The Vigil of Birth

Staff Editor

For low-risk pregnancies, midwife care can offer mothers the birth resources they need: patience, attention, and time.

Illustration by Tara Anand

So much of pregnancy is numbers. How many days since your last menstrual period? How many babies are in there? How long is the femur? How thick is the placenta? What’s the angle of the nasal tip? How many centimeters is your fundal height? How many weeks? How many more weeks? Are you sure it’s that many weeks? Are you sure it’s just one in there?

With labor comes a new metric: hours. This is the worst number of all. You’ll hear tantalizing tales, intended as encouragement, of labors measured in minutes. I myself know a baby who made a sudden appearance at home after a short spell of light contractions spaced 15 minutes apart.

Alas, that was not my baby. My first pregnancy was twins. They were delivered—unusually for multiples—without a C-section or epidural, by a doctor who specialized in complicated births with few medical
interventions. At a prenatal visit, I asked about the longest time gap he’d seen between babies. Two hours, he said. I was reassured.

After my delivery, I assume that doctor has revised his approach to this query, because my gap between babies was four hours and 45 minutes. That’s not reassuring at all.

But it was instructive. It taught me how time matters in birth—and how much a provider’s posture toward time can reveal about the nature of their care. My doctor was on no schedule but mine. Those 285 minutes were very uncomfortable but never unsafe or uncertain.

In a more conventional hospital setting, however, they wouldn’t have been allowed. I’d most likely have been bundled off to the operating room, then tasked with caring for two infants while recovering from both kinds of delivery at once.

My second birth reinforced the time-and-care lesson, albeit on the other end of the timescale. I went to our midwife-run birth center at 8 a.m., had the baby at 5 p.m., and by 10 that night was at home in my own bed.

Everything was different, yet the philosophy of care was the same. And though the primary provider at my first birth was an ob-gyn, his team was heavily populated with midwives and his style of care more resonant with theirs than with many of his medical peers. That was exactly why we’d sought him out.

Midwife-attended deliveries like mine are uncommon in America, and that’s a shame. Of course, midwifery isn’t appropriate for all pregnancies. There are many women and babies for whom hospital care, up to and including a scheduled C-section, is the right and prudent choice. Freestanding (not hospital) birth centers are only equipped to handle low-risk, uncomplicated deliveries, which means some women will “risk out” of their care, as midwives tend to phrase it. Twin pregnancies like mine are automatically high-risk.

But most pregnancies aren’t multiple, and far more births could be safely handled in birth centers than the 12 percent attended by midwives today. Not only could, in fact, but should, because midwife care in low-risk births correlates with better outcomes for mothers and babies alike.

Midwifery is the default option for low-risk deliveries in countries other than the US with the safest maternity care, and in America, peer-reviewed research shows that states with more midwife integration see “significantly higher rates of spontaneous vaginal delivery, vaginal birth after cesarean, and breastfeeding, and significantly lower rates of cesarean, preterm birth, low birth weight infants, and neonatal death.” There’s even evidence suggesting that expanding use of midwives could slow the worrisome decline in American birthrates by making pregnancy and its aftermath less of an ordeal.

This all might seem counterintuitive, I realize. Wouldn’t the greater resources of a hospital mean greater safety? For high-risk pregnancies, yes. But for low-risk pregnancies, a midwife-led birth center is more likely to avoid unnecessary medical interventions—like a C-section, which, being a major abdominal surgery, is good to avoid if it’s safe to do so—while offering women a greater supply of the resources needed most: patience, attention, and time.

“During my long labor in the hospital with my first, the doctor would stop by periodically to see how I was doing. The labor-and-delivery nurse on duty was also spread thin,” recalled Margaret St.Jean, a retired teacher in Virginia who also happens to be my mother-in-law. In the hospital, “I didn’t feel personally supported by anyone except my husband for hours of labor,” she said, but “when you opt for midwifery care, they act as their title describes. They are ‘with woman,’” as per the etymology of the term.

Following that difficult first birth, which ended in a C-section she’s long believed could’ve been avoided with more attentive care, Margaret sought out midwives for the delivery of her six subsequent children.

“Midwives keep their eyes on the laboring woman, not on machinery spitting out information,” she recalled of those births. “In later stages of labor, you cannot ask for what you need. A good midwife’s skills of observation guide her to help you. The obstetrician is trained as a surgeon. Sometimes their skill is essential to saving lives, but they don’t spend hours by your side.”

For Margaret, the practical advantages of midwifery are linked to her duty as a mother before God. Today, a birth-center delivery is often more affordable than a hospital birth—that, as well as “transparent, upfront pricing,” was “a huge selling point” for Austin Gravley, a youth ministry director in the Texas panhandle whose wife chose midwife care. But 30 years ago, midwives were the more costly option for my in-laws. Their decision was born of the biblical conviction that “children are a heritage from the Lord” (Ps. 127:3), and parental responsibility a weighty trust.

Most other parents and providers I interviewed didn’t see quite so direct a connection between their faith and their choice of midwifery. But many described a real resonance.

“My perspective as a Christian leads me to view bearing and birthing children both as a blessing and a part of normal life, but also as something cursed and difficult,” said Elisabeth Young, who works at a Christian nonprofit in Maryland. Though her choice of midwife care was mostly about its demonstrated benefits, she appreciates that midwives don’t treat “pregnancy and birth as an illness,” she told me. That’s not a theological position, exactly, but it makes good theological sense.

Ann Ledbetter, a certified nurse-midwife in Wisconsin who attends 40 to 60 births a year, said her faith “definitely” shaped her choice of work. “I have always felt in a weird way that I was guided toward midwifery,” she said, recounting a college-era pledge to God at the University of Notre Dame—
made in a moment of desperation over an organic chemistry class—to “honor [God] with my work, whatever it may be.”

The Reformer Martin Luther famously entered ministry under similar circumstances—though his distress was over a lightning storm rather than sophomore-year o-chem—so perhaps it’s appropriate that Ann is a Lutheran today. Still, she’s held on to the Catholic idea of a “preferential option for the poor,” which means following Jesus in prioritizing the “least of these” (Matt. 25:34–40).

For Ann, that’s meant working at a community health clinic where 8 in 10 patients are low-income. “It has always been my dream to provide high-quality maternity care to people who often have very few choices when it comes to childbearing,” she told me, “and I feel so lucky to have ended up in a job where I can do this every day.”

Midwife care isn’t infallible, of course. Some midwives are incompetent, as are some members of any field. And sometimes things go awry—even dangerously awry.

Austin, the youth ministry director, initially preferred a hospital delivery “out of an anxious sense of ‘What if?’ ” His wife, Melissa, had been intrigued by home birth with a midwife’s help, but for Austin, this was simply too much risk. (It’s too much for me as well, though I know several women who’ve had midwife-attended deliveries safely at home.) Austin and Melissa settled on a birth center as a middle ground.

After delivery, their son was doing well, but Melissa was losing too much blood and needed surgical repair. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital. “At first I was deeply angry about the whole ordeal,” Austin said, because “this was the exact ‘What if?’ that I had feared.” But the midwife in attendance “proved her trustworthiness,” he continued. “I respected the fact that she made the call for help and would not leave Melissa’s side until she was safe.” Their second baby, due in April, will be delivered at the same birth center.

The midwife’s assistant at that birth, Austin noted, was “a super-crunchy, progressive woman who was not a Christian,” whereas he and his wife are “theologically conservative Reformed evangelicals.” Melissa and the assistant “had some fascinating conversations about Jesus, the gospel, and church,” he said, and the couple was able to “pray for her and show to her a confidence in Christ throughout, especially after the birth when the medical emergency began.”

This pairing—of theologically conservative Christians with crunchy, often-secular progressives—is a birth-center distinctive I’ve noticed as well. Sometimes, sitting in a waiting room for a prenatal appointment, I’d marvel at who else was there with me: a homeschooling mom of five in skeins of denim next to a first-timer with grown-out purple hair and a pronouns pin. Where else in this polarized country would we all so naturally, intimately, and congenially converge?

“Most midwives I have seen, I would guess, do not align with me politically or religiously,” said Hallie Skansi Toplikar, a nurse in Central Texas who’s observed this pattern too. “Yet the friends I have that are most likely to use a birth center or even home birth are my Catholic mom friends.”

Christine, a nurse in Pennsylvania who wanted to be identified by only her first name given the sensitivity of her work, sees this unusual social mix as an asset. “One of the really beautiful parts about a birth center is that it’s a place where maybe not all of your values or all of your ideals overlap” with the people you’ll encounter, she said. “But your ideal for a low-intervention, natural birth is what brings everyone together.”

At her birth center, staff and patients alike vary widely in their views. “Certainly, I fit into that Christian-mom demographic, but we have staff from lots of different perspectives,” Christine said, and they work to serve every mother well.

My mother-in-law Margaret saw this three decades ago. “I think there may be a ‘fellow traveler’ feeling that links the conservative Christian and the crunchy progressive,” she mused—“the value of principle above convenience. These principles may not be exactly matched—for instance, on the issue of abortion. But I think there is a shared value of independence and personal responsibility.”

In her experience of midwife care, “people got along in a very comfortable way” across wide ideological and demographic divides, Margaret said. “Pregnancy, labor, and delivery are ties that bind women deeply together.”

Supporting his wife through labor can bind a man to good fatherhood, too, by offering an intensive tutorial in the long, often weary yet lovely responsibility of raising children.

“I definitely sympathize with husbands who are concerned” about risk in nonhospital births, Austin reflected. “But even after my wife’s situation, the birth center was a genuinely beautiful and unique experience, and I don’t think that’s something to take lightly if it’s something your wife wants and it’s safe to do. It pushed me completely out of my comfort zone,” he added, “but if your midwife is trained and trustworthy, the upsides are valuable.”

That value extends beyond any one family. Birth deserts—places where women have no nearby facility offering maternity care—are an urgent and dangerous problem in America. It’s a lot more feasible to start and support a freestanding birth center than an entire hospital. Even so, it’s not easy.

Some states maintain unfriendly legal environments for midwives, with limited licensure options or onerous and counterproductive supervision requirements. Birth centers often operate on thin margins, organized as nonprofits to accept much-needed grants and other charitable giving. They try to keep costs low to make midwife care as accessible as possible, yet even with a small sticker price, insurance companies can be obstructive and reimbursements too few.

Money woes are common, Christine said, telling me that the sole freestanding birth center in Philadelphia closed in February. After nearly half a century and 16,000 babies, rising “financial and regulatory challenges” finally made it impossible to continue.

Talking about delivery practices can be difficult, because even dispassionate conversation about birth centers might feel like judgment for women who of necessity or choice took a different route to motherhood. It’s a prickly subject, and understandably so. But I have no qualms in saying that this facility closure is a severe loss for the women of Philly. That’s not because midwife care is right for every birth but rather because it’s a blessing for many.

“My midwives were strong Christians, and I did feel God was very present and active in my births with them,” said Carrie Stallings, a writer and tutor in West Texas who chose midwife care for its practical benefits. “But he was also present and active in my hospital birth.”

We know that God will be attentive either way, but if you want a birth provider ready to stand vigil, consider calling a midwife.

Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Bonnie Kristian

Books

Review

Congress Is Overwhelmed and Incompetent

Haley Byrd Wilt

Self-interested and self-loathing, it’s unable to represent the American people well. A new book suggests solutions.

Illustration by Ronan Lynam

Representative Chip Roy was staring at me, baffled. I had sidled up to the Texas Republican while he was leaving the House chamber one afternoon last spring to ask him about the tech billionaire Elon Musk. Roy was used to me pestering him as he walked to and from votes—all Hill reporters do it—but this question was particularly outlandish to him.

“Do you feel like Congress,” I’d wondered aloud, “needs to be leading the audits here instead?”

At the time, Musk was at the height of his cost-cutting paroxysm. With President Donald Trump’s thumbs-up, he’d been unilaterally canceling congressionally approved spending. But Roy wasn’t worried about encroachments on the power of the purse. He was just glad that someone was looking at outlays.

“I have 14 people in my office,” Roy told me after he’d recovered from my question. “How the frick am I going to go through every report of every dollar that’s being spent?”

Musk’s short-lived initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency, wasn’t quite the picture of independent, dedicated oversight. But Roy’s answer was telling nevertheless. How indeed might a member of Congress today conduct any meaningful oversight when lawmakers can’t hire enough staff, aren’t able to hold on to the employees they do have, and keep retiring themselves?

A few months after our conversation, Roy announced he would leave the House to run for a state-level office. If he wins, he’ll have far more resources at his disposal as Texas attorney general than he ever did as one measly member of the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Roy’s answer that day encapsulated a problem that gnawed at me throughout the nine years I spent as a journalist on Capitol Hill. In those years, almost every article I wrote about lawmakers’ foibles and triumphs could be tied into the same overarching story: Congress is on the verge of being a failed institution.

And that’s a charitable way of putting it, placing failure at a vague point in the future. (Chatting with close friends, I’ve sometimes stated my verdict in the past tense too.) My disillusionment isn’t just some jaded outsider’s view, nor is it particularly rare. People from both parties who work in Congress often feel the same way.

House members are drowning in constituent casework, with district sizes that have ballooned and are far too large for them to actually represent. Congress can barely keep track of the gargantuan executive branch’s public activities, let alone its inner workings. And members can’t even tell if the laws they pass are being implemented correctly. On multiple occasions in the course of my reporting, I had to tell congressional staff that the agencies they were supposed to be keeping track of had ignored the plain meaning of laws to entirely sidestep congressional oversight. Overburdened with other work, the staffers hadn’t noticed.

This decay is largely a capacity problem. Congress isn’t investing in itself enough to be able to represent the American people well or to provide meaningful checks and balances.

Many Republican lawmakers have taken this broader trend of congressional disempowerment to absurd new heights over the past ten years—committing themselves to the president so devotedly that they’ve shrugged off rightful powers to declare war, set economic policy on matters like tariffs, and control the purse strings.

A new book from Johns Hopkins University Press, Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress, explains that this situation isn’t just a this-decade disaster. It’s the result of many decisions by lawmakers to treat Congress as a scapegoat for America’s political woes. For more than 30 years, members have slashed their own resources and frozen staff and member salaries, motivated by a desire for short-term political wins. If most Americans hate Congress, those lawmakers reason, perhaps they can win votes if they act as if they also hate Congress.

Glaring ethics violations by members have demanded reform throughout US history. But largely freezing the Hill’s resources has left the place a lot more dysfunctional in the long run.

Much of the brokenness I witnessed while reporting on the Hill sprang from this self-interested self-loathing. Congressional staff are overwhelmed and often leave for jobs with better benefits. Smart lawmakers who earnestly want to work on some of the nation’s most pressing problems burn out and quit. And committees bumble through hugely important investigations with just a handful of dedicated staff members.

These aren’t sustainable working conditions, especially when you factor in the death threats faced by members and staff. A review of employment data last year found that the “probability of a staffer departing the House and Senate in a given year is 13% and 17%, respectively,” a rate far higher than the rest of the federal government at an average of roughly 6 percent. A record number of lawmakers have, like Roy, already announced they won’t run for reelection in 2026.

Throughout Stuck, Maya Kornberg—a researcher at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice—describes how members allowed the legislative branch to stagnate, gutting nonpartisan research agencies that provided technical information and blocking their own cost-of-living pay increases. The book is at its most useful for newcomers when Kornberg identifies the structural changes Newt Gingrich implemented to push most power into the House speaker’s office, changes she notes Democrats simply turned around and kept in place later.

“Before the change in ’94, for fifty years the chairs ran things,” a former Democratic lawmaker told Kornberg, referring to congressional committees. Gingrich, a Republican, instead told the chairs “what bills he wanted and in many instances gave the specifics of what he wanted in the bills,” the representative said. “When we retook the House in 2006, because at that point most people had only been under the Republicans and that’s the way it was done, they said f— ’em. We will do it that way too. And we did it exactly the same way.”

This style of top-down legislating has led to some of the most toxic moments in recent congressional history. And it has also prompted a quiet atrophy among rank-and-file members, many of whom now don’t have the muscle memory or expertise to legislate on their own.

To Roy’s credit, he ardently fought that trend while he was in the House, demanding more power for regular members. But it’s a red flag when even the lawmakers who most want to cut spending and conduct oversight feel they have to outsource that job to the executive branch.

“Our committees do some of it,” Roy said of oversight during that interview about Musk, “but that takes a while to get through the system.”

The answer is not just to kick Congress over and over again until it repents but instead to give regular lawmakers the tools they need to do their jobs. Those rank-and-file members are from our communities, sent to DC to represent us. Representative democracy can be a beautiful system when carried out in earnest—and with the right resources.

Kornberg urges tweaks to empower new members, including more robust rules training so they can navigate the Hill without marching in lockstep with party leaders. She also calls for Congress to spend more on itself, growing its staff and offering salaries competitive enough to draw talent.

Her ideas make sense; plenty of political scientists have argued for similar changes. But a more ambitious plan—expanding the number of members in the House itself—would do a lot more to revive the institution.

George Washington once envisioned a ratio of one representative for every 30,000 constituents. But for more than a century, while America’s population has grown, the House has been frozen at 435 members. Each House member today instead represents an average of 760,000 people.

In one stroke, expanding the House would bring members closer to the communities they work for, reduce their casework to more manageable levels, and make it harder for party leaders to insist on their hyperpartisan, top-down machinations.

But even considering a change like this one seems far outside the realm of possibility for this Congress. Today’s lawmakers can hardly keep the government’s lights on.

Still, throughout Stuck, Kornberg strikes a hopeful tone.

“Congress is always changeable,” she writes, “shaped and reshaped by the people who walk its halls.”

It’s true: Congress really is just people. I’m reminded, whenever I think about Capitol Hill, of Augustine’s quote about bad times. “We make our times,” he said. “Such as we are, such are the times.”

That sort of admonition is what I wished for most while reading Stuck. Much of this malaise raises questions of virtue and courage. Members broadly agree Congress is broken, but they can’t seem to will themselves to rebuild it.

Someone—perhaps a former lawmaker or a longtime Hill reporter—should write a more uninhibited, prophetic version of this book, reminding members of what Congress ought to be.

It won’t be me. After nine years, I found I couldn’t keep spending so much of my time around an institution that respected itself far less than I did. Like so many others, I quit.

Haley Byrd Wilt is a writer based in the DC area. Her reporting has been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, NOTUS, and CNN.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Is Congress a Failed Institution?".

- More from Haley Byrd Wilt

Church Life

What’s the Difference Between Privilege and Blessing?

Karen Swallow Prior, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists also weigh in enjoying unnecessary luxuries and the nature of fun.

Illustrations by Ben Hickey

Got a question? Email advice@christianitytoday.com to ask CT’s advice columnists. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: How much is too much? I’m thinking about all the unnecessary stuff we buy for ourselves when our resources could be used to alleviate suffering. How can I justify taking my family to a $100 dinner when there are single moms in my city who need that money for groceries? Vacations, jewelry, luxury cars: How do we Christians justify those things? It’s an unoriginal question, but I think about it a lot. —Torn in Texas

Karen Swallow Prior: It’s helpful to begin with the biblical principle of tithing. The spirit of the tithe is to give according to a posture and a proportion. Both principles apply regardless of income, and they require us to give early, gladly, and in the percentage we promised, not merely whatever we feel we can spare (1 Cor. 16:2; 2 Cor. 9:7).

But for those of us who enjoy prosperity and material excess beyond what most of humanity can imagine, that answer may seem insufficient. The needs around us are great, and many of us could give much more while still living comfortably ourselves.

Practically, you might consider giving more of your income to those in need. Maybe build a habit of donating to a local food pantry each time you eat out or adopt an overall lifestyle that’s considerably less luxurious than what you can afford.

But perhaps the most helpful way to address the question is to turn it around. Instead of asking how much is too much, ask what our lifestyles are doing to us—both individually and collectively. There’s a reason Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). Scripture doesn’t say exactly how much is too much, but a lifestyle of giving rather than acquiring brings us nearer to the kingdom of God.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Karen Swallow Prior lives in rural Virginia with her husband, two dogs, and several chickens. Following a decades-long vocation as an English professor, Karen now speaks and writes full-time.

Q: How do you discern between privilege and blessing? I was raised to think my house, car, and sociodemographic context were blessings, but I’m now aware of the economic and social systems behind all that—I’m realizing my privilege. But also, my parents are amazing humans, which is a blessing. How should a Christian think about ideas like luck, blessing, and privilege? —Moneyed in Michigan

Kevin Antlitz: I tend to think of blessing as a divine intention, an unearned gift of God’s favor meant for a person’s flourishing. Privilege arises from our cultural context. It’s the advantage that comes from one’s social location. It may come from parts of our lives that we have no control over (e.g., race or sex) as well as from aspects that could possibly change (e.g., education or class).

There can be overlap between these two categories, but they aren’t the same, and how they relate is complex. To have privilege—say, being born into a wealthy family—can absolutely be a blessing. But not having privilege isn’t a curse. After all, Jesus did say, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20).

For Christians, it’s important to remember that neither privilege nor blessing is the result of luck or chance. Every aspect of our lives is part of God’s good (albeit mysterious) providence.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that it’s okay to be grateful for all these things—so long as we understand that both privilege and blessing are not ultimately for us. They are given for the sake of others. We need not feel guilt or shame for the goods we enjoy, but using them rightly is fundamental to our identity as God’s people. Like Abraham, the father of our faith, we are blessed to be a blessing (Gen. 12:1–3).

Jack Richardson

Kevin Antlitz is an Anglican priest at a Pittsburgh church positively overflowing with kids. He and his wife have three young children who they pray will never know a day apart from Jesus.

Illustrations by Ben Hickey

Q: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about fun. I have two young kids, and a desire to have fun seems pretty wired into the way they not only want but need to experience the world. And they want me to have fun with them! Does fun cease to have value at some point in life? Or does it become refreshment for doing our “real” work? Or does it have its own value? —Inquisitive in Ireland

Kiara John-Charles: Our society often treats fun as a reward for completing our “real” work, something to squeeze in after our obligations are fulfilled. Then, as responsibilities grow, we may forget to pause and enjoy the life God has given us.

While fun can refresh us after work, it also holds unique value. It’s not inherently frivolous or foolish but a meaningful part of life given to us by God. Fun creates connection, sparks creativity, brings balance in hard times, and forms joyful memories. “A cheerful heart is good medicine,” says Proverbs 17:22, “but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”

Fun can also help us cultivate joy and gratitude. Learning to appreciate the small gifts woven throughout our lives helps us enjoy God and his creation. Your children are inviting you into a beautiful space God intended for us. From the beginning, God delighted in his creation (Gen. 1:31), and as his image bearers, we are meant to delight in the world around us as well.

Scripture reminds us that joy can fill our everyday moments (Ecc. 8:15) and that it is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). The prophets depict playing children as a sign of God’s favor and redemption (Isa. 11:8; Zech. 8:4–5). And as you find ways to have fun with your kids, you might experience delight and the gift of life in an entirely new way.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kiara John-Charles is an LA native with Caribbean roots and a love for travel and food. She works as a pediatric occupational therapist and serves at her local church in Long Beach, California.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

Qualms & Proverbs: Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Ideas

Birth and Death are Life Issues

Ashley Hales

Staff Editor

A note from CT’s editorial director of features in our March/April issue.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

For everything there is a season,” the Teacher tells us in Ecclesiastes. “A time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecc. 3:1–2, ESV).

I remember the morning I found out I was pregnant with my eldest son. Shortly after breaking the exciting (and surprising!) news to my husband, I took our dog for a walk. In that moment of quiet, one of my first thoughts was Lord willing, this child will outlive me. The reality of death became personal.

In the stories we tell and the legacies we bequeath, birth and death are always intertwined. And in this issue of Christianity Today, we examine both the beginnings and the endings of lives lived toward God.

Karen Swallow Prior describes how childlessness can be a blessing: “Sometimes, while we are looking for one gift, it can be harder to see another one resting, still wrapped, in the other direction.” In conversation with Prior is Kara Bettis Carvalho’s report on fertility and reproductive technologies. And as the internet laments the struggles of parenting, Kate Lucky reminds us of the joy of motherhood.

These are not merely women’s concerns or personal ones. As we consider demographic cliffs, declining birthrates, and the importance of passing the faith to subsequent generations, these stories speak to all of us as we promote the common good and make disciples.

Likewise, we must think Christianly about death—not as a merely natural phenomenon but as a spiritual reality, an entrance into eternal life. Just as we fight for the lives of the unborn, we must also fight for the lives of those close to death, opposing all forms of euthanasia even when they’re branded as “compassionate” or “dignified.” To that end, Kristy Etheridge reports on Catholic and evangelical responses to physician-assisted suicide in Canada and New York.

In between birth and death, the church works toward human flourishing and restoration. You’ll see evidence of this in Emily Belz’s feature about Christian boarding houses and Andy Olsen’s reporting on churches advocating for those wrongly detained. In our new Dispatches section, several CT staffers highlight Christians laboring to redeem business opportunities and rejuvenate a beleaguered city.

In our reporting, reviews, and personal essays, we always take the side of life, including in this Lenten and Easter season. (We’re honored to feature an interview with theologian Fleming Rutledge about the Crucifixion and Resurrection.) We serve a Savior who passed through death, bearing the weight of sin and purchasing our redemption. Victorious, Jesus ushered in real life, and in so doing declared—as poet John Donne wrote—“Death, thou shalt die.”

Ashley Hales is editorial director for features at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Editor's Note".

- More from Ashley Hales

Ideas

The Birds and the Bees, Babies and Me

Karen Swallow Prior

God calls us to a fruitful life, no matter our fertility.

Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook

I spent a lot of time thinking about the birds and the bees while growing up. I was raised in a rural community as the child and grandchild of farmers. I helped oversee the births of kittens, chickens, rabbits, and one horse. Later, as a college student, I worked at a farm that bred and trained show horses. At times, I was called on to assist in the breeding of mares, the collection of semen from stallions for use in artificial insemination, and the castration of colts. On the farm, we had no doubts about how and when a new life began because we spent so much time trying to facilitate, manage, and control it. The facts of life were all around us every day.

The barn housed one stallion, a stunning steel-gray Arabian. He’d been brought to the farm with hopes he’d sire more progeny from his coveted lineage, but alas, he turned out to be sterile. He didn’t know it though, and whenever a mare was led past his stall, he’d prance about with flared nostrils, arched neck, and flourishing tail. As his past and present owners battled out their legal and financial claims, his fate remained in limbo. Once, I got to exercise him by galloping through the wooded trails that wound around the outskirts of the farm. It was the most exhilarating ride of my life. Like most stallions, he had to be turned out alone and housed in a stall set apart lest he be constantly worked up by the other horses. His was a lonely life.

Like other animals, human beings are subject to nature’s laws. In the realm of mere nature, reproduction is a biological, mechanical, and utilitarian affair. Yet when it comes to human reproduction, so much more than science, biology, and nature are involved. Being made in God’s own likeness and image, humans are more than natural beings. To bear or not to bear a child is a matter that touches on all that it means to be human: not just our biology but also our personal desires, drives, hopes, expectations, and fears—all these wrapped up in our social and familial contexts, traditions, and assumptions.

Being childless has forced me to examine these things.

The thought of not having children, of not being able to have children, had never occurred to me. People in my family tended to marry and have babies early. Not always in that order. I assumed when I married at age 19 that babies would come not long after. They didn’t. But I was still young and not worried. I had so much life ahead. I embraced fully what was already in front of me: marriage, school, work, and a thriving church life.

Year after year passed, however, and I didn’t get pregnant. Then one day, I woke up in the surgical room of my gynecologist after a procedure that discovered and (ostensibly) repaired the damage done to my body by previously undiagnosed endometriosis.

“You’ll be pregnant within six months,” the doctor said confidently.

Except I wasn’t. Not six months later, not one year later. Not, as far as I know, ever.

The doctor also mentioned that the next step would be to take fertility drugs. He said it as though he were a waiter in a fine restaurant describing the next course as he cleared the current dishes away. I nodded dumbly, got dressed, and shuffled woozily to the waiting room to find my husband. Because it had taken longer than expected for me to awaken from the anesthesia, we were the last patients to leave. As we exited the building, I was surprised to find it was already dark outside.

This was the ’90s. Tabloid headlines regularly blasted harrowing but triumphant stories of multiple births resulting from fertility treatments. Afternoon talk shows featured beaming young parents seated on plush couches next to six, seven, or eight infants or toddlers adorned in matching bow ties and ribbons. But beneath the shiny surfaces emerged stories of months of bed rest for imperiled mothers, pregnancy “reductions,” and fragile babies spending weeks or months in intensive care units. At the same time, breakthroughs with in vitro fertilization raised a little (but not much) public debate about the ethics of intentionally creating embryos fated for medical waste bins or perpetual storage in freezers.

It seemed there were more regulations and safeguards around breeding horses than in making God’s image bearers.

The blessing of medical science had healed my diseased body, as far as we could determine. That was enough. My husband and I decided that intentionally undertaking such grave medical and ethical risks was, for us, too close to testing God. We declined further fertility treatments of any kind, leaving it in God’s hands. And to wild abandon in the marital bed.

Still, no babies came.

I didn’t have many role models for faithful, happy, childless marriages. I have vague memories from my childhood of an elderly couple, distant relatives, who lived in an old brick house in Vermont where a clear, stony brook gurgled in the back. They were kind hosts who let me ramble throughout the place, full of rooms with no other children to be found. There was a sense of something mysterious about them and their home—something about the abundance of a life that doesn’t look like everyone else’s—that lingers with me still.

Most of the married women my age in church had or were having children, so I didn’t find childless role models there. Nor did I reveal my fertility struggles with my church or even my family. These were things few talked about then, and if the internet existed at that time, I didn’t know about it. I certainly didn’t want pressure, or sympathy, or advice. Most people assumed, I think, that I was tied up with my academic pursuits and didn’t want children at the time or perhaps ever. If they were making that assumption, it was fine with me.

Later, into my 30s and 40s, as such subjects were increasingly becoming topics of public conversation, much of what was expressed—by childless women more than childless men—displayed a level of existential longing, struggle, and despair that I did not share. Because I was not striving to be pregnant, I felt my loss was less. I resonate with words I recently read from the late Elizabeth Felicetti. In Unexpected Abundance: The Fruitful Lives of Women Without Children, Felicetti mentions that since she had no diagnosis for her infertility, she had no cause to turn to reproductive technologies. As a result, she says, “I sometimes felt like I could not express my own sadness about children because I had not gone to such lengths.”

Being in the minority is, by its very nature, hard. Procreation reflects the natural order and is the pattern fulfilled by most creatures and most people. It is the way of the birds and the bees. But not me.

The hardness of not having the children I hoped and dreamed I would have has brought various kinds of grief. Chief among them is knowing what a great father my husband would have been and wanted to be. Smaller sadnesses include how I missed being able to read to my children the stories I loved when I was a child. To hear a child’s delighted squeals when playing with a puppy. To watch a small being grow into the unique person whom God made her to be and whom I had a part in forming. To experience my own children having children.

But great blessings have come, too, blessings that a path with children would likely have turned toward the home rather than outside it. My husband has been a teacher—more than a teacher, a father figure—to the teens he teaches in school. Likewise, I have been, for a small number of my own students, a mother figure—to some (they tell me) the mother they never had. I have written books that have helped others love the stories I love. I have cared for many of the lesser creatures God created and called good. I have been able to give back to my parents in their last years a fraction of all they gave me, by housing them, caring for them, and being their companion and helper—more so, to be sure, because I did not have children to care for as well. In the “sandwich” generation—those caring for two generations, those before them and those after them—I am an open-faced kind.

This openness is a gift. Childlessness can be a calling in the same way that being a parent is a calling, or as marriage or celibacy can be callings. Not to be called to something is inherently to be called to something else, even if that something else is elusive for a while.

Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook

Writing about celibacy—another way of life outside the ordinary course for most people—Wesley Hill observes in his essay “Celibacy Is Not the Gospel” that celibacy can “witness to the coming new creation in which ‘they neither marry nor are given in marriage’ (Matthew 22:30; 19:12),” just as marriage can “point to the coming wedding supper of Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:31–32; Revelation 19:6–8).”

Similarly, while having children is the primary way to fulfill the creation mandate given in Genesis 1:28 and 2:15, those who do not have children can also “be fruitful and multiply” (ESV) in other service to God’s people. Just as marriage points to the mystical union of Christ and his church, so too children point to a fruitfulness of our spiritual lives that is born of life in Christ.

In her book Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling, Anna Broadway relays the words of Joanna, a celibate Catholic, who describes her call as one not to singleness or celibacy but rather to a life in community. “Through that shared religious life, she’s bonded with people she didn’t choose,” Broadway writes. Joanna explains, “They are given to me. And I learn to love them.” Similarly, in childlessness, God brings people other than our own children into our lives to love.

A rich, helpful heritage on childlessness is contained in the pages of the Bible. Indeed, it’s a recurrent theme resonant with individual, historical, and spiritual meaning.

Abraham and Sarah using the enslaved Hagar as a surrogate rather than trusting God to fulfill his promise moved me deeply early in my infertile years. I felt the anguish of each of them and understood the desire to take actions oriented toward the promise God had made, being unable to imagine how else God might fulfill that promise.

Their story served not only as a warning but also as a reminder: God’s grace is sufficient. It is sufficient when we obey and when we disobey (for God was merciful and faithful even when Abraham and Sarah were not). My heart goes out to Sarah—and to Hagar. The pressure Sarah felt to have a child, to give Abraham heirs, and to see the fulfillment of God’s promise grew heavier on her year after year, until she and Abraham took matters into their own hands, altering the course of history. Many of our desires are socially constructed, as Sarah’s surely were in a patriarchal culture in which her value as a woman depended almost entirely on her ability to produce an heir. Our discontentment becomes greatest when expectations we or others impose on us go unmet.

I have, over the years, heard from many people struggling with infertility. Sometimes they are would-be fathers or would-be grandparents. But mostly they are young women facing the prospect of dreams and expectations (not only their own but often, sadly, those of others) unfulfilled. What I want to tell them—what I do tell them—is that God’s gifts are good. He may not give you the one you wanted, but he will give you others.

It’s a cliché and as such is sadly drained of meaning. But it’s a truth whose meaning is worthy of recovering: Children are a gift. A gift is neither a right nor an obligation. A gift is given. A gift is received. A gift is not to be demanded or rudely refused. The best gifts are not deserved or bought, sometimes not even sought. The gift of children is like this. So, too, are the other gifts God brings. Sometimes, while we are looking for one gift, it can be harder to see another one resting, still wrapped, in the other direction.

Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook

In the midst of the years that are the time of peak fertility for most women, I was (along with trying to get pregnant) working on my PhD in English literature. I was fortunate that my studies gave me a closer look at British authors (my specialization) who were faithful Christians who contributed much good to the world—but didn’t have children. Jane Austen, brilliant novelist and satirist who never married, was one. Hannah More, the evangelical poet, dramatist, social reformer, and abolitionist, was another. In fact, More had four sisters who assisted each other in their educational and charitable endeavors, and none of them married or had children either. Nor did the poet Christina Rossetti, whose devout faith led her to minister to prostitutes as a volunteer with the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. Charlotte Brontë lost her only child during pregnancy and lived the remainder of her life childless. Her sisters Anne and Emily never had children.

Church history is also full of people who did not have children and yet lived fruitful lives in service to their neighbors and to the church. Paul, for example. Jesus! Julian of Norwich, Queen Elizabeth I, Florence Nightingale, and John Stott. Some of my closest friends, too.

Childlessness is actually much more historically normal than you might think. Historian Rachel Chrastil writes in How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children that “widespread childlessness has been a long-standing reality in northwestern European towns and cities from around 1500 onward.” One notable exception is America’s baby boom (the period for those born between 1946 and 1964), an event Chrastil characterizes as a historical anomaly: “Some of the highest rates of childlessness ever recorded (including current rates) were for women born around 1900,” Chrastil said elsewhere in an interview. “In the U.S., for example, 24% of women born in 1900 never had children. Among those born a half-century later, between 1950-1954, a much smaller number, 17%, reached age 45 without ever having children.”

Since then, childlessness in America has seen a dramatic increase, as many experts and news headlines have highlighted. One in five US adults ages 50 and older have never had children, according to an analysis of government data the Pew Research Center reported in 2024. The same analysis found that 23 percent of adults in their 50s and 22 percent of those in their 60s have never had children. On a global scale, the World Health Organization estimated in 2025 that infertility affects one in six people of reproductive age at some point in their lives, a significant factor contributing to childlessness.

Why do these numbers matter? Childlessness is fainter in our collective consciousness than in reality. It is often portrayed as either an expression of some sort of defiant independence or a cause for scrutinizing pity. But there is a wide range of experiences, circumstances, and contingencies that lead to not having a child. Nevertheless, for whatever reasons they are childless, a group who constitute 20 percent of the population may be a minority, but they are numerous enough not to be invisible or inconsequential. Childlessness doesn’t need to be normalized, because it is—in fact, if not in understanding—already normal.

Recognizing this will naturally open ways for the childless among us to be more integrated into communal life—especially church life. Collectively (while taking individual differences into account), childless people have just as much need to socialize as young mothers do, for example. They desire to participate in holiday meals, traditions, and celebrations just as much as those with children. They will need care and comfort when they are sick or aging—and, in fact, will likely be in greater need of such than those who have children to assist in the later years. I don’t know a single childless person who doesn’t worry about facing the end stages of life not knowing who will be there with them. We need imaginations that make more room for the reasons for childlessness and, more importantly, for the childless people among us. We need structures, institutions, and policies that do the same.

Christians have even more than contemporary trends and social structures to draw on in considering what childlessness has to teach. There is more to being fruitful than what the birds and the bees show us. We have more resources than the natural family to draw on in loving and caring for one another.

As Emily Hunter McGowin observes in Households of Faith: Practicing Family in the Kingdom of God, “Scripture characterizes the church as God’s household.” The New Testament refers to fellow believers as brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers.

Of course, McGowin explains, the natural family is not the same as the church family. “Unlike the church, however, which anticipates a future union with Christ in the new heavens and new earth, Scripture suggests that human families as we currently experience them will come to an end.” Because the kingdom of God is an eternal family, the church must be a place that not only supports human families in this earthly life but also recognizes and affirms in practice the status of spiritual mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters in the eternal family of God.

Desire for children is natural. Yet part of what the story of Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament teaches focuses on more than just natural children. Sarah’s conceiving and bearing a child with Abraham when both were so late in age was a work of God, not the flesh. The symbolic (as well as historic) significance of this event is described later in the New Testament by Paul when he writes in Galatians 4:22–31 that God’s spiritual children are those who came through Abraham and Sarah not through the flesh but through God’s promise—through his grace.

Grace, as Aquinas says and the Westminster Confession suggests, perfects nature.

We speak of the birds and the bees to speak of the ways of nature. But the ways of nature are authored by a God who is beyond nature. When nature sings, heaven sings too. There is grace too in the ways of the birds and the bees and the galloping steed.

And it is grace, not nature, that has made my life fruitful.

Karen Swallow Prior is a scholar, writer, and speaker who lives in rural Virginia.

Testimony

Born a Woman, I Spent Six Years Living as a Man. Then God Showed Me My True Identity.

Kyla Gillespie

God’s voice reached me through a compassionate Christian couple.

Photography by Carissa Kennedy for Christianity Today

I was born and raised in a Christian home in British Columbia, Canada, in the ’80s. I had always loved Jesus and followed him with a childlike faith.

I can remember, at 3 or 4 years old, being abused by an elderly family member. Through my mom’s quick response, it never happened again. But my difficulties were not over. I began to feel confused about my gender. I can still hear my mother’s voice: “You’re not a boy, Kyla. You’re a girl. Do you understand?”

Once, I was sitting by the ice rink where my hockey team practiced. I was no more than 5 years old. My parents had just been informed that I would no longer be allowed to change in the general locker room with the boys. As the only girl on the team, I would need to change in the girls’ washroom. My little mind couldn’t take it in.

As far back as I can remember, I loved what my brother loved—BMX racing, G.I. Joe, exploring in the woods, fishing, camping, and ice hockey. I wanted to dress and talk like my brother. The struggle with my identity intensified through my teenage years and grew into full-blown gender dysphoria. I found myself attracted to other women, which filled me with guilt and shame.

Around that time, my parents divorced suddenly, and my family was ripped apart. Both of my parents remarried, and I was forced to divide my time between them.

By age 16 or 17, it was becoming evident that I was no longer welcome in my dad’s home with his new wife and children. My stepmom didn’t want me to be part of their tight-knit unit, and I began to tiptoe around what was once my carefree home. I happily shared a room with my new stepsister, but from one weekend to another my personal belongings began to disappear.

One Friday evening when I arrived at my dad’s, I looked around my room and saw only my bed. Where had all of my stuff gone? I frantically searched the house and finally ventured to the basement. There I found it all. Every one of my possessions had been packed into storage boxes. No word of explanation came that weekend from my dad. Tears of sorrow overcame me as I asked my mom if I could live with her full-time. I didn’t stay at my dad’s home after that.

From that point forward, ice hockey became my driving passion. I played competitively and made it onto a professional team.

I started drowning my stresses in alcohol when I was 19. Blackouts, partying, gambling, and a trail of failed same-sex relationships followed. Before long, my faith was nearly nonexistent. I chose the life I thought I wanted above my relationship with God. But when alcohol fueled a dangerous downward spiral, I chose to enter a Christian recovery center.

I got sober there, but my battles with same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria continued. To try to win the war raging inside of me, I decided to transition from female to male. Two years later, after hormone therapy, surgeries, and sweeping lifestyle changes, I could finally pass unnoticed in the world as a man.

I changed my name from Kyla to Brycen. I had arrived. With each step of the process, I eagerly awaited the satisfaction and relief that would surely follow. But they never came. Altering my body hadn’t healed the brokenness inside.

Through my connections with the recovery community, I had kept some loose ties with a local church, even though my faith had unraveled. After living life as Brycen for more than five years, I remember sitting in a church service one summer night, contemplating life. God only knows why I was there. Yes, I had loved Jesus as a kid, but after the devastating events of the previous decade, I was done with God and done with difficult people. I wanted what I wanted, without any pushback from Christians.

I was about to leave the church that night and never return, when I noticed a woman—who moved like a force of nature—heading straight for me. I wanted to bolt, but I stood my ground. Jess, the new pastor’s wife, introduced herself, and I quickly felt at ease around her. Accepted. Seen. That introductory conversation became a catalyst for the change of a lifetime.

Jess introduced me to her husband, BJ, and a core group of Christians who became my friends. These people were different than any churchgoers I had ever known. They were more like Jesus. Getting close to them made me rethink my life. But I still believed I could fly under the radar as Brycen, the Christian man.

Not long after, I found myself confiding to Jess that I had been born Kyla—a female—and had transitioned to Brycen years before. Jess was quiet as she listened intently, sympathizing with every word of my lifelong struggle with sexuality and gender. I had never felt so safe in the hands of another soul. It strengthened our bond, and I began to fully share my deepest secrets, one by one.

My path forward happened through baby steps. Truths, bathed in love. Questions asked—about faith, love, truth, and identity—and answered with total honesty but with kindness and care. Months later, Jess told me that if ever I wanted to detransition, she and BJ would love to have me stay at their home. Detransition? I just smiled and thanked her for her gracious offer but politely declined.

Meanwhile, I had renewed my interest in God’s Word, searching the Scriptures voraciously. And God was speaking to me through his words and through my friends. I read verses like Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” His design.

It was an out-of-body experience when God broke through and started to show me intimate truths I could never see before. And it was becoming painfully clear that I had to choose which life I wanted: his or my own. Would I embrace the design he had given me or cling to the identity I had created?

God was asking me to trust him, to have him be my safety net. I wasn’t sure I could physically be a woman again. Yet if I continued in unrepentant sin, always telling God that I knew better than him, would I truly be his forever?

One night I was overwhelmed in the darkness, sobbing in bed. Needing to know God’s mind, I climbed out and crumpled to the floor, crying for relief, for clarity. Not a half-hearted cry like the ones I had made so many times before without being willing to change or surrender, but a deep soul-cry from a place of abandon—a cry for him to rescue me.

After six years of living as Brycen, I cried out, “What do you want from me?” There on my bedroom floor, I heard God speak into my heart so clearly that I will never forget it: Return to me, Kyla.

Kyla. I hadn’t used that name in almost a decade. It was attached to so much pain and discomfort. But this time, when he used it, it felt like home. Like I was safe. I asked him, “Can’t I stay as Brycen and follow you?” He spoke deeply into my soul: No.

I argued. “But God, I don’t know what that would look like, or if I can ever be female again.” He spoke to my heart: Whatever it looks like, are you willing to trust me? All I could do was cry out, “Yes!”

That night, I sat on the floor in the presence of the living God for what seemed like hours. And when I got up, I knew I’d never be the same. God himself had met me, remade me—clearly and vividly. Everything had finally fallen into place. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I moved in with Jess and BJ for a powerful year of transformation. The reconstruction of my mind, body, and soul was sometimes painful and sorrowful, filled with monumental struggles almost beyond my ability to bear. But God sustained me. And my friends walked with me, laughed with me, and cried with me every step of the way. I was becoming whole.

All my life I had searched for congruence, for some kind of deep, lasting peace. And I found it only in Jesus, the one who saves.

Can I tell you that I never struggle anymore? Oh, no. Some days are cloudy and dark. But others are filled with so much light that it floods my soul. And has it been worth it? Without question. The living God has met with me profoundly and powerfully, and I’ll never look back.

I am Kyla, restored.

Kyla Gillespie is the founder of Renewed & Transformed, a ministry dedicated to sharing Christian teachings on faith, sexuality, gender, and identity, and the author of TransFormed.

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

- More from Kyla Gillespie

Books

Review

Does the Body Tell the Truth?

Jen Pollock Michel

Jen Hatmaker’s Awake, Alan Noble’s To Live Well, and Molly Worthen’s Spellbound approach virtue and the body in different ways.

We are rushing from church on a Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to find parking for the penultimate performance of the new pop-rock musical Mythic. Premiering in the US at the Cincinnati Playhouse, the Hamilton-styled show brings to life the Greek myth of Persephone, goddess of spring and the underworld.

Recast for the modern stage, the myth is a recognizable human story of parental love and adolescent self-will. Earth-loving Demeter, goddess of the harvest, forbids Persephone, her teenage daughter, from attending a very publicized party at the Acropolis. But Persephone, undeterred, wants her “own place in the Pantheon.” This craving for celebrity, attended by sexual desire, lures Persephone into Hades’s arms, and she is trapped in the underworld with no hope of escape.

There, Persephone sets out on an unexpected and highly implausible mission: She will improve hell’s landscape. “You’d be surprised,” she sings. “Some things grow even though skies are bleak.” There’s a palpable vibe shift with Persephone’s generative efforts. The gardener succeeds in growing beets. Charon, hell’s ferryman, begins giving lively tours to recently arrived guests. Persephone even invites Hades to consider the possibility of his own transformation, should he choose it.

At first, her optimism is rebuffed, taken for a cruel naiveté. “I’m a pest,” Hades sings, glittering in a sparkly black tracksuit and frowning behind a pair of dark shades. “A deadly, messed-up, cruel, unruly freak.” Hades wallows in the mire of his own depravity, seeing no chance in hell to redeem a doomed future, fixed in place because of a damaged past. “There ain’t a heart here. There’s a hole. I’m a deep, dark, damaged soul.” But gradually, hopefully, Hades begins to tussle with “rival desires” for a kind of moral rebirth.

“Is there a chance in hell?” the god of the dead sings.

On the one hand, Mythic traces the typical plot lines of familiar Disney movies. Destiny is a future seized and self-made. Yet on the other hand, wanting to make a bad life right, Hades entertains the hope of his own glory. In this way, perhaps unwittingly, Mythic invokes a Christian truth about the body—that though it is sown perishable, it might be raised imperishable (1 Cor. 15:42). Christian hope is always actionable: a thing with feet.

It makes me think of the first time I read On the Incarnation by fourth-century Christian theologian Athanasius of Alexandria. Athanasius can’t help but see a dilemma facing God in humanity’s rebellion. If God destroys the people he’s created, visiting upon them the just punishment for their transgression, he will subject his image bearers—and his image—to corruption. This would mean overseeing “the ruin of His own work.”

Yet if God stays his hand, he cannot be trusted as true. His mercy would make him a promise breaker. The incarnation of God, then, could be the only solution to the divine bind. Only by assuming our form could God die our death. And only by dying our death could God restore the grandeur meant to shine from the shook foil of human flesh. God would take on a body—because human bodies, in the grand scale of creation, mattered that much.

This, then, is always true: What we do and say with our bodies is a decidedly spiritual affair.

The body speaks its many “truths” in Jen Hatmaker’s recent memoir Awake.

Beginning with a section titled “The End,” Hatmaker, once a widely popular evangelical author and speaker, travels the back roads of her 2020 divorce. She attempts to make sense of the gradual-then-sudden end of her 26-year marriage, which leads to the spiritual “orphaning” from a movement (and Austin, Texas, church) she once led with her ex-husband. Follow me, the body calls to Hatmaker (and the reader) throughout the book, as if with divine authority.

When Hatmaker and her husband married, at 19 and 21, respectively, both understood the strict terms set by purity culture—that marriage must be swift lest sin be swifter and the budding rose of feminine virtue be prematurely plucked.

But after her divorce, biblical chastity as traditionally defined came to seem as ridiculous and arbitrary to Hatmaker as purity culture’s prudish definitions of female modesty. (Hatmaker tells the story of the time when she, as a youth leader, was turned away from a worship gathering at summer camp because of the length of her shorts.) Our bodies, says Hatmaker, are not a scandal; they speak our desires and deserve our rapt attention. She casts them as “the most trustworthy character in the play.”

Yet not all the bodies in this story deserve such unqualified trust. At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, Hatmaker woke up to the bombshell revelation of her husband’s infidelity. “I just can’t quit you,” he voice-texts his lover in the dark, five words that gut the house the Hatmakers have been building together for almost three decades.

The next hours are spent uncovering years of duplicity, and for the briefest of moments, Hatmaker remembers that the world isn’t yet shattered for her children, who are still sleeping. “They don’t know. I don’t want to know. I want to go upstairs with them and not know.” The world is cleaved into before and after, and soon enough, everyone is “flayed by betrayal.” One body, living its “truth,” has wreaked havoc on the body of his family—and grief, in all its tumbling disorientation, spills from these pages in the author’s sleepless panic, manic fixing, and worn-out despair.

As Hatmaker tells the story, a mercy was yet found on the other side of that middle-of-the-night revelation. The body’s pain is redeemed by the body’s self-love. The betrayal that broke her life wide open finally shattered religious commitments that she would no longer defend, especially a joyless Christianity.

Hatmaker ultimately rejects a theology that purportedly rejects the body, especially its premonitions and pleasures. She piles up biblical proof texts to claim how untenable—and dangerous—suspicion of the body proves to be: The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves. I no longer live. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

“What source of authority are we left with,” Hatmaker asks, examining Jeremiah 17:9, “when the enemy of goodness and truth beats inside our own chests? When we cannot trust our own instincts, whose do we trust instead?” To dispel with misgivings about the body is, of course, necessary for the “sexual renaissance” Hatmaker wants now to enjoy in midlife. And while it’s a move that permits, more importantly, it self-protects. Only self-belonging can, in her estimation, recover the security and safety Hatmaker tragically failed to find in her one-flesh marriage.

“I physically run my hands gently up and down my arms,” she says in the early days of grief. “I hold my face between my fingers. I wrap my arms around myself and say out loud: ‘I am my own best friend. I am safe with me. I am home.’ ” Only the body is a girl’s best friend.

Hatmaker is a gifted storyteller, and Awake surges with the electricity of her humor and intimate candor. As someone told Hatmaker in the earliest days of her burgeoning ministry, “I like you. You’re funny and smart. You have a power about you.” That person wasn’t wrong.

Hatmaker’s rise as a spiritual leader figures into a longer history detailed in Molly Worthen’s sweeping book Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. Charisma, writes Worthen, represents the “contentious invitation to let some great and ungovernable power work through you.”

In ancient mythology, charisma illuminated the gifts of the gods: beauty, poetic skill, prowess on the battlefield. In the Christian Scriptures, Worthen writes, charisma indicates the filling of the Holy Spirit, “the sudden shower of grace . . . which [gives] ordinary Christians a role in God’s plan to restore the sinful world.”

Charisma, however, is not just a religious phenomenon. As Worthen details, it is a power mediated between any spellbinding leader and set of adoring fans, any riveting storyteller and dazzled crowd. In our digital age, charisma sells books and generates huge social media followings. Despite sometimes-obvious vice, it even wins elections. The difference, then, between divine gift and cheap counterfeit is as slight and slender as a knotted red tie.

According to Worthen, the history of charisma, in America, has led to certain telltale patterns: “the primacy of private experience over external evidence, concern for authenticity rather than moral character, skepticism of institutions, and the inclination to trust a story that ‘feels true’ instead of reasoned argument.”

In Hatmaker’s memoir, which sounds like an anthem to the sound judgment of the body, those patterns are unmistakable. But Hatmaker’s confusion is hardly uncommon among those who call themselves Christians. We all struggle to discern when the Spirit speaks through the body—and when the body speaks
for itself.

Worthen begins her engrossing history of charisma in the Puritan era, with the tragic story of Anne Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. Hutchinson was a reputable midwife, and her experience in the birthing room with its many griefs, along with her facility in Scripture, gained her a reputation as a doctor of the soul.

Unfortunately for her, Hutchinson was also a woman gifted in courage and the plain-speaking “too-muchness” to which Hatmaker often alludes in her own story. “When [John Winthrop, the colony’s former governor,] called her ‘a woman of ready wit and bold spirit,’ ” writes Worthen, “he did not say it in admiration.”

The trouble began for Hutchinson when the meetings she hosted in her home to discuss the Sunday sermon grew in popularity and even began attracting men. Religious and political authorities alike took worried notice. They were especially disheartened to learn that Hutchinson openly criticized local Puritan clergy, who enjoined the anxious spiritual practice of keeping diaries as proof of one’s salvation. In those pages, congregants were supposed to record any hopeful signs of their election and any foreboding evidence of their unregeneration. Eventually, with enough empirical evidence in their favor, those written testimonies were read aloud before the congregation, the male eldership voting to confirm the “visible saints.”

Hutchinson saw the practice as a blasphemous display of works-based righteousness. She believed that Christians should instead rely on the direct, interior witness of the Holy Spirit to assure them of their election. Though hers was a theological conviction that might hardly be considered controversial today in most evangelical churches, it pitted the “truth” of the individual’s body against the orthodoxies of the body of gathered saints.

Until the end of 1636, she had the support of the majority of her Boston congregation and one-quarter of the colony’s voting church members. But political machinations were unleashed, and Hutchinson was eventually excommunicated and exiled, her presumptions of personal spiritual revelation declared dangerous and seen as foreboding of a greater evil—namely fornication.

“That filthy Sin of the Community of Women and all promiscuous and filthy coming together of men and Women without Distinction or Relation of Marriage, will necessarily
follow,” proclaimed John Cotton at the end of Hutchinson’s trial.

Heresy, it was assumed, would eventually show up in the bedroom—because vice, like virtue, acts as a unified whole. As the Scripture teaches, to break one law is to be lawless (James 2:10). In Hutchinson’s case, however, vice never showed in the bedroom.

She was a widow when, in the fall of 1643, she received a revelation to buy land in what is now the Bronx. The Dutch warned her of the dangers of resettling in land owned by the Wecqueasgeek people, with whom they were at war, but she ignored them. After the corrupt political official to whom she made payment for the land pocketed the money, Hutchinson and several of her children were murdered in a Wecqueasgeek attack.

As a matter of bodily conviction, Hutchinson had been sure of God’s guidance and protection—and she’d been dead wrong.

The body, it seems, famously speaks out of both sides of its proverbial mouth. It tells its truth, and it also tells convincing lies. The body’s knowledge is both instructive and incomplete. Until the day when our faith is made sight, we must rely on truths external to the body about what is life-preserving and life-destroying.

While intuition can serve as a kind of physical spidey-sense, it is also an impoverished source of moral knowledge. And this shortcoming is why we need to be taught to live in the reality of the world.

Appealingly, the return to older traditions of virtue offered by Alan Noble in his new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, provides more solid ground on which to stand than the instincts of the body or the gut preferences of the cultural moment. The virtues, as moral categories, draw clear and important boundaries around the true and beautiful and good. Providing objective criteria for good and for evil, virtue tells us when to call a woman a saint—or a man a fool—because the body, like a tree, bears its obvious fruit.

There is so much we misunderstand about the nature of our moral responsibilities, Noble writes in the opening of To Live Well. Morally, we’re “winging it,” he indicts. Exploring the four cardinal virtues (justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence) and the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), Noble endeavors to help us as Christians get our bearings in our God-created, God-haunted world as we face a near infinitude of choices and suffer a paucity of moral knowledge.

What’s better—and best? What may seem right—but ultimately leads to death? To be clear, these aren’t guiding questions for Hatmaker. In contrast, Hatmaker notes her own domineering mind: “God, the amount of work it takes to exit my head and live in my body is colossal,” she writes.

Clear moral thinking, which Noble models in his book, isn’t just a rescue from the muddled moral reasoning philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism”—a reasoning that is painstakingly obvious in Hatmaker’s own appeal to follow the body wherever it leads. It’s also a lifeline out of the burdens of evangelicalism’s “emotionalism,” this idea that faith is most trustworthy when felt. Our body can, in fact, be our worst enemy. Noble, who has written publicly of his battle with OCD, understands that faith can falter in the morning when it’s time to get out of bed, especially if the body gets to talking.

There is nothing retrograde or nostalgic here in Noble’s treatment of the virtues, as if we might imagine returning to a simpler era where people knew the good and did it. Rather, Noble constructs a picture of virtue as hard work, shored up by the grace of God and exhibited as a coherent whole. Daily choices and small gestures, practiced today and tomorrow and the day after that. With enough repetition, virtue, like the act of brushing of our teeth, can become a commonplace rather than considered action, gloriously routine in the movements of work and friendship, marriage and parenting.

In particular, I’m taken with Noble’s exploration of justice (as Hatmaker might herself be). This virtue, Noble argues, reminds us of what is owed to our neighbor. Acting justly includes, as we might expect, submitting to governing authorities; protecting the weak; and daily, regularly mending relationships. “We have an obligation to seek the common good,” Noble writes.

But this isn’t the most surprising element of justice, as he describes it. “Part of justice is giving what is due to the broader community, which is you living a righteous, virtuous life.” Your honesty, your fidelity, your humility, your meekness, your patience, your long-suffering, your love—these are also your just acts, acted out in bodies and in places, not blasted on social media. To act justly is to create a society in which every body, made in the image of God, flourishes.

Justice would have ensured the kind of fair trial Hutchinson was denied. And considering the betrayal in Hatmaker’s story, justice would have kept its promises, even when the body insists it can’t quit its temptations.

To reconsider justice in this way, as owing our neighbor our virtuous life, is to see these truths about being human: To be human is to have a body—and to have a body is to have incurred great debt. None is righteous, no, not one. A cursory glance inward, and I can see I owe so much to so many: to my parents, for whom I have often been profoundly ungrateful; to my husband, from whom I have often, in fearful self-preservation, withheld myself and my love; to my five children, whom I’ve raised to be as broken as me; to my suffering neighbor, with whose needs I can’t be bothered.

There’s not a single chance in hell that I, or anyone else, can pay down a balance of wrongs done and rights left undone—unless another pays it for us for the sake of a love that binds justice to mercy. Virtue, as a lexicon of the good, allows me to name my sin with unflinching honesty. Then, the good news of the gospel allows me to hope that my vice will not be the final word—because hope is the thing with feet. In the words
of Athanasius:

[Christ] saw how the surpassing wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, he took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own.

Hatmaker seems to quietly pine for a love that measures as wide and as deep and as long and as high as God’s reckless love for the world. Quoting Maggie Smith’s poem “Rain, New Year’s Eve,” Hatmaker wants to “love the world the way I love / my young son, not only when / he cups my face in his sticky hands, / but when, roughhousing, / he accidentally splits my lip.” She seems to instinctively know that bodies have a way of breaking things—and that some loving way must make repair possible.

I can’t help but remember the moment I left Cincinnati’s playhouse, in the rain, and mused on Hades’s prospects. What if, enfolded into a love we have not chosen, we could become another version of ourselves? What if, in hearing the voice of God, we could hear our bodies speak more than shame, self-disgust, or even deluded self-love?

Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27). You’d be surprised. I mean, truly surprised.

Jen Pollock Michel is an author, speaker, and spiritual writing mentor for Whitworth University’s MFA program. Her most recent book is In Good Time, and her forthcoming book publishing this fall is A Rule for the Rest of Us.

- More from Jen Pollock Michel

Ideas

Torn on IVF, Evangelicals Turn to Natural Family Planning

Kara Bettis Carvalho

Staff Editor

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

Illustration by Grace J. Kim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I found Caitlin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Grace J. Kim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Kara Bettis Carvalho

News

Mortgage Man for God

Kara Bettis Carvalho

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

Image courtesy Dean Harrington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But in 2023, things started to turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Kara Bettis Carvalho

Culture

AI Necromancy Impersonates the Dead

Haleluya Hadero

Staff Editor

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

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mostly addicts.”

“In heaven?”

“Nope, in hell.”

She backed away from her computer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

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

- More from Haleluya Hadero

4/15 EVENT

4/15 EVENT

The Vigil of Birth

Congress Is Overwhelmed and Incompetent

What’s the Difference Between Privilege and Blessing?

Birth and Death are Life Issues

The Birds and the Bees, Babies and Me

Born a Woman, I Spent Six Years Living as a Man. Then God Showed Me My True Identity.

Does the Body Tell the Truth?

Torn on IVF, Evangelicals Turn to Natural Family Planning

Mortgage Man for God

AI Necromancy Impersonates the Dead

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related