Evangelical Divide Widens After South Korean President’s Ouster

Isabel Ong with Jennifer Park in South Korea

Several Christians don’t see reconciliation as a possibility after the political saga.

Riot police stand guard near a banner with a photo of South Korea president Yoon Suk Yeol on it.

Anthony Wallace / Getty

Last Friday morning, Kang Gwi Ran made her way to President Yoon Suk Yeol’s residence in Yongsan, a district in Seoul where an estimated 15,000 supporters had gathered as they awaited the results of Yoon’s impeachment trial. The Presbyterian pastor in her 50s hoped to catch a glimpse of the man she called “Mr. President,” though she didn’t manage to see him.

When the news broke at 11:22 a.m. local time that the Constitutional Court had unanimously decided to remove Yoon from office, Kang felt overwhelmed by despair and wondered if God had abandoned her country. “It felt like standing at the edge of the Red Sea, like the Israelites during the Exodus,” she said.

A half-hour bus ride away from Yoon’s residence, a markedly different scene unfolded at Sookmyung Women’s University. Jeon Jeehoo, 24, sat with a friend from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, watching the live broadcast of Yoon’s ruling in a classroom with about 150 fellow students.

Upon hearing the verdict, Jeon burst into tears while others around her screamed with joy. She recalled the many winter nights she and her friends had spent on the streets protesting against Yoon and felt a sense of relief.

“I normally don’t ask God to do certain specific things, for I believe that is God’s right and authority,” Jeon said. “However, in this case, I was never more desperate.”

For six weeks, South Korea waited anxiously for updates on Yoon’s political fate after the final hearing of his trial concluded on February 25. When the Constitutional Court announced its judgment on April 4, protesters danced in the streets while supporters screamed and broke down in tears. A meme that read “404: President Not Found” began circulating rapidly. Yoon supporters, meanwhile, created a new slogan: “Yoon again!”

Korean evangelicals have also found themselves split over the ruling. Some see it as God’s just judgment, while others are disappointed by the outcome. Believers struggle to see how they can reconcile with those on the other side of the political divide.

“I don’t think it’s possible to restore relationships with those who’ve already been brainwashed and lost their discernment,” said Kang. “It might only deepen spiritual harm and cause further division.”

Yoon, who had been in power since May 2022, is the second president in the country to be impeached. In 2017, the Constitutional Court ousted former president Park Geun-hye for violating the Constitution and laws while in office. (Yoon had helped to impeach Park when he was a prosecutor.)

This time, the court ruled Yoon’s declaration of martial law last December illegal. It also claimed Yoon undermined the National Assembly and other governmental institutions by mobilizing the military and police. Acting president Han Duck-soo said a presidential election will be held on June 3.

Yoon was not in court when the judges delivered the verdict. “I am very sorry and regretful that I could not live up to your expectations,” he wrote in a statement shortly after the court’s decision. “I will always pray for our beloved Republic of Korea and its citizens.”

Yoon faces another criminal trial on charges of insurrection for declaring martial law.

Moon Chan, 50, who had joined protests calling for Yoon to step down, believes the verdict was “an example of how the wicked fall into their own pride and schemes as God carries out his justice.”

His daughter Hyein, who protested with him, added that she had been praying for God to protect Korea. “I believed impeachment was essential for the country’s stability and recovery,” she said. “This result felt like a divine response.”

Kim Jae-gwon, who wanted Yoon reinstated, felt a surge of frustration when he heard the court verdict. A cry of anguish escaped his lips. But the 74-year-old retired pastor has continued to trust in God’s sovereignty. “I had prayed earnestly that this outcome would not come to pass, but my prayers were not answered,” Kim said. “Still, I choose to believe that there is a greater purpose behind it all.”

Church denominations and parachurch organizations have urged believers to maintain peace in the wake of Yoon’s impeachment ruling. The Anglican Church of Korea encouraged the country “to grow stronger while [tolerating] differences.” The Communion of Churches in Korea (CCIK) called for Christians to speak and act in ways that align with the message of Jesus and to vote in the upcoming election for a candidate who fears God.

Yet some Christian leaders decided to stir up dissent instead.

Jun Kwang-hoon, the outspoken pastor of Sarang Jeil church, led an 18,000-strong protest the day after the court verdict dropped. Participants chanted slogans like “impeachment invalid” and “impeachment is fraud” as Jun rallied them to start a revolution against what he perceived as the court’s unjust decision.

The evangelical pro-Yoon group Save Korea initially planned to hold a demonstration the day after the court ruling but canceled it shortly after the verdict, saying that they accepted the court’s decision.

After Yoon declared martial law on December 3, Moon Chan began learning where people in his church, Onnuri Church, stood politically. “At times, I felt confused, even angry,” the businessman said. “I sensed a deep disconnect in some conversations, as if we couldn’t truly understand each other.”

His frustration and disappointment grew into something more serious. “Over time, those feelings built up into resentment—and I came to realize that such hatred doesn’t come from God but from Satan,” he said.

Christians aren’t sure how to repair the political divide within the church. Jeon Jaehyung, Jeehoo’s father, shared that he does not desire “closer fellowship” with conservative churches, particularly those in the far right.

“I no longer have a place in my heart for these churches,” he said. “I can only hope that the passage of time and each of us trying hard from our own positions will foster mutual understanding.”

Kim affirmed that reconciling with other believers who hold divergent political views is important and necessary, even when it’s hard to understand believers who “sympathize with Communist ideology.” (Korean evangelicals like Kim feel that Yoon was instrumental in resisting the spread of Communist influences in the country.)

To build a democratic nation, Kim says, Christians “must learn to walk alongside those with different beliefs—even those who do not share our faith.”

Moon Chan continues to beseech God for greater compassion. “Through this impeachment crisis, I’ve been asking God to guard my heart so that it doesn’t turn against others,” he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the Communion of Churches in Korea as a member of the World Evangelical Alliance.

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News

Evangelicals Won’t Dance with the Devil

Franco Iacomini

Why Salvadoran Protestants boycott a traditional Holy Week event.

Salvadorans dressed as "Talcigüín" and Jesus dance during the tradition of Los Talcigüines in Texistepeque.

APHOTOGRAFIA / Contributor / Getty

The morning after Palm Sunday, a mysterious procession of red-clad figures enters the main square of Texistepeque, a small town in northwestern El Salvador. The talcigüines (Nahuatl for “devilish”) have just attended 8 a.m. mass at San Esteban Catholic Church and now, leather whips in hand, are striking whoever crosses their path.

Many visitors are eager to feel the sting.

Every year, tourists come from across the region to participate in the local Holy Week tradition. Some believe that each stroke of the talcigüines’ whips means God sees one less sin on their ledgers of wrongdoing. Others come only as observers of the unusual practice, which was developed out of Roman Catholicism, the Matthew 4 account of Satan tempting Jesus, and the local Indigenous Pipiles culture and dates back at least as far as 1850.

César Velásquez hopes these tourists make time to drop by his souvenir store, where he sells glasses, keychains, and calendars. In 2022, the designer created a special collection of talcigüin mugs, hoping to recoup some of the money he lost after the government canceled the event in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19.

Customers liked his work, but fellow congregants at his Assemblies of God church disapproved, accusing Velásquez of worshiping the Devil and of supporting the Catholic church. When he ran into fellow church members on the streets, some looked the other way. These reactions, along with what he calls the “excessive legalism and conservatism” of local evangelicals, led him to leave his church for one 12 miles away.

“Evangelicals in Texistepeque don’t even want to leave their homes so that people don’t think they’re participating in the festival,” he said.

But living in this small town, Velásquez feels he has little economic choice but to engage in the city’s largest event of the year. His latest design depicts a silhouette of San Esteban Church alongside a red figure.

Many of the evangelicals boycotting the festival are converts from Catholicism, who don’t approve of the holiday’s fanciful retelling of a serious passage of Scripture.

The event begins when the actors portraying the talcigüines and Jesus attend Mass. After the service concludes and the talcigüines begin whipping people, Jesus enters the scene, holding a small cross and playing a hand bell. Over the course of the morning, Jesus walks through the square as, one by one, the talcigüines dance in front of him and simulate blows in a choreographed fight. Eventually, each talcigüín lies down, defeated. Jesus steps on each one and keeps walking.

Around 11 a.m., all the defeated talcigüines lie down in front of the church in a line. A serene but triumphant Jesus walks over each one, a symbol of the triumph of good over evil, and enters San Esteban. The crowd applauds.

Historians consider the Salvadoran festival a relic of the pantomimes that Catholic priests used to evangelize Indigenous populations and believe the Franciscan’s habits inspired the talcigüines’ attire.

For years, the entire town threw itself into the festival. But as the country became more evangelical, many no longer wanted to be associated with anything that felt like an endorsement of Roman Catholicism or indigenous practices. (Currently, 44 percent of Salvadorans identify as Catholics, while evangelicals make up 39 percent.)

Born in Guatemala, Maynor Beltetón has lived in El Salvador for 25 years and pastors Iglesia Macedonia, in Texistepeque. Despite living in the city, the professor at the Instituto Biblico Castillo del Rey (Castle of the King Biblical Institute) has never seen the talcigüines festival in person and discourages Christians from attending.

“This is not harmless dramatization,” he said. “It has an origin, a purpose, and a theological meaning that are incompatible with evangelical Christianity.”

Spotlighting the demons and promoting the idea that a whiplash can remove one’s sin undermines Jesus’ role in salvation, argues Beltetón, quoting 1 Corinthians 10:21, which says, “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons.” He also believes the festival gives undue prominence to the Devil and confuses new believers about what is and isn’t the gospel.

“Although it includes the figure of Christ, its purpose is not to exalt him and his redemptive work,” he said.

Ronald Peñate, who briefly pastored a small Texistepeque congregation in 2017, described the event as “just a dramatization.”

Peñate sees the demonization of the festival as emblematic of a conservatism that keeps the church looking inward and keeps it from growing. But this attitude put him at odds with church members who asked Assemblies of God denominational leaders to remove him after only three months on the job. Peñate obliged and now pastors a church in a nearby city.

Peñate wanted to encourage his former congregation to see the talcigüines event as an evangelism opportunity and an opportunity to engage those from out of town.

Meanwhile, though Iglesia Macedonia is just five blocks away from San Esteban church and the city park that hosts most of the festival, Beltetón has no plans to visit the park during Holy Week.

“They’re going to whip you,” he said. “You don’t have time to preach, to show the true victory of Christ.”

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Culture

Review

A Jesus Movie … with Charles Dickens?

Peter T. Chattaway

The star-studded new kids’ movie “The King of Kings” cleverly tells the story of the gospels with a creative framing device.

Charles Dickens voiced by Kenneth Branagh in The King of Kings.

It’s not uncommon for animated movies about Jesus to tell their stories from a child’s perspective. The Miracle Maker—for my money, still one of the best Jesus movies in any format—is told partly from the point of view of Jairus’s daughter. Light of the World, which comes out later this year, focuses on Jesus’ relationship with John (the youngest disciple, according to tradition), who is depicted in the film as an “ordinary boy.”

The King of Kings, an Angel Studios release opening this week, also puts a child protagonist front and center, though it comes at the gospel from a rather different angle. Instead of highlighting a child from the first century, it presents the narrative as told by 19th-century writer Charles Dickens (voiced by Kenneth Branagh) to his young son, Walter (Jojo Rabbit’s Roman Griffin Davis).

There’s a historical basis for this framing device. Dickens—famous for novels like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities—also wrote a book about Jesus called The Life of Our Lord, which he read to his children every Christmas. Dickens refused to publish this one. Indeed, it was so personal to his family that the book—which was written in the 1840s—wasn’t published until after the last of his children died in the 1930s.

The King of Kings is different from The Life of Our Lord in some ways. But the central conceit—a father tells a story to his son—allows the film to approach the story of Jesus, even its darker parts, in a child-appropriate way. The dialogue between Charles and Walter—especially the fact that Walter can interject with the occasional question—allows the film to explain details big (What’s the Passover?) and small (What’s a manger?) that might otherwise fly over the heads of younger viewers.

The basic beats are all here: the birth of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac), his childhood in Nazareth, his visit to the temple when he was 12, his baptism by John the Baptist, some of his more famous miracles, and finally the events of Holy Week, including his death and resurrection.

At times, Walter and his father stand apart from the story, discussing it from the safety of Charles’s study or watching from a distance within the first-century setting. At other times, they take part in the action, sometimes to comic effect—as when their cat, Willa, gets lost in the crowd—and sometimes in ways that bridge the gap between then and now, as when Walter, eating some biscuits that his mother (Uma Thurman) has brought to the study, imagines handing them over to one of the disciples. The biscuits turn into the fish and loaves with which Jesus feeds the multitude.

Despite the focus on Dickens and his family, the film—directed by Seong-ho Jang and produced by Mofac Animation, a South Korean visual-effects studio—doesn’t owe a whole lot to Dickens’s book. It often fills in details that Dickens left out, it emphasizes a different set of themes, and it is even more theologically orthodox (more Christian, one might say) than the original text.

One of the biggest differences is right there in the movie’s title. The real Dickens says very little about Jesus being a king in his book; when he uses the word, he is usually talking about one of the wicked Herods. But in the film, Walter is obsessed with stories about King Arthur, so Charles decides to tell him a story about the true King of Kings. The script is full of lines about the kind of king Jesus was: one who was humble, one who served his people, and so on.

The film is also more candid about the encounters Jesus had with Satan and the demonic world. While Dickens does say that Jesus prayed for 40 days in the wilderness, he leaves out the Temptation, and he tends to talk about the “madness” of the demoniacs Jesus healed rather than the spirits that tormented them. The film, on the other hand, deals with these stories frankly—and cleverly, too, conveying the demons’ presence through small tornado-like dust clouds. The Charles of the film makes a point of saying that Jesus resisted temptation “using only the Word of God.”

The film also emphasizes faith in a way the book never does. The Charles of King of Kings says Jesus performed miracles not just “for the sake of miracles” but “to prove the power of faith.” He even says the demons obeyed Jesus because they “knew that Jesus was the Son of God and they knew how strong his faith was.” (Some viewers might wonder how accurate it is to say that Jesus had faith; how one answers that question will presumably be affected by how one reads passages like Hebrews 12:2.) And in the film, Jesus himself tells his disciples, “Have faith in me and be saved.”

That said, King of Kings doesn’t improve on The Life of Our Lord as much as it could have. Dickens wrote about the Jews of Jesus’ day in a way that reflected the prejudices of his age, and while the film corrects some of his errors (it is much clearer in the film that it was the Romans, not the Jews, who crucified Jesus), its depiction of the Pharisees as one-dimensional villains plays into old stereotypes, however unintentionally.

Overall, though, the film is impressive, and creatively so. The framing device, in which Charles tells the story of Jesus to young Walter, allows children in the audience to see themselves in Walter even as he sees himself in the people whose lives Jesus touched. The virtual cinematography is dynamic and expressive, and in certain key sequences— as Charles explains the origin of Passover or the reason Jesus died for our sins—the film puts its regular computer animation on pause and communicates its ideas through lightly animated Gustave Doré–style woodcuts.

The script, written by Jang with an assist from Rob Edwards (The Princess and the Frog) and Jamie Thomason, includes the odd Bible-geeky detail, like when the twelve apostles are introduced and one says to another, “Hey, your dad’s name is Alphaeus too!”

And the voice actors are well cast: especially Kenneth Branagh, who brings his masterful, sensitive approach to the part of Dickens, and Oscar Isaac, who got one of his first big breaks playing Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph, in The Nativity Story and now strikes just the right note of compassionate authority as Jesus himself. (Other cast members include Mark Hamill as Herod, Forest Whitaker as Peter, Ben Kingsley as Caiaphas, and Pierce Brosnan as Pontius Pilate.)

The film makes one other theological tweak to Dickens’s book worth noting. The Life of Our Lord harps on the idea that if people are good, they can go to heaven and even become “bright angels” there. The main point of Jesus’ ministry, as Dickens saw it, was to teach us “to be better” so we could go to heaven when we die. (Dickens even seems to embrace a form of adoptionism—the belief that Jesus was a purely human person who was “adopted” by God at some point in his adulthood—when he says that Jesus himself was “so good that God [loved] Him as His own Son.”)

The film, on the other hand, puts its ultimate emphasis on the Resurrection and makes clear that the beginning of salvation is not just at some point in the future but in the here and now. “We’re alive again because he is risen,” says Charles. Amen.

Peter T. Chattaway is a film critic with a special interest in Bible movies.

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Pastors

Three Questions Your First-Time Guests Are Asking

Luke Simmons

To make a lasting impression on first-time guests, churches must move beyond logistics and speak to the deeper questions people carry through their doors.

Photo by Pearl / Lightstock

In the era of blockbuster romantic comedy films, one man was able to do the impossible: discover What Women Want. In the film, the chauvinistic Nick Marshall, played by Mel Gibson, is struggling in his work and family relationships. After a freak accident, he gains the supernatural ability to hear the thoughts of every woman nearby.

He quickly discovers that mind reading opens him up to both possibility and peril. The comedy plays with the idea that, to most men, discerning what women want is more difficult than splitting the atom.

In many ways, church leaders often wish we had a superpower like Nick Marshall’s and could hear the thoughts and desires of our first-time guests. What are they really thinking? What unspoken questions are they wrestling with? Fortunately, when it comes to getting inside the heads of church guests, it’s far less of a mystery. Unlike the fictional world of romantic comedies, real-life ministry offers us practical ways to understand what newcomers are thinking and feeling when they walk through our doors.

Getting into the mind of a first-time visitor

After more than 20 years in pastoral ministry and thousands of conversations with those new to church, I’ve discovered there are consistent patterns in what newcomers are asking themselves. These concerns aren’t merely casual curiosities—they’re deeply personal questions that ultimately determine whether someone walks away or becomes part of our church community.

Understanding these questions has helped us discern how our team can create a truly welcoming church environment.

At a surface level, the kinds of questions asked by those who are new to our church are pretty obvious:

Where do I check my kids in?
What is a service like?
What should I wear?
What kind of a church is this?

These important logistical questions are ones many churches appropriately answer on their website “About Us” or “Sundays” pages. Some churches even create a dedicated “New Here” section to help people get oriented.

But beneath these practical inquiries lie deeper questions—the ones that guests rarely verbalize but that significantly influence their experience and decision to return. These unspoken questions reveal what guests are truly seeking when they walk through our doors.

Three questions guests are asking

After countless conversations with newcomers, I’ve discovered that nearly every guest is internally asking three fundamental questions.

1. Will this be worth my time?

Most people don’t need one more thing to do. Their lives are packed full with work, kids’ activities, family commitments, hobbies, travel, and grinding through the week.

Even their downtime is often filled with an endless stream of media: YouTube videos, social media reels, television, music, and every form of algorithmic distraction. And if the content doesn’t grab them in the first three seconds, they swipe and scroll on.

Time has become our most precious currency. In a world of constant busyness and mental activity, people instinctively evaluate every experience through this lens:

Is this worth the investment of my limited time?

Church guests are not exempt from this calculation. With so many other options competing for their attention, they’re always, even if subconsciously, asking:

Is that church worth my time?
Would I enjoy it?
Would it help me?
Will I understand what’s going on?
Will I regret giving an hour to it?

The uncomfortable truth is that in today’s culture, churches must recognize they’re not just competing with other churches for attendance—they’re competing with Netflix, youth soccer leagues, and the simple appeal of a quiet morning at home.

What makes this challenge unique for churches is that we’re offering something no streaming service, sports league, or lazy Sunday morning can provide—connection with God and His people. Many guests walk through our doors carrying a spiritual hunger they can’t quite name. They might evaluate church using the same “is this worth my time” metric they apply to everything else, but our opportunity is to help them discover something they can’t find anywhere else.

When we recognize this reality, we stop trying to compete with entertainment and instead focus on creating authentic moments where people encounter the living God.

2. Will I fit in here… really?

A pastor friend of mine once asked an elderly woman who helped lead the senior adult ministry what she’d learned from her years serving in that role. Her answer:

“All ministry is junior high ministry.”

What exactly did she mean by that?

Think back to junior high—that awkward season of profound insecurity, shifting social dynamics, and overwhelming self-consciousness. During those formative years, one concern loomed larger than all the rest: fitting in.

The truth is, we never really outgrow that fundamental human need. Whether we’re 12 or 72, we all want to belong. But here’s the crucial insight many churches miss: People don’t just want to be told they belong—they need to actually feel it.

Here’s the honest tension: as pastors and leaders, we can’t ultimately determine whether guests will feel like they belong. That decision rests with them. Often, it depends on factors outside of our influence—like whether they see others who look like them or whether they share a similar story.

Even though we can’t guarantee a guest will feel at home, we can take meaningful steps to create a genuinely welcoming environment. We can strive to understand and appreciate all kinds of people. We can be intentional about building relational connections between people who might naturally appreciate and enjoy each other.

The goal isn’t to manufacture a sense of belonging, but to cultivate thoughtfully designed spaces where it can take root and naturally flourish as the Spirit moves.

3. How will this help my family?

It’s almost a cliché: I grew up going to church, but kind of drifted away. But now that I have a family of my own, I want my kids to have a good spiritual foundation.

This sentiment—expressed in nearly identical words—reveals something profound about what drives many adults back to church:

Parents are searching for trusted allies in the battle for their children’s hearts and minds.

In a world where children are exposed to moral chaos and confusion, many parents feel overwhelmed. They’re looking for guidance. They want help. They need direction.

Almost every church thinks about helping families at a surface level. They aim to provide a safe, clean, and fun ministry environment for children. But these baseline offerings barely scratch the surface of what families truly need.

Churches that truly understand the weight behind this third question—How will this help my family?—don’t stop at a good Sunday experience. They position themselves as active partners, coming alongside parents in the spiritual formation of the next generation.

Imagine what a church truly fighting for families might offer to parents:

Healthy and meaningful mentoring relationships with loving, trusted adults (beyond the parents)
Support and resources to help parents navigate the tough conversations on topics like God, technology, gender, and sexuality
Encouragement and tools to strengthen marriages and break unhealthy generational patterns
A context of care and support through seasons of trials and suffering

Understanding these three underlying desires of church guests isn’t as complicated as we might think:

Guests want church to be worth their time.

They want to genuinely belong, not just be welcomed.

And they want support in raising spiritually healthy families.

When churches intentionally address these deeper questions, they create environments where guests don’t just visit once or twice—they return. They become part of the community. And in time, they invite others to do the same.

Editor’s Note: Stay tuned next week for a follow-up article from Luke Simmons where he turns the tables and suggests three questions pastors should be asking their visitors.

Luke Simmons is the lead pastor at Ironwood Church. He coaches leaders, church planters, and pastors, in addition to creating resources and experiences for pastors through FaithfulAndFruitful.com.

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Ideas

Our Rights Come from God

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

Good government can and must secure our life and liberty, but our rights don’t depend on anything as flimsy as citizenship.

Undocumented immigrants are shackled before boarding an ICE charter jet.

John Moore / Getty

It was an “administrative error,” the Trump administration conceded in a court filing at the end of March, to deport a Salvadoran man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia from his home in Maryland to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison. But error or not, the administration averred, what’s done is done. Though Abrego Garcia had been granted a withholding of removal by an American judge in 2019, the US government declined to fetch him back. The administration is uninterested in correcting its mistake.

As of this writing, Abrego Garcia’s case remains in contention, and the White House is enmeshed in many similar court battles, not least those concerning the deeply troubling detentions of foreign students for their political views.

Just this week, the Supreme Court ruled that though the administration would be permitted to move forward with deportations of Venezuelan migrants to the same Salvadoran prison, it could not do so on a whim. People subject to “detention and removal” under the law in question are “entitled” to “judicial review,” the conservative majority held, to determine whether the allegations against them are true “before such removal occurs” (my emphasis). Indeed, the court affirmed, citing Reno v. Flores (1993), “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law.”

Let’s set aside the details of these cases for a moment. I find it absurd to justify the Venezuelan deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, because that law is only applicable in situations of “declared war,” and we are not in such a situation and have not been since September of 1945. But suppose you disagree. That’s fine. The point is about the rule of law itself. It is about due process and the very source of our rights.

My contention with the court is that we owe due process of law to all people in the United States, regardless of the allegations against them or their immigration status. But I would quibble with one word of the majority opinion’s phrasing: entitles. In the Fifth Amendment and elsewhere, the Constitution guarantees due process and rule of law for all. But at a fundamental level, our entitlement to these goods does not come from any law, not even the supreme law of the land.

Good government can and must secure our rights to life, liberty, property, religion, speech, assembly, and more. But the state does not and cannot create those rights. It has not that power. It is only their guardian.

The foundational insight of US law and politics is that these rights predate the government, that they are real and enduring regardless of who is in power and with what agenda, and that they do not depend on anything as flimsy as legislation or citizenship or—God forbid—executive orders. They are an unalienable endowment. And though the preexistence of our rights certainly can be assumed and asserted in secular terms, as in our Constitution, here at Christianity Today, let’s cut to the chase: Our rights come from God.

Individual rights, human rights, constitutional rights—whatever phrase you prefer—exist because of the imago Dei, because of God, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17, KJV throughout). They do not come from princes, “in whom there is no help” (Ps. 146:3).

As the poet John Milton argued in 1649 in a proto-republican text, “No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.” Every person is God’s creature for whom Christ died and therefore of incalculable worth. No person has authority to say otherwise. There is no divine right of kings, nor of presidents.

This divine origin of our rights has two implications for our present politics, implications to which we as American Christians would do well to attend, whatever our political aims. One is that our rights cannot be limited without due process of law, and the other is that our rights cannot be denied, regardless of who we are.

On the first point, as Milton observes, human government is necessitated by the Fall:

Till from the root of Adam’s transgression, falling among themselves to do wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, [humans] agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury, and jointly to defend themselves against any that gave disturbance or opposition to such agreement. Hence came cities, towns and commonwealths. And because no faith in all was found sufficiently binding, they saw it needful to ordain some authority, that might restrain by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common right.

That authority to restrain is not boundless. The foundation of God-given rights remains, even if we are obliged by the fruits of sin and death to build on it a prison. This means that our rights do not go away even when we are accused of some grave evil, but they may be constrained if we are found guilty under due process of law.

Of course, the state rarely needs to hear that. The government doesn’t have to be told twice about its opportunities to constrain our rights. What it must be told not twice but endlessly is the converse: that our rights cannot be constrained without due process and, therefore, that when due process has not been provided, the government is obliged to make things right.

Practically speaking: Perhaps Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s withholding of removal should be revoked. Perhaps he should be deported. I will be agnostic on that question here. But “administrative error” is not and never will be an acceptable means to that end. Abrego Garcia must be returned to the United States and given due process of law. And maybe that process will not go the way he hopes. So be it. But the process must happen.

It must happen for his own sake, because of his own rights. But it also must happen for my sake and yours and the sake of everyone in this country where we seek—rightly, haltingly, insufficiently, in our best moments—to be, in John Adams’s words, “an empire of laws and not of men.”

Ah, you may be thinking, but Abrego Garcia is not one of “us.” He is not a US citizen. True enough, but it doesn’t matter.

It might well matter if our rights came from the law. In that case, we should have to rely on what the law tells us about citizenship and the durability of rights across borders. But my core argument is that our rights do not come from the law. The law is merely their defender. Our rights come from God. And that means, to my second point, that they cannot be denied, regardless of who we are.

Citizenship is not a trifling matter. There are many circumstances where it makes a difference. But God does not dole out the imago Dei according to citizenship. If we imagine we can justly deny each other God-endowed rights on that basis, we act above our station. Think what you please about this president or that policy, but the state does not trump God, not even if national security is at stake.

Now, as it happens, this reality is duly reflected in our Constitution. As the Supreme Court observed this week—echoing past decisions and father of the Constitution James Madison—“It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law.” The Constitution is typically precise in its language. It says citizen when it means citizen (for example, in the qualifications to be president or in the Privileges and Immunities clause) and person when it means person.

The Fifth Amendment, which says the government may not take “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” says person. Though there is some legal ambiguity around some constitutional rights accorded to the people, a phrase sometimes understood as the citizenry and sometimes as the whole population, there is no ambiguity here. Due process in the United States does not depend on citizenship. The Fifth Amendment guarantees it to everyone in the US and directly ties it to our most basic rights, the rights that come from God.

Let me conclude by noting the utter banality of everything I’ve written here. This is basic, basic stuff if you are an American: I am drawing on the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, words every schoolchild should know.

It is even more basic if you are a Christian. I am drawing on Genesis 1 and the first sentence of the Nicene Creed. Our rights come from God. That is not the formulation every Christian in every time and place would use to express the divine source of human worth, but it is a perfectly useful and defensible one. It is one American evangelicals have long employed (sometimes to our compatriots’ scorn). We should keep on saying it, particularly those of us who helped elect an administration in which due process is apparently not a priority.

And while we may or may not want to move our immigration policy in a more restrictionist direction—this is a matter on which reasonable Christians and Americans can disagree—the way to do that is to change the law, then follow it. What we must not do is ignore or distort the law. We must not willingly let errors stand. We must not abrogate God-given rights with untenable shortcuts we will come to regret.

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

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Culture

Ins Choi, the Accidental Preacherman

Isabel Ong

The creator of “Kim’s Convenience” wrestled with the call to pastoral ministry. But his faith and art have led him there nevertheless.

Ins Choi in Son of a Preacherman.

Photography by Chelsey Stuyt

Would Jesus wear Birkenstocks, flip-flops, or Crocs if he were here today?

It’s a cool spring night in early April, and close to 120 of us are seated elbow to elbow in the basement of an Anglican church on a quiet residential corner in Vancouver, Canada. In the center of the space, standing on piles of Persian carpets, is a performer with salt-and-pepper hair, a band of musicians behind him.

The man continues singing a jazzy ditty: Would Jesus ban plastic bags? Would he be a fan of Jesus Christ Superstar? Would he look at the church and say, “What the?”

We laugh loudly and often as the performer asks his amusing questions: how Jesus would act and what he would say about us, the world, and the church. But the performer, Ins Choi, never laughs along—as if to underscore that these silly thought experiments are actually worthy of contemplation.

Most people are better acquainted with Choi’s art than with the artist himself. He’s the creator behind Kim’s Convenience, the hit play turned TV series on the life of a Korean immigrant family in Toronto, which won rave reviews as a “charming, understated family dramedy” with a “quietly revolutionary” approach to portraying Korean food culture on screen. Cast members have garnered best actor and actress accolades from the Canadian Screen Awards, with one actor (Simu Liu) going on to score the role of Shang-Chi in the Marvel universe.

But here, in the darkened confines of Pacific Theater, hosted by Holy Trinity, Vancouver, there is no caricature of the stereotypical Korean immigrant—speaking in broken English, working hard to save up money, insular in thinking—to serve as comedic relief. Instead, the 51-year-old actor-playwright lays bare his life experiences with aching vulnerability, albeit replete with self-deprecating and sometimes incongruous humor.

Few people are able to hold an audience’s attention span for 80 whole minutes. But Choi can, and with apparent ease. Most of Son of a Preacherman—a world premiere, running until April 13—is a monologue, backed up by a trio of talented musician-actors (Ben Elliot, Rachel Angco, and Haneul Yi). Alternating between song and spoken word, Choi weaves together the threads of his life story, including his family’s sojourn out of North Korea into the south and his supposed destiny—to be a preacher just like his father, grandfather, and cousins.

Throughout Son of a Preacherman, Choi breaks the fourth wall over and over again. We are intimately present as he wrestles with his artistic vocation, which he embarks on after a dream in which Jesus flicks him on the forehead (twice). We hear his plaintive cry of trust in God despite friends encouraging him to give up on his craft. When he tells the audience, “Thank you for coming,” before closing the show with a stirring, hopeful poem, we are collectively (and disappointingly!) jolted from our immersion in his world.

That God, Jesus, and church are mentioned repeatedly in the play without cringe or kitsch is a testament to Choi’s finesse. In life and art, he navigates the tensions between creative calling and cultural expectations, between devotion and self-expression.

Choi was born in South Korea in 1974. His family resettled in Scarborough, Ontario, and lived above their uncle’s grocery shop, where Choi would while away his time writing poetry and songs.

He grew up in Toronto Korean Bethel Church, an immigrant community, where his father’s effusive preaching style piqued his interest in the art of storytelling. Sticking pictures on the walls of the tiny storage-locker room that was his office, the pastor would pore over books, then write his sermons, rehearsing them out loud. At the pulpit, he mimicked different animal noises: a rooster, a cow, a sheep, a dog. “He would play the fool, a clown,” Choi said in an interview with CT.

God found the 15-year-old preacher’s son not in the pews of his father’s church but at a Korean youth group gathering in downtown Toronto, where Choi was sitting in the back with the cool skateboarders and hoping to meet girls. Choi had been to other events like this. But this time, when the speaker invited students to come to the front if they wanted to meet Jesus, something prompted him to go forward. He grabbed his skateboard, pretending he was going to go to the restroom. Instead, he walked down the center aisle, weeping and falling to his knees as a counselor prayed over him.

“It was quite an emotional, euphoric moment of experiencing the God I heard about,” the one whom his father and grandfather had dedicated their lives to, Choi said. “It was like a reunion.”

When Choi didn’t get into university, he attended Bible college, dropped out, then studied theater at Toronto’s York University. He struggled to land roles, frustrated by the one-dimensional bit parts regularly offered to actors of Asian descent. He began working as a part-time children’s pastor at his father’s church while spending long hours penning poetry and plays at the coffeehouse Tim Hortons.

He also began pursuing a master of theological studies from the evangelical Anglican Wycliffe College in Toronto. Marion Taylor, who taught Choi Old Testament, said that his time there helped the fledgling artist to integrate his gifts in drama and production with his faith.

Choi would seize the opportunity to “dramatize Scripture and make it his own in class,” she said. In one instance, Choi memorized parts of the opening chapters of the Book of Lamentations. As he was practicing his oration in a big hall at the college, a passerby who overheard his recitation thought someone was having a nervous breakdown. “He was just lamenting over the destruction and the blood [in the book],” Taylor said.

After seminary, Choi began writing a play about a Korean immigrant family running a convenience store in Toronto, based on the parable of the Prodigal Son. No one wanted it when he first shopped the script around theaters in Toronto, Choi tells us in Preacherman.

His breakthrough came in 2011 with a performance at the Toronto Fringe Festival. When the play ended, there was complete silence. Choi felt stricken by self-doubt; perhaps the audience had hated it. Then cheers and applause filled the space. Choi’s career took off; he went on to be the writer, cocreator, and executive producer for the TV adaptation.

Watching Kim’s Convenience, you might be able to tell its creator is a Christian. There are characters like Umma (Jean Yoon), a devout believer who always exhorts others to “praise the Jesus,” and pastor Nina Gomez (Amanda Brugel), the earnest, awkward leader of her rambunctious Korean flock. The characters are sweetly sincere and relatable in expressing their faith, which heightens the comedy when they reveal their flawed humanity. It’s like Appa (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) says: “Every time you gossip, you make the baby Jesus cry.”

The show, which debuted in 2016, faced criticism in its later years, with the majority-Asian cast lamenting the production team’s lack of diversity and accusing them of creating racist storylines. After its fifth and final season, Choi walked away from the project, saying that he had “nothing more to give this.” Kim’s Convenience was eventually canceled in 2021.

Outside the TV series, Choi’s body of work mainly revolves around playwriting. He staged Songs, Stories, and Spoken Words in 2018 and Bad Parent in 2022, which details the ups and downs of new parenthood. (Much of the latter’s material was drawn from his experiences as a first-time dad.)

Now with Son of a Preacherman, Choi has returned to the stage—possibly the place where he feels most comfortable showcasing the intricacies of a baptized imagination, as C. S. Lewis puts it. Preacherman isn’t Choi’s first explicitly Christian work. There’s Subway Stations of the Cross, an hour-long solo show in which a homeless man brings an urgent message from God, and The KJV: The Bible Show, in which Choi shares his experiences with the translation.

It’s lonely being a writer, Choi told CT. The social aspects of theater—lunching together, working with designers and the director, and having a common goal—attracted him back to acting. “It’s such a public, communal experience. … I missed it a lot,” he said. “It was good for me to be in community—like church.”

Haneul Yi, a young Korean Canadian actor and musician, is part of Preacherman’s ensemble. One of his favorite songs in the show is “I Rejoice,” which speaks about the struggles Choi faced as a Korean Canadian artist: feeling overlooked and forgotten, perennially an outsider in the spaces he hoped to inhabit. It’s one of the few songs in the play directly addressed to God.

Yi said Choi told the cast that two identities define who he is: a follower of Jesus and an artist. “I can really see both in his life; it just shines in the words he says and the actions he takes,” Yi said.

In Preacherman, Choi explains how he contemplated following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and becoming a preacher. It was a well-trodden path, one that felt safe and familiar. But he wrestled with, and eventually surrendered to, a stronger desire to act and write.

“When I’m on stage, when I’m acting, I feel like God is smiling on me,” Choi said in a 2021 interview. “I feel like he’s shining his light on me, because it’s what he created me to do.”

Choi’s creative work still reflects much of what a serious expounder of the Word does: probing and interrogating theology and praxis in a gritty, rubber-meets-the-road kind of way. In Preacherman, he incorporates a hilarious spiel on what the biblical prophets would say and do if they all got together: Who would be ostracized, and how would they react to the only one (Samuel) who got a sequel?

In Subway Stations of the Cross, he conveys the surprising grace of God in the guise of a social outcast through a poem: “God is calling for you / God is falling for you / It’s appalling how much God is falling for you.”

“I’m not a preacher,” he declares in Preacherman. “I never became a preacher.” But as a friend texted him after the preview in Toronto, “The irony is that you are preaching the gospel through your storytelling.”

“Serving your audience is also a ministry,” Choi told CT. “I feel like people go to a theater [and] all of a sudden they feel like they’re part of a group experiencing a show together. They laugh together, they gasp together, and so they feel less alone.”

Son of a Preacherman examines the tension between art and faith with unflinching honesty. Ultimately, Choi shows us that this tension is good, even necessary, shaping us into the people God made us to be. Artist and Christian can be one and the same.

Isabel Ong is the East Asia editor for Christianity Today.

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Theology

How Christians Embrace Nihilism

Russell Moore

Columnist

The church’s current temptation is a Christology empty of Jesus and a biblical authority void of the Word.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

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

“It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches.” This is the assessment my friend David Brooks offers in the latest issue of The Atlantic about the state of a movement he once claimed for himself: American conservatism.

Brooks notes that despite the people-versus-elites messaging, virtually all of the national leaders he sees celebrating cruelty and vice are wealthy Ivy Leaguers. He dubs them “Vineyard Vines nihilists.” Brooks argues that this would be bad enough were it just a political matter, but the nihilism, he argues, has “eaten away at Christianity” too.

Many of these nihilists, Brooks writes, “ostentatiously identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart—or, to be more precise, a high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.”

“To Nietzsche, all of those Christian pieties about justice, peace, love, and civility are constraints that the weak erect to emasculate the strong,” Brooks continues. “In this view, Nietzscheanism is a morality for winners. It worships the pagan virtues: power, courage, glory, will, self-assertion,” as well as domination over “those sick sentimentalists who practice compassion.”

When it comes to Christianity, at least one thinker did see the embrace of nihilism coming—40 years ago.

In his 1986 book The Seduction of Christianity, French philosopher Jacques Ellul warned that a move of Christianity toward nihilism—literally, the belief in nothing—was already happening in recognizable stages.

Christianity moves toward nihilism, Ellul argued, when we see “the transforming of a living movement of relationship into an achieved and definite situation.” Ellul said that this kind of “freezing” of a relational religion into an artifact was anticipated by the New Testament itself.

“This was the mistake of the disciples when they saw the transfiguration and proposed to set up the tents so that they could remain in the ineffable light in company with Moses and Elijah,” Ellul wrote. “It is the mistake of an attempt to solidify in an arrested comprehensive and explicable system that which is an unforeseeable movement toward some outcome.”

When I first read this passage many years ago, I disagreed with Ellul’s assessment. And in many ways, I still would.

At first glance, Ellul seems to be making the sharp distinction between “doctrine” and “experience” that was characteristic of much of 19th- and 20th-century Protestant liberalism. As a careful student of Karl Barth, Ellul would have known that an experiential Christianity shorn of an objective Word led to its own kind of nihilism—the “natural theology” that evolved into the Volk religion of German blood and soil that led, ultimately, to death camps.

And if what Ellul means by “freezing” is the transformation of the living, relational revelation of Christ into a commitment to a canonical, textual authority that stands outside of and over the person and the church, I would argue that this “freezing” isn’t the source of our present nihilism. If anything, it’s the exact opposite.

Many of those urging evangelicals to “get real”—and, thus, to get over the “losing” mentality of the Sermon on the Mount—speak loudly about the authority of the Bible but strangely say very little about the actual words of the Bible.

In fact, many of those most gleeful in empowering the kind of Nietzscheanism that Brooks describes are far more conversant with natural law than with the biblical text, with a “worldview” abstracted from the text rather than the actual text itself—with its narrative and poetry and calls to sacrifice as well as with its doctrinal systems and moral admonitions.

If I can think of one defining characteristic that I could have—and should have—seen coming, it would be those who love Christology but not Jesus, biblical authority but not the Bible, conservatism but not that which is to be conserved.

That, in fact, is the stage Ellul was most prophetic in seeing from afar—what he calls “dissociation.” He wrote, “It breaks the link between the Word and him who speaks it, between persona and proclamation (e.g., the fact that the word of Jesus is true only because it is he who speaks it).”

Ellul argued that this happens whenever there is, contra to the New Testament, the articulation of a “‘Christian’ morality that is independent of faith” and conversion. He wrote that the perennial temptation of the church is to take up an effort “to achieve objective conduct without reference to the spiritual life, without the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.” In that sense, the old song is right: “There’s nothin’ cold as ashes / After the fire is gone.”

As Flannery O’Connor put it:

Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than it is if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac. Both of these kinds of knowledge are necessary, but in the last four or five centuries we in the Church have over-emphasized the abstract and consequently impoverished our imagination and our capacity for prophetic insight.

Christianity is more than just “a personal relationship with Jesus.” That’s true. But it certainly cannot ever be less than that.

When people created to be in communion with God, through Christ, in a living communion, replace that with “the experience of the numinous” generically, they end up with a dead moralism.

But when they replace that living faith with a set of ever-narrowing doctrinal requirements or “worldview propositions,” they end up filling the need for vitality with what seems most alive at the moment. In our moment, that’s politics.

Politics comes ready-made with its own version of revival and lots of heretics to hunt and boundaries to police, all with the added bonus that one need not actually crucify the flesh and can actually celebrate the “utilitarian” purposes of what Jesus said led to death.

The American church has not yielded fully, or even (I think and pray) mostly, to nihilism. But as God warned Cain, it “is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it” (Gen. 4:7, ESV throughout).

The hour, though, is late. The tents are here on the mountaintop, but where’s Moses? Where’s Elijah? Where is the glory? To find that again, we must listen for the voice that once thundered from the cloud: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matt. 17:5).

A church that turns from nihilism will be disoriented—just as Peter, James, and John were when the voice spoke. But the end result will be the same: “And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only” (v. 8).

Many of our evangelical clichés have proven to be truer than we knew. “Jesus plus nothing equals everything,” the pulpit aphorism went. It’s true—Jesus plus nothing does equal everything. Jesus plus nihilism, though, is impossible. We must love the one and hate the other.

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

News

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Moving to Canada

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

The influential seminary, once called a “love gift to the worldwide church of Christ,” has long struggled financially.

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School screengrab

A prominent but troubled evangelical seminary has agreed to be acquired by a Canadian university and move to British Columbia, the school’s leaders announced Tuesday.

The move comes after years of financial struggle and declining attendance at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School—known as TEDS—an Evangelical Free Church school whose alums have played an outsized role in shaping American evangelicalism.

Trinity will continue to hold classes at its Bannockburn, Illinois, campus north of Chicago during the 2025–2026 academic year but will move to the campus of Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, in 2026. Current faculty will get a contract for the coming year, but it’s unclear how many will move to Canada in the future.

The school said current students will be able to complete their program through in-person and online options. Students who are US citizens will still be eligible for federal financial aid, though the school said details about scholarships for students have yet to be determined.

Along with moving, TEDS will part ways with Trinity International University, its parent nonprofit, which will continue to run online classes and operate a law school in Santa Ana, California. Trinity International President Kevin Kompelien said that given the challenges in higher education, the divinity school needed to ally itself with a larger institution.

“I believe a school like TEDS will thrive best and accomplish our mission most effectively as part of a larger theologically and missionally aligned evangelical Christian university,” Kompelien said in a statement.

Founded by Scandinavian immigrants, Trinity was born from a merger in the 1940s of the Chicago-based Swedish Bible Institute and the Minnesota-based Norwegian-Danish Bible Institute. Though affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church, a Minneapolis-based denomination with 1,600 churches, the school has long sought to influence the wider evangelical world. Longtime former dean Kenneth Kantzer, who led the school from 1960 to 1978 and helped it grow to national prominence, called TEDS “the Free Church’s love gift to the worldwide church of Christ.”

Among the school’s alumni are historian Randall Balmer, Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, New Testament scholars Scot McKnight and Craig Blomberg, disgraced evangelist Ravi Zacharias, Christian television host John Ankerberg, and Collin Hansen, editor-in-chief of The Gospel Coalition. Longtime professor Don Carson also was one of the founders of The Gospel Coalition, helping launch the so-called Young, Restless and Reformed movement that led to a Calvinist revival among evangelicals. Kantzer went on to be editor of Christianity Today magazine. The school is also home to a number of centers, including the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, named for a prominent evangelical theologian.

But over the last decade, Trinity has fallen on hard times. In 2015, the divinity school had 1,182 students—the equivalent of 753 full-timers—making it one of the nation’s larger seminaries. By the fall of 2024, that had dropped to 813 students and 403 full-time equivalents. In 2023, the university shut down its on-campus programs, leaving it with too much property and not enough students. The university ran a $17.3 million deficit in 2023, according to its latest financial disclosure to the IRS, after shutting down its in-person undergraduate program. Trinity’s 2024 audit shows a $7.6 million deficit, with a similar deficit expected this year. A $19 million long-term loan is also coming due in 2026.

The entire Trinity campus is currently under contract, and the school hopes to close on that sale in October. After the sale is complete, Trinity will lease back part of the campus for the rest of the academic year and use the proceeds to pay off the $19 million loan. About 100 students currently live on campus and their leases will become month to month for the upcoming academic year.

A university spokesman said many details of TWU’s acquisition of TEDS remain to be sorted out, such as what happens to the Henry Center and other centers at the school and how many professors will move to Canada. The two schools are doing due diligence in hopes of finalizing the acquisition by the end of 2025.

Trinity Western will not take on any of TED’s financial obligations as part of the merger. The Canadian school’s president said the merger will lead to a “stronger combined future.”

“We are privileged to continue a longstanding legacy of evangelical scholarship and expand the impact of a global Christian education,” TWU President Todd F. Martin said in a statement. “We are driven by the same heartbeat for the gospel, and together, we can do even more to serve the Church and societies worldwide.”

Historian Joey Cochran, a TEDS alum, said news of the move to Canada is another sign that evangelicalism in the Midwest is on the decline. Institutions like TEDS, he said, once helped shaped the movement, but now most of the power has shifted to the South, he said, pointing out that Baptist seminaries in the South dominate theological education, with nearly 20,000 students enrolled in the six seminaries run by the Southern Baptist Convention or at Liberty University. That’s more than a quarter of the 74,000 seminary students in the US, according to data from the Association of Theological Schools, which includes Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish graduate schools of theology.

“We are seeing, in real time, the Southern-ification of evangelicalism,” said Cochran.

Mike Woodruff, pastor of Christ Church, a multisite evangelical church based in Lake Forest, Illinois, not far from the TEDS campus, said news of the move and merger is sad but not unexpected.

“Most graduate schools in theology are struggling,” he said. “It’s just a very different world.”

Woodruff said his church had hired grads from TEDS in the pasts and that professors from TEDS have taught in the church’s programs. The school’s presence will be missed, he said.

“It’s a loss,” he said.

Mark Labberton, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, said Trinity, like many seminaries, including Fuller, has faced serious headlines in recent years, like nearly all institutions of higher learning. While the school had outsized influence, it was tied to a smaller denomination, so had fewer resources to draw on. And while many TEDS graduates were known for their ability to innovate and influence, the school itself was less so.

“It would be known for faithfulness but not creativity alongside faithfulness,” said Labberton.

Ed Stetzer, dean of the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, said TEDS was often referred to as the “Queen of the Seminaries” and was well respected for its influence in theological education. News of the move and the school’s troubles is unsettling, he said.

“It’s a jarring moment in theological education, and a sign of the times,” he said. “Seminary education is in trouble—and more closures and mergers are coming, unless seminaries and churches find new and innovative ways to partner.”

David Dockery, a former Trinity International University president who now leads Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, said he has hope for the future of TEDS. The school has reinvented itself before, moving from Minneapolis to downtown Chicago and later to the Chicago suburbs.

“This in many ways will be Trinity 4.0,” he said. “It now has an opportunity for a new and next phase, and I pray God’s blessings upon them as they make this important transition.”

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Ideas

O Death, Where Is Your Pod?

A. Trevor Sutton

A controversial Swiss device advertises a quick and painless death. The cross shows us another way.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, AP

Millions of people travel to Switzerland each year in pursuit of its natural beauty, hiking, and skiing in the Alps. But increasingly, visitors are arriving as “suicide tourists” seeking to control their own deaths. According to Kalima Carrigan, professor at the University of Amsterdam, suicide tourism is “travelling to Switzerland for an assisted death … a ‘one-of-a-kind’ event which may be more appropriately characterised as a limit case of medical tourism.”

Several other European countries, such as Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain, permit physician-assisted suicide, but in other European countries assisted suicide is illegal and sometimes punishable by prison time. British lawmakers and citizens are actively debating assisted-dying legislation making its way through Parliament.

Across the pond, Ecuador recently legalized euthanasia; Colombia had already legalized assisted dying. Canada, ten US states, and Washington, DC, also permit physician-assisted death.

While Western countries are increasingly legalizing assisted dying, individuals—often accompanied by family and friends—still travel to other countries in order to end their lives. (Though Canada has deemed physician-assisted suicide to be legal, United States citizens cannot travel there as suicide tourists.)

One company, Exit International, faces questions surrounding its 3D-printed Sarco suicide pod, which has been called the “Tesla of euthanasia.” It allegedly enables an individual to commit suicide without the help of a physician or anyone else. According to the device’s creators, the Sarco 3.0 ensures “a peaceful and reliable death to the user inside.”

As a technology scholar, I see disturbing patterns around these conversations. The language of “suicide tourism” reveals our desire to bring death under our control and convenience. Uncomfortable though it may be, the differences between controlling one’s vacation and controlling one’s death are not as vast as we might think. The devices that we use for the perfect vacation habituate us to desire devices for the perfect death.

The designers of this device use words such as elegance, portability, and speed as unique selling features. This device may not stay confined to Switzerland; its creators have promised to make it available elsewhere—like the United Kingdom—as soon as legislation permits.

These 3D-printed pods come with many different features. The sleek design evokes the adventures of space or sea travel. Portability allows these pods to be used anywhere—at a beach, in a forest, or in the mountains, where the clear hood allows the viewer to take in the surroundings. A detachable coffin makes for convenient cleanup and disposal. According to the founders, in 60 seconds, the Sarco 3.0 replaces oxygen with nitrogen so that the person in the pod reliably dies.

Perhaps the most novel feature of this new device is that it requires no specialized skills or assistance: The user can just push a button and go. While not available yet, future iterations of the device will allow users to activate it with voice control or eye movement. The user-directed features of the Sarco 3.0 are significant since many nations have laws against aiding and abetting suicide.

Two philosophers of technology—Jacques Ellul and Albert Borgmann—can help us make sense of things like suicide pods and suicide tourism.

Jacques Ellul, a Christian sociologist and philosopher, authored the influential book The Technological Society in 1954. In this book, Ellul developed the concept of la technique,or in English simply technique. Technique, according to Ellul, is aimed at maximum efficiency and optimization: “Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” Technique is the “one best way” to do something.

Technique encroaches on every field of human activity: education, parenting, manufacturing, and countless other fields. Education seeks a technique for the one best way to teach students how to perform math problems. Parents desire a technique for the one best way to quell tantrums. Manufacturing pursues the one best way to produce parts in a factory.

The search for the one best way and for total optimization also finds its way into the world of tourism. Cruise lines and Disney vacations promise absolute vacation efficiency so people can squeeze the most out of their limited time away. Every inconvenience and interruption has been removed so participants can have a reliably good time on vacation. All the diversions and detours have been avoided for maximum efficiency. Though it may not go by the language of technique, tourism often seeks easy and reliable ways for people to have the best vacations.

The same is true for medical tourism. People travel to other places for the best, cheapest, or most efficient medical operations. For example, around 1.5 million people travel to Turkey each year as medical tourists—including so many Americans that the US Embassy and Consulates has offered guidance on how to go about doing it.

The forces behind tourism and medical tourism have spilled over into suicide tourism. The endless pursuit for the one best way tries to tame something as wild and uncontrollable as dying. A technological society that desires total optimization will inevitably create something like suicide pods. A world of technique will inevitably seek an efficient methodology for death.

The makers of the Sarco pod describe on their website other obvious methods available to commit suicide yet present their device as the pinnacle of efficiency, control, and reliability. As Exit International puts it, “Death is a voyage of sorts … Sarco makes it an event to remember?” (One might almost think they’re selling cruises.)

While Ellul helps us see how technological societies seek absolute efficiency and optimization, Albert Borgmann reveals our obsession with ease and convenience. Like Ellul, Borgmann was a philosopher of technology and was also deeply influenced by the Christian faith.

According to Borgmann’s “device paradigm,” technology has so stamped contemporary life with its peculiar pattern that it now characterizes and influences all facets of life. Technology is the characteristic way in which the world is taken up today. For example, death, dying, and technology form a triptych at life’s end. Seldom does a person now die without tubes and cords attached to the body.

Devices not only surround us but also form us. They dictate our values, morals, expectations, and experiences. According to Borgmann, devices are attractive because they are quick, easy, foolproof, and safe. Using devices like smartphones or smartwatches makes little demand on our skills, efforts, or abilities. There is no training needed to operate them. Furthermore, they offer uniformity and consistency—they work the exact same way every time.

But death is not a device. It is not easy or safe. It demands skills and abilities such as patience, endurance, faith, and trust. Death is never uniform or consistent, nor is it ultimately under our control (Job 14:5). However, a device like the Sarco 3.0 brings ease and consistency to dying. Suicide pods make no demand on our skills and abilities beyond merely getting in and pushing a button. The devices that fill our pockets and accompany us on our vacations furtively form us to think that death should be just as easy, safe, and consistent.

The Christian tradition has much to say about death and dying, including about the tools and technologies that surround them. Starting in the Middle Ages, Christians have talked about the Arma Christi,or the “weapons of Christ.” These are the instruments used in the Passion, such as the cross, the crown of thorns, and the nails.

The Arma Christi also includes more peripheral items, such as the sponge that was offered to Jesus on the cross and the lance that pierced his side. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that these are all manifestations of technology. The cross was a violent technology of the Roman Empire. Crowns, nails, sponges, and lances were all tools and technologies of the time.

There was nothing elegant or speedy about the Passion. The death of Jesus was neither safe nor easy. This messy, violent, and horrific death has transformed our relationship with life, death, and dying. Yet the resurrection of Jesus enables us to see tools and technologies, life and death in a new light and with new hope.

A world of technological devices and suicide pods needs a radically different message: “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). While designers and engineers, legislators and marketers hope for elegant, portable, and speedy ways to die, the Christian tradition hopes in something radically different in the cross of Christ and the empty tomb.

As Wendell Berry puts it in his novel Hannah Coulter, “It is this body of our suffering that Christ was born into, to suffer it Himself and to fill it with light, so that beyond the suffering we can imagine Easter morning and the peace of God.” It is in these wild and mysterious places, suffering and death, that we find an even more radical hope: victory over death and eternal life.

A. Trevor Sutton is a pastor, author, speaker, and professor. He is the author of several books, including Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits.

- More from A. Trevor Sutton

News

Uncovering Good Reporting amid Troubled Times for Journalists

Marvin Olasky

Zenger Prize winners showcase the courage and empathy needed for sound truth-telling.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, WikiMedia Commons

A 2019 novel by Jason Liegois, The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt, equates reporters with the holy fools of Russian literature, those who spoke truths that normal people could not or would not say. Most Americans are not so charitable: A Gallup survey last month showed seven in ten people had zero or little trust in mass media to report news “fully, accurately, and fairly.”

Good polling data on evangelical views of journalism is hard to find, but a survey last year by George Mason University and The Washington Post showed that only 13 percent of self-defined “white evangelical Protestants” in six swing states trusted journalists to be fair reporting on politics. The rest did not.

Yet those who lambast journalists generally miss out on some excellent, even courageous, stories. One example: Last month, The Bulletin, a Christianity Today podcast, featured an interview I did with Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic. To report and write her article “Seventy Miles in Hell,” published last August, she walked—as tens of thousands of would-be US immigrants have done—through the Darien Gap jungle in Panama.

Dickerson showed the trip’s dangers: “Looking down at a thrashing river, I held on to ropes that made it safer—slightly—to creep across sheer rock faces behind parents with crying babies strapped to their chests.” Like the migrants, she had to make it past jaguars and vipers and survive by “exceeding what I would have thought physically possible.”

Amid the hardship, Dickerson also recorded examples of empathy: “We came upon a fallen tree trunk covered in wet moss that we would have to cross like a balance beam above a racing river.” A little girl was “unsure of what to do,” so a teenaged boy not related to her “reached over, wrapped an arm around her belly, and carried her across.”

That’s one example of courageous, ground-level reporting, and today the Christian foundation Zenger House is announcing its fourth annual Zenger Prizes for thoroughly researched journalism that conveys a biblical understanding, whether or not the writers are Christians.

The name comes from John Peter Zenger, a brave 1730s Christian newspaper editor who told the truth about a corrupt New York royal governor. He went to prison for eight months during a time when laws defined journalism as public relations that should make government or church leaders look good.

Today’s 12 Zenger Prize recipients include Dickerson as well as Jason DeParle, for his November 24 New York Times article headlined “At Bible Study for the Homeless, a Search for Meaning.” (That piece and all the other winning articles since 2022 can be accessed at the Zenger Prize landing page.) The Times rarely runs a story about daily Bible studies, but DeParle described vividly and positively the Lamb Center in Fairfax, Virginia, which has been a sanctuary for the homeless for more than three decades.

Harvest Prude of Christianity Today is another Zenger Prize winner for her September 2024 article “The Christians Trying to Restore Our Faith in Elections.” Prude profiled officials and volunteer poll watchers who face criticism, threats, and even demonization. She describes one: “Christine Johnson is the type of American who kisses her ballot and thanks God whenever she votes.”

Zak Keefer is a Zenger winner for “I lied about everything,” his story last July in The Athletic about NFL player Grant Stuard, who hid his parents’ trauma and became the caretaker for his siblings, sometimes at age 11 driving them to school. Stuard eventually professed faith in Christ, transformed his own life, became an NFL linebacker, and helped his family recover and his mother to become sober.

Liz Essley Whyte won for her August 7, 2024, Wall Street Journal story, “Doctors Can Now Save Very Premature Babies. Most Hospitals Don’t Try. “Medical advances have increased survival rates for babies born during the 22nd week of pregnancy. At some hospitals, two-thirds stay alive. Many hospitals, though, either lack the capability or choose not to resuscitate due to high costs, disability risks, and pessimism about treatment.

Wednesday’s announcement lists Zenger winners who reported on Hurricane Helene, US-Mexico border issues, a Trump rally, and social workers in India who saved the lives of baby girls. Other writers described how doctors and volunteers tried to rescue 370 children in a Sudan orphanage and how a retired professor taught 400 Afghan women to drive.

The complete list of this year’s winners, with links to their winning writing, is at zengerhouse.com, which also features winners from the previous three years and their articles: Past winners include five CT writers: Emily Belz, Kara Bettis Carvalho, Angela Lu Fulton, Sophia Lee, and Andy Olsen. The Zenger House website includes a 13-minute video with highlights of interviews of eleven of this year’s prize winners.

The 12th winner this year is posthumous: Marshall Allen, who died last year of a heart attack at age 52, is receiving a prize not for a particular article but for years of investigating overcharges by hospitals. Allen’s work culminated in his 2021 book Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System.

Allen, once a missionary in Kenya, described in The New York Times in 2018 his “natural progression from the ministry to muckraking. … Both are valid ways of serving a higher cause. The Bible endorses telling the truth.”

Marvin Olasky, CT’s executive editor for news and global, chairs the Zenger House board and is one of five judges. He recuses himself from voting on CT writing.

- More from Marvin Olasky

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Getting into the mind of a first-time visitor

Three questions guests are asking

1. Will this be worth my time?

2. Will I fit in here… really?

3. How will this help my family?

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