Died: Arthur Blessitt, Who Carried a Cross Around the World

The evangelist set a world record for longest pilgrimage and kept going for 43,340 miles.

Photo by Antony Matheus Linsen/Fairfax Media via Getty Images / edits by Christianity Today

People had a lot of questions when they saw a hippie minister with slightly shaggy hair hauling a 12-foot cross with a wheel across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, hauling it down highways, up mountains, into deserts and jungles, through war zones, through cities and remote villages, and into countries where he did not know the language or understand the customs.

They asked what he was doing. Where he was going. And most of all, why.

Arthur Blessitt would answer with the gospel. He would say, “Jesus, man, he loves you,” and tell them the cross was a sign of how much. He would say, “If you would like to know Jesus and invite him into your heart, please pray this prayer with me now, Dear God, I need you …”

Blessitt did that for 43,340 miles, by his count. Which worked out to about 86 million steps and shoes he had to resole or replace several times every year.

He started in Hollywood in an impractical pair of sandals that he quickly replaced and went across the country to Washington, DC, and then on to 323 other countries, island groups, and territories. He set a Guinness World Record for longest ongoing pilgrimage and kept going for several more decades after that. He carried his cross all over the world for more than 50 years.

In his not-so-humble moments, Blessitt called this “one of the most dramatic and enduring pilgrimages in the history of man.” But he would also say his own role should not be overinflated. What had he done, except walk? Except be obedient to the voice that told him to go?

“I was just a donkey and pilgrim, lifting up the cross and Jesus,” Blessitt said.

Everywhere he went, people asked him to explain himself, and he told them about Jesus.

The evangelist died on January 14, 2025, at the age of 84. In a final statement posted to his website, Blessitt said he was looking forward to walking in glory.

“These feet that walked so far on roads of dirt and tar will now be walking on the streets of gold,” Blessitt wrote. “Ready to see Jesus again!”

Blessitt was born on October 27, 1940, in Greenville, Mississippi, to Virginia and Arthur Blessitt. The elder Arthur served in the Air Force in World War II and was stationed afterward in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Louisiana again.

The family was not especially religious but attended a Baptist revival when young Arthur was 7. It was held in a bush arbor—a temporary structure in the woods, made of brush and branches piled on top of fresh-cut poles—and the boy wanted to go forward during an altar call. Blessitt’s parents said he was too young to make a decision for Jesus. On the way home, as he recalled in his memoir, he pleaded and pleaded until his father hung a U on the dark Louisiana road, headed back to the revival, found the minister about to leave in his car, and said, “My son wants to give his life to Jesus.”

Blessitt told everyone he knew about his newfound salvation, leading his sister to Christ and handing out tracts and talking about Jesus in the bars where his father went to drink—until the elder Arthur, too, accepted Jesus.

Blessitt felt a call to ministry when he was 15 and went to Mississippi College and then Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary to prepare. He got ordained in a Baptist church and lasted one semester in seminary before feeling compelled to spend all his time evangelizing.

He ended up in Elko, Nevada, preaching in the brothels that were legal in the state, and then in Los Angeles, where the 1960s counterculture was exploding. In West Hollywood, he found a whole generation experimenting with drugs and music, new lifestyles, and new ideas, all searching for something better than their parents had given them.

“Kids are totally disillusioned with the phony concept of life,” he told a British reporter seeking to understand the hippie phenomenon. “They are contemptuous of the great American dream of money, two cars in the garage, cooler TV, coziness, and complacency. Jesus offers life: L-I-F-E.”

Blessitt, experienced at evangelizing in bars, made his way through the clubs on the Sunset Strip, including the famous Whisky a Go Go, before deciding to start his own: a nightclub for Jesus.

It was a safe and free place for people to go—strung-out kids, street hustlers, bikers, drug dealers, drag performers, and rock musicians. Blessitt gave out coffee, Kool-Aid, bagels donated by a Jewish deli, and New Testaments with psychedelic-looking covers. His wife, Sherry, said he should call it “His Place,” so he did, and he made a big cross to hang on the wall.

The cross came down when His Place was evicted by the landlord. Blessitt carried it outside, chained himself to it, and announced he was going on a hunger strike to protest this blatant attempt to banish Christian witness from Sunset Boulevard. He fasted for 28 days, Blessitt later wrote, before the owner of another building offered him a building for His Place.

Blessitt was only in the new location for a little while, though, when he heard Jesus speak to him.

“Not in an audible voice,” Blessitt later explained, “but in my heart and mind. I know HIS voice.”

Jesus said, “I want you to take that cross that is hanging on the wall in His Place and carry it across America.”

Blessitt said, “Thank you, Jesus, wow!”

There were lots of reasons to think this was a bad idea, but the 29-year-old evangelist was committed to being obedient to what he heard God say, regardless of the consequences. A few hundred people, including his wife and young children, gathered to see him start off on Christmas Day 1969. He led the crowd in a chant:

“Give me a J.”

“J!”

“Give me an E.”

“E!”

He spelled out Jesus and then asked, “What does that spell?”

The crowd said, “Jesus!”

Blessitt said, “What does America need?”

And they answered, “Jesus!”

He headed to DC. It wasn’t only the nation’s capital that needed Jesus, though, so after arriving in the summer of 1970, Blessitt decided to continue to Florida. But it wasn’t only America, either, so he went to Canada, and then to the ends of the earth.

Blessitt wrote about his journeys in his diary and later his memoirs with boundless cheerfulness. He had an apparently inexhaustible optimism for what he believed God was doing and always ran into people ready to hear how Jesus loved them. He told stories of amazing encounters, dramatic conversions, and miracles. Though ordained a Baptist, as time went on he increasingly spoke like a charismatic.

“Well, TODAY THE GLORY FELL!” he wrote in the late 1980s. “I know it’s strange, but there is a moment on almost every walk in every country where the glory comes, when there is liberty—there is a breakthrough.”

Following the Spirit could be dangerous. Blessitt wrote that someone tried to set his cross on fire in Indiana and a group of men on motorcycles stole it in Assisi, Italy. He was thrown in jail multiple times and assaulted by police at least once. He was chased by an elephant in Tanzania, a crocodile in Zimbabwe, a green mamba in Ghana, and men with stones in Morocco.

In America, he was shot at several times. Once, Blessitt said he jumped in a ditch and hid. Another time, he didn’t know why he hadn’t been hit. Maybe the men just missed, he reflected later, or maybe an angel had intervened, deflecting the bullets.

Blessitt ignored a doctor’s advice to get surgery for an aneurysm when he first set out and was fine, which he considered a miracle. He made up his mind to ignore all danger from then on. If he believed he was called by God, that overrode everything else.

“The call of God is not conditional,” Blessitt wrote. “I’d rather die in the will of God than live outside it.”

That commitment wasn’t a burden, for Blessitt, but a great adventure. People didn’t realize how exciting it could be to serve Jesus, he said. When he thought back at the end of his life to what he’d done and where he’d been, he couldn’t help but exult.

“Thank you Jesus for calling me to evangelism,” Blessitt wrote. “I have preached in houses of prostitution, homosexual churches, Hell’s Angels camps, rock festivals, in bars, nightclubs, go-go clubs, nude clubs, love-ins, on the streets, on sidewalks, on porches, in football stadiums, at automobile races, wrestling matches, dirty movie-porno clubs … even an occasional church!”

Blessitt is survived by his first wife, Sherry; his second wife, Denise; sons Arthur Joel, Arthur Joshua, Arthur Joseph, and Arthur Jerusalem; and daughters Gina, Joy, and Sophia.

He asked that there be no funeral or memorial services.

“The greatest thing you could do would be to go out and lead one more soul to be saved,” Blessitt said. “Share Jesus with someone today.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Blessitt’s age at his death.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

Review

Pilgrim Charity and Pilgrim Cruelty Aren’t Easily Separated

John G. Turner

Their treatment of Native populations appears hypocritical. But evangelism and conquest furthered the same underlying mission.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In 1623, former Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow rushed west from Plymouth to visit Ousamequin, the Pilgrims’ Pokanoket ally and protector. Ousamequin was gravely ill and hadn’t eaten for days. Winslow found him surrounded by powwows “in the midst of their charms for him” and by women rubbing his extremities to keep him warm.

The guest from Plymouth examined the Pokanoket leader’s mouth and discovered that his tongue was “exceedingly furred.” Winslow used his knife to scrape away pus and relieve Ousamequin’s swelling before feeding him some “conserves.” Within a half hour, Ousamequin had considerably improved, and Winslow treated others in the village who were ill. “I see the English are my friends and love me,” Ousamequin declared. “Whilst I live, I will never forget this kindness they have showed me.”

Winslow spent the night in conversation with Corbitant, another local native leader. They talked about religion after Corbitant asked Winslow why the English prayed before meals. Winslow explained that all good things come from God and it is appropriate to thank him. The Pilgrim visitor equated the English God with Kiehtan, a creator deity known to Algonquin peoples.

These were intimate, tender, and hopeful moments, but within weeks relations between the Plymouth settlers and the Natives took a very different turn. Ousamequin warned the Pilgrims that the Massachusett people, located to their north, intended to attack the English settlement. The Massachusett were traditional enemies of the Pokanokets, Ousamequin’s people. Ousamequin recommended a preemptive attack.

Pilgrim leaders heeded his advice. They sent Captain Myles Standish and a small party of men to an English outpost on the rim of Massachusetts Bay. Standish and his soldiers encountered two Massachusett men, Wituwamat and Pecksuot, who apparently boasted of having killed Europeans. The Plymouth visitors feigned good intentions, then surprised their Native counterparts. Standish grabbed a knife hanging from Pecksuot’s neck and stabbed him to death. Others in the group murdered Wituwamat. The English killed around nine Massachusett in all before returning to Plymouth. They brought Wituwamat’s head with them and displayed it on a pike above Plymouth’s fort.

“Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had killed any!” John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ pastor, wrote from the other side of the Atlantic. Robinson was baffled. Why had Standish acted in this manner? He lacked Christian “tenderness.” God would not approve of such barbarism.

How could the Pilgrims exhibit such a mixture of charity and cruelty? How could hopes for Native conversion devolve into bloody treachery and conquest? Were the Pilgrims hypocrites? Were they and their descendants not true Christians?

In The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People, Calvin Theological Seminary professor Matthew Tuininga argues that the English settlers of New England were not hypocrites. It wasn’t despite their Christianity that they conquered and decimated Native peoples. Instead, both evangelization and violence served the same broader purpose. Daniel Gookin, a Massachusetts Bay magistrate, referred to Native missions as a “War of the Lord” that freed souls from bondage to Satan. The Boston minister Increase Mather likewise referred to the 1675–1676 King Philip’s War as a “War of the Lord” in which God triumphed over his enemies. The English preferred peaceful conquest to bloody fighting. Either course, however, served the cause of Christ.

This book is a bracing corrective to simple morality tales. As Tuininga observes, prior generations of white Americans portrayed English colonists as well-intentioned men and women who established religious liberty and democracy in New England. Yes, Natives lost most of their land, but that was an inevitable byproduct of establishing conditions in which future Americans could flourish.

Nowadays the Puritans—Tuininga’s not-overly-accurate shorthand for most English settlers in New England—receive much more critical appraisal. While some American Christians still lionize the Pilgrims, contemporary books and curricula often depict them as rapacious racists who “used Christianity as a tool to justify the enslavement and genocide of innocent Native Americans.” Tuininga contends that “the reality is more complicated and disturbing.” Puritan theology “was not mere window dressing.” It animated both Edward Winslow’s anticipation of Native conversions and Standish’s murders of Wituwamat and Pecksuot.

The Wars of the Lord is a landmark history of 17th-century New England. Most historians narrate events in a single colony, such as Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. Tuininga, by contrast, weaves together the histories of many English jurisdictions, not only the above but also New Haven, Saybrook, and Connecticut. The granular points of theology and church-state relations differed in the various colonies, as did the tenor of English-Native relations. Many scholars, moreover, take seriously either theology or political developments, specifically English interactions with Natives. As Tuininga notes, however, the Puritans “did not separate the spiritual and the secular.” He likewise maintains a broad scope.

If readers need encouragement to plunge into this capacious history, they should know that Tuininga combines sharp analysis with a readable and even entertaining narrative. There are familiar characters, such as the Pilgrims, Ousamequin (whom the Plymouth leaders called Massasoit), Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, and Mary Rowlandson, who wrote about her captivity during King Philip’s War (named for the Pokanoket chief Metacom, who went by “Philip”). Tuininga also introduces a procession of less familiar Native leaders, such as Awashonks, a female Sakonnet chief whose people supported but then abandoned Metacom during the mid-1670s war.

Awashonks is a paradigmatic example of Native persistence and adaptation. Like Metacom, she had rejected Christianity and resisted English encroachment onto her people’s land. As King Philip’s War turned in the favor of the English, though, Captain Benjamin Church of Plymouth Colony visited Awashonks with an overture of rum and tobacco. She wisely made him sample the rum to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. Then she struck an agreement with Church. Her men would fight for the English in exchange for “liberty to sit down in quietness on their lands.” The Sakonnets didn’t trust the English to honor their word, but they felt that an alliance with the settlers was their best chance.

King Philip’s War was a costly victory for the English. Approximately 10 percent of military-age colonists were dead, many towns were ravaged, and economic losses were immense. But fewer than half of all Natives survived the war. Many survivors were enslaved or reduced to servitude, and many more lost their land. Awashonks was right to be suspicious of English intentions. Her people lost almost all their territory.

It is surprising, perhaps, that the English also won the other “war of the Lord.” By the early 1670s, a large number of Wampanoags in what is now Southeastern Massachusetts had embraced Christianity, and the trend continued after the war as well. Certainly, some Natives rejected Christianity, as Metacom and Awashonks had done. But for many survivors, Tuininga explains, “Christianity became the key ingredient that held their communities together and enabled them to preserve their culture.”

One weakness of The Wars of the Lord is its overreliance on Puritan as an explanatory category. The label makes sense for the earlier portions of the story, those involving the Pilgrims (a separatist faction of the broader Puritan impulse within English Protestantism) and the founders of the Bay Colony.

It’s a less helpful term for the 1670s. Benjamin Church was the grandson of a Mayflower passenger, Richard Warren, who was one of the merchants who invested in the colony. Church and many other men of his generation probably did understand Natives as in some way in thrall to Satan, but they first and foremost were animated by a lust for land that transcended theological or religious boundaries. Missions to Natives, moreover, were never a central concern for most English settlers.

Tuininga’s narrative skill and solid research more than make up for this weakness, and the book’s greatest strength is his thoughtful approach to the American past. He ends his story with a conversation between Daniel Gookin and Waban, one of the earliest Massachusett converts to Christianity and the longtime leader of the Natick “praying town.” Waban complained to Gookin about the fact that the English did not accept Christian Natives as equal members of the body of Christ. Gookin pointed out that Jesus and his disciples also suffered unmerited persecution. “Waban, you know all Indians are not good,” Gookin observed. “So tis with Englishmen … and this we must expect while we are in this world.”

In his account of the dialogue, Gookin gave himself the last word, but the point was fair. English and Natives alike were a mixed multitude, and broad historical developments rarely hinge on the relative morality of opposing groups of people. Tuininga writes at great length about the “deplorable consequences” of English settlement without making them about “deplorable” individuals.

The Wars of the Lord is an antidote to contemporary political debates about the American past, which are not so much about the facts of history as about the relative importance placed on them. When it comes to 17th-century New England, should one focus on English settlements and the development of their religious and political institutions? Or on the Native peoples and their resistance to English conquest? How much time should one spend on the “deplorable consequences” for Natives versus the opportunities that drew waves of European immigrants to New England?

Tuininga demonstrates that the best response to these and related questions is simply to write good history. In its message, moreover, The Wars of the Lord is an appropriate mixture of thanks and lament. Natives “lamented, and still lament,” he concludes, “the injustices and tragedies that devastated their people and the way Christianity was used to justify it.” Conversion did not erase the sting of conquest. At the same time, Native Christians remained “thankful for the gospel and the hope it provided.”

There is no reason 21st-century American Christians should not partake of these mixed emotions when reflecting on their nation’s past. It is hardly surprising that English colonists, despite their professed allegiance to Jesus Christ, put their own interests above those of the peoples they displaced. After all, as the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, “The good news of the gospel is not the law that we ought to love one another.” We, like our forebears, often fail to do so. “The good news of the gospel is that there is a resource of divine mercy which is able to overcome a contradiction within our souls, which we cannot ourselves overcome.” Thanks be to God.

John G. Turner is professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University. His forthcoming book is Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.

- More from John G. Turner

Ideas

The Peace Church that Changed My Life

Bonnie Kristian

Anabaptism is 500 years old. Its distinctive witness—on Scripture, community, and more—is a treasure worth defending.

Wikimedia Commons / Edits by CT

I became an Anabaptist because of George W. Bush.

Well, not so much Bush personally—though the former president’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the context in which I began to grapple with what Jesus said about enemies. But I mostly mean the embrace of Bush and his Republican Party by American evangelical culture in the early 2000s.

Those were God-and-country years, kind of like these. We didn’t hear about “Christian nationalism” back then (the preferred nomenclature was “theocracy” and its variations), and certainly the GOP platform was different than it is today on key points. Bush himself was, in retrospect, a much more conventional figure than the next Republican to hold his office.

But the sense that we evangelicals had an ally in Washington, that there was no real question whom a true Christian would support, that being a good Christian was very closely tied to being a good American, that it was perfectly appropriate to play videos in church services that explicitly likened the sacrifices of American soldiers to the salvific death of Christ—all that was as much in the air in 2004 as in 2024.

Anabaptism, which marks 500 years today, felt like a revelation.

I was first attracted by the tradition’s deep skepticism of politics and power and its simple, obedient reading of biblical commands to peace—a reading reinforced by the testimonies of the early Anabaptists, many of whom were martyred by fellow Christians for their faith. With time, I also came to love and admire Anabaptism’s distinctive prioritization of robust community life and high expectations for ordinary Christians’ knowledge of the Bible.

I spent about a year learning about Anabaptism before a move to a new city gave my husband and me the opportunity to join an Anabaptist church that would eventually become a congregation of Mennonite Church USA (MC USA). Our church had a handful of ethnic Mennonites, people whose families had been in the tradition for generations, in some cases with relatives in the Amish community. But most of the church consisted of people like me: refugees of Bush-era evangelicalism looking for a church that would ask more of us.

We wanted our lives to revolve around church. We wanted a community where living in walking distance of one another and getting together multiple times a week, both for church and just to hang out, would be normal and expected. In our church’s first phase, before I arrived, many members even lived in community houses, eating and gardening together and sharing their resources.

The houses broke up as people started getting married, from which you can infer—if you hadn’t already—that the congregation was overwhelmingly people in our mid-20s. I don’t say that dismissively; we were young but serious, and the influence of the Anabaptist tradition was an orienting force for our enthusiasm.

The first winter there, my husband and I joined both a small group and a sermon discussion group, which meant spending (because we did not have our own building and so worshiped on Sunday evenings) three nights of every week on church. We loved it.

It was sometime after our church had formalized its Anabaptism by joining MC USA that I began to realize we had a problem—and not just our congregation, so far as I could observe, but the larger body.

I’m not interested in besmirching a church that was deeply formative for me and where I still have many dear friends. So instead, I’ll simply say that I think we did an excellent job of fostering the Anabaptist distinctive of thick community life, but we didn’t do such a good job of maintaining our early congregational focus on theology and Scripture. We never stopped preaching the Word, but when a denominational discernment process about gay marriage exposed disagreement in our ranks, it became apparent that many of us had not absorbed the historic Anabaptist view of the Bible as an authoritative rule of Christian life.

This shift was also apparent when I attended a theology conference at the denomination’s flagship seminary with several women from my church. Many of the offerings at this event were baffling. Relatively little would have been recognizable to the founders of our tradition.

One session, burned into my brain, posited that Jesus was transgender. A friend attended to find out what the argument could possibly be; she said the speaker had said that because Jesus had no human father, he could only have an X chromosome, and because he presented as a man, he was therefore trans. As my friend gave this report, I thought I could faintly hear Menno Simons spinning in his grave.

It may come as no surprise that MC USA, though delayed by the pandemic, ultimately voted to change its theology on gay marriage to an affirming stance. More conservative churches have largely left the denomination, forming conferences of their own.

In some cases, the conservatives retain historic Anabaptist distinctives. But in others, they’re slipping away from the tradition’s defining stances on peace and politics, looking increasingly like any other evangelical church. The progressives, too, are dipping into politics, and both camps—as I wrote for The New York Times in 2022—are doing so without the grounding of a theological tradition concerned with how to do that well.

The result, as Anabaptist scholar John Roth wrote at Plough, is that their “political witness” often “basically aligns with the partisan divisions of the broader culture.”

Of course, it’s not as if the future of Anabaptism in the West depends on Americans swayed by the winds of politics and culture. Ultimately, it depends on God, and even humanly speaking, Old Order Mennonites, the Amish, the Bruderhof (the publishers of Plough), and similar traditions remain much as they have for decades or centuries.

But the kind of Anabaptism that was crucial to the growth of my faith as a young adult—distinctive and traditional but not insular or anachronistic—does seem to be in jeopardy here. Its withering would be a great loss.

Though a cross-country move has landed me in an Anglican church for a variety of reasons, I still consider myself an Anabaptist. I realize the forebears of the tradition might disagree, to which I can only say that I aspire to imitate them more than I do.

I hope the movement they started will be robust and vibrant another 500 years hence, if the Lord tarries. I hope it will be available to other Christians, especially young ones, who may be inspired by their model of radical commitment to Christ.

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

- More from Bonnie Kristian

News

Canadian Government Considers Changing Churches’ Tax Status

Adam MacInnis in Nova Scotia

Proposal startles religious groups even in a month of major political upheaval.

An Anglican priest in Toronto prepares for a worship service.

Nick Lachance/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Canadian politics are rarely dramatic. But in the last month, the country has been in a turmoil as finance minister Chrystia Freeland quit hours before she was scheduled to deliver an economic update, amping up the infighting in Canada’s governing Liberal Party and pushing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to announce he will resign after a decade in power. The country is also roiling over the new American president’s proposed 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods and divided over how to respond to Donald Trump’s offhand suggestion that the United States should annex its northern neighbor.

Meanwhile, Canadian Christians were startled by another development: a formal recommendation that the governing party consider taking tax-exempt status away from churches.

The Standing Committee on Finance, which includes representatives from four of Canada’s parties, issued a report in December with 462 recommendations. Item 430 recommends Canada “amend the Income Tax Act to provide a definition of a charity which would remove the privileged status of ‘advancement of religion’ as a charitable purpose.”

In other words, churches should no longer be considered charities, and donations to churches should not be eligible for tax deductions.

“I was kind of surprised that the finance committee thought, Yeah, it’s a good idea. We should do that,” said Levi Minderhoud, policy analyst for the Association for Reformed Political Action Canada.

While Canada has seen a shift away from religious affiliation in recent years, 53 percent of people still identify as Christian, according to the last census. Canadian law is also rooted in British legal tradition, where churches have been classified as charitable organizations for hundreds of years. While tax-exempt status can be seen as a privilege given to Christians, it extends to other religious groups as well and is grounded in the recognition that the government’s authority is limited when it comes to spiritual things.

“The idea [is] that the state isn’t really in charge of the church, doesn’t tax the church in the same way that it gets to tax individual citizens,” Minderhoud said.

Some in the Liberal Party want that to change, though, and are apparently unconcerned with the long-established legal precedent.

Religious groups, including the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) and the Canadian Centre for Christian Charities (CCCC), have written to the new finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc, to oppose the idea. LeBlanc, who replaced Freeland and has been seen as a possible replacement for Trudeau, declined to comment for this article.

The Conservative Party—looking ahead to the expected 2025 elections—is assuring religious groups that it will not take away their charitable status.

“The Conservative Party of Canada believes in the freedom of religion,” shadow finance minister Jasraj Singh Hallan told Christianity Today in an email. “We were the only party to oppose this measure. … So it becomes clear that we need an election to get a Common Sense Conservative government elected to protect religious freedom.”

The Conservative Party is currently leading in the polls by more than 20 points. Most observers think the Liberals will lose a no-confidence vote in Parliament in March and then the subsequent election. The proposal to change churches’ tax status isn’t likely to shift any votes in their direction—and they probably can’t move forward with the idea anyway.

“This is not a realistic political thing right now,” said Ray Pennings, executive vice president of Cardus, a nonpartisan Christian think tank based in Canada. “But it does speak to a cultural narrative that is being pushed by some in which the intrinsic value of religion is no longer understood as a public good.”

Some local governments have already made moves to tax churches. In 2018, Nova Scotia decided that parts of the property of about 20 churches across the province were not tax exempt because they provided childcare centers during the week. In 2022, Iqaluit, in the territory of Nunavut, decided nonprofits would no longer be exempt at all. The two churches in Iqaluit—one Catholic, one Anglican—were told they would need to pay the government $38,000 and $29,000 each year, respectively. Church leaders described that as a “crushing financial burden,” which would likely force them into delinquency.

If the churches are forced to close, that would have negative impacts on the community, according to Christians who live there.

“These churches are the forefront in helping the poor and the needy and those who are hurting,” Looee Arreak, an Inuit gospel singer, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “We see families that are in trauma, in shock, trying to fundraise for the funeral cost of a loved one that has [died by] suicide because of post traumatic stress disorder. If you’re going to tax the churches, at least put the [funeral] costs down.”

EFC public policy director Julia Beazley made a similar point in her letter to the finance minister.

Cardus has done a lot of research in recent years on the financial benefit, or “Halo Effect,” of churches and found that the average congregation’s positive socioeconomic impact in the community is more than ten times the value of tax exemptions and credits. Similar studies in the US have found that urban congregations contribute more than $1 million each to their local economies.

Paul Rowe, professor of political and international studies at Trinity Western University, a Christian university in British Columbia, said these churches are also filling needs that would otherwise fall on the government. In Vancouver near where he lives, for example, First United Church – Vancouver Downtown Eastside does a lot of work ministering to people who are homeless or struggling with addiction.

“You take away their charitable status, and they’re going to be completely dependent on some kind of government handouts,” he said.

Rowe said the proposal is unlikely to move forward, given the precarious position of the Liberals. But he doesn’t think the idea is going away.

He said taxing churches might cause a backlash on a national level now, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be palatable in some regions. Quebec, for example, has more negative views toward religion than other parts of Canada.

And perhaps the proposal from the finance committee is a sign the idea is growing more popular. A poll in 2022 found that 37 percent of Canadians thought churches should keep their tax-exempt status, while 35 percent would approve of it being taken away. The rest had no opinion.

So even though the proposal doesn’t seem like it’s going to go anywhere, in the midst of the general political turmoil, religious groups say they are still alarmed.

“The Recommendations politicize charitable status … and set a dangerous and destabilizing precedent for the charitable sector,” Deina Warren, CCCC’s director of legal affairs, wrote to the finance minister. “The contributions and positive impacts of religion ought to be affirmed and fostered in a diverse, multicultural, multi-religious society such as Canada. This proposal does the exact opposite.”

- More from Adam MacInnis

Pastors

Reading the Room: A Pastoral Vision for a Politically Weary Congregation

Ronnie Martin

Pastors face the critical challenge of guiding their congregations through lingering political tensions in the post-inauguration landscape.

J Studios / Getty

It was the exhale heard around the world.

After what seemed like the longest election cycle in American history, the race for Leader of the Free World reached its long-awaited conclusion on November 7. Depending on which candidate you deemed most worthy of the office, it was either a better or bitter end.

If you’re a pastor, you likely experienced a sense of relief, regardless of the result. A church divided by political allegiances weighs heavily on pastoral hearts, and no wonder, when you consider the past two election cycles and the damage that politics in general has done among evangelicals and churches.

Now, I am not here to provide data or statistics on political divisions in the church (there is plenty of that). What I want to do is address the Now what? questions that pastors may have as President-elect Donald Trump enters his second term, and more specifically, how you can lead and encourage your congregations who are likely suffering some measure of political fatigue.

Acknowledge the Mood in the Room

You are not preaching politics from the pulpit when you acknowledge what people may be experiencing in this cultural moment. In fact, one of the most pastoral responses we can give in times of uncertainty is the one Jesus gave to his disciples in John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” By acknowledging the mood in the room and the lack of peace in the world, you give people permission to rejoice or grieve, while teaching them to be curious and sensitive to the various emotions their brothers and sisters may be experiencing. If that isn’t enough, you also let your people know that political differences don’t need to be taboo if they are approached with a heart of understanding, reasonableness, and grace.

Don’t Speak in Vague Generalities

Without ignoring wisdom and discernment, try not to dance around the political differences that exist among your people. Common deflections like “whatever side of the political aisle you’re on” or “we don’t do politics at our church” may feel like safer responses in the moment, but these vague generalities fail to provide clear, thoughtful leadership informed by the gospel.

To address these differences effectively, we must understand the specific challenges facing both sides of the political divide. Justin Giboney highlights two key dangers for the relationships of people who hoped for opposing outcomes:

Whether your candidate wins or loses, there will still be hurting people who need you to give them hope and be a sober and thoughtful advocate for them. Don’t let the outcome defeat you or compel you to pretend the battle is won. Avoid bitterness and triumphalism.

For those who voted for Trump, the danger might be a kind of triumphalist complacency. They feel vindicated after Trump’s victory, forgetting that their hope should have never depended on whether Trump won back the office or not. This kind of triumphalist mindset bypasses the missionally minded sensitivity and understanding that neighbors who feel disappointment or fear will need.

For those who voted for Harris, the danger might be falling into a state of bitterness or despair, instead of remembering that their hope was never meant to be placed in the election of one candidate or the defeat of another. Left unaddressed, hearts burdened in this way can grow cynical and create a lasting divide between neighbors that goes far beyond politics.

The inauguration provides pastors with an inflection point to step courageously down the middle of political divides with a message of divine hope. To remind their people that “The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue” but that “the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love” (Ps. 33:17–18, ESV).

Offer Unifying Words and Prayers

Don’t discount the healing power of unifying language on the hearts and minds of your people. Pastors, you have so much more than a “can’t we all just get along” gospel. Your words and prayers carry the power of resurrection contained in them. Never grow weary of casting God’s vision for your people, that Jesus Christ was sent “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:10). We can be sure that unity matters to God because of how great the cost was for Christ to accomplish it. Because this is true, when church members divide over politics, the mission of God is marginalized, mocked, and maligned.

If a pastor’s calling is to point people to the love, forgiveness, peace, and joy of Jesus, then let’s offer continual glimpses of those realities by exhorting the faithful and praying for the unity that has already been provided through the salvation of Christ. It is no small thing.

Get Your People Back to Acts

It may be a necessary thing to preach unity, but it’s another thing to actually practice it. Our unity must move beyond words into visible acts of faith. In these delicate times, few things will display the love of Christ as powerfully as church members who lay aside their political differences and sacrificially serve one another. The church is uniquely positioned right now—in exactly the right place and at the right time—to love and serve in the most countercultural ways.

The greatest way for the church to shed its (sadly, earned) reputation as a hub for nationalist ideologies is by becoming what Jesus died on the cross for it to be—a community of light carriers who love God, love their neighbors, and love seizing every opportunity they can to offer that light to others. “Here, have some light!” the church exclaims, and the world is once again dumbfounded by acts of divine kindness and compassion.

Pastors must offer their congregations the countercultural vision: a bold reminder that the Lord remains sovereign regardless who the American people elect as their president. Empires may rise and fall, leaders may come and go, but his eternal purposes stand firm. The church’s calling remains unchanged—to live as faithful witnesses, anchored in his unchanging plan within an ever-shifting world.

To be clear, there would have been many concerning implications of the election of either candidate, and this article is not meant to dismiss or candy-coat the underlying complexities. Rather, it offers some ways forward for pastors seeking to shepherd their people through these challenging times.

As the inauguration approaches, our task is clear: to read the room with wisdom and discernment, avoid trite spiritual fix-its, and lead our people to refix their eyes on the One who through whom “all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16).

Ronnie Martin is the director of leader care and renewal for Harbor Network.

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News

Trump Opens Second Term with Bold Promises

Harvest Prude

With nods to his widening base and prayers from Christian leaders, the president acts fast on campaign priorities like immigration.

President Donald Trump speaks at inauguration

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images / Bloomberg via Getty Images

In the Capitol Rotunda surrounded by politicians, a lineup of tech CEOs, and select faith leaders, President Donald Trump began his second term in office with bold promises for America’s coming “Golden Age.”

The president claimed not just a national mandate but also a divine mandate, repeating that he had been saved from last year’s assassination attempt so that he could “make America great again” and pledging that his administration “will not forget our God,” as he rattled off plans to swiftly act on immigration, energy and climate policy, and trade.

“I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success,” Trump said during his inaugural address in a ceremony moved inside because of harsh winter weather in Washington and broadcast to supporters watching in DC’s Capital One Arena.

“But first, we must be honest about the challenges we face. While they are plentiful, they will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.”

Incoming presidents often strike a balance between cordiality to the outgoing administration, calls for the country to unify as a whole, and clarity around their own new direction, but “that’s not Trump’s style, and never has been,” according to Amy Black, professor of political science at Wheaton College.

In his speech, the incoming president painted an unsparingly dark picture of the nation under President Joe Biden and attacked the current state of politics as radical, corrupt, and vicious.

“My recent election is a mandate,” Trump declared, “to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal, and all of these many betrayals that have taken place, and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom.”

With a bigger base of supporters—Christian activists with pro-life posters stood alongside social media influencers and trade workers in line for his inauguration-weekend rally—Trump’s return to Washington comes in contrast to eight years ago.

Instead of Trump facing skepticism from his own party or members of his own administration, Republicans for the most part have embraced his “Make America Great Again” direction, and he has nominated loyalists to his cabinet spots.

“I would say that people are less afraid now to be openly supportive of Trump,” said Vanessa Valentino, a Catholic whose family traveled from Chicago to Washington to celebrate Trump’s second term. “People are a lot more comfortable now to wear a Trump hat.”

During the four years since 2020, Trump and his allies have had time to think and plan for a return. “There is a specificity to some of the promises that I do think shows the difference between a first and second term,” Black said.

What inauguration ceremonies fail to capture is that bold visions can get caught in the slower cogs of America’s political processes, from the courts to Congress.

“Some of these things he will have the power to do singularly as the chief executive. But some of what he’s promising isn’t possible with just the president alone,” Black said.

Certain announcements on Monday were policy reruns: Trump promised to declare a national emergency over the southern border and reinstate his COVID-19–era “Remain in Mexico” for asylum seekers. Others were new: Trump pledged to have an American flag planted on Mars, rename the Gulf of Mexico, and end requirements for auto makers to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The administration is preparing to scale up deportations of undocumented immigrants and freeze refugee resettlement.

“As Christians who believe that God established the family at the beginning of creation, we cannot sit silently as policies are proposed that would entail family separation on a horrifying scale,” World Relief president and CEO Myal Greene said in a statement. “We urge the administration to prioritize deportation of those with violent criminal convictions and to find more humane alternatives, such as working with Congress … for longstanding members of our churches and communities.”

After Trump once again won the white evangelical vote while making significant gains among Hispanic Christians, Christian supporters celebrated the president’s inaugural pledges, with some conservatives noting his statements that there are only two genders and that he would dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the government.

“Such a strong inaugural address by [Donald Trump]!” Clint Pressley, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, posted.

The indoor ceremony began late, and the schedule was adjusted for Trump to be sworn in immediately after Vice President JD Vance, with Trump apparently forgetting, perhaps in the rush, to place his hand on the Bibles being held by First Lady Melania Trump—the same two from the 2016 inauguration—as he took his oath of office.

The inauguration included prayers from two Protestant pastors, two Catholics, and a rabbi—each calling for prayer and asking God to help Trump and the country in the four years ahead. Another scheduled prayer, from Imam Husham Al-Husainy, was cancelled.

“Give our leader wisdom, for he is your servant, aware of his own weakness and brevity of life,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan, echoing King Solomon. “Send wisdom from heaven that she may be with him.”

Monday’s ceremony was Franklin Graham’s third time praying at an inauguration, following four inaugural prayers by his father, evangelist Billy Graham. Graham’s prayer provoked applause from Republicans in the audience at points: “We come to say thank you, O Lord,” he prayed. “Father, when Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand.”

In an energetic benediction, Lorenzo Sewell, pastor of 180 Church in Detroit, quoted the entire closing of the “I Have a Dream” speech to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He concluded, “Go forth now with these words of President Trump’s emblazoned on our hearts. As long as we have pride in our beliefs, courage in our convictions, and faith in our God, then we will not fail.”

Sewell is newer to the circle of religious clergy associated with Trump. He spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention and has hosted Trump at his church.

Mika Edmondson, pastor of New City Fellowship in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said on social media that praying for one’s leaders could also mean “praying that the Lord will restrain them from their own worst impulses.”

Some familiar faces were relegated to the background. Paula White, who led Trump’s faith outreach during his last time in office and prayed at the previous inauguration, sat in the audience this time. During the campaign, Trump told her the next faith office would be directly involved in the Oval Office, but he has not made official announcements or appointments.

Greg Laurie, who belonged to the team of spiritual advisers during Trump’s first administration, asked for prayer for the president on social media and said he was grateful that “many committed Christians have been put in positions of influence around the president.”

With the ceremony moved inside, ticket holders instead queued up, some overnight in the freezing cold, to secure their place in Capitol One Arena, where Trump also held a rally Sunday night.

Others abandoned their bags at the security checkpoint outside the arena when they realized they had to choose between keeping their possessions or securing their seat inside.

Owen Strachan, the director of the Dobson Culture Center, shared a prayer for Trump that came with a caution: “Pray for your current leader, but put your hope and trust in Christ and Christ alone.”

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Inkwell

The Age of Fluidity

Griffin Gooch

Elastic language for yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Painting by John Martin

EACH PLATITUDE rolling off my pastor’s tongue sounded like metal scraping against the side of a cheese grater. I’m either nine or eleven or thirteen and already an atheist. Even though it must have been around 2010, the early-to-mid ’90s wave of agnostic grunge filled my eardrums and swayed me toward ecclesial skepticism. In hindsight, the anti-religious-institution arguments I absorbed through pop culture weren’t very logical or compelling. But the clothes and personas seemed way cooler than any I’d ever seen at my church, and that itself was logical and compelling enough for my unformed frontal lobe to toss out religion altogether.

The part that got to me wasn’t so much the community or the moral ideas or the character of Jesus, but the language. It was the apathetic yet stylized drawl—overly rehearsed and spliced together like a knockoff MasterClass outline of how an emotional speech should go: when to get loud, when to whisper, where to drop thesis and insert joke. To this day, every time I hear the words grace, faith, or the Word of God says, I still hear my pastor’s voice reverberating through them. The breathy hushed exposition and superficiality—I wanted to get as far away from church as possible. And so I did. I basically committed to the least Christian lifestyle I could dream up, which is still a pretty surefire way to end up in jail. Which I did.

ON THE SUNDAY of the final day of my sentence, the inmates were given a choice to either go to church or stay in our cell. A surprising number chose to remain in their cells, the one they had spent the other 24 hours per day in—an impulse I couldn’t personally relate to. Alongside a small group of others, I sat through the prison missionaries’ hodgepodge of Christian language via acoustic songs and unplugged sermons. A showcase of all the words I’d grown to hate so much. But this time around, I was physiologically shaken, my cynicism totally eradicated. I immediately and uncontrollably burst into tears. The words sounded different, new, the opposite of artificial—real and true and raw. And for the first time, the gospel was real and true and raw.

After the ministry team shared, I said a prayer with them, letting all the language my old pastor drilled into my mind fall out of my own mouth. They finally weren’t platitudes—they were desperate, shaky, and powerful.

The seven years that followed were an intensive training camp of relearning the Christian vocabulary, taking the words wrung of meaning and drenched with cynicism and restoring them to life. Sometimes, I drift back into skepticism, and other times, I jump so far to the other end of the spectrum that it turns into naive optimism.

Yet regardless of which direction the pendulum swings, I’ve come to a conviction: Words come to life when they’re most needed.

C. S. LEWIS NOTES, “As everyone knows, words constantly take on new meanings.” I’m fascinated by how words carry power and even more fascinated by how words that have power one day might lose it the next; why phrases that ignite one generation to faithfully follow Jesus turn into a dead orthodoxy that their kids roll their eyes at.

Over time, words lose buoyancy. Say a word 50 times fast, and after 49 times, it’ll sound like gibberish. Language is always evolving—it’s stretchy and subject to trends. Take a Google Ngram Viewer tour through Christian history and you’ll see how our phrases rise and fall in popularity. Nowadays, many “Christians” are dropping that moniker altogether because of its association with nominative evangelicalism and subbing in “follower of Jesus.” The words born again and believer blew up in the ’70s and ’80s, peaking in 2010, and have been declining each year since. Jesus freak was originally a pejorative that littered Elton John songs, until bands like DC Talk co-opted it—only for it to descend back into obscurity a few decades later.

Gen Z doesn’t “go to church,” they “attend gatherings.” During sermons, they don’t say “amen” and “hallelujah,” they say “wow” and “yup.” They cringe every time someone throws a definite article in front of “Holy Spirit.”

OUR WORDS SHIFT when we need to express something our current vocabulary can’t. Wineskins get old, and so do we. New language is fresh, but as it ages, it loses its edge, and, in the worst case, enters the realm of cliché. This is one potential hazard for Christian terms, what the writer Jonathan Merritt calls “fossilization.” It’s a side effect of a hyper-transient culture: The words aren’t forgotten but overused, until we become so cynical toward them that we refuse to let them have any power.

Language gets fossilized when it’s loaded with too much history. But another problem arises when there’s not enough history. Lots of vocabulary that was meaningful even two generations ago are eclipsed by “cultural amnesia”—the tendency to remove the past, along with its traditions, taboos, mores, and norms, from our daily consciousness. It’s basically the state of being ahistorical: forgetting what lies behind (literally) and straining toward anything novel that lies ahead.

But, as historians Will and Ariel Durant note, language is one of the few “connective tissues of human history.” If our language has no historicity, it gets driven and tossed by the cultural seas of the present moment—a reality hauntingly demonstrated by lexicographer Peter Sokolowski’s confession that those in his profession now pay attention to TikTok trends to modify their definitions.

FOR THE MODERN Christian who has a vested interest in staying in touch with the ancient, this fluidity threatens the power of our words.

Theologian Marcus Borg pointed out that spiritual vocabulary loses both its meaning and power due to “spiritual illiteracy.” People no longer hear these terms as if they’re resounding out of their ancient origins. Rather, they only hear their contemporary distortions. Henri Nouwen commented on this struggle:

When we wonder why the language of traditional Christianity has lost its liberating power for those who live in the modern age, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that we see ourselves as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future.

For many, this just isn’t the case anymore. A few years back, Merritt partnered with the Barna Group to take the pulse on religious vocabulary. They found that only 13 percent of self-identifying Christians were having spiritual conversations once or more per week. When pressed about why they don’t have more religious conversations,

Some admitted they felt confused about what spiritual words actually mean. In many cases, the confusion doesn’t necessarily result from lack of knowledge or experience. Sometimes, it’s the opposite. People in insular religious communities might have used some words so often they don’t know what they mean anymore. The words have become shopworn.

ALL THIS BEGS the question: Is there any use in trying to renew old terms? Or should we just let them die and dream up new ones? Do we spend an hour each Sunday drilling in church history and etymology, or do we just flow with the zeitgeist?

If we’re a product of our time and place, which everyone of course is, we’ll naturally adopt new terminology in order to communicate with our context. So, I don’t think there’s any real need to intentionally pursue trendy, relevant terminology—chances are, this will just happen by virtue of being a human in the third millennium.

But in a hypermodern age like ours, there’s still merit in renovating older phrases that connect us to something historical, even when they sound tacky. Not in a nostalgic sense, as if trying to recreate the past, but in a transformative sense, paving the way for the needs of our milieu.

Because of fossilization, it took a jail cell to wake me up to the authenticity of the Christian language. For some of my friends, the pull toward ahistoricity is why they left the faith. Both ends of the spectrum harm, which is why I think a third way, a way of renovating terms according to our present needs, might be the water needed for parched lips.

WHILE I HAVE the utmost respect for language scholars, the process of pruning terminology most often correlates to the needs of God’s people rather than academic movements. When language renovation is left up to small bands of elites, it gets obscured for everyone else.

This is the driving tension that the characters in R. F. Kuang’s novel Babel wrestle with. The speculative novel follows a group of intercultural Oxford students studying in the prestigious university’s language department, housed in a literal tower called “Babel.” During their studies, they come to find that Babel is more than a linguistics undergrad program—it’s the British Empire’s tool for centralizing authority, using language to make a more powerful Britain rather than to create a better world.

The students grapple with the question, “Can we live with the consequences of making language a privilege of the elite, or do we fight to give language back to the people?” They ultimately choose the latter, toppling the tower that dominated communication and decentralizing language for the masses.

It’s fiction, but this story constantly repeats itself in real life. For one, Babel’s arc played out in the mid-20th century via a philosophical movement called post-structuralism.

BASICALLY, GUYS LIKE Jacques Derrida wanted to deconstruct interpretive structure. Things themselves—a dog, a novel, a gesture—couldn’t have meaning, because whatever meaning was imposed on them would be steeped in the interpreter’s worldview.

Post-structuralists deconstruct because they think power dynamics clandestinely lie behind everything: Books shouldn’t be enjoyed because they’re just a tool to keep you distracted. Family is just a construct to keep you too busy to fight corruption. But, in earnest, it’s just fake activism, muddying up terminology for the sake of displaying enlightenment.

In The Best Minds, writer Jonathan Rosen details his own coming of age during the height of post-structuralism’s popularity. Although Rosen was captivated with the movement at first, he began noticing that their lingual gymnastics often minimized the concepts they deconstructed. Derrida or Foucault invoked examples of mental illness to describe how authoritarian powers—the state, the government, the spectacle of society— dominate the masses. True madness was created by the corrupt powers of society, they said; to be deranged was to lack the willpower to resist their control.

Rosen especially struggled to swallow their lectures after visiting his lifelong friend Michael Laudor in a mental ward. Growing up together, Rosen had had a front-row seat to Michael’s brilliance and sociability, as well as to his slow decline into hospitalization for his paranoid schizophrenia. This promising Yale student now stumbled while stringing sentences together, thought he was constantly under surveillance, and could barely read the pages of the books he’d read voraciously his whole life. According to post-structuralists, Michael’s suffering was brought on by a “social construct” that arose from “disciplinary discourse.” Was Michael’s issue simply his own lack of willpower?

Of course not. No amount of post-structuralist prose was going to dismantle his schizophrenia. This was a real neurological disorder, not an academic exercise, and it was chewing up his best friend’s personality.

LIKE THE TRENDINESS of words, post-structuralism came and went. The grand total of their efforts amounted to a feverish paranoia toward authority, a feeling that still haunts the world today. It minimized peoples’ sufferings, taking terminology away from those most in need of it. As Francis Schaffer commented on post-structuralism, “In it, language leads to neither values nor facts, but only to language.”

If they proved anything, it’s that language in the wrong hands, be it a cranky professor or a selfish pastor or a corporate demagogue, can be stripped of its potential to unify. And so, like Kuang’s Babel and Genesis 11’s Babel, the post-structuralist’s tower toppled.

Language doesn’t exist in some esoteric third space, like a Cartesian museum display. Language needs community, needs to pass through lips, needs to be tasted as it moves beyond our vocal cords and enters the throes of daily life—person to person, soul to soul. It’s the connective tissue of the masses, not an academic privilege.

Despite how often Scripture’s been abused by those with power, it is and always will be a rhetoric of revolution for those without any. For a native Greek linguist, the Bible is not very complex. It’s written in laymen’s vocabulary—the kind of casual language you’d use while making a shopping list with family. After reading through the New Testament for the first time, Augustine admitted feeling disappointed. Augustine was the equivalent of an elite Ivy Leaguer, on par with the philosophical heavyweights of his day. But the Bible was written for poor agrarian farmers in an epoch where the literacy rate was only around 10 percent.

Accessible language was a necessity. If the Bible had been written at the caliber of, say, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason—arguably one of the most dense and difficult volumes ever written—then the Bible wouldn’t have been for everyone; it would’ve only been for the Kants and Foucaults and Derridas. As Mark Strauss writes,

There is nothing archaic, solemn or mystical about the kind of language used by the inspired authors of the New Testament. It is the Greek of the street. . . . Just as God took on the form of common humanity when he revealed himself as the living Word, so his written Word was revealed in language that the person on the street could understand.

By using the language of the lowest common denominator, the Christian vocabulary enveloped the entirety of the population, making itself available to all.

Babel and the post-structuralist mindset remind us that language is for the people and serves a purpose. This means that language will always keep evolving and changing because the needs of the people will always be evolving and changing. We’ll always need new ways to communicate our longings, our losses, our jumbles of emotion. To centralize language, like how the Catholic church centralized doctrine before the Reformation, is simpler and more efficient—but only for the arbiters making the calls.

For everyone else, it limits expression. This is why Martin Luther’s efforts to decentralize the Bible, putting Scripture into the hands of the people, was in its own way a toppling of Babel. It took the language of the Christian movement and restored it to its original purpose: a rhetoric of transformation for the lowly, meek, and mourning.

I’M STILL A recovering cynic. Sometimes, I go weeks where every noun in the Christian vocabulary feels dry. But then, a need comes. A desire that can’t be quenched. A loss I can’t ignore. And like a faucet slowly turning, words like trust, contentment, gratitude, and hope start dripping afresh, like sunlight crackling through the spaces in a floorboard. It’s a process, but I’m slowly learning to stand more in line with the psalmist who wrote, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth” (Ps. 119:103).

Language is always pointing to something beyond itself. God’s name isn’t actually “God,” but what philosophers call a signifier. It’s the thing that points to the signified—which in God’s case is the Divine Creator, Father of Jesus.

By one scholar’s count, God is given 967 different signifiers throughout the Bible. He’s infinite, self-subsistent. Attaching one finite name from a finite language just doesn’t do the trick. Different signifiers help emphasize different parts of his being (Father, Son, Spirit), angles of personality (wonderful counselor, wise king), and patterns of behavior (advocate, comforter). But none of them would be sufficient on their own.

Their multiplicity is necessary. Sometimes, we just need to express something that nothing in our current vocabulary can. And so we perpetually search beyond our present borders to praise the God without any.

But I don’t ever want to neglect the arsenal of classical Christian terms. It’s like drawing water from a deep well: locating the originality in old words and making adjustments when dry words need animation, always on the hunt for new ways to say old things rather than new concepts to reshape old ideas. To borrow biblical language, we are always putting old words in new wineskins—remembering that the beauty of treasures in old chests is evergreen and not simply nostalgic.

THIS IS WHY I like picturing Christian vocabulary as elastic, rather than static or plastic. Static means no change; plastic means total change. But if something’s elastic, it can bend to accommodate new functions while also snapping back into place.

For me, this is a perpetual project. Every once in a while, I need to redefine or shelve a phrase with too much baggage. Other times, I need to challenge the popular understandings of words like grace. But I remind myself that for every half-hearted, inauthentic, or dead pronunciation of faith, there are millions of Christ followers around the globe clinging to the word faith as if it’s the only thing keeping them moving.

This is why even the most fossilized words can be brought back to life, why post-structuralism’s attempts to control language can’t help but fail, why earnest attempts to worship always supersede academic exercises. The Christian vocabulary rushes alongside the downtrodden, the promising student who lost it all because of schizophrenia, the 18-year-old kid hitting his lowest points in a jail cell.

Babel, post-structuralism, fossilization, and ahistoricity all reveal one central truth: Despite our best efforts to manipulate language—subbing in trendy terms, sticking to old fossils, or trying to control them altogether—words will always be empowered by those who realize their utter and absolute dependence on God.

Everything else is just semantics.

Griffin Gooch is a writer & speaker with a Master’s in Theological Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary.

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News

As Powers Shift in DC, Christians Take the Long View

Harvest Prude

Believers working in Washington rely on faith and church community when political transitions put their work in flux.

Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images

Around Washington, DC, you can see signs of the upcoming presidential transition. Security fencing went up around the Capitol building for the inauguration ceremony. Road closures rimmed the National Mall. The local airports saw constant traffic as people came to pick up their inauguration tickets.

While the city prepares for this week’s activities welcoming President Donald Trump back to the White House, churches in and around DC pray for what changes lie ahead—policies that affect the country overall along with the work and livelihoods of those in their pews.

The lawmakers, Hill staffers, and political appointees working in the District “don’t just win or lose an election; they win or lose jobs,” said Mark Batterson, pastor of National Community Church, a multisite congregation in DC.

The city is buzzing with anticipation and transition. People are waiting to hear back about jobs with the incoming administration. They are packing up their offices on the Hill, leaving think-tank positions to take jobs with lawmakers’ offices, and vice versa.

Federal workers are wondering about new policies that may impact how much flexibility they have, and contractors wonder if they will continue to have work once their contract expires. A new government-efficiency commission under Trump has pledged “mass reductions” in agencies and staffing, leaving many on edge.

Pastors in DC are used to the pressures and prayer requests that come with government transitions every two or four years. Batterson at NCC has led his flock through eight presidential inaugurations, offering spiritual counsel through the transitions, cuts, and political spats that accompany each new administration.

In a congregation where worship gatherings and small groups intentionally span political parties, Batterson prays for the “Esthers and Nehemiahs, Daniel and Deborahs, who feel called to public service,” a reference to biblical figures who served in or close to the halls of power. He likened the role of the church to “Aaron and Hur, who held up the arms of Moses; we want to do the same for political leaders.”

Katelyn Walls Shelton knows firsthand the tension that comes with watching election returns come in and knowing the results would determine whether she’d have a job. Though the older leaders of political offices and think tanks are typically the ones in the spotlight, legions of 20- and 30-somethings like Shelton are directly affected by who leads Congress and the White House.

Shelton worked in the House for a short stint, and her husband, John, worked in the House and Senate, where shifts in congressional majorities affected staffing levels, even if the members they worked for kept their seats.

She first came to DC on a field trip with other wide-eyed eighth graders from Tennessee, and the allure of politics led her to settle in the area in 2018. She’s since worked on Capitol Hill, for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) and under the Health and Human Services Department—first in the faith department then on issues affecting women’s health care.

“It really does feel like your life. Your day to day depends on who the next president is going to be or who is in power, who has the majority in the House or the Senate,” she said.

The DC churn can also spur a sense of discouragement from those in the political minority or those working in a divided government.

“There was a lot of talk among our friends like, ‘Hey, if President Trump loses this election, we’re going to go home. Like, we’ll be in our 30s before we have a Republican trifecta. What’s the point of ten years being around here and never working in the trifecta?’” said Jonah Wendt, a former staffer for Texas GOP representative Chip Roy and a current policy advisor for former vice president Mike Pence.

Now, he finds the mood in Republican circles to be much more jubilant. He and his wife welcomed a baby daughter in October. When November’s election returns came in, one of his friends told him, “That’s so great—she shows up right before we enter America’s golden age.”

Wendt takes a more pragmatic outlook. He anticipates that after a flurry of executive orders, a couple big messaging bills, and one big reconciliation bill, it’ll be back to a “slow slog” for legislation under the thin majority in the House.

Wendt has found himself staying grounded with the help of his Lutheran church community, where leaders pray for both Democratic and Republican leaders by name.

When Michael Sobolik came to DC a decade ago, he realized it was much harder to win policy victories. He was frustrated by the ignorance, self-interest, and roadblocks that got in the way and found himself searching the Scriptures to see what God had to say about governance.

“In DC, where the whole city revolves around power and influence and access in one way or another, I have found over time, I’ve been so amazed at how explicitly the Bible speaks to people who are ministering in those spaces,” said Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

The stories about Esther and Daniel took on new meaning. “You’re dealing with elite politics; you’re dealing more broadly with God’s plan of redemption for all of humanity and his people.”

Brent Leatherwood, president of the ERLC, has also been in prayer for the outgoing and incoming administrations, including through his church’s 40 days of prayer for America’s leaders.

Leatherwood, who lives in Tennessee and spends plenty of time in DC seeking to advance the policy priorities of Southern Baptists, described himself as “bullish” about making progress during the next four years.

“The reality is we are called to pray for those in authority, regardless of what party,” he said. “I think that’s been a consistent part of my life, particularly just in this role, because these are men and women that I interact with.”

In early conversations with Trump’s transition team, he’s been urging the administration to focus on filling faith offices across the federal government. The ERLC also just finalized its 2025 policy priorities, which they are going to take to every member of Congress as well as administration officials.

“We’re trying to view the priorities of the administration and see, Are there places where we can be a helpful voice? Are there places where we need to call attention to some things? Are there places where we’re going to have to be a voice that fully articulates what Scripture tells us and what our convention prioritizes?”

He added, “That’s the same posture that we took four years ago with the incoming Biden administration, and four years before that with the first Trump administration.”

Heather Rice-Minus knows well the necessity of working tirelessly for her particular cause, regardless of who occupies the White House.

Rice-Minus grew up just outside the city in Northern Virginia and has lived in DC proper for a decade with her husband and children. She is president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian nonprofit that advocates for prisoners, their families, and justice reform. Her family lives in Congress Heights, less than a ten-minute drive from the Capitol.

“The Lord has brought incredible opportunity to Prison Fellowship to work with each administration that has come,” she said. Amid increasing polarization, she said she’s grateful criminal justice has still been able to garner bipartisan support.

“We’ve been able to find common ground on justice and in many cases, you know, make some pretty significant reforms that I’m very proud of.”

The last time Donald Trump was in office, he signed the First Step Act into law in 2018. But what would eventually become the First Step Act had been in the making for years prior and went through several different iterations before it was passed.

She remembers one conversation with her sister where she told her it often takes years for legislation to pass. Her sister responded, “Wow, that’s so depressing.”

Rice-Minus doesn’t see those intervening years as a waste. “That is where you forge friendships. That is where you come up with creative ideas of, ‘How do we get people to care about this?’ That’s where you learn what the windows of opportunity are to push something through.”

That interim is also when Rice-Minus spends a lot of time in prayer.

Prison Fellowship has teams of Christians, often volunteers, who pray together. These volunteers and Prison Fellowship staff also meet with lawmakers to talk about their cause. Those groups include formerly incarcerated individuals as well.

“I can’t even tell you how meaningful it was for them,” Rice-Minus said, “for them to walk and sit down at someone’s Senate table and share their story and share about why they care about the oversight and dignity of people behind bars.”

Seeing real-life impacts also keeps her going. Since then, Rice-Minus has met individuals who have come home from prison and been restored to their families and communities as a result of that legislation. Her church, NCC, has sponsored children of incarcerated parents through Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program, and she was able to deliver Christmas presents to families in Ward Eight last year.

Many Christians working in DC say the partnership, guidance, and counsel from their church communities makes it possible for them to endure the stresses that come with their jobs.

Sobolik appreciated the robust theology of work—that “all work is part of redemption”—that gets taught at his Anglican parish in Capitol Hill, Church of the Resurrection.

Among his circle of family and friends, the upcoming inauguration has brought a spectrum of reactions to the surface: “Some are really happy. Some of their careers have really changed for the better. And then we have other close friends who are anxious, uncertain about what’s going to come, and their careers are suffering,” he said.

Sobolik seeks to temper both his hopes and fears during elections. He looks for areas of overlap where he can cooperate with those in power. And he tries to get people together to find common ground.

His work focuses on US-China relations and national security, so while the Biden administration was in power, he planned dinners focused on China policy with both Democratic and Republican attendees. They were off-the-record gatherings. “It wasn’t about shouting anyone down or saying, ‘I’m right; you’re wrong.’ It was talking through problems and trying to find solutions.”

“With the incoming administration, there’s a lot I’m probably going to agree with them on China. There’s a few things I’m probably going to disagree with them on as well. It requires a lot of prudence.”

Shelton also said Christians in DC get used to taking the long view as they prioritize their vocations. “A lot of Christians are involved in politics because they have a particular cause in mind,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean the work for your particular cause stops if your party is not in power.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Ideas

The Unrecognized Great Awakening

Jonathan Tremaine “JT” Thomas

Americans talk about Civil Rights as a political movement. But as MLK well knew, it was more than that. It was a revival.

Protesters Kneeling Before City Hall on April 6, 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Universal History Archive / Contributor / Getty / Edits by CT

Prophet or activist? Pastor or social reformer? In the six decades since his death, the testimony and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has been so extensively documented and analyzed that it seems almost asinine to imagine posing a new question about his life and work or the Civil Rights era more broadly.

But I want to propose that King has been mislabeled—or, more precisely, that even many of his admirers have missed a title he deserves: revivalist.

It’s well recognized, of course, that the Civil Rights Movement under King’s leadership pulsed with the gospel of the kingdom. But what I’m saying is not merely that King and many lesser-known activists were Christians whose efforts were motivated by their faith in Jesus. Rather, I want to suggest that this was not merely a political movement that used biblically inspired strategies like nonviolent demonstration. It was a spiritual movement of great awakening, even a widely unrecognized Great Awakening in the grand tradition of grassroots American revivals.

What does true awakening look like? Biblical and historical records can help us discern how God awakens nations to the love of the Father in the way of Jesus.

Christ’s own ministry should be our first example. Amid social upheaval and political violence, Jesus begins teaching in the synagogues of Galilee. He declares that the Spirit of the Lord has anointed him to “proclaim good news to the poor,” “freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:16–21). Then he hits the streets, preaching repentance because “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17, ESV).

This is not a just a good sermon topic. It’s a blaring announcement of the arrival of a new age. And Jesus does not just speak his Good News. He makes a public demonstration of its reality, confronting the injustice of illness and death itself, releasing the health care plan of a heavenly administration.

With the touch of a hand, he heals the sick, raises the dead, and embraces the outcast. These are acts of love and peace but also destruction of the order and norms of a sinful and sorrowful world. We don’t call the earthly ministry of Jesus an awakening, but it is the awakening that would spark all others. In the backwaters of Galilee, often on the margins of society, Jesus inaugurates the greatest liberation movement in human history, introducing the higher standard to which all will ultimately be held.

In the first days of the church, we see a time of awakening, too, marked by a growth of practical human wisdom and the visible working of the Holy Spirit. God in Christ destroyed “the dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile in the early church, creating one new humanity, “members of [God’s] household” from every tribe and tongue (Eph. 2:11–22).

Acts 2 records a profound moment for this unity: God’s reversal of the division of the Tower of Babel. It is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that people from all over the known world—“Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs” (vv. 9–11)—could all understand the disciples’ proclamation of the gospel at once.

“Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?” the crowd wonders. “Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?” (v. 7–8). The answer is that this was an awakening, only possible with the supernatural grace of the Spirit.

The distinct eras of divine activity in American history that we call awakenings are similarly marked by exposure of depravity and pursuit of social righteousness—by repentance and public revival. As Christian History explained in 1989,

It is of major importance to remember that awakenings are not simply times of enhanced personal religious experience. Awakenings have social impact. In the wake of spiritual awakenings comes social restoration. Corrupt, immoral, unjust, and ungodly people and societies can return to honesty, purity, justice, and holiness. Culture can be transformed; but first must come transformed people.

The awakenings were not masterfully designed through central planning from the corridors of ecclesial power. They relied on organic, individual responses of obedience after definitive encounters with the Lord.

The best known of these movements, the Second Great Awakening (c. 1795–1835), produced moral-reform movements around public education, social services, women’s suffrage, and the establishment of abolitionist societies in the United States and the United Kingdom. From William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect to Harriet Beecher Stowe and the New England Congregationalists, supernatural encounters with the awakening glory of God led to new pursuit of justice and public demonstration of God’s love.

This outpouring of measurable institutional reforms in addition to mass salvation should not surprise us. As Wilberforce observed, it is “the glory of Christianity, to extinguish the malignant passions; to curb the violence, to controul the appetites, and to smooth the asperities of man; to make us compassionate and kind, and forgiving one to another; to make us good husbands, good fathers, good friends, and to render us active and useful in the discharge of the relative, social, and civil duties.”

The Third Great Awakening ran through the 1930s, and I am not the first to suggest that we should recognize a Fourth Great Awakening beginning in the mid-19th century. But the awakening I see is not the rise of the Religious Right, as has been proposed elsewhere. It is the Civil Rights Movement, which exhibited that same pattern of calls for repentance and revival followed by tangible social impact.

Perhaps those—Christian or not—who aren’t active participants in the Black worship tradition have undervalued or overlooked the hand of God in instigating and sustaining this movement and its transformation of American society. Granted, a significant portion of African American spirituality and theological interpretation has been archived in songs and stories preserved through oral tradition instead of publication.

But whatever the reason, historians and theologians alike have failed to acknowledge or embrace this awakening led by the Black church (or, indeed, to embrace the Black church itself). The unholy segregation between predominantly Black Protestant traditions and predominantly white evangelical traditions has extended to how we perceive the movement of the Spirit in our own recent history.

The Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. was not a revival in the sense of a mass public proclamation of the gospel of salvation. But from my vantage within America’s freedom experiment, its defining characteristic was mass demonstration of the fruits of salvation (Matt. 7:15–20).

And that public demonstration was only part of the work. A significant and necessary part of this awakening happened in hidden prayer meetings, in countless hours spent on the floor, crying out to God for help. The Holy Spirit came upon those who waited in this undignified travail, releasing specific strategies for confronting the dark powers of oppression within society.

Like the early church disciples and the abolitionists of the Second and Third Great Awakening, men and women of all ages became possessed with unshakeable hope in Christ after receiving visions, dreams, and divinely inspired ideas through prayer. Those deep movements of the Spirit may not have been visible in the newspapers, but much of the Civil Rights activism the papers did document poured from this well.

“We experienced something extraordinary in the freedom movement, something that hinted at a tremendous potential for love and community and transformation that exists here in this scarred, spectacular country,” said Civil Rights activist Rosemarie Freeney Harding, who worked with King and served in the Mennonite tradition for many years. “For a lot of people in the Movement, our participation gave us a craving for spiritual depth.”

In this Fourth Great Awakening, millions surrendered to tenets of the lordship of Jesus. Embracing the Beatitudes, they responded to government-sanctioned persecution with the fruits of the Spirit. They embodied the spiritual longing of a generation and made prayer a form of nonviolent direct action. The soundtrack of the movement was songs of intercession and eternal hope in the promises of God, and the spiritual transformation undergirding this pursuit of social righteousness was no less robust simply because the change didn’t occur at a public altar call.

On May 17, 1957, 25,000 Negro Americans arrived at the Lincoln Memorial for a three-hour prayer vigil called the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. The purpose was to commemorate the anniversary of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, to demonstrate support for new Civil Rights legislation, and to arouse the conscience of the nation to continued pursuit of freedom and equality.

In his first major outing as the newly elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a young Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the crowd. He delivered a brilliant prophetic rebuke to Washington, charging leaders in both major parties with a “dearth of positive leadership,” betrayal of “the cause of justice,” and “a high blood pressure of words and an anemia of deeds.”

“We come humbly to say to the men in the forefront of our government that the civil rights issue is not an ephemeral, evanescent domestic issue that can be kicked about by reactionary guardians of the status quo,” King said. “It is rather an eternal moral issue.”

But later, King would conclude his speech by making an explicitly revivalist appeal—an appeal that was met with the enthusiastic affirmation of the crowd, whose responses are here in parentheticals:

Let us not despair. Let us realize that as we struggle for justice and freedom, we have cosmic companionship. This is the long faith of the Hebraic-Christian tradition: that God is not some Aristotelian “unmoved mover” who merely contemplates upon himself. He is not merely a self-knowing God, but an other-loving God (Yeah) forever working through history for the establishment of his kingdom.

And those of us who call the name of Jesus Christ find something of an event in our Christian faith that tells us this. There is something in our faith that says to us, “Never despair; never give up; never feel that the cause of righteousness and justice is doomed.” There is something in our Christian faith, at the center of it, which says to us that Good Friday may occupy the throne for a day, but ultimately it must give way to the triumphant beat of the drums of Easter. (That’s right)

King’s fervent engagement with Scripture, appeals to fellow Christians to imitate Christ’s love, and declarations of the victory of God over evil amount to half the speech.

In King’s leadership and the work of thousands of faithful activists, the Civil Rights Movement was a radical force of societal transformation that unashamedly marched under the banner of the lordship of Jesus. It awakened the conscience of the nation and continues to captivate hearts and inspire hope for the oppressed. It should be recognized alongside earlier awakenings for its reshaping of US public life and the American church.

As we simultaneously commemorate King’s life and welcome a new presidential administration into power, leading up to Black History Month, may we be provoked by King’s timeless words—and hear them not only as an activist’s speech but also as a revivalist’s sermon. It is time for the whole body of Christ to step out of suspicion and into love, to recover our shared inheritance from this unrecognized awakening.

Rev. Jonathan Tremaine “JT” Thomas (@jontremaine) is a missionary; the president/CEO of Civil Righteousness, which is a movement of holy activism; and the senior advisor of justice and reconciliation to New Room for Seedbed.

- More from Jonathan Tremaine “JT” Thomas

Ideas

It’s Time for a New Era of Christian Civility

Alexandra Hudson‌

Healing political division requires we revive the lost virtue of civility, grounded in universal human dignity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

Over the past few years, our society has continued its trend toward increased political polarization, as the share of people swinging to the far left and right increases. In fact, a recent poll shows that nearly half of US voters believe those in the opposing political party are “downright evil.”

As a result, the public square can be a volatile and even violent place to engage. This is something I experienced firsthand while working in the federal government from 2017 to 2018. In Washington, I observed two equally dehumanizing extremes: explicit hostility and deceptive politeness.

The politicians who most often make the news are those who are overtly aggressive and willing to trample anyone in their path to gain power. Others appear polished, poised, and polite—but their behavior masks ulterior motives. For example, one of my supervisors used our shared Christian faith to disarm and manipulate me. She would smile and invite me to pray with her at lunch, only for me to later discover she had been undermining me to our superiors.

My experience was so dispiriting that I fled politics and Washington altogether to write a book aimed at helping myself and others think more clearly about our deeply divided era and the ways we each might be part of resolving our crisis of polarization and dehumanization.

Turning to Scripture and great thinkers of the past to help me process what I had endured, I reflected on timeless questions: What does it mean to be human? What respect do we owe each other by virtue of our shared humanity, beyond our differences and disagreements?

The Bible reminds us that humanity is a conundrum defined by both nobility and wretchedness: We were made for community with God and others, but we are also selfish and fallen. We thrive in cooperation but are always threatened by our inclination to put ourselves above others.

As philosopher Blaise Pascal noted, “The more enlightened we are the more greatness and vileness we discover in man.” We are the pinnacle of God’s creation, uniquely bearing the divine image, yet also capable of base and ignoble conduct. Likewise, Augustine’s concept of humanity’s “lust to dominate” explains that both overt hostility and false politeness arise from the self-love of our sinful nature rather than a love that sees and respects others as fellow persons created in God’s image.

I came to realize that our present division requires far more than mere courtesy or politeness. We need to usher in a new era of civility—a virtue that has been all but lost in our country. And for Christians, civility is rooted in the imago Dei—the inherent dignity we all possess as beings created in God’s image. This foundation is crucial for flourishing across our differences today.

What changes must we make as a society, and especially as a church, to usher our nation into a new era of civility, founded on the Christian principle of universal human dignity? There are at least five.

First, we must stop confusing civility with politeness.

As I’ve already alluded to, there is an essential and often-overlooked difference between civility and politeness, and confusing the two has lost us the ability to speak the truth in love to each other.

Politeness is manners, etiquette, and technique—it’s a type of behavior—whereas civility is a virtue far deeper and richer than mere conduct. Instead of focusing on the form of conduct, civility gets to the motivation of any given action.

Civility is a disposition that recognizes and respects the common humanity, the fundamental personhood, and the inherent dignity of other human beings. In doing so, civility sometimes requires that we act in ways that appear deeply impolite, such as conveying difficult truths or engaging in robust debate—facing meaningful differences and important issues head-on.

As I’ve written for CT before, Jesus himself was not always polite, but he was continually civil.

Civility both requires certain actions and restricts other actions. It requires that we stand up for ourselves and be willing to speak hard truths in love, but it never lets our disagreements devolve into dehumanization or violence that violates another person’s imago Dei.

Today, some Christians seek to overcorrect for what they think of as a culture of suffocating politeness by supporting leaders and pundits who exhibit a brash delight in delivering hard truths and puncturing hypocrisy. Yet this approach often ends up fostering hostility and aggression and falls prey to the same dehumanizing attempt to control others that is evident with patronizing politeness.

In other words, politeness lies in superficial conduct, while true civility requires us to speak truth in love while recognizing and respecting the fundamental dignity of those we disagree with.

Second, we must stop making an apocalyptic religion out of politics.

The “religionization” of politics has led many believers to elevate political stances to the level of doctrinal orthodoxy—such that they become litmus tests for Christian identity. This, in turn, has led to us publicly question the faith of those who have differing views from us and to reduce complex individuals to political caricatures.

Increasingly, evangelical Christians on both sides of the aisle have become emboldened to say that anyone who disagrees with them on certain hot-button issues is not a true Christian at all. We often judge a person’s faith on whether they think the “right” way or support the “right” person.

But politics has not just become a religion—it’s become an apocalyptic religion. Some evangelical Christians have come to justify any behavior necessary to “win” a political battle or election, including dehumanizing political opponents and even fellow believers.

This political approach is often informed by a certain theology. In 2022, Pew Research found that over 60 percent of evangelical Protestant Christians said they believe “we are living in the end times.” While this is not an unbiblical belief in itself, it can be dangerous when paired with a dominionist mentality.

Such apocalyptic thinking is nothing new in Christianity. It’s important for us to be students of history, as a close study of the past can temper the false notion that ours is the worst or most perilous era for Christians. For example, Martin Luther thought he was living in the end times and, during the Protestant Reformation, falsely accused the pope of being the biblical Antichrist figure—a line of reasoning that provided ideological ammunition for violence toward Catholics.

Claiming we are on the brink of civilizational and cosmic collapse is useful for fundraising and winning elections. It raises the stakes of policy debates and election results and scares people into donating and turning out to cast their ballots. But this high-stakes mentality can be deadly, as it clouds our ability to see the image of God in those we perceive as political enemies.

Third, we should start viewing people holistically instead of reductively.

We often reduce people to their worst moments or views in isolation of their humanity. This can happen in one of two ways: One, we fixate on something they said or did of which they are probably not proud but which, thanks to technology and social media, has been immortalized and widely circulated. Or two, we boil them down to the views they hold (or the politicians or pundits they support), instead of seeing them in the full context of who they are as human beings.

Though we are all fallen and fallible, we’ve come to view the world through a cheapened simplicity: black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. We’ve adopted a strange perfectionism, where we expect those around us to make no errors in judgment, past or present—while forgetting that every one of us is defined by both greatness and wretchedness, as Pascal wrote.

It is time we start “unbundling” people—seeing vices in light of virtues and recognizing the complexity of human beliefs. Unbundling is a mental framework we can use to help us see the parts in light of the whole, mistakes in light of victories, and any views we deem as wrong or misguided in light of nuanced reasoning and motivations.

In essence, we must perceive each other’s irreducible worth as persons created in God’s image, a value which transcends all our differences. As human beings, we are each an amalgamation of contradictory impulses and desires. We are each imperfect in our knowledge and our conduct.

Unbundling means we resist the tempting impulse to see people or politicians as merely Republicans or Democrats. It means we recognize our mistakes or disagreements while being mindful of the basic respect we owe each other as fellow human beings with inherent dignity.

Fourth, we should only draw lines in the sand where they really matter.

We can remember adiaphora, which essentially means “indifferent” in Greek. This idea was popularized during the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent decades of religious wars. In an era where Christians were killing one another over numerous secondary theological differences, this word helped believers keep in mind the essentials of their faith.

Adiaphora distinguishes core Christian tenets, like Christ’s divinity and resurrection, from nonessentials, like views on infant baptism and transubstantiation.

The fact that Christ was God incarnate—who lived, died, and rose again on the third day—is nonnegotiable for the Christian faith. But reasonable minds can and have disagreed on many other theological, doctrinal issues or aspects of faith and practice, such whether the Bible should inform us on public policy regarding fossil fuels or tax reform or education.

As Augustine once wrote, “Love, and do what thou wilt.” In any given situation, determine how the love of God and the love of others might apply, and then act—in that order. We must approach disagreements on public policy or lesser issues with grace, recognizing room for differing interpretations, even within the household of faith.

Fifth, we must revive curiosity, instead of judgment, as our first instinct.

Humility leads us to another vital ingredient of Christian civility: curiosity. Today, political disagreements often become moral indictments. In our conversations with people we disagree with, we subconsciously think, Because you support this presidential candidate or hold this view on this issue, I know everything about you.

By contrast, curiosity is based in the recognition that every one of us is infinitely complex and comes to our views about the world for many different reasons. It acknowledges that people approach and answer life’s foundational questions differently and can come to different conclusions about how our faith and Scripture should inform public life today.

Curiosity also requires the humility and modesty to realize that none of us will ever have all the answers, at least this side of heaven. We must accept our natural limits as finite human beings who only “know in part” (1 Cor. 13:12)—otherwise, we essentially place ourselves on par with God, which was the original sin of humanity.

Instead of assuming we know all about someone based on their political stance, we should ask them more questions and listen patiently for their answers—without planning our next response. And the next time we’re debating someone with a different view, instead of presuming they are wrong and we have perfect knowledge on the subject, we should say, “Tell me more!”

In many cases, we may find that we are all more alike than we think. And in others, as we hear from another person’s perspective, we may learn new insights we’d never thought of before.

Regardless, we must cultivate a humble curiosity about people and the experiences that led them to their views of the world. Honoring people’s stories and respecting their perspectives are foundational to the task of reviving civility in our divided world.

Lastly, the apostle Paul lays out a wise and helpful biblical blueprint for Christian civility in Romans 14, offering us valuable insights on how to welcome differing views among believers without judgment.

As Julien C. H. Smith previously wrote for CT, this passage outlines Paul’s prescription for a polarized church in Rome, where Jews and Gentiles were divided and “the truth of the gospel was being challenged by a myriad of small grievances that threatened to turn neighbors into enemies.”

As paraphrased by The Message, Paul begins the chapter by saying, “Welcome with open arms fellow believers who don’t see things the way you do. And don’t jump all over them every time they do or say something you don’t agree with—even when it seems that they are strong on opinions but weak in the faith department. Remember, they have their own history to deal with. Treat them gently” (Rom. 14:1).

The apostle explains that we need to accept that Christians will think differently on many issues rather than try to convert everyone to our ways of thinking. He cautions against harsh criticism over dietary choices and holy days, instead emphasizing mutual respect and unity—advising that “each person is free to follow the convictions of conscience” (v. 5, MSG).

In summary, he urges believers to “make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification” and not let arguments over secondary matters such as these “destroy the work of God” among them (vv. 19–20).

These are words of wisdom for our moment, vital for ushering in a new era for Christian civility. Our sovereign God can handle our disagreements, along with the workings of elections and the cosmos, without our help or interference.

Embracing these principles can help heal fractured communities and repair the tattered social fabric in both Christian and secular circles. Let us navigate these divided times with grace, respect, and a renewed commitment to seeing the imago Dei in everyone around us.

Alexandra Hudson is the author of The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.

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