Today Is Dharma Day

What you should know about the basics of Buddha’s life and teaching.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

Buddhism benefits from a superb public image in America, judging by the comments students offered during the eight years I taught a class called Journalism and Religion at the University of Texas at Austin. They described Buddhism as “peace, love, and goodness. Very calm. Super chilled out. Centered. Nonviolent.”

CT’s foray into Jewish history last month looked at Orthodox Judaism, the oldest of the three main schools of American Judaism. To go deeper into Buddhism, we should examine the older of the two main schools, Theravada Buddhism, which has one of its major festivals today, July 10. Asalha Puja, known also as Dharma Day, commemorates the first sermon by Siddhartha Gautama, known as Buddha (“enlightened one”). He spoke to 5 people. Now Buddhists may number more than 1 billion.

Buddha’s sermon is a good place to start, because classic Buddhism, like Christianity, centers on the life of one person. Siddhartha Gautama, born near the border of present-day India and Nepal, lived sometime in the sixth and fifth centuries BC (his followers disagree on the dates). The standard story is that Siddhartha’s parents were the king and queen of the Shakya kingdom, one of many Indian principalities. (Others, though, say that the Shakyas had no king but were ruled by an oligarchic council of elders.)

According to legend, Siddhartha’s mother dreamed the night before his birth that an elephant carrying a lotus flower in its trunk entered her womb through the right side of her body, signifying that the child would be great. Soon after birth, the infant Siddhartha purportedly walked seven steps in each of the four directions. Lotus flowers sprouted where his feet touched the earth, and the baby announced, “No further births have I to endure, for this is my last body. Now shall I destroy and pluck out by the roots the sorrow that is caused by birth and death.”

The story is that Siddhartha lived in great luxury and wealth and that his father, King Śuddhodana, tried so hard to keep him from being upset that when Siddhartha went out for a walk, the king employed smiling people to fill the path. Buddha later said of his childhood, “I was delicately nurtured. … I had three palaces: one for winter, one for summer and one for the rainy season, [where] during the four months of the rains, entertained only by female musicians, I did not come down from the palace.”

When he was 29, though, sheltered Siddhartha saw “a sick man, suffering and very ill, fallen and weltering in his own excreta.” Agitated upon seeing a dead body, he viewed a wandering monk serene in the face of such misery. Siddhartha wanted to be like him and made the Great Renunciation: “Give up the princely life and become a wandering ascetic.”

He immediately left his wife and infant son and headed south to centers of spiritual discipline. Siddhartha hopped from teacher to teacher, unsatisfied, and almost starved himself over the next six years: “All my limbs became like some withered creepers with knotted joints … the skin of my belly came to be cleaving to my backbone.” He became so weak that he saw he could not gain enlightenment that way and started taking care of himself.

Within the traditional Buddhist story, then came a night when Siddhartha sat at the base of a tree and liberated his mind by realizing what he called the Four Noble Truths: Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by our attachments to the world and people around us. We end suffering by developing nonattachment to anything and anyone. We advance our consciousness by taking the Noble Eightfold Path.

That path includes a lot of “thou shalt nots.” No lies, abusive or divisive speech, idle chatter. No killing or injuring, stealing, engaging in sexual misconduct. No trading in weapons, slaves, meat, liquor, poisons. It also includes “thou shalts”: Resolve to leave home and renounce worldliness. Avoid unwholesome environments and situations. Monitor your thoughts. Meditate.

Dharma Day celebrates the first time Buddha communicated those Four Noble Truths that together make up dharma, the ethical standard for Buddhists. His sermon is the Buddhist equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount—except that while Jesus spoke of those who are blessed, Buddha emphasized the bad news: “Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are stressful; association with the unbeloved is stressful, separation from the loved is stressful, not getting what is wanted is stressful.”

The only way out is “renunciation, relinquishment, release.” Buddha spent the next 45 years of his life traveling on foot through Northern India and preaching about avoiding fleshly delights. In that way, Buddhism is the opposite of Islam, which emphasizes the physical world. And yet we do have to eat to live, so part of celebrating Dharma Day is eating simple food—traditionally laba congee, porridge with rice.

Shortly before death, when asked who would succeed him as the authority concerning matters of doctrine, Buddha replied that each individual’s sense of dharma—the cosmic law underlying all existence—should rule. Buddhism thus became more a general philosophy than a fixed doctrine.

It’s hard to know in Buddhist teaching what authentically came from Buddha. He had many disciples and a large following, but his words were not written down until about 250 years later. And then the writing went on and on. The scriptures of one of the two main divisions of Buddhism, Theravada, are 11 times longer than the Bible. The scriptures of the other main division, Mahayana, are more numerous still, encompassing more than 5,000 volumes.

This means no one can carry all of Buddhist scripture to temple worship as many Christians carry the Bible to church. Sects typically emphasize favorite sutras (writings) and downplay others. Moreover, various Buddhist leaders quarrel about even the core teachings of their faith. Individual teachers have great latitude to shape their particular kinds of Buddhism. They sometimes become heated in criticizing other Buddhists.

But with all the battles, the appeal of Buddhism is strong for those who have tasted the world’s pleasures and found them wanting. Buddhism, born and developed in a culture of great poverty and suffering, opposes the greed, hatred, and ignorance that naturally envelop us. And it fits with the spirit of an age in which many think we humans can turn ourselves into wise beings without needing God.

- More from Marvin Olasky

Inkwell

Stop Dressing like a Transcendentalist

Carter Davis Johnson

Maybe relating our fashion choices to dead philosophers can keep us from disastrous consequences.

"The Spy" by Vasily Vasilevich Vereshchagin

The wake-up call came over the loudspeaker and sank into our barrack’s stone walls. It was still dark outside and cold. I shifted under my quilt and guessed the time. When Blake returned from the showers, there would be an eight-minute window to get up, break down our institute-issued mattresses and wooden bed frames, put on the correct uniform, and walk to formation.

Our heavy wooden door swung open. My mental timer started. I rolled out of bed and wordlessly began the day. I put on “winter class dyke,” our cold weather uniform: grey wool pants that were notoriously itchy until you wore them for a few days, and a long-sleeve black button-up with a corresponding black tie.

I tucked the tie between the shirt’s second and third button, a mid-century GI style that our superintendent preferred, then opened the door and listened. The Virginia Military Institute bustled in the darkness. Another muffled announcement: “Class Dyke. Rain cape. Rain cap cover.”

Naturally, we all tired of the strict regimen and sameness of our uniforms. When leaving post for an open weekend or furlough, we relished putting on normal clothes. It was always odd seeing friends in civilian attire; 90 percent of the time with them was spent in uniform. The oddness was also due to the wild divergences in style, until then undisclosed. There were Hawaiian shirts, cargo pants, hipster fits, tactical clothing brands, wild fluorescent colors, skater fits, tank tops, and other methods of asserting one’s individuality. The result: cacophony.

But somehow, outside of their uniforms, my friends seemed less like themselves.

Swathes of modern dressers, just like Virginia Military Institute cadets, are trying to assert their identity against the group, against that unnerving sameness that pervades modern style. Walk across a college campus or a shopping mall, and you will notice waves upon waves of athleisure wear and ubiquitous configurations of popular trends. In response to this homogeneity, many dressers are desperately trying to be unique. Bright colors. Bizarre mismatches. Ironic kitsch. Clothes that are sausage-link-skinny or grocery-bag-baggy.

As Ezra Pound and the Vorticist movement declared a century ago, the only rule is to make it new. Uniqueness has become the standard by which fashion is measured. Yet uniqueness is no longer measured in relation to the town or community; one must compete with a global network of new. Social media is a constant stream of trends and fads that leave the individual scrambling to find something exceptional.

The current proliferation of options means a further individualization of style. Clothes have largely abandoned utilitarian purposes. We no longer think about what we wear primarily in regard to a vocation. Although we have “work clothes,” these are only a fraction of our wardrobes.

Americans buy four times as many new articles of clothes as they did in 2000, even though one study found that we don’t wear 50 percent of the clothes we own. Even worse, every year, we prematurely throw out approximately 400 billion dollars’ worth of clothing. Of course, fast fashion accelerates our already extreme consumption and waste. Manufacturers are producing 100 billion new garments (globally) per year. This is more than ten times the number of people on earth.

This surplus, symptomatic of a broader affluenza that is both personally and ecologically harmful, has also changed how we see our clothes. They have become signals, more than ever, of how we conceive of ourselves. Today, it’s less about representing a group or a socioeconomic status and more about defining a personal ethos or, in modern parlance, a vibe.

When we conceptualize style as a project in order to assert the authentic self against the masses, we begin to dress like Transcendentalists. Transcendentalism was an early 19th-century literary and philosophical movement that sought to reestablish individual flourishing in the face of a rapidly industrializing economy, a default intellectual conformity, and a tumultuous political era, which would soon culminate in the American Civil War.

If we peel back our current anxiety about unique style, we find that this tradition of thought has helped define the American cultural imagination for 200 years. Understanding the dangers of Transcendentalism might help us reconceive how the individual can relate to society, revealing how our style can move past the reactionary and endless search for newness.

This tradition is not the only one to have contributed to the hyper-individualization we see in culture today. There are many major philosophers and thinkers who have described the relationship between the individual and society as antagonistic. There’s Nietzsche’s fictional character, Zarathustra, who heroically rejects the masses of “last men.” There’s Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, a bleak book in which the individual willingly accepts societal oppression in exchange for safety. And, moving out of the 19th century, there’s Camus and Sartre and their individualized brand of existentialism.

But in this essay, I’m interested in this widespread and pervasive movement (largely in the West) that has made the individual the arbiter of identity. The Transcendentalists, specifically Ralph Waldo Emerson, offer a clear presentation of the broad themes that these various philosophies uphold, making Transcendentalism an ideal representative.

In Emerson’s famous essay “Self-Reliance,” he writes, “Man is timid and apologetic. He is no longer upright. He dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.” Emerson fears that true education and meaningful action are giving way to mimesis, where the individual merely parrots a sage or popular opinion, never daring to think for themselves.

Although this danger was more pressing in the early 19th century when tradition held an authoritative position in social and educational life, we still face the essential danger of groupthink, which has proliferated rapidly through digital communication.

Surveying his cultural moment, Emerson concluded that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” This persistent struggle between society and the individual forms the bedrock of his response. If society is a crushing force, the individual must respond with gritty independence.

Emerson counsels, “Insist on yourself; never imitate”—a mantra that ought to sound extremely familiar. It’s posted (in some version) every day on every social media platform. It’s behind the clerk at the DMV. It’s hanging in your dentist’s office. It’s proclaimed by influencers and politicians and your grumpy uncle. We don’t exaggerate when claiming that this insistence upon the self is a fundamental ethos of the American national identity.

I certainly don’t want to demonize Transcendentalism. It can offer a helpful and often necessary corrective. It startles us out of the dangerous lullaby of rote tradition. It asks us to take account, to face ourselves. It calls for heroism.

As another early 19th-century American, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, would write, “Be not like dumb driven cattle, be a hero in the strife.” In this heroic approach to the self, Transcendentalism urges us to embrace action and accountability for our lives. Thoreau’s famous opening to Walden, “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” is one of my favorite passages in American literature. He earnestly desires to see for himself, to “cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner.”

Transcendentalism is a philosophy with a pumping, vital heart. Yet its adherents’ correction—as with so many other philosophies—overreaches, swinging us toward consequences that can be disastrous if left unchecked.

The first consequence of rampant Transcendentalism is that the individual becomes isolated from others and tradition. “It is only as man puts off from himself all external support and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail,” Emerson writes. “He is weaker by every recruit to his banner.”

The strong Transcendentalist is by necessity alone; Emerson calls for the removal of all external support. Solitude is not always lonely, but when all support is cut and every “recruit” turned away, the individual is dangerously isolated. When our actions and thoughts lose the barometer of community, they can careen wildly. Hermitage is almost always unhealthy.

Furthermore, if human community weakens the individual, then nonhuman community, like tradition and culture, present a similar danger to the Transcendentalist. Tradition is a form of communion, with Chesterton memorably describing it as the “democracy of the dead.” Transcendentalism, however, casts a disparaging eye on tradition. Recall Emerson’s lament about the “saint or sage,” admonishing readers to preference individual belief over inherited wisdom.

Second, Transcendental individualism is erratic and volatile, closely correlated with increased isolation. Because the individual is only accountable to himself, he achieves an odd infallibility. Listen to Emerson’s confidence: “Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? … Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”

The emphasis is not on truth or congruity; instead, the most important factor is that the words be spoken with resolute conviction, “as hard as cannon-balls.” Authenticity becomes the measurement of our speech, regardless of whether our “authenticities” vary from day to day.

Our search for a unique, individual style manifests both of these philosophical consequences. Our wardrobes are increasingly defined by isolation (you have to be “one in a million”) and volatility (the trends are wild and fast; see “sardine summer”). Because we have abandoned the judgment and taste of tradition, we are left with the avant-garde. And the avant-garde is constantly changing, constantly pushing further. A cursory review of the Met Gala displays this trajectory. There is nowhere to rest.

As long as we dress like Transcendentalists and set ourselves against society, we’ll be trapped between the dichotomy of dressing like the dull masses or breaking with all convention. While this binary is ultimately false, it does highlight a central dilemma: Can I express myself without being ostentatious? Can I imitate others without being dominated by tradition?

We can give an affirmative answer to both questions, but to do so, we need a different paradigm to capture the relationship between the individual and society. I’d like to offer one as an exemplar: the interpersonalism of Martin Buber.

In his famous book I and Thou, Buber explores two distinct modes of relating to the world: I-It and I-Thou. The first mode (I-It) relates to the world as a series of objects that can be used instrumentally and coordinated within our tasks. The second mode (I-Thou) relates to the world as a reciprocal encounter that transcends instrumental use. In an I-Thou encounter, we are influenced by the other as we influence them, and neither of us is coerced into a relationship of “use.” Buber extends these paradigms in a number of philosophical, sociological, and theological directions.

Crucially, beneath each of these extensions is a fundamental claim about the self: “Man becomes an I through a You.” Rather than positioning the individual contra others, Buber makes the relationship between others (and the Other, God) the central feature of our identities. We have no conception of a self without the other, through whom our self is constituted and contrasted.

Both ways of relating are necessary, but each way is dependent on context. In an I-Thou relationship, both parties mediate each other; imagine two children playing with a jump rope, shaking their respective handles. The waves sent from one side influence the other and vice versa.

In an I-It relationship, only one side mediates, attempting to control and use the other. In this case, only one of our players swings the rope. The other side is motionless and completely defined by the movement of the other. Obviously, this is appropriate in some cases (such as bringing my coffee mug to my lips) but harmful in other cases (such as trying to emotionally control my friend).

Importantly—don’t miss this—the silencing can happen in both directions. I can impose myself on others. Or society can impose itself on me. A true relationship is always a balance: “Relation is reciprocity.”

Buber’s interpersonal philosophy, like Transcendentalism, has important and far-reaching consequences. First, it resolves our central dilemma. Because the individual’s relationship with others is reciprocal (I-Thou), we can relate to society without silencing others or losing our voice. The rope can move on both ends.

Second, interpersonalism shifts the telos of style. Rather than establishing myself, the goal becomes relating positively to other people. We begin to dress for the other. This doesn’t mean pandering, seducing, or mimicking. It means that we understand our responsibility toward others; after all, we are helping to constitute their self as well. We are the Thou to their I. Each of us bears a responsibility to model to others what we value in the world.

We can feel this when talking around children. We realize that children soak up the speech and habits of adults, so we are especially careful with our words. We know our words have influence.

Your style has influence too. It’s a contribution to a collective conversation. For good reason, menswear writer Derek Guy has compared style to language. Stylish fashion is a dialogue with culture and society. As mentioned before, this dialogue must go in both directions. We have to guard ourselves from being swept up and defined by larger trends, while also recognizing that all of our choices emerge from past traditions and historical precedents.

Back at the Virginia Military Institute, our uniforms weakened our personal voice, quieting our end of the rope. In response, cadets shook the rope wildly when the opportunity arose, losing the balance in the opposite direction. But the uniforms also produced a sense of collective identity, both among ourselves and with past school traditions. Successful style needs balance and reciprocity. Can we achieve this tender tension today?

Thankfully, there’s a common (although underappreciated) custom that offers individual agency while tying us to a broader community: the dress code. Although dress codes have grown more and more niche (reflecting the hyper-individualism of fast fashion), they do offer a kind of practical solution for developing lasting and meaningful style. At their core, they are a set of conventions that can direct our choices. When I read “business casual” or “cocktail attire,” I am given constraints that encircle a wide range of individual possibilities. Both ends of the rope move.

Next time you’re wondering what you should wear to dinner, ask yourself: “What would Martin Buber do?” Maybe relating your fashion choices to dead philosophers is just what you need to make your style decisions for the evening.

Whatever you do, don’t be like Ralph. Keep him tucked away in the drawer. We don’t need to forfeit individual style, but we can make little choices that bring us closer to the world around us. Because it’s only in relationship with others, as in life, that style can blossom with balanced freedom.

Carter Davis Johnson is a writer and teacher whose work has been published in Road Not Taken, Flyover Country, Warkitchen, Rova, New Verse Review, and Front Porch Republic. He also writes a Substack publication called Dwelling: Embracing the non-identical in life and art.

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News

7 Significant Changes in Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’

Harvest Prude

Evangelical ministries and advocates respond to the legislation’s impacts on immigration enforcement, food aid, and abortion funding.

House Speaker Mike Johnson signs the one big beautiful bill act.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Does President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” come as good news to evangelical churches and ministries?

Trump signed the gargantuan spending and tax policy package on Friday after it narrowly passed in Congress. The budget reconciliation bill makes most of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent while spending more on the border, interior immigration enforcement and defense. It also cuts funding for health care programs like Medicaid and food benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Christians were quick to weigh in on aspects of the package, with some praising it for pro-family changes to the tax code while others lamented the considerable cuts to social safety-net programs.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill adds $3.4 trillion to federal deficits over a ten-year period, predictions that the White House disputes.

Here are some relevant aspects of the new law:

Withholding Medicaid funds from abortion clinics

One provision in the bill bars clinics and healthcare providers that offer abortions from accepting federal funding through Medicaid.

Planned Parenthood, as per its 2022-2023 annual report, reported receiving $699 million in government grants, contracts and Medicaid reimbursements. That means federal money makes up a little over a third of its overall revenue.

Pro-life evangelicals celebrate the move as a step toward defunding Planned Parenthood.

“Today marks a new milestone for the pro-life movement,” said Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who had called on Congress to defund abortion providers. “Defunding Planned Parenthood and big abortion have long been a priority for millions of Southern Baptists, Christians and pro-life activists. …These heinous organizations profit from death, and, all too often, it is taxpayers who have funded their work. That repugnant scheme is halted beginning with this law.”

The American Principles Project, a politically conservative advocacy group, also celebrated the legislation’s “significant pro-family wins, including defunding Planned Parenthood.”

“I applaud President Trump for his unwavering commitment to putting families first and building a brighter future for our country,” APP president Terry Schilling said in a statement.

Planned Parenthood is challenging the provision in court and currently has a 14-day injunction from a district court judge.

Increasing the Child Tax Credit

The bill makes numerous changes to the tax code, from removing taxes on tips for the first $25,000 of income for tipped workers to permanently increasing the estate tax exemption.

The bill increases the Child Tax Credit from its current $2,000 per child to $2,200 per child and indexes the amount for inflation, extending what was set to expire from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The bill also makes part of the adoption tax credit refundable, adjusted for inflation.

A variety of Christian groups supported the increase to the child tax credit, telling CT ahead of the vote that they hoped lawmakers would pass pro-family policies as part of the package.

The Christian Employers Alliance also celebrated individual tax cuts, which they previously stated would secure “relief for 95% of Christian-owned businesses.” The group voiced its support for other provisions in the bill, saying overall the bill would “unleash the economic power of Christian employers.”

Cutting food assistance through SNAP

The bill slashes SNAP by about 30% over the next decade, which will shift some costs to some states. Some estimates are that 15-25 percent of SNAP program costs and 25 percent of administrative costs will shift to the states. Millions are expected to be impacted, including, according to one liberal think tank, an estimated 2 million children.

SNAP feeds more than 42 million people each month, around 13 percent of the US population, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Children account for 40 percent of those who benefit from SNAP. Senior citizens (those 60 and older) make up 18 percent of SNAP participants.

Christian food banks and food pantries have expressed concerns that the reduced funding and higher requirements for SNAP eligibility under the new bill will create an even greater hunger gap to fill. There are also concerns that states may opt out of the program entirely if they’re unable to shoulder the cost of the program.

“We average anywhere from 150-200 plus families every Tuesday and Thursday,” Florida resident James Showen, a volunteer at a Florida food bank, the Epps Christian Center, told WEAR News. “Those numbers are increasing because the food stamps and other programs are cutting back completely.”

Bread for the World, a Christian advocacy organization focused on hunger, said in a statement the cuts would have harmful impacts: “We need to be clear eyed and honest – this bill’s passage will significantly increase hunger in the United States,” Rev. Eugene Cho, president and CEO, said. “Bread will not stop until Congress restores full funding for these vital programs.”

Jeremy Everett, executive director of The Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, said he was “grieved” and “stunned” by the bill’s significant cuts to food assistance programs like SNAP.

“The decision to gut SNAP, the most effective anti-hunger program in our nation’s history, is not simply misguided policy,” he said. “It is a compromise of values.”

Everett added that Christians are called to “speak plainly when justice is at stake.” He cited Matthew 25:45: “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

“When our leaders prioritize politics over people, especially the poor, they may win the day, but they lose the way,” Everett said. “Scripture does not allow us to turn a blind eye to suffering, and neither should our laws.”

Cutting Medicaid

The bill cuts more than $700 billion in federal Medicaid spending over the next decade. Other estimates place the cuts at $863 billion or $1 trillion. Children’s hospitals, rural hospitals and community health centers that serve less populated areas are expected to struggle in light of the cuts.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) said in a statement that though the group supported an earlier version of the bill, the final version was a cause for lament.

Archbishop Timothy B. Proglio, president of the USCCB, said the cuts to healthcare and food assistance are “unconscionable.”

“The bill, as passed, will cause the greatest harm to those who are especially vulnerable in our society,” said Proglio. “As its provisions go into effect, people will lose access to healthcare and struggle to buy groceries, family members will be separated and vulnerable communities will be less prepared to cope with environmental impacts of pollution and extreme weather. More must be done to prevent these devastating effects.”

Funding immigration enforcement

The legislation gives more than $46.5 billion for border wall construction, $45 billion for detention facilities and $29.9 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It also puts a new $100 minimum fee for asylum seekers. Asylum applications were previously free. It also adds fees to other immigration applications, including $550 for work permits for asylum seekers and $500 for Temporary Protected Status applications, which were previously only $50.

Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization, had urged members of Congress to vote against the bill, decrying its “massive increase in immigrant detention and deportation funding” and the impact that would have on people fleeing humanitarian crises.

Advocates argued that the shifts stand to affect children in particular. More kids are at risk of family separation as caregivers get deported. Without assistance at the border, unaccompanied children become vulnerable to exploitation. And as Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, writes, the bill’s provisions “permit strip searches of minors at the border and in government care” and “fund the indefinite detention of families.”

Cutting federal student loans

The bill has several implications for higher education. It cuts around $350 billion from higher education programs over the next decade through measures like reducing Pell Grant eligibility, limiting federal aid and cutting a few loan programs. It also introduces a risk-sharing model that puts schools on the hook when students default on their loans by requiring colleges and universities to reimburse the federal government for students’ unpaid loans.

The government ties federal aid to graduate earnings. That means institutions will lose federal loans if undergraduate programs’ alumni earn less than the median salary of a high school graduate in their state.

The Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU), which represents more than 170 Christian higher education institutions, said in a statement, “While we appreciate several of the bill’s positive elements and potential benefits, we are concerned that it ultimately falls short in supporting student access and success. The emphasis on earnings as a measure of value risks penalizing students who pursue lower-paying public service roles—many of whom do so out of a deep sense of faith and calling.”

Kevin Brown, President of Asbury University in Kentucky, argued for Deseret that faith-based institutions could be penalized if graduates prioritize calling over earning potential. “For CCCU schools, as well as other religiously oriented and mission-driven schools, there are better ways to think about value,” he wrote.

Offering federal funds for school vouchers

The bill also includes a national private school voucher program, the first time lawmakers have passed federal legislation to send tax money to private schools. It creates a nonrefundable tax credit that allows taxpayers to donate to scholarship granting organizations, such as private or religious schools, which in turn provide vouchers for students. The tax credit can also apply to homeschooling costs. States can opt out of participating, so it’s likely that the program will be unevenly available to families. The program becomes available January 2027.

Reactions were divided.

A number of Catholic groups celebrated the development, though others noted there were many unknowns about the way it would be implemented.

“There are no explicit protections for religious liberty, which is a problem for us,” John DeJak with the USCCB told the Catholic News Agency. But he noted Catholic Bishops’ longtime support for a similar program and concluded, “We are positive but cautious.”

James Cultrara, co-chairman of the New York State Coalition for Independent and Religious Schools, told the New York Times he hopes states will opt-in. “We are celebrating it, but we have work to do,” he said.

Other groups landed more firmly on the cautious side about the development. The Home School Legal Defense Association wrote earlier this year that it “opposes any kind of government funding for homeschooling” on the grounds that it would allow government officials “a reason to further regulate and oversee homeschooling.”

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Theology

Why Superman Matters

Russell Moore

Columnist

What we love about the hero is not his power so much as his vulnerability.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

As I’m writing this, I am preparing to go with my sons to see a one-day-early screening of the new Superman film by James Gunn. I can hardly wait.

No doubt that moviegoers and my fellow Superman fans will argue about the movie—its continuity in the tradition of the classic 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve, and so forth.

One debate trope I hope does not return, though, is the well-worn argument that “Superman is boring because he’s too powerful and can’t be hurt.” Here’s why that matters.

I do not write this as a neutral observer but as a fan of the character—and of the larger DC universe—since before I was even able to read. The stories from Smallville and Metropolis (and Gotham and Central City and Paradise Island) populated the Fortress of Solitude that was my childhood imagination in ways that, looking back, I think pointed me onward to the writings of Lewis and Tolkien and beyond.

But why did I and millions of others over the past 80 years want to put that red blanket over our shoulders and pretend to fly?

Author Grant Morrison (himself a prolific writer of comic books and graphic novels) has argued that Superman persists because he represents hope and power; he is the pop-culture equivalent of a sun god.

Some psychologists would say that Superman appeals to us because of his power. We long for the grandiosity inherent in the ability to fly, outpace bullets, see through walls, or, as on the cover of that first Action Comics, lift a car over our heads.

Some would say that children especially identify with the phenomenon of the secret identity: “I might seem to be bumbling, bespectacled Clark Kent, but if you could just see me in my Kryptonian battle armor …”

The idea of Superman as the idealization of strength and power would make sense. His name, after all, comes from Friedrich Nietzsche and his idea of the Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But if Nietzschean power were what we longed for, then there would be other characters more powerful than Superman to stand in for hope. The atomic symbol of Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, for example, would be far more appropriate than the S-shaped logo of the House of El.

No, what we love about Superman is not his power so much as his vulnerability. In this, playwright David Mamet was right when he wrote in the 1980s that the real draw of Superman is not flight or x-ray vision but kryptonite. “Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home,” Mamet wrote. “It is the remnants of that destroyed childhood home, and the fear of those remnants, which rule Superman’s life.” He continues,

Far from being invulnerable, Superman is the most vulnerable of beings, because his childhood home was destroyed. He can never reintegrate himself by returning to that home—it is gone. It is gone and he is living among aliens to whom he cannot even reveal his rightful name.

The Superman mythos, he concludes, is a fable not of strength but of a “cry for help.”

Mamet is partly right. An inexpressibly powerful alien force would not be as beloved, because it wouldn’t seem to ring true in our own lives. Kryptonite is the symbol of brokenness.

More than the literal kryptonite, though, is the metaphorical kryptonite in the background. Superman wears the uniform of a lineage far away and lost forever. Beyond that, he has learned to lose those who welcomed him into the human family—the Kents.

Superman may be the Man of Tomorrow, but he can be hurt; he can even be killed. And even worse, he can lose those he loves. We can identify with this. We don’t all come from Krypton, but we all have kryptonite.

This brokenness, however, leads to purpose and mission. In the Geoff Johns era of Action Comics (one of the best, in my opinion), Jonathan Kent tells his son, “Your greatest power isn’t being able to fly or see through walls. It’s knowing what the right thing to do is.” That’s consistently true of the character over the past 80 years. That’s one of the reasons the incarnation of Superman as a husband and a father is especially inspiring, as he tries to do his best to balance family and work.

One of my favorite Superman scenes is from Scott Snyder and Jorge Jiménez in their run on the Justice League comics series of June 2019. Superman, drained off-world of his power, reignites out of sheer force of will. The scene—expertly drawn by Jiménez—shows Superman charging through the sky between the reflections of his father, Jonathan Kent, and his son, also named Jonathan Kent. The scene sums up a legacy and a future that gives Clark Kent his power and also makes him able to be hurt.

This sense of mission, and the ethical framework undergirding it, is activated not by a yellow sun but by patient parenting. It didn’t come from Krypton but from Kansas. Superman may carry out his adventures with the powers of Kal-El, but all the while, he’s really Clark Kent. Those principles point him back to the joy and hurt of a love that can die but is as strong as death (Song 8:6)—stronger, even.

That’s why the other “boring” charge against Superman—that he’s too much of a Boy Scout—doesn’t work either. In a 2021 piece in Entertainment Weekly, journalist Darren Franich explores why the concept of an “Evil Superman” keeps reappearing, whether it’s the twisted Ultraman version of Earth-Three, the red kryptonite storyline of the Smallville television series of a quarter century ago, or the diabolical Homelander of Amazon Prime’s The Boys. Franich writes:

The arrival of an Evil Superman is meant to connote adulthood and maturity—the kind of stuff you could never ever get away with in kid stuff. Mature content isn’t the same as maturity, though, and it’s notable how often an Evil Superman is also a character without a supporting cast, a proper job, or even any motivation beyond pure lizard-brain violence.

How often is that version of “maturity”—of the Evil Superman kind—seen right now in this era, both in the church and in the world? Hedonism is maturity. Rage is passion. Propaganda is vision. Cruelty is strength. Intuitively we know this isn’t right, and we have to shut down our consciences to pretend it is.

One of the most striking Superman covers of all time would have to be in the J. Michael Straczynski “Grounded” run of 2010–2011, depicting a little boy wearing a Superman-logo T-shirt as he looks upward. He has a black eye. The story—one of the few in which we see a Superman in his right mind and furious at the same time—depicts the little boy asking Superman, who bears a similar mark of injury, “Does your Dad beat you too?”

No, he didn’t. And that’s why the fury-filled Superman goes to find this abusive father. He knows that this isn’t normal, that it isn’t right.

Much has been made of the religious imagery in the Superman mythos, especially the Old Testament echoes of Moses in the basket. Some have suggested that Superman is a Christ figure, a concept implicit throughout the Superman Returns film and elsewhere.

As a Christian, though, I think we identify with Superman not so much because he is godlike but because he is, underneath it all, so very human. We might be thrilled to see a superhero flying upward in the skies above us, but really, we’re looking past him for Someone else.

We all like to be saved from danger by a real or imagined Superman every once in a while. But Supermen have come and gone. This character has persisted for almost a century. That’s not because we think he can save us, but because we know, deep in our hearts, that a Superman needs a savior too.

Note: This is a revised, expanded, and updated version of “Who Will Save Superman?” published on the author’s website on April 17, 2018, on the 80th anniversary of the creation of the character.

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

Theology

Imam’s the Word

Jayson Casper

Shiite sects differ on what matters most in a leader.

Shiite Muslims carry a portrait of Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, as they attend a symbolic funeral to commemorate the death of Imam Musa al-Kadhim in Basra, Iraq on January 26, 2025.

HUSSEIN FALEH / Contributor / Getty

(This is part two of a four-part series on Shiite Islam and the Iranian regime. Please click here to read part one.)

The previous article introduced the Shiite concept of justice through Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Ali is a linchpin for understanding the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam, the former representing the majority of Muslims in the world and the latter representing the majority in Iran. In 1979, Iran led a revolution that resulted in the world’s only Shiite government, establishing wilayat al-faqih, the “guardianship of the jurist,” meaning the rule of an expert scholar in sharia law.

This article will continue our examination of Shiite history, starting with the way Shiites see the Quran as containing both literal commands and mystical values. Shiites say it takes spiritual insight to understand the Quran correctly. And there are a multitude of traditions—the Sunna, from which Sunnis take their name—describing what Muhammad said and did.

Sunni scholarship recognizes many of these reports as authentic and others as uncertain or outright invented to support a political cause. They exist in the thousands, and although the standards of determining authenticity are internally rigorous, the task is a human endeavor.

Shiites say the Sunni criteria are necessarily insufficient. They believe proper Islamic leadership requires supernatural insight passed directly from Muhammad to his offspring—those who knew him best. Ali married the prophet’s daughter Fatimah, and they had two sons, Hasan and Hussein. Recall that Ali was assassinated in an Islamic civil war and leadership passed into Sunni hands.

In AD 680, Hussein led a revolt against Yazid, the sixth caliph, whom many Sunnis consider impious. Yazid’s army slaughtered Hussein with his small contingent in Iraq, marking another blow to Shiites while reinforcing their understanding of themselves as an oppressed but righteous minority. Shiites mark this event yearly during a commemoration called Ashura, honoring and mourning Hussein as the “Lord of the Martyrs.”

More description of this event will follow in part four. But its impact was profound. Hussein’s oldest son did not take part in battle due to illness, and he retreated to Medina, the holy city of Muhammad’s leadership in present-day Saudi Arabia. Here Shiites maintained a base of support, far from the Sunni center of power in Damascus.

Hussein’s son succeeded his father as imam, and the line continued for a total of 12 imams. Throughout this time, the Shiite community kept its distance from politics but often suffered persecution by the Sunni caliphs. Yet imams gave Shiites guidance—encouraging a quietist posture in formal submission toward unjust rulers. This involved taqiyya, hiding one’s true beliefs to survive an oppressive regime. Coming from Muhammad’s household, they believed they had the right to rule. Given their stature in society, wisdom advised them not to proclaim it aloud.

This, at least, is the interpretation given by the largest branch of Shiite Muslims, known as Twelvers. Another sect of Shiites centered its theology of the imam on the tradition, mentioned last article, in which Muhammad spoke in support of the oppressed. Known as Zaydis, they exist today primarily in Yemen and maintained that imams earn legitimacy not from family inheritance but by leading their people in revolt against unjust rulers. That willingness to fight is one reason why Sunni caliphs consistently persecuted the partisans of Ali—Zaydis and other Ali-linked movements constantly rebelled.

The other primary sect of Shiite Islam is the Ismailis, most prominent in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, led today by the Aga Khan. Of the twin Shiite theological concerns—justice and leadership—Ismailis focus on the esoteric knowledge they say the imam should have to lead well. Though Ismailis once commanded a powerful dynasty in Egypt, since the mid-19th century they have not sought to seize political power.

Iran is primarily a Twelver nation. And Twelvers had a particular problem after the line of imams ended with the disappearance of the twelfth: Who would guide the community? (The next article will describe the circumstances and implications of this disappearance.) A Zaydi imam could arise at any time. For Ismailis, the line veered to another figure and continues today. The Aga Khan claims to be the fiftieth in succession.

But Twelvers have an additional problem. After Ali, the imams did not possess political power. If Shiites did come to rule, how could they govern without an imam? Which leads back to the original question of this series: Is Iran’s Islamic Republic a faithful model of Shiite governance? Shiites are keen to apply their definition of justice in society through the Quranic injunctions to “command the right and forbid the wrong,” reflected—rightly or wrongly—in the role of morality police in Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran.

The religious legitimacy of Iran’s Islamic Republic, however, does not rest solely on how well it applies the Quran. Some Iranians favor strict enforcement of female head covering, others less so. And although many courts have issued verdicts against converts to Christianity, others have ruled on their behalf.

The test comes in evaluating political power in the absence of the imam. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s first supreme leader, offered a particular solution: The jurist, the religious scholar, rules in his stead. But he was not the first Twelver to confront this conundrum. The next article will continue the history of Shiite politics, from which Shiites can judge whether wilayat al-faqih is a consistent or aberrant answer.

- More from Jayson Casper

News

Pro-Lifers Strategize as the UK Expands Abortion Access

Madeleine Davies

With abortion pills by mail and a new amendment decriminalizing women who end their own pregnancies, can evangelicals convince their country that Both Lives Matter?

Members of Parliament voted on the decriminalization of abortion on June 17, 2025 in London.

Alishia Abodunde / Getty Images

Debating abortion law in the United Kingdom last month, members of Parliament were warned that access to abortion was “increasingly under attack.”

Stella Creasy, a Labour MP from London, pleaded with colleagues to “listen to our American counterparts, who bitterly regret not having acted under Biden and Obama to protect abortion access and who now find medics being prosecuted and dragged across state lines.”

Conservatives dismissed her claim. Julia Lopez, an MP representing an outer London suburb, suggested that “the boogeyman of the US right” had made a return to the chamber. “Apparently, unless we agree to these amendments, evangelical religious groups paid for by US cash are going to start rolling back women’s reproductive rights in this country,” she told MPs. “This is utter nonsense.”

The exchange illustrates a sharp divide in how the British interpret the state of abortion access. While pro-life campaigners fear that the country is moving toward an “extreme” position, pro-choice voices see access under threat.

Overturning Roe v. Wade in the US prompted media outlets in the UK to speculate about whether the same could happen in other countries. Dr. Jonathan Lord, a consultant gynecologist for the National Health Service, told The Guardian newspaper earlier this year that “the radical American right wing” had been “empowered” and was attempting to push its “extreme anti-abortion views in the UK and around the world.”

During debate of the UK’s wide-ranging Crime and Policing Bill, MPs rejected Creasy’s proposal to make abortion access a human right in England and Wales but adopted an amendment to decriminalize women who terminate their own pregnancies, regardless of the number of weeks of gestation.

The vote in favor of this change—by a comfortable majority of 379 to 137—was front-page news in the UK, with headlines including “MPs vote to decriminalise abortion at any point up to birth.”

The reality is more nuanced. The 1967 law that legalized abortion in the UK stipulates that abortions will not be criminal offenses provided that they meet certain criteria. Two registered medical practitioners must agree in “good faith” that the woman is not more than 24 weeks pregnant and that there’s a risk to the woman’s physical or mental health, a “substantial risk” that the baby would be “seriously handicapped,” or other limited factors.

The recent amendment does not change this. Anyone other than pregnant women acting outside these conditions—including medical professionals—could still face prosecution. Nevertheless, it aroused strong emotions in Parliament, and Christian groups have voiced their condemnation of the change.

“Dangerous and late-term, self-induced abortion has been legitimised,” wrote Dawn McAvoy, who leads Both Lives UK, an Evangelical Alliance initiative. “Instead of the law protecting both lives in pregnancy, all unborn children have lost legal protections, and women have been abandoned by those tasked and paid to provide care.”

The vote follows a spike in prosecutions of women accused of having illegal abortions since the introduction of “pills by post” during the pandemic. The program, which allows women up to 10 weeks pregnant to receive abortion pills in the mail after a phone consultation, was made permanent in 2022.

Since its introduction, more than 100 women have been criminally investigated, 6 have faced court, and 1 has been sent to prison. During the debate, MPs were told that prior to it, only 3 women had been on trial over the past 160 years.

Among the Christian MPs who spoke during the debate was Rebecca Smith, a Conservative who suggested that a return to face-to-face consultations represented a “better way forward.”

Dr. Caroline Johnson, a Conservative MP who is also a consultant pediatrician, agreed and warned that under pills by post, women accessed abortion pills late in their pregnancies and were left “traumatized.”

Some women have lied to access the pills, while others have been mistaken about the stage of their pregnancies.

Last year, a man was sent to prison for spiking a woman’s drink with abortion pills obtained via the program. The year the program became permanent, a BBC poll of 1,000 women found that 15 percent reported “pressure to terminate a pregnancy when they didn’t want to.”

The Crime and Policing Bill debates renewed conversation about the UK’s abortion laws. Unlike the vast majority of European countries, the UK does not have abortion on request, although many argue that this is what exists in practice.

According to government figures, every year more than 250,000 abortions take place, and one in three women in the UK will have an abortion at some point in their lives.

The country also has some of the most liberal laws in Europe when it comes to late-term abortions. The evangelical Both Lives initiative has highlighted that the vast majority of abortions are carried out for undisclosed mental health reasons.

Against this backdrop, the overwhelming majority of the British public—87 percent—supports access to abortion, though a quarter believe that restrictions should fall earlier than the current 24-week limit.

Although pro-life groups and campaigns exist in the UK, they have nothing like the convening power evident in the United States. Fewer Brits than US citizens identify as Christian, and the constituency most opposed to abortion in the United States—white evangelicals—is a fraction of the size in the UK.

Furthermore, as a report by the think tank Theos observed, the UK lacks “the kind of tight-knit, symbiotic relationship between a right-of-centre political party and a unified Christian constituency” that emerged in the latter decades of the 20th century in the US.

Although some Christian charities are dedicated to campaigning against abortion, they have had to adopt tactics alternative to aligning with a single political party with a set of demands.

James Mildred of the charity CARE (Christian Action Research and Education) has noted that an “absolutist” approach to ending abortion “avoids pragmatism about what is politically possible and therefore gains little support from lawmakers—who are the ones actually able to change the law.”

The Both Lives initiative, first launched by the Evangelical Alliance in Northern Ireland in 2017, now seeks to engender a “new conversation” across the UK around the complexities of abortion.

“For decades British governments have provided—and privileged—one response to a pregnancy crisis: abortion,” said McAvoy. “Despite the language of ‘choice,’ we must ask honestly, ‘Is this system truly pro-choice or simply pro-abortion?’

“Unless we offer meaningful alternatives—real, supported, viable choices—abortion rates will continue to rise. Women who, in other circumstances, might choose to carry, birth, and love their child are being left with no visible path but termination. And disproportionately, it is the most vulnerable—the disadvantaged, the disabled, the unwell—whose lives are being ended.”

In the intermediate term, the initiative aims to see a return to in-person consultations, as MP Johnson had proposed.

Other aims include reducing the time limit “as far as Parliament will accept it,” McAvoy said, and tackling the “disability discrimination” inherent in permitting abortion after 24 weeks in cases of fetal disability.

McAvoy would also like to see the provision of independent counseling for pregnant women to avoid the “conflict of interest” whereby those providing counseling are also those providing abortion.

In common with other pro-life groups, Both Lives is investing in education—marshaling facts and data to better inform the current conversation. CARE has produced material such as “6 things abortion campaigners won’t tell you about decriminalisation.”

Polling is also a popular tactic, testing whether the public’s views on abortion are really that settled. Last month, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children commissioned a poll that found that 67 percent of respondents agreed that “abortion is a matter of life and death, and it is therefore appropriate that the criminal law provides a clear boundary to protect everyone involved.”

The charity has campaigned to end the government’s “two-child benefit cap,” under which only the first two children of a family qualify for some forms of welfare, and it cited evidence that the cap is influencing women’s decisions to have abortions.

In 2022, Christian charities spoke in support of Heidi Crowter, a young women with Down syndrome who unsuccessfully challenged in court the provision of abortion past 24 weeks in the case of babies thought to be disabled.

The Both Lives initiative, with its emphasis on “gracious” and “respectful” conversation, is evidently wary of entering the waters of a culture war. A notable line in the guide states, “We don’t want to see the UK church following a more fundamentalist-partisan-political line when it comes to this issue.”

It’s an approach that mirrors that of other charities. In 2013, the head of CARE, founded in 1983, told Theos:

When CARE started, it would be true to say that CARE staff would, on occasion, march—perhaps with a banner saying “abortion kills” … Very quickly we said we wouldn’t ever do that again because what does that say to the woman who’s standing by the road? … There will be Christians who will say either we’ve gone too soft and lost it … but then we’ll be attacked from the other side who say we’re pro-life and therefore we’re not caring for women.

This is a key challenge that pro-life campaigners must grapple with in the UK. Though they may stress the importance of gracious, respectful debate, in a country with such strong support for abortion, the very act of opposing it is likely to offend.

“We seek to protect life and so have always supported legislative initiatives that seek to lower abortions, whether through changing the legal time limit for abortions or clarifying that sex-selective abortions are illegal under UK law,” said Caroline Ansell, director of advocacy and policy at CARE.

“How we communicate on this issue is of paramount importance,” she said. “Our model is Jesus, who came from the Father, full of truth and grace. We want to hold out a better story on abortion than the one our society tells. That story is based on the amazing truth that a person comes into existence at conception and their life has intrinsic dignity from this point through to its natural end.”

The Both Lives guide warns that the UK church cannot “remain silent and apathetic” on the matter of abortion and cautions that “in the society we live in, the idea of any limit on bodily autonomy will be inherently offensive to many. The church therefore should stand firmly on the truth that all life has inherent dignity and value from the moment of conception.”

In recent years, one tactic adopted by pro-life campaigners has attracted more media attention than any other: prayer outside abortion clinics.

In her book Anti-Abortion Activism in the UK, Pam Lowe, a sociologist, suggests that “anti-abortion activism lacks public support and has largely been unsuccessful since 1967.” She also reports “evidence of increased activism outside abortion clinics, with more faith-based groups beginning to organise ‘vigils’ which seek to deter women from entering.”

In October last year, a new law came into effect prohibiting all protest activity within 150 meters of an abortion clinic. This includes any attempt to “influence” a person’s decision to access the clinic. It’s a rule supported by 77 percent of the public, according to a 2023 poll.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, US vice president JD Vance cited the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a man convicted of breaching a safe access zone after refusing to move on while praying outside a clinic, as evidence of “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” His intervention was condemned by Creasy in Parliament.

Creasy’s criticism of pro-life campaigning has been challenged by other MPs. The activities she has listed—the March for Life, activities on university campuses, and the lobbying of MPs—are all the rights of citizens in a free country.

Last year, the Northern Irish MP Carla Lockhart, a member of the evangelical Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, accused her of having “demonized” such campaigners, who “value life and who value both lives in every pregnancy.” For its part, the current Labour government has said it is “wholly committed to ensuring access to safe, regulated abortions.”

Creasy is right that American organizations have influence on the landscape in the UK. One example is the Alliance Defending Freedom, a US-based legal organization that provides free representation in cases concerning “religious freedom, free speech, and the sanctity of life.”

Its clients include Smith-Connor and Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the director of the UK March for Life, also arrested and charged after praying outside a clinic.

Meanwhile, the UK affiliate of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR UK) is committed to using the tactics of the founding American organization: graphic images of abortion deployed on the premise that “we will never truly understand the horror of abortion until we see it.”

In 2019, it paid for a billboard campaign in the London area represented by Creasy. The owner of the billboards removed them after Creasy complained she was being harassed. She was pregnant at the time.

The charity’s head of training and development, Aisling Goodison, argues that to end abortion, campaigners must learn the lessons from historical campaigns, including the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in the US—both of which, she argues, deployed graphic images.

While Creasy and others warn of the rise of pro-life activism, the fear among some in this constituency is that the campaign isn’t loud enough.

“Most Christians in the UK today think and behave much like the rest of the world when it comes to abortion,” according to Dave Brennan, the leader of Brephos, CBR UK’s initiative that encourages churches to speak about abortion. “We’ve accepted the rhetoric of choice.”

“Silence has pervaded the church, and we need to find a renewed confidence in the good news of the gospel for both lives in pregnancy,” said McAvoy. “Women facing pregnancy crises and considering abortion, and all those living with post-abortion pain and loss, deserve the hope, help, and healing that we know is found in Jesus.”

Dismissing the “boogeyman of the US right” in the House of Commons last month, Lopez spoke of a “very different and a more balanced national conversation” in the UK.

“It is not extremist to want protections for viable babies, and it is not anti-women to say that coercion or dangerous self-medication should not be outside the reach of the law,” she argued.

The country’s pro-life campaigners agree. But as they seek to turn the tide of public opinion, views within the movement on the right methods remain divided. While some caution against a conversation in the US mold, others see helpful lessons.

- More from Madeleine Davies

News

Churches Can Endorse Political Candidates, IRS Says

Daniel Silliman

New interpretation of tax law is a win for conservative Christians who have long opposed the Johnson Amendment.

Christians in Alabama pray for an upcoming election.

Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

The IRS has asked a federal court to reconsider its understanding of what happens at church.

A sermon is like “a family discussion,” the IRS said in a court filing on Monday in Tyler, Texas. And if a pastor endorses a candidate in one of those family discussions, that’s part of “bona fide communications internal to a house of worship.”

A 1954 amendment put forward by Lyndon Johnson when he was a senator prohibits churches and other tax-exempt organizations from getting involved in political campaigns. Until now, the IRS said that a public statement from a church on behalf of a candidate or in opposition to a candidate was a clear violation of the law and “absolutely prohibited.”

In the court filing, the government agency offers a new interpretation, clarifying that statements made in a church are not public.

The IRS now says that, actually, nothing that happens at church or through a church’s “usual channels of communication on matters of faith” can violate the Johnson Amendment. Even a sermon that explicitly tells people in the pews how to vote does not “participate” or “intervene” in a campaign, according to the IRS, at least not “within the ordinary meaning of those words.”

The agency wants the court to settle a lawsuit brought by the National Religious Broadcasters and two evangelical churches in East Texas. The court filing, which was first reported by The New York Times, also notches a political victory for conservative Christians who have long opposed the Johnson Amendment.

Southern Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress once called the law an “assault by government on religious liberty.” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Erik Stanley said it violates pastors’ “right to speak about Biblical truths from the pulpit without fear of punishment.”

Opponents of the Johnson Amendment even encouraged pastors to violate the law in acts of civil disobedience. About 30 churches participated in the first Pulpit Freedom Sunday in 2008. More than 1,800 joined in 2014.

Efforts to repeal the law have not gone anywhere, though. North Carolina congressman Walter B. Jones, a former Southern Baptist who converted to Catholicism in his 30s, proposed overturning the Johnson Amendment several times without success. Oklahoma representative James Lankford, an ordained Southern Baptist minister who served in the House and is now in the Senate, has repeatedly tried as well, but his proposals have died in committee.

Donald Trump embraced the issue during his 2016 run for president as part of his outreach to religious conservatives. Repeal of the Johnson Amendment was added to the Republican Party platform, and vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said it was one of the top reasons Christians should vote for Trump, right after Trump’s promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices.

Trump reiterated his commitment after he won, telling the National Prayer Breakfast he would “get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”

He tried twice. An early draft of Trump’s signature legislation, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, included language that would allow churches to engage in political activity without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status. It was stripped from the bill during the budget-reconciliation process, however, to allow the senate to pass the legislation without needing a filibuster-proof majority.

Trump also signed an executive order which he said “got rid of” the Johnson Amendment. Legally, however, the order only had the power to direct the Treasury Department to relax enforcement of the law.

The law has not been enforced very often. In more than 70 years, it appears only two churches have lost their tax-exempt status for political activity. One took out newspaper ads opposing Bill Clinton’s bid for the White House in 1992. Another reportedly lost its status in 2012, but details, including the church’s name and purported political activity, are unknown.

In 2022, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune investigated more than a dozen apparent violations of the law and found the IRS had “largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities.”

Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and Patrick Henry College, said the IRS investigated his church, however, during Joe Biden’s time as president.

Farris now serves as general counsel for the National Religion Broadcasters and is part of the litigation team suing the IRS over the Johnson Amendment.

“We’re trying to reinstate the original vision of America where churches could preach the whole counsel of the Word of God and not stop at applying that to the issues that are facing us,” he said in an interview last year. “We think that churches and other nonprofits should be able to freely say whatever they want to say.”

A Lifeway Research study found most Americans don’t want ministers to endorse candidates, but they are more open to it than they used to be. The percentage of Americans who say a political endorsement during a worship service would be appropriate more than doubled between a phone survey in 2008 and an online survey in 2024.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Evangelicals Murdered as Armed Groups Reclaim Territory in Colombia

Hernán Restrepo

Eight Protestants fleeing violence in their home region were found dead after being summoned by an armed group.

Members of a FARC dissident guerrilla group march on a rural area of Colombia.

JOAQUIN SARMIENTO / Contributor / Getty

A story of violence, forced displacement, and mistaken identity lies behind the killing of eight Christian leaders in Colombia, whose bodies were discovered last week in a mass grave.

The victims—a pastor from the Iglesia Cristiana Carismática Cuadrangular (ICCC, the Colombian branch of The Foursquare Church) and seven others affiliated with the ICCC and the Iglesia Evangélica Alianza de Colombia—went missing in April.

They had traveled to the village of Puerto Nuevo after a summons from Frente Primero, a dissident group of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

All eight Christians had previously fled from Arauca, a region close to the Venezuelan border where armed groups have increasingly targeted pastors and converts to Protestantism.

According to the prosecutor’s office in Calamar, where the bodies were found, Frente Primero had mistaken the Christians for members of another armed organization, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN, National Liberation Army), which has one of its bases in the Arauca region.

“This situation apparently stems from the origins of some of them; they are of Araucanian origin, and in this criminal paranoia, the perpetrators assume they are members of the ELN,” prosecutor Raúl González told the newspaper El Colombiano.

The massacre shocked Christians in Calamar. Images from the burial site showed rudimentary wooden crosses, suggesting that local residents may have tried to honor the victims as best they could before officials reached the gravesite.

The victims have been identified as Nixon Peñalosa, Maryuri Hernández, Isaíd Gómez, Maribel Silva, James Caicedo, Oscar García, Jesús Valero, and Carlos Valero. According to a local pastor, they were “brothers of good testimony, people who always showed their commitment to the community.”

After the discovery of the bodies, more violence hit the town of Calamar. On Friday, a drone carrying a grenade hit an army base near the city center.

As a result, the city suspended administrative services for the day, citing risks to the safety of public employees. Churches in the area also moved Sunday evening services up to the early afternoon, between 2 and 3 p.m., to ensure that people would be home by nightfall.

“There is a tense atmosphere, but people have not stopped congregating. We perceive the massacre as an isolated incident, but we ask for much prayer,” said the pastor.

The country’s decades-long armed conflict officially ended with the 2016 peace deal between FARC and the Colombian government, but many parts of the country remain contested territory between state forces and armed groups who rejected or abandoned the accords.

Calamar, a town of 11,000 inhabitants in Guaviare, a jungle region in southeastern Colombia, is in the heart of one of these land conflicts, between Frente Primero (also known as Armando Ríos and ruled by warlord Iván Mordisco) and the faction led by Calarcá Córdoba.

Last month, from June 7 to June 21, Mordisco ordered a curfew in the Guaviare from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The region’s economy, which relies on agriculture and livestock, faces challenges related to production and logistics. The difficulty in monitoring enables illegal activities, such as the planting of coca for the production of cocaine.

International observers and Colombian lawmakers alike have condemned the killings.

“Eight Christian leaders have been massacred in Calamar, Guaviare. This is an atrocious act that brings mourning to the country and an alarming sign that religious freedom is in danger in Colombia’s most forgotten regions,” said Senator Lorena Ríos, a vocal advocate for religious freedom.

Ríos has called for a full investigation by the Attorney General’s Office and the National Protection Unit, demanding justice for the victims and security guarantees for Christian communities in rural conflict zones.

Several Christian organizations in Colombia, including the Evangelical Confederation, have echoed her demands and called on the government to take decisive action to protect pastors and faith leaders in high-risk areas.

In a post on X, Colombian president Gustavo Petro described the events as “a serious affront to the right to life, religious freedom, and the spiritual and community work that so many people carry out in regions historically plagued by violence,” and he called on state entities to redouble their efforts to protect social and religious leaders.

Christian and Jewish groups harshly criticized Petro last April for choosing an anti-Zionist rabbi named Richard Gamboa as the new director of the Interior Ministry’s Office of Religious Affairs, which is responsible for coordinating interfaith dialogue and promoting religious freedom in the country.

Christian advocacy groups are particularly concerned by this latest incident. Open Doors, a global watchdog for religious persecution, ranks Colombia 46th on its 2025 World Watch List of countries where Christians face the most persecution. The group cites persistent threats, surveillance, and even assassinations of church leaders who oppose the influence of armed groups in rural Colombia.

“Colombia fell 12 spots on the World Watch List, but this shouldn’t be taken as a sign that everything is well,” states Open Doors in its latest report. “Church leaders are particularly at risk because they are seen as competitive influences for the young people that make up much of the guerrilla groups’ ranks.”

Adding to this recent massacre was the murder of pastor Marlon Lora, his wife, and his daughter on December 29, 2024, in Aguachica, César department, in northern Colombia under mysterious circumstances. The investigation conducted by the Attorney General’s Office showed that the hit men apparently mistook one of the victims for the woman they had been paid to kill.

“Calamar is a place of good people, where they want to get ahead. And people who work hard,” said a local pastor.

“God has been raising people up in different ways here, restoring families, and the church has flourished beautifully,” he said. “But in the midst of all this, we must know that there is a spiritual struggle that is not against flesh and blood but against the works of the murderer. It is our duty to seek God and cry out to him.”

Hernán Restrepo is a Colombian journalist based in Bogotá. Since 2021 he has managed Christianity Today’s Spanish-language social media accounts.

- More from Hernán Restrepo

Church Life

All the Light It Hurts to See

Natalie Mead

Scripture tells us God’s glory is blinding. Chronic migraines helped me see for myself.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash / Wikimedia Commons

I live six blocks from the Pacific Ocean. A desirable location for most. But not for me. When my husband and I walk to the beach in the evenings, as the sun dips beneath the horizon, I never look straight ahead. Instead, I watch the surrounding clouds change colors. That’s all I can bear to see of a sunset: the back of it as it passes me by.

Chronic migraine disorder involves being in pain more often than not, and the stress that this pain induces on the nervous system means that sufferers often struggle with a variety of neurological symptoms. One of my most annoying symptoms is extended periods of photophobia, or light sensitivity.

Yet it’s much more than a “sensitivity,” in my opinion. Photophobia is a barbed wire fence wrapped around my entire world. It turns car headlights and TV screens into flame throwers and laser beams. iPhone flashlights (which people accidentally turn on all too often) drill straight into my skull. I can’t even tolerate regular light bulbs unless they are completely covered by shades.

So, you can probably imagine how I feel about the sun, the biggest light bulb of all, and the ocean, the world’s largest mirror.

Every day I’m reminded that my chronic pain turns good and beautiful things that other people enjoy, like summer or campfires or Christmas decorations, into sources of frustration and fear. And that has spiritual implications.

The first time I noticed this wasn’t while taking in a sunset but while sitting in church. My San Francisco congregation is small and frequently moves from place to place; at the time I first got sick, we met in a conference center with LED track lighting, like what you’d find in a fashion outlet store. Each fixture pointed in a slightly different direction, leaving me with no escape from the overwhelming brightness. The lights near the pulpit were the worst of all. So, during my first year of chronic pain, I spent most Sunday services looking at the floor. (Later on, my church met in a ballroom lit by two giant spotlights. I can’t decide which was worse.)

How was I supposed to engage with people in my church community when I was so preoccupied with avoiding the lights? Connecting with God proved even harder. After all, wasn’t he the one who allowed this sickness that made church so inaccessible to me? I felt like I was being punished for obeying the command not to give up on meeting together (Heb. 10:24–25).

My difficulties with church were just the tip of the iceberg. What I found even more concerning was how quickly and completely my pain choked out every other aspect of my spiritual life. I was usually too distracted by pain to pray, but on the rare occasion that I did, I was unable to conjure even the mere idea of God. It was like talking into thin air.

Reading Scripture was difficult too. God’s Word had always been my map. But now, whenever I opened it, I found myself circling around the same handful of psalms, all of which were laments or complaints. Psalm 88, for example:

Your wrath has swept over me;
            your terrors have destroyed me.

All day long they surround me like a flood;
            they have completely engulfed me.

You have taken from me friend and neighbor—
            darkness is my closest friend. (vv. 16–18)

Whenever I tried branching out, I was confused by the Bible’s frequent references to God as loving, good, and beautiful. This was not the God I knew, at least not anymore. All of the many exhortations to “Praise the Lord!” rang hollow. The map was muddled now, providing directions to a foreign land where I didn’t live and couldn’t possibly belong.

C. S. Lewis wrote that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” So, though I never went looking for solutions to the crisis created by my chronic pain—most likely because I doubted there was anything to learn, spiritual or otherwise, from my suffering—the answers found me nonetheless.

Over my ringing ears, pounding head, and certainty that pain was all curse and no blessings, I started to hear God shouting something I’d never heard before.

Ezekiel saw the glory of the Lord as a figure that from the waist up “looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down … looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him.” When the prophet saw this, he fell to the ground (Ezek. 1:27–28).

During the Transfiguration, Jesus’ face “shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light” as the Father spoke to the disciples out of a “bright cloud” (Matt. 17:2, 5). The disciples ended up face-down on the ground too.

The apostle Paul’s conversion involved a light from heaven that was so bright, it struck him blind, and—you guessed it—he “fell to the ground” (Acts 9:4).

Before getting migraines, I knew these stories, and I knew their shared message: God’s glory is so bright and beautiful, it totally overwhelms those who encounter it. What I didn’t fully take in back then, however, was the physical circumstances these stories likewise shared. They all involved the glory of God manifesting as a light so bright, the witnesses reflexively recoiled. Put another way, these are all examples of divine photophobia.

My photophobia is not the result of a divine encounter, as it was with the apostle Paul. But the discovery of this aspect of my physical experience in Scripture relocated parts of me that had been lost for too long. I still understood so little about God, still felt so far from him in many ways. But when it came to these stories about his blinding glory—or other parts of the Bible that described God as surrounded by light—I realized that by experiencing photophobia, I was, in some small way, able to feel God’s glory in my body. It was as if, on the map, God had drawn an X next to Paul on the road to Damascus or an arrow labeled “You Are Here” pointing to the mountaintop with the disciples.

Perhaps I could connect with God in spite of—no, because of—my pain, and perhaps the photophobia I’d considered a spiritual barrier was actually an invitation into a deeper understanding of my Savior that went straight to my neurons. As I continued to squint beneath the bright lights on Sunday mornings, I was comforted by the possibility that my symptoms were, somehow, holy.

On a recent trip up the California coast, my husband and I decided to pull over to eat lunch on a beach. It was late fall, so the sun glanced off the water even that early in the day, forcing me to tip the brim of my hat down until I couldn’t see the ocean. This was an inconvenience I would usually grumble about, but much to my surprise, I found myself enjoying the sound of the waves and the warmth of the salty air. And as I ate a sandwich we’d picked up at a drive-through, I found myself thinking about how God’s radiance is more than our eyes can behold, just as the sight of the sun hitting the ocean at that moment was more than my eyes could behold.

Would I rather have been able to look directly at the ocean, to fully take in God’s marvelous creation? Yes, definitely. But in the absence of that, I was thankful that divinity can exist alongside difficulty and suffering alongside the sacred.

That day on the beach also gave me a new understanding of Christ and his grace. Jesus’ sacrifice is our only protection from the overwhelming, overpowering glory of God; Jesus is the shade at our right hand that allows us to boldly approach the throne of unapproachable light (Ps. 121:5; 1 Tim. 6:16). Or, to put this in terms a photophobe would understand: Jesus is my hat on the beach, my sunglasses on a bright day, and the colorful clouds surrounding the world’s greatest sunset.

Jesus is also the light of heaven, the sun of the New Jerusalem. And I know that when I see him there, I won’t mourn the sunsets I missed.

Natalie Mead is currently pursuing an MFA while writing a memoir about chronic pain, relationships, and faith. Read more of her writing at nataliemead.com.

- More from Natalie Mead

News

Inclusive Worship Shouts, Shushes, and Sings to the Lord

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Christian researchers examine how autism and neurodivergence could reshape church services.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Trent Broussard realized that his son had perfect pitch when the eight-year-old called him out during a worship set. “That’s the wrong key!” his son shouted over and over as Broussard sang a version of Hillsong’s “Mighty to Save.”

Broussard’s son was diagnosed with autism at age three. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 1 in 31 children in the US have some form of autism, and studies have shown kids with the condition are half as likely to attend religious services.

Broussard said inclusion of people with neurodivergence can challenge people’s expectations for what a Sunday service should feel like.

“You may very well get outbursts in the middle of a service,” said Broussard, now an assistant professor of music at Williams Baptist University.

“We used to get death stares when my son would yell out in church. But we were lucky to have leadership who told us, ‘You’re doing nothing wrong; we want him here, just as he is.’ How I wish that would happen everywhere.”

Broussard belongs to a growing group of scholars studying the experiences of neurodivergent people in corporate worship. He wrote his dissertation about the inclusion of people with autism in corporate worship in Southern Baptist churches—in hopes that planning worship with neurodiversity in mind can enrich and enliven the life of the church.

“Most churches that don’t seem very open or accommodating just haven’t had the opportunity to see that things can be done differently,” he said. “We sing about a gospel that is available for all people, of all shapes, forms, and fashions. If our worship doesn’t include all people, that calls into question whether we believe the things we profess about God.”

The emphasis on order in church worship can hinder efforts to make room for neurodivergent people, said Nathan Myrick, assistant professor of church music at Mercer University and the director of a new initiative funded by the Lilly Endowment that aims to study and enhance worship for neurodivergent children through the arts.

Myrick recommends a more flexible approach.

“Neurodiversity in our communities can reveal our fear of being out of control,” said Myrick. “So much of our polity and rituals are about exerting control.”

That’s not to say that there is no value in having some expectations about appropriate behavior in the context of corporate worship, Myrick added. “There is value in learning to participate, but our expectations are overwrought and unrealistic.”

Myrick and Broussard both noted that, for many churches, emphasis on production and a seamless flow of service can discourage or reject interruptions. And while it’s reasonable to want Sunday morning worship to include times of meditation, prayer, and corporate reading, churches can still let families know that everyone is welcome, even those who struggle to stay still or quiet.

Sunita Theiss and her seven-year-old son have autism; she has written about the challenges of participating in the life of the local church as a neurodivergent parent with children on the spectrum.

Theiss points out that every church offers accommodations of some kind for certain populations, though they may not be explicitly labeled “accommodations.”

“Lots of churches have hearing augmentation or special family-friendly services and events,” she said. “I was recently at a church that had rocking chairs in the back for mothers of young children. My Anglican church doesn’t use incense because we have older congregants who are sensitive to strong smells. Those are accommodations, whether we call them that or not.”

Theiss says churches that are just starting to take a closer look at the ways their worship practices might exclude those with neurodivergence would benefit from looking at the things they already do to accommodate the needs of their community.

“All of us have an internal line that we’ve drawn,” said Theiss. “We’re willing to accommodate to a point, but not past that. Each person has their own line, and frequently, for neurodivergent people, the lines are just different.”

Theiss and Broussard both point out that many adjustments that can help neurodivergent people aren’t complicated or expensive but go a long way in showing welcome. Broussard says that even a simple printed order of service can help some attendees feel more at ease.

For younger children, he suggests “first, then” charts—simple, graphic depictions of the order of events. Theiss says that having a few freely available tools like fidget toys and noise-reducing headphones helps families with neurodiverse members feel seen and accepted.

Broussard also says that churches with bigger production budgets should carefully consider how they use lighting during services.

“When you go to a theater, you’ll see warning signs about things like strobe lights and flashes,” he said. “Lighting is a great tool, but we shouldn’t need that warning for corporate worship.”

Noise sensitivity is a common characteristic among neurodivergent people. While worship volume can be a sore spot for musicians, serving the community may mean giving up the goal of trying to recreate the immersive worship concerts modeled by megachurches like Hillsong and Bethel. Churches may opt to have separate services or spaces to serve those who prefer a quieter mode of worship.

There are many unique profiles and needs that accompany neurodivergence, and advocates acknowledge that it’s impossible to perfectly accommodate everyone.

“We have a sensory mismatch in my own house. I have one kid who needs to wear headphones for the other one to enjoy loud music,” Theiss said. “In a church, multiply that by 100. You aren’t going to be able to accommodate everyone, but you can have some tools available.”

Emma Friesen, a graduate of Duke University who is entering graduate school to study occupational therapy, experiences sensitivity to loud noises and has felt firsthand the strain of participation in corporate worship.

“Congregants having seemingly conflicting needs in regard to the corporate worship service makes me think of the miracle of the loaves and fishes,” said Friesen. “In that story, there is enough for everyone, and sometimes that can feel far away from our day-to-day lives.”

Friesen says that one way churches can start making more room is by intentionally choosing messiness and welcoming mistakes.

“Creating a culture of informality can go hand in hand with creating a welcoming community,” said Friesen. “At my church, I like how it is not uncommon for a worship leader to pause the sermon because of a passing train or do something like restart a song.”

Broussard also sees value in cultivating communities that actively push against the tendency to platform and celebrate attractiveness and polish.

“There are churches where everybody on the platform falls into the ‘beautiful people’ category,” said Broussard. “You can see this corporate mindset that it’s more important to have something attractive than it is to honor the dignity of all humans.”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been criticized recently for making broad claims about the nature of autism spectrum disorder and for saying that autism “destroys lives.” Myrick says that a Christian view of neurodivergence ought to be one that treats its many expressions as examples of the diversity and vibrancy in creation.

“There’s a theological through line from Genesis to Revelation of the expanse of creation and God’s vision for humanity as fruitful and diverse,” Myrick said.

A gracious, openhanded set of worship practices that emphasize flexibility and freedom can help make the church auditorium or sanctuary a place where more of the body of Christ can gather. In churches that make no attempt to accommodate neurodivergence, what appears to be order and organization might actually be homogeneity.

“Contemplating how God might be relating to those in our community who have significant cognitive disabilities can help push our theology towards a bigger view of God’s grace,” said Friesen. “I think that is good news.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

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