Trump Task Force Hears Out Christians Who Challenged Biden Administration

Kate Shellnutt

An evangelical litigator and the provost of Liberty University spoke at the kickoff meeting to address claims of anti-Christian bias in the federal government.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks with the Task Force for Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias at the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, DC.

Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images

The Justice Department lent a listening ear on Tuesday to conservative Christians with stories of investigations, fines, and bitter clashes with the Biden administration.

A task force established by President Donald Trump to address anti-Christian bias in the federal government met for the first time—gathering Attorney General Pamela Bondi, Faith Office leaders Paula White-Cain and Jennifer Korn, and several members of Trump’s cabinet to discuss previous cases of Christian discrimination in their agencies.

The meeting follows department-level directives issued this month urging State and Veterans Affairs employees to report instances of bias against Christians or policies seen as hostile to Christian views.

The task force heard a defense of a suburban Washington, DC, church that faced Internal Revenue Service (IRS) review over a sermon favoring Trump as a candidate. The Johnson Amendment, a provision in the federal tax code, currently bars tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing politicians.

Michael Farris, the former head of the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said his church, Cornerstone Chapel, “had been investigated and punished by the IRS for our (outstanding and courageous) pastor Gary Hamrick’s 2020 election sermon.”

Farris also serves as counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters and named Cornerstone’s case in the group’s 2024 lawsuit against the IRS over the Johnson Amendment.

Currently the prohibition on political endorsements doesn’t get consistently enforced; pastors have even violated the ban deliberately en masse as a demonstration of free speech. A congressional bill introduced last month proposes allowing nonprofits to make campaign statements if they come in the “ordinary course of carrying out its tax exempt purpose.”

Liberty University provost Scott Hicks spoke against record-high Education Department fines issued against the two biggest Christian colleges in the country: Liberty and Grand Canyon University. Neither case directly involved the schools’ Christian convictions, but each maintained that it received unfair treatment from the Biden administration.

The Education Department fined Liberty $14 million last year over campus safety violations in its response to sexual assault. The amount was triple the highest previous fine for such violations, issued to Michigan State University due to Larry Nassar’s abuse of student gymnasts.

“Many of the department’s methodologies, findings, and calculations in the report were drastically different from their historic treatment of other universities,” Liberty said in a statement at the time. “Liberty disagrees with this unfair treatment.”

Grand Canyon, based in Phoenix, faced a $37.7 million fine in 2023 for misrepresenting the cost of graduate programs. The university sued and accused several federal agencies of “extreme government overreach in what we believe is an attempt to harm a university to which individuals in these agencies are ideologically opposed.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial surmised the regulatory oversight might be from progressive regulators who don’t like to see enrollment on the rise at a conservative Christian school.

The examples of anti-Christian bias evoked by the task force and Trump administration officials mostly come from conservative Protestants and Catholics who say they experience discrimination for expressing their faith, as well as their views on topics like LGBTQ issues and abortion.

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted during Trump’s previous term, Americans on the political right are over twice as likely (70%) as those on the left (32%) to say evangelical Christians are subject to discrimination.

“I have chaired meetings in the past where the top Christian litigators shared our most outrageous cases and where we were making plans to fight back,” Farris wrote on Facebook Tuesday. “Today’s meeting had that same spirit but with one major difference. These people actually run our government and were swiftly [taking] the kind of action that for a long time Christians have believed were demanded by justice. I was amazed and encouraged deeply in my soul.”

The White House Faith Office, now specifically tasked with addressing anti-Christian bias, has developed what some Christians see as a narrower network of church and ministry leaders who align with Trump.

Critics worry that the initiatives overstate the threat of Christian persecution over religious liberty overall. The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty expressed concerns that the task force “could be weaponized to enforce a theological conformity that will harm everyone’s religious freedom, including those of Christians.”

After the meeting, the Faith Office director, Korn, pledged to “protect all faiths” and “have government protect Christians, not punish them.”

Earlier this year, current ADF president and CEO Kristen Waggoner applauded Trump’s executive order to address anti-Christian bias and called out “the Biden administration’s deliberate targeting of Christian beliefs through discriminatory policies,” referencing cases “from foster parents barred from providing loving homes to children in need due to their faith, to targeted overregulation of ministries and the weaponization of the FACE Act against pro-life advocates.”

Cabinet members brought up some of those examples at the meeting as they shared further complaints, including religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, treatment of Christian homeschoolers in foreign service, and challenges to classroom instruction around gender.

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Pastors

Pastors, Don’t Just Proclaim the Resurrection. Participate in It.

Chris Poblete

The Resurrection isn’t just a message you deliver. It’s a daily reality you receive, especially when ministry leaves you tired or anxious.

Will & Deni McIntyre / Getty Images

It was the Monday after Easter. Like many pastors, I woke up tired and anxious.

Tired, because I had just poured everything I had into Resurrection Sunday, as pastors do—crafting the sermon weeks in the making, coordinating our liturgy for the holiday, rallying our serve teams, double- and triple-checking our follow-up processes for the many visitors who would fill out our proverbial pews (we met in a school theater with fixed seating). An entire ecosystem had been set in motion, and I labored hard to ensure every detail unfolded perfectly.

Anxious, because I was beginning to notice the gaps. We missed a few key details in our communication. A few guests came, received, and left without meaningful connection. I can still see their faces awkwardly looking around for what to do next before deciding to make their way to the parking lot. It’s the kind of thing that stays with you longer than it should when you’re a church planter.

I prepared my morning coffee and sat down at my desk. I noticed an early draft of my Easter sermon notes. They were full of the usual scribbles, arrows, highlights, and chicken scratch anecdotes. And right in the middle—triple circled in bold—were two words from my text in 1 Peter: living hope.

I had proclaimed this hope the day before, but sitting in my post-Easter haze, I realized how deeply I needed to participate in this living hope for myself.

The temptation to perform

For many pastors, Easter is likened to our Super Bowl Sunday. It’s a day many occasional churchgoers actually decide to attend. It’s a day regular churchgoers decide to bring their family or friends. Knowing this, we pastors think about stage decor and sermon flow, lighting and logistics, first impressions and final invitations—more than we typically do.

None of this is inherently wrong. Truth be told, faithful stewardship of the moment demands that we take those details seriously. But if we’re not careful, we treat Easter like a production to be executed rather than a reality to be entered. It becomes something we present to others rather than something we receive ourselves.

And when we do that—when Easter becomes something we put on—it’s no wonder we wake up the next day feeling like it’s all been put out of us.

That Monday-morning fatigue isn’t just physical; it’s spiritual too. We end up feeling like hired hands instead of sheep, performers instead of participants, proclaimers of a hope we’ve neglected to personally embrace.

We need to remember and rehearse the glorious truth: Easter was never meant to be an event to perform. It’s meant to be a tomb to be raised from, united with our Lord in his death and resurrection.

A living hope for pastors too

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!” Peter writes, exulting. “In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet. 1:3).

That short phrase—living hope—has held me together more times than I can count. It’s much more than a mere line of sentiment; it’s a theological thunderclap. It reminds us that resurrection is much more than a past historical event or a future eschatological promise—it’s a present reality, pulsing with every heartbeat of our existence. It’s something alive. Right now, it’s breathing new life into once-dead hearts—including yours and mine.

It’s one thing to preach that. It’s something else entirely to feel it rise in your own chest.

Jonathan Edwards once said, “There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness.” A man can know what honey is and still have no idea what it tastes like.

The same is true for the Resurrection. We can exegete a text, parse Greek verbs, flesh out the theological implications, and craft vivid illustrations for our people—but if we’re not embracing it ourselves, we’re missing the point. Even worse, we’re starving ourselves spiritually.

Resurrection is more than a doctrine we explain. It’s something we embody as followers of Jesus ourselves.

Your baptism runs deeper than your ordination

To be baptized into Christ is to be set apart and marked—not only with his humiliation, but in his resurrection. That’s the shape of the Christian life: down into death and raised to walk in newness of life.

That shape holds true for pastors too. Before we ever answered a call to ministry, we descended into the waters of baptism. Before any ordination service affirmed our role as pastor, our baptism declared our identity as a new creation. That moment—when we were united with our Lord in his death and raised with him in resurrection life—is more foundational than any laying on of hands, any seminary degree, or any title before our names.

Ordination may affirm our calling, but baptism ratifies our belonging.

When the annual Easter service arrives, we don’t stand apart from the resurrection story as its narrators; we stand within it as its participants. We, too, are the ones who have been raised with Christ to a living hope. Having died to our old ways, we now walk in the newness of life. We must remember that resurrection isn’t just what we preach—it’s what we practice. It’s not merely something we explain to those under our shepherding care. It’s something we embody as sheep before our Chief Shepherd.

Recipients of the resurrection, not just messengers

So yes, we preachers announce the Good News with our lips. But let us also demonstrate it with our lives. We die to the idol of performance. We die to our pride. We die to the exhausting pressure to make every Easter “better” than the last (whatever that means). And in all our weakness, we cling to the one who raises the dead to a living hope.

Because the tomb wasn’t just emptied once in history. It’s still empty today.

Pastor, maybe your Easter sermon didn’t land the way you had hoped it would. Maybe the worship set fell flat. Maybe the follow-up plan had gaps that are now haunting you. Maybe the spiritual high you were praying for never seemed to come. Maybe Monday came too fast, and with it, the familiar cocktail of fatigue, disappointment, and doubt.

Allow me to gently remind you: Your worth is not measured by the quality of your sermon, the size of your crowd, or the smoothness of your service’s flow. Your worth was sealed the moment you were united with Christ—by grace through faith—in his death and resurrection.

You are more than a mere messenger of the Resurrection. You are a recipient of it too.

The living hope Peter describes wasn’t meant to stay trapped in your sermon notes—it was meant to meet you in the soul fog of your Monday morning. Resurrection isn’t a one-day performance; it’s a daily reality for all who are united with Christ. Even now, the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, reviving a spiritual vitality that ministry has worn down, restoring in you what exhaustion has depleted.

So take heart. Know that you are not alone. Your Shepherd knows the weight that you carry, and he’s not requiring you to carry resurrection in your hands—he’s inviting you to experience it in your heart.

I looked once more at those circled words in my messy sermon notes: living hope.

The phrase had stirred in me days before, when I first wrote it. But now, after the whirlwind of another Easter Sunday, it hit differently. Deeper. More personal. It wasn’t a phrase I needed to proclaim; it was a promise I needed to receive.

That hope is still alive. Still speaking. Still strong enough to raise the dead, downtrodden, and weary places within my own soul—and within yours.

Pastor, the resurrection you proclaimed this last Lord’s Day is also the resurrection that sustains you, not only as a pastor but also as a follower of Jesus. It’s more than a doctrine to affirm or a story to tell. It’s a person who meets you in your weariness and walks you out of the tomb once more.

So before you rush on to the next thing—before your weekly staff debrief, your next elders meeting, your spring and summer series planning—pause. Let the stone roll back once again. Let the light break in. You have been born again to a living hope.

Not only for them—but for you.

He is risen. He is risen indeed. And so are you.

Chris Poblete is the editorial director for CT Pastors and a former pastor and church planter.

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Theology

A US Evangelical Considers Pope Francis

Russell Moore

Columnist

The pope was tricky to categorize and at times theologically confusing. Yet I couldn’t help but admire him.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

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

With the death of Pope Francis this week, my thoughts went in many directions, but one of them was the memory of my humiliation at the front door of his house.

Invited by the pope to speak at the Vatican on an evangelical view of marriage and fidelity, I arrived in Rome jetlagged and exhausted, having just finished teaching at a Southern Baptist seminary on Martin Luther’s view of conscience.

Going through security at the Vatican, I handed the Swiss Guard what I thought was my passport, pulling it absentmindedly out of my pocket, from the same suit I had worn back home. After a moment or two of his puzzled expression, I realized that I had given him a pocket-sized copy of Luther’s 95 Theses.

An archbishop there with me said, “Just don’t nail it to the door and you should be fine.”

As I wrote shortly afterward for the National Review:

I wondered which of my grandparents would be more ashamed of me: my Roman Catholic grandmother, for my ushering the tumult of the 16th century right there to the pope’s door; my Baptist-preacher grandfather, for entering the Vatican at all; or all of my grandparents together—evangelicals and Catholics alike—for my violation of Southern manners.

The pope, of course, never knew about the awkwardness of my entrance—and my Catholic friends in line with me, far from offended, joked with me about it for years. But even if the pope had known about it, he probably would have waved it off. Martin Luther is not as dangerous as he used to be, and one might wonder whether that’s a good development or a bad one.

Perhaps one of the reasons for better relations between Catholics and evangelicals is that both have changed for the better.

Apart from the writings of “integralists,” mostly in ivory towers, the Catholic church has revised its previously authoritarian views of human rights, religious freedom, and the relationship between church and state, as well as its conclusions about the eternal destiny of “separated brethren.”

Evangelicals—for the most part—no longer think of the pope as the “antichrist” or of the Roman church as the “whore of Babylon” from the Book of Revelation.

But better relations might be a sign of something else—of the ways a secularized Western culture has affected all of us, to the degree that we no longer feel the existential weight of the arguments that once led to reformations and counter-reformations, inquisitions and uprisings.

Those are not minor matters, after all. The books of Romans and Galatians are all about what it means to say that God justifies the ungodly—what could be more important? And if the Roman church is right that Jesus’ promise to build the church “upon this rock” (Matt. 16:18) is about a Petrine office continuing from then until now, then what follower of Jesus could ignore that?

Probably some degree of both factors are at work. But probably, also, both Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants have, over the centuries, learned to take their doctrines more seriously, not less.

A Roman Catholic who believes that the Eucharist is the real presence of Christ would find that beautiful enough to attest to itself—with no thought of torturing a detractor or withholding the Bible from the laity.

An evangelical Protestant might believe in justification by faith alone—in the right sense of “alone”—strongly enough to believe that one is justified by faith in Christ, not by one’s doctrinal formulation of justification by faith.

For Catholics, Pope Francis was (and is) a kind of Rorschach test of where one thought the church should go in this century after Vatican II, after the world-shaping influence of Pope John Paul II. Pope Francis was, after all, a polarizing figure precisely in the ways he didn’t polarize.

He wanted divorced and remarried Catholics to have access to the Eucharist. He supported gay civil unions and the baptism of transgender people. He expressed his hope that hell was empty. He actively opposed the Latin Mass movement and emphasized the long-standing Catholic social teaching on the treatment of migrants and refugees and on the protection of the environment.

But Francis was no “progressive” in the ways that word is typically defined. Even as he wanted to expand roles for women in the church, he opposed women’s ordination. Despite his “Who am I to judge?” rhetoric on sexuality, he believed and taught the historic Christian sexual ethic restricting sexual union to the married, and he defined marriage as the lifelong union of a man and a woman.

He was pro-life on abortion (as well as on the death penalty and euthanasia and surrogacy), speaking out about the evil of seeing human beings as “disposable.” He opposed what he called “gender ideology”—warning that “canceling” difference when it comes to the creation categories of male and female would ultimately mean canceling humanity.

It was hard, then, for the world or the church to fit Francis into an ideological niche of traditionalist versus progressive, much less into American red versus blue. In the end, that leaves any observer of Francis to make a choice—either to shoehorn him into one tribe or another, and thus to valorize or villainize him, or to see him not as a set of ideas but as a man.

And in that sense, who cannot admire the simplicity and humility of this man, especially at this moment?

The pope exasperated me theologically when he told a little boy that his atheist father would be in heaven because he had been a “good father.” But at the same time, I teared up with admiration to see him hug that little boy—grieving the loss of his dad and fearing what must seem like an eternal orphanhood.

I would differ from the pope on some of the ways he would talk about the implications of “accompaniment” (though as a Protestant, I would have to say, “Who am I to judge?”) and the boundaries of the Lord’s Table. But can we not all affirm that seeing the church as a field hospital is no doubt rooted in Jesus, who told us, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Luke 5:31, ESV throughout)?

One can acknowledge that some of Pope Francis’ statements on matters of sexual morality could be confusing at times while still seeing that he recognized what far too many of us ignore—the double standard of people who call out sinners in the flesh while ignoring those with more “angelicity,” as he put it, who “dress themselves in another guise: pride, hatred, falsehood, fraud, abuse of power.”

The specific applications of his impulse need not be replicated by evangelicals or other Christians for us to see that the impulse itself—toward mercy and grace—is one we ignore at the peril of our own witness.

Pope Francis made mistakes. So did his namesake, Francis of Assisi, and so did the apostle Peter, whose legacy he sought to fill. So did every human being except one (and let’s not get into a debate about Mary right now). So will you, and so do I.

As we look back on the life Pope Francis, though, can we not hope that when we do err, by God’s grace, we might do so while aspiring to mercy rather than to vengeance?

Even those of us without a pope, even those of us with our pockets full of protestations, can agree to that.

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

Inkwell

The Good Life Cannot Be Optimized

Mark Casper

Secular monks on the precipice of burnout

Mount Desert Island, Maine by Jervis McEntee

YEARS AGO, I used to walk my old neighborhood in Charlotte, listening to podcasts as I paced beneath a towering canopy of willow oaks. At the time, one of my go-to’s was The Tim Ferriss Show, a popular podcast where host Tim Ferriss deconstructs world-class performers, extracting the tactics, tools, and routines normies like me can use. As I listened to episodes with titles like Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money or How to 10x Your Results, One Tiny Tweak at a Time, I hardly ever looked up to notice the trees.

Eventually, I did notice something rather odd in the show’s introduction. Over thunderous, electronic beats, I heard familiar clips from various films that together, embody the ethos of the show. “At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half a mile before my hands start shaking,” says Matt Damon as the trained assassin Jason Bourne, a nod to the show’s emphasis on peak physical performance. But the clip that stood out to me featured the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1991 action classic Terminator 2: Judgment Day: “I’m a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.”

In the film, the Terminator is a machine with human-like skin designed for one thing only: destroying its target. Undoubtedly, there is some tongue in cheek on Ferriss’s part to include a clip like this in his podcast introduction. But after listening to numerous episodes, I couldn’t help but get the sense that there was more truth in it than one would expect. A certain kind of ruthless efficiency—a “machine-like” approach to everything—seemed central to Ferriss’s vision of the Good Life.

WE ARE LIVING in the Age of the Machine, which Paul Kingsnorth defines as “the nexus of power, wealth, ideology, and technology” that has emerged to “replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods.”

We have not only embraced the way of the Machine, we have chosen to become machines ourselves. Consider how often we say we need to “recharge,” as if we were iPhones running low on battery. Or when we say we are “hardwired” for something. Our language is the canary in the coalmine: It seems we have concluded that to thrive in a Machine society, one must become a machine.

IN 2020, practical philosopher Andrew Taggert wrote an essay in First Things about the rise of what he called “secular monks.” According to Taggert, these educated, wealthy, urban men “embrace a secular ‘immanent frame,’ ascetic self-possession, and a stringent version of human agency.”

Above all, they commit to work—to working on themselves and on the world—as the key to salvation. Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control: among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.

Perhaps you have never gone full “monk mode,” eschewing hot showers for ice baths and grande lattes for shots of wheatgrass. (Lord knows I haven’t.) But it’s clear to me that their ethos has deeply embedded itself in our lives and cultural psyche. You do not have to be a young man plunging himself into a tub of ice daily to suffer from chronic self-improvement.

As Taggert outlines in his essay, the ideological river secular monks swim in is made up of several different streams: the pursuit of preparation (control), the pursuit of optionality (freedom), the pursuit of creativity (power), and above all, the pursuit of optimization (perfection). He summarizes their worldview:

“As human agents, we should divide our actions into means and ends, and if we’re good optimizers, we will discover and use the most effective means by which we can satisfy those ends. This defines human existence as [Tim] Ferriss sees it: an endless game of self-one-upsmanship.” While our methods may not be quite as extreme as these monks’ liturgies, I believe we have become just as obsessed with optimization.

Case in point: several years ago I started noticing an interesting trend. In conversation after conversation with friends and coworkers, I heard the same line: “I can’t remember the last time I read any fiction.”

This statement bewildered me to no end. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Eventually, it dawned on me: In a self-improvement culture, there is no room for art. There is only room for things which have an explicit, utilitarian purpose. Literature, art, poetry, films—these have no practical value in and of themselves. So why read a novel when you can learn ten principles from a self-help book?

IN THE INTRODUCTION to his book Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life, artist Makoto Fujimura picks up on this very idea:

The assumption behind utilitarian pragmatism is that human endeavors are only deemed worthwhile if they are useful to the whole, whether that be a company, family or community. In such a world, those who are disabled, those who are oppressed, or those who are without voice are seen as ‘useless’ and disposable. We have a disposable culture that has made usefulness the sole measure of value. This metric declares that the arts are useless. No—the reverse is true. The arts are completely indispensable precisely because they are useless in the utilitarian sense.

When productivity becomes our highest ideal, we eliminate everything from our lives that isn’t deemed “useful” or “practical.” So we stop reading novels and poems (why bother?). Instead, we listen to nonfiction audiobooks (it’s more efficient that way) about “supercharging our productivity” while jogging, driving to work, or washing the dishes.

This never-ending project of self-optimization means we live on the precipice of burnout. We can’t even remember the last time we marveled at a sunset, stuck our nose in a flower, gazed in wonder at a painting, or laid our hands on the giant bole of a willow oak and lost ourselves in its sprawling canopy. We have not simply lost our humanity—we have opted to become mere “living tissue over metal endoskeleton.”

UNDERNEATH OUR CULTURE’S quasi-religious pursuit of optimization is the desire for perfection, which has its roots in a deep awareness of our brokenness. We are not the men and women we aspire to be. But the secular monk’s quest for perfection does not find Jesus of Nazareth nor his teaching of self-giving love for God and neighbor at its core. Nor do most of our efforts at personal growth. Unsurprisingly, self remains central to our project of self-improvement.

Like the secular monks, we desire to live without limits. To become impervious to decay, death, and the terrifying chaos of life. To “impact” the world through the indomitable force of our work. In short, we want to be superheroes. No wonder most tech innovations coming out of Silicon Valley market themselves as “superpowers.” It’s what we think we want most.

But there’s one small problem. “It’s increasingly clear,” writes Andy Crouch, “that superpowers come at a cost. Every exercise of superpowers involves a trade: You have to leave part of yourself behind.” In our relentless quest to optimize our lives and acquire as many “superpowers” as possible, we become less human. Less real.

IN ONE SENSE, a novel is indeed “useless.” There is no obvious practical value to it. The same is true for other art forms. You do not walk away from a Rembrandt painting, a Terrence Malick film, or a Mary Oliver poem with five practical action steps for how to get more done in less time.

Living in the Machine can sometimes feel small, tedious, and tawdry. Beauty cuts through our rationalistic, materialistic mindset and helps us reclaim the wonder we were made for. In his book An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis writes about the life-changing power of reading great fiction:

…the first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before.

Indeed, how can we be the same after sculling down the river with Ratty and Mole or trudging up Mt. Doom with Frodo and Sam? After scouring the seas with Captain Ahab or putting on a Christmas play with the March sisters? After wandering the Kentucky hillsides with Jayber Crow or burying our faces in Aslan’s mane alongside Lucy and Susan?

Great literature does something to us we can barely understand or even imagine. As Lewis says, it sparks an “enlargement of our being.” It opens up a landscape both within and without.

YOU WILL NOT FIND any of the works I just referenced in the self help section of a bookstore. And yet I consider them integral to the formation of my spiritual imagination. This is why art’s “uselessness” is the very thing that makes it indispensable: It teaches us how to be human again. Great stories remind us that we are more than just our outputs—grades, careers, successes, bank accounts, or possessions. They shake us awake from our rat-race way of living.

The Machine “wires” us to think and live in “-er” terms—i.e. better, faster, easier, more, etc. But the life we desire cannot be found by embracing the way of the Machine. We cannot “hack” our way to the Good Life nor optimize our way to flourishing. To the Machine, art simply “does not compute.” It doesn’t make logical sense. But great and “useless” art punches a hole in the industrial cage the Machine has built around our souls. And through this hole, the light of another world and way of being comes streaming in.

Mark Casper is a writer who has been published in Mockingbird and Short Fiction Break. He writes towards the life we long for through the lens of literature, poetry, art, film, and theology on his Substack, The Kingswood.

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News

Tunisia Church Tries to Hold Steady

Luke Waggoner

The spiritual descendants of Tertullian face pressure.

SOPA Images / Getty

Almost 15 years ago, Tunisian calls for democracy reverberated throughout the Middle East and North Africa, toppling dictators and empowering citizens with new liberties.

Last week, a Tunisian court sentenced to prison nearly 40 political, media, and business leaders perceived to be threats, some receiving sentences up to 66 years.

Still, on a typical Sunday at Église Réformée de Tunisie (ERT, Reformed Church of Tunisia), 120 or so congregants walkpast a block of French-colonial-style apartments, turninto a courtyard adorned with bougainvillea, and enterthe sanctuary.

They have a variety of backgrounds. One was an astrologer who read the Bible and had his whole cosmology turned upside down. He asked to be baptized and now leads the liturgy at ERT’s services. Another attendee learned about Christianity online, told his mother, and faced her disappointment. Several years later, she had a dream in which Jesus came to her and told her to read the Bible. She woke up, did, and professed faith in Christ. Another is a young Tunisian woman who rejected Islam and became a Communist but felt compelled to seek a better purpose. She was recently baptized.

But most of the worshipers at the 143-year-old church are from sub-Saharan Africa and came to Tunis for college, or they are passing through the capital on their way to Europe. Sunday services also include a handful of American and Canadian expats.

Some Tunisians view Christianity as a foreign force, counter to the Tunisian way of life. That’s ironic, because Christians lived in what is now Tunisia within decades after the first Easter, although the gospel’s exact journey has not been confirmed.

The early Christian apologist Tertullian, born in Carthage in 160, established core church doctrines that inspired the martyr Cyprian and later Augustine, a bishop in neighboring Hippo (modern-day Annaba, Algeria). A strong Christian presence continued until the Muslim conquest in North Africa in the seventh century reduced the Christian population to a small minority that persists today.

Tunisians then lived under numerous empires before the French took over in the late 19th century. After gaining independence in 1956, Tunisia was initially more tolerant toward religious minorities than many of its neighbors were, even protecting the freedom of religion in its constitution.

For the first decades of the post-independence period, a liberal expression of Islam coexisted with Christianity. But in 1987, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali took power and sought to tightly control all minority movements that could threaten his power.

On December 17, 2010, a young, demoralized man staggered angrily into a local government office in central Tunisia. He doused himself in paint thinner and lit a match. Incensed by Ben Ali’s decades-long authoritarian rule, Mohamed Bouazizi chose this gruesome final act of protest out of desperation for a freedom he believed impossible to attain.

Yet his death sparked the Arab Spring protests that unseated Ben Ali and raged in various forms throughout the Middle East and North Africa for 15 years.

The movement ignited civil wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria; spurred the removal of dictators in three of the North African countries; and launched an initially promising political transformation in Tunisia. In 2014, the country organized its first free and fair elections and had a Nobel Peace Prize–winning transition followed by subsequent peaceful transfers of power. Many believed Tunisia would go the same way.

A reworking of the constitution, though, centralized power in the executive. The president is both the head of public prosecution and the sole figure capable of dismissing any judge on relatively limitless grounds.

The constitution includes language directing the state to protect Islam and guarantee its preeminence. One constitutional expert concluded that the government “is founding a religious state.”

Anti-immigration sentiment in the country has further complicated the lives of many Tunisian Christians. About 16,500 black, sub-Saharan refugees and migrants have registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, though many have entered the North African nation without registering.

In 2023, authorities rounded up 1,200 black Africans, destroyed their property, and, allegedly, physically and sexually assaulted the migrants before expelling them at the Libyan border.

Anyone who speaks out against the government increasingly risks prosecution. Decree-Law 54 is ostensibly a cybercrime law prohibiting speech that spreads false information, but the definition of what that is remains vague and subjective. Several recently-sentenced political opponents were arrested under the law, now weaponized to stifle dissent, hamstring lawyers, and punish antigovernment comments by journalists and others.

ERT and other churches in Tunisia try to make sure that new converts don’t believe their faith will automatically make life easier. As Augustine, who spent much of his ministry in Carthage, once wrote, God’s grace is meant “to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in faith.”

Luke Waggoner is an international political and governance consultant.

This article has been shortened at the urging of Tunisian Christians.

- More from Luke Waggoner

Ideas

The Male Malaise

Domonic D. Purviance

Rapid economic and social shifts have undermined traditional ideas of manhood. At the Cross we find a better vision—and more.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels, Wikimedia Commons

Most cultures worldwide, anthropologist David Gilmore wrote in Manhood in the Making, have generally defined manhood around three capacities: the abilities to provide, protect, and procreate. For generations, the United States was no exception. Becoming a husband and father, along with serving as the primary breadwinner, has traditionally been the path prescribed to American men for achieving this sense of manhood.

However, economic and social shifts over the past 50 years have led many to question this traditional view, especially the capacity to provide. The transition to a high-skill, service-oriented economy requiring greater training and education has particularly disadvantaged men—especially those who, in another time, would’ve earned a living through manual labor. The proportion of men dropping out of the labor force continues to rise, and many of those with jobs suffer stagnant wages. Meanwhile, the education gap between the sexes has widened, with women now earning the majority of college degrees each year.

Sometimes when this issue is raised, there is an impulse to dismiss it: Why don’t men try harder? Or why don’t they simply get rid of their outdated view of manhood? That attitude is a mistake. The male instinct to provide is not just a social construct; it is fundamentally rooted in how males are wired.

As Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves argued in Of Boys and Men, the erosion of the provider role has profoundly impacted men’s perception of their value and place in society. Men who do not see themselves as providers, especially financially, are more likely to detach not only from the labor force but also from society as a whole. Why? Because men who feel they don’t measure up as financial providers often view themselves as inadequate or may be seen by others as societal liabilities.

Even men who do provide financially may still feel inadequate, though, if they are unprepared to meet new social expectations. Either way, too many men are left feeling worthless, aimless, disillusioned, and disenfranchised—an issue we cannot overlook.

The church can’t overhaul the whole economy or make it easier to measure up to the wider society’s expectations. But we can offer a vision of manhood sufficient for navigating the changes and complexities of our era. As Christians, we are blessed that God provides us with a clear vision of manhood, one that transcends different times and cultures and is far beyond anything we could invent to meet this moment.

This vision is not dependent on changing economic, social, or cultural realities. Nor is it solely linked to the roles of husband, father, and financial provider. Though these are all good things, as Tim Keller explains in his book Every Good Endeavor, they cannot be ultimate things. Our identity as men can’t be solely and ultimately anchored in our capacity to perform or achieve in these areas. That will lead to a fragile self-worth that falls apart when we encounter changes and challenges.

This vision is also not a call to deconstruct manhood altogether or a call for each man to invent his own definition. As Gilmore explains, manhood needs to be taught. Without guidance, men may feel lost or, worse, develop dysfunctional models of manhood that are harmful to society.

The central image of God’s vision of manhood is the Cross. At the Cross, Christ provides men with a clear, unambiguous, and enduring vision of being a man—one that remains relevant despite the societal changes around us. Paul makes this clear in Ephesians 5:25–33, where he discusses the relationship between husbands and wives, admonishing Christian men in Ephesus to love their wives the way “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” In other words, Paul suggests that if you want to know what a real man looks like, look to the Cross, where Christ laid down his life for humanity.

This is a challenging call to selflessness, to following Jesus by willingly laying down our lives for those we love. Here, Paul calls husbands to prioritize their wives’ interests above their own, and in Philippians 2:3–4, he broadens that to all relationships: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”

Selflessness does not equate to weakness or timidity. On the contrary, Ephesians 5 calls for men to demonstrate strength and leadership in their marriages. However, being the “head” in marriage (v. 23) is not just any kind of leadership. Instead, God’s vision of manhood emphasizes gaining influence through self-sacrifice and using our strength to care for those we love, just as we would care for ourselves.

Whether married or not, men are made for selfless leadership. It gives meaning and purpose to our masculinity. Instead of reducing manhood to economic utility and financial provision, selfless leadership calls us to provide our whole selves—mind, soul, and body—for those we love, just as Christ did. I believe this call has the power, with God’s help, to awaken the hearts of disillusioned men by giving them a motivation and purpose worth living and dying for: the welfare of those entrusted to their care.

Of course, no man can fully live up to the vision of selfless leadership exemplified in Christ at the Cross. This is true no matter how hard we try. Furthermore, simply understanding this biblical vision of manhood is not enough to address our culture’s male malaise. As the church, we must go a step further.

The Cross is not just where we find God’s vision for manhood. It is also where God shapes us into the men we are called to be. At the Cross, we confront the sobering duality of our humanity. On the one hand, we are confronted with a clear view of our depravity, weakness, and inadequacy as men. We are so flawed that we cannot save ourselves. We cannot provide for our own souls, let alone those of others. We are completely dependent on God to send his Son to accomplish what we cannot.

On the other hand, the Cross reveals how unconditionally loved and valuable we are to God. Our weakness does not diminish his love. Despite our inadequacy, we are so valuable to him that Jesus willingly suffered the consequences we deserved, allowing us to gain the hope of “being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).

The Cross is the only place where a man can be inadequate and valuable at the same time. Only here can he encounter the power of God’s redeeming grace, a power that enables him to see his true worth and identity and transforms him into the man God calls him to be.

In that sense, the ultimate solution to the male malaise is the same as it has always been: We must preach the gospel to our men. The gospel must be more than a message we recite; it must be where we anchor our very identity and value as men. The Bible must be more than a book we read to find a moral code; it must be where we go to encounter God’s grace until it transforms us into selfless leaders. And most importantly, Christ must not merely be our example in manhood. He must be our Savior.

Domonic D. Purviance is a writer, men’s ministry leader, and finance and economics expert. He cofounded King Culture, a nonprofit organization that equips men to reflect the selfless leadership of Christ.

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News

A Christian Medical School Opens for the First Time in 40 Years

Emily Belz in Nashville

The Nashville program joins a growing movement to teach future doctors a “whole person” model of health care.

The first medical students at Belmont University's Frist College of Medicine participate in a pediatric clinic.

Matt Willoughby / Courtesy of Belmont University

For the first time in more than 40 years, a new Christian medical school granting MD degrees has opened its doors in the US.

A class of 50 students is finishing its inaugural school year now at Belmont University’s Thomas F. Frist, Jr. College of Medicine. That’s 50 future doctors who could be reinforcements for a workforce facing severe shortages.

“I call them the fabulous 50,” said Tanu Rana, a microbiologist and immunologist on the new faculty. “I love them dearly, and I’ve really enjoyed every second with them.”

It’s a diverse 50: The first class includes veterans, farm kids, and speakers of 24 different languages.

A new medical school in general is rare, let alone a Christian school. Belmont’s is the first MD-granting school of any kind to open in Tennessee in 50 years.

“It’s been extremely hard,” said Anderson Spickard, the school’s dean and a veteran internal medicine doctor. He came to the startup school from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he was a faculty member for 27 years. “There’s tension at every turn.”

Oral Roberts University, which opened a medical school in 1981, appears to be the most recent Christian MD-granting institution to open. It closed in 1990 under millions in debt.

Belmont’s medical school has a clinical and advisory partnership with HCA Healthcare, a mammoth health system based in Nashville and founded by members of the Frist family. The school’s new facility, abutting the Belmont campus, is a $180 million columned edifice with labs, cozy study rooms, and a mock hospital ward for simulations.

Peter Huwe, who was teaching at Mercer University School of Medicine before joining the Belmont medical school faculty, said he had dreamed of being able to teach medicine from a Christian standpoint.

When he started looking into teaching at the Belmont medical school, “I could look around and see, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to work. They’ve got the pieces in place,’” he said. He is now a biochemistry professor at the school.

The school emphasizes servant leadership in doctors, a phrase faculty used several times in interviews, and whole person care.

Whole person care is a compassionate health care model for doctors to build relationships with patients and take social, spiritual, emotional, and behavioral factors into account in treatment. In education focused on whole person care, doctors learn to listen to patients and have empathetic conversations on difficult subjects—like terminal diagnoses.

Loma Linda University School of Medicine, a Christian medical school outside of Los Angeles, has for more than a century taught the “whole person care” model that Belmont is now undertaking.

More national medical organizations are recommending that US physicians, especially in primary care, shift toward that whole-person model. Another new, nonreligious medical school opening later this year will be focused on whole-person care.

Students entering medical school now are also more attuned to the whole-person approach, said Huwe, with their sensitivity to mental health and a person’s community context.

“It’s not as big of a leap for this cohort of students,” he said.

The cadaver lab at the school is unique in that it has an anteroom where students pause for 15 minutes of prayer and reflection before going in. “Fearfully and wonderfully made,” from Psalm 139:14, is printed on the wall outside.

While the school is open to anyone no matter their faith, the school’s leadership emphasizes that the school is rooted in Christ and his example. Faculty pray and have devotions together. They want to train doctors “having that humility to recognize that we’re broken,” said Huwe.

In the lobby of the main new building adjoining Belmont’s campus in Nashville hangs a seal for the new school. At its center is the Rod of Asclepius, a staff with a snake from Greek mythology that is associated with medicine. Spickard said that also references John 3:14, where Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.” The verse refers to his death on the cross, which in turn references the story in Numbers 21:4–9 where sick Israelites who looked on a snake would live.

“The snakes remind us that we’re facing evil here—the machinery, if nothing else, of what’s making that patient sick,” said Spickard. “But if we look at the snake without the cross, we get overwhelmed to face evil on our own.”

On the seal, the staff is planted in water, referencing Psalm 1 (“like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season”). And leaves and fruit grow around the staff, representing Revelation 22, the tree of life with fruit for the “healing of the nations.”

“Christ said that he took evil down with him and buried evil once and for all,” said Spickard. It reminds him as a doctor that he’s not the hero bringing lifesaving care to everyone. “We’re planted in that stream of water.”

Until becoming a dean and hanging up his stethoscope, Spickard was one of the few modern-day doctors still doing house calls. That allowed him to do whole person care; he was often tending a patient in a bedroom, washing his hands in a family bathroom, sometimes walking into a house that the family hadn’t had time to clean.

He wants students to understand that house-call feeling: that entering patients’ lives is high stakes and vulnerable.

Spickard’s agreement to join the new school came at a time of personal vulnerability. He had just learned his son was dying of cancer; he was a dad in the ICU (intensive care unit) watching doctors he had trained over 27 years at Vanderbilt care for his son. It was a raw time to be contemplating a new medical school formed around whole person care and the example of Christ.

Shortly after his son’s death, his own dad died. Initially a faculty member, he was asked by the school’s board at that time to become the dean. He said yes but told them, “You have a wounded dean.”

“The chair of the board said, ‘That’s the best kind,’” said Spickard.

Then he stepped into all the challenges of a new medical school. A big hurdle is winning accreditation, which the Frist school did in 2023 from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the body that oversees all MD programs in the US.

Another challenge is that a standalone startup like the Frist school must find partner institutions for clinical rotations since Belmont does not have its own teaching hospital. Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, for example, has Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where students rotate.

But the school’s partnership with HCA Healthcare means that students will do rotations at HCA-affiliated facilities in Nashville.

Already, the first-year students have also done rotations at Siloam Health, a longtime Christian nonprofit health clinic in Nashville that serves refugees, immigrants, and other low-income residents who are uninsured. The clinic has been doing whole person care for more than 30 years, and Vanderbilt medical students rotate there as well.

On the wall in the lobby at Siloam is printed the story of Jesus healing a blind man in John 9, where he tells the man to wash in the pool of Siloam and the man regains his sight. Back in the offices where doctors see patients are hanging quilted flags from all the patients’ countries, like Cameroon and the Dominican Republic.

The clinic’s leadership wants to show the students “we can do excellent, charitable whole person care. It does exist,” said Katie Richards, Siloam’s CEO.

The Frist school encourages students to work in rural health and global health and has a scholarship for those who intend to be rural physicians. Rana, the microbiologist, leads a global health elective at the school, through which students will visit Korea and India.

Some of the members of the first class are already planning to work in rural communities.

The medical school also has an unusual department: health systems science, which teaches students how to interact with systems of medicine so they can help patients figure out paying for care and navigating options—an essential skill if doctors want to help patients as whole people.

Whole person care teaches doctors to be good listeners of their patients, Spickard said, but doctors should also be “listeners” of the health care system.

“We don’t want you to think of the health care system as something you need to be vaccinated against, to go out and tolerate,” said Spickard about his students. “But be agents of hope within it.”

This article has been updated to clarify that the medical school’s partnership with HCA Healthcare is not financial.

- More from Emily Belz

News

Oldest-Known Hymn Inspires New Worship Song

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Historian teams up with Chris Tomlin and Hillsong’s Ben Fielding to adapt rare music dating back to the third century.

The Oxyrhynchus papyri, dating to the end of the 3rd century, contains a Christian worship hymn including both lyrics and musical notion.

Courtesy of The First Hymn movie

Historian John Dickson knows that “early” Christian music usually refers to sacred chants from the ninth or tenth century. So when he noticed a reference to an ancient hymn from hundreds of years before that—way back in the third century—he was immediately curious.

The words and musical notations to this obscure sacred song, penned in Greek on a tattered papyrus fragment uncovered over a century ago, named the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” and responded to pagan beliefs.

“The Christians who produced this were trying to create music that was understandable for their surrounding culture,” Dickson told CT. “It’s simultaneously worship and public Christianity.”

The ancient Greek hymn is by far the oldest surviving piece of Christian music—it predates the next notated work by six centuries. Inspired by the ancient fragment, Dickson reached out to Ben Fielding, a fellow Aussie and a songwriter for Hillsong, to turn it into a singable work for today’s church.

Early conversations between Dickson and Fielding eventually led to a collaboration with Grammy-winning worship artist Chris Tomlin, culminating in the production of a new worship song, “The First Hymn,” and a documentary about the discovery and study of the papyrus fragment containing the hymn.

Courtesy of The First Hymn movie

Chris Tomlin, Ben Fielding, and John Dickson

Through the Psalms and other biblical texts, Christians have had access to words that might have been sung by ancient worshipers. But this early hymn is the first example of Christian music with both text and musical notation preserved—offering rare hints about how the music of early Christian gatherings might have sounded.

“The First Hymn” pulls from the Trinitarian themes and reverence for creation in the ancient song, showcasing Tomlin’s knack for writing simple, syllabic melodies that hold up with minimal accompaniment or full band. It feels thoroughly contemporary even though the text and melody are based on a piece of music likely sung by third-century Christians.

Christians across denominations have been captivated by the idea of singing songs with deep roots in the historic church. Over the past two decades, some evangelicals in the US have migrated to Orthodox or Anglican churches in search of historically rooted faith practices. The Catholic church is experiencing a resurgence of enthusiasm for tradition. Interest in hymns and hymnals is on the rise in a variety of church settings.

“The First Hymn,” like the preceding “ancient-future” worship trend of the 2000s, offers connection to early believers by adapting or reviving an artifact of the faith for modern Christians.

“I’m skeptical of fads, including the fad of ‘going back,’” said Dickson. “I don’t think of this as ‘going back.’ It’s giving something back to the church.”

Now a faculty member at Wheaton College, Dickson has been a lecturer in Hebrew, biblical studies, and classics at institutions in Australia, the UK, and the US. But in the ’90s, he was a singer-songwriter in a rock band. He’s long had an interest in putting ancient words to music, and the text of what scholars call “the Oxyrhynchus hymn” (or P.Oxy. XV 1786) presented the opportunity to join in what Dickson sees as a work of public theology by early Christians.

The Oxyrhynchus hymn was found in a massive collection of papyri uncovered in Egypt. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri contain an estimated half-million fragments, mostly records and correspondence.

The fragment on which the hymn was written preserves 35 words and the accompanying melody and rhythm in ancient Greek musical notation. It is believed to be the conclusion of a longer song.

Let all be silent:
The shining stars not sound forth,
All rushing rivers stilled,
As we sing our hymn
To the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
As all Powers cry out in answer,
“Amen, amen.”
Might, praise, and glory forever to our God.
The only giver of all good gifts.
Amen. Amen.

“‘Giver of good gifts’ was one of Zeus’s epithets,” said Dickson. “But the writer says ‘only giver of all good gifts.’ This may be a nod to Zeus.”

Dickson suggested that the writer of the hymn may have been directly answering or conversing with the competing religious beliefs of the time, something Paul modeled in his letters.

“The phrase ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ comes from a hymn to Zeus,” Dickson observed. “Paul can quote it [in Acts 17:28] and say that this finds its fulfillment in the one true God.”

The theme of cosmic silence (“Let all be silent”) would have resonated with non-Christians in ancient Greece and Egypt, said Dickson.

Musica mundana—the music of the spheres—was a philosophical concept articulated by ancient Greeks to describe the harmony and balance of the heavenly bodies, governed by mathematical relationships. The call to silence of the heavenly bodies was something the Greeks would recognize as a command that only a powerful god could give.

“The thematic setting of silence is pagan,” said Dickson, noting that biblical texts like Psalm 148 most often call the natural world to join in a chorus of praise. “Asking all creation to be silent instead of joining in praise is weird from a biblical point of view.”

Courtesy of The First Hymn movie

Oxyrhynchus excavation site in Egypt

While “The First Hymn” is the first effort to introduce the ancient song to a general audience, musicologists and historians have been studying it since 1922. Charles Cosgrove’s 2011 book, An Ancient Christian Hymn with Musical Notation: Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1789: Text and Commentary, provides extensive analysis and history of the fragment.

Cosgrove observed that the hymn is a challenge for researchers because it isn’t of central importance for scholars of ancient Greek music and because historians of Christian liturgy generally lack the specialized knowledge necessary to fully grasp and analyze the Greek musical notation.

In academia, the hymn has remained in no man’s land. Its relative isolation and obscurity has to do with the fact that there are so few contemporaneous artifacts to compare it to.

“One hopes that in further discoveries … another such hymn will come to light,” wrote Cosgrove. “But for now, P.Oxy. 1786 is our only example of pre-Gregorian Christian music. For that reason alone it deserves a comprehensive treatment.”

The adaptation of P.Oxy. 1786 by Dickson, Fielding, and Tomlin is perhaps their version of a comprehensive treatment: an accessible song and a documentary about its history for those hungry for a connection to the historic church.

The documentary premiered at Biola University on April 14, followed by a live premiere of the song at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, on April 15.

Resources for churches interested in using the song for congregational worship are already available on platforms like MultiTracks, where worship leaders can download charts and a collection of performance tracks—including all six electric guitar parts and a background choir.

“The First Hymn” is a stirring anthem in the recognizable style of today’s popular worship music, featuring layers of synth textures and a clear verse-chorus structure that builds in intensity from a relatively sparse first verse.

Other than the title, there’s nothing in the text or production that hints at the song’s ancient origin, as the modern setting avoids the potentially gimmicky inclusion of tropes to signal the old or exotic (such as the use of harmonic minor scales or the sound of a zither). Tomlin and Fielding have reworked the lyrics so they fit neatly over a singable melody.

Tomlin calls the song “a sacred gift passed down from the early Church,” connecting its story to the lives of martyrs and persecuted Christians throughout history. “Now, 1,800 years later, we stand in a long line of brave and bold believers, singing alongside them.”

Dickson said that today’s church can learn from the openness of early Christians and their ability to “use pagan motifs to convey Christian doctrine,” even complicated doctrines like that of the Trinity.

“The cool thing is, there’s nothing new here,” Dickson said. “The Trinity is the center; it’s the nature of God in three persons. And here’s the oldest hymn we have, reminding us of that.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Wire Story

How the Catholic Church Will Pick the Next Pope

Mathew Schmalz – The Conversation

A Catholic scholar explains every step of the conclave process that will determine the successor to the late Pope Francis.

Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican for a conclave.

Maurix / Getty

With the death of Pope Francis, attention now turns to the selection of his successor. The next pope will be chosen in what is called a conclave, a Latin word meaning “a room that can be locked up” or, more simply, “a closed room.”

Members of the College of Cardinals will cast their votes behind the closed and locked doors of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, famous for its ceiling frescoes painted by Michelangelo. Distinguished by their scarlet robes, cardinals are chosen by each pope to elect future popes. A cardinal must be under the age of 80 to be eligible to vote in the conclave. Of the 252 members of the College of Cardinals, 135 are currently eligible to elect the new pope.

As a scholar of global Catholicism, I am especially interested in how this will be the most diverse conclave in the history of the Catholic church.

For many centuries, the College of Cardinals was dominated by Europeans—Italians, in particular. In fact, the first time a non-European cardinal actually cast a ballot in a conclave was only in the 20th century, when Baltimore’s archbishop, James Gibbons, voted in the 1903 papal election. Now, the College of Cardinals has members from over 90 countries, with Francis having appointed nearly 80 percent of them.

Holding a conclave to elect a pope is a tradition that goes back centuries. The practice was established in 1274 under Pope Gregory X in reaction to the chaos surrounding his own election, which lasted nearly three years. The tradition is old, but the results can be surprising, as when Francis himself was elected in 2013 as the first non-European pope in almost 1,300 years and the first Jesuit pope ever.

The conclave begins

Before the conclave, the College of Cardinals will meet in what are called “general congregations” to discuss issues facing the church. These general congregations will also be an opportunity for new cardinals and those from distant geographical locations to get to know their fellow cardinals.

This can be a time for politicking. In times past, the politicking was rumored to include bribes for votes, as was alleged in the election of Alexander VI, a Borgia pope, in 1492. Nowadays, it is considered to be bad form—and bad luck—for a cardinal to lobby for himself as a candidate. Buying votes by giving money or favors to cardinals is called “simony” and is against church law.

Two to three weeks after the papal funeral, the conclave will begin. The cardinals will first make a procession to the Sistine Chapel, where electronic jamming devices will have been set up to prevent eavesdropping and Wi-Fi and cellphone use. As they file into the chapel, the cardinals will sing, in Latin, the hymn “Come Holy Spirit.” They will then vow on a book of the Gospels to keep the conclave proceedings secret.

After these rituals, the master of papal liturgical celebrations will say out loud, in Latin, “extra omnes,” which means “everyone out.” The doors of the Sistine Chapter will then be locked, and the conclave will begin.

The voting process

The cardinals electing the pope will be seated in order of rank.

Usually, the dean of the College of Cardinals is seated in the first position. But the current dean—Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re—is over the eligible voting age and will not participate in the conclave. Instead, this papal election will be led by the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

When the cardinals have assembled, nine will be chosen at random to run the election, with three of them being “scrutinizers” who will examine the ballots and read them aloud.

After writing down the names of their chosen candidates, the cardinals will bring their ballots to the front of the chapel and place them on a plate that is set on top of an urn in front of the scrutinizers. Using the plate to drop their ballot into the urn, they will say, “I call as my witness Christ the Lord who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one who before God I think should be elected.”

A new pope is elected by a two-thirds majority. If this majority is not reached during the first ballot, the ballots will be burned in a stove. Black smoke rising through the Sistine Chapel’s chimney will signal to the outside world that the election is still ongoing, a tradition that began with the election of Benedict XV in 1914. Chemical additives are used to make sure the smoke is black because during the election of John Paul II, there was confusion over the smoke’s color.

Following the first day—and on the days thereafter—there will be up to four ballots a day if a two-thirds majority is not reached. Both Benedict XVI and Francis were elected after relatively few ballots: four in the case of Benedict; five with Francis. According to rules set by Benedict, if a new pope is not chosen after 13 days, there will be a day of prayer and reflection. Then the election will be between the top two candidates, one of whom must receive a two-thirds majority.

This new rule, some commentators have suggested, could lead to a longer or even deadlocked conclave because a compromise candidate is less likely to emerge.

The Room of Tears

Conclaves are usually short, such as the three-ballot election that chose Pope Pius XII in 1939. On a few occasions, deliberations have been quite long—the longest being the 1740 papal conclave, which elected Benedict XIV and lasted 181 days.

But regardless of the time frame, a new pope will be chosen. Once a candidate receives enough votes, he is asked, “Do you accept your canonical election as supreme pontiff?” By saying, “Accepto,” or “I accept,” he becomes the new leader of the Catholic church. This time, the ballots will be burned to create white smoke that will tell the world that the conclave has ended and that a new pope has been chosen.

Immediately after being elected, the new pope decides on his name, as Jorge Mario Bergoglio did when he was the first pope to choose the name Francis. The choice of a name—especially one of an immediate predecessor—often indicates the direction of the new pope’s pontificate. In Francis’ case, his name honored Francis of Assisi, a 13th-century mystic known for his simplicity and love for nature.

The new pope is then led to the “Room of Tears.” In this chamber, off the Sistine Chapel, he will have moments to reflect on the burdens of his position, which have often brought new popes to tears. He will put on a white cassock and other signs of his office. His election will be announced from the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

From the balcony, the new pope will greet the crowd below and deliver his first blessing to the world. A new pontificate will have begun.

Mathew Schmalz is a professor of religious studies at College of the Holy Cross. This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

- More from Mathew Schmalz – The Conversation

History

Nailing Down the Truth of Christ’s Crucifixion

Daniel Silliman

Apologizing for what I got wrong reporting on an idiosyncratic view on how Jesus died.

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Like so many Christians, I spent a lot of time before Easter thinking about the Crucifixion: how it must have felt for Jesus to die that way, how God chose this particular device of Roman terror to accomplish our salvation, and how it worked practically to kill someone on a cross.

An article in Biblical Archaeology Review piqued my reporting curiosity. A Bible professor suggested it was possible that crucifixions at the time of Christ’s death used ropes rather than nails. That’s obviously an idiosyncratic view—and almost certainly wrong, it seemed to me. But I thought it was interesting.

My curiosity took me to the descriptions of Christ’s death and the details in those accounts. I didn’t think about John 20:25 and the implication of the idea that Thomas was mistaken to think the resurrected Jesus would have nail marks in his hands. Thomas clearly would not have said that if the Romans at that time used ropes.

My article implicitly called into question the inerrancy of Scripture. In my eagerness to explore the historical context of Christ’s death, I missed that, and I’m sorry.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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Your baptism runs deeper than your ordination

Recipients of the resurrection, not just messengers

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