thompson and Build More

A good way to think about housing is the classic example of pricing snow shovels during a storm. Most people feel it is unfair for a store to raise prices when demand spikes, but economically, higher prices help ration limited supply and signal that more inventory is needed. If prices stay too low, a few people can buy everything, leaving others with nothing. It is not perfect, but it helps balance the market.

Housing works in a similar way. This is why the government forcing prices down to make housing affordable for everyone is not a real solution. It only makes shortages worse by reducing the incentive to build and thus limiting supply.

High prices feel frustrating, but they signal that there is not enough supply. We need to build more, and a big part of the problem is that we have made that too difficult. This is the problem Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson highlight, and it’s why their “abundance” approach to make housing more affordable (by building more) makes the most sense to me.

That said, there are important caveats. Real estate moves in cycles, and if too much supply hits at once, you can get rising vacancies and falling profits, which can slow future development. It also matters what we build and where we build it. So the goal should be strategic abundance, reducing barriers and regulations while still being thoughtful about timing, location, and scale.

Lucas Escamilla, senior, Baylor University

Americans Need to Learn How to Save

Affordability is one of the biggest buzzwords. Open a social media app, and you’ll see headlines declaring that Gen Z will never afford health care, let alone a house. People think sticking taxes on the rich and getting handouts is going to get them out of the hole. But those who climbed their way out of poverty and are now able to afford the unaffordable didn’t expect politicians to solve problems for them. They acted themselves.

My family immigrated to the US from El Salvador and lived a life where affordability extended far past housing and health care into everyday necessities. Rather than sitting around and passing the torch to politicians, they solved their issues quite simply: They worked. Ask Americans ranting about affordability what their dream jobs are; I doubt any would say working at Taco Bell. It might not be luxurious, but that’s what my family did. They lived minimally, saved, and let their earnings slowly accumulate.

In the book Mere Economics, economists Art Carden and Caleb S. Fuller encourage readers to save money so they can “bake a bigger pie next year.” Working hard is also straight up biblical. The apostle Paul writes, “Mind your own business and work with your hands” (1 Thess. 4:11). The real way to address affordability is to stop passing the blame to others and make it happen for yourself.

Paige Demosthenes, junior, Baylor University

Our Housing Dreams Are Doomed

It’s not hard to see that affordability in the US is becoming the plot of a dystopian novel, where basic needs grow increasingly out of reach. Shelter shouldn’t be a luxury. But in our current political atmosphere, I don’t see a solution for rising housing prices.

Most of the proposals offered thus far feel like chapters in the same dystopian story rather than actual exits. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s vision offers the relief of rent control for rent-stabilized housing and the prospect of building more public housing, but it’s just a Band-Aid. On the other hand, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s fight against the vetocracy—by trying to reverse an entire system of housing permitting laws—makes sense on paper. But it is essentially a losing battle against a system designed to say no. A lot of people, for example, don’t want more apartment buildings built in their neighborhoods, and their preference is our downfall.

Then there is Elon Musk’s techno-optimism, which feels the most dystopian. He thinks we would be living in the most optimal world when artificial intelligence and robotics have generated so much economic output that scarcity disappears entirely.

None of these paths feels like a real way out. Between Band-Aid fixes, never-ending fights about permits and zoning laws, and a lifeless robotic future, a true solution seems hopeless.

Tabitha Dalton, senior, Baylor University

Mamdani’s Long-Shot Plans Are Good

Zohran Mamdani’s approach to affordability stands out to me because it directly targets everyday costs. He thinks housing, transit, and food are public goods and wants to implement policies like rent freezes, free buses, and city-run grocery stores to help solve the issue in pricey New York City. Instead of relying on markets to gradually lower prices, he aims to immediately reduce costs for working people in a very clear way, which I appreciate. However, he does face major hurdles. Many of his proposals require state approval or billions in funding. So even though he has a strong vision, I do think his plans are not that feasible, at least in the short term.

By contrast, writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson emphasize increasing supply, especially of housing, by reducing regulations. I think their approach is more pragmatic and arguably more achievable, but it can feel slow and less responsive to the immediate challenges people face. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s tech-fueled, no-work-needed vision is appealing in theory, but it lacks concrete short-term solutions and assumes technology alone will fix structural inequality.

So if I had my pick, I would say Mamdani, but he faces an uphill battle.

Tyler McKinney, senior, Baylor University

The Government Is Making Things Worse

Mamdani, Klein, Thompson, and Musk each identify a real part of the affordability crisis. Mamdani is right to treat high housing costs as urgent. Klein and Thompson are right that scarcity, red tape, and blocked construction drive prices higher. Musk is right that innovation and growth can help. Still, these views miss a deeper problem: Affordability is also about government discipline, misplaced priorities, and a system too often run by career politicians with little incentive to reform it.

Policymakers expect young Americans to accept high rents, delayed family formation, and a lower standard of living even as Washington spends tens of billions of dollars on foreign aid. At the same time, it keeps expanding promises without showing the discipline to manage programs efficiently, reduce waste, or address long-term obligations like Social Security before a crisis forces painful cuts. Good stewardship means using limited public resources responsibly, because affordability is not only an economic issue but also a matter of human dignity and flourishing.

A better answer is a free market with guardrails. Policymakers should make it easier to build by cutting zoning barriers, shortening permit timelines, and reducing fees that discourage new housing. They should encourage competition and supply rather than relying on new public programs first. Congress should also adopt term limits. America should not be governed by lifetime federal politicians who face too little pressure to challenge failed systems. My generation does not need bigger promises. It needs more housing, more accountability, and leaders willing to let markets work while governing with restraint.

Jose Tamez Villarreal, senior, Baylor University

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Books

Excerpt

American Presbyterianism Was Born Amid Chaos

D.G. Hart

An excerpt from Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, University of Notre Dame Press

Francis Makemie is sometimes called the father of American Presbyterianism, and he earned that status thanks to two episodes during the last two years of a life that ran from 1658 to 1708.

The first, in 1706, was his organizing the Presbytery of Philadelphia, a grassroots effort of six other pastors that created structures for ordination and church discipline. It lacked oversight from any Old World ecclesiastical body and owed its New World existence to both the exigencies of colonial existence and the religious freedom that Pennsylvania—a colony founded by Quakers—afforded to Protestants from all over Europe.

The second episode that framed Makemie’s reputation was his defiance of British colonial policies in New York. On the way to Boston during the summer of 1707 to recruit pastors for Presbyterian congregations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, Makemie stopped in New York. He and his companion, John Hampton, received a cordial welcome from the colony’s governor, Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury. Makemie’s meal with the governor never suggested that Presbyterians were unwelcome in New York.

Makemie had no awareness of restrictions on worship and accepted an invitation to preach in a home of local well-wishers. Because Makemie lacked a license, his preaching was against the law, as Lord Cornbury interpreted it. Local authorities had him arrested and imprisoned. Both Makemie and Hampton were in jail for 46 days. When the case went to trial, Makemie mentioned that Quakers and “Papists” had worshiped without penalty. He also appealed to England’s laws of toleration.

An intriguing angle on this claim was whether the Church of England’s prerogatives applied to the colonies as much as to England itself. These arguments were sufficient for the jury to find Makemie not guilty.

That did not clear him for court costs. In A Narrative of a New and Unusual American Imprisonment of Two Presbyterian Ministers and Prosecution of Mr. Francis Makemie (1707), the pastor (who also conducted trade in the Caribbean) itemized his legal fees. Between jailers, justices of the peace, sheriffs, and travel, Makemie was forced to pay more than 81 pounds (the equivalent of almost $25,000 in 2023).

Born in 1658 in Ramelton, a town in Ireland that boasts the oldest Presbyterian church on the island, Makemie’s roots went back to obscure Ulster Protestants who settled earlier in the 17th century. His family’s Presbyterian convictions were no match for either Oliver Cromwell’s government or the Restoration.

As an outsider to the Church of Ireland, Makemie could not attend Trinity College in Dublin, but he enrolled instead in 1676 at the University of Glasgow. Ordained in 1681 by the Presbytery of Laggan in west Ulster, Makemie left for North America two years later with a commission to plant churches among Presbyterian settlers.

When he left Ireland, prospects for Presbyterianism either in Scotland or Ireland were not encouraging. Nothing in Makemie’s subsequent career, however, suggests an attachment to the cause of Presbyterianism either in Scotland or Ireland.

In fact, the young pastor’s movements within England’s North American colonies indicate a strategy of fitting in more than advocating reformation.

The Presbyterian pastor also aligned himself with the Reformed churches of Geneva, France, Scotland, and England. A few years later, during a business trip to Barbados, Makemie lost the polemical edge that had been a trademark of Presbyterianism. He did so in a pamphlet written in 1697 (published in 1699) to defend Reformed Protestants from claims by Anglicans that Presbyterians were a fringe group of Protestants.

Makemie argued that Presbyterians were in fact the “truest and soundest part” of the Church of England. At the same time, he constructed an “ecumenical bridge” between the two British Protestant rivals. Makemie objected to using “Presbyterian” or “Puritan” as epithets. One important reason was that Presbyterians agreed with the Church of England “in all points of Faith, and Divine Ordinances, or parts of Worship.”

The only differences were in “Ceremonies, Government and Discipline.” Did the colonial setting take some of the edge off Presbyterian zeal?

Whatever the demands of his environment, Makemie’s attempt to find a common cause with other British Protestants was indicative of Presbyterians in the English-speaking world after the Glorious Revolution.

By the 18th century, Presbyterians were recalibrating ecclesiastical ideals to gain a foothold in the emerging structures of liberal society. How central Presbyterianism was to other sectors of national life was the question that church officers and members on both sides of the Atlantic needed to answer.

Two hundred years later (1906), leaders of the Presbyterian Church USA, the communion that sprang from the presbytery that Makemie had organized, gathered in Accomack County, Virginia, to unveil a statue that memorialized the colonial pastor.

Henry Van Dyke, professor of literature at Princeton University, composed a poem for the occasion, “Presbyter to Christ in America.” The Dutch American feted the colonial Ulsterman in American cadences:

To thee, plain hero of a rugged race,
      We bring a meed of praise too long delayed.
      Thy fearless word and faithful work have made
The path of God’s republic easier to trace
In this New World: thou has proclaimed the grace
      And power of Christ in many a woodland glade,
      Teaching the truth that leaves men unafraid
Of tyrants’ frowns, or chains, or death’s dark face.

Oh, who can tell how much we owe to thee,
      Makemie, and to labors such as thine,
      For all that makes America the shrine
Of faith untrammeled and of conscience free?
Stand here, gray stone, and consecrate the sod
Where sleeps this brave Scotch-Irish man of God!

Makemie’s life, and his time in prison, became an easy narrative by which to prove American Presbyterianism’s stake in American independence. But reading Makemie’s life forward into American independence misses the revolutionary politics of the 17th century that shaped the Presbyterian’s life and ministry. Makemie himself belonged to a generation that was still recovering from revolutionary wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland during the 1640s and 1650s, which culminated in the beheading of Charles I.

The Ulster Presbyterian was also living with the fallout of another revolution, this one Glorious, which provided a constitutional framework for the English monarchy. As much as Makemie may have inspired American patriots, his career embodied the religious and political uncertainties that characterized the English-speaking world between 1558 and 1689.

Published with permission from Notre Dame Press, excerpted from Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution. D. G. Hart is professor of history at Hillsdale College. He is the author of Protestants and Patriots, among other books.

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News

Supreme Court Says Schools Can’t Hide Kids’ Gender Transition

The Bulletin

Q&A with attorney Adele Keim on the landmark ruling for parental rights.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

On March 2, the Supreme Court voted in a 6–3 decision to allow California parents the right to be informed if their child chooses to socially enact gender transition at school. The Bulletin sat down with Adele Keim, legal counsel at the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, to understand more about this landmark case, not only for parental rights regarding their children’s gender expression but for religious freedom more broadly. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation in episode 263.

What was argued in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the case brought to the Supreme Court?

This case was originally filed by two teachers and two families in California. All of them were Catholic. The parents had gone to their children’s schools and said, We think something’s going on with our child. Have you socially transitioned them? Have you changed their name and their pronouns, and are you treating them as a boy instead of a girl?

In both cases, the teachers and principles said, No, we would never do that. We haven’t done that. Years went by, and, in both cases, the two children had severe mental health crises that resulted in hospitalization and suicide attempts.

The parents discovered upon the hospitalization of their kids that the schools actually had lied to their faces. Their children had been transitioned socially and were being treated as the opposite of their biological sex—girls being treated as boys. Teachers had actively worked to conceal this from the parents throughout years of parent-teacher conferences. They did false paperwork so the parents wouldn’t catch on and then refused to answer questions, stonewalled, or lied when the parents asked the question.

The California law actually required school districts statewide to engage in this pattern of concealment from parents unless a student affirmatively told the school, I want you to tell my parents about my experience of gender incongruence, about the fact that I’m using different pronouns and a different name at school, that I’m going to the boys’ bathroom instead of the girls’ bathroom.

Because the California law required the school districts to conceal actively from parents, the parents sued to challenge that law. They proceeded along with two Catholic teachers who said, We have a religious obligation to be truthful and to not lie in our jobs.

There was a lengthy trial proceeding with expert witnesses from both sides and testimony from the parents, families, and administrators. In December 2025, the district court judge ruled in favor of the parents and the teachers and issued an injunction that said California could no longer enforce this law. After this injunction, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals tried to pause the ruling and allow California to continue its concealment practices while the case went on. Federal court cases can take years to complete.

The parents and the teachers went to the Supreme Court and asked for the policy to be paused while the lawsuit continued. The Supreme Court, unusually, reached out and agreed. In that 6-3 decision, they said, We think this is outrageous, and we’re not going to let California keep parents in the dark while this case is litigated.

What argument does California make for why concealment is necessary?

On the legal side, one of their primary arguments was that children have a constitutional right to privacy under the California constitution, and the state needs to protect children’s right to privacy from their own parents. The district court and the US Supreme Court rejected that argument. The supremacy clause in the US Constitution overrides a contrary state law. Even if the contrary state law is very popular back home, the federal Bill of Rights controls. That’s why Jim Crow was overturned.

California doesn’t think they’re doing evil or harm here. They say they are motivated by a concern to avoid child abuse. The state has said throughout that they do not want children who disclose to their parents that they are feeling gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, that they want to transition, to face child abuse at home. It is important and legitimate that the state is concerned about avoiding child abuse.

The US Supreme Court said that, while their concern was fair, the state has an entire child abuse enforcement system in place to adjudicate cases of genuine child abuse. All teachers are still mandatory reporters who can report potential abuse through the right channels for proper investigation and, if substantiated, for child abuse charges. There’s a whole process for protecting the child while protecting the integrity of the family, seeking changes in the family, and eventual reunification if that’s possible or removal if it’s not.

The Supreme Court took great pains to say those processes still apply. California still has all of those tools because the state does have a legitimate and important interest in preventing child abuse. But what the court did say was that the state can’t presume that parents will abuse their children and therefore protect them from their parents.

The Catholic parents in this case testified that their beliefs prevented them from letting their children go through social transition. They said they would get their children counseling and help and support them. They would show them love and acceptance but would not facilitate their gender transition. The court below and the Supreme Court found that that is not child abuse—that the parent has a fundamental right to raise their child in their faith and the state may not knowingly and deliberately interfere with a parent’s efforts to raise their child in the faith.

That’s a really important thing for Christian parents to hear out of this decision. There are ways to be a loving parent that do not involve facilitating a gender transition when you believe, as a Christian parent, that is not in the best interest of your child.

The district court said in its ruling for the parents that, if parents didn’t know what was going on, they couldn’t help their child. All the experts agree that kids whose parents are working together with their therapists to address their problems do much better than kids whose parents are not working with their therapists. Unless parents are involved, the child is essentially left on their own. Schools cannot arrange therapeutic intervention on their own; parents need to be involved. Concealment doesn’t serve the child’s interest on any level.

Is this concealment by school districts happening in other places beyond California?

This is happening nationwide. Around 2016, right at the end of the Obama administration, these policies started to be rolled out and recommended by advocacy groups as the gold standard for accommodation for transgender students. They were often introduced with nondiscrimination policies. Schools could not discriminate against students on the basis of their transgender status. If the student asked you to, you concealed their social gender transition from their parents. If the student and their parents disagreed about transition, you sided with the kids over their parents’ objections. Those policies have been around for 10 years, and estimates say about 1,200 school districts have them. Some are imposed at the state level.

How would parents know that’s going on in their particular school district?

You could look up rights for transgender students in your district. You could go in and talk to your kid’s teachers. If you have a good relationship with teachers or administrators, you can say, “What do you do in these situations?” And you can put them on notice. You can say, “I really care about my kid. I want to get them all the help that I can, so I really want you to let me know if my kid is expressing discomfort with their gender identity and wanting to transition. Please tell me.” You can bring it up in parent-teacher conferences if you feel comfortable, reminding them that you are your kid’s best advocate. You are the one who knows your kid best and loves your kid best. You can do it in a winsome way, but you can also do it knowing that the law is on your side.

Parents have the right and the duty to raise their children in the way they see fit. The Supreme Court case law here goes back a hundred years. That’s a fundamental constitutional right, and that overrides your school district’s policies. Any school district officials that now continue to conceal gender transitions from parents are in violation of clearly established constitutional law. It means they’re personally liable for monetary damages.

We want a pluralistic society. That’s what it means to be an American. What is the limiting principle for how our education system should address these ideologies as they emerge in our culture?

The Mirabelli case went back to 100-year-old case law that existed at the height of American xenophobia, where Nebraska tried to enact laws that banned German Lutherans from having Bible classes in German, in their parochial Lutheran schools, and Oregon tried to outlaw Catholic schools. Both laws were designed to shore up support for the nascent public school system, but they required you to send your kids to public schools only. The Supreme Court said 100 years ago that the child is not the mere creature of the state. It is their parents who have the responsibility, the right, the high duty to prepare them for their future life and their responsibilities.

Those principles are still true today, and they apply in the most contentious questions that educators and parents are dealing with today. Parents are still the primary educators of their kids, and the public schools do not have the right to deliberately interfere with parents’ efforts to bring their kids up. This is important for Christians, but it’s even more important for members of religious minorities.

Protestant parents who do not wish to have their child enrolled any longer in a public school may find a Protestant school nearby. It may not be ideal. It may be costly, but you may also have a homeschool co-op nearby that you can join or a private school you can go to. You shouldn’t have to do this, to be clear, but there are options out there.

If you’re a Muslim parent in Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, there are no good options for you other than sending your kid to a religious school that’s not your faith. If you’re the parent of a disabled child who needs a lot of special support, there aren’t good options for you outside of the public school system.

When Christian parents step up and say, This is woven into our constitution, and you can’t take this away from us, it actually has an umbrella effect. Our advocacy advances the common good for our Muslim neighbors and for others who are, for some reason, locked into the public system and don’t have a way out.

- More from The Bulletin

Books

Review

The Meaning of Your Life Can’t Rest on You

Matt Reynolds

Arthur Brooks’s new book is enjoyable, smart, and often wise, but a search for true meaning must bring us to Christ.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Portfolio

When discussing the biggest problems in life, Christians are understandably eager to present Jesus as the solution.

Sometimes this looks like basic fidelity to Scripture, which depicts Christ as the source of all wisdom, the one in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Regrettably, it often looks more like the dreaded “Jesus juke”—an awkward, heavy-handed, or manipulative attempt to shove faith into a conversation. (Yes, I worry about the Iran war. But in the end, I’m more concerned about the war to win souls for Christ.)

I fought mightily to restrain this altar-call impulse while reading Arthur C. Brooks’s newest book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. A Harvard University professor and leading expert on happiness, Brooks specializes in social science, and his book leans on insights from this field as it investigates why so many people enjoying outwardly enviable lives struggle with loneliness, anxiety, and aching dissatisfaction. But as much as I long to answer such existential worries with Jesus’ self-attestation as the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6), I wanted to honor Brooks’s expertise and his chosen analytical framework.

And it’s not as though Brooks ignores the place of Christianity in illuminating life’s meaning. Far from it: He writes candidly about his own Catholic faith and often bolsters social-scientific findings with complementary strands of Christian wisdom, alongside samplings from other theological and philosophical traditions.

Still, the further I read, the more trouble I had quieting my inner Billy Graham. I can understand why Brooks issues a generous, inclusive invitation, proposing pathways to deeper meaning that anyone can pursue, regardless of religious beliefs (or lack thereof). There are virtues to mapping out the good life with ecumenical expansiveness. Yet I’m loathe to settle for anything less than acknowledging Christianity as the map itself.

Before plunging into those waters, let’s back up a little. The Meaning of Your Life addresses a specific dimension of the social crisis playing out in parts of American society. Many researchers have studied the mental health burdens weighing on younger generations, raising alarms about their disordered attachments to smartphones and social media. Others have dug into data concerning Americans without college degrees and steady paychecks who fall away from family and community, get hooked on drinking and drugs, and succumb to premature “deaths of despair.”

Brooks aims his appeal at the high-achieving end of the bell curve, toward members of America’s “striver” class. Blessed with superior gifts and unceasing energies, these strivers are continually scaling mountains of personal, educational, professional success—always pushing, in the words of one interview subject, to earn “the next gold star.” But Brooks observes a void in their lives. As their accolades and material wealth pile up, they wonder whether their labors amount to anything worthwhile, especially after counting the cost in strained relationships, harried psyches, and punishing daily grinds.

Brooks sees these tendencies in his Harvard students. He sees them in personal and professional acquaintances. And he sees them, perhaps most profoundly, in himself. An incurable striver from childhood onward, Brooks excelled as a classical musician before pivoting to triumphs as a professor, nonprofit boss, and public intellectual. He resonates on an intimate wavelength with misgivings about workaholic zeal crowding out deeper questions of meaning. Much of his happiness research, he admits, doubles as an avenue of “me-search.”

With that record, Brooks might seem like an insufferable showoff, custom-engineered to arouse envy in mere mortals (like me). But I think regular Joes will find his manner disarmingly down-to-earth. The book features the same genial, plainspoken, and self-effacing style on display in his advice essays for outlets like The Atlantic and The Free Press. For anyone seeking practical, relatable guidance on happiness, I can imagine him making a delightful conversation partner.

Such guidance abounds in The Meaning of Your Life, in which Brooks distills decades of research and reflection. The “problem of meaning has vexed me more than any other in my career,” he confesses, “and this is the hardest book I have ever written.”

Early on, Brooks recounts a conversation that provided a flash of conceptual clarity: One anxious striver described feeling trapped in a “simulation” where cheap, two-dimensional stage props replaced the rich architecture of authentic life. That image struck a chord, and subsequent interviews echoed a similar refrain: “Life felt unreal,” Brooks reports, “full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible.”

Eventually, Brooks concluded that what “was missing was the one thing that can never be simulated: meaning. Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless. Or that they didn’t know what they were meant to do in work and life.”

As Brooks observes, strivers can often identify and lament this absence of meaning. But they’re tempted to respond in counterproductive ways, soaking up the screen-based diversions of our digital age. Time and again, the book introduces fine specimens of on-the-clock industriousness who fritter away their leisure hours with aimless scrolling. The ensuing dopamine briefly numbs their discontent, but their sadness returns soon enough, piling guilt atop their weary souls while leaving the fundamental problem unresolved.

Escaping this “doom loop,” Brooks argues, is the first step toward getting a firmer grasp on what life is all about. Yet what strivers need most, he suggests, is an awakening jolt to parts of their neural circuitry too often stuck on sleep mode.

As Brooks theorizes, the people most adept at climbing ladders of power and prestige tend to operate within the brain’s analytical centers. What they often lack is a receptivity to signals sent from the brain’s opposite hemisphere, a fertile soil for ruminations on mystery, beauty, divinity, and other proverbial staples of late-night dorm-room debates. This is where meaning dwells most richly, Brooks suggests, in the “numinous” realms that defy rational explanation.

How do you open new passageways to these neglected regions? This question guides most of Brooks’s chapters, which offer concrete strategies for “ignit[ing] the right hemisphere of your brain” and training it to recognize what matters most.

He asks readers to make regular assessments of the coherence and direction of our lives, invites us to pursue romantic love and committed friendship, and calls us to look beyond our own needs, cultivating an openness to spiritual realities. He teaches us to orient our working hours to something beyond money and our leisure hours to something beyond fleeting or trivial pleasure. He encourages us to immerse ourselves in natural, aesthetic, and moral beauty. And he reminds us that our suffering, while inevitable, need not be in vain.

By and large, this is wise (and sometimes urgently needed) counsel. If you’re struck in a metaphysical rut, you can hardly go wrong hearing an orchestra, hitting a hiking trail, taking someone on a date, catching up with a friend, or—who knows?—even darkening the doors of a church. I have my quibbles with certain arguments and illustrations, as anyone might. But Brooks’s core recommendations seem broadly congruent with basic Christian teachings.

Speaking of which … uh-oh, here it comes. Let’s call it a Jesus juke lite. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Scripture, of course, doesn’t say much about the brain’s precise cartography or the happiness principles that flow from diagramming it rightly. But it says plenty about what makes meaning genuinely meaningful.

Drawing on a definition proposed by psychologists Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger, Brooks pictures meaning as a cord of three strands: coherence, purpose, and significance. You’ll notice the glaring absence of any anchoring in objective realities or moral truths. Plenty of false religions and grotesque ideologies check these three boxes. Perhaps their adherents enjoy a secure sense of meaning, but it rests on a foundation of illusions and lies.

In his determination to liberate meaning from the cramped perspective of rationalistic strivers, Brooks risks liberating it from anything solid and stable. At one point, he approvingly cites psychiatrist Carl Jung, who wrote, “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble.” Which requires getting comfortable with philosophical and experiential loose ends, rather than demanding some program or paradigm to tie them together.

But Christians believe the Bible spells out both our greatest problem (sin and alienation from God) and an efficacious solution (Christ’s death and resurrection). Yes, our faith embraces mystery and transcendence. It proclaims realities so unfathomable—a triune God, a divinely ordered cosmos, a virgin birth, a kingdom that has no end—that our puny minds can scarcely comprehend them. But it tethers the sublime grandeur of redemption to decidedly non-numinous claims of historical fact.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives them a workmanlike rundown: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve,” and then to a further succession of disciples and apostles, including Paul himself (vv. 3–8). If these statements are untrue, he insists, then our “faith is futile,” and “we are of all people most to be pitied” (vv. 17, 19).

If Brooks’s conception of meaning lacks a firm grounding in objective truth, it also lacks a firm grounding in the binding stories, communities, and traditions that have structured lives and shaped consciences for most of human history. In other words, it lacks a firm grounding in the authoritative meaning we inherit, rather than the subjective meaning we find and choose for ourselves.

Even as Brooks exhorts us to look outward and forge relationships of reciprocal care and concern, the book’s overall thrust remains curiously individualistic. It’s right there in the title, which speaks of the meaning of your life, not life in general. Words like search and journey get heavy workouts, suggesting more of a lonely quest than a baptism or initiation into an established community.

In fairness, Brooks does include a moving epilogue tied to his experience walking the famed Camino de Santiago with other Christian pilgrims. Here he stresses how meaning can find us rather than us finding it. For most of the book, however, the onus seems to fall on individual seekers, who need only drop their phones and reprogram their brains by doing “what your grandparents did in the course of their ordinary lives.”

In fact, I was surprised that Brooks didn’t pay more attention to broader trends of institutional and communal decay. If people today are starved of meaning, perhaps that’s because an atomized society isn’t satisfying their hunger to belong.

Here, again, is where Christianity helpfully enlarges the frame. Scripture doesn’t deny the subjective dimension of meaning derived from relationships, responsibilities, talents, and callings that vary from person to person. But it weaves those threads into a single all-encompassing story of redemption showing all people, in all ages and places, as well as who they are, where they’ve come from, and where God in Christ wills to take them.

There are lots of things worth saying to anyone doubting the significance of their life and work, and Brooks says many of them clearly and effectively. But here’s what I’d like to say most: Step into the story of redemption. Put your trust in its author and perfecter. Look forward to its consummation in the new heavens, the new earth, and the multiethnic multitudes gathered to worship Christ forevermore.

Discovering the meaning of your life, of all life, really is every bit as simple—and infinitely, gloriously complex—as that.

Matt Reynolds is a writer and a former CT editor. He lives with his wife and son in the suburbs of Chicago.

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News

1,000 Kenyans Fought for Russia in Ukraine. Many Were Duped.

Pius Sawa

False advertising lured Africans to Eastern Europe for jobs, then recruiters pressured them into the army.

Families of Kenyans recruited illegally to fight for the Russian army in the Russia-Ukraine war hold photos of their missing relatives on March 05, 2026.

Anadolu / Contributor / Getty

Ian Simiyu was struggling to find enough day-labor jobs to provide for his family in Eldoret, Kenya, when he came across a Facebook ad last April recruiting Kenyan citizens to work as cleaners in Russia. His younger sister had taken a job as a housemaid in Qatar, so the idea of working abroad and earning more money to send back home appealed to him.

The ad said the company would provide a Russian work visa and an airline ticket. Excited, he worked to get his passport, but the paperwork and fees bogged down his efforts to go abroad.

What he didn’t realize was that other Kenyans had responded to similar ads and traveled to Russia to work as drivers or security guards only to find themselves coerced into joining the country’s army.

Several months later, as Simiyu waited for his passport, he saw a video released by the Ukrainian army of a 36-year-old Kenyan man—identified only as “Evans”—appealing for release after being captured and detained on the frontlines. Evans said a sports agent tricked him into traveling to Russia on a tourist visa, only to force him into the Russian army. Shocked by Evans’s story, Simiyu realized the job he had been hoping for was likely a scam.

A February report by Kenyan intelligence officers estimated more than 1,000 Kenyans have fought in Russia’s war against Ukraine—some voluntarily and others, like Evans, tricked into it. The intelligence officers also alleged corrupt Kenyan and Russian officials colluded with recruitment agencies to fraudulently press unsuspecting workers to join the military. After an outcry from the families of the duped Kenyan recruits, foreign minister Musalia Mudavadi met with his Russian counterpart this month. They agreed Kenyans would no longer be able to join the army.

At least one Kenyan, Charles Waithaka Wangari, has died in the war, while 39 have been hospitalized and 28 are missing in action. The Russian Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, denied accusations of embassy officials’ involvement and called such reports propaganda.

Human rights group Vocal Africa alleged individuals connected with the Russian Orthodox Church in Kenya promoted work opportunities in Russia. In recent years, the Russian church has expanded in Africa, growing to 350 parishes across over 30 countries. A professor of ecumenism said the church is part of Russia’s “soft power” in the continent, as the church aligns closely with the state.

Yet a Russian Orthodox priest in Nairobi told Religion News Service the church sends seminary students to Ukraine only for religious studies, and it warns them that military recruitment can happen there.

Most church leaders in Kenya contacted by CT declined to comment on potential recruitment by the Russian Orthodox Church until reports receive further confirmation.

One Christian, Justus Wazlala, said, “If … the Russian Orthodox Church was involved in this human trafficking, then it is high time the government started monitoring foreign churches in country, just like it is with Islamic groups.”

According to Ukraine’s February estimates, Russia has recruited over 1,700 soldiers from 36 African countries, and reports of fraudulent recruitment have surfaced in other nations, including South Africa and Zimbabwe. The daughter of Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former prime minister, resigned from her position as a member of Parliament after accusations that she helped fraudulently recruit Africans into the Russian army.

Human rights advocate Stephen Lempaa told CT that high unemployment and poverty in Kenya leave young men susceptible to recruitment into foreign armies. The Kenya Poverty Report of 2022, released in 2024, shows over 20 million Kenyans lived below the poverty line. Unemployment and poverty in Kenya have forced many to look for work abroad and have made young people prime targets for recruitment by terrorist organizations like al-Shabaab.

In one case reported by The Kenyan Daily Post in early March, a man named Dennis Mokaya Mong’are left Kenya in November and traveled to Moscow then Belarus for promised work as a cleaner, only to have his passport confiscated after arrival. Mongare said he was forced to sign documents in Russian before military personnel sent him to the frontlines. After sustaining injuries in a February 5 drone strike, Mongare reportedly pled with the Kenyan government to rescue him and others coerced into joining the conflict.

Lempaa said desperation also influences voluntary recruitment. Some jobless young men searching for purpose end up fighting in Russia or other African countries—such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan. Lempaa said many Kenyan youths have fled the stagnant economy at home with a common slogan: “I [would] rather die of a bullet than die of poverty.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests social media may influence some youth to consider foreign army service, especially in Russia. In late February, when Kenya’s National Intelligence Service arrested Festus Arasa Omwamba—a prime suspect in Russian recruitment of Kenyans—young men on social media asked for information about joining the Russian army.

“How do I reach this man for greener pastures[?]” wrote a user named Baraka John Mwas, a single man from Nairobi, Kenya.

“Please I need his contact,” wrote Bamah Emzo from Cameroon. “I want to go fight for Russia.”

Senator Okiya Omtatah from Busia County, Kenya, pointed to a June 2023 government initiative to increase youth employment abroad and questioned whether the program was used to deliberately send Kenyans to Russia. He called for the government “to come clean.”

Ian Simiyu said he believes God prevented him from taking the job offer in Russia. Instead of going abroad, Simiyu decided to farm a two-acre plot of family land. Now he grows kale and onions, selling them to urban markets and hotels. His profits bring in enough to feed his family, help his younger siblings, and give a tithe to his church.

“God has opened me another door,” said Simiyu. “I don’t know if I would be alive, had I gone to Russia.”

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News

Finland’s Top Court Split on Christian Politician’s Hate Speech Charges

Ken Chitwood

The court convicted Päivi Räsänen for publishing a brochure on sexual ethics but acquitted her for a social media post quoting Romans.

Member of the Finnish parliament Päivi Räsänen testifies on "Europe's Threat to American Speech and Innovation" at the U.S. Capitol on February 04, 2026.

Heather Diehl / Staff / Getty / Edits by CT

In a divided ruling, the Finnish Supreme Court on Thursday delivered a mixed decision in the long-running case involving parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen, finding her guilty on one charge of hate speech while unanimously acquitting her on another.

The court voted 3–2 to convict and fine Räsänen for her role in publishing and maintaining public access to a 23-page pamphlet published in 2004 arguing that “homosexual relationships challenge the Christian concept of humanity.” The narrow majority said the material—distributed by the Luther Foundation Finland, the legal entity behind Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland (ELMDF)—“made available to the public and kept available to the public opinions that insult homosexuals as a group on the basis of their sexual orientation.”

The ruling also applied to bishop Juhana Pohjola, who published the pamphlet. Pohjola is the leader of the 2,749-member ELMDF, as well as chairman of the International Lutheran Council, a worldwide association of conservative Lutheran churches that oppose same-sex marriages and the ordination of women.

At the same time, the court unanimously upheld Räsänen’s acquittal on a charge stemming from a 2019 social media post in which she posted a picture of Romans 1:24–27 to criticize the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland—one of Finland’s two national churches—for its affiliation with the Helsinki Pride march. Though the national church does not officially perform same-sex marriages, it has grown increasingly LGBTQ affirming. Räsänen led the opposition against the passage of Finland’s law recognizing same-sex marriage in 2017.

The ruling by the Supreme Court, which heard the case in October, upheld earlier lower-court decisions that the tweet, while offensive, did not amount to “incitement to hatred” and thus did not meet the legal threshold for criminal liability.

The mixed verdict marks the latest development in a case that has drawn international attention for its implications regarding freedom of expression, the limits of religious speech, and the interpretation of hate-speech laws in democratic societies. In February, US House Republicans invited Räsänen to testify at a hearing on European online censorship laws.

Räsänen, longtime member of Finland’s Parliament for the Christian Democrats and former interior minister, expressed strong disagreement with the conviction.

“I am shocked and profoundly disappointed that the court has failed to recognize my basic human right to freedom of expression,” she said following the ruling. “I stand by the teachings of my Christian faith, and will continue to defend my and every person’s right to share their convictions in the public square.”

Räsänen said she is considering appealing the decision to the European Court of Human Rights.

ADF International, the global arm of the Alliance Defending Freedom, represented Räsänen and Pohjola and has been involved throughout the proceedings. In a statement released after the decision, the organization highlighted the dual nature of the outcome.

“Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy,” said Paul Coleman, the organization’s executive director. “It is right that the Court has acquitted Päivi Räsänen for her 2019 Bible verse tweet. However, the conviction for a simple church pamphlet published decades ago—before the law under which she has been convicted was even passed—is an outrageous example of state censorship.”

This would have a “chilling effect” on society in regard to free speech, he said.

The legal proceedings against Räsänen began in 2021 after Finnish prosecutors brought multiple charges alleging that her public statements and writings violated laws prohibiting “incitement against a minority group,” including sexual minorities. The charges related to three separate instances, including the 2004 pamphlet, the 2019 tweet, and comments made during a radio interview. Lower courts had previously acquitted Räsänen on all counts, finding that her statements fell within the bounds of protected expression and did not constitute a hate crime.

The Supreme Court’s ruling partially overturns those earlier acquittals, but only with respect to the pamphlet. In its decision, the court noted Räsänen’s text characterized homosexuality as a “disorder of psychosexual development” and a “sexual abnormality,” concluding that such descriptions were demeaning toward gay and lesbian people.

The court has not yet released a full English-language summary, but Finnish-language reporting indicates that the justices were divided on how to balance protections for free expression with safeguards against speech deemed harmful to minority groups.

At the same time, the unanimous acquittal on the tweet signals a point of judicial agreement that in public debate not all religiously grounded expression—particularly the quotation of religious texts—meets the threshold for criminal sanction. The distinction suggests the court is attempting to navigate a line, however contested, between protected participation in civic discourse and speech it determines to be injurious.

If Räsänen proceeds with an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, the case could extend well beyond Finland. The court, which is based in Strasbourg, France, would likely be asked to consider whether the application of Finland’s hate-speech laws in this instance aligns with the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly its protections for freedom of expression and religion and how that aligns with upholding the dignity of minority communities.

“This is not about my free speech alone, but that of every person in Finland,” Räsänen said. “A positive ruling would help to prevent other innocent people from experiencing the same ordeal for simply sharing their beliefs.”

- More from Ken Chitwood

Books

Review

When ‘Nothing’ Happens

Justin Ariel Bailey

Three books to read on church life and ministry this month.

Illustration by Christianity Today

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

Kyle Strobel and John Coe, When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near (Baker, 2026)

What do we do when it feels like spiritual life has stalled? During just such a season in my early 30s, I discovered a lecture by theologian John Coe. I was surprised to hear him describe the feeling of God’s distance as a gift, a chance to face the truth about my need for Christ. I wished for a book-length treatment to share with others.

Fifteen years later, I’m glad to report that it has arrived, cowritten with his colleague Kyle Strobel (see their earlier volume Where Prayer Becomes Real). This new volume reconnects with a neglected Protestant tradition that makes sense of spiritual dryness: a mind that wanders in prayer, boredom with the Bible, coldness in praise.

The authors argue that when spiritual practices stop providing excitement, they become mirrors, showing us our hearts. Mistaking emotional warmth as the mark of a healthy spiritual life, we go looking for a shot of adrenaline. But this search for feelings is a mark of immaturity! Newborn babies drink out of bottles, but for greater growth to occur, their parents must wean them. Likewise, God must give us experiences that are hard to chew for us to know him more deeply.

Unless we are willing to face the truth and journey with Christ into the brokenness, seeking better feelings may become a strategy to avoid God, leading us to miss the gift of the dry season.

Amy Peeler, Ordinary Time: The Season of Growth (InterVarsity, 2026)

Peeler’s Ordinary Time is the final book in InterVarsity Press’s Fullness of Time series, which views the seasons of the church year as an instrument for discipleship. Peeler writes as one who has lived and led others through the seasons, but as a “convert to liturgical worship,” she is an ideal guide for Christians less familiar with the church calendar.

Early in the book, she observes that over half the year is classified as “ordinary time,” which means it is neither a season of fasting (like Lent) nor one of feasting (like Eastertide). As such, ordinary time might feel like a season to rush through on the way to the “excitement and change” we crave. Yet this balance between seasons is a gift. “God does a radical thing,” she writes, “and then grants us time to reflect on it. If every day were radical, we could not take it in.”

Moving gently through the weeks of the calendar, Peeler pauses to reflect on the prescribed prayers, lectionary passages (like readings from Genesis), and celebrations (like Trinity Sunday, Christ the King Sunday). Each calendar season has a color, and Peeler notes that green is the color of ordinary time, reminding us that growth happens in the midst of everyday rhythms and common means of grace.

Julie Canlis, A Theology of the Ordinary (Godspeed, 2017)

Julie Canlis’s Theology of the Ordinary is short, but I have yet to find another book that contains so much depth for its page count. Drawn from a lecture series presented to undergraduate students, Canlis’s writing counters the “cultural obsession with greatness” that tilts spiritual formation toward supercharged emotions, radical discipleship, and measurable impact. Although these emphases can correct a faith “devoid of sacrifice or hope,” she wants to offer a theology of the ordinary that “will not undermine being passionate or sold-out but will ground and purify it.”

Canlis organizes her book in three movements: the blessing of the Father on ordinary life (creation), the inhabitation of the Son in ordinary life (redemption), and the work of the Spirit to shepherd our everyday lives toward their intended goal (new creation). Alongside this Trinitarian story, she describes three lesser “counter-stories” that stand in as substitutes. The “Gnostic Story” rejects God’s original blessing on creation. The “Docetic Story” seeks redemption apart from the humanity Jesus wants to heal. The “Platonic Story” places the spiritual life on a higher plane, splitting the ordinary from the extraordinary.

In the last decade, some of the cultural tilt toward exciting spirituality has leveled out, whether from weariness, cynicism, or recovery work found in popular books like Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary or Douglas McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy. Yet we always need the call to offer our everyday, “walking-around life,” (Rom. 12:1, MSG) to the God who remains faithful in every season. Indeed, these books testify that what feels like nothing is often the ordinary work of God.

Justin Ariel Bailey is a professor of theology at Dordt University. He is the author of Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture.

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News

Pro-Life Ministries Find New Ways to Connect Clients and Donors

Adam MacInnis

Social media and giving apps expedite the process of helping women with unplanned pregnancies.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye

Tears filled Tierra McCarty’s eyes as she saw her cellphone notifications pop up, one after another. Strangers were sending her money.

God was answering prayer and using technology to do it.

“Are you okay?” her teacher asked as the notifications and tears continued.

McCarty was in her first week of classes to become an aviation technician. It was a dream she says God placed on her heart as she searched for a way to make a better life for her two kids. But after her first day of classes and a shift at work that night, McCarty came out to find her car gone. It had been repossessed. What had seemed like a God-ordained path felt blocked as she lost her only means to get to work or school.

Desperate, McCarty reached out to Amy Ford, founder of Embrace Grace, a Texas-based ministry that had supported her during an unexpected pregnancy eight years earlier. McCarty had remained connected with the ministry in the years that followed and knew that Ford sometimes posted about urgent needs on social media.

“I feel like I’m drowning with my kids in my arms,” Ford recalls McCarty saying.

Ford posted McCarty’s story on her personal Facebook page, where she has 7,000 followers who support Embrace Grace, and the amount needed to get the car back—around $5,000. Within days, the request was met by a mix of small and large donations from various people.

McCarty’s story is just one of many now happening across the US as pregnancy support centers harness technology to meet urgent needs in real time.

“It’s just cool to see everybody coming together for a cause, and Facebook seems to be a really good platform,” Ford said.

For more than 50 years, Heartbeat International has served women with unplanned pregnancies, building the largest network of pregnancy resource centers in the world. Heartbeat president Jor-El Godsey recalls that during his earlier days working at a pregnancy center, he heard about a client who was biking three miles to work each day. The center put out a request in a newsletter to help her get a car. Social media, he said, is today’s newsletter, and he sees the benefit of using it and other technology to help moms in a more expedient way.

“If it’s really a connected community, then there’s a great way simply to say, ‘These are the needs that we have,’ or ‘This person has this particular need,’” Godsey said.

Many of the more than 4,000 Heartbeat-affiliated centers already use social media tools to serve clients, he said. In addition to general Facebook posts on specific pages, they commonly use giving apps that notify people of needs and allow them to donate instantly from their smartphones to make giving easier. Godsey said he’s only heard positives from those who have used these tools, and he’s found that the support can influence whether a woman chooses to keep a baby.

“To be able to say we can help you with this and we can help you with those other things and we can provide, it unlocks for them the fact that they can do this,” he said.

A 2023 peer-reviewed study published in the medical journal Cureus found that lack of support and lack of financial security both play significant roles in women’s decision to get an abortion. Of the 1,000 American women surveyed, 54 percent said they would have continued their pregnancy if they had had more financial security.

Human Coalition, a national pro-life organization, also reports that many of the women who contact them considering an abortion say they would prefer to parent if their circumstances were different.

“We address those barriers so that they can make a decision with a clear head, not based on temporary circumstances,” said Becky Gallagher, national director of social services for Human Coalition.

Erin Rogers, executive director of the Bakersfield Pregnancy Center, has witnessed the difference support can make in the lives of women.

“For some of our clients, it’s those very practical things that make them believe that having this baby is just impossible,” Rogers said.

Anel Rubio is an example. At 16, she received help at Bakersfield after learning she was pregnant with twins. Part of what brought Rubio peace was the way the center helped meet her physical needs.

“They were able to provide a lot of the things that I needed to start,” Rubio said.

That help included everything from prenatal vitamins and clothing to contact information for a health provider and enough clothes and diapers for the babies’ first year of life.

“I don’t know where I would be without the support of the Bakersfield Pregnancy Center,” Rubio said. “I feel like they set me up for success.”

At Bakersfield, Rogers said staff now use a software program called Meet the Need.

“I think pregnancy centers should use every tool that they can reasonably do,” Rogers said.

She likes Meet the Need because it doesn’t cost anything and has been effective. Staff at the center are able to share a link to Bakersfield’s Meet the Need where specific requests are listed in digital and nondigital communication, and if someone calls wondering how best to give support, they can direct them to the site.

“It’s a very easy tool to use to remind people who you are and what you’re doing and how they can get involved,” she said.

Another platform used by some pregnancy centers is called CarePortal.

With CarePortal, centers can publicize specific needs someone has, such as for a stroller for twins or help with vehicle repair. Churches register to receive notifications when a need is posted and then share it with their circles.

Gallagher said Human Coalition–affiliated centers have been using CarePortal to serve clients in Texas and North Carolina and are starting to expand use in Georgia. She said it’s been a blessing for women in need.

“They get to receive timely, compassionate support that helps relieve immediate stress and then reminds them that they’re not alone during a vulnerable season,” Gallagher said.

It can also be the start of a deeper relationship with people and the church.

“That is always a hope of ours, that the clients can see the love of Christ through tangible help,” she said.

Most needs are met the same day, while larger requests, such as a rent payment, can take up to a week or two.

There is a risk that with ease of giving, donations can become automatic or so sophisticated that it loses a personal connection, according to Godsey. “Even if someone is faithfully giving a few dollars every month or significant dollars on a regular basis, it can be done automatically,” he said.

He believes part of the solution is for pro-life organizations to share the prayer requests and personal stories behind the needs.

At Embrace Grace, Ford said she’s found the posts for help that get the strongest response are those in which she shares the most details about the person needing the support, because it allows others to relate more.

“People want to know the story—the why,” she said.

To mitigate the risk of someone taking advantage of people’s generosity, Ford makes sure she only posts a need for women she knows personally through Embrace Grace and knows have legitimate needs. Ford posts links for people to donate directly to the person, such as Venmo or Cash App, and then the individuals let her know when the need has been met.

Sometimes, people who donate continue to build connections with the people they help. McCarty, for instance, received some donations from people who work in the aviation industry and told her to get in touch when she graduates. Others have added her on social media and followed her journey. When she posts a video of herself working on a plane, they’ll leave comments of encouragement.

The whole experience was spiritually uplifting, McCarty said.

“It just opened my eyes to a deeper revelation of how much God loves me and how much he’s gonna cover me and keep me,” she said.

This spring, when she walks across the stage at graduation, she will remember the people God used to make it possible.

“God knew exactly what needed to happen,” McCarty said. “I needed the courage to ask for help, and then I just needed to sit and watch him make that way for me.”

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